Flynn's Paws: My Thoughts, My Gripes

Tag: food

  • 20080731-Foreclosure Bankruptcy

    Ah yes! Here is yet another synchronous coding that personalizes my initials ‘pour moi’ – the blog title may well be a manifestation of my ‘anger’ towards those who dare reap the rewards of cash (or appreciated profiting) from ‘flipping the house’. A house is supposed to be a place of shelter, protecting the inhabitants within said dwelling against the elements of nature – wind, rain, wind, sun, wild animals, pesky insects, etc. – and not some inanimate object (or real estate property) meant to be bought and sold quickly after making home improvements.

    A home is supposed to be sweet (like gardenia scented candles), warm (like a raging fireplace) and cozy (like a bear skin rug). Homes are where families are raised and nurtured with precious memories to be passed on to the next generation. This is how I envisioned real estate property. People buy into the real estate market and live happily ever after. The neighborhood is quaint and quiet and harbors good neighbors who are relatively nice and won’t mind loaning a few gardening tools or a cup of sugar once in awhile. The value of a home is as good as the value of the neighborhood and most importantly the value of loving and caring people.

    Alas, I see lots of uncaring people who are in love with making cash from the equity of theirs home, which is really another loan on top of the original mortgage – both of which must be paid off one way or another. The media as usual has been presenting many foreclosures on homes due to (at times predatory) lending to risky borrowers. These same borrowers know damn well they cannot afford to put themselves into debt. And yet they want to live in a descent house with all the nice amenities of fine living. I don’t see the logic in how the poor could live in luxury and don’t understand why they would want to assume a lifetime of commitment that only the wealthy are in reality able to buy.

    Buying a dream is one thing. But selling reality is another. The predators know damn well how to catch their preys. They send out their scouts to ‘find’ a player who gets sold into a scheme that appears ‘too good to be true’. Once the ‘asset’ has been acquired, the sucker is lead to believe that its business as usual. Of course greed appears to be the motivating factor behind any business-minded piglet (moi), whose original goal was the free will to share and but in turn fulfill the subconscious ego of appreciation. The ‘fallen’ have truly depreciated their value by not being true to themselves – ‘indulging in activities that don’t befit’ the person.

    The risk of losing the house is up to the person. That is their choice or sometimes not — due to loss of job, mind or disability. The risk of filing for bankruptcy is also another way of saying that the borrower is simply unable to pay back the lender. And of course the lender would end up being ruined too. Their survival depends on the lifeline of their tentacles wrapped around investors and their capital, the borrowers and their payments and others sources of credit. Without the useless bottom feeders, the top heavy weights will all fall down.

    That is how the world operates. A few won’t suffer but a majority will not escape the darkest of night. I think that’s why some brokers (whose job allows people go broke) jump out the windows when the stock market crashes. It gets that bad because there is no way to repay unpaid debt or fill in a deep hole six feet deep and so on. I don’t know how the economy could sustain itself towards a path of destruction. I see the ‘DOW’ is weakening. I don’t see how anyone could buy into (or gamble away) a ‘short’ market either and still recover the losses against inflationary pricing and the weakening dollar. It’s insane, really.

    I see more people are waking up to truth that we the consumers are being gouged by high prices. Our local malls have lots of empty space for leasing; the roads have less traffic and more cyclists; and the grocery stores have lots of spoiled, leftover food, too. For example, one store nearby our home is more expensive than the other store (which requires more traveling time and waste of gas just to get there).

    So, people who cannot afford to pay high prices won’t go shopping; thereby leaving businesses to close shop and workers to go jobless. I don’t know why the government won’t declare that the United States economy is in recession. I don’t know why I could just file for bankruptcy and be counted as among those who tried to live the American dream (or horrible nightmare). It’s a sad fate but there is always that light at the end of the tunnel or pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, right? Meh!

    Copyright © 2008 by Fluffy von der Flynn. All rights reserved.

  • 20080719-Strange Cars

    Around 11:50AM, I noticed through our front window the same beige-colored, four-door sedan making a U-turn down my long, stretch of road. Only this time, a shiny SJPD, highway, patrol squad car was tailing it from behind. Then I ran to the television room in hopes waving down the squad car but thought it went straight ahead towards the railway intersection. But the squad car made its U-turn and speed in the opposite direction in hopes of intercepting that car.

    I’ve noticed recently how this vehicle (with two missing hubcaps on its right two wheels) would park next to the house across from us and along my long, stretch of road. The guy has a portly belly and would wait there underneath the neighbor’s eucalyptus tree. Then yesterday or the other day, which I cannot recall, he got out of his driver’s side of the car and went to open up his trunk.

    He proceeded to stamp on some aluminum cans as loudly the sound echoed back into our open front, window. For me anyone opening their trunk is signaling their ‘gang members’. I’ve had this happen too many times. I know this is recent because I’ve been living in this neighborhood all my life, never moving to anywhere else.

    So yesterday another parked car contained a handsome-looking, dark-skinned Asian (who really appears Filipino) to me. Maw and I had finished harvesting some long, stringed beans and purple ‘sweet pea’ pods from our backyards. She had grown those from seedling and now the plants are taller than us, almost the height of six foot.

    We made our made from the backyard to the front yard when I noticed that guy, who mysteriously disappeared. I believe another vehicle came to pick him up because he left all four windows opened. This was after both Maw and I harvested Philippine eggplants (with very dark purple skin) and long Anaheim, green peppers.

    I wonder if our fellow San Jose Police Department has noticed the parked vehicles along my long stretch of road, which is my middle name, my mother’s maiden name — both of which appears fully spelled as part of our identification documents.

    To add at around 11:00AM on Friday, July 18, 2008, I noticed a long shiny, silver-colored truck load check in at the main gate of Moffett Field. The back part of the load had the following website, in which Tesla has been on the something all these years. The truck load was parked near the airstrips, by the way.

    Copyright © FVDF. All rights reserved.

  • 20080508-Having Not

    They kick and scream, crying about how they ‘have-not’ enough money to sustain their comfortable lifestyle. Their hearts are generous and they have all the time in the world to help others and never run out of things to do in spite of their old age.

    They play nice and smile, happy about how they ‘have-not’ enough money to spend unwisely on themselves. There are young at heart and they are too busy and tired to care for others beyond the call of duty or work.

    Both sides are manipulators to my purpose. I will not be swayed by other sides. They do nothing to serve me or our trust. My interest in them is not approved. My energy invested in them is wasted.

    My time too is wasted thinking about the old timers and the twosome, both of whom are now testing my resolve. I have already made up my mind long ago about those who ‘have not’ money – one with fixed income and one living by each check, respectively.

    I am carefully weighing my options about what to do with these people in my life and observing how these foolish ones continue to barrage me with their short-comings. I fail to understand how they don’t see this, my burden of living up to my soul’s purpose to help.

    Now I see how the ‘have-nots’ complain, turning blue in the face or pale in color whatever the stories happen to come out of their blow holes, through my hard of hearing set of ears and into my big brain of neutrality.

    These ‘have-nots’ will never know true happiness until they remove the denial to ‘have’ what everyone wants – inner peace. Their only path to destruction is their distractions in life – family, food, friends, sex, and of course money.

    The worst is fear. The fear is to loose these distractions in life. And without these distractions, jealously forms and of course the hatred for not being able to sustain that which makes inner peace almost next to impossible.

    So what am I to do? Nothing, yeah that’s it! But then again ‘have-not’ yet decided. Perhaps, I should learn to take care of myself first and take everything else from there until the ends of time.

    Copyright © 2008 by Fluffy von der Flynn. All rights reserved.

  • 20080424-Rice Price

    Well, we just bought a dozen, 20-pound bags of rice at $8.49 from $5.00 the last time we went grocery shopping at a place (other than WalMart, a place I’ve never shopped before in my life). We plan on getting more next week. I take this as a ‘good’ signal for the more ‘obese’ countries (no offense) to trim down a bit and start sharing whatever is left from the abundance of foodstuff. I wouldn’t worry too much about losing rice to other alternatives such as rice, like corn, oatmeal, grits and basic bread.

  • 20080325-Recycling Resin

    After a couple of weeks, I realized how slow we are to change. My parental units and I are so clueless that we have been throwing away money, literally! These are in the form of recyclable materials that we would use, such as egg cartons, oil jugs, drinking containers (i.e. water bottles) and plastic bags (from the grocery stores)!

    We learned one morning while eating breakfast at McDonald’s restaurant from ‘Carlos’, one parishioner, that there is a small recycle station on a parking lot nearby a gasoline station. So ‘Paw’ and I decided to haul some plastic bag full of recyclables, which included aluminum cans ‘Paw’ would crush underneath the feet. We got around $14.00 that day.

    Afterwards, I’ve been ‘cross-training’ myself on looking for those recycling symbols (three clockwise arrows forming a triangle with recycling numbers ranging from 1 to 7). The McDonald’s coffee cup, its lid and the little, half-and-half milk container are made out of ‘polystyrene’ (or recycling number 6 found inside a triangle of three clockwise arrows).

    Some numbers are not inside triangles but have barely legible printing, such as the letter ‘PS’ and ‘6’ closely togther. Anything that feels like plastic should be closely scrutinized for any faint description of recycling number. I almost missed the ‘triangle 6’ on the bottom of a plastic tray, which contained my ‘Chips Ahoy! – Chunky Chocolate’.

    I got mad at ‘Paw’ again for not cooperating as he is slowly becoming an old timer that I’ve been ranting about in blogs as seen on television and in nursing homes (where my paternal grandmother was put by three of her children and that in-law, ‘Orge’). I was loud as usual but resigned to creating new plastic bags, labeled with the recycling number for my convenience; since ‘Paw’ wanted to combine all the recycling numbers together.

    However, the big ‘Mexican’ guy of the small, ‘mobile’ recycling station said that these numbers from 1-7 should be separated out because the prices for each one differs. The most common numbers we have so far are 1, 2, 5 and 6. I have some household items with recycle number 3, such as lotions and containers for hydrogen peroxide, dishwashing liquids, liquid bleach and liquid softener.

    We normally rinse these containers with water and sometimes I find myself soaping and drying these so the storage of my hard work outdoors won’t be overrun by ants or other curious and hungry critters in search of left over tidbits stuck on my recyclables. We keep the lids to the main recyclable container (i.e. water bottles) but I always make sure these have the recyclable numbers pre-printed somewhere on the lids.

    ‘Maw’ told me of someone who actually bought a new car using the cash he got from collecting recyclables from the parks, streets and probably from neighbors’ garbage, like some woman who was waiting in her car one day to go through ours. I told her I wanted to dig around the McDonald trash bins and ask the other people nearby for their coffee cups. This is money in the making.

    I even told ‘Paw’ about my idea of opening up recycling centers in the Philippines. I went on to describe how I could help the children after they came with their bags of recyclables from the land fills by having them wash their hands and feet and sitting them down to my long table of food and water. As usual, my ‘Paw’ has a habit showing his frown face of an obvious upside down smile and saying flatly, ‘No’.

    So I learned the meanings of each recycling numbers found on the following Wikipedia article: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resin_identification_code]. The other recyclables are tossed into our local container for later sorting by the city.

    I hope to earn my measly money this way and joked to ‘Maw’ about how I could disguise myself as a homeless person with a shopping cart just so I could go rummaging through the public trashcans for recyclables.

    I really could use a new car because my 1998 Ford Mustang needs a new transmission. The downshift from 60mph to even 50mph is harsh and I’ve no money, thanks to TPTB! Y’all know who you are! You promised!

    Copyright © 2008 by Fluffy von der Flynn. All rights reserved.

  • 20080314-Modifying Again

    Well, I’ve located the ‘#contentalt’ section of the CSS for my current theme ‘Andreas09’ and changed the font size to 14px and the favorite font style to ‘Georgia’. Now we more myopic readers could see my rants better. I took awhile and tested each section to find out where I wanted the changes because I didn’t know the ‘codes’ to the WordPress ‘elements’ to this current pink and purple theme.

    I do notice more television personalities are wearing more pink, purple and cool blues in their wardrobe, like Greta Van Susteren and Sean Hannity — both who work for Fox News on cable. Around noontime, I did come across some nice ties at the men’s department of Sears in Eastridge after the completion of my parental units’ tax returns done at the H&R block. Guys who could wear pastel in their wardrobes are cool (and not gay) to me in the least.

    The whole shopping mall was not busy and quite dead because we arrived early around 10:00AM. Some people were working at a more relaxed pace and the shoppers are hopefully waking up to the fact that they too won’t find a descent job to pay for their next meals if they continue their destructive trend of self-fulfilling egos by buying more clothes and shoes and various junk to clutter up the home, garden and, yes, garage.

    Anytime the garage becomes a storage place means there is no hope for these mindless packrats as they continue to accumulate more junk than is necessary. It’s an addiction and like me I’m addicted to blogging all day without a care in the world. As long as there is water (running, hot and filter), food cooked by ‘Maw’, electricity for my computer and good healthy pair of hands, I’m happy being indoors while staring at the beautiful day of clouds, sun, trees and birds.

    Copyright © 2008 by Fluffy von der Flynn. All rights reserved.

  • 20080304-Daily Diary

    Evening weather cold 05:54AM and saw seagulls flying northbound. orange sunset seeing. otherwise clear blue skies the whole day. I was upstairs after coming home from lunch at Kentucky fried chicken.

  • 20080301-Dreary Dinner

    Both Brat and Twit attended this evening’s mass and all three of us were not excited as we car pooled the twosome to the church. The service seemed longer than normal and the place was packed with people. A Chinese lady was behind me and I sat down rather fast with my back upon her left hand, which was still holding the pew.

    She sang horribly and I scratched my right ears to signal to those who saw me of my discomfort of hearing her singing off key. She also coughed and the more I made faces of disgust. These entities never seem to go far away. I would rather punch in their ‘toad-like’ faces than hear them cough anytime. But this was neither the time nor the place for violence.

    Getting angry should have been justified for waiting twenty minutes after the guy said in a couple of minutes from 06:15PM to 06:35PM. We had called around 04:30PM in hopes of the food being ready around 06:00PM, which was about the time the evening mass was over.

    I was standing with my right side next to the glass door where the bells chimed with each customers coming and going, opening inward to freeze as Paw and I waited in that small place while Maw and the twosome, Brat and Twit, bickered in the Mercedes Benz E430. Then the heater was on full blast to get me all warmed up. That irritated the passengers but too bad for them I was cold.

    Maw had reported to me about the twosome’s concern (or rather more like a complaint) about me for not being as sociable a person with my peers. They have told Maw how I needed ‘friends’ to rely upon in times of distress and to tell them of my every problem from bio-units situations to various unimportant details in life.

    I, on the other hand, told them off and that I don’t always tell my parental unit(s) all that I know. I don’t think Twit heard me well enough to stop her blabbering from the backseat about how she is ‘lucky’ to have at least one close friend, Cunning, to disclose all her secrets. To me, she is a security risk and I definitely have since she hooked up with Brat written her off my trust factor.

    And Twit once again continues to believe he is always right and no one would listen to him and his adult version of a tantrum by getting unreasonably loud with us old timers from the backseat and on our way home from the restaurant. He means well for he wants me to improve on my anger management and pretend that I had forgotten the misdeeds to us three ‘elders’ prior to living with Twit.

    The point is my only closest friends are my bio-units and they are the only ones that I know who have the patience and understanding to put up with the likes of me and my behavior. If the twosome would care to tell me directly instead of Maw, then that would piss me off further but I suppose that’s typical of bio-units members to spread their disagreements by informing the party other than the person in question.

    Some friends come and go as they please, like high school buddies. Some don’t always attend the funeral of the deceased, for example. Some have a certain level of energy to deal with people and hear them out no matter how annoying the subject matter may be to unaccustomed ears, like mine which happens to be deaf on the higher frequencies.

    Anyway, dinner went well from 07:00PM to 07:45PM. I stuffed my face with boiled green beans and chicken chow mein and some tofu and cabbage from this other dish of saltiness. Maw did most of the talking but not Paw and me as usual with the twosome contributing to this after mass and at dinner at home. I was not too excited tonight; I couldn’t recover from being too sleepy earlier this afternoon didn’t help either.

    Copyright © FVDF. All rights reserved.

  • 20080224-Controlling Cruds

    After watching the skit by Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live (SNL) last night, I can’t help but wonder why critics make a big deal about Hillary Clinton and why other womyn cannot tolerate us female bitches who happen to show some ‘human’ emotions by crying (or partially shedding her crocodile tears) in public.

    Crying does not mean a woman is weak. Women do cry, sometimes embarrassingly due to hormonal fits of rage enough to scare a grown man (like Bill Clinton) to stray into another woman’s arms (like Monica Lewinsky) for comfort. There is no woman out there who would not cry after her man has had affairs outside the sacred bond of matrimony.

    Someone’s private life, including marriage problems, should not be made to public scrutiny. There is no perfection in relationships since there is always bound to be something dysfunctional going on all the time. While marriage does have its ups and downs, women are bitches because men will continue to behave differently by nature’s grand design.

    Men are simplistic like an on-and-off switch. Feed them food and sex and they will come running: Good boys! Punish them for doing wrong or nothing at all around the place and they will run away: Bad boys! Controlling one’s husband is different than controlling one’s emotions while serving as public servant.

    This female responsibility as wife should in no way interfere with her running a country as a potential Commander-In-Chief of the United States. And I see no threat to the whole world if Hillary, nay, a female ‘human’, does represent this most powerful nation in a world predominantly ruled by men, especially in the Islamic nations.

    There continues to be Muslim women who truly ‘stand by their men’ and are truly unsympathetic to those women who ‘stand up for change’ against the iron fist of outmoded men brow beating their ideologies of women as evil and whores. Another example is where women in a Pampanga province of the Philippines still work to sell while the men hold the money.

    And despite being the weaker sex — the physical design of smaller frame and strength to defend against the injustice of rape, some have paid dearly with their lives with beheadings and stoning – symbolic executions of hope for womyn kind, mother, wife and sister alike.

    The ‘new black’ is back and they are ‘female’! It’s not the color of the skin that divides us as a nation but the gender worldwide really. They are back to fight for what this country needs, someone who will control the country and lead the nation to a better future, a more maternal kind where women are more organized, thoughtfully planning daily affairs to keep the family together.

    There is nothing wrong with a woman president who ‘wears the pants’. I personally don’t like wearing a dress, well, because I almost tripped over my long skirt with my high heels on a date one night. And where business only attire is required, women should not be viewed as less than a woman or totally disrespected for not acting like a lady all dolled up and ready to go at a moment’s notice.

    Copyright © 2008 by Fluffy von der Flynn. All rights reserved.

  • 20080222-Daily Diary

    thought during morning mass: how about if the these aliens function in our reality through symbolism and not spoken language as we know it. so I ‘thought to my self’ of typical symbols – trees, halos, crosses, on gelard uruk

    cooked pancakes! fluffy stacks! about twelve big ones instead of buying 3 flap jacks for around $4.50 at Denny’s.

    Then I did around two dozen crepe of mostly egg yellow and rubbery texture. Then dad called jr. to come by and pick up the pancake and crepe extra left over. he left around 07:50PM after arriving an hour ago.

    I did my widgets and learned at night about the
    tag. saw and saved two photos of Shrimpsei, his daughter and granpaw!

  • 20080219-Daily Diary

    09:40AM raindrops fall. gray clouds. finished cooking four sunny side eggs, four toast. sliced medium cheddar cheese. washed dishes.

  • 20080202-Buddha’s Being

    Why is Buddha smiling?

    He is smiling because he knows more than we could ever realize about ourselves. He laughs in the faces of those who take his philosophy too seriously and turns his enlightened thoughts into a religion – Buddhism. A simple smile is a reflection of one’s current state of mind and is quite contagious when others see a sincere smile. For those with good teeth of pearly white, a bigger smile is better. Furthermore, he believes in doing nothing to justify his existence by sitting and praying everyday and as a result has gained unhealthy pounds over the course of his life.

    Why is Buddha fat?

    He is fat because he eats too much for his own good. His followers don’t understand that he is diabetic and all those food left on his alter goes right to his thighs but more noticeably to his big guts. He wants more than oranges and tea as food offerings. That is why there are different kinds of food besides soup and vegetable, both of which are boring when eaten every day! Noone has died a quick death from eating fatty meat or decadent chocolate, either. It’s moderation that is important for good health but Buddha doesn’t care because eating is his passion.

    Why is Buddha bald?

    He is bald because he has been pulling his hair out of frustration. His followers believe in killing the female babies and in supporting superstitious belief systems, like Feng Shui and lunar cycles. The fear-mongers need not utilize scare tactics to control people. People are by nature imperfect, misbehaving once in awhile, but are not stupid to go along with what everyone else in a particular group dictates as the norm of society. His baldness represents his removal from anything belonging to this world, a form of ego – self-centeredness, including the high maintenance of hair.

    Author’s note: No religion or philosophy is perfect. People need to think well on their own for once. Each person must learn to discern his/her/its own truth and not go along with any religious dogma. That is why the head (rational mind) is placed over the heart (emotional kind) and everything else, err, below (uncontrollable grind).

    Copyright © 2008 by Fluffy von der Flynn. All rights reserved.