Auntie Kate The Resale Expert

When in doubt, right-click. I finally got it one day when, for the umpty-umpth time, I screamed at my screen and cursed at my computer. I actually wrote When in doubt, right-click on a Post-It and stuck it to the monitor.

It’s a good rule. Before you start thinking the programmer was a total idiot, the CPU is having a meltdown, or the stars are misaligned and you might as well stop working and go float around in the pool with a rum and coke balanced on your mouse-potato tummy…. right-click.

Aha! There the little bugger is: just the menu choice you were clicking the left mouse button for, over and over, swearing it had to be there. All you had to do was…right-click.

Life lesson learned: take a different approach. Try a different path to your destination. And sometimes thinking outside the box works before you have to resort to A; throwing the whole problem out the window in disgust or B; dousing yourself with rum and cokes. When in doubt, right-click.

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Well, those we we we all the way home piggies below made me hungry for ribs, so I used my friend Shirley Innis’ Magic Ribs recipe. Recipes from friends are always the best and usually the most fun to make too.

Shirley’s Magic Ribs

Ribs, beef or pork (I used 4-5 lbs baby back pork ribs… more would work too)

Roast bare at 450 degrees for 20 minutes to render fat and to brown them a bit (I roasted them 30-40 minutes, but then I have a DuH who’s very happy with well, well, well-done food!) I cut the ribs into serving amounts, too, so that they would fit into the Dutch oven in the next step…

Put them in a large pot. Add (here’s the fun part) a full, big bottle of ketchup and a 2-liter btl of real, not diet, Coke. Shirley made the excellent suggestion to add garlic and some thin-sliced onions, so I did.

Cook uncovered for hours. The longer the better. Gives you plenty of time to bury the Heinz and Coke bottles in the recycling bin so your guests think you’re a master of subtle yet piquant seasoning.

When the sauce is at about 1/3 its original volume, it’s time to whip up some cole slaw (cut the standard creamy dressing with about 1/4 volume white wine vinegar, much better and better for you) and cook up the corn.

Got any recipes to share?

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Last night we went to dinner to a restaurant we’ve never gone to before, here in Sarasota Florida where we’ve lived for 10 years. We’re having a merry time, and all of a sudden, a stranger from another table comes over. She says, “Excuse me, are you from Ohio?” I nod. “Columbus?” Yes. “One More Time?” Oh my goodness, she has recognized me from a dozen years ago, when she shopped in the consignment shop I founded in Grandview Heights, One More Time.

Boy, that’s fun, on your 60th birthday to be recognized from 12 years earlier (hey, I must not be lookin’ too bad!)…until she said “I thought I knew that voice!”

Same thing happened years ago, when my shop (and I) were much younger. I was in a children’s play, an annual fund raiser for Children’s Hospital, and I was a dragon. Green union suit, tail, green makeup, false eyelashes, and I even breathed fire. So there I am, dressed up like a foolish dragon, doing my newly-learned trick of breathing fire, when a young audience member, who I guess really got into the story, yelled “Kate!” Some 8-year-old recognized me by my voice too!

Lesson learned. Lower my voice…and wear makeup, preferable not green, next time I go out. You never know when someone’s watching listening!

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My whistling ducks out my office window are losing their reflections day by day.

No, they aren’t becoming vampires. The pond is drying up. The drought here is getting really dangerous for all Floridians.

The whistling ducks (which look like a cross between a duck and a sleek goose, with their long legs and their “Roman nose” beaks) and the regular ducks sit in the shade of the live oak on the bank of the disappearing pond and stare out at the lowering water level, which means less fish, which means less food. The herons and egrets stand in the middle of the pond amongst the lily pads, and their knees don’t even get wet.

Once in a while a wood stork struts by, looking disgruntled. (But then again, wood storks always look disgruntled.) And the one mamma duck with babies is losing them at the rate of one every day or two… not their reflections but her real babies, the little bright-eyed ducklings who scurry across the lily pads chasing bugs.

The dragonflies are out in full force though. Eating lunch today, I saw a grass stem with six small green dragonflies lined up facing exactly the same way, and a much bigger, pink dragonfly on the tip of the stem, facing the opposite way.

We wish it would rain.

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Who knew? Emoticons have a birthday, and it’s September 19.

The little smiley face 🙂 and its cousins turn 25 this year. (You’re not supposed to call them smiley faces though. Apparently that word is copyrighted. That’s why they have the robot-like name, Emoticons.)

Yes, it was back in 1982 when (more…)

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