Thought note: Food ingredients?

I remember when food was simply mixtures of ingredients like flour, milk, sugar, and eggs. You cooked them, sat down and ate your meal. Now I am not a TV chef with recipes from around the country and abroad. I am the chef in my house and I do cook from scratch, using basic ingredients. If I eat out and enjoy a dish that tastes good I will go home and find the recipe on the internet and cook it at home. In my house we eat very few prepared foods from the grocery store.

I understand that today lifestyle moves at faster pace that when I was younger. Both mothers and fathers have to work to make ends look like they meet. Everyone is doing more to fill up the time in their lives. Kids have schedules that rival their parents. It is not just filling up all available time. It is the rushing to do it fast as possible. No matter fast the movement, there is never enough time. We feed with quick spurts to get something in the stomach. The microwave oven has become the major appliance in a kitchen. Our food ingredients reflect this pace of life. They have become chemical compounds designed in labs.

I don’t understand what is advertised as ingredients in food. You need a scientist to explain what they are. Corn maltodextrin, hydrolyzed soy and wheat gluten protein, sodium acid pyrophosphate, monoglycerides, sodium sulfites and sodium bisulfites (preservatives), disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate, sodium phosphate, calcium phosphate, yellow 5 and yellow 6 are ingredients. What food group they belong to? I have a sense that ingredients in today’s prepared foods are for the time they spend on shelves. But I’m sure that some government agency said it is okay for human consumption which I think means it’s okay to eat

Thought Note: Product Recalls

I have had friends call and get on my case about not consistently writing my blogs (Lostsurvivor.com and TJThoughtsthings). My reasons, job and writing new manuscript (Ghost Watcher) was not good enough. I have to agree, especially when I wrote in TJThoughtsthings I would. I have to admit it was good hearing there are readers out there that wanted me to spill thoughts out of my mind.

So here is a thought note:

What happens to things that are recalled?

The media lets us know about products that are recalled, but I don’t remember ever seeing or hearing about what happens to the products. For example, meat recalled receives attention of being pulled off store shelves. I, like many others, assume it is send back to the company that made it. Then what? Do they destroy it? I have seen and heard of diseased cows and chickens destroyed in the media. But I don’t remember the media saying what happens to recalled packaged meats. It is a vast distribution system for these products, consisting of warehouses and delivery trucks before they get on the shelves. How do they handle recalled products in these cases?

And what about those toys that were recalled? What happen to them? Were they put a boat and shipped back to the manufacturer? If a recalled product is not good in American, does that mean it is not good in other countries?

Perhaps there are simple answers to these questions and I just missed it in the news.

The Journey: New York, New York

New York, the big apple with Broadway shows, Empire state building, Harlem, Wall Street, and the 8 lane George Washington Bridge. Three or four miles before the George Washington Bridge we ran into a traffic jam. The smell of gasoline and diesel fumes from the slow crawl of cars mixed in stifling heat was overbearing. No one could go anywhere. People turned off their cars and stood or sat on their car’s hood watching the frozen stream of metal.
There are no bathrooms on controlled federal roads except at the exits. Some people had blankets and were lying in the grass on the side of the road drinking alcohol. People were yelling at other people, some cussed others passed a bottle between them. A few were peeing on the side of the road. It was a party to some, to others a pain in the butt. We had the CB on listening to the truckers. The chatted that filled the air was to watch out for the Mexican 500 that would start when the bridge lowered. The traffic started moving slowly, cars filled with Mexicans sped over highway embankments and dodged dangerously between cars. I don’t understand how there were no accidents.
We could see the Empire State Building outline through the smog. I asked Carol if she wanted to go into New York and see some sights. She was not interested in seeing any more of New York. She had seen more people in the traffic jam than she had ever seen in Springfield were enough people for one day. She said the only way she would see New York would be in a tank.
Stamford Connecticut, we stayed at the Stamford Inn, off 195. An older hotel, which in it’s hey day was a Holiday Inn catering. That night an assortment of characters filled the hotel. Highway travelers reflect the nature of America. They are from and going to every area of America. Regional differences of clothes, living, and thinking clash in hotels like the Stamford Inn. The local police visited the hotel twice.
One of Carol’s friends, in Springfield, had given us a contact name that was the owner of one of the local radio stations. Carol called him and talked about living and working in Stamford. He wasn’t very encouraging, but offered to help us.
I don’t know if it was the hotel setting, the constant buzz of traffic, the lack of encouragement, or our expectations that made up our minds we were not going to stay in Stamford. Whatever the reason we decided to leave and continue our search for a place stop and live.
We decided not to travel the main federal highways, but to meander on two-lane tree covered back roads.

The Journey – car troubles in Pennsylvania

Bad weather and car troubles had to happen sooner or later. No car trip would an adventure unless these events are part of it. We had had no problems with either until we were in the low ridges of the Appalachian mountains in Pennsylvania. The Appalachian region is generally considered the geographical dividing line between the eastern seaboard of the United States and the Midwest region of the country.

We encountered large thunderstorms few miles out of Danville, Pennsylvania in the mountains. The wind driven rain was a torrid down pour causing everything to disappeared outside the car’s window a few times including the car hood. Cars were parked bumper to bumper underneath overpasses. Speeding trucks whipped the driving rain up from the road bed into a blinding dirty fog. I followed their lead and kept driving but slower. After about twenty-five minutes of creeping through the downpour, the sky cleared up and the sun came out. I told Carol if we had pulled over, we would still be on the mountaintop in the drenching rain. We were out of the rain but her mind was still on the mountain with the fright of speeding trailer trucks engulfing us with clouds of dirty back wash from their tires.

We were a few miles from Stroudsburg Pennsylvania when the front of the car begin to wobble violently side-to-side whenever I went over ten miles an hour. I pulled off the road and checked the wheels, looked under the hood. I could not see anything that would cause the problem. A state trooper pulled up behind us. He looked at the wheels and under the hood. He couldn’t see anything wrong. He directed me to a gas station at the next exit that repaired cars.

I drove slow, as slow as when we were caught in the drenching in the mountains. I had a difficult time controlling the steering wheel. We pulled into the gas station, a man was standing outside smoking a cigarette. His eyes got big and the cigarette fell from his mouth as he watched us wobbled into the station. When we got out of the car he said he could believe his eyes. The left front tire was wobbling side to side. He had never seen anything like it before.

We had lost three tire lugs off the wheel. Only two lugs, next to each other, were holding the tire on the wheel. The gas station didn’t stock Peugeot replacement parts. In fact they had never seen or heard of a Peugeot. We looked in the yellow pages for the nearest Peugeot dealer. There was one in New Jersey. Thank goodness the station did have some metric lugs that fit. They were plain tire lugs not the chrome-plated lugs like on the other tires rims, but they would hold the tire onto the wheel and stop the wobbling that’s all we cared about.

We didn’t realize that you don’t go driving around America in a Peugeot. Most people had never heard of the French car. We were very lucky to find a dealer close. There were very few dealerships in the United State. With all the fast hard driving and bad weather we had been through we felt blessed nothing happened to us.

Lost Time

I have lost a lot of writing time the past few weeks, between mother-in-law trips from nursing home to emergency room a few time, medical procedure on me, working for the State of Illinois (which is planning to pass a thirty day budget for a 12 month year), and installing new window Vista on my laptop. But, the swirl of activity has put my mind to work which always helps my writing. Ah, but the writing doesn't get done unless I write the words. So, I have to get back to my writing disciple. Writing everyday. One of my goal to is write in this blog at least every day. Everyday is what I working for.

I thought about lost time. What makes time lost? Distractions. Something, most of the time ourself, wish we were doing something different than what we are doing. It gives us the feel we have lost time. You can't get time back you lost. All you can do is to do what you feel is important for your time.

The Journey: On The Road East

On route 80 going east big trailer trucks whizzed past us. Their speed scared Carol. She asked if they knew the speed limit. That was unimportant to them, time was money and speed was the way to get more time.

We had a CB radio that plugged into the cigarette lighter and had a magnetize antenna you put on the roof of the car. CB’s were the highway's communication link. You don’t realize the number of people that are on the airwaves until you spend time out on the road. Truckers have CB conversations like they are in the same room with you. They talk about everything from the weather across the country, how to by-pass state weighting stations, what they had to eat and what their wives and girlfriends did or didn’t do. No one uses their real names on the air they have handles. Airwave names, that most of the time are reflective of who they want people to think they are, like Grey fox, wild man, hoochy momma, farm boy and the like.

Carol like to listen to the CB traffic, a new and different language to her. She heard women on the CB saying what milepost or exit the commercial beaver house was parked. She finally asked what the women where talking about. I laughed. Her face flushed when I told her they were telling men where their camper was parked. They were women who were applying one of the oldest trades.

She couldn’t believe there were women traveling the highways doing that. Long distance truck driver don’t stay in one place very long. When they off the road they were not making money. Since they are always on the on the road, houses of pleasure were mobile like their customers. The journey would be full of discoveries we had never thought about.

America does not need made up heroes.

America is full of real heroes. She does not need to make them up. There are many different types of heroes. There are those that do a heroic act in war, during disasters, and responding to circumstances of accidents. Then there are those unsung heroes who meet the challenges of daily living in an unforgiving world for their children, for their future and hopes. The media does not make heroes. The media shows the actions of ordinary people reacting to extraordinary situations that create heroes.

In Vietnam during combat daily heroic acts kept most men alive. Someone who charged the enemy without regard to their personal danger, threw their bodies on a grenade to protect their fellow soldiers, or exposed themselves to enemy fire to drag a wounded man to safety. Acts done with no thought of being a hero but because something someone had to do at that moment to save lives. Someone who was willing to give up their life so others men could live. No thoughts of the consequence just the act that needed to be done. I was a corpsman with a Marine long range recon unit. When a man was wounded my only thought was to get to him as soon as possible no matter what was happening around me. Part of it was my training to respond, it was my job. Facing death continuously was not part of the job description. Yet, when a man yelled “Doc, I’m hit” without thinking I ran or crawled to him. I was scared, though fear screamed in my mind I didn’t hesitant. The need to help overrode the fear. There were times I didn’t know how I survived. No matter how often it happened, I was ready to do it again. To some these actions would be considered heroic acts, or just crazy, to me and men I served with it was my job.

Mother’s and fathers are heroes. They face a world everyday they have no control over to feed, clothe, and protect their children from harm. Some days it seems impossible but they make it to the next day to meet new challenges. They strive to give tomorrows to their children. The personal sacrifices, the pain, the suffering they endure quietly most of the time. For most it is their love and job.

America is who she is today because of her heroes. Some we know about, most we don’t. After most heroic acts, heroes look forward to a normal life. There is no hero’s life style. The heroic act happens at a time and place, one of many events that happen in a life.