Footle and Grok

Do you want to have a clean house and get rid of extra food in your pantry*? Invite friends to stay for the weekend.

We had Jay and his son, Kaden, over last weekend. Hubby has known Jay a year longer than he has known me, so Jay and Kaden are more like family than friends. Because of this, I told him my home is his home, and he could eat whatever he wanted out of my pantry.

Voila!

He opened a bag of oats, so I sent the whole thing home with him. He expressed a like for black olives, so I gave him my last can of those awful things. His son loved the butterscotch bars** I made that used the can of sweetened condensed milk I’d had in my pantry for years. I made a box of pasta salad for dinner (one box down, two to go.)

We had lunch at the lake, so I brought all the snack-like items that had been hanging out in my pantry too long. Slim Jims, almonds, and beef jerky packages all disappeared!

After they left, it took me five minutes to put the house back together and relax, knowing that my overstuffed pantry has a little breathing room.

Who can I invite over next?

*I love having a pantry with empty shelf space, but Hubby abhors a vacuum and buys more food when he sees empty shelves. Our shelves are really deep and can hold a ton of food. (Food I really don’t want to move to Montana.) I stop this from happening by bringing all the food to the front and filling the back with empty boxes. It looks really full, but it isn’t. Sneaky, but effective. (He doesn’t read this, so don’t tell him.)

**I’m not sharing this recipe because the bars weren’t that good and were so sticky at first that I couldn’t even cut them into squares.

It’s Monday and for some reason this meme spoke to me, so I’m sharing it with you. I hope we all overcome what is holding us back this week and do things that we thought were impossible.

I love looking at expensive cars. I don’t EVER want to own one, but I love to see them on the road. I saw a Lotus once in London, England and got giddy.

Most of the time, I ogle Corvettes (my favorite car), but yesterday I saw a car I’ve never seen before, and I had to gush about it.

I dislike visiting Walmart in the afternoon because it is a madhouse, but we had company over, and I needed chips and flour tortillas for tacos. Hubby also had a prescription ready for pick up, so I braved the Walmart crowds.

I was on my way home on I-5 when a car passed me in the fast lane. It was not speeding, and I soon caught up to it. I’d never seen a car that cool looking. For a moment, I wondered if it was a Tesla, but when he sped up again, I was able to read the name on his trunk. 

McLaren. 

I’d never heard of a McLaren before, and when I researched the car, I was shocked to find out I had been passed by a $200,000 car. Unbelievable.

I love looking at expensive cars, but we were both driving down I-5, and one assumes we were both going to get to our location in one piece. Was he 33 times more comfortable or safer than I was in my car? I doubted it.

The number one reason I don’t want to own a luxury car is that I like to look at them. If I am driving or riding in one, I can’t see what the car looks like. What’s the fun in that?

I’m grateful that someone bought a $200,000 car and drove on I-5 at that time so I could see how cool a McLaren is. I guess going to Walmart in the afternoon has an advantage after all.

(YouTuber sounds like a potato.)

I have finished my first week of making videos for my YouTube channel. I thought I might list a few thoughts I’ve had about working in this new medium. There isn’t any order here. I’m doing a brain dump, so a year from now, I’ll know how it felt at the beginning. I appreciate everyone who subscribed and hope for more growth in my future.

My thought on Jenn’s Writing World:

• It’s a lot easier to make a YouTube episode than a podcast episode.
• Working with camera gear is fun.
• Learning how to create a YouTube video from start to finish is one-part learning from YouTube videos and three-parts trial and error.
• It’s way cheaper to create YouTube videos than podcast videos.
• I need to improve my scripts.
• Every YouTube expert said to do one video a week. I did six the first week, and I plan to put out a video every day in April. Apparently, I don’t listen well.
• It took time to find the right free video editing program, but I believe I found a great one with Shotcut.
• Every YouTube expert said don’t do an intro video, but I wanted to, so I did.
• Every YouTube expert said to just “jump in” and don’t wait. They were right about that.
• I bought little gear to get started, and I feel good about the thirty or so dollars I’ve invested.
• Walmart has a ton of YouTube recording stuff for the same price as Amazon with no wait. I wish I had known that before.
• I may go to three episodes a week, Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday, instead of Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I don’t have to decide until May.
• My most popular videos are my write-ins which are great, but they take the longest to edit.
• However, the editing is easy and fun, so I don’t mind.
• I have a ton to learn (I really want to edit in a clone segment), but I’m having so much fun that I don’t mind how little I don’t know.
• I have ten subscribers in my first week, which is grand. My first goal is 100 subscribers, so I’ll have to figure out how to get the word out.
• Getting the word out is the part I don’t like, so I need to learn how to make it fun (or pay someone to do it for me.)

If you read that whole list, you now know everything that’s in my head about my channel (I’m sorry.) I didn’t realize it would be so long. I’m doing a write-in every day in April to go along with Camp Nanowrimo, so I’ll do a check-in at the end of the month.

Again, thank you for all your support. I genuinely appreciate you all.

I like to think about infinity every once in a while. It’s sort of a hobby. When I’m not thinking about infinity, I like to think about zero, another interesting number.

Numbers I try not to think about too often are attached to teeny tiny things like atoms or DNA. Those kinds of numbers make my head hurt.

Here is an example that I found while looking for interesting science facts. The headline reads, “There is enough DNA in the average person’s body to stretch from the sun to Pluto and back — 17 times.”

That is an impressive fact, but here is the part that blows my mind.

The genetic code in one human cell contains 23 DNA molecules (we know them as chromosomes.) Each of these DNA molecules contains 500,000 to 2.5 million nucleotide pairs. When uncoiled, one DNA molecule is on average 2 inches long.

In the article, they do some math and get to the Pluto number. That’s fun, but that isn’t what rattles my brain.

We have about 37 trillion cells in our body, and each one has between 11.5 million and 57.5 million nucleotide pairs. In one cell!

DNA is small, but these nucleotide pairs are beyond tiny. I can’t imagine how small they are, and I can imagine lots of weird things.

Look at the skin on the back of your hands. Millions of cells make up your skin, and each of those has millions of these nucleotide pairs.

If I keep staring at my hand, I might go crazy. I’m going to think about infinity instead.

For most of my life, when I heard chia, I thought of pets (although I’ve never personally seen one.) About fifteen years ago, I read Born to Run and learned that people ate chia seeds for energy. When I went on a cruise in 2019, I had a chia pudding that looked ugly but tasted good.

Since then, I’ve heard about chia seeds in plenty of running books, podcasts, and videos. I looked into making overnight oats (with disastrous results), and many of the recipes included chia seeds.

I’ve decided I’d like to add chia seeds to my diet. It took me a while to find them in Walmart, but I finally found the right aisle last week.

Unfortunately, they only had large packages that were rather pricy. I’m not ready to commit to a huge bag of chia seeds that I may never use. (This goes against my empty pantry plan.)

So I need some help. Do you eat chia seeds? Can I borrow half a cup? I wish they made a beginners bag that I could buy. If you know where I can find that, without breaking the bank, that would be great.

If you have any experience with chia seeds, let me know. This is not a normal food for me, but I enjoyed the pudding I had on the cruise. If I decide I like it, then I can buy the big bag at Walmart.

Many thanks.

It’s time to talk about dinosaurs again.

I love writing these posts because I have to do research, and I end up learning something new about one of my favorite subjects. (One reason I am moving to Bozeman, Montana, is because of dinosaurs.)

We’ve probably all seen gigantic dinosaur skeletons in museums. They are amazing, but most of the time, these animals were not discovered by themselves. Often, instead of one animal being found fossilized in the ground, there are many different types of dinosaurs scattered around a dig site.

One of the challenges paleontologists face is figuring out which bone belongs to which animal. If the dinosaurs were buried quickly, the related bones might be in the correct location. More often than not, the bones are disturbed by flooding, landslides, or being eaten by other animals, so it can be hard to tell which bones go together.

That is where science comes to the rescue.

In the early days, paleontologists had to use their knowledge of animals past and present to piece the dinosaurs back together. Today they have hi-tech tools to help them, including the microscope.

How does using an instrument that looks at small things help identify something as large as a dinosaur bone? Scientists take a tiny core sample from the fossil and look at it under the microscope. They can then learn the animal’s age when it died, an extremely useful bit of information.

If you have two bones that look like they might come from the same dinosaur, but one belongs to an animal that died ten years before the other, you know they don’t belong together. With this information, we can more accurately assemble dinosaurs and know for sure what the animal looked like, at least on the inside.

I think this is clever. It’s a simple way to answer a complicated question. Unfortunately, by using this technique, museum directors are discovering that some of their dinosaurs are not as accurate as they could be.

This is why science is so fun. We are always improving our knowledge. By thinking outside the box, we can use the small to learn about the large.

Before I start today’s post, I want to thank everyone for supporting my YouTube channel. I already have seven subscribers, which I’m thrilled with. My third episode, the first ten-minute writing video, went live this morning. I hope it spreads to writers around the world.

Onto today’s post.

Happy National Melba Toast Day.

I don’t understand Melba toast. There are more interesting breads to eat. If I want something small and dry, I’ll have a cracker. Why does Melba toast need to exist, much less have a holiday?

And why do I have an unopened box of Melba toast in my pantry?

Melba toast was first made for Dame Nellie Melba, an Australian opera singer, around 1897. She was ill, and her chef, Auguste Escoffier, made it for her often.

So Melba toast started as food for ill people. It might have disappeared from culinary history, except that in 1925, the Mayo Brothers created an “Eighteen Day Reducing Diet” for Ethel Barrymore. Melba toast was part of the diet, and it gained in popularity.

I probably purchased the box in my pantry for my hubby when he was trying to cut back on carbs. I’m not surprised we never ate it. But now, I have to find a use for Melba toast.

This website has 50 different toppings for Melba toast. It might be fun to try a few. I could also put toast on top of the clam chowder that Hubby made.

The box of Melba toast is small, and I could make it disappear in just a few days with a little creativity.

Do you like Melba Toast? If you do, how do you eat it? I’ll gladly try any ideas. This is not a holiday I want to celebrate next year, so I better eat my Melba toast today.

Last week I learned a ton, and this week I plan to learn even more. I hope you learn something interesting this week too. No matter what you do or what you learn, you are awesome.

I have learned more in the last week than I have learned in months. I’ve created multiple blogs and podcasts over the years, yet I’ve never had more fun than when I made my first YouTube video.

This first video isn’t the best ever, and I look forward to improving my recording skills, but I did edit it better than I expected. You can watch it here.

There is no shortage of YouTube videos on making a YouTube video; some are excellent, and some are useless. However, I learned a lot by trial and error. No one can teach everything in a video. That’s a good lesson to remember.

My first two videos aren’t going to improve my SEO or gain the subscribers I need to get monetized. Instead, they’re the ones I wanted to start with, the ones that make me happy. My official writing videos start on Tuesday.

If you’re a writer who wants to improve or know a writer who wants to improve, I’d love it if you shared my channel. I hope that together we can build a community of successful writers.

Here are the links I have so far:

• Episode 1 that comes out Sunday
• Episode 2 that comes out Monday
• Jenn’s Writing World Youtube channel

Thank you for your support. Let me know what you think.