Moqueca: A Brazilian Culinary Experiment

I tried my hand at cooking Brazilian food for the first time this evening. I have several friends from Brazil, so I've eaten plenty of Brazilian food, but I'd never actually made it before. Until now.

It turned out well. It doesn't look spectacular because it's a one-pot meal, but it's got an amazing flavor to it.

Honestly, I've never actually had Moqueca; I just happened to have most of what I needed on hand, so I threw it together. It's mainly salted cod in a broth of coconut milk, tomatoes, cilantro, garlic, and Indian chilis. I did a quick side of garlic rice to soak up the leftover broth.

I will definitely make this again, probably with an extra chili next time...

Learned Topics from LabSim Fifth Chapter (A Response to Threaded Discussion 07)

The use of conditional formatting to highlight cells containing particular values, text sequences, or falling within a range of values was something new to me; I had seen this done many times before, but until completing LabSim 5.9, was unsure of how to employ this technique myself. I intuitively guessed that there had to be some way of automating the whole process of color-coding cells given specific conditions, rather than doing so manually, but I had never actually employed conditional formatting like that before, for spreadsheets I was actively working with.

I've already made use of this new skill in my own life. 

Recently, I started building a spreadsheet that would allow me to compare all the pros/cons of multiple options for a program I have been looking at enrolling in. One of the obvious things you look at when comparing options is cost. Having learned how to conditionally format cells, I designed a scheme where Excel would color-code cells in the "Program Cost" column of the spreadsheet, based on what percentile of the cost distribution a particular program's cost fell into. The end result was a nice, stoplight-themed color code that allows me to compare program costs more effectively, by more or less immediately disqualifying program options whose total costs' fall in the "red."

I look forward to further exploring conditional cell formatting using percentages, highs/lows, etc. in future projects.

The Joys of Tax Season

With about a month before the filing deadline, I officially started attempting to file my taxes yesterday.

I often hate being right about things, because normally when I make a prediction, it's unabashedly negative. And bitter. 

Unfortunately, tax season thus far pretty much has played out exactly how I expected it to.

Before I left Hawai'i, I made sure to place the information packets for my health insurance/retirement plan  in a *special folder* that, of course, is now missing. I really thought I left Oahu with it; it was a cheap folder provided by the state, and it was this really...headache-inducing gauche shade of pink. I would've noticed if it were missing. So where did it go?

The thing that's most aggravating is that I didn't even want the retirement account to begin with because, for a nice, big segment of people under the age of seventy in the United States, retirement is never going to become a reality anyway; we're too poor. And all the "wealth management" tips and "investment hacks" in the world are not going to change that simple fact. It's not going to happen.

I called the retirement board and, apparently, it's going to take weeks to get the information, and the information request must be faxed.

We're off to a real great start.

Thoughts on an App That Saves Me Money

I'm not a mobile app person. I download as few of them as I can get away with, I don't like how the icons clutter up my display, and I hate the incessant notifications I get from them all day, even when I disable them. The word "disable" must have a different meaning to most app designers than it does to me...the hits keep coming.

I did, however, download an app a couple months back that has legitimately been worth it, and has already saved me some cash on my biggest expense (groceries): Ibotta.

Right now, I probably spend about four hundred a month on grocery items; it's without question my biggest recurring expense. There are a couple reasons for this, one of which being my refusal to cook with low-grade vegetable oils, due to their general toxicity. Instead, I rely mainly on coconut oil and ghee, and neither of those, barring the occasional sale at La Bonita, are cheap. This is where Ibotta comes in.

Ibotta allows you to take pictures of your receipts, and submit the receipts to them. Prior to doing so, you scroll through their current offers at a particular market, like Sprouts, and select what you intend to pick up. Then, when you submit your receipt, it compares your items to the pre-selected goods, for which there are manufacturer refunds offered, and you get money back on those purchases. Simple.

Ibotta doesn't help much with some of my big ticket items, like Ora King salmon, or heritage eggs, but it saves me a ton on those cooking oils, as well as other items, like the shredded coconut and bitter chocolate I use in my yogurt parfaits in the morning. In fact, when I hit the store the other night, I ended up getting 15% of my bill back in refunds.

I know there are other apps like Ibotta out there, but I haven't tried them yet. A lot of these things just straight up do not apply if you live in Hawai'i, so there was a long period where I just gave up on that kind of thing. Returning to the mainland, though, now I can save again...so that's something.

Huzzah for saving money.

Learned Topics from LabSim Fourth Chapter (A Response to Threaded Discussion 06)

Learning about how to properly employ section and page breaks has been enlightening. I knew what page breaks and section breaks were, but I didn't really understand how to distinguish between their uses (i.e. purpose) in more complex documents. The way LabSim combined their usage in some of the testing documents really helped to delineate the differences between the two.

A big part of a previous job I held involved preparing contracts for state business; many of these contracts were actually extensions, and so we had templates that we had to update and fill-in with new information as the renewal deadline began to approach. Not really understanding the difference between these two types of breaks created enough of a headache on its own, but when combined with the fact that oftentimes, in retrospect, the breaks seemed really poorly planned to begin with, it became a nightmare for any other than the shortest of renewals.

In all honesty, I don't ever want a job like that again, so I don't intend to be able to directly apply this knowledge to a similar situation in the future. Having said that, I still use Word frequently, and finally understanding how to organize multilayered lists, and utilizing breaks in a clear way to ensure the numbering for different lists is correct, will still be helpful.