Go Off On A Tangent.  It is so fun to see how our little blog group of 4 has grown and  developed in the past 2+ years.  It has been so exciting to not only read each others posts but to come to know each of these great people.  What started as theatre acquaintances has grown into a group of the best friends I have ever had.  That is what has made our little gang of tangenteers so special:

• Taylhis describes her life as a stay at home mom, with her fabulous hubby, and their four wonderful kids and their menagerie of pets.  At times humorous, thought-provoking, but always insightful!  She may not have a great amount of time but I love reading every post she has the time to create.  And with baseball season finally approaching… you can bet she will be going in-depth (as much as possible) on  another season of her beloved Cubbies!

• Derek has documented the many roles he has played as a substitute teacher in the burbs of a great metropolitan area, to youth group leader, and finally to his position in the auto industry.  Postings are a bit spread out but always fascinating.

• The “Old Admin“… well what can we say about him.  I think he last posted way back in October.  I have been waiting on an Office post since da Bears’ season has come and gone once again.

• Justj joined our gang a few months after we started.  His random thoughts center a lot on his family which I find truly endearing but also delve into many of his hobbies as well.

• Somewhere along the road, we picked up a few other tangenteers.  Mare has become a great friend through my involvement with yet another community theatre group.  And with the new admin there are big changes in store.  Not forgetting froggy and our newest Kloe.

Brand new to the site is an interactive page on which you can post a single blerb about anything… much like tweeting (or whatever it is) but I think it will be even more fun.  So why not follow us and go off on a tangent of your own!

WOW!  How could I almost forget dear Carol!  She is also one of our new followers who offers great insight into her everyday life as a teacher and mother…. or this and that!  GREAT FRIENDS ALL!!!

I noticed that I was getting hit by a lot of search engines today. They were all finding the same post. Last year around this time I started to review all of the fast food fish sandwiches in our area. Guess what, there is a big search going on for fast food fish. A new fast food place opened in our area, so I may have to review the Sonic fish sandwich. But for now, I’m going to go in a different direction or TANGENT if you will.

Eating fish during lent? Why?? I did a quick search and found out is was more out of ‘eating from the land’ than skipping meat. Apparently (I’m not sure about this yet, the web is full of useless information too), eating fish derived from fasting. Apparently you could eat the food you gathered during a fast. This included vegetables, fruits and the like. It also included fish, since anyone could catch fish. Meat from other animals was the province of the well to do or wealthy.

Other sites have said that this developed to allow the working people something to eat with a high level of protean, just to keep their strength and let them keep working the fields. I’m not really sure about the why’s yet, but I will continue to work on it. That question just got me curious.

And one more tangent…. Easy fish recipe. Works for most firm fleshed fish (Salmon, catfish, ocean perch, red snapper, walleye, ect.)

Aluminum foil
Fish fillets
Tomato slices
Onion slices
Salt
Pepper
Sliced garlic if desired…
Oil of choice or butter

Layer on foil (one serving per foil pouch) from the bottom up
onion slices, tomato slices, fish fillets, salt, pepper, garlic, tomato slices, onion slices. Drizzle with oil or add butter pats. Close up foil. Cook…

Over hot coals 10 -15 minutes per inch flip about halfway through cooking time.
(open one and see if fish is starting to get opaque on the first side, flaky on the second side.) Or use gas grill, or cook in oven preheated to 375.

Wonderful stuff…

WOW!

I’ve made 500 blog posts here on My Food Chain Gang!  That is A LOT of rambling and a ton of tangents!  Thank you for reading; especially those of you who have read all 500 posts, if there is anyone who could stand me for that long!

I think after that many posts, I’m entitled to a generic one, noting nothing other than my 500th blog post, don’t you?

No, I’m not talking about the oranges called Cuties.

Have you heard of those?  They’re small oranges especially grown to be kid-friendly: less sour taste, seedless, and easier to peel and smaller than regular oranges.  I’ve been wanting to try them for our family, but when I finally remembered to pick them up at Walmart, the bag I had hastily grabbed contained smashed and rotten fruit.  What else is new – our Walmart always carries terrible produce.  But this is not going to be a Walmart-bashing post.  Tangents aside, I posted pictures of our new pet rat cuties in my previous post, so here are pictures of our real cuties.  Here is our one little guy with his 3 older sisters:

And below are the oldest and the youngest kids in our family – they’re 8.5 years apart.  I wish I had blocked the sun before I took this picture!

I have a love/hate relationship with electronic technology.  I love and appreciate the advances that have been made in the world, and I use lots of technologically savvy stuff every day.  But I hate learning the new stuff, and if I procrastinate, it seems that when I finally break down and learn it, something new immediately comes along to replace what I have just learned.  And I am married to a technology addict.  I know it’s a common thing for men to be into electronics and the latest gadgets and all of that, but I think our house is exceptionally up-to-date on the electronic gadgetry, especially when it comes to computers.  My problem with it lies where the technology becomes more of an inconvenience than it is a convenience.  I have a few examples I will share:

1.  Hi-Def Tv – My husband will sit and flip channels in the middle of a show just to try to find the hi-def version of the show.  Of course he doesn’t choose to do this during a Chicago Bears game or something he is inclined to watch.  For those shows, he will actually think about it ahead of the show’s start time.  He’ll sit and flip looking for high-def while I’m watching something, during shows like Dr. Phil or pointless reality shows.  I know, these are dumb shows, so I shouldn’t care about missing them.  But if I’m going to sit and watch something, then I want to watch it, I don’t want to miss any of it, otherwise I’m wasting my time.  So, if I’m watching Dr. Phil, and hubby comes over and tries to find Dr. Phil in hi-def, I might just miss the backround of a guest’s story and not know what is going on for the rest of the show.  Like I said, it’s not like we’re talking about high quality tv here, but who needs Dr. Phil in hi-def anyway?!?

2.  GPS –  I cannot tell you how many times our GPS guy has gotten us lost.  Yes, we have a GPS system in our car with a male voice – he was on sale.  I’ve always thought I was pretty good at navigating; pretty good at being a human compass and learning the layouts of strange cities and towns pretty quickly.  In the years before we had GPS (and kids!) we used to travel by car A LOT, and I was always our navigator.  I’d like to think I got us out of more than a few scrapes with just my sense of direction and an atlas…  But my past experience gets me no where compared to the GPS guy.  He has taken over.  My husband will insist that we follow Mr. GPS’ directions, even while I’m saying they don’t make sense.  For one thing, he’s led us into a lake before, literally.  Well, luckily common sense did prevail there at the last minute…  my husband stopped the car before he drove into the lake, but he was tempted to trust Mr. GPS, and drive into the lake, I know it.  Maybe it sounds like I’m jealous of Mr. GPS, but I’m not, really I’m not.  I just suspect that he might have it out for us, or that he is a practical jokester who gleefully directs us into predictaments just to see how we get out of them…  Kinda sounds like a dumb sitcom – tune in each week to see how we maneuver our way out of whatever mess Mr. GPS has finagled us into this time…

Don’t get me wrong – I do appreciate all the technology most of the time, in a way.  If my husband weren’t so into all these things, I wouldn’t have all the cool gadgets that I have, and I would not know how to use anything, including my computer probably!  But how ironic is it that this post has been sitting in my drafts for weeks now, not getting finished, just because other things kept coming up that I wanted to write about, so I wasn’t getting a chance to finish it.  But how ironic, that today when I went to tangents.org, I got the following message about learning new technology?!?  If you don’t hear from me for awhile, I’m just procrastinating learning the new “back end” of tangents!

Well my friendly bloggers…  I have some great news that is going to make you all very mad!  Yes, you read that right.  Tangents will be updated with the latest versions of the blog software by next Friday and as soon as today (whenever it is released).  Why will this make you mad?  Because the backend you have worked to learn is going to look significantly different.  But don’t worry!  You have the basics down.  Once you take a few minutes to get used to the new layout you will be comfortable again and blogging on Tangents.Org will be better than ever!

This is the THIRD time I’ve gotten this email forward, so I thought it was worth mentioning in my blog.  The subject line of the email reads:  Fwd: Dangerous Spider Bite – Brown Recluse Spider (Graphic pictur…
The body of the email shows some awful pictures of someone’s infection on their hand that they supposedly got from a spider bite.  Since I am a skeptic of ANYTHING I get via email forward, I looked up this warning on snopes.com, the website that investigates possible urban legends and their origins.  Actually, while I was at it, I looked up snopes on snopes.com, seeing what they’d say about their own site being an urban legend, but that’s another post…

Anyway, back to the spider bite warning.  Instead of posting the pictures of the infection here, I will just provide a link to the snopes.com entry about it since the pictures are pretty gross…  Click here if you have a morbid curiousity and you’d like to see what the inside of someone’s hand looks like.‏  So anyway – and I find myself saying anyway again, which means lots of tangents in this post :).   Anyway, when I looked up the brown recluse spider bite warning on snopes.com, it said that the status of this legend is undetermined, which means that they don’t know if it’s true or not.  Evidently, the photos are real, and it’s really an infection in someone’s hand that is pictured, but the origin of the infection is not necessarily the spider bite.  Here is a description of the incident by the victim her-(or him) self:

 I suspect a spider bite was the cause.  I was out in
the wood at Caddo Lake and noticed a bite on my thumb.  The doctor I was
seeing thought it was a spider bite.  Other doctors told me it was a brown
recluse bite.  It was also a MRSA infection.  It became so infected
because the first antibiotic I was on was not doing any good and I tried
to finish the semester before going in to see the doctor.
It was a very interesting experience and I no longer wait to go in to the
doctor.  Whether or not it was a brown recluse bite or not I can’t say.  I
saw some very good doctors who specialize in spider bites and they thought
it was.  But you have probably seen the latest info on MRSA infections
being misdiagnosed as spider bites.

Umm…  this person described this experience as “interesting”?  Wow, what a mellow personality one must have to possess a wound that looks like that and describe it as interesting… 

So, the moral of the story is, be careful with spider bites.  Be even more careful with email forwards, and most importantly, (especially if you’ve read my post called, “Don’t Let a Hospital Kill You) take good care of skin infections before they become as serious as the one pictured in the spider warning email, or you will have an “interesting experience” of your own!