I’m unimpressed
By everything you do
You make me sick
I never wanna be like you
Your hollow words
Opinions all cut-and-dried
I know it hurts
But sometimes reality bites

You are the end
You are the end
I’m the beginning
You are the end
You are the end
I’m the beginning
And you are the end

You make me puke
I can’t stand your stupid face
Your sightless eyes
Your touch like death’s cold embrace

Take care of yourself people.

Not real fish.

Just so you know.

It’s for the benefit of my cats.

Four out of five of which are lard asses. And the fifth is working on it.

The two youngest seem to love chasing it. Both need exercise. The fifth to stave off the fate of the other four, and well, the fourth could just benefit from losing some weight.

Cat one shows interest. But just carrying the stick around on your otherwise un-cat focused activities just seems to keep him mildly interested. He watches, waiting for more “effervescent” activity of the fish-on-the-string-on-the-stick thing, when I make the effort to fling it around for him. Dangle it against a wall or a door jam, and he’s right there. Weirdo.

Cat two seems to feel that the whole fish-on-the-string-on-the-stick thing is beneath him. Though you can occasionally catch him off guard.

Cat three is teetering on the edge of excitement and disdain.

All of them need exercise.

Which is why I am sitting here with a fish-on-the-string-on-the-stick thing between my legs, ready to get up and move around my house, and have my cats burn off some of that lard.

Yeah that thing that makes all life on this planet even possible.

No, I haven’t become some sort of vampire. Or mogwai (I’m not quite that cute).

No, my fears about the sun are based more on things like:

“A strong wave of charged plasma particles emanating from the Jupiter-sized sun spot, the most powerful seen in four years” – Huge solar flare jams radio, satellite signals: NASA

The size of freaking Jupiter people!

Ok, so you might be thinking: Sure Scott, that’s pretty big, but so what?

Problem is that those waves of charged plasma particles cause all sorts of havoc when they hit our little planet. The Earth’s ionosphere does its best to block these storms, and ends up funneling most of it to the North and South Pole (which causes the aurora borealis).

Now the aurora borealis is beautiful and all. I would like to see it in person one day.

But they are symptoms of huge amounts of radiation from the sun slamming into the earth’s “shield”. And it turns out that earth’s shield does an admirable, but not entirely effective job.

As a result you get disruptions to electrical power grids, radio, electronics (anything with a circuit board) and satellite communications (including GPS).

Now imagine your day today without any of the above. No radio. No GPS. No Satellite TV. No iPhone. Oh yeah, and no power.

Eh, you might be thinking, I’ve had to do that before. No biggy.

Ok so then, maybe imagine the next few weeks or months like that. And not just for you. Everyone around you. Potentially whole countries of people.

Bit of a different story now? Imagine the social chaos.

I’ve done a lot of reading on this topic. Watched documentaries. Makes me want to go into survivalist mode and start putting away food and making preparations for life without electricity. Read NASA’s Severe Space Weather – Social and Economic Impacts report, and you might too.

Patate Al Sale Profumato is an Italian dish that seems wholly unlike the stereotypical Italian fare. It makes a great side or brunch, and will have you coming back for more (and probably tasting garlic for the rest of the day). Even if there are only two of you eating, I recommend that you increase all of the ingredients so that when someone sneaks back for seconds, they wont be disappointed.

Use ingredients from your garden, a CSA, a farmers market or the organic section of your local grocery store when you can.

Patate Al Sale Profumato
(Potatoes with Sage and Rosemary)
Serves 2

1.5 pounds of potatoes
1/4 of a cup of olive oil
6 fresh sage leaves
1 sprig of fresh rosemary
1 sprig of fresh parsley
freshly ground pepper
1 clove of fresh garlic

Peel and rinse the potatoes and then dice them up into roughly half inch cubes. Dry them on a table cloth and then saute them in a casserole dish in the oil. Warning: Make sure that your casserole dish is suitable for oven top cooking. I don’t want you shattering your cookware while using this recipe. That would make me feel bad!

Keep the potatoes moving so that they don’t stick to the bottom of the pan too much. Once the start to change color and look like they are getting that golden brown color, move them into your oven which has been set to 350 degrees. Leave it in there for about 20 minutes.

Finely chop your sage, rosemary, parsley and garlic and mix them together with some freshly ground pepper.

Toss the hot potatoes in a large bowl with your herb mix and serve.

Then come back here and leave a comment about how much you love them

If you’ve purchased Yankee Candle brand jar candles, you’ll know that they cost an arm and a leg.

So when I had a Yankee Candle jar candle with an entirely defective glass jar (no seriously, look at the picture), there was no way that I was just going to throw it out, and there was also no way that I was going to light it so that it could spew its molten love wax all over the place…

Initially, I thought… Mmmm, this is the perfect job for the Handy Man’s ultimate – DUCT TAPE! But the crowds of uncouth heathens shouted me down, and I was forced to come up with a better, more destructive alternative. Damn. Luckily, I had a spare jar from a spent candle. So I went to work on my fallback, and I might add… devious plan…. transplant one candle into the jar of another…

Step one involved a hammer (and quite frankly was the most fun and satisfying step).

Once I had beaten up all the defective glass, and peeled it away (with only minor wounds suffered by yours truly), I was left with a amusingly naked candle.

Which was unfortunately, too girthy to fit into the glass jar of the expended one that I had intended to use as its replacement vessel. Bugger.

So then, out came the serrated knife and Step Two (which happens to be the second most fun and satisfying step of the whole process) – trimming the excess body fat.

Once the candle was taught and trim, I was FINALLY able to get it into the spent jar. And viola a brand new candle is born.

It’s alive… its ALIVE!

All part of the blurb describing Dark Fall: The Journal, a point and click adventure game that I was playing last night.

The should have added “A pissy PDA.” to that blurb as well.

You play the brother of an architect whom is redeveloping an, as you soon discover, haunted hotel and train station. He leaves you a troublesome voice mail, and filled with fear for your sibling, you rush off to help him.

But he is nowhere to be found. *cue spooky music*

After bumbling around for a bit you do stumble across his PDA. Fiddling around with it you get this error message (click for a larger version):

Perhaps he didn’t meet a grisly end at the spectral hands of some nasty otherworldy spooks after all…

If his PDA knows what it is talking about, maybe his debt collectors finally caught up with him.

A baby inside the yellow bell pepper (capsicum) that I was cutting up for dinner is not something that I had expected to see that evening. Click the image for a bigger version.

Related posts:

1. Pretty Sky

A good idea is a good start, but it shouldn’t be the only thinking that you do about your future website.

Imagine driving in a strange place with no map or GPS, knowing that you have to get to a certain town but not knowing where it is.

Throw in some dense fog, and this is exactly the job that you are assigning to your web developer if you don’t have a clear concept of what you want them to do.

A builder wouldn’t construct a house without an architectural plan, and your web developer shouldn’t either. Attempting to do so will lead them into not realizing your idea, either partially, or even worse, completely. It will result in inefficient use of time and delays and most likely leave you unhappy with the result.

Fleshing out your idea, crystallizing the concept in your mind, drawing up those architectural plans for your new website will make the entire process of developing your site smoother, and help your developer give you exactly what you had envisaged.

A good web developer knows this and can help you through the process of taking your idea to the level of a fully fleshed out concept, but the more you bring to the table, the easier this process will be.

Rasages de M. Frog à être lisses pour les dames

Related posts:

1. Adventures of M. Frog: The Pillow