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Observation #1
Men are gross. The ladies are right about that. Why do I say that? Yesterday, at the Y , I’m getting dressed after my swim. One of my fellow members is also attending to his grooming. He takes the blow dryer there for use in drying hair, presumably that particular hair on top of the head, and, after a quick once over to his pubes, uses the communal blow dryer to dry the space between his toes! All of a sudden, I really didn’t need to style my hair with the blow dryer.
Observation #2
Somebody tell me the difference between cultured buttermilk and kefir. The most basic one is that kefir costs about twice as much. The two products taste remarkably similar. I know there are active probiotic cultures in kefir, but does their presence mean I have to pony up twice as much dough? I guess so.
Observation #3
Kitchen parchment is really cool stuff. Last night I lined the pan with it when I grilled the swordfish steaks in the oven and wrapped the corn on the cob in it as I cooked them in the oven along with the fish. The clean-up with parchment was easier, I think, than with aluminum foil. By the way, cooking corn in the oven or on the grill is so much easier than throwing them in boiling water on top of the stove.
Observation #4
Fruit 1: Why do strawberries seem to last an incredibly long time before turning into gross red pulpy blobs these days? I notice this in the ones I buy at the market in the big PETE #1 containers that come from some farm near Watsonville, California. Maybe they pick up a weird vibe from the spirit of John Steinbeck, who lived near there. The locally grown, “pick your own” kind seem to have the shorter life I remember from the Dark Ages of the Eisenhower Administration.
Fruit 2: Peaches grown locally, within a few hundred miles, more or less, are delicious. The ones trucked in from California or Washington (I live in Virginia) are pretty nasty. Let’s not even talk about the ones from Chile that show up in the stores in the winter. I must say that the Chilean cherries are pretty good. Chilean apples aren’t bad. The oranges are so-so.
Dispatches From Dystopia 
1. Just yuck.
2. Buttermilk generally only has one strain of probiotic whereas kefir usually has more than 10. Nutritionally they’re almost identical otherwise. Both are yums.
3. I’m scared to cook with this stuff. I’m sure I have no clue about it, but it always seems like I’d be cooking wax onto my food.
4. 1. GMOs are bad m’kay. (but convenient for the reason you give) They scare me.
4.2. Lucky!
Thanks. I had the suspicions about the buttermilk and the strawberries. Kitchen parchment is not waxed paper. They are entirely different. I find the bleached parchment at my supermarket, but kitchen shops and some natural food stores carry an unbleached kitchen parchment. I’m going for that next time. As usual, thanks for stopping by.
Oh. Yeah duh. 😄 Ok. So just plain parchment paper makes clean up easy? Thanks for the tip! I’ll have to expand my kitchen accouterments drawer. Hehe
I first learned about parchment when some super-fussy restaurant served fish “en papillote” . the got the parchment all nice and full of air around the filet. For the life of me I’ve never been able to do that. But I got to using parchment. All I keep in mind is that paper burns at 451°Fahrenheit.
Interesting observations! I’m glad that emdimensional had input on them, cause i’ve got nothing useful to say. Except blow-drying between one’s toes is certainly – um, interesting. Ok, gross. Lol.