Tag: soup

Cover Art of "Hulk Hercules Professional Wrestler"

Cover Art of "Hulk Hercules Professional Wrestler"

I have been using a plugin to automatically post a summary of my weekly tweets, but that plugin stopped posting a while back for no reason that I can determine. *sigh* So in place of that automated posting and because I find I actually have a few semi-random things to say, today I give you my random and assorted musings.

A good friend of this site has recently become an officially published author (with a book and everything *grin*). Congrats Cath!

Humans are remarkably adaptable creatures. Yesterday, I noticed the house felt cold. I checked the thermostat and found the air temp and dropped to 62° (even though the heat was on and set to 68°). I dug out my copy of Home Improvement 1-2-3 and tried to diagnose the problem. I learned several things that weren’t the problem, but found nothing I could do to correct the situation. Today I’ve been working from home all day and got used to the cooler temperature without realizing it. At least without realizing it until after I had: an expert come out, tell me the furnace’s ignition coil was bad, replace it, charge me a $185 and leave. Then I noticed I was used to the cooler temperature, because all of a sudden it felt very warm to me.

After five years of married life, my wife has yet to completely around the bend and kill me. Go Michelle! ^_^ As an anniversary present from her to me, I received a ticket to Red Green‘s One Man show when it hit Des Moines last weekend. Even better since she bought the ticket during IPTV‘s Festival1, my show ticket came with a ticket allowing me to get a bit of face time with good ol’ Red at a meet-and-greet after the show. The whole evening was, to quote another attendee, “a scream”. Even better during the meet-and-greet, I got my copy of Duct Tape Is Not Enough signed!

As for my present to Michelle, I got her exactly what she asked for: a Wii Fit Plus. We’d been interested in it for a while but then got to try it out at a friend’s place and we were rather hooked. It is a rather interesting way of getting/staying active. I especially like the logging/graphing functions in it, so I can easily see how much I’m improving (or not improving as the case may be). Though I do wish it would write notes to the Wii’s messaging system like Wii Sports does. *shrug* Oh well.

1 Technically, some friends bought the tickets and she paid them back for the cost of my ticket. Yeah Cath & Bryon! ^_^

*blech* I hate being sick. Sure, it’s paid time off from work (121.5 hours of sick time remaining) but I’d rather be feeling good and taking vacation time. I am mostly over the bug I’d caught, but still feeling a bit congested. That being the case, I’m skipping coffee today in favor of hot tea1. This being Wednesday, my preference for tea caused a bit of confusion.

Let me ‘splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. Buttercup is marry’ Humperdinck in a little less than half an hour. And every Wednesday, myself and a few co-workers head over to the Terrapin to get a cup of real coffee2. Almost without fail, I order a “Grand Canyon” which is 2 shots of espresso, steamed milk, a shot of dark chocolate syrup and a shot of mango syrup. *yum* When I got there today, I picked up their tea menu and Rob (one of the owners) ordered me to put it down. I explained about the congestion and he accepted it, but I wouldn’t say he was happy about it. Then I ordered their Chinese Breakfast tea, as the description sounded similar to the yunnan jig tea I’ve mentioned before. Hot caffeinated beverages acquired, we headed back to the office and I headed back to the mountain of email that had arrived while I’d been out. After clearing out that mess (most of it went straight to the trash), I started/continued testing a problem I’d been working on Friday. I’m still processing the data for that test now, but I’m also starting to wonder if I should have stayed home again.

Today, like Sunday, I woke up feeling better than the day before. The problem is like Sunday, I didn’t stay home. Sunday, Ariesna & I were invited to go to Niabi Zoo over in Illinois with some of her family. It was a fun day and I took quite a few pictures3 but by the end of the day, I was totally wiped out and realized I should have stayed home. Now I’m not wiped out (so far) but I do feel more tired than I should from just sitting at a desk, staring at a computer screen. Ah well, not much I can do about that now.

BTW, last night I upgraded Cath‘s site to the current version of WordPress. I was kind of annoyed at how long it took but then most of that time was taken up my crappy ftp client having problems deleting the files for the old version from the webserver. Mind you I was booted into Windows at the time4 which undoubtably was part of the problem. But I did eventually get it done and wouldn’t you know it looks nearly identical to what it did before. I’d call that a good sign for a seamless upgrade, but I’m waiting to hear back from her before I call it a success. So why the upgrade? In part to patch some old security holes and in part because all the new/interesting stuff for WP is happening on the newer versions. This way if she feels like going out and picking a different theme5; it should be trivial to install it.

Anyway, one of the reasons I was annoyed with the amount of time it took was last night also happened to be the season premier for NCIS. I’ve been a fan of this show for a while now, but season 2’s finale was murder. Quite literally, as they killed off one of the NCIS agents. I was very much looking forward to seeing where they’d take the show next, but with upgrading the site and some other things I didn’t get to watch the show as thoroughly as I would have liked. From what I did see, I’m not sure how enjoyable season 3 will be. I don’t care for the new characters they introduced into the NCIS office (Director Jenny Shepard and Agent Ziva David). The romatic background between Gibbs & Shepard could be an interesting subplot but they seem to be pushing it too hard in an episode which should be dealing more directly with the remaining NCIS agents working to find Kate’s killer. And then to make the episode a 2-parter leaving us on another cliff-hanger is distinctly annoying. *sigh* I guess we’ll have to wait and see if they can pull this up with next week’s episode.

1 Next to chicken noodle soup, hot tea works best for clearing up congestion and helping me feel better.
2 The first part of this paragraph is a quote from The Princess Bride. And when I say coffee, I mean flavored espresso.
3 I’ll see about posting some of them later. Incidentally, there was a classic car show being held on the zoo’s premises so don’t be surprised if you see more car than animals photos.
4 I had some work to do that required M$ Word, as OpenOffice Writer couldn’t properly edit the fancy formating in the document (originally created in M$ Word).
5 By perhaps looking through the themes in Alex King’s Theme Browser….

Bah, I’m still a bit torked off about yesterday. At work1, there’s been a person who keeps sending up emails with the wrong code in the subject line. We use these codes to route the issues to the correct person and putting the wrong code on the email can mean a delay of at least a week before the issue gets looked at. Well, this same idjit2 sent an email asking for an update on one of those issues. Since I was running a process at the time; I looked over the issue, found it was mislableled, forwarded it over to the correct person and then spent probably 2 hours writing up a diplomatic response explaining the difference between two of the codes we use.
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Miso Soup is one of Mark’s favorite’s! It was extremely tastey.

Miso Soup

    Ingredients (serves 4)

  • 3 cups water
  • 2 T miso
  • 2 green onions, finely minced (optional)
  • 1/2 cake tofu, cut into 1/2 inch cubes (optional)
  • 2-3 fresh mushrooms, thinly sliced (optional)
  • 1/2 tsp. sesame oil
    Directions

  1. Heat oil in bottom of small pot, add green onion (if using) and cook for about 5 minutes stirring frequently.
  2. Add 2 1/2 cups water.
  3. Dissolve miso in 1/2 cup water and add to pot.
  4. Bring to a boil. Lower heat, add mushrooms and tofu if desired.
  5. Serve.

I’ve been back in the States for a few days now and I’ve been meaning to1 write a little something reflecting back on the trip; however with jet lag and what not2, I’ve been a bit too tired to write anything up. Since I received a friendly reminder about it from AWelkin; I figure I better hurry up and write something. First off, let’s get the gushy fan-boyishness out of the way. Going to Japan was an amazing experience and something that I am very glad that I had the opportunity to do. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, here are some of the impressions that I’m left with from my visit to Japan.
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