Mild Amusement

A while back, the Mild Wife and I decided to get a fancy shmancy smart scale ( something like this ). We both like to keep an eye on our health, and the scale is one of those numbers that provides some hints about general health. Sure, the actual weight number can be misleading, but that's where a smart scale fills in some of the gaps. If you measure both your overall weight and your fat percentage, you've got a decent picture of what's happening with your body. Now, we both know that the numbers aren't supposed to be completely accurate. However, so long as they're consistent, you can make deductions about how your diet and exercise are treating your body. Let's say the scale consistently says that you're five pounds heavier than you actually are. That's nice, but it's the same five pounds every single day. If my weight is lower on a Tuesday than on a Monday, that still means I lost some weight. So far, the scale has proven useful, but I get a b...

As I've noted here, there have been quite a few travels during the last few months. On the last leg of the trips, the Mild Wife and I ended up in Colorado to visit some family . During that time, we had some fun exchanges with my sister, my brother-in-law, and her kids. Not surprisingly, the ones with the kids were the most amusing. For this particular post, I'm going to describe one of the food-related ones. Specifically, I made causa with my nephew at one point. Now, if you've never had Peruvian causa, I added a link to a Wikipedia article that has a picture of it. That article is in Spanish, because the dish in question is more well-known in countries that speak Spanish. Still, if you want to get an idea of what it is, the picture there is a good way to get the gist of it. In the simplest terms, it's a potato/tuna casserole. The version I've always seen isn't as fancy as the one in the link; we usually just used a big Pyrex container and made a big sheet o...

To finish out the great world tour of 2019, the Mild Wife and I ended up in Colorado the week after the Kazakhstan trip . If you've been following along, this year has included trips to two different continents away from home. This wasn't the plan at the beginning of the year, but somehow, this is where we ended up. Still, I've been lucky to be able to go on all these trips, so I'm not complaining at all. In fact, I'm blogging about it to share some of the fun. For this particular trip, I was visiting family, so it was all play and no work. I left my work stuff at home, and the Mild Wife and I threw ourselves into spending quality time with my sister, her husband, and her kids. There were lots of fun moments, but the general memory I have was of interacting with our older nephew. His younger sibling is still a baby, so while we had some very cute moments and pictures with the baby, we spent more time talking and playing with our nephew. Since the Mild Wife and I...

As the last couple of blog posts pointed out, I was recently on a trip to Kazakhstan . So far, I've regaled you with stories about, essentially, pieces of paper. Sure, they were important pieces of paper (the postcards were important to me), but they were just that: paper. In a way, though, they highlighted just how different things were in that country compared to what I was used to. I don't normally have to track customs forms or have that much trouble finding a way to mail something, after all. Today's post, on the other hand, is the opposite of that. The more things change, the more they stay the same. As I mentioned last post, I was in town the day before a local holiday. That led to shenanigans when it came to the operating hours for the post office, but it also led to the set up for this post. Specifically, I needed to have dinner the night before this holiday, and I wasn't feeling particularly adventurous. So, I figured I'd wander down to the hotel restaur...