Entries from January 2008 ↓

Cooking with Kerosene

As strange as it may seem, we do a lot of our cooking on kerosene. It’s more economical than propane and it is just more convenient for us. Sure we have our electrical appliances that we do a lot of our cooking with, but kerosene is our old standby.

We have a small 10 wick kerosene burner made by some unimportant manufacturer. We have a 1 gallon gas can that we use to get our kerosene. We have found that cooking with kerosene is about 40% less expensive than cooking with propane. Our latest addition is a oven attachment that sits on top of our burner. We have just got it, so there hasn’t been enough time to really try it out, but I am looking forward to bake some cakes with it.

Word of the Year

During this time of the year, there are always seems to be a list coming out for some kind of best of the year, this time is it is the word of the year. I have seen a couple of these lists of the top words of the previous year and I usually have actually heard of the words, but not this year. It seems like they have a list of some obscure words.

The American Dialect Society decided that subprime is the 2007 Word of the Year. Subprime is a euphemism for loans to people with less than perfect or less than golden credit. With the mortgage woes, I think most of us have heard the word.

The other nominations seem obscure to me like wrap rage. That’s the rage you feel when opening a plastic wrapper. Never heard of that word. Tapafication is the tendency of restaurants to serve small portions. I haven’t heard of this word either. Ditto for googleganger. Googleganger is someone who shows up when you do a Google search for your name but isn’t you.

Well, I least I learned a few new words. Now, can I put them into my vocabulary?

New Year Resolutions

It’s that time of the year again to make New Years Resolutions and try not to break them before the end of January. I have made a couple of New Years resolutions in order to help my family. I have decided to try to cook more meals at home. In the busy days of teaching, it can be tough to find the time to cook the meals I have wanted to, but I am going to make that effort this year.

I am also going to make a resolution to do volunteer work. I’d like to volunteer more often to help people. I think it would something benefical for everyone.

Finally, I am resolved to write a book this year. I am trying to discover the topic, maybe I will just start writing and see what happens.

What kind of resolutions have you made?