A lesson in physics

Some of you may have completed a physics class in high school. I did. It was sophomore year, with Mr. Mitchell. I can’t remember if the Romgi and I had that class together or not – I think physics was 2nd period, and we had world civ together 3rd period, so whether or not we were both in Mr. Mitchell’s physics class, I can pretty much guarantee that I spent most of class writing notes to the Romgi. Which means I may not have paid a lot of attention to the material.

Those of you who actually learned something may recall that temperature does funny things to objects. In particular, leaving liquids in the freezer can sometimes have unexpected results.

For instance, take a look at this regular bottle of Martinelli’s sparkling apple cider:

Now see the curious things that happen when you ask your husband to put a similar bottle into the freezer because you want to have some, chilled, in about 10 minutes, but you get distracted first by Super Mario Galaxy and then by yet another complete breakdown, and don’t remember there is Martinelli’s in the freezer until late the following morning:

…Oops.

There goes my refreshing treat…sorry about the mess, the Romgi, I’ll clean it up rl good!

Groucharoni

Apparently I’m in a rather grouchy mood this morning.

Because I haven’t bothered to unsubscribe, I’m still on the email list for BYU’s Sociology department. That means I sometimes get notices about internships, forums, etc. This morning one of my genius former fellow students thought, “You know what, with this email list, I can get in touch with the entire Sociology student body all at once!” Which is quite true, but…well, I’ll get to that.

So I got an email from this kid who let all of us know that he’s selling the textbooks for Soc 420 for way cheaper than the bookstore, so let him know if you’re interested.

Maybe this is really not a big deal. Everyone wants to sell their books, everyone wants to buy their books from somewhere other than the bookstore, and it should be a win-win. But, as I said, my grouch meter seems to be completely full. Because what I got out of the email was that he was using a department list – where students provided their email addresses to the department secretary in order to be updated about department events and news – to advertise the books he waited too long to sell back to the BYU Bookstore.

I couldn’t just let it go, though…I wrote back.

“It’s kind of tacky to use this mailing list to advertise. Didn’t BYU make a book exchange and the Wilk board for this type of thing?”

In all fairness, he did reply and apologize for the extra spam, although he said he didn’t know about the book exchange and most people probably haven’t heard of it either, and he doesn’t trust the Wilk board. (The Wilk board is a very large cork board in the student center where students can post things for sale, items wanted, apartments for rent, and so on.)

I realize that there are probably a lot more people who pass through the Wilk every day than get the Sociology emails (and read them), but he doesn’t seem to realize that whereas the Wilk board would have let him simply put a phone number or email address as the contact information (and he could have created an email account specifically for that purpose), with the information in the email I got I easily looked up where he currently lives, his permanent address, and two phone numbers.

I want you all to applaud me for just biting my tongue this time and not writing back to tell him he’s an idiot. A tacky idiot, at that.

Mysterious Meat

I love ham. It should have gone on my list of favorite things, but…somehow it slipped my mind. Ham is especially good because I have it so rarely that it’s always a treat. I’d be overjoyed if we got to eat ham and turkey on Thanksgiving, ham on Christmas, and ham and lamb on Easter. I kind of think that would be perfect. You know what else is great about ham? Leftovers. Thick-cut ham sandwiches are rivaled only by thick-cut leftover turkey sandwiches. Ahh.

That being said, last night I experienced something new. It was called ham. But it was an impostor.

Dramatization.

The Romgi and I went to the ward Christmas party, which promised lots of food and a nativity program by the kids. We got there on time and waited patiently for things to get started so we could eat. Sign-ups had been going around the past few weeks, and I knew there’d be many types of salads and potatoes; sure enough, when we finally got in line to get our food, there were easily 8 different types of mashed and funeral potatoes. (Luckily I sampled the best funeral potatoes. Some of the others looked iffy.)

We made it down to the far end of the serving table, where three platters of ham had been set out. The first two were too thick for my taste (yes, it is possible) and had the yucky skin-stuff on them (bleh), but the third looked beautiful. Slightly thin-cut, but the pieces were big and looked to be glazed with some sort of delicious glaze. I grabbed an extra large serving and headed back to our table.

When I have a plate full of holiday-type food, I start by eating a bite of potatoes, then some salad, stuffing, roll, fruit, potato, and finally meat. So it took a while to get to the “ham.”

It was not pleasant.

The problem wasn’t the pineapple sludge poured on top of it. That part I could mostly handle, and mostly scrape off. The problem was the texture of the meat itself.

This will probably sound disgusting, and it really was: imagine if you had some perfect ham, and for some reason you kept chewing it until the cows came home, and at that point you decided to spit it out, add a little something to make it creamy, turn it into a paste, and shape the paste into ham-shaped pieces.

I can’t think of any other way ham could be ruined so badly.

Ham is not creamy. It’s meat. Ham should not scrape off like liverwurst. It’s not canned.

Ham should not make me cry.

(It’s ok, I didn’t cry until around 1am when I wanted to barf. And that was mostly because I was really tired and grouchy and ill. Plus, I did eventually go back for a slice of the thick ham, which was a nice normal ham texture.)

And there you have it. That is the story of the pineapple ham paste.

P.S. We are beginning to consider the possibility that it was tofu or soy ham. What an abomination.