Our RV Adventures

It only made it down to 35° here last night, despite the 32° that was forecast. Today wasn’t much better with the temp finally crawling up to 45°, and tomorrow looks to be more of the same.

However we’re a lot better off than the dozen or so global warming protestors out in Denver CO waving signs in front of the Department of the Interior office there. They’re calling for the US to abandon ALL fossil fuels, and I guess, freeze to death. As for them, they’re walking around in 4†of snow, and it was –10° last night. This is called “The Al Gore Effectâ€.

We finally got a chance to try out the Cranberry Orange Nut Bread Jan baked yesterday morning. So we had a couple of slices for breakfast this morning, toasted with butter. Really delicious.

Here’s the recipe for now. I’ll post it later in Jan’s Favorite Recipes.

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Cranberry Orange Nut Bread

Ingredients:

2 cups Flour
1 cup Sugar
1-1/2 tsp Baking Powder
1 tsp Salt
1/2 tsp Baking Soda
3/4 cup Orange Juice
1 Tbsp grated Orange Peel (orange zest)
2 Tbsp Shortening
1 Egg, well beaten
1-1/2 cups coarse chopped, Fresh (or frozen) Cranberries
1/2 cups Chopped Nuts (Jan used pecans)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350°. Grease up a 9″ x 5″ loaf pan

Mix together all dry ingredients in a medium mixing bowl. Mix in egg, shortening, orange juice, and orange peel until well blended. Mix in cranberries and nuts.

Bake for 50 minutes (start checking at 45 minutes) until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool on rack for 15 minutes. Remove from pan and cool completely. Wrap and store overnight.

Continuing in Jan’s Happy Homemaker mode, she did another batch of her Chicken Vegetable Soup this morning. Perfect for this cold weather.

The recipe is already posted in Jan’s Favorite Recipes

But for us, Jan adds some heat by substituting a can of Hot Habanero Rotel tomatoes in place of the can of crushed tomatoes.

Jan started working on our Christmas cards this afternoon so I printed up a couple of pages of return address labels for her. I custom make them every year, using a different graphic.

Last year it was a candy cane, so this year I decided to go in a different direction.

Jan however, decided that the wrong direction and suggested strongly that I reorient my aim and try again. So now it looks like we’re going with these.

Sometimes Jan just has no sense of humor.

I mused a couple of weeks ago under the Greg’s Musings tab about how we seem to be losing our history. In the article “Are We Erasing Our Past?â€, I talked about how Political Correctness is causing us to change names of buildings, and even move or tear down decades-old monuments.

Well, this has come back to bite Yale University in the butt with a vengeance. Like many colleges and universities around the country, there have to calls to rename or remove statues, buildings, or entire colleges. In Yale’s case, the object of derision is the John C. Calhoun Residential College, part of the overall university.

John C. Calhoun was a Yale graduate, class of 1804, where he was valedictorian. During his years of political service, he was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, a U.S. Senator, Secretary of War under President James Monroe, and Vice President under both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson.

So all in all, it seems he would be the perfect candidate to have a Yale college named after him, and that’s what happened in 1933.

But in 2016 ole John has a problem. You see, besides all his other qualities, he had some other ones. He was also pro-South (being from South Carolina, probably not unexpected) and pro-slavery, the real deal breaker.

So recently Yale established a procedure for students and others to demand the renaming of any university facilities that don’t meet their ideals. Like for example, Styles College, named for Ezra Styles, the 7th President of Yale, and a founder of Brown University.

But, even though Ezra condemned the cruelty of slavery in the United State, he owned slaves, a contradiction found among many in that time period. But now Yale has a real problem.

You see, Elihu Yale, for whom Yale is named, was also involved in the slave trade. As an official of the East India Company, he oversaw the operation of an important node of the Indian Ocean slave trade and certainly profited from slavery.

So get your vote in now for your choice for the university’s new name.

Maybe the safest choice would be No Name University. It would probably cut down on a lot of arguments..

Thought for the Day:

“My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.†― Orson Welles

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Jan was in Happy Homemaker mode this morning, so she whipped up a a loaf of Cranberry Orange Nut Bread, made with fresh cranberries.

Unfortunately it wasn’t quite cool and ready to try before it was time to leave for our San Antonio day trip. So we were on the road about 11am with our first stop the Tuesday Morning in the Olmos area of town.

It only took Jan about 10 minutes to find 4 boxes of high-end cards, a total of 60, that were originally priced at $20 a box, so $80 of cards for only $25. Nice.

Then it was back down south to the City Base area to the Sam’s Club for my prescription and a couple of other things. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to use the new Scan & Go app that I talked about yesterday. Since I checked out at the pharmacy, I just let them handle the other two items as well. Maybe next time.

Then it was a couple of miles down the road to the theater to see Dr. Strange, the latest in the Marvel Universe pantheon of superhero movies. Although I guess you can’t really call Dr. Strange a ‘superhero’.

His backstory is a little different from the typical superhero one – you know, born on another planet, bitten by a radioactive spider, really a Norse god,  or maybe given a lantern by a dying alien, all the normal ways to gain superpowers.

No, Dr. Steven Strange was a world-renowned, but arrogant and egotistical, neurosurgeon whose hands were seriously injured in a car accident. As a result he can no longer do surgery. So after exhausting the range of Western medicine, he journeys to Nepal to seek out an ancient sorceress to heal him. Instead he becomes a master sorcerer himself and resolves to spend his life making up for his past.

The casting of Benedict Cumberbatch as Dr. Strange is an almost perfect match to the comic book version that I remember from the 60’s.

Although not nearly as cerebral as Arrival , the sci-fi movie we saw a couple of days ago, it was fun and added a new link to the ongoing story line in the Avengers’ movies and TV series. Well recommended if you’re into this kind of movie.

It seems like most sci-fi movies, and Marvel movies in particular, have extra scenes during the credits, scenes that usually add a lead-in to the next movie, and sometimes the whole over-arcing Marvel story line. And the RunPee app always gives us the info on these extra scenes.

Since this movie’s been out for over a month, there were only about 10 people in the theater, and most of them stayed for the first extra scene in the middle of the credits, but only Jan and I, and two others, stayed for the second one at the end of the credits. When I see people leaving early like this, I’m always tempted to yell out that there’s more, and I have done it a couple of times in the past, but not this time.

After the movie, our last stop was the nearby Cracker Barrel for their Thursday Turkey and Dressing. Just as good as always.

Then it was back on the road, heading home, getting back to the rig about 6:30.

A very nice day.