I may or may not blog about dieting and exercising and making my body feel broken, but this is too damn good to share:
Berry Good Shake
Ingredients:
Stolen from here. Absurdly tasty… Om nom nom nom
Exhibit A: Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada last week
Exhibit B: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada today
It’s currently colder here now than it was in Iqaluit when I was there, but not to be outdone, the temps in Iqaluit have dropped since I left.
Being that my car didn’t start yesterday when trying to leave work and I don’t have a proper way to plug it in (snaking an extension out the front door isn’t proper in my mind), I’m calling in “it’s really fucking cold outside” and working from home this morning.
But instead I offer visual confirmation that the legends are true!
I created a platform with two triangular supports. And covered it all with tinfoil. I baked two 9″x13″ pan cakes. The first of which was almost a complete failure as it didn’t want to come out of the pan. The second time around I sprayed the pan much more liberally with olive oil and the cake was released quite easily. The failed cake worked out quite well as the angled section of bridge deck.
Go me!
Life in general has been pretty damn busy. I spent a few days being frustratedby my guitar and then went out and purchased an Epiphone Gothic SG
Excepting last week which got mucked up by a work-trip down to Canmore I’ve been doing pretty damn good about getting to the gym in the mornings. I can’t say as I’ve made much progress in terms of strength but I can’t really have expected to anyways. The big accomplishment so far has been to be regular about working about and not pussying out during the workouts and cutting things short. I gained a few pounds over the last week so the 10lbs I’d lost in the first 2 months of moving out have all but disappeared. I’m not terribly chapped by it though. I know it’s going to be a bit of a battle to cut the fat I’m carrying.
The apartment has been coming together really well. I’ve got a lamp to hang somehow from a concrete ceiling in the bedroom and a speaker cable to pin up so we stop tripping on it, but after that we’ll be mostly ready for our housewarming parties finally. Bit of cleaning to do, some research into how to make the chocolate fountain go, and a lot of trying not to stress out over what people think of the place.
A little over a week ago I bought a slow cooker so Friday I took a page from the cookbook that came with it and made “Chicken with 40 cloves of garlic”. It proved to be rather tasty. The leftovers from that chicken as well as a roast chicken purchased earlier that week became soup this weekend, which shall be dinner tonight. While cleaning Saturday we also made a couple cups of rice so we can make fried rice Tuesday night. I’m so domestic it hurts.
That’s all for now, I guess we’ll see how long it takes for me to post again.
Life’s been treating me pretty well this past month.
I’ve been good about something things (try to de-stress and such) and not so good about others (diet… exercise) but overall I’ve been pretty happy about how this month has gone. Ultimately it’s time for me to develop a new routine and stick to it rather religiously.
Over the last couple evenings I’ve attempted a repair of the poorly designed floating bridge on my guitar and restrung it. Spent a few minutes strumming away before I made supper this evening. I’ve been debating trying to pick up guitar again as a winter project. Other contenders for that spot are also getting my HAM license and working on my geek cred. I suppose it would be possible to do all of these things, but I don’t know how likely that really is.
Yesterday also brought an upgrade of wordpress to the blogs I host. 2.3 seems to be pretty neat. They’ve added tag support as well as a tag-cloud widget for the side bar. It figures that such a thing should exist as just 3 days ago I found a cloud widget that works on the existing category system. I guess if I’m to start tagging things I’ll need to reconsider my current categories.
I’ve also seen talk of a Debian User Planet which somewhat intrigues me. I think I’d be more inclined to write and thusly post more technical articles if I knew people who’d get some use out of them would actually be exposed to them. Though for such a thing to happen I would need to be able to generate an RSS feed for just a single category and I haven’t found a way to do this yet.
To be fair, if I expect people to read what I write, then I need to write more compelling content and post more frequently. I suppose that would tie in with the above. Establish a routine that involves posting to the intarwebs, practicing guitar, studying for the HAM license, and working out. Oh yeah, and work and socializing and sleep.
oi.
There is a new home!
We officially have our apartment! We’ve managed to snag a two bedroom halfway up a 14 story high-rise on the south-side. Close to work for me(relatively speaking, 27km commute one-way is now 9km), close-ish to work for Carla (she works downtown now). Dave gets a room for an office, we get some privacy and independence, with a little bit of best-friends-that-live-across-the-hall just as icing on the cake.
Walk-through, lease-signing, key-getting and move-in this Saturday. Joygasms abound!
The first pipe I bought has seen a bit of abuse over the last 2 years and I’ve started to become displeased with the way it’s been smoking. It’s not entirely surprising either. So many different blends have been through that bowl. It’s been time for a good, thorough cleaning. The question is, how do you clean a brier bowl?
After joining the pipes.org forum and spending some time reading over the maintenance section the solution seems to be the “Salt and Alcohol” treatment. Wherein you remove the stem, block the shank, fill the bowl with kosher salt, then top it up with alcohol. Let it sit for 12-24 hours. Remove the contents of the bowl, let it all dry out, and repeat.
We’re currently at the “let it set” stage. Here’s to hoping I get to enjoy my first pipe again.
Just stupid busy.
I’ve been fighting with server bitchyness the last week or so now. Apoc seems to have a memory issue somewhere, but I haven’t been able to find it yet. I’m not sure if it’s hardware or an issue with the new Xen kernel I’m running from etch. Eventually I will get this resolved. I still need to move the jabber server off the VM server and onto the new seraph. Need to get another disk in seraph and mirror them too. So much stuff to do.
I spent yesterday layed out in bed with a fucked up back. It still hurts this morning but I’m hoping I’ll survive the day. I guess maybe it’s time that I actually see somebody about that.