A new leash on life . . .

I've got this song running through my head -- not your usual Christmas song, but a Muppets song.  Apparently, none of my kids nor my husband had ever seen The Muppet Movie, [how?! how!?], so this past Wednesday, when our family Advent calendar flipped open to reveal "Movie Night", we had to rectify that.   

Side note: my running buddy June was raised Mennonite; she says that the Muppet Show was the only show, besides Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons, that her family watched.  Her dad, however, didn't like the Muppet Show, because it was too irreverent.  Be warned. 

My husband was mostly impressed by the guest cameos: Steve Martin, Orson Welles, Richard Pryor, etc etc.   My daughter said, "I kind of recognize some of those people. but they look so much younger than I think of them."  Well, yess.

For me, though, I was almost disappointed by my favorite song from the movie, which comes when Kermit and Ralph commiserate over women.  [Of whom there are disappointingly few in the movie, I must admit].  I was disappointed because for years -- decades even -- I've been singing the song to myself, and then in the movie they left some of my favorite verses out!   

How could that happen?  How could I know more words than Kermit and Ralph did?  It turns out that the sound track I'd listened to while growing up came from the British version of the movie, not the American. 

Through the miracle of the internet, I tracked it down:  "This is a rare clip from the 97-minute UK cut of 'The Muppet Movie', shown only in British theatres in 1979 and once on VHS. This extended scene features additional lyrics not included in the US/international cut." (Available here, with a list of glowing and bubbly compliments.  I'm not the only fan of this song.)

Just feast your ears on these awesome lyrics:

 A collie that's classy,  A laddie needs a lassie;

A lover and wife . .  . gives you a new leash on life!

Merry Christmas and happy holidays.  I'm going to take myself for a walk now.  

My homemade canning jar lid rack for the dishwasher

And here -- because I don't apparently have anything to do -- is a project I've been contemplating a long time, and I finally just gave myself the gift of a half-hour in the basement and made it. 

Behold the canning-jar-lid rack,
sitting happily in the dishwasher,
with canning jar lids along for the ride.

We do a lot of canning jar lid washing, and our dishwasher has no good way to stand them up like plates (does yours?  does anyone's?  no idea).  Apparently, it's possible to buy these racks online, but of course I'm all to-heck-with-buying-stuff, so I thought and thought and thought, and finally came up with this design.  It's inspired both by the existing peg-up structure that the dishwasher already sports so jauntily, and also by the fact that I had a bunch of skinny dowel rods leftover from making soap dish racks last Christmas season. 

When I made this, I got to play with a bunch of my favorite tools:  the cordless drill (so much!), the circular saw to  slice down the base strips, a new orbital sander because -> fun <-, a mallet to pound dowel rod pieces into the holes, and a bolt cutter to snip the dowel rods.  (That last one was not exactly super professional, and it means that the ends of the dowel rods have a crimped appearance, but it's not like gazillions of people are wandering through my kitchen to look at stuff inside my dishwasher, are they?)  The bars along the bottom are held together with really short-snipped dowel-rod pegs.  I like that this is an all-wood thing that is just held together with wood.  

Canners all know that you're not supposed to reuse the metals lids for next year's batch of applesauce or whatever (and then, we confidentially tell you that we reuse them anyway . . . shhhh!).   But the metal lids are perfectly fine for everyday purposes, and the Tattler plastic lids are fine for reusing over and over again in canning projects for decades.    Because of that, and because we use canning jars for storing leftovers, yogurt, butter, pesto, . . . basically, for just about everything . . . we seem to have lots and lots (and lots) of canning jar lids in every load.  

And now, my canning jar lids are upstanding.  yay!

Random thoughts on my computer co-dependency

I once went to a talk by a philosopher/psychologist who studied the way that tools can become an extension of our bodies: canes, glasses, scissors . . . if we get good enough with them, they begin to feel not like separate objects, but extensions of ourselves, he argued. Today my computer went through one of those required software upgrades and had to shut it self down and then reboot, leaving me with 15 or 20 minutes in the middle of the day during which I could not do anything with my computer. I had pored over my to-do list, and the only thing -- the only thing that I could do with my computer inaccessible to me there in the middle of the day -- was to go bug other people who were hard at work and tell them bad jokes. This is an indication that my relationship with my computer is perhaps a little bit too intense.

But at least I know a bunch of bad jokes. 

With my husband off in Madrid, I'm trying to get to bed at 8 and wake at 5. I try to finish up my email at 7 so I have one hour with no blue light, although I don't always succeed. One morning this week, I woke up and had 31 new emails waiting for me at 5 AM. Another morning I woke up and I had 24 new emails. Oh. My. Goodness.

My to-do list as an associate dean is getting so long, and so convoluted, that my paper planner method has become insufficient. Today, I combined my various to-do lists into an Excel spreadsheet, so that I could sort based on urgency or category of the tasks. I had 39 items at the beginning of the day. I had 45 at the end of the day. Well, at least I'm grateful for spreadsheets.

I love my "start dictation" button, and the fact that I can just speak aloud and have my computer write down mostly what I say. When my brain starts dribbling out my ears, I become a terrible typist. Huzzah for dictation!