In late May, I saw that the City of Boston was launching a curbside food waste collection program or a household composting program. When I was a teenager, my mother did composting for her garden, and I’ve always wished I could do composting in my apartments. There is an independent program in Boston called Boostrap Compost, but since I’m on a fixed income, the monthly charges were more than my budget could fit.
When I saw the City of Boston was starting its own program, I registered immediately. There’s no charge to participate, and they provide you with everything you need to get started. The starter kit contains
A wheeled bucket to put out on trash day
A smaller bucket for your kitchen
A roll of compostable liners for your kitchen tub
A guidebook to help you know what you can put in the tub
And a handy magnet to put on your refrigerator you can check you make sure you’re only putting acceptable items in your tubs.
If you already do recycling with your eligible trash, you’ll find that some recyclables, like paper towels and toilet tissue cores, can go into your compost tube. If your grocery store has compostable bags for their produce, you can use those to put compostable items in. When you run out of bin liners, you can use a double-lined paper bag or any BPI, CMA, or OK Compost certified compostable bin liners. It’s all in the guidebook, and you can also check the FAQ page for more information on the program.
They’ll start collecting food waste the week of 1 August, and it will be picked up on your regular trash day. If you have multiple trash pickups every week, they’ll pick up your food waste on the first pickup of the week. Not every neighborhood in Boston is participating yet, and the first step of signing up is to make sure your neighborhood is eligible.
If you want to get some of the compost produced by the program for your garden, you can purchase bags of compost. I’m going to look into doing that when I finally start doing more gardening than the five pots of plants that live on my back porch.
If you’re interested in getting more information or signing up, congratulations, and thank you! You’re a better steward of our shared planet than many of your fellow human beings. Go to bostoncomposts.com and peruse the information, including the FAQ page, then fill out the enrollment form and get ready to start keeping some of your food waste from going into the landfill.
Updated 19 Oct 2023: Due to circumstances I won’t get into here, I’m no longer on the social media platform I mentioned in this post. As a result, I’ve removed references to it from this post and other articles on this site. As I say at the end of the post, I’m movin’ on.
While watching Outside Source on BBC World, the news broke that Twitter had accepted Elon Musk’s offer to buy the company. As soon as I heard that he wanted to buy the bird app, I tweeted that I would close my account if the sale went through.
When I heard the news today (oh boy), I immediately started paring down the number of folks I was following, and someone reminded me to archive my account before closing it. While I intended on killing my account before the first pitch between the Dodgers and D’backs, I’ll wait to get my archive before leaving there.
As The Zombies sang while opening up their 2015 album Still Got That Hunger, I’m moving on.
Growing up in New Orleans, I always drank coffee and chicory. Many people think chicory makes coffee stronger, but it really adds complexity to coffee.
After moving to Boston in 1989, I couldn’t get my chicory coffee because Boston stores don’t carry it. Now and then, I could find a can of Luzianne or French Market coffee at the grocery store, but it wasn’t available in the stores where I usually shopped.
Last year, I discovered that I could find coffee and chicory on Amazon. I found not only the Luzianne Coffee my mom made when I was a child, but they also had the Community coffee we came to prefer.
I immediately stopped buying the coffee I had been drinking and switched to only buying my Community Coffee New Orleans Blend. It was great to be drinking the coffee I drank back home, even though it wasn’t quite the coffee mom used to make.
I’ve long had mild tinnitus, but after getting my 2nd COVID jab, the ringing went from occasional to persistent, and I got hit with pain along with the ringing. When I saw my ENT doctor, she said that caffeine is a big trigger for tinnitus, so I tried making a half-caff blend for my coffee.
Community’s New Orleans Blend coffee doesn’t have a decaf version, so I bought a bag of decaf coffee and chicory. I found the blend a little too bitter for my taste, so I went back to just getting the New Orleans Blend coffee. I said it wasn’t quite what my mom made because she added a chicory product called Coffee Partner to each bag of coffee, but it wasn’t easy to find. Eventually, I found it on Amazon and got a box, and I remembered why my mom made coffee this way. It made delicious, rich cups of coffee with that extra kick that New Orleans insist on getting from their coffee.
It’s a pretty straightforward recipe, but I wanted to pass along the recipe I came up with so you can try it at home. You’ll need a large bowl, a digital scale, and a whisk. You do have a digital scale in your kitchen, right? A lot of people can measure by sight, but my eyes aren’t calibrated nearly well enough. If you do any baking from scratch, your digital scale is required to get the proportions right for the chemistry that is baking.
Recipe: Coffee and Chicory, Hardin Style
Ingredients
1 12 oz bag of Community Coffee New Orleans Blend
3.25 of Coffee Partner (92g)
Add the coffee and chicory into a large bowl and whisk until well combined. Store in an airtight container away, preferably a vented container that will allow CO2 to escape but not allow air to come in.
Like I said, it’s pretty straightforward. I love my 22 oz stainless steel canister from Veken for storing my coffee. It seals with a simple latch, a measuring scoop with a hook for storing it, and it even has a date tracker to let you remember when you last filled it.
Products mentioned
This article contains affiliate links. I may earn a commission should you make a purchase using my links.
I strenuously avoided coverage of the counting of the ballots in the 2020 election this week. I knew I’d get way too many instances of someone calling a state’s race for one candidate or another, and with all the early and mail-in ballots to be counted, I wanted to hear results, not projections. For many years I’d hated the practice of “calling” a state’s election with maybe 15% of the actual votes counted, and this year it was even more important that we wait to get actual counts of the votes cast, not educated guesses.
Tuesday night on Twitter, I took the extreme action of blocking/muting/unfollowing people who kept talking about projected results because this year, more than ever, we needed to wait for actual vote totals. Goddess knows Donald Trump was going to not only claim victory way too soon, but he was also going to fight counting all the early votes and mailed-in votes. He knew that people voting for Joe Biden were voting early and by mail due to the pandemic, and his supporters didn’t believe the novel coronavirus was a big deal and waited to vote on election day. He knew if they just looked at the ballots cast on 3 November, the totals would be in his favor.
There’s just one problem. No presidential election in US history has been decided on election night. Absentee ballots and votes from military members stationed abroad can always come in after election day. Most states have laws saying that if they’re postmarked by election day and arrive within X number of days of election day, they get included in the official vote totals. Plus, no locality releases official vote totals that night. Before they can have official vote totals, they have to do what’s called canvasing, which is the process of confirming exactly who got how many votes in each district. This process doesn’t start on election night, and it can take multiple days, depending on the number of ballots cast.
On Friday evening, I finally started watching news broadcasts as they talked about the status of the counting, seeing that many states had totals that showed which candidate won their state’s votes. As always, some states took longer, and while it was getting close, it wasn’t over yet.
I don’t usually donate to political candidates due to my fixed income, and with my being a steadfast mugwump that refuses to align with any political party, state party organizations don’t get my money. This year I donated to the Wisconsin Democratic party so I could enjoy a reunion of the surviving cast members of The Princess Bride, one of my favorite movies, and a special preformance of the Rocky Horror Picture Show using some of the original cast members. I was glad to see that while the state of Wisconsin went for Trump/Pence four years ago, this year Wisconsin’s Electoral College votes are going to Biden/Harris, and I’m glad my contributions helped even in some small way.
Today the news came out that Joe Biden won the votes from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which gave the Democrats 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency. That made Donald Trump, to borrow a line from Mich McConnell, a one-term president.
It’s not official yet.
There were big celebrations across the country at the news of the Biden/Harris win, but it’s important to remember that their victory isn’t official yet. Some states could find their results challenged, with recounts ordered to verify the vote totals. Florida gave us the mother-of-all-recounts back in 2000, and almost nobody wants to revisit that bit of history.
Despite national interest in doing away with the Electoral College and just using the popular vote to decide the election, the US Constitution states that we actually elect people to vote in the Electoral College. The states have until 6 December to determine who their state’s electors are. Six days later, on the second Wednesday in December, the electors meet in their respective states and the District of Columbia to cast the votes to decide which candidate gets their states’ Electoral College votes. This is usually a winner-take-all affair, but Maine and Nebraska split their Electoral College votes based on votes cast in specific regions of the state.
These votes usually follow the votes cast by the actual voters in their states. However, there have been instances where an elector decided they know better than the voters and votes differently. Known as an “unfaithful elector,” this causes a lot of controversies, and some states have passed laws requiring their electors to follow the “will of the people.” Of course, these laws were challenged to the US Supreme Court, but in July the laws were upheld. In our current hyper-partisan times, it wouldn’t surprise me if there were electors pledged to one candidate vote for another.
The results of the Electoral College aren’t official until 6 January, when a joint session of Congress convenes to count the votes of the Electoral College and declare the official winner of the 2020 presidential election. There can be challenges to Congress’ official results, but I don’t see the results changing due to being challenged, even in this hyper-partisan year.
Congratulations to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris
While there are all sorts of things that can happen between now and 20 January, Inauguration Day, I’m happy to see that former VP Biden and Senator Harris will be our 46th President and our 49th Vice-President. As it’s been pointed out many times on Twitter today, Senator Harris will be our very first female VP, the first VP that graduated from a Historically Black College/University (Howard University). She will also be our nation’s first VP of color and the first VP whose parents are from India.
When the campaign started I had hoped to be able to call her Madam President-elect, but I’m happy with her being Vice-President-elect. The important thing is that our nation’s four-year-long nightmare under the Trump administration is coming to an end. President Biden and our next Congress will have to deal with cleaning up the mess made by the current administration, and the Goddess* only knows how much Trump will try to screw up things for President Biden in the next 73 days. As I write this, the Republicans still have a slim majority in the Senate, with the results in Alaska, Georgia, and North Carolina being too close to call. There will also be runoff elections for both Senate seats for Georgia, so the balance of power in the Senate won’t be known until after the new year starts.
There’s a new sign on the Nanci’s Naughties roof
A couple of months ago, I found a Bye Don 2020 lawn sign in Second Life and put it in front of the Nanci’s Naughties mainstore. I try to keep my store no-partisan, but with my clear support of the LGBTQ+ community, I thought I’d add that to the front of the building. I used a picture of the yard sign to create a large sign for the top of my skybox home, and today I put the sign on top of the store itself. I’ve had the store’s logo on the roof to help identify it on the Second Life map, and I’m curious to see if the overhead view is updated to show the new sign or if I get asked to remove the roof sign. I don’t know if SL has a policy on big political statements like that, but I guess I’ll find out.
I wrote this article for this site rather than the Nanci’s Naughties site because I didn’t think it would be appropriate to be so political there. When I started to write this article, I also didn’t realize I’d be writing an explainer on the late stage of US presidential elections. I used a report from the Congressional Research Service to get the particulars of what the next steps are, especially the specific dates of things.
Here’s hoping the next four years are a lot fairer for everyone in the US, regardless of where they came from or how long ago they arrived. I also hope that there can be a lot less hate of our fellow persons and that the next four years will need a lot fewer adult beverages to deal with the shitstorm coming from our nation’s capital. It’s not over yet, but we can start counting the days until the change comes.
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*My referring to the deity as the Goddess is not up for discussion. You do you and I’ll do me. We can agree to disagree on this, but if you try to bring shit in my comments I’ll blackball you in a hot second as soon as I see it. You can disagree, but don’t be an asshole on my site. Or an ass-half.
Growing up, my mom and grandmother gave me a love of eating good salads, and in the last few years I’ve started changing from buying salad dressings to making my own. Not only do they not have all the preservatives the stuff on the grocers’ shelves have, they’re also pretty easy to make. I cook for just one, li’l old me, so I’m not going to go through huge productions just to have homemade salad dressing.
Some time back I discovered Rachel Cooks when I was looking for a homemade taco seasoning recipe (there’s also a large batch recipe if you find you want to make it less often but enjoy it regularly). Then I discovered her honey mustard vinaigrette dressing and I became hooked on her recipes.
I’ve since subscribed to her email newsletter, and today’s edition was all about her yummy salad dressings. After tweeting a link I decided to share all of the salad dressing recipes I use. They’re not all from Rachel (sorry!), but they’re so good that I bookmarked them so I could find them easily. I put vinaigrettes into Good Season cruets, and right now I have a bottle of their Italian dressing just to use up one of the packets I got when I decided I wanted a second cruet for salad dressings. My creamy dressings are in repurposed salsa jars, which makes me glad I save my old jars after I empty them. (My taco seasoning is in a reused spice bottle that lives next to my nukeomatic.)
My gateway to homemade dressings was the vinaigrette from The Kitchn’s Classic Salad Niçoise. I don’t remember where I saw the recipe, but I quickly bookmarked it as something to try. I’ve since made it for other salads, and if I didn’t have a bottle of Italian dressing in my fridge the bottle would have balsamic vinaigrette from a stand-alone recipe.
I think I found Rachel’s honey mustard vinaigrette recipe while looking for balsamic vinaigrette recipes, and it quickly became my favorite dressing. I use Grey Poupon’s Harvest Coarse Ground Dijon Mustard in it, and I’m thinking of trying it with Zatarain’s Creole Mustard something that I grew up eating on sandwiches. I could easily use just this dressing on all my salads if I didn’t want to make sure I didn’t get sick of eating it all the time.
Every now and then I want some thousand island dressing and wanted to find recipe, but every recipe I found used a hard boiled egg. Adding the egg sharply reduces how long it will last in your fridge, and when I was ready to make it I wanted something that needed less prep work than Rachel’s recipe called for. I ended up going with a recipe from Simply Whisked, but I’ll give Rachel’s recipe a try for the next batch, but my days of buying bottles of thousand island are over.
When I was in high school, Kraft’s Catalina dressing was my go-to dressing. Since I got older I didn’t like how sweet it was, but every now and then I still want some on my salad. Rachel has a recipe for that, and it’s just what the doctor ordered. I mixed it up in a salsa jar to save a dirty bowl, but my immersion blender clearly wanted more room to work so next time I’ll dirty a bowl to make it. And I know I’ll make it again. The recipe says to run it through the blender, but I really hate having to clean my blender for such a small amount of dressing.
I’m not a big ranch dressing eater, and I rarely buy buttermilk unless I’m whipping up a batch of buttermilk drop donuts so I may buy a bottle of ranch dressing from time to time. There is one other kind of bottled dressing that I used to buy and I had a hard time finding a replacement. I love dipping my homemade chicken tenders in honey mustard dressing, but Rachel’s recipe isn’t what I want to dip my tenders in. In fact, most of the recipes I found weren’t the nice, creamy dressing I was looking for. I ended up trying the dip recipe for The Kitchn’s Turkey Wraps with Honey Mustard Dip and it’s pretty good.
Rachel’s list of salad dressings & toppings includes two recipes I definitely want to try. One is for homemade croutons, and the other is for Caesar Croutons. I really like croutons, and I used to be able to eat them right out of the box, but lately it seems the croutons I buy are bigger than the ones I got in my 20’s. Rachel’s recipes use sliced bread, which will make for the size of croutons I’m wanting. Then the only salad topping I’ll need to make myself is bacon bits, and I need to work on my chopping skills to get good bacon bits. And, of course, I need to not eat the bacon before I have a chance to turn them into bacon bits, but I know I’m not the only one who thinks there’s no such thing as too much bacon.
I’m thankful that I got my mom’s love of cooking, and her desire to do more than your basic American meat-and-potatoes cooking. Maybe it came from living in New Orleans, where your basic meat-and-potatoes meal can be as out of place as a harpsichord at a guitar shred fest. Wherever it came from, I love to cook and the only reason I don’t try more recipes is because it’s rare to find recipes that will only feed one person. That and the fact that so many recipes I’d want to try use ingredients I don’t usually buy, and I’m concerned about being able to use up what doesn’t go into the dish.
Updated Tue 11 August 2020 to include changes in the order of how the ensemble members are sorted.
The movie had been scheduled for an October 2021 release but, since the coronavirus pandemic shut down the Great Bright Way, the Hamilton producers were able to get the release date pushed up.
As we got ready for the premiere of the movie, dubbed the #Hamilfilm, the Disney Studios Twitter account posted a series of images to serve as a premier program for the film’s release, similar to the Playbills that theatergoers get when they see the stage production. I quickly saved the images to my laptop so I could refer to them while watching the movie, and I ended up creating a PDF of the files to use them more easily. I added a Playbill-style cast listing that incorporates some of the ensemble track information from the Hamilcast podcast, which I’ve already shared on Twitter.
Twitter user Mrs. Bullwinkle told me about a graphic created by The Hamilton Bracelet listing the times within the movie for each of the songs so we can jump to them, and I’ve since added that to my PDF.
Meanwhile, I’ve been asking both the Disney Studios and the Hamilton producers if they’d mind if I shared my PDF. If they said not to share it, I’d drop the matter, but I haven’t gotten any response, so I looked for the best way to share it. I found a website that turns PDF files into digital magazines and created an account, but the uploading process should take ten minutes, and it’s already been over an hour since I uploaded my PDF.
Silly me, because I can easily share the PDF via this site. This is the third version of the PDF, and if I update it again, I’ll update this page. The first version was just the images from the Disney Studios, and the cast pages above, although without the source credit for the ensemble tracks and the head shots. The second version added the Hamilton Song Cheat Sheet, and this newest version got the credit information on the cast pages.
Of course, if Disney or the Hamilton team asks me to take this PDF down, I will. In the meantime, I hope this adds to your enjoyment of the #Hamilfilm. If you’re like me and wasn’t sure if you wanted to buy Disney+, the $9.99 monthly cost is a lot less than the price of a ticket to the theatre, and you can watch it as many times as you want in any given month. Talk about a bargain!
Watch the #Hamilfilm on Disney+. Make sure you watch the whole credits to hear the exit music that you can’t hear on the Original Broadway Cast Recording (OBCR), and don’t forget to watch the extras.
*Alas, not every country around the world can get Disney+, so their wish still has yet to be granted.
My weight has been an ongoing battle over the last couple of years, but this year has had some good news on the bod front.
If you follow me on Twitter you may have seen several celebrations as I got nice lower numbers from my scale. For years in my teens and twenties I weighed in around 150 lbs., and I considered 200 lbs. to be a red line I did NOT want to cross even as it got harder to keep my weight down once I hit my 30’s. As I started 2017 I was logging my weight as part of my weekly measurements to track how my body changed with hormone replacement therapy (HRT). I’m not nearly as active as I used to be so my weight kept heading upward. Granted, that’s kind of a good thing as my body started filling out and getting feminized, but I still disliked my weight getting too high.
You can imagine my displeasure as I started 2019 at close to 235 lbs. My favorite clothes didn’t fit anymore, and I simply hated being so heavy after spending so much time in the 150s. I knew that between my metabolism changing and my HRT I’ll probably never be in the 150s again but I hoped to get back to around 185. Over the last year, I realized 185 was too big a goal to reach for at once so I set interim goals of 200 and 215 lbs.
For some reason, I tweeted that I had hit 215 lbs on 13 December but forgot to write about it here. I no longer take my weekly measurements since I’ve reached a plateau in my changes, although I do log my weight every Sunday as I log my blood sugar and blood pressure at my doctor’s suggestion. I also try to step on the scale twice a day to try to catch when I eat too much to try and get rid of it the next day, and I smiled yesterday morning when I logged 216 yesterday. I figured I might log my measurements either today or tomorrow to get the end of the year readings, depending on what my scale showed in the mornings.
Today I was so amazed when I stepped on my scale I immediately moved my laptop into the bedroom so I could log the measurements before I had a chance to forget to do it as I started my day. (It’s been known to happen.) The magic number from the scale? 214.6, a number I hadn’t seen in over two years.
I grabbed a summary of how my body changed over the course of 2019 for my trans sisters. I’ve been on HRT for over 3 years and it’s been slow going, but I’m sharing this year’s numbers to show that you should be patient. The changes are coming. All numbers are in inches.
Overall I’ve added 3.25 inches to my bust over the past 3-and-a-half years, almost an inch and a quarter to my hips and an inch to my bum. I only added an inch to my waist over that time and I’d prefer more in my hips and bum but I’ll take what I can get at this point.
I hope everyone has a fantabulous start to their 2020, and may your new year be at least a sight better than 2019 was. Goddess knows that for all the good news I’ve had there’s been a crapload of bad news too, but that’s just how the old cookie crumbes, eh?
The problem with doing three different sites is I can get multiple notifications for the same sites. Today I went through the sites I follow via WordPress and moved all the Second Life related sites I follow to the account connected with nancisnaughties.com.
I’ve also unfollowed several sites relating to writing because I’m no longer doing any creative writing outside of my two WP sites. That’s simply to cut down on some of the clutter associated with this WP account. If you’re in that group of sites please know that ho offense is intended, it’s just a matter of only having so many hours in already busy days.
I’m still going to be updating this site, although my Nanci’s Naughties site will get the most activity simply because I have new products coming out every month in Second Life, and many of the designs I create will be available in my real-world clothing store as well.
If you’re in Second Life and you’re finding that I no longer follow you with this WP account or the old Nanci’s Naughties account it’s likely I’ve followed you on my new NN account. I hope to see you over there.
As I say on the SL store site, stay naughty out there, y’all. Just remember, you can be naughty without being an asshole. There is a difference.
When I first started this site it was to support my writing, but I haven’t written anything in a very long time other than posts here and on my other sites.
Since I don’t expect to do any more writing, this evening I took all of my ebooks out of print. I also removed the menu item about my books, although the pages will stay on the site since going through the posts to remove the links, or the posts themselves, will require more energy than it’s worth.
I’ve told Smashwords, Amazon and Google Play to stop selling my ebooks, and it will take some time to get the word out to all of Smashwords’ distribution partners so if you’re interested in my writing you’ll need to search quickly for them since I expect them to leave all the sites by early November.
I haven’t written much on this site because I’ve been concentrating mostly on the site I created for Nanci’s Naughties, my Second Life store. If you follow me on Twitter you know there has been some good news lately that I need to post here.
Something else you may know from Twitter is that I have some websites that I hit every day for a Photo of the Day rotation, and I wanted to share them with everyone here so you can have a place to find my list if you find you want to join me in checking out some pretty pictures every day.
I originally found these sites thanks to the Photo of the Day widget created for KDE 4 on Linux. The widget doesn’t work anymore since I upgraded my laptop to KDE 5 on SolydK Linux but I have a page of links I created for my start page so I can continue checking them out every day.
Next comes Steve’s Digicams with their Photo of the Day contest. Every day you get a picture from around the world. I use a slideshow of photos I find online as my desktop wallpaper (I generally have my laptop busy too often to set up a screensaver) and there are a lot of photos from Steve’s contest in the mix. I could also include them in a screensaver but my laptop is in use so often that I don’t use a screensaver.
Another great compilation comes from National Geographic, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone. NatGeo is known for their gorgeous photography, and their Your Shot program is the source for another folder of amazing photos in my wallpaper rotation. They also have the pictures in their NatGeo Photography Twitter stream, giving you another reason to follow them.
A site that used to be in the app is Wikimedia Commons, but a change to their site broke their part of the KDE app a couple of years ago. They make it easy to check a month worth of pictures, and one of these days I need to get in the habit of checking their site often again.
A non-photo site to hit daily
There’s another site I hit every day, but not to see pretty pictures. FreeKibble.com was created by a then 11-yeard old Mimi Ausland as a way to provide food to animals in shelters. Simply answering fun, one-question quizzes about dogs and cats provides ten pieces of kibble to our furry friends, and there’s even a way to provide litter for the kitties. My bookmark starts with the kitty quiz, and after feeding the felines I provide them with some litter I give the doggos some food, too. Plus you get to learn a little something about our furry friends. It doesn’t cost me a dime, just a little time, and they regularly have double days where you can double the amount of food you provide without doing anything extra.
Mimi recently launched a new site, Free The Ocean, to help clear our oceans of plastic. Every day answering the quiz helps remove one piece of plastic from the ocean. Yeah, it’s not much, but as I write this, people on the site have helped remove over 77,000 pieces of plastic from our oceans. And I’ve learned a little more about the planet I live on, which is always a good thing.
Do you have a Photo of the Day site that you check often? Let me know in the comments and help us all find more beauty to add to our lives.
