Homemade Granola

So you read the title and thought, "OMG Thea's become a hippy. She's probably growing out her armpit hair and installing hydroponics in her closet. I can't believe she made her own granola.” Well, it’s true folks. No, not the hippy part, just the granola. But I had a damn good excuse.

I went grocery shopping the other day, at Safeway.com, and while I was sitting in front of the breakfast isle I thought, “Hey, I should get oatmeal.” This was a couple weeks ago, you know, the dog days of summer - that sweltering time of year when San Francisco is about 57 degrees. So I ordered what I was pretty sure was oatmeal.

This is one of the hazards of online grocery shopping. You can never know exactly what you’re going to end up with. It makes it exciting. In the past, I’ve mysteriously received cat food (I don’t have a cat), ice cream (which really wasn’t so bad), a fish filet (oooh it was terrible, don’t tell Keithen it was ever in the house, or he’ll convince himself that he can still smell it), and very large, heavy amounts of filtered water, none of which can be explained, and fortunately none of it was on my bill. But this time, I just screwed up and didn’t read what I was buying. Instead of Quaker Oatmeal, I accidentally purchased Quaker Oats. Forty-two ounces of them.

Same thing, right? I opened it up one morning, hoping to make a nice mushy bowl of oatmeal, but there was something not quite right about it. It was all oats, no meal. Whole oats. Like what horses eat. I thought, “Well, I’m sure it’ll be just as good as oatmeal,” and scooped some into a bowl, added boiling water, and gave it a stir. You know, oatmeal-style. People, they are not the same thing at all. Not at all. OK chemically, biologically, exactly the same – but in terms of breakfast they are completely different. Oats are inedible to humans in their natural state.

So my next thought after dumping my horrific breakfasty failure was, “What the fuck am I supposed to do with all these fucking oats?” And then it hit me.

Granola.

I googled “homemade granola” and discovered that granola only requires three ingredients: oil, some kind of sweetening substance, and of course oats. Oh, I was so totally going to spend the rest of the day making granola. Until I ran out of maple syrup. Which I did pretty fast, actually.

I used grapeseed oil because it’s healthy and has a light, slightly nutty flavor. (If you have not discovered the wonder that is grapeseed oil, I strongly suggest you go find some right now and get fryin’.) I added some maple syrup, a spoonful of honey, an unnatural amount of cinnamon, and finely chopped blueberry yogurt Luna bar that, realistically, neither of was ever going to eat. I mixed it all together, put it on my nonstick cookie sheet, and baked it up.

Mmmmm. My granola was a golden-brown, cinnamony success.

Then I made homemade crackers. They weren’t as good.

This morning I finished the week’s worth of granola that I made, and I plan to make more, because I’ve barely made a dent in my 2+ pounds of oats. I don’t know how future batches will turn out, but this batch of homemade cinnamon blueberry-Luna-bar granola gets a 7.8 out of ten.

Yahoo! Avatars

Remember paper dolls? There used to be these books on the spinny racks at the five and dime that had a cut-out two dimensional doll inside them. She stood there on the first page, perforated, half-naked, and beautiful, waiting for me to flip through her different historical, multi-cultural outfits and dress her up for any occasion, folding the little white tabs around her waist and over her shoulders. She had clothes that I would never have: saris, ball gowns, police uniforms, lab coats, flapper dresses... unfortunately, I never got to dress her up, because I was too poor. I just got to look at her in her underwear, count my change, then go back to the ice cream parlor/laundry mat where my mom was and get a fifty-cent scoop of rocky road.

Wow, it really sounds like I grew up in the fifties. I swear I'm only twenty-three, it was just a realy small town. Heard of Guerneville? (If you're a gay northern Californian male your answer doesn't count.) Yeah, that's what I thought. Well, anyways it's 2007 now and we have Yahoo! Avatars! OK, they've been around for awhile, but today I looked at mine, wondered if my hair was still like that, decided I didn't like those red earrings anymore, and suddenly became inspired to write a review.

What a weird, weird phenomenon. I think I first created my Yahoo! Avatar about three years ago. Even though I knew it was stupid and pointless, I felt totally compelled to make a little cartoon Thea for everyone on Yahoo! to see. Have you ever answered a Yahoo! question? I have. You know what I noticed? Every freaking person on Yahoo! has a freaking avatar. It seems like everyone tries to make it look actually like themselves, too. How weird are we? We feel this urge to make sure people who interact with us know what we look like. And we need to know what they look like too, dammit. But of course, the world is full of ugly people, so what better way to do it than with a cartoon avatar that only vaguely resembles the person it represents?

When I first made my avatar, there were only like seven outfits, and ten backgrounds, and a hairstyle that sort of looked like what I usually did at the time. Now, there's like a thousand of everything (but still not the right pair of jeans) and the really creepy thing is, my hair now looks almost exactly like what my avatar wears. It's like... I've styled my hair in order to more closely resemble my avatar.

Of course it's a fun advertising tool for Yahoo! too. They have all kinds of branded tee-shirts, backgrounds with Jeeps in them, and new outfits that strongly resemble those coming out in the latest historical movie. I bet they make some decent ad money from that stuff. The best part about the advertising, though, is that it makes Yahoo Avatars free! Otherwise there's no way I'd pay to waste time dressing up a stupid non-dimensional paper doll. I could be spending that money on an ice cream cone - I mean paying off my student loans. Stupid college.

Ah, so, yeah, Yahoo! avatars are like free paper dolls, only you get to make them look like yourself. So they're more fun. And they don't get wrinkly when you've dressed them up too many times.

If you have never seen one, it looks like this:


Well, mine looks like that. The rooster represents my boyfriend, Keithen. He was born in the year of the Rooster. And I like just like chickens, OK?

So you can also zoom in and make sure the face resembles your own as much as possible. For some reason my zoom button hasn't worked for a few months. I don't know if they screwed up their programming or what, but now I can't see close enough to know if the eyes I picked still look the most like mine, or if I should use one of their new pairs. Of course none of them really look like mine, but it's just frustrating having a button there that doesn't work. WTF, Yahoo?

Now, I know Yahoo! isn't the only company to make these creepy online you-cartoons. Some readers, for example, may have seen the absolutely-terrifyingly disturbing Zwinky commercials. I can't use Zwinky because I have a Mac, but I imagine it to be the same idea idea as Yahoo! avatars except with private-information-gathering, government-operated mind-control programming embedded somehow. I don't trust free programs that can somehow afford to run 30-second ads during prime time. It's freaky. It's wrong. At least Yahoo! avatars are honest about how they pay for themselves - with branded outfits and accessories.

So as a way to kill time on the internet while waiting for the Star Wars: Force Unleashed preview to download, I give Yahoo! Avatars a 5.6 out of 10. I mean, I could be reading the BBC science news instead, but sometimes I've just seen one too many mutant baby animals.

Mammals - A Guide to Familiar American Species

Today I am going to write my first book review. I'm excited!

I found this book last year when I went to visit my grandma. She lives in the middle of the forest up near Hood Canal and her house is made entirely out of gingerbread. She has a bit of an ant problem, but the gingerbread makes surprisingly good insulation. I never would have suspected.

Well, she had recently moved in and unpacked about seven hundred million boxes of old books that she's been hauling around since the fifties. So her entire living room (I'm not exaggerating! The ENTIRE living room! And it's kind of a big living room,) was full of grandmother-high stacks of old books. It was like the library of a mad naturopath. It was the library of a mad naturopath. She had everything from A: The Magic Vitamin to Zinnias, Garden of Color. She's been studying plants and nutrition her entire life, and in those piles of books, one could document the history of the entire American movement towards natural remedies. I managed to find two books that weren't solely devoted to plants and/or vitamins. One was an 1890 edition of the White House Cook Book, which I was immediately instructed to get my hands off of, and the other was this book:


It was so mine.

I looked through it and found pictures like this one:


And advice like this:

Mammals as Pets

Our best pets are domesticated mammals. Wild ones when captured young make fine pets, too. Be sure to observe the law in capturing them. Raccoons, skunks and tree squirrels make good pets. Flying squirrels, white-footed mice, and chipmunks do well in captivity. Foxes, coatis, woodchucks, armadillos, and even larger mammals are kept as pets. Be sure you can provide proper food, clean drinking water, and a satisfactory shelter. Take time to handle and play with your pet, if you want it to be tamed. Experts at zoos can give you practical advice.

What are coatis? Oh, this is a coati:


How cute! I totally want one! What a useful book! The blue parts on the North American map are where they used to live, and the pink/purple is where they live now. As of 1955.

I have to admit that I haven't actually read the book cover to cover - I've mostly just looked at the pictures. But from what I have read, I've learned things like:

Otters are large, aquatic weasels. Two kinds live in North America - the Sea and the River Otters.

Sea Otter is larger, more valuable, more interesting.

Really! I've had that sea otter living under my sink this whole time, and I had no idea it was more valuable than a river otter. Fascinating.

I also learned that tuft-eared squirrels are our most attractive squirrels, that bottlenose dolphins are commoner than common dolphins, and that bog lemmings are not true lemmings, but are in fact more like voles.

This is an absolutely fantastic book, especially for anyone going back in time to the fifties on a hunting expedition. I give it a 9.8 out of 10.