Monkling's Blog

Tonight Frank & I went with Theresa to a Mexican restaurant we like. She usually wouldn’t be joining her parents on a Saturday night but we were going to BJ’s afterwards and she wanted to go shopping with us. BJ’s is one of those warehouse shopping places and Theresa wanted to stock up on stuff she needs for dorm life. Important things like pens, post it notes, disinfectant wipes to clean things…

Anyhow, so getting back to the restaurant, Frank & I are ordering beers. Theresa is just getting water. I made some comment about how, in a few months, she’d be able to order a drink. After the waitress walks away, she says, “Gee, Mom, thanks for embarrassing me.”

“Huh?”

“You had to say that in front of the waitress?”

Well alrighty. I had no clue talking about how she’s going to be 21 soon was a topic of embarrassment. I can see if maybe the topic was about sex or discussions about graphic surgical procedures but that? Never saw that one coming.

Besides, she should be used to me making wise cracks and shooting my mouth off. That’s okay. I don’t care if she thinks I’m strange. Her friends think I’m cool. Now isn’t that all that really matters?

I’m not really a football fan, much less a Super Bowl fan, although I do like seeing the big, showy commercials. I will confess, though, that I did watch last year simply because the Patriots seemed just a wee bit arrogant & I was hoping they’d lose. Naturally it helped that a NY team was playing against them.

Then there was the one a few years back that I watched the start of. Frank was upstairs doing something & I saw this guy grab the ball and run all the way down the field for a touchdown. I yelled up to Frank, “Honey, how unusual is it for a guy to make it all the way from one end to the other without getting tackled?” I’m not sure we had Tivo at the time so lucky thing for reruns.

Anyhow, the point isn’t about football. It’s about parties. I’ve never gone to a Super Bowl party and I’ve never had one. Not a real one with huge amounts of food and enormous amounts of people. But I’ve been thinking about an impromptu party I did have.

It was back in 2002. We were home doing nothing. The game was going to be on in a few hours. I had enough stuff in the house that I could whip together some food appropriate for a little party. I decided to call my parents and tell them to come over. I knew they’d be home and that they’d be free. They usually were.

I have no idea what teams were playing. I have no clue who won. I do remember we had a fun time. I had just bought some new living room furniture and that was the first time my mom got to see it. Overall, it was just a fun evening.

As it turned out, it was the best move I ever made, throwing that spur of the moment Super Bowl party. About a week or 2 later, my mom died and that was the last time I saw her. Ever since then, I’ve been a big fan of spontaneous parties.

I don’t mean this to be a sad post, about my mom’s death. I mean it to be a good one; one that says our last time together was fun. A post that says, go do stuff, have fun, to hell with the fact that maybe your house isn’t 100% perfect and you only have 3 types of snacks instead of 7. No one will care. It’s the company that counts. So go invite someone over or make plans or something. Just go spend time with the people you care about.

Regular Readers: you’ll want to ignore this. It’s boring, technical stuff. I’m just posting this here as a little public service act. There is another, real post just below this one.

Everyone else who actually searched for this: read on.

I’ve had major headaches trying to import data from Excel into MySQL. I never found anything online that adequately addressed the issues I had. After a lot of trial & error, I’ve found a way to do it. I then wrote down every step for myself because I know 5 months from now, I will completely forget what I did.

I decided to share this information to save others the trouble so they can avoid errors such as the dreaded “Invalid field count in CSV input.” This assumes you are familiar with using phpMyAdmin and Excel.

These steps worked for me. If they don’t work for you, well I’m sorry. I tried.

1. Create your table using phpMyAdmin. Make sure you have the same number of fields here as the fields in the data you want to import.

2. Clean up your Excel file. Try to avoid having semicolons or quotes in your data or it’ll mess with the import. If you must have those, you need to use the escape character \ before every single instance. The easiest way to clean that up is to use the ‘Find & Replace’ in Excel.

There is also a problem with blank field values, even if you create the field in MySQL with a null value. No matter what I’ve tried, I run into errors when attempting to import fields with empty data.

To get around that, I use ‘Find & Replace,’ to replace the empty fields with  . I click the ‘options’ button and check ‘Match case’ and ‘Match entire cell contents.’ Then click ‘Replace All.’

After that, save it as a normal Excel file. It’s probably a good idea to save it with a different name just in case you accidentally deleted something you needed without realizing it. I like to play it safe & always back up everything before making changes to files, especially files with thousands of records.

3. Open the Excel file in Open Office Calc. Open Office is a free, open source program that is compatible (& comparable) with MS Office that you can download here. I use it because it allows you to specify exactly how you want your CSV file saved. If there is a way to do the same thing in Excel, I have yet to find it.

4. Within Open Office Calc, save your Excel file as a text CSV file using the following values:

Character set: utf8
Fields terminated by ;
Text delimiter “

I know, I know. CSV stands for “comma separated” value so why are we using a semicolon? Well it’s because a semicolon seems to be the default setting in phpMyAdmin. I prefer not to mess with defaults, the logic being they must have picked it for a reason.

5. Open your CSV file in notepad to double check that the field contents are within quotes and the fields are separated by semicolons. Make sure you don’t have your field headers in the first row. (If you do, just delete it.)

6. Go into phpMyAdmin. Select your database and table. Then click the “Import” tab. Browse to the file you just saved. The default character set of the file should be utf8 but if it’s not, change it to that. The format is, of course, CSV.

My options are always:

Format of imported file: CSV using LOAD DATA
Fields terminated by ;
Fields enclosed by ”
Fields escaped by \
Lines terminated by auto

Click the “Go” button. All of your data should have been imported into the database. Click the ‘Browse’ tab to check it. Like I said, this is what works for me. If it doesn’t work for you, well go find someone who’s smarter than I am to help you out. I’m not an expert on this. I’m not an expert on much of anything.

Please tell me people aren’t quite that dumb. I was looking at the FDA website to see just which products were recalled. I don’t really have any peanut butter products, just plain old peanut butter & wanted to make sure that wasn’t on the hit list.

On the page that describes the peanut butter salmonella issue, there is this statement:

Do not eat products that have been recalled and throw them away in a manner that prevents others from eating them.

I’m sorry but if you know your product was recalled and you eat it anyway, you deserve to get food poisoning. You are a complete idiot and, as punishment for being a complete idiot, you get to puke your guts out for a few days.

And how does one throw something out in a way that prevents others from eating it? I’m thinking if you’re throwing stuff out, you’re not setting it out on your front porch with matching dishes and silverware. I’m assuming it would go into a trash barrel. Are you supposed to lock your trash up? Perhaps you need to put warning labels on the trashcan saying, “Caution! Eating garbage may be hazardous to your health!”

If anyone is interested in seeing a list of recalls – while the FDA does have the info on their website, you have to click a hundred different links to see the complete list. This website has a list with everything on one page.

I was happy to see that Jiff wasn’t on the list. Now, after all this talk about peanut butter, I’m getting hungry. I think I’ll go make a peanut butter sandwich.

Y’all know that random, odd things pop into my brain which I then feel compelled to share with my blog readers. Today’s random, odd thing has to do with cooking, just in case you didn’t get that from the title.

Something on someone’s Facebook caught my eye and got me to thinking. It was about cooking chili with beans and then picking them out. Now I’m wondering how many people cook things they don’t like.

I don’t do peas. I might cook them but I can tell you right now, it’ll be a cold day in hell before I ever make pea soup. With just plain peas, you can contain the smell somewhat but the soup – blech! It’ll make the entire house smell like peas, which means I’d have to leave.

That was one of the good parts about moving out of my parents’ house. I never again had to sit at the dinner table and see things like liver or other disgusting stuff I hated. I never could figure out the liver thing with my mom. Even she didn’t like it but she had it in her head it was good for you so, naturally, she had to cook it for us.

By the way, speaking of picking beans out of chili and gross things my mom used to cook, sometimes for dinner my mom would make macaroni and peas; always with elbow macaroni. I’d pick every single damn pea out of there. There was an issue, though, because sometimes peas could be hiding inside an elbow. You had to be real careful eating that stuff.

I blame my father for the whole pea thing. He was one of those, “You’re not leaving until you eat everything on your plate!” kinds of fathers. He basically forced me to eat the things when I was young. My kids benefited from that. I never, ever forced them to eat something they didn’t like. If they had a problem with what I cooked for dinner, they knew where the cabinet was that had the cold cereal.

If you’re married, you might cook something for your spouse that you don’t like, just to be nice but how often do you do that? Are there things you absolutely won’t cook or even allow in the house?

Subtitled: More things you don’t want to hear from your kids.

“How can you tell if you have a concussion?” Theresa asks me.

“Why?”

“I jumped on _____’s back…”

I immediately cut in yelling, “What??? Are you out of your freaking mind? Do you remember what happened the last time you did that? You know – the whole ankle thing?!”

“Well he was just throwing me onto the bed. Except I bounced and slammed my head into the wall and saw stars. Then I was nauseous the rest of the night and had a really bad headache. I still have a headache and feel light headed.”

“Uh, yeah, it sounds like you may have a slight concussion,” I tell her as I’m thinking okay, she didn’t drop dead during the night so I guess it can’t be too bad or life threatening.

The girl is on her way home so once she arrives (only a 15 minute drive from school) I’m checking her pupils & asking a million questions. (Hey, I watch all those medical shows so even though I’ve been out of the medical field for 20 years, I still think I know what I’m doing.) Then she’s off back to school after I tell her she has to take it easy and she is to check in with me often.

Several hours later, Frank & I are at a dinner at our parish when I get a text message. The message says, “Do you think it’s okay if I go to the gym tonight?” I stared at the message in amazement. I kept my reply short. “Uh, NO!”

Completely on a tangent, or more of a rant, what the hell is the deal with websites that promote gossip and online bullying? This isn’t even just at the junior high school or high school level, either. We’re talking college. You would think people in college would be somewhat more mature and you’d think people who run websites would be more responsible but apparently not.

There is this college gossip website. It’s a free for all. You can name names and basically make up whatever you want about people. And they do. I’ve heard about it before from my daughter but tonight I went to look at it when I found out she was a victim. The entire site is just absolutely disgusting and there is nothing illegal about it. No laws, nothing. I just don’t get it.

I was going to take the day off today from blogging. I was going to declare this Sunday as a day of rest. We were out most of the day – first to Mass, then to a dinner that our parish has for all the people who do volunteer work and then it was off to the nursing home….

Quick story about the volunteer dinner thing. You had to fill out a form so they knew how many people were going to show up. Otherwise, how would they know how much food to order, eh? On the slip to fill out, there was a line where you were supposed to write what group or ministry you belonged to. I wrote in, “Supreme Website Ruler.” I take care of the parish website. Hey, if I’m going to fill something out, I might as well make it entertaining for whoever has to read it.

Now the Nursing Home story. Frank & I got there first, before his sister. About half an hour later, Mel comes walking in with 2 other friends and the room is filled beyond capacity.

It’s hot in the nursing home. Initially, walking in there from outside where it’s like -324 degrees out, it feels great but then it’s way too hot. My mother in-law is always hot even when others aren’t so we always play out the same routine.

“Is the window opened?”
“Yes, Mom.”
“I don’t feel anything. Open it more.”
“It’s opened as much as it can open.” The window only opens up about an inch.

There are 5 of us in the room and only 1 seat so Frank is sitting by his mom on the bed and Mel is sitting on the edge of the roommate’s bed. Mel starts opening her blouse. I don’t recall what the conversation was that led to her doing that. I only remember her pulling on her blouse. I made some crack about, “What is this – a strip club?”

My mother in-law is very hard of hearing and didn’t hear what I said. I’m not even sure she knew I said anything. She says, “What is this – a burlesque show?”

It seems there’s always some sort of story any time we go to the nursing home. Last time we walked in, I had the nurses asking, “Are you the one who made all those cookies?” (Frank had bought a bunch in with him right after Christmas.) That was also the week MIL’s roommate was upset because her son wasn’t there yet and she thought he was in jail. (No, he is not a criminal & I’m not sure why she thought he was in jail.)

I bet y’all wish you could go to a nursing home each week for your entertainment, don’t you? You’re all so jealous of me and all the fun I have there.

First, we had to play with the new high def stations. This is how the game goes: Find a show that’s on NBC. Tune it to it. Then switch over to the NBC high def channel. Keep hitting the ‘last’ key to constantly switch back and forth. Say to your husband, “Does it look different?”

That’s the fun part. Then there is the dangerous part. I have discovered that if oh, say you’re experiencing PMS and will eat anything that is not nailed down – it is not a good idea to check out the Food network on high def to see if it looks better. It does. It will make you want to run up to the TV and cram your face into it to try and eat the pretty food.

After slamming your head into the TV screen a few times, you’ll get dazed. You will then wander into the kitchen for some real food. After your head has cleared, you may find out you emptied out the entire pantry.

I’m pretty sure I mentioned once before that we have a webcam. We use it to talk to Stephen on Skype and I love it except when the boy doesn’t sign on for days & days. Then I leave him messages in Italian in my status window. Sad, pathetic Italian messages about how I need to talk to my son.

Anyhow, one day I was talking to him and he was drinking something green. He asked me if I knew what it was. I didn’t have a clue. My only guess would have been that it was some sort of mint stuff.

Steve tells me, “It’s green sambuca. It’s illegal in the US. Want to know why? Because it has codeine in it.”

I did a bit of research on that & found a rumor saying not that it had codeine in it but that certain other ingredients, when mixed may produce something similar to codeine. In any case, I doubt that’s true.

When we were visiting Stephen, he took us to a restaurant he goes to often, I think called Abruzzo. (I need to confirm that with him.) Like all the other restaurants he took us to, this was fantastic. I don’t think I ever tasted an artichoke as good as there. And the pasta… oops. Let me wipe the drool off my keyboard.

We were stuffed but Steve insisted we order dessert because, if you order dessert, they bring bottles of sambuca to your table: white, black & green. Naturally we all tried the green. And ended up buying 2 bottles of it to bring home.

Then came the doubt. What if it really is illegal to bring into the US? Will the nab us at customs? What if it’s perfectly fine to bring it home but the bottles break? Now that would have been even worse than if they took the bottles from us.

When we packed up to leave on that last day, I wrapped the bottles in bubble wrap. (Lucky thing I had used bubble wrap to safeguard all those Christmas cookies I brought to Steve!). Then I wrapped them in clothes. Then I put that in a plastic bag. An elephant could have sat on that suitcase & these bottles wouldn’t have broken.

The airport wasn’t a problem. There were no beagles sniffing out my booze. There was no x-ray machine searching for forbidden alcohol. There was no sticky green liquid oozing out of the seams.

I am now the proud owner of a bottle of green sambuca. Still one burning question remains – why are there deer on the label? What do deer have to do with sambuca?

The good part about switching over to fiber optics for everything is the cable guy got here early – 8:30 & was done by 1. Another good part was he wasn’t afraid of the dog, which made my life tons easier. When you have someone wandering all around your house and you have to spend the day confining the dog to different areas, that is one major pain in the ass.

The bad part is it took me a bit of fiddling before I could figure out how to hook up the DVD player. Actually I got it right the first time. I just didn’t cycle through enough of the options on the TV. Ya know that button that says, ‘source?’ Well who the heck would thing there would be 439 choices there??

The scary part: Theresa said he looked like Larry the Cable Guy:

He might have. A little. Plus he smelled of smoke. I also couldn’t help wondering why he sat out front in his truck for an hour after he was all done here. Lunch break? Smoking break? Did he have binoculars and was spying on me? I’ve got news for him if it’s that last one – there ain’t much to see around here.