Ziploc Baggies

Ah-hah, I finally thought of something for this letter.  I honestly lay awake in bed with Z words running through my brain, thinking to write a poem with lots of Z words for the finale of this challenge.  Maybe I’ll save that for next year because then it hit me – baggies, something I use daily.

I would actually be lost without these things.  There is such a variety of sizes that it makes them practical for almost any use.

I really like the Ziploc brand because they have a better zipper seal than those other brands.  Oops!  There’s another Z word - zipper.

You can find tiny versions of these bags in the craft stores.  Not only are they good for crafts, but I find them very useful when traveling.  I put my vitamins in them and don’t have to pack the big bottles, which take up way too much room in the suitcase.  I also use them for earrings and other jewelry when traveling.  They’ll slip into your purse easily and the items won’t be tangled.

I use them in the kitchen all the time for various things, from cut up veggies to leftovers for the freezer.  I’ve also put extra parts in them that we need to keep, such as screws, washers, nuts, bolts, etc.  The list is endless.

All this thinking about Ziplocs had me curious as to when they were invented.  It turns out they were developed by Dow Chemical Company in 1968.  Today Johnson and Johnson market them.  To read the Wikipedia article click here.

Yard Sales

I like going to these, but not having one myself.  People are strange where I live and unless you’re practically giving it away, you’re better off to donate your junk or sell it on Craigslist.  That’s certainly better than sitting in the yard for hours waiting for people to come by.

They hold garage sales and yard sales here on Fridays and Saturdays.  It’s a no-no- to hold them on Sundays.  This is the first state I’ve lived in where very little business is conducted on a Sunday.

We did well with yard sales in California, but not here.  Tools and baby items are popular in this state, so you’ll get some lookers if you have those things for sale.  You better be prepared to strike a cheap bargain though, if you want the sale.

Looking at yard and garage sales is a completely different thing.  One man’s trash is another's treasure, as they say.  You never know what you’ll find if you’re willing to take the time.  I especially like the sales if the proceeds are going to a worthy cause.  My neighbor holds a yard sale twice a year to benefit homeless animals and the no-kill shelter where I live.  She does very well because people like giving to the animals when they buy something from her.

Do you frequent garage sales?  Have you ever found a real bargain?

Xebec

Here’s a bit of old history.  The xebec is a Mediterranean sailing ship common from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

These ships were small and fast, thus ideal for use in warfare or by pirates.  They were useful in raids. 

The Spanish and French Navy used these vessels in the 1700’s.  The early boats had two masts and the later ones three.  In wartime, the ship could hold up to 400 men and 16-40 guns depending on its size.  In peacetime, this ship could transport merchandise.

Drawing of xebec

Xebecs were equipped with a lateen rig (large triangular sail mounted at an angle to the mast).  This allowed the vessel to “tack against the wind” and gave it an advantage when maneuvering around other ships or making a fast getaway.  The bow and stern extended in length over the hull giving the boat a lot of area for sails.  The sails could also be lowered quickly for passage under bridges.

Because of the lateen rig on the xebec, they were most useful in the Mediterranean Sea.  Square sails served better when sailing in the Atlantic Ocean due to the wind.

The Portuguese also used these vessels for long distance exploration.

So there you have it.  I bet this is something you didn’t know about history.

Weird Dreams

I’m the queen of weird dreams.  If I can manage to sleep more than three or four hours a night, I always dream something crazy, usually in the wee hours of the morning.  I don’t know where this stuff comes from.  The things I dream have nothing to do with my recent reading material, current TV shows I’ve watched, or things I’ve read surfing the internet.

I’ve kept a dream journal about all this bizarre stuff for at least the last twenty years.  I keep thinking a pattern will emerge but the only thing concrete at this point is the fact I’m usually around lots of people.

The last week in March, I was dreaming about Sharon Osborne.  I don’t think I’ve ever dreamed about the Osborne’s before.  In my dream, she was running a beauty salon in a western town.  At least all the buildings were western style in architecture.  She must have been in a mall-type situation because there were lots of other rooms and waiting areas in the place, and many people milling about. 

She gave me a purse-type case with lots of wrapped packages inside.  The wrapping paper was old-fashioned, similar to newsprint or an old newspaper, but with small floral patterns on it and each tied separately with curling ribbon.  After I got home, or where I was staying, my husband started opening them.  Some were flat and others were tiny boxes. 

A flat one had an announcement in there that stated Ozzy was going deaf.  My husband asked me if I gave her my condolences and of course I didn’t know, so I went back to talk to her.  She was busy working on someone’s hair so I decided to wait. 

While waiting I saw a man come in for surgery.  He had a bandage on his head and was in a wheelchair.  They wheeled him into another room.  There was a kitchen in yet another room.  A group of people in white clothes was busy cooking fish.  They started washing up kitchen utensils to use in the operating room.  “This will be fine,” they kept telling the man who looked skeptical as they brought in spatulas, big kitchen forks and knives.

I went to the restroom and a large gray, fluffy cat followed me in.  The room was tiny with a sink and toilet and a shoebox-sized litter box.  The cat got in to do his business standing and waving his tail in a flag as he sprayed the entire bathroom and me.  I had my arms up to protect myself.  I saw the cat lounging earlier on a cushion in the waiting room where there were skylights and potted plants all over.

When I came out, I went to another restroom and cleaned up.  This one was bigger and some girls helped me sponge up my arms and legs and change clothes.  I wasn’t mad at the cat because the litter box was too small for him.  Then I went to the kitchen to eat fish while I waited for Sharon.  Then…I woke up.

What do you make of this dream?  Have you ever dreamed anything bizarre?

The Vaccary

I grew up on a farm so this is a fitting word because we had many cows.  I decided to research pastures from ancient times.

The vaccary is an archaic word meaning a cow pasture or dairy farm.  In medieval times, it was linked to grazing land in the moors and valleys of the Pennines in Yorkshire and Lancashire.

 Old vaccary in Pendle UK

 

In the thirteenth century, numbers of vaccaries were carved out of old private hunting chases of nobility, who created them in an attempt to get some revenue back from their holdings.  Vacarries were small-scale commercial cattle farms.  In places around Pendle in the UK (more famous for its witches), you can still see the big stone slab walls that kept the cattle enclosed.

The word is from Medieval Latin, derived from vacca (for cow) and vaccinate (Latin vaccinus) for the cowpox serum used to protect people from smallpox.

This information is from World Wide Words

Useful Products

This one is to make cleaning easier.  I recently found this product and I’m amazed with what it can do.  I’m not very domestic and hate cleaning and cooking, which is an oddity, I guess, because I’m female.  I’m always looking for something to make the job quicker so I can get back to doing what I’d really like to do, writing, reading, sewing, crafting, playing with the cats, etc.

Unfortunately, I live in a dust bowl called the desert.  Red sand surrounds me.  I can dust and in two days, the red sand is back.  I still like to leave my windows open because there aren’t that many days you can do that in the desert.  Face it I love fresh air, but usually it’s too cold or too hot around here for open windows.  Regardless, the sand finds a way into the house.

This is a new dusting cloth by Clorox.  Don’t worry it isn’t smelly like bleach and is safe to use on just about any surface, including electronics.  It’s a dry duster similar to the refill cloths for the swifter, but this is thinner and a bit stickier (not the sticky you’re thinking of.) 

This cloth is about 8” by 8” and is designed for dry dusting.  Unbelievably, one cloth can dust an entire room.  That’s what the company advertizes and they don’t lie.  I tried it in the dustiest spot in the entire house, my husband’s office.  I wanted to put this to the test and I wasn’t disappointed.

The wipe picks up dust and cat hair (I have plenty of that) and it stays on the cloth because of the tacky texture.  You actually remove it and not just move it around as you dust.  When finished you just toss the rag in the trash.  The dust cloth starts out as a light yellow color.  By the time you’re finished, it will be brown.

Handy dispenser box

It only took me about an hour to dust the entire house, which is 3300 square feet.  If you need to do a quick job, this is for you.  On the days I use this new product, I can eliminate my use of glass cleaner and furniture polish.  Yes, these wipes will clean glass too. 

Normally I carry around a cleaning basket loaded with paper towels, half a dozen different cleaners, dust rags, scrubbing sponges, etc.  I think Clorox Dust Cloths is a marvelous find.

Traveling the Al-Can Highway

When you drive to Alaska, the Alaska-Canada Highway is the only way to get there.  This is some highway and one you’ll never forget.

 The Alcan Highway

 

When we got the wild hair to go to Alaska we didn’t know what we were in for back in the seventies.  This one-thousand mile road is dirt and not even paved, at least it wasn’t back then.  Of course, we found this out later because when we went in March the road was covered in snow.  Someone told us that it was worse to travel it in the summer when you ate dust the entire way.

The highway weaves in and out, around mountains, and across flatland's.  There was so much snow that the road was like a trench with great walls of snow above six-feet high on each side in lots of places.  Picture driving in the kind of trenches you see in the Olympics for the bobsleds.  Thankfully, you seldom meet another vehicle, but on the downside, this can be a bad thing if you are sucked into the snow bank.  That did happen to us and finally a large truck came along to pull us out.  A person could freeze to death out there in the wilderness.  For March it was cold, no need to worry about food spoiling.

Alaska Landscape

We (there were three of us) slept in the truck.  There are very few motels or gas stations between the long stretches of wilderness. 

It took us about six days to make this trip from Texas.  What a drastic change.  We left the eighty-degree temps for the low twenties.  In Montana, we ran into a blizzard and had to stop for the night because of whiteout conditions.

It’s a good thing we bought several pounds of smoked sausage to take along on the trip because we literally lived on that almost the entire time.  Everything was expensive, so we only got a motel room once on the road.

We had stopped somewhere along the way and were going to try to grill something on a small pit we had in the back of the truck.  What a joke that was.  It was too damn cold to hang around outside.  We crawled back in the truck and broke out the sausage. 

Later, we were sucking fumes so we pulled into a gas station and had to stay there until daybreak when the guy came to work so we could fill up and get on the road.  We ran the motor just enough to take the chill off the truck so we could dose off during the night.  There was nothing else around, just this small gas station in the middle of nowhere.

 Alaska Landscape

 

The night we did have a room, we decided to cook hamburgers. All of us were tired of sausage at that point, although it did hold up well.  We just passed the brown paper bag around and got some out when were hungry.  It was quick and easy eating, but that sausage was getting a bit hard and chewy, more like jerky.

We stopped at a tiny market close by the motel and got the stuff we needed for burgers.  We had the hamburger with us already.  It stayed frozen in the back of the truck since our escapade of grilling it on the side of the road a few days earlier hadn’t worked out.  I think we probably got some produce.  It’s been so long ago I really don’t remember.

Once back at the motel, we had to do what we could in the tiny room with just enough room for two beds.  There was a small bath to the side so we set the mini-Weber grill on the toilet seat.  I know this sounds bad, but you do what you have to do.  We had a good laugh about it all and I’m sure anyone would have thought we were nuts if they could see us cooking food in a bathroom, not exactly the most sanitary place in the world.  Those were the best burgers though and our only real meal since leaving Texas.  Heck, maybe anything would’ve been good.  We were probably just starved for any kind of food besides sausage.

We were all pretty scroungy looking by that time.  It did feel good to take an actual shower that night and get on some cleaner clothes.

That was one long trip.  When we finally arrived at the Alaska state line, we found better roads even if the snow was about the same.  We drove into Anchorage, another few hours away, and ended up in a commune where another friend was staying.  I’ll end this here because life in the commune is a completely different story.

Have you ever endured such conditions or lived in a commune?