Ruth
TSA’s still at it.
Not prehaps a huge surprise, but still. I had been wondering how people with implanted metal devices were fairing under their tender ministrations, and now I know. I guess that after whatever point I finally break down and allow them to put the pins in my knees that they keep saying they need to I won’t be flying again!
Kinda weird…
So I use Gmail as my primary email, I have Yahoo & Hotmail accounts too, but mostly use those as spam catchers. In theory I have an email through my ISP, but I’ve never used it. Yesterday, on Gmail, I was sending out an email, and forgot to attach the file I was sending along, but in the email I wrote the phrase “I have attached…”. So I hit send, and instead of the email getting sent I get a popup asking me if I meant to attach a file cause I put the phrase “I have attached…” in my email, and do I want to continue to send or cancel send and attach file?
So of course I hit cancel and go back and attach the file. And I’m glad that it did get caught cause this particular email was kinda important but under the circumstances I’d have never noticed (and the receiver would likely never have told me) that I’d neglected to attach the file, and that would have been a bad thing.
But really? When did the system start reading my email well enough to know that I meant to attach a file and stop me when I didn’t? I’m not sure I like that…..
I made stuff!
Yesterday I decided to try my hand at making butter. Why, I’m not entirely sure, other than it seemed one of those oddly gourmet sorta thing to do and yet seemed REALLY easy to do. There are instructions online in about a million places for home made butter, but they’re all pretty much identical, I picked this set because I liked the pictures. I will say it was more like 1/2 hour to get butter rather than 10 minutes. Not sure why. But otherwise it really was as easy as they said it was. Pour whipping cream in the mixer, and let it run till it forms butter. Used the buttermilk this morning to make pancakes, and of course used the butter ON the pancakes. Turned out pretty good too, though I’m not sure its worth the fuss and bother.
Then today I decided to try my hand at the cheese spread recipe I mentioned before. Much thanks to North and DaddyBear for the suggestions and help. My ingredients were about 9oz of cheese total, mostly sharp chedder (cubed), with a handfull of grated asiago, 1/4 pound of butter (softened in the microwave), a big dollop of sour cream, and a dash of Red Hot. First thing I learned: my blender hates me. I really need a food processer if I’m going to start doing things like this on a regular basis. The blender managed, but it wasn’t happy about it. I’m also not sure the flavor is going to be strong enough, I might want some extra extra sharp chedder next time. But its currently sitting in the fridge solidifying a bit so we’ll see. Flavor at first spoon lick wasn’t bad, just not as strong as I was hoping for. Unless it turns out really nasty (which I don’t expect at this point) I’ll eat it no problem, but I’ll have to break down and get the food processer before I start serious experimenting. I think a bit less sour cream less time, unless it solidifies up more than expected its a bit creamer than I prefer. Also the stick of butter seemed a bit much, though it blended in better than I thought at first glance.
Sorry for the less than steller pictures, I almost forgot to take them at all!
Deer! (again)
Husband’s of the opinion that it might be the same one, though the lighting is enough different its hard to tell.
Morning laugh
Go here. Technically safe for work, but only if your co-workers don’t have dirty senses of humor. Some of the comments may not be safe for work.
Spam email
I try to go through the spam folder on my email once a week or so, just to make sure that nothing important got put in there by accident. Though I do have to say that Google has an awesome spam detector, I almost never get spam in my inbox, and I can’t recall the last time something important went into spam by mistake. But I still check.
Recently I noticed a trend. Among all the drug offers and advertisments for porn and organ enlargement, there have been ALOT of AARP offers. Like several a day. Now I had been ignoring them, I’m no where near old enough, but today I decided to look at them out of curiosity.
They all appear to be the same at first glance, the subject line is either FREE GIFT or MEET BETTY WHITE, and the inside appears to be a standard “come join us and get this free gift!!!” sort of solicitation that you would expect to get from AARP. There’s just one problem, not one of the links in the email leads to an official AARP site, and the links in each email are different from the next email, as are the email address they come from, and I don’t mean one is from joe blow at AARP and one is from joe smith at AARP, I mean they’re info@RandomWebsiteName where RandomWebsiteName matches the random website that the links to go. And none of them are (up front) valid websites, for example one is konstructionleadersteel.com (where links go to konstructionleadersteel.com/********(random letters and numbers)*****), another is sleepingbabyshop.info, or sleepingangelimages.info. None of them are the same (I only spotted one duplicate in the 28 I’ve received in the last week). So just for the heck of it I copied out the links (so I could go to the link without clicking from the email) and went to the “home” page of a couple. Blank pages. No idea if its just an attempt to get money, or spread a virus, didn’t feel like digging far enough to find out.
I gotta say its pretty slick looking, and since its aimed at a generation that isn’t always comfortable with computers I bet it works on occasion too. Kinda scary.
Mother Nature….
…I appreciate the time and energy you put into making things grow, or not grow, as your whim permits, but really, attempting to play with evolution to force my corner of the country to grow gills is really not nessecary. You can stop sending us rain for a while. Please send it to Texas instead.
Cooking help?
Ok, I know there’s a couple folks who read this who COOK, where as I CAN cook, but am generally much happier following a recipe (there are exceptions to that, but not many). Once I know a recipe reasonably well I’ll play with it, but I gotta have that start.
So, I want to make my own cheese spread. Why? Cause a really GOOD cheese spread is hard to get sometimes, and the rest kinda suck. The BEST cheese spread I can get locally I have to go rather out of my way for and it costs more than the rest (of course), its worth it, but its still money and time spent that gets annoying when I want cheese spread.
So I went looking for recipes. I’m gonna link to three, there’s lots more, but these three seem to be reasonably good examples of what I’m seeing:
So. The are some rather significant differences here, and I’m bit stumped as to which I’m likely to want to try. They all call for butter, but one also calls for sour cream. One calls for white wine (but notes that if you only have water that’ll work), the others don’t call for any liquid. The amounts I’m less worried about (though there’s some significant differences there too), I’m capable of adding bit by bit till I get the texture I want, and I can figure out flavorings myself, but does anyone have any ideas as to which recipe might be a better choice (or at least WHY this one calls for sour cream, and that one white wine….), or do you have a recipe to share that you’ve already tried?
Rest of the days links
Small donors aren’t donating to the presidential re-election campaign.
Maybe I won’t be buying that Vizio as a 2nd tv after all.
School Committee learns an economics lesson.
Thought fruit juice was healthy? Think again!
Why does the NYPD have the capability to bring down a plane??