Restriction:

This particular recipe is almost always prepared by a parent.   Sometimes a much older sibling prepares it for younger family members.   Neither the parent or older child have any intention of using it personally.

Ingredients:

Carnation Instant Milk (in the red and white box), or,

for pennies more, Carnation Evaporated Milk (because it’s canned it keeps forever ~ won’t get bugs in it or turn into a solid block it if gets wet.  Perfect for your fallout shelter!)

Water

Instructions:

Mix.  Don’t worry about the clumps because no matter how much you stir, mix or blend this they will not completely disappear.   If you used the Carnation Evaporated Milk there are no lumps.   That’s one reason why it costs more.

Tell your children (or younger siblings) that, despite its somewhat watery with floaters appearance,  it tastes just like regular milk!  Insist they use it on their cereal if they won’t drink it outright.

Store unused milk in refrigerator indefinitely, even if the kids start eating their cereal dry.

When it turns a greenish color consider make a new batch.

I sit at my deskchair and stand on a precipice simultaneously.  Creating words in the German fashion of concatenation (like desk chair becomes deskchair) and letting my thoughts flow freely, possibly incoherently to whomever may be reading this.   Two weeks from today I need to start using my savings account.   Today I need to lower my “expectations” about employment.  No, strike that.   I need to CHANGE my expectations.    I’ve had a few high income years I should just be thankful for and move on.    Today I am going to change my future, before that cat runs off with it!

From Yahoo! News:

Planet could be ‘unrecognizable’ by 2050, experts say

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A growing, more affluent population competing for ever scarcer resources could make for an “unrecognizable” world by 2050, researchers warned at a major US science conference Sunday.

The United Nations has predicted the global population will reach seven billion this year, and climb to nine billion by 2050, “with almost all of the growth occurring in poor countries, particularly Africa and South Asia,” said John Bongaarts of the non-profit Population Council.

To feed all those mouths, “we will need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000,” said Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

“By 2050 we will not have a planet left that is recognizable” if current trends continue, Clay said.

The swelling population will exacerbate problems, such as resource depletion, said John Casterline, director of the Initiative in Population Research at Ohio State University.

But incomes are also expected to rise over the next 40 years — tripling globally and quintupling in developing nations — and add more strain to global food supplies.

People tend to move up the food chain as their incomes rise, consuming more meat than they might have when they made less money, the experts said.

It takes around seven pounds (3.4 kilograms) of grain to produce a pound of meat, and around three to four pounds of grain to produce a pound of cheese or eggs, experts told AFP.

“More people, more money, more consumption, but the same planet,” Clay told AFP, urging scientists and governments to start making changes now to how food is produced.

Population experts, meanwhile, called for more funding for family planning programs to help control the growth in the number of humans, especially in developing nations.

“For 20 years, there’s been very little investment in family planning, but there’s a return of interest now, partly because of the environmental factors like global warming and food prices,” said Bongaarts.

“We want to minimize population growth, and the only viable way to do that is through more effective family planning,” said Casterline.

From USA President Obama as quoted by Information Week:

“By the mid-2030′s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth,” said Obama. “A landing on Mars will follow,” he added.

Click on link below for full article:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/fabrics/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224400444#

From the History Channel: THE UNIVERSE “Space Colonization”

“Space colonization is no longer the fodder of science fiction, it is becoming a reality. Examine the efforts underway to establish a human colony on Mars, including how they plan to grow food, recycle wastewater and introduce greenhouse gases to revive the red planet and make it more habitable for humans. Cutting-edge computer graphics are used to bring the universe down to earth to show what life would be like on Mars, and to imagine what kind of life forms might evolve in alien atmospheres.”

http://www.history.com/shows/the-universe

The Universe Season 2, Episode 13 is on “Space Colonization” but NOTE:

It is now listed as being on http://www.history.com/shows/the-universe/episodes as Season 5 – perhaps they are doing as an updated re-run?  If you have Netflix and Google “The Universe Season 2 Episode 13 a direct link to the video will come up.

From NASA / JPL:  MARS Exploration

“Since our first close-up picture of Mars in 1965, spacecraft voyages to the Red Planet have revealed a world strangely familiar, yet different enough to challenge our perceptions of what makes a planet work. Every time we feel close to understanding Mars, new discoveries send us straight back to the drawing board to revise existing theories.

You’d think Mars would be easier to understand. Like Earth, Mars has polar ice caps and clouds in its atmosphere, seasonal weather patterns, volcanoes, canyons and other recognizable features. However, conditions on Mars vary wildly from what we know on our own planet.

Over the past three decades, spacecraft have shown us that Mars is rocky, cold, and sterile beneath its hazy, pink sky. We’ve discovered that today’s Martian wasteland hints at a formerly volatile world where volcanoes once raged, meteors plowed deep craters, and flash floods rushed over the land. And Mars continues to throw out new enticements with each landing or orbital pass made by our spacecraft.”

Link to sites:

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/ and  http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/mars/mars_colonize_terraform.html

From MARS SOCIETY / MARS DIRECT:

Wikipedia excerpt:   “Mars Direct is a proposal for a Manned mission to Mars. Proponents of the scheme have claimed it to be both cost-effective and that it can be conducted with current technology. It was originally detailed in a research paper by NASA engineers Robert Zubrin and David Baker in 1990, and later expanded upon in Zubrin’s 1996 book The Case for Mars. It now serves as a staple of Zubrin’s speaking engagements and general advocacy as head of the Mars Society, an organization devoted to the colonization of Mars.”

Website: http://www.marssociety.org/home/about/mars-direct

Video on You Tube:

http://www.uncontactedtribes.org/brazilfootage

Ernest Hemingway said “The first draft of anything is shit.”

Might be true, maybe not always.  Although I have done re-writes of my stories before, I have come to realize something.  I don’t get the same rush of excitement with the second draft.

I find that I’m always looking to take a different route when I go somewhere.  And I usually look for a new destination.  So I prefer to visit a country I haven’t been to before, watch a movie once, try a new recipe whenever I can, don’t go back and re-read a book.   With writing stories I like to follow the next idea, flesh it out and move on.   In this case I suppose the writing will be terrible but if the reason I wrote was to explore my own thoughts, memory and imagination it doesn’t matter.   I may never publish a short story or novel but I will have enjoyed writing that first shitty draft of it!

He is performing at the ROXY in Los Angeles on Tuesday night January 18, 2011.

You can find out more about Jay by listening to the attached video and

checking out his website http://jaybrannan.com

http://jeshudak.com

A sample of her work: