Link Log for February 21 (#1)

More snow is falling. I waited for one of the resident humans to get in before leaving the Dog Sanctuary last night, fell asleep on an armchair and am procrastinating before walking home in the snow. Not many e-friends are online this morning (I'd prefer not to be online myself!) so here are just a few links in the categories: A Grandmother's Plea, Animals, Food, Local Market, Mental Health, Music, Scams, Weather.

A Grandmother's Plea 

Nancy Hardin asks readers to share and post this everywhere:

http://allthingsoflife.com/?p=67

Animals 

The big attraction to this promotion for a nature trail is the cute wild pony pictures. Should that be "mane attraction"? (Ouch! Stop throwing things at me!)

http://rootsrated.com/stories/a-winter-hike-to-the-top-of-virginia

How hungry would you have to be to consider eating a pangolin?

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/world-on-a-plate/2015/feb/20/critically-endangered-pangolins-rescued-then-sold-as-food?

Lots of cute pet pictures on Tsu of course...today's included kangaroos!

Food 

Some would say +Coral Levang 's "chili meal" is a different thing from Real Chili, which, according to purists, is a meat dish served beside the beans and the corn or cornbread. Fine. This "chili meal" is a balanced serving of protein, carbohydrate, and fiber, cooked in one pot. And it'll taste good.

http://www.personapaper.com/article/24467-quick-and-easy-chili-meal

I plussed one of +Coral Levang 's posts that asked for suggestions on using up frozen puff pastry dough, so thought I'd plus this one in which she used it up. Something strange happened at Google + though. The actual article displays three pictures of yummy-looking sweet and savory pies. The "plus" post displays what looks like an animal rummaging around garbage cans! Wotthe...

http://personapaper.com/article/24357-puff-pastry-no-longer-a-freezer-mystery

Here's the one that may inspire somebody to do all their frugal home cooking for the week this weekend. (Good idea for local lurkers. Cook, and warm up the kitchen, while you have electricity...with the Big Wet Snow falling, we may not have electricity next week, but we are likely to have a natural freezer for a few days.)

http://personapaper.com/article/24534-cooking-quickly-for-one-or-for-many

And, for vegans, one of the classic Granola Green vegan recipes:

http://personapaper.com/article/24580-once-upon-a-time-i-was-a-vegetarian

And here, for variation's sake, is a frugal comfort food recipe not posted by Coral Levang:

http://warnerwords.weebly.com/food-therapy/leek-and-potato-soup-time

Local Market 

I can't believe this market's trying to open today. Bitter cold, icy roads, piled-up snow and more snow falling on top of it. If I were shopping in Abingdon I'd go in and buy stuff just to show respect. (That's a hint, Abingdon readers. So far the worst thing that's happened at the Dog Sanctuary is that one dog took one horrified look at the deep falling snow and made a puddle on the porch...in the snow that had blown in.)

http://us4.campaign-archive1.com/?u=c9b3fb0bfb5a7fded483296f8&id=cf5d3898ba

Especially alpaca yarn. If you could crossbreed sheep, goats, and camels, the result would be alpacas--cute, fluffy pets who need to have their hair combed and cut in spring, and whose surplus hair can be spun into delightful soft yarn. Some say alpaca yarn is less itchy than wool or mohair, and it's less likely to shrink if it gets wet.

http://www.dreamlandalpacas.com/store/

Mental Health 

At least as much truth as comedy here:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-study-finds-therapy-antidepressants-equally-ef,38026/?

(Feeling depressed this morning? Go and clear the snow off a disabled person's paths. If you can't, if you are the disabled person, you're not the person I'm trying to goad here. If you do, and it doesn't make you feel less depressed, call a medical doctor.)

Music 

ABBA: Swedish for Agnetha, Benny, Bjorn, and Annifrid, a pop quartet of my youth. Paul Rance has a fan site here:

http://www.booksmusicfilmstv.com/Abba.htm

And a page for the singer best known as Cat Stevens, a.k.a. Stephen Georgiou, a.k.a. Yusuf Islam.

http://www.booksmusicfilmstv.com/CatStevensYusufIslam.html

This fun fact about the Beatles was news to me. Now I want to hear their version of "My Bonnie."

http://personapaper.com/article/24530-the-most-important-beatles-song-is-the-most-forgotten

Scams 

Thanks to Jonah Goldberg to sharing this denunciation of what some are calling a fraud in the Tea Party's name. (Duh...anybody can be a Tea Party so you know a few of "us" are scammers. But nobody hates a bogus conservative charity as much as a real conservative.)

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/05/exclusive-pro-troop-charity-pays-off-tea-party-cronies-instead.html

And, while we're here: I bought and read all of C.S. Lewis's books during Walter Hooper's lifetime; I don't think the political columns Lewis wrote in the 1940s precisely translate to any position on current political issues, but he certainly said some things applicable to the "progressive" totalitarian movement we're seeing today, and I would have been interested in reading them. Unfortunately, when I finally found the online time to open http://libertyalliance.com/c-s-lewis-mere-liberty-evils-statism/, a nasty little Facebook pop-up prevented me from even opening the actual page from which the opening paragraph and picture seemed to have been ganked. Attention Liberty Alliance--if people hate you and your Tea Party, it's not necessarily even about your politics, because a page as bad as that one doesn't reveal anything about your stated political position. It's because you're spamming people with e-mail teases that promise interesting content and deliver nasty spyware that fouls up their computers. And if you continue doing that kind of thing, you deserve to be hated. Liberty Alliance hasn't done that in the past. Some terribly clever person evidently thought it was a terribly clever idea. Well, it's not clever, only terrible. You are being e-spanked, and further e-mails from you are being routed directly to the Bacon Folder.

Weather 

Today's news is weather. And weather damage. We'll probably be seeing more of this kind of news:

http://www.wjhl.com/story/28165464/crews-on-scene-of-water-main-break-in-jonesborough

My part of the world doesn't get as much star-gazing weather as it once did...one of the ways I knew I was Highly Sensory-Perceptive was that, as a child, I did see six Pleiades. The ancient Greeks saw seven, named them Seven Sisters, and imagined them all running away from the giant bully Orion. The Hebrews don't seem to have had that story (though Moses met his wife by defending seven sisters from a gang of male bullies), but Orion and the Pleiades are mentioned in the Bible. They are two of the easiest constellations to recognize and tend to catch the attention of people who don't know any star names and stories. +Protecto Shell shares a telescope image: like most of the constellations we see, the Pleiades include several stars we don't see:

http://stargazers-guide.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-pleiades-in-formation.html

Right. The snow has finally stopped falling. I think I'll try to find some wheel ruts before the melted snow freezes into ice, walk home, and see whether I still have electricity. The odds are against it, but then what are the odds of a Big Deep Freeze and a Big Wet Snow occurring back-to-back like this?

The cats, unfortunately, have probably been eating well. Many little creatures have succumbed to the cold, and some of them have probably tried to seek shelter in the cellar, where four cats (and a raccoon, and a possum) were waiting for them. This of course does not mean the cats won't want just as much kibble. And a fire.