395th Friday Blog Roundup
At the end of last year’s cherry season (it actually may have been closer to mid-fall), I bought a push button cherry pitter from the farm store where we buy our vegetables. It was a few dollars and pitting cherries is enough of a pain in the ass that I tended to not give them to the twins because they couldn’t really grasp the concept of spitting out the pit.
I used the push button cherry pitter for the first time on Wednesday, and I fell so deeply in love with it that I immediately started calling people to see if they too knew the beauty of the cherry pitter. People didn’t react well to my effusive questions, brushing me off as if cherry pitters are not something to be cherished or discussed ad nauseum. Some friends actually seemed concerned when I offered to drive out to the farm store to buy them one, and they muttered things like, “that won’t be necessary.” I want to give people the gift of cherry pitting, and people seem unsure of whether they want to take it. Odd.
If anyone has a good recipe for cherry preserves, the twins and I would like to try our hand at making our own cherry yogurt filling. Yes, it is just an excuse to pit more cherries.
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What are your thoughts on this idea of pay per use of the Internet?
I use my home Internet for play, but I also use it for work, and it doesn’t really bother me to use it for work because I have unlimited usage. But if I had to pay every time I used the Internet, would it make me feel cranky to answer work emails off the clock? Would I cut corners instead of giving it my all? We’ve created a culture in America where we meld business with pleasure, being accessible outside of work for work-related questions/actions. We can’t create that culture and then set up obstacles that don’t allow us to follow that culture. Would having to pay every time to used the Internet make you use it less, or would it not affect your usage at all?
And dude, if I was being billed for spam getting past the email filter and coming into the inbox, I hope the government would do more to curb spam.
I know this isn’t imminent, though capping your Internet usage in tiers is something that companies do for smartphones.
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Because the twins have to share a birthday, we created for each of them a floating family holiday called ChickieNob Day or Wolvog Day. They float along the family calendar and each pop up once a year. The way one knows that it is ChickieNob/Wolvog Day is that you go down to your chair in the kitchen and it is decorated in a big sign and lollipops. When it is your special day, you get to choose all the activities and meals.
It was ChickieNob Day last weekend, so we ate doughnuts for breakfast (I was thankfully spared and allowed to eat yogurt though I still ended up smelling like the doughnut store which turns my stomach) and painted pottery and swam. And then the ChickieNob cried when it was time for bed because she wanted every single day to be ChickieNob Day. Don’t we all.
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And now the blogs…
But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week as well as the week before. In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:
- “Visible Life” (Slate)
- “Right Where I Am: 2012” (Still Life with Circles)
- “Belief, Discussion, and Dissent in the Cloud” (A Half Baked Life)
Okay, now my choices this week.
Life As I Know It has a post about witnessing pure joy. Until you see unadulterated joy, you can’t really understand the difference between extreme happiness and what lies beyond. But she got to witness it when an adoption was finalized. She writes, “Sure I’ve seen plenty of happiness, but this was something different. This was more. It was a couple who had truly given up on this ever happening. Today I literally witnessed a dream come true.”
A Thousand Oceans has a gorgeous post for Angie’s “Right Where I Am” project that recounts what life is like 2 months and 3 weeks after a loss. I will give you a heads up that you — like me — will bawl reading this, especially when you consider the most enormous part of her move: “Leaving this place, packing these boxes with our books and pots and pans, is leaving my children behind. So on this day, 2 months and 3 weeks since Aminadav and Naava came and went and returned to the land, my land, I hope you can understand why I can’t interrupt my moping to thank anyone for enabling me to leave this place.” And you will suck in your breath when you read what her MIL said. It is a gorgeous, heartbreaking post.
Lastly, A Half Baked Life has a post about what she learned about between-ness from an exercise she did in yoga. Instead of moving right into the next position, her teacher had them hover close to the position for a moment before completing it, creating a slow-motion effect. She explains, “I am not good with in-between-ness. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the journey from point A to point B, but rather that I generally live with my end goals in sight, and I tend to be hell-bent on arriving at them.” The post really resonated with me, perhaps because I feel similarly about between-ness — both struggling with it and knowing there is a lot to learn there.
The roundup to the Roundup: Profound love of the cherry pitter. What do you think of pay per use for the Internet? It was ChickieNob Day. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between May 24th and June 1st) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week? Read the original open thread post here.
18 comments
A ChickieNob (or Wolvog) Day sounds lovely! What a great idea to celebrate the twins as individuals.
That post by A Thousand Oceans is incredible. I had marked it as a potential second helping, but you beat me to it!
Love your idea of an in-between-birthdays way to celebrate each twin individually!
Most of us already pay for the Internet through our monthly service provider fees (which can be fairly substantial in Canada, particularly for higher speeds). I don’t download tons of movies or music files, though, so I can understand wanting to charge extra for people who use extra bandwidth. I don’t think most people realize how much bandwidth they use (I sure don’t — I don’t have a smartphone, so that aspect of the payment plan escapes me.)
It does suck that more & more sites generally are moving toward paid access, although I understand the current model isn’t sustainable for a lot of sites — particularly for magazines & newspapers, which are seeing hard copy sales dropping like stones. The NY Times has a paywall (you get, I think, 10 free articles a month & then you start being charged), & The Globe & Mail announced it is going that direction as well. I get the Sunday NYT at home, so I get unlimited access, & I’m also a Globe home delivery subscriber, so I hope they will adopt that aspect of the model as well. I also pay for access to Ancestry.com, which is horrendously expensive, but also invaluable for genealogical research.
*beams* … I’m glad that my post resonated with you this week! (And funny … I was in yoga again last night, doing that practice, in a room I swear was about 80 degrees, and thought of you …)
We have pay-per-access for our cell phones, oddly enough. And I barely use mine (though texts are free). I don’t know what would happen if I had to pay per use of the internet … I’ve also stopped reading quite as much on the NYTimes website because of their fees. I really do take the “freeness” of the internet for granted. Though … perhaps it’s less about access and more about the sustainability of a particular site?
If I had to pay for the use of the internet every single time I used it, I would likely only use it for work and would stop all outside use. In fact, I would plan (on a list) what I needed to look up or search for or read and do it during work hours just so that I wouldn’t be spending my own money on it in the evenings and weekends.
This question actually reminds me of being on a cruise and since we are going on one in just 16 days to celebrate our 12th anniversary, we were talking about using the internet on the cruise. We both decided that the costs weren’t worth it and are looking forward to unplugging for a whole week. The list below is what it would cost to use the computers on the ship or to bring our own and log into the wifi on board. So, we let everyone know that we’ll be inaccessible for the entire week and we won’t have a clue if anything newsworthy happens.
• 480 minutes for $159 USD
• 240 minutes for $89 USD
• 120 minutes for $59 USD
• 45 minutes for $29 USD
• Pay As You Go: $0.75/min
Ridiculous, right?!?
Anyway, here is a recipe for your cherries. I use the canned pie filling, so use the same amount as would go into a can. Mix that with a box of angel food cake mix. Don’t add anything else. Bake according to the box mix directions and serve with whipped cream or ice-cream. You can always substitute other fruit pie fillings (blueberry, apple, etc.). It is light and airy and if you are on weight watchers and cut the 13 x 9 inch pan into 24 pieces, they are only 2 points each. Calories is right under 100 (depending on the filling used) and not counting the topping. Enjoy!
Hey, my comment pertains to your beloved cherry pitter. Cherries are my absolute favorite fruit but I always felt that a pitter was just a gadget that I would never really use (and when eating fresh cherries there is something ritualistic about spitting out the pits). However, since you have landed on a great one, please share as I want to get one toot sweet.
I LOVE my cherry pitter too. It was used so I had to buy a new gasket recently (get it at a local a CE hardware store) and a new spring but it works like a champ. I actually made a cherry pie, just got the random recipe off the internet. My neighbor actually has the cherry tree so she gives me cherries if I help pick them.
OK, I have an olive pitter that I have used as a cherry pitter but haven’t been thrilled with. Do you know how they compare? What cherry pitter do you have? I am glad to know I’m not the only mom who withholds cherries from her kid on the basis of pits.
I buy what is about the right number of minutes for me on my personal cellphone (300 per month) and then pay extra if I go over that; if I use it for work and that causes me to go over, it irritates me. I do pay attention to how many I’m using though I rarely have to cut back to avoid overuse.
Love the idea of giving the kids their own day. That sounds like an amazing way to make sure twins are celebrated for their being who the are.
Cristy at Searching for a Silver Lining had a post about haters this week that really stuck with me. http://searchingforoursilverlining.blogspot.com/2012/05/anatomy-of-hater.html It is definitely worth checking out.
Yeah, I cut up the cherries for my daughter, because I do not want her to miss out on the delicious summer treat. I want a cherry pitter! I saw your tweet about it and was going to inquire more, but felt like a dork. Clearly, I would have been in good company!
I have a link this week! And no one posted it yet! (I’m kinda surprised)
http://mrsspit.ca/?p=3512
Oh, also, if I had to pay per use of the internet, I would hardly use it any more. That’s why I’m sticking with my cell phone company, because they have unlimited data. I am C H E A P, and it would be like paying for the public library on a per book basis. I just wouldn’t do it. I’d buy a couple road maps and put the encyclopedia people back in business and the internet providers could go f*** themselves.
I’ve paid for internet usage by the hour, when traveling in Europe and such, and I’m careful and thrifty but invariably end up with a few minutes left over and then go on the equivalent of an internet spending spree, wildly looking at anything I can just to get my money’s worth. Except when it’s been snail’s pace slow, like two minutes for one page load, at which point I’ve cut my losses and walked away in a huff.
Paying for bandwidth makes a lot more sense to me than paying for time. Unless I’m using someone else’s computer, why should they care if I take a long time to read an article on a static page?
At what age did you start ChickieNob Day and Wolvog Day? I’ve considered it ever since you first mentioned it but I don’t know if they’d quite get it yet. Their preschool has special days for each child, sometime around the birthday but not necessarily on the exact day, and I do plan to request that Burrito and Tamale get different days. Even though it will mean baking two batches of muffins.
A second helping of a post that I keep thinking about.
http://babyinterrupted.blogspot.com/2012/05/somebodys-baby.html
Oh, Mel! Thank you so much for adding my post to the Roundup! 🙂
I do believe that paying for sevice would make me use it less. Then internet would be just like cookies for me. When I have cookies in the house, I HAVE to keep eating them until they are gone. I only ever want them when I have them in the house. (That’s why I make sure not to buy cookies very often.) Internet is the same way. I use it the way I do because I can–it’s easy to access and relatively inexpensive. If they made it harder/more expensive to access, then I wouldn’t “want” it as much.
having lived in nz/ australia.. i lived with a metered internet set up. You paid for a month of access.. but after X number of MB, you were dropped to dial up speeds.. totally changes everything
You get angry that you have to download the tax forms, instead of pick them up printing at the post office. You expect people to warn you about huge attachments. You call instead of go online for some info…. I think it is good to have some reminders, because internet/the cloud etc isn’t ‘free’. Its servers eating electricity in a server farm somewhere.. and we’ll get addicted to ‘free’ utilities just like we always do — on the other hand, I love having the internet tap on full blast and the magic of sharing things like we can do now.
As for the other major theme of your post.. i love that they have a floating holiday as a surprise. My friend’s twins always get a ‘special day’ coupon from me. They are identical. They have always called it their ‘separate days’ day because it was the first time they had ever really done fun things separately from their parents and brother. Those are also some of my favorite days because they treated every moment as if it was precious. Joyous intense living. Thanks for the flood of really happy memories tonight — all thanks to the free internet!
To everyone who wants to know about the cherry pitter:
This is the one I got: http://www.pushbuttoncherrypitter.com/
It’s at our farm store (we buy our vegetables from a nearby farm and they also sell a few random kitchen gadgets) for $8.95. You just put the cherry in the small dip in the top of the jar, push the button (I have the twins pit them for me), and the pit pops into the jar below and you drop the cherry into a bowl. No mess. Easiest clean up. I seriously can’t believe that I used to cut cherries in half and dig out the pit.
Hi there! I hope this isn’t a terrible faux pas, but I’d love to throw my own link out there for consideration. Writing publicly about infertility is new for me, and I feel so much better, freer (I always hate how that word looks spelled!), calmer now that I’m “out.” I hope there’s more to come… and I’d like to thank you and this site for helping me see how many women write so well about this issue. Thanks for listening… and enjoy those cherries! http://www.freckledcitizen.com/2012/05/new-day.html?m=1
The Koop Triplets have made it home on day 94!
http://thekoobers.blogspot.fi/2012/05/94-days.html
And now that I’ve read your post…my comments. 🙂
I remember back in ’94 we actually had pay per use dial-up internet. I think we had so many minutes per month and then if we went over it, we had to pay more. I know that limited what we could do online or we (kids) had to pay our parents for the amount extra we used. Many net-mobile connections (here in Finland) are charged the same, unless you have an unlimited package for a set price (which I do until the end of the year and if I don’t find a cheap package to continue with, I might not have net on my phone. It’s a toy I’ll miss, but can live without as we have computers at home).
Not having to pay for Internet per use is somewhat novel to me, too. Turns out I would/have watched my consumption more closely, work offline then upload, skim, triage more brutally, get annoyed at people spamming including friends sending crap (especially in big chunks) and you have to drop the expectation that everyone around you can and will connect online, but at the end of the day it’s just about spending priorities and Internet rates fairly high on mine, so.
Bea