Happy birthday,jiffjenn!

I like using a crock pot about once a week in the winter.  So I've developed a basic approach to cooking in one which is adaptable to various ingredients.  Usually it works out pretty well.

The important thing is that unless you have six kids, you should look for a smaller crock pot.  Mine's a 2.5 quart model, about half the size of Mom's old "three turkeys and a ham" pot.  The smaller size works out quite nicely with standard food packaging.

So here goes, tonight's dinner (plus a few future lunches):
1.5 pounds of uncooked mild Italian sausage, cut into short pieces
1 big can (the double-size can) of diced tomatoes
1 tiny can of "tomato sauce"
(one of those two cans had "Italian herbs" already mixed in from the factory)
a couple cloves of garlic
usually there'd be some onion, if I had remember to buy one
didn't need salt, plenty in the sausage and tomato sauce
a bit of fresh ground pepper
about 1/3 cup of uncooked rice.
Throw all this into the crockpot before going to work, top up with water, and leave on "low" until you get home.

So here's the theory section.  You might have noticed that I didn't say to brown or precook the sausage.  Instead, it cooks in the pot with everything else.  The uncooked rice is important, because it soaks up excess grease.  I don't even bother browning ground beef, I just buy the least fat version (about 95% meat, 5% fat).  Yes, it is considered healthy to throw away grease from cooking.  But that grease is energy, it's part of why we bother eating.  If you want lighter food, you can compensate by just putting the soup/stew/chili on regular rice or noodles to balance it out. 

I haven't tried a vegetarian version of this cooking approach, but I'm sure it's possible.  Probably would cook much faster as well.  Something like a fake meat product (the "Gimmee Lean" sausage is pretty good) with added olive oil would probably work out quite well.

I'd totally forgotten about this.  It's several years old, and I found it in a folder called "OldDisk" from 3 or 4 or more disks ago.  I think it did actually somewhat come to me in a dream.

Bear in mind that I'm a musician, but not a songwriter.  I had no idea what to do with this, other than stash it away on the computer somewhere.

I had this dream last night
I had this dream last night
I was hearing a new Adrian Belew song
Or maybe I was recording it
Maybe I was recording it


It was like a King Crimson track
Where he doesn't quite sing, doesn't quite talk
And it repeats a lot
It repeats a lot


It was all about these evangelists on TV
Asking for your support
Because when I look in the faces of these children
I know we are closer than ever
We are closer than ever


And I'm proud we have spearheading our efforts
He really needs no introduction
And we do need your support more than ever
Because we're so close to our goal
We're so close to our goal


Weird, huh?

"If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, (even if we don't speak often) please post a comment with a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL memory of you and me. It can be anything you want - good or bad - BUT IT HAS TO BE FAKE. When you're finished, post this little paragraph in your journal and be surprised (or mortified) about what people DON'T ACTUALLY remember about you."

Oddly enough I haven't run across any comments on various plot holes in the latest Will Smith extravaganza. 

I did enjoy the movie, by the way.  :)

Dunno if these count as proper "plot holes", in that the movie wouldn't have worked without them, but they're little comments on "wait, why didn't..." which I thought of in the day or two after seeing said movie.

1.  Humans, dogs, and rats are susceptible to the virus - why not the lions, deer, and birds?
2.  The "dark seekers" mutated by the virus have vastly increased metabolism - heart rate, breathing, energy.  What were they eating to support that metabolism?  NYC should have been completely bare of life, instead of wild herds of deer wandering about.
3.  Smith's character knew that the mutants were affected by UV light, yet all his last-ditch defenses used incandescent lighting.  Much less power into flourescent lights would have produced much more UV light.
4.  It was kind of silly that Smith's character completely missed how the mutants were organizing themselves.

What would be a no-brainer under Windows or Linux has me stumped on OS X.  Actually I've got a couple of them!  To give some backstory, I recently moved full-time over to the MacBook and turned off my noisy (not too bad compared to some previous ones) desktop which had run various flavors of Linux over the years.  Now that I can get enough of my critical apps (OpenOffice, GIMP, Ardour) to run on a Mac I'm good for daily/weekly stuff.

I should mention that I'm doing 99% of my keyboarding from a Kinesis Contour keyboard, which has pretty decent Mac support.  For what it's worth I have the same complaints on the MacBook keyboard too.  I do like the Mac OS X for the solid Unix underpinnings and multimedia support, and of course the hardware is very elegant.  But it's really mouse-oriented, and the keyboard equivalents even for handicap access fall far short of Windows and Linux support.

#1 - Go to beginning or end of line.  OK, that's Splat [aka Command aka Apple] arrow.  That does generally work, except of course in Firefox where that same key combination is pre-empted for page back/forward.  I suppose I could remap that, but why can't I just have the Home and End keys be my universal beginning/end of line keystroke?

#2 - Dialogue boxes and the default button.  On pretty much any other operating system I can use Tab or the arrow keys to move the highlight to a different button.  Haven't found any way at all on the Mac for this.  Google searches for lists of keyboard shortcuts haven't yet found such a thing. 

So it all started when I bought a new car.  My old reliable, the 1995 VW Jetta, was getting a bit too long in the tooth to be the One True Car in my possession.  Never stranded me by the side of the road, but at least a couple times in the last winter I had to crawl in from the passenger side until I had the chance to disassemble the driver's side door and lube things up.  But now I've got a modern, rubber-covered, "of course you'll be happy to have a huge key" key.  And unlike the Jetta, this one has a chip in there so I can't just carve off the rubber and end up with a plain metal key. 

So, it didn't fit nicely on the keyring.  I made up a short chain to "decouple" it (to use an audio term) from the main ring, and that helped a lot.  A month passes, and the idea starts gnawing around in my brain like those thingys from "Star Trek IV: The Wrath of Khan".  And so we end up with this:



Of course the tricky bit will be adding future keys.  I'll need to make some slightly bigger rings in the middle to accomodate a sixth chain, and then of course we're no longer in a prime number so maybe I'll want to have seven chains. 

OK, that last sentence was a joke - I'm not quite that obsessive.

OK, this one is for those of us who are a bit on the anal side about punctuation. 

Presenting the road sign apostrophe kit!  We've created a set of adhesive apostrophes, in a variety of typefaces and point sizes for the most popular road and store signs currently in use.  You can use these to correct apostrophe abuse on just about any sign you see!  There's also a magnetic version.  And both versions include blanks to cover excess apostrophes.  Oh, and due to popular demand the blanks now constitute 99% of each kit.

Well, it had to happen someday.  At the very least there's the territorial issue of grabbing my favorite username before somebody in the billions of people worldwide happens to stumble upon it too.

That's about it for now.  I'm not planning on doing an especially active diary here. 

But then you never really know, do you?