Good luck with the interview, ChiKat. I hope it works out for you!

Thanks! It's for a school I'd really really like to work at. And, teaching what I want to teach.

use frozen fruit

I do the same thing, Teppy. Easy peasy.

I'll reiterate my one piece of advice: stay away from little seeds. askye's tip about the teabag is a good one too.

My experience with blenders has been that no matter how many buttons a blender has, I only use pulse, slow, faster and liquify. No matter how expensive the blender was, I always eventually get too ambitious about what can be liquified and burn out the motor, so I always buy cheap blenders.

Good luck, ChiKat!

My only blender tip is that you can fill it (as much as it was full of food, that is) with water and a drop of liquid detergent and whirl that up for quick cleaning - makes real cleaning much easier or will do well enough if you are feeling particularly lazy.

I've got an old skool Waring blender that doesn't even have buttons, it just has the switch. I bought it new a couple of years ago-- my MIL and I laugh, because she has the same blender, except hers is nearly fifty years old, a wedding gift.

Suckers LAST.

now y'all got me hungry. Dunno what to cook thou.

Work went fine. My Sherlock Holmes skills were put to work, and my theory from 3am was actually what happened! Crazy how my brain solves it at ungodly hour, and the two of theirs caused it/couldn't figure out why during normal awake hours. Pfft. Whatever.

Now I'm working on sounds for the Gala video. Cute/Crazy/Cat gal that I talked about earlier is working on it. How can I resist a plea for help for the gal I'm swoon-y for? I think I have "sucker" written on my forehead. Soap not working.

Anyone got some time to help me track down some data about the accuracy of this statement: "What frustrates me is that for decades now, the government has decided that it has the responsibility to rid the country of poverty. In doing so, however, poverty has actually increased. It's a joke in Conservative circles that whenever Democrats decide to declare war on something (drugs, poverty), they lose"?

Well, first of all the War on Drugs was declared by Nixon first and then reiterated by Reagan. Both of whom I'm pretty sure were Republican.

Well, that's what I thought, but I didn't want to just say that and make myself look stupid.

[link]

And here's a graph showing the rise and fall of poverty from 1959 to 2005. Looking at it, it appears to me that it seems to rise in conservative years and drop in liberal ones.

Wikipedia: [link]

In the decade following the 1964 introduction of the war on poverty, poverty rates in the U.S. dropped to their lowest level to date: 11.1% . They have remained between 11 and 15.2% ever since. Since 1973 poverty has remained well below the historical U.S. averages in the range of 20-25%.

Cites [link] Census poverty tables