Taking Charge

Okay, this is one of the tastiest recipes I’ve tried in ages. It was printed in the Amish Cook column in our paper, so we snipped it out and tried it yesterday. I’ve made a couple notes and changes. It was printed without a baking temp and the time was wrong, so I fixed it. I also made a couple substitution notes as well.

HOMEMADE STRAWBERRY BREAD
Source: http://www.oasisnewsfeatures.com/new/column/june-8-2009#comments

2 eggs
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon almond extract *Optional – just use 1tsp of vanilla if you leave this out
1 2/3 cup flour(stir or sift before measuring)
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups chopped strawberries-fresh or frozen and lightly drained
1/2 cup chopped nuts-your choice *Optional

Beat eggs until foamy. Add oil, sugar, vanilla, and almond to eggs and mix well. Stir well or sift together flour, baking powder, soda, and salt. Add to previous mixture and stir until just barely moistened. Add strawberries and nuts and lightly mix being careful not to over mix. Pour into greased 9×5 loaf pan and bake @ 350 65 minutes until nicely browned and toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. May need to put foil over top if browns to quickly.

NUT-BUNNY!

Usage – “I’d thought of a lot of things this nut-bunny could have wanted from me; that hadn’t been one of them.”

Source: Skin Trade – Laurell K Hamilton

The story of my life. I’m still having issues, even after having the tech out and inspecting all the lines, giving me a shiny new modem and everything. So that means it’s got to be either a problem that one of the computers is causing on the network or the wire from the jack to the modem. We’re buying a new phone cord to see if it’s the later, but I’m afraid that it’s the former. I see a reformat in my near future. :/

I’m a bad poster lately. I’ve just not really felt that up to it. Especially since my glasses broke last weekend. Plus my Internet connection has been highly unstable. I think, however, that I may have isolated the issue. We’ll see, I guess. I’m hoping that closing a few excess ports was all that I really needed to do. A lot of the ports that were open, were there for when I was DJ’ing and I’d never bothered to close them back up since they weren’t hurting anyone.

I did order a pair of glasses this morning from Zenni Optical. I just hope that I read the prescription right and that we did the measurements right. I figure that if I don’t have it right and they’re screwed up, I’m only out $22. I need to get a new prescription soon anyway, so I can always get them to measure me and make sure that I have the proper information. For the price, I’m not going to bitch if the first pair is wrong. It’s a learning curve and stuff.

The beginning of the week was busy for me. Sunday, we went to the store to pick up a few things and ended up going a second time, to another store, to pick up the majority of the monthly groceries. We need a few things still, but they’re mostly things that we can pick up any time. Monday, Rob had his final dental visit for the minor stuff. We have to have an impact wisdom tooth taken care of still, but that can wait a while longer. We need to find a decent oral surgeon for that.

One thing that’s been plaguing me is problems with my internet connection. It’s been pulling this weird up/down/up/down game for about 3 weeks now. Now, I’ve had my DSL for 3 years and in that time, we’ve had maybe 3 major outages and a half dozen small outages. I can not complain about the service I’ve gotten from Frontier. I can, however, complain about the problems I’m currently having. I think the modem, being 3 years old and on 24/7, surviving several storms where it never got shut off (my bad for not being home), is finally on it’s last limbs. A couple weeks ago it started, so I called tech support to see if there was problems in the area. There were not, so he sent out a tech. He split the signal at the box, fixed a small problem and it was fine for a week or so. Tuesday, however, it started acting up again. The modem is throwing errors, it’s resetting itself, dropping at random intervals, but the DSL connection from the box to the modem is staying up. So, I call Wednesday and they suggest moving the modem. Fine, did that, it seemed to be alright. Nope. Yesterday, it acted up again. Shut everything down while it stormed. Came back several hours later, rebooted and it was fine. This morning, however, acting up again. So I call, get treated like I’m stupid, finally get a ticket. Tomorrow they should be out. He better have a modem to replace this one because that’s the only logical explanation we have. If the modem is off for a while, it’s fine for several hours after rebooting it.

The phone company did foil my plans of going to the lake tomorrow, but that’s alright, I can survive. I’ll just go another time. I do have to go into the city Tuesday, but there won’t be time to go to the lake, since we have to be back to get Rob’s hair cut and go to an appointment in the Valley. Wednesday, we also have an appointment in the Valley and I need to go to my sister’s house one day. I’m kind of hoping to be able to do that next Saturday because I want to head over to the Oakdale Mall and meet .

I think I’m going to head off to check on the manicotti that’s baking away in the oven chill for a while and see if turning the modem off while I’m gone makes it behave for the evening. I kind of doubt it though.

Good:
* I have 6 beautiful tomato plants.
* I learned a lot about local history and got to hear some absolutely fascinating stories.
* Getting a couple decent shots of the site of the Old Mill and Old Jail

Bad:
* We can’t take the road trip we wanted to this summer.
* I was the youngest adult listening to the local history.
* The Old Mill is gone now.

In Between:
* I learned a lot about local history tonight, but it left me digging for a lot more information that I can’t find.
* I wish my father was still around to share his own stories with me.
* They’re going to be doing more history nights, but I may not be able to attend due to Rob’s schedule.

I was going to write a normal post, but I’m tired and feeling stupid, so I’m going to bed instead.

$20 later, we know that the spot on the bottom of Rob’s foot is absolutely nothing of any consequence. It’s a solid mass that comes from him having been a dumb ass when he was younger. I’m not kidding about that either. But at least we know that there’s nothing there to worry about, so it was worth the co-pay cost.

I’m in a fairly foul mood tonight, for multiple reasons. None of which have to do with anything online. But, my mood is seeping into the things I say and do in public venues. Not good. I try not to let that happen, I try to stay off of plurk, lj, twitter, etc. I should have done the same tonight, but I didn’t. Oh well, that’s life. At least no friends were lost.

I don’t understand people though. People go off on these things that just make no sense to me. For instance – Bruno/Eminem at the MTV Awards. I saw the show, I turned away, so I googled and saw the video. I would have been pissed if I was Eminem too. Staged or not, it was disgusting and disrespectful. Personally, I don’t think Bruno was meant to land face in Eminem’s crotch. It looked like a stunt gone awry to me. Get over it, the world won’t end. Just like, I don’t understand why it matters if Adam Lambert is gay or straight. Kara DioGuardi said on “The View” last week – “I don’t think that Adam was ever in [the closet]. So I think he was always openly out.” I have to agree with her statement. Apparently, he is going to come out formally in Rolling Stone. Big deal. He was out (to me) from the moment I saw him, frankly.

I watched the first episode of “I’m a Celebrity.. Get me out of here” and can only conclude that it’s more train wreck television. Sadly, there really isn’t much else to watch right now, so I won’t be watching much television for a little while. I’ll stick with reading and listening to audio books. Currently, I’m listening to The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Far from my usual reading, but I’m quite enjoying it.

Anyway, it’s time to sleep, or something like that. So I’m out.

What the bloody fuck? It’s going to be June in another hour June 1, so why on earth is there a frost advisory? Oh yeah, because Mother Nature hates me! Of course, I planted my seeds a week ago, which means that they’ve probably germinated. They haven’t popped yet, so they should be alright, as long as we don’t get more than surface frost. Frost isn’t guaranteed, but it’s close enough that I’d be willing to bet that we get some frost. Sucky.

We also have what’s called a Roll Out Garden along our driveway. We’ve had it for several seasons, though, so it may not be any good. This is the first year we’ve gotten around to cutting in a bed for it. We have another one that hasn’t gotten put down yet, so we know that one is safe from frost. The problem is, our cats think that they can dig in it. Bastards. And in case you’re curious? The flower bed is straight. Our driveway, however, is not.

I wish I knew if the lilacs I planted last spring are going to live or not. They don’t seem to be growing other than some leaves. I had to put tires around them in order to keep them from being mowed down when Rob mows. I had 4 total, but there was absolutely no growth on 2 of them, so I let him mow them down when he mowed last.

Meh, I’ve been fighting Firefox for an hour, so I got off track.. I’m gonna just go to sleep and I’ll write another post tomorrow or something

We’re trying to save money for Rob’s vacation and it’s pretty damn hard. Especially since I am getting a new camera Wednesday. I love my camera, but I need a better one for a lot of the stuff we do, especially for sports. Need a better zoom for the project I have planned for fall. Meh, anyway. I’m trying to figure out a day trip for during Rob’s vacation, but it’s damned hard to find any decent travel deals for a day trip. I don’t know that I’d want to drive somewhere, especially if the price of gas is going to stay up where it is.

I’d kind of like to take a bus trip, maybe, but I’m not sure what’s going on when Rob’s off. *ponders* Looks like the only bus company I know of in the area is only going to New York City and, despite having friends in NYC, I don’t really want to go there. Especially for $50/person. I can take $100 and drive down and not spend that much.

Maybe we’ll drive upstate for the day. Maybe we’ll drive to Harrisburg. Who knows. Hell, we probably won’t go anywhere. We’re boring like that.

This is what we dealt with in my area today. Luckily, we’re up on a hill, we had no problems, other than one good crack of lightning hit close enough that it knocked a clock off my bedroom wall.

It seems like every spring I go through a severe case of ‘net apathy. Not sure why, but I get to the point where I’d like to completely shut down my computer and Internet and walk away from it all. Spring Fever? Maybe, but it goes away after a while. The thing is, this year, it started early. I’ve been slowly building up to the point where I’d like to put my fist through my monitor since February. I’ve been spending a lot of my time reading or listening to audio books. Mostly to keep my brain from being able to think too much. I think I need something more going on when I’m at home.

I have a lot of things that I should be doing, I’m just apathetic about doing them because they involve sitting here looking at the computer screen. Meh. I think I’ll feel better when the weather is decent enough that I can go dig in dirt and plant my garden. I want to grow peppers, squash and tomatoes. I’m also thinking of planting a small patch of rhubarb and I’d also like to grow asparagus, but I keep getting told that it’s too difficult. Meh.

There’s a lot going on in my brain, but most of it, I’m not willing to share. It’s hard and it’s frustrating, but it’s life. So until I feel like sharing, I’ll just babble on about stupid little things like getting the car inspected yesterday and getting hugs from an old friend.

Until next time.