Friday, September 4, 2026

Tortilla Pizza

This is probably better labeled as a "use the leftovers" pizza.  We started using a couple of flour tortillas that had been around for a while, cooked up what was left of a package of chorizo, some Cotija cheese that somehow hadn't gone bad yet, and some corn and sliced cherry tomatoes.  The only "fresh" ingredient was a few leaves of basil growing in a pot on our back deck.  A few minutes in the oven and it made a tasty lunch and made some space in the refrigerator.  



Thursday, September 3, 2026

Fancy Bloody Mary

The wild Bloody Mary you see below comes from Luke Wholey's Wild Alaskan Grille on Penn Avenue in Pittsburgh.  It features a whole fried soft-shell crab that forms a body, arms, and legs, a pickle spear for a mouth, and pimento-stuffed green olives for eyeballs.   Add crispy bacon, jumbo shrimp, and a couple of celery stalks, and you have an afternoon cocktail, a delicious appetizer, and a sideshow for the thousands of people strolling down the street.




Wednesday, September 2, 2026

Hoarding Disorder

I couldn't resist; I used AI to remove the street address from the picture below.  Too embarrassing.

To be fair, this house has no basement and only 1,040 square feet of living space, so it's understandable that the garage is being used for storage.  Before they cleared a path to their back door, all the stuff in the driveway was also in the garage.  Given that the valued possessions include a green, circa-1940 classic car (or at least the front part, as shown on the left) and most of it is junk, this is way beyond storage and into the realm of hoarding.

As the article at the link below begins, "Hoarding disorder is a chronic difficulty with discarding possessions—even those without any monetary value—accompanied by a dysfunctional attachment to often worthless or unusable items."  It also gives some good advice on how to overcome hoarding.  It's a good read even if you're just trying to do some spring cleaning (or fall cleaning) and get rid of some marginally useful possessions.



Tuesday, September 1, 2026

Double Tap The Back

Unlike yesterday's feature, I wouldn't have thought this might exist.  On both the Apple iPhone and the Google Pixel, you can configure an action to take when the camera detects a double tap on the back of the device.  As you can see below, I've configured mine to take a screenshot, so instead of the cumbersome combination of pressing the power button and the volume down simultaneously, the double tap involves less movement and coordination.  You can read more about the feature at the links below.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/111772