Just Horsin' Around - Thoughts on Central Texas Real Estate and More

This is another one of my quick and easy recipes.  An interesting flavor, can be thrown together, and you can broil them if you don't want to mess with the grill.  (Remember to line your broiler pan with aluminum foil for quick and easy clean-up as well as cooking!)

Serving Size  : 4     

 1           teaspoon    ground cumin
 1           teaspoon    ground coriander
 3/4        teaspoon    ground cinnamon
 1/8        teaspoon    salt
 1/8        teaspoon    fresh ground black pepper
 2           teaspoons  olive oil
 1           lb              steaks -- Ribeye (3/4 inch-thick)

Prepare grill.

In a shallow bowl stir together all ingredients except steaks. Add steaks and rub with spice mixture. Let steaks stand, covered, at room temperature 15 minutes.

Grill steaks on an oiled rack set 5 to 6 inches over glowing coals about 3 minutes on each side for medium-rare. (Or you can broil steaks under a preheated broiler 3 to 4 inches from heat.).
Serve steaks with chutney. Enjoy!

Living in Austin, we heard within minutes when Lady Bird passed (4:18 p.m., Wednesday, July 11, 2007, at age 94).

She was a true and gracious Texas lady, devoted to her state, its natural beauty, the beauty of our country, and LBJ.  (Not necessarily in that order.)   She managed, while being the quintessential political wife, to somehow transcend politics.  She'll be missed, even by many who never met her; somehow I thought she'd be here forever, sort of like the state capitol and the UT Tower.  

Farewell, Lady Bird.  We'll plant wildflowers in your memory. 

Anyone who's been on the internet for any length of time knows, hopefully, that not everything that goes around on the internet is absolutely true.  In fact, of the things that tell you to "forward to everyone you know", over 95% of them will be hoaxes, outdated, or worse. 

Fortunately, there's a way to check such things BEFORE sending them on "just in case".  Simply go to one of the urban legend sites (my favorite is www.snopes.com, but there are several), which I recommend you keep bookmarked, and check whatever has hit your Inbox - again, BEFORE SENDING IT ON OR POSTING IT TO YOUR BLOG.  (I can't emphasize that enough.) 

Why is this such an issue?  Well, it makes you look foolish when you forward on something that everyone else knows is such an old hoax that it has a long, grey beard, for one thing.  For another, it uses up bandwidth that could be better used.  It's annoying to those who receive these things who know better.  It encourages the people who write them and send them out just to see how many people will be tricked into forwarding them on to do it even more often.  

But there's a more important reason that I just saw demonstrated on our local news. 

There's a hoax going around right now involving traffic laws being changed on July 1, with outrageous fines being applied.  Mildly annoying, but easily debunked with 30 seconds on snopes.  However, a lot of people aren't checking before they send it on as fact; a lot are sending it on "just in case, what can it hurt" and then checking after they've let the genie out of the bottle or the cat out of the bag - or not checking at all.  The result, here in Texas (one of the versions is for Texas, another for California, who knows if there's versions for other states), is that the Texas Department of Public Safety, which has much better use for its time and resources, is fielding thousands of calls asking about it, to the point that they have put a notice on the news that this is a hoax and PLEASE don't pass it on, in hopes of stemming the tide and getting back to taking care of real business.  This is costing us our tax dollars, folks.

That is the kind of thing that "just in case, what can it hurt" forwarding can cause.

So, please, when you get something in your mail that wants you to send it to everyone you know and their dog, pause a moment.  Check it out beforehand.  You'll learn, soon enough, if you do this consistently, that you don't even have to check, you'll recognize the hoaxes when someone sends them on to you "just in case," and just hit delete. 

Thank you.

While we still have a 50% chance of rain in the area for the next several days, it looks like (knock on wood!) that the major flooding is over, at least on our place.  So this morning we're pumping out the flooded storm shelter.

It was difficult getting a photo, on a sunny summer morning, of what is essentially a dark hole in the ground, but here it is.  The line that you see inside is the water level (understand, several people, including tall men, can stand upright in this shelter when it's not full of water - the grey thing on the left in the shelter is the top of the rail for the steps going down into it).  The black cat is Beezl, our 17+ pound 12 year old black cat who, along with our Morgan horses, supervises every project we do to make sure we do it right. 

More cheerfully, while things are a bit soggy, the world as seen from our front porch is once more a beautiful, green place, washed clean of the dust of the recent drought by the storms that blew through. 

Mother Nature has her moods, as do we all - stormy one day, putting on her party dress the next.  This is just another event in a long life of learning to live with her in relatively peaceful co-existence.