Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Archives for April 2005

Weird ATM occurrence

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I went to the ATM today, as I haven’t been in a while. The branch of my bank I went to had a snazzy new ATM setup, with Hi Tech Graphics and touch screens and everything but a back massage. Neat. I put my card in, I type in my PIN, I go through the rigamarole.

While the ATM counts out the money and prints my receipt and all, I glance at the picture of the ATM card that they put underneath the card slot and I think, “That’s not the card I put in there.”

The cash door pushes money at me and the receipt prints out and then my card comes out. Indeed, I did not put my bank card in there; I put my regular ol’ Visa in there. I have no idea what my Visa’s card PIN is; I have never used it for cash. The receipt in no way mentions that this was a Visa cash advance, although of course it doesn’t have my bank balance on there either.

What happened?

  1. Dude! You got lucky! Free money! Where’s that bank?
  2. In fact, you have beaten the 1-in-10000 odds (probably slightly less than that) and, in fact, your bank card and your Visa card have the exact same PIN.
  3. The bank could frickin’ care less as to whether you have the PIN for a Visa card. Have Visa card, get money. In which case: where’s that bank?

My letter to TIME

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To: Time

I can only assume with your choice of Ann Coulter as the cover at the tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing that you are either woefully stupid or want to up sales by pandering to the right-wing extremists that Ms. Coulter appeals to. Stupid or venal: which is it? In either case, you shouldn’t be running a newsmagazine.

“My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.”
–Ann Coulter as quoted in the New York Observer, Aug. 20, 2002

“RE: McVeigh quote. Of course I regret it. I should have added, ‘after everyone had left the building except the editors and reporters.'”

–Ann Coulter, from an interview with Right Wing News

10Ks and cinnamon rolls

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Rob and I have decided we need to do a race a month in order to keep up our interest in training. We’re not particularly interested in doing a marathon—I want to do a marathon, just not right now. Right now, I want to run regularly and have a good time at it.

So this morning we went to do the HP Up and Running race, which is a good-sized fun run (you don’t get trampled by thousands of people). The downside in a race like this is, when you’re the back of the pack, you’re the back of the pack. There may have been people behind us. I steadfastly refused to look back to confirm or deny. We did the 10K in about 80 minutes, which comes out to about 13 minutes a mile (strangely, the 10K has mile markers; go figure). Not great, but it’s the longest distance either of us has run in a while, and we both felt tired but pretty good at the end. And I felt a hell of a lot better than I did last year, when my foot started hurting something awful around mile 4 and I basically had to hobble in to the finish.

Or we did. Rob and Laura were supposed to come over after the race, but Rob said he was feeling exhausted. Combination of a lot of running and a lot of late-night World of Warcraft, I suspect. I can definitely understand the tiredness: I’m sitting here feeling tired. Not as bad as the first time I ran the Bay to Breakers, when I fell asleep on my mother’s couch immediately upon sitting down. But tired.

The up side of Rob and Laura not coming over was: more cinnamon rolls for us! I made cinnamon rolls, mostly to prove that I could do it. The last time I tried to make cinnamon rolls at home, I didn’t know what I was doing, the dough was too soft and puffy, and the entire process ended up in a stupid doughy heap that I threw away. This time: I know a little bit more, and last night I made a brioche dough that sat in the fridge all night and was nice and cold to work with. I rolled the dough up into its spiral, but then forgot to seal the edges, so all of the rolls opened at the ends. Well, this is how you learn.

I used Nancy Silverton’s brioche recipe from Baking With Julia and the cinnamon sugar recipe from the Sur La Table class I took a couple of weeks ago. Of course, the SLT recipe makes about 8 times too much, so I sealed the remained in Tupperware for the next roll-making occasion. The roll dough was perfect. I need to add more butter (yes! more butter!) to the interior next time to make the roll soft and gushy, but it was pretty damn good as it was.

Yum.