Amy’s Gripping Commentary

Some random thoughts to prove I’m still alive.

I did indeed have cadaver bone put in during my osteomyelitis treatment! It was irradiated, powdered, and mixed with what is basically plaster of Paris, but it still sounds exotic. Unfortunately I’ve had some additional dental pain recently. You’d think I traumatized my teeth or something.

Arliss had her fourth surgery a week ago (vet and I agreed she didn’t need a CT scan after all) and she’s doing great! She even gained weight in the last two weeks.

Loving the Indy Winter Farmers Market on Saturday mornings. The place is PACKED and I love seeing cyclists with panniers riding in the snow! Note: the local chickens went on strike when it got super cold the last couple of weeks, so eggs were harder to come by. I like being able to get a half dozen a month since we don’t use more than that, and then I can take the carton back to the farmer to use again.

I discovered recently-reopened El Sol de Tala. This town has more Mexican (I use that as a geographic/ethnic term loosely) restaurants than you can imagine, but this one place stands out. They even have a veggie menu. It’s not the same old enchiladas anymore, people!

Following a craving, I had French toast at Denny’s, and even if they hadn’t ruined it with cinnamon and powdered sugar, it still was nowhere as good as Dad’s. He also blows away every pancake on earth.

I’ve finally heard from some of the relocation folks and the target start date in Ireland is March 1. There’s so much to do that it’s hard not just to plop on the couch with 81 SVU reruns on Tivo and ignore the obvious (that’s how many were scheduled in this two week period). One of my current focuses (okay, foci) is pantry raid: use up all the groceries that line our cupboards and freezer. In the past week we had breakfasty stuff to use up biscuits and fake sausages and last night I made chik’n and rice casserole. My freezer has several fake meat products that I’ve always kept as backup, but usually have been creative enough not to need for most cooking. I see a lot of chili in our future for the ground ‘beef’ crumbles…

Recycle your Christmas tree into compost/mulch now until January 31 at various Indy parks (free), or for ten bucks there’s a guy who will come get it from you first! And you can recycle cardboard, styrofoam, and electronics on January 9. More info here and here for the Jan 9 event.

Do not add me to your mailing list. Ever. Unless I ask to be on it. Just because I found your product online or bought something in your store doesn’t mean I want a relationship with you, future business with you, nor physical mail at my house. In fact, if I could order something to be shipped to my house without telling you where I live, I would.

OMG, great business opportunity: cloaking who orders stuff and where it goes! I can already get a single use instantly-generated number for my credit card to use online. What if they could cloak the rest of my identity during the purchase?

This problem afflicts my online donations to charity, too. Don’t make me a scrooge.

On the list so far recently:
Men’s Wearhouse (David had to rent a tux for a wedding. He doesn’t like you.)
DiscoveryStore (I bought someone a gift last year. I don’t like you either.)
Gardener’s Supply
Zappos.com magazine (whattttt?? It’s defined by its online-only existence!)
Sephora (Funny how my online profile says I’m not on your catalog list but I still get one)
American Diabetes Association (hardest mailing list I ever tried to get off)
Gleaners Food Bank
Farm Sanctuary
Wheeler Mission
Bike Nashbar
Some home-grown mortgage company who just didn’t understand why we don’t want their personal newsletter after buying a house three years ago. I don’t care if you went to Florida for a week or if you have tips on how to make soup.

I call to opt out when I can, but someone keeps selling my name. There must be some law about easy opt-out from email lists, because every time I am added to one I can get off in one click. I can also control what I see through spam filters if necessary. But it is usually really hard to get off a catalog list, and when you do call, you still see them for months. Ask my permission to share my info, or offer me a discount on my purchase to sell my info to someone else.

It makes me want to opt out of consuming altogether. Not a terrible idea…

The sun is shining through my huge window in my energy-efficient office building, where lights go out when motion is not detected. From here I can see the giant smokestacks of Covanta, where the city’s curbside-collected trash is burned to make steam and then electricity. I think this is a pretty neat way to handle waste, and I learned that they recycle the metal that comes through the trash too. I’m sure it’s because they can sell it/can’t burn it so well, but the net effect is good for resource preservation.

Next Sunday is America Recycles Day.

The site has a recycling conversionator/calculator (which was niftier than I expected), a pledge, and a few links to recycling information. Now, I’ve been recycling as long as I can remember, and I think it’s pretty neat that my Dad has been into it longer than that. I pay extra for curbside recycling because it’s incredibly convenient and shows the neighbors I care. Curbside even takes #1-7 plastics now along with the cardboard, glass, and aluminum.

This one from the website was a shocker: Every three months, Americans landfill enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet! While I hear arguments sometimes how it’s not ‘cost effective’ to recycle glass and paper when the economy is down, aluminum is pretty universally agreed upon as probably worth recycling, even by folks who just don’t give a crap about any other recycling. Aluminum has value to anyone who takes it to the scrapyard. Of course I set it out with the curbside pickup (our biweekly recycling tote is usually full and also larger than our trash volume) because as long as it gets to a recycling facility, I’m happy. I also trash dig at work and pick up recyclables in parking lots and when I walk the dogs in the park. I know I’m the weird one, but Americans are so lazy that we landfill airplane loads of metal?

Anyway, thanks for taking a moment not to put a pop can in the trash. It’s really not that hard to put it in a recycling bin later.

Best recycling info in Indy is at Keep Indianapolis Beautiful. Their new website looks nice but I’m not sure the map of where to recycle stuff is as useful as the list they used to have.

Because David does everything with flair, as I often say, I give you: the rain barrel.

I don’t think the neighbors knew what they were agreeing to when he asked if he could install the barrel between our homes. Their large bush obscures it well enough from the street, and the goal was to share the water with them (they garden much more than we do and have many beautiful flowers). They’ve taken to calling it the Water Tower and singing of Petticoat Junction girls. We did finally have rain today and it works! There is room for a second barrel beneath the first one and the stand would survive a tornado.

After a lesson wearing the harness in the house, and a lesson going on a walk with the harness, today Walter tried the harness attached to the WalkyDog on the bike.

I walked the bike several blocks with him in a fine drizzle, and we’ll have to practice more because he wants to pull. At least he’s no longer afraid of the bike! We had the most success while going quickly and as far from the curb as practical, because then he’s focusing on trotting and not sniffing the gutter. I guess that’s good once we get going but I haven’t tried riding with him yet!

Just caught Casper snoozing, my fluffy nut who can’t be brought inside from the yard these days without a cookie bribe because she’s too busy eating tomatoes.

Now the dogs are wrestling and nibbling each other on that bed. Their best performances this weekend were Casper barking at an email inbox chime she thought was the doorbell (Walter is bright enough to know better) and Walter being scared of David, who came home from a wedding last night in a tux. He had to strip to underwear before Walter stopped hiding behind me and ran to meet him!

When I was young, we’d go visit my great great aunt and uncle’s farm on the west side of town. Uncle Walt and Aunt Dorothy had 80 acres, and at various times, cows, chickens, corn, a pond, an inground pool (this was the most exciting part for my brother and me at the time), dogs, woods, strawberries, you name it. They had a long dirt lane and when you drove on it, the resident dog (jobs included guard and groundhog killer) would come running to meet you.

My mom and her mom both spent lots of time at the farm when they were young. I am SO glad we got to go visit too, but I wonder what it would have been like to live there for whole summers. There are stories of using dynamite to blow up field rocks and my mom getting lost as a toddler and the dog finding her.

They lived in a creepy-cool 1850s(?) farmhouse and the upstairs, a place we rarely visited, wasn’t even vented for heat. The dirt cellar had amazing jarred veggies on old shelves. The big wraparound porch had rocking chairs and bees would visit the flowers while you sat around and talked.

The old barns were really amazing to me. I was not very adventurous and didn’t explore as much as I should have, but the falling-down old chicken coop and slatted corn sheds fascinated me. My memories don’t include the animals that lived there, since Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Walt were older by then and rented their cornfields to other farmers, but the old buildings were right there by the house as a reminder. There’s a picture somewhere, one I clearly remember, of kids bottle-feeding a calf. I remember the wooden ramp with rails where the grown cattle apparently climbed on the truck to go to slaughter. My mom said Uncle Walt would cry when they left.

Whatever happened to that world? It must have been amazing to be an American farmer through the bulk of the last century; the changes in fertilizers and yields, the move to families shopping in big grocery stores, the selling of this beautiful property in the country to be another fancy subdivision after the old farmers went off to assisted living facilities. Uncle Walt suffered from illnesses related to his life’s work, but I just remember him sitting in a recliner and telling deadpan jokes. (When asked why his dog was so spoiled, he responded with the title of this post.) Aunt Dorothy climbed on top of the shed in her 70s to paint; I remember her still liking to eat Long John Silver’s food, of all things, in her 90s, long after moving away from the farm and going deaf.

I was thinking of the farm after watching Food, Inc. last weekend with friends. Please go see it–it’s amazing what we don’t know about the food we eat and where it’s sourced. I visited a farmers’ market just before the movie, and went to another one this past weekend, but yet that’s not where the bulk of my food starts. I’m trying to take advantage of more markets this year while we are in growing season, plus we are growing more vegetables ourselves. When I stop to think about this basic thing, food, it amazes me what an industry it’s become. Now there are even concerns about ‘food security,’ whether from national perspectives or right here in my city.

Maybe it’s not helpful to idolize the old family farm in this day of WalMarts and a bigger population, but I know none of Uncle Walt’s cows stood knee deep in their own manure their whole lives, nor did his chickens live in cages the size of a sheet of paper. The unchecked growth of factory farming and seed law signals to me the dirty politics and the greedy side of capitalism that tosses aside any reasonable treatment of worker, animal, or planet.

The power of consumer dollars: a vote every time you eat.

I’m very excited about the upcoming opening of our first non-profit community grocery in a rehabbed building in an underserved part of the city: Pogue’s Run Grocer!

I have been giving to more charities lately and every freakin’ time they add me to the mailing list. This drives me nuts. I understand I look like a good prospect because I’ve donated once, but my environmental side detests physical mail, especially solicitations, and I only donate online anyway. Why can’t there be a radio button for me to decline future mailings when I give the first time? I’d be much more likely to give again without the aggravation. They waste my donation on paper, postage, staff… that’s not why I gave them money.

Seriously, people, contact me by EMAIL if I gave you money through your website. Then I can spam or unsubscribe (or even better, set my preferences to remind me again in six months when I’ll be ready to give to you again) and you don’t waste your time and money. Let’s put the Post Office out of business. Nonsense. Why do you need my address to give you $$?

Went to Indiana Black Expo corporate luncheon this week. My company bought a lot of tickets. After a silly string of forwarded emails that never did find out if I’d have something to eat at this function, and several comments that I could always eat the salad (argh), in an ironic twist, EVERYONE ate salad! That was the meal. Sure, everyone else had a chef salad but sure enough, there was a foliage-only version for the picky weirdos like me. Wow, I had a lot of fiber that day.

Jamie Foxx and a few other folks received awards after short comments by the governor, mayor, and former mayor (who oddly enough received an award at the other corporate fundraiser I attended and he now works for my company). I was looking forward to inspirational speeches and was a bit disappointed that it focused on entertainment and awards, but I projected my previous experience here, I guess. Or perhaps that’s a cultural bias. Anyway I really preferred the Lambda Legal dinner because the speakers were good.

Okay, now my debut music video. I’ve been playing with a little Flip video camera mounted on my bike. The lame Windows MovieMaker software won’t allow me to specify how much to speed up the clip (at least I can’t find a way to do it other than double or half speed), so I couldn’t match the length to the song I chose. But I do have a video now which is just part of a cloudy Friday’s ride home, sped up so it’s less boring. Of course you won’t get to hear the guys yelling at me out their car window (the only part I understood was the F-bomb), but you will get to hear Silversun Pickups’ Lazy Eye. Until the song ends and there’s a little silent cycling left over. Ideas for better (hopefully free) software? Also, what is the best (fast, universal, whatever) file format for sharing on blogs and such? I started a Vimeo account, which is the embedded video below, but it’s showing as slightly poorer quality than the original file I uploaded, which can be clicked on with the text right above the Vimeo stuff. The direct link file format seems slow and large.

Yes, I know I have lots of room for improvement in editing. Just a first attempt.

commute071709_0001

Indy Bike Commute from Amy D on Vimeo.

This free .pdf tofu cookbook looks pretty good. Most recipes are vegetarian, but there’s at least one that incorporates seafood.

Delicious Living Tofu Cookbook

The cookbook does not talk about prepping the tofu first (I usually press it but some people freeze it or do other manipulations), and without prep you may have a disaster. One simple way to press it is to put the block between paper or kitchen towels and put something heavy (like a cast iron skillet) on top. The goal is to get rid of excess water before you cook it. Tastes and handles way better this way.

Also make sure you buy the right firmness. Basically choose firm/extra firm for any stir fries or other keep-it-intact cooking. If you are doing desserts or otherwise blending it, get the softer varieties.

Afraid of tofu? You might want to start with Tofu Prep for Virgins, a post where you learn to deep fry it and you can also link to some lovely macrophotography of grody lunch meats and sausages.

Where can you buy tofu? At most grocery stores, actually! It’s often in the refrigerated/produce section, like at WalMart. At Meijer it’s there too but in a subsection for soy products and organics. Note some brands, while sold refrigerated, don’t need to be kept refrigerated. Just check the box.

Enter to win a $25 gift card to Whole Foods! (That would buy a lot of tofu.) The blog post talks about value at Whole Foods, and I agree that their house brand is good and saves money. But it’s also true about organics being more expensive: for a shopper who never leaves a traditional grocery store, they’ll quickly see how the price is higher for organics vs regular offerings. I was at Meijer yesterday and found 5# of non-organic potatoes for about $2, but the organic potatoes, in a 3# bag, were $3, and the organic potatoes were smaller too. I try to strike a balance and go organic as often as the budget allows (which is frequently) and think about which foods SHOULD be organic in my diet. For example, banana skins are thick and don’t get eaten, so it’s less important to me if they’ve been treated with pesticides than a fruit or vegetable that I will wholly consume. Of course that doesn’t take into account the effects on the earth from using those pesticides, but sometimes we must ease into better decisions.

Did you know all produce at Marsh groceries is now organic? That’s one way to remove that painful decision for the consumer! I hope more places go that route, which creates greater demand for organically grown products, which will then become cheaper.

I’m glad this film is coming to Indy! I can’t figure out if it’s really playing on Friday or if that’s just the national release date; the local theater says it’s coming July 31.

Coming to Indianapolis
July 17
Keystone Arts Cinema

Filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that’s been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, the USDA and FDA.

Food, Inc. reveals surprising—and often shocking truths—about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.

There are some free screenings too, but not in Indy.

This one is happening at our favorite restaurant and involves bikes and the urban eastside! I hope we can get a reservation.

August 4: Urban Farm Tour & Farm to Table Dinner

Where: R Bistro (888 Massachusetts Avenue, Indianapolis)
When: August 4:
5:30pm Urban Farm Tour followed by dinner seating at 7:00pm
OR
7:00pm Urban Farm Tour followed by dinner seating at 8:30pm
Cost: $25 for Slow Food members or $30 for non-members
(price includes taxes and gratuity – drinks are not included)
Dress: Casual with comfortable shoes, as guests will be walking or biking and exploring urban farms before dinner.
Reservations are required: Call R Bistro at 317.423.0312
*If you prefer the vegetarian option, please alert R Bistro when you make your reservation.

Join Slow Food Indy for a tour of urban farms and kitchen gardens and enjoy a local hog roast at R Bistro.
While guests have the option to skip the tour and simply make dinner reservations, we hope you’ll follow local farmer-tour guides on foot or bring your bike! We’ll tour the Big City Farms Urban CSA lots, the Cottage Home Community Garden, and several backyard kitchen gardens in the Cottage Home Neighborhood. The tours will depart promptly from R Bistro, and guests are requested to meet there at 5:30pm (in advance of a 7:00pm dinner seating at R Bistro) or at 7:00pm (in advance of a 8:30pm dinner seating at R Bistro).

Only a few seats are still available! Call R Bistro at 317.423.0312.
Reservations will be closed on July 31st (or when all places are filled).

Found both of these at Slow Food Indy. I’m not a member but they often have interesting stuff going on.

Bike to Work Day was a couple Fridays ago in Indy, and although I was actually on vacation, I biked-to-vacation by joining the masses who converged on the circle downtown. Then the rest of the schmucks actually had to ride to work! Ha. I rode home and drove to Tennessee for a Smokies trip.

I bought a nifty camera mount to use my little Flip video thing on my bike, but due to downright user error and low batteries, I have little to show for my experiments. I hope to post a real ride soon.

Here’s the Lilly contingent gathered on the circle.

The Star caught us getting organized in their gallery.

There was also a pic taken at Indy Cycle Specialist before we left but it doesn’t seem to be posted. Meanwhile, someone from the Indy Star interviewed a few of us and, as usual, I was quoted slightly out of context and with only the dorky movie reference included. It’s still better than the rabbits jumping around misquote, and probably better than being on TV last fall.

In the meantime, I’ve been to NJ for a conference (where I also sat in a ca.1745 church’s cemetary to read for awhile), IL to transfer rescued rabbits, the northern part of the state for the annual family holiday/race day cookout, and enjoyed my tax dollars at work at Ohio’s Air force museum and that hiking trip in the Smokies national park (which ended with an energy museum visit in Oak Ridge, but I accidentally called a sex line in Jamaica when I misread their phone number on a billboard!). Being off work is great!

Those on Facebook may be familiar with recent escapades. Here’s a summary and a few extras!

Poor David Beckham, victim of endorsing a product that can vandalize.

I finally captured this bizarre vehicle while biking. I’ve seen him around but now I know where he lives! I think he collects abandoned carts from the neighborhood.

April 7: Evacuation
April 8: Unclog sewer pipe
April 10: Are four gin & tonics a lot?
April 11: Pissed about working on a Saturday during my vacation
April 12: Beat the pants off my family at Scrabble
April 13: Finished state taxes and had an embarrassing exam
April 15: Ate all the peanut M&Ms in cubicle next to mine
April 17: Rode bike to work and saw red-headed woodpecker, Christmas tree w/tinsel, middle-aged guy in fedora on BMX
April 17: Went out drinkin’ with friends and then bought cigarettes for the first time
April 18: Rode my bike to Race for the Cure
April 20: Busch Light can in my newspaper tube
April 21: Work woke me up at 1 a.m.
April 23: Casper won a photo contest
April 24: Work woke me up at 3 a.m.
April 24: Some asswipe broke into my Jeep
April 25: Rode my bike to Earth Day
April 25: Appraisal woes and bought a refrigerator
April 25: Someone stole my credit card number
April 26: Mutt Strut! Pics to come but this is my favorite:

April 28: Frustrated by canceling services and realizing property taxes are worse than I thought
April 28: Someone shit in our driveway
April 29: Sold my house! Still pissed about taxes
Next few days: Slammed at work and given an ‘opportunity’ (that means more work)
May 2: ToxDrop and electronics recycling
May 3: Insulated the attic

Don’t you want to be my friend now? My favorite FB comments had to do with the shit in the driveway.

February was relatively productive for me, at least in the world where I don’t get around to blogging as a result. This is too bad since I usually share that it’s Adopt A Rescued Rabbit month and low-cost spay-neuter month. We did adopt out several rabbits, though, including a couple from my house: Tegan, who we captured as a stray last fall, and Raquel, a shelter rescue a couple years ago who was recently returned by her adopters because they were moving (can y’all hear me groan? I wonder if it was convenient for them to take their kids and dog to the new house). These two buns are very sweet and both were adopted into homes with a bunny boyfriend, so they’ll never be lonely.

Tax tip for Hoosiers: You may have received a property tax rebate from the state last year. Well, guess what, that’s income now. I found this helpful info about how to handle the rebate, and if you itemized like I did, you’ll need to check out the 1040 instructions for line 10 and read Pub 525. And then you’ll put the ‘recovered’ income on line 21.

More dumbass packaging.

David needed to repair some air hoses, so he bought some fittings. They weren’t right, so he bought different fittings. They weren’t right either, so he ordered some fittings online. They shipped in a box like this.

Please note that on the same day he also received something else from Amazon which was a larger item yet managed to come in a smaller box than this one.

Oh and those fittings were wrong too, so he sent them back (in a Jiffy bag of course) and ordered again and got the same tiny parts in the same big box!! I need to go plant a bunch of trees now.

…Especially because I bought a sample size of hair cream and a makeup pencil sharpener. Sephora was kind enough to send these tiny items (look for them, they’re in the picture) in this big box with bubble wrap and lots of virgin paper stuffing. Guess I won’t be buying from them again. I found a free shipping code and didn’t want to mess with traffic on the northside, thinking this was more efficient.

What’s the environmental Hail Mary? Besides recycling all the boxes and air pillows, of course.

It’s the return of Manic Mommy’s Virtual Blog Blood Drive! Click here for details. The basics: donate blood from Jan 1 to Feb 28, 2009, get your picture taken while donating, and send the pic to Manic Mommy to enter the contest! It doesn’t matter where you live, just go to your local blood bank or blood drive and get your picture taken. First prize is a week at a Florida resort, and there are gift cards and stuff too. I won last year though it wasn’t a big enough contest at that point to give away a vacation!

A couple notes for those of you who have been rejected for low iron: I learned that ‘normal’ hematocrit is 35-45% but (at least around here) the blood bank requires at least 38% to be eligible to donate. They test this by a simple finger prick. Your iron level can fluctuate a lot so if you just supplement/focus your diet a bit before you go, or do that if you get rejected and then you can even go back the next day to try again, you may just be eligible after all! I also learned that 75% of people are able to get back to this iron level in the eight weeks required between donations and it’s harder for women than men, so you might need to focus your diet/wait just a bit longer if you have recently donated. Just because you’ve been rejected before does not mean you will be if you try again!

In central Indiana, you can even schedule appointments online, get points and prizes, and track your donations and cholesterol over time. I just signed up last week and the system knew my last 1.5 gallons and cholesterol readings from the last few years. Of course you can do walk-in donations too! Check out DonorPoint.org.

Some other upcoming events I’m considering: Komen Race for the Cure for my friend Dawn’s mom, April 18 (run, walk, or donate), and cycling around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for Tour de Cure for diabetes, June 13. Who’s in?

Yesterday I left the house to meet Nicole at the gym. As I was going down our steps, I detected a large creature in the yard. By the time I realized it was the neighbor’s escaped Rottweiler, I was in his sights and I went straight to my car, avoiding eye contact. After I got in, he went up our front steps and lifted his leg on the inside of our porch wall! I took this to mean: Your porch is mine, beeotch.

Then he patrolled the street by standing in the middle of it, trotting through other neighbors’ yards, and generally looking like he owned the place. Here he’s heading past my car after a jaunt down the street. We don’t even know his name but I’d like to know how much danger I’m in since he seems to get out a lot!

“NOW” available at Meijer!

Our site at work is sponsoring a peanut butter and jelly collection for Gleaners food bank as part of the MLK Day of Service. After a few days collecting last week we already had 450 pounds of it, but mostly I found the easeled signs at the doors funny:

I joined Sam’s Club (they are offering $25 gift cards with new memberships for a few days) and found this great sign at the customer service desk. Of course the way they positioned it I really had no idea where the line formed, but, well, they had a sign with fun errors.

While looking for the peanut butter and jelly, I found Red Gold tomato products. David is a canned tomato snob and will only agree to Red Gold purchases (since they are local I can support this with a little less eye-rolling). Still, I thought 6.5 lb cans were a little much for a two-person recipe.

What’s amazing is that these 102-oz cans were only about $2.30, and a 14.5-oz can at a regular grocery is well over a dollar! It was tempting. I found an eight pack of the small cans for less than six bucks and was pretty happy with the price, but unfortunately that meant additional packaging.

I also found a composter at Sam’s (Dawn and I are in discussions about getting this started, seeing as how we have a lot of bunny turds at our disposal). I didn’t buy this one, but I appreciated the Sense of Humus.

Mulch your dead Christmas tree, recycle your cardboard, and get rid of old electronics without sending them to the landfill or paying someone to take them on January 10 from 10-2 at four Indianapolis parks: Broad Ripple, Ellenberger, Garfield, and Krannert. As usual this is poorly advertised but if you happen to be on the right email lists you find out about these things. The event did make it in electric bills but for some reason is not advertised on the city government website that is sponsoring it… good job SustainIndy! There is a lovely flyer about the event here, complete with typos.

Note that some electronics (like computers and cell phones) can be recycled at ToxDrop/eCycle on all their scheduled days (every week). I get the sense that this park event will allow other electronics, or at least I hope so since the vampire microwave needs a place to go. TVs up to 27″ will be accepted at this event.