Category: Home Base

On Sunday, desperately looking for something non-bland to eat and not wanting to leave the house to find it, I made a serendipitous find: a packet of Wendy’s honey mustard salad dressing in the butter keeper in the fridge. I proceeded to squeeze the contents of this pakcet out over several boneless chicken breasts, baked ’em, and boy, was that yummy.
My wife reminded me that we had a whole bottle of such dressing, and told me where it was. (The chaotic space that is our pantry/utility room sometimes requires such reminders, it’s not as if we’re hiding food from each other.) It turned out to be Atkins honey mustard dressing, but I gave it a try anyway.
El wrongo! Here’s why it didn’t work: Atkins licensed foods replace the kind of sugar you normally expect with alcohol sugar. This is why any Atkins candy bars make me almost violently ill, but it also explains why the dressing simply vanished between when I put the chicken into the oven and when I took it out. Having an alcohol component, this dressing, of course…evaporated. Leaving very little in the way of anything to flavor the chicken, much less permeate it and make it yummy.
So there you go: Atkins dressings are pretty much out the window as a marinade or for cooking directly into something. Maybe you already knew this, and this is a “duhhh!!” revelation that I’ve only just had the occasion to stumble upon, but it was a (tasteless) discovery for me.… Read more

…but circumstances have forced me to return to eBay as a seller. I’ll be putting quite a few items up Very Soon, but I’ve already got one for sale that anyone ogling the soundtrack section may be interested in.
Click here to glance over ye olde eBay auctions. Buy early, buy often!… Read more

Hooray! My car has survived 130,000 miles with me behind the wheel. (This is a picture from last December, so don’t freak out, we don’t have snow on the ground in early July.) The car is ten years old, and in a couple of weeks I will have had it for nine of those years. It got me to Green Bay, and brought me back, and it’s still hanging in there despite huge sheets of white paint that have detached from the body and flown off. I have a feeling it probably isn’t going to hang in there much longer – there are some serious engine problems cropping up that it just isn’t going to be worth it to fix. I could probably get more out of the car in salvage than I could get in trade for another car (and in any case, my wife has a “spare” car since she got her SUV last summer, so there’s another set of wheels waiting in the wings). But y’know, this little car is one of a kind. Okay, granted, it’s not hard to see a ’96/’97/’98 Corsica on the streets (they’re still incredibly common). But this car is like my trusty steed. I’ll truly be sad when the day comes to put her out to pasture.… Read more

I’ve spent the past several days trying to ramp up my “photo dump” project and get enough stuff put together to fill a whole CD – and to my amazement, I haven’t come up with 750 megs worth of pictures yet. I’ve even gone back and organized all of the pictures I have on floppies from my older digital camera, and I’m still not there – and we’re talking about basically every digital photo that I’ve taken (and saved) since 1999. Something else I’ve discovered is that, anyone or anything you think you’ve taken a zillion photos of, you probably have, in reality, two or three dozen. When it came right down to it, I was amazed at how few photos I had of Chloe, or of Iago, and especially of Chelsea. (Conversely, you find that you’ve got a zillion photos of the most insignificant things imaginable.) What I do have so far is 4,057 pictures in 125 folders (which divide everything up by subject or sub-subject). Just about every critter here and at the farm has his or her own folder, though there are exceptions (cows and ostriches have “species folders”). There are folders for everyplace my wife and I have lived, and even my apartment in Green Bay. I have plenty of photos taken at work here (and in Green Bay), every gaming expo I’ve been to, and guest critters like Sampson and Gabby Cat. I still have a few stashes of floppies to locate and go through, but this is the vast majority of the pictures that I’ve taken in the past 7 years. I’ve made a concerted effort not to throw anything away; there were only a very few things I didn’t keep, and they tended to be old action figure shots I had taken for the Toybox section of the site, and other stuff along those lines. You don’t get that kind of self-editing when you have a roll of film developed, and I was going for the same idea here – even oddly-framed, off-centered pictures of horses are on there. Not to fill out space, but because one simply never knows. There’s a story behind every shot.
It amazes me how much some of the pictures bring back to me. There’s one floppy with some shots of our mostly-empty apartment, circa October ’99, with a strange hue of orange from the setting sun shining through the windows, and I remember that day – couldn’t tell you what day of the week it was exactly, and I’d have to right-click on the photo and look for the date – distinctly, walking around my new place in a daze, wondering what the hell kind of crazy thing I’d just done, moving back to Arkansas without a job. Amazing how that stuff comes flying back, isn’t it? And it’s mainly the orange light, and the somewhat disjointed series of shots (my temporary computer setup, a slightly out-of-focus Iago cleaning himself next to a laundry basket of dirty clothes, Othello snoozing on the couch). I’ve actually thought about posting some of these photos in the blog and retro-dating them to when they were originally taken, with only a line or two of text explaining the when and where; I might still do that, and probably create a new “old photos” category so you can find ’em if you want (or avoid ’em if you want).
Before I go there, though, I think I need to go to bed.… Read more

So I went to check my Amazon Associates numbers the other day, and saw a notice that Amazon is now dealing in groceries. I’m not quite sure how that’s supposed to work, but the image displayed with this announcement was the unmistakable purple box which surrounds any batch of Annie’s organic foods. I decided to search the mighty Amazon grocery selection and was left fairly underwhelmed in quite a few areas. I did, however, find one of the current favorite snacks of the Green household: Annie’s Cheddar Bunnies! These are somewhat like Goldfish, only all-organic and without shoveling wholesale artificial preservatives into your system. And they’re actually quite tasty, if I do say so myself. If you want to order a herd of Cheddar Bunnies, click this link, bon appetit, and thanks for the cash. (Now, that said, I’d be less than honest if I didn’t also give mad props to another – and probably slightly less healthy – snack of mine, Reese’s Caesar Croutons – with or without the salad.) Seriously though, with the benefit of some decent prices, and the understanding that this isn’t a service that’s going to be delivering anything extremely perishable to anyone’s door, this might help to level the playing field where organic and healthy foods are concerned.
Do give Annie’s stuff a try, though. It’s good stuff.… Read more

Well, it took a while to happen, but at last it finally did: I filled every tape, and every memory stick, with video and still photos from the new camera. My wife scored me a stash of cheap DVD-Rs from the local freight store last week (I haven’t had any blank DVDs for a while now), so last night I ran at least 4 hours of video off to DVD (most of it horses and baby horses, or Olivia in action, or, if she was asleep, Olivia inaction), and copied almost all of the photos from my largest memory stick (256 megs) off to my hard drive. I was amazed at how many pictures I had taken – by far, the most frequent photographic subject with my camera is anything with four legs, and within that category, Chloe and Olivia were in the lead. I’m glad there are as many photos of Chloe as there are. I always said Chloe beauty shots were easy (all you need is Chloe and a camera), and the same is proving to be true of Olivia, although in her current “little kid” state there are plenty of utterly goofy moments in with the beauty shots (see the row of dancing Olivias in one of my previous entries from this week). 😆
I was surprised that there were nearly two full hours of Boss, and almost as much as some of the other horses and their fillies. In all, I now how four one-hour tapes to reuse, and one memory stick; I still need to dump the vast majority of the Boss still pictures, my photos from last year’s CGE, and much more. Once all this stuff is dumped off to the hard drive, it’s time to burn a CD-R or two (or maybe even a DVD-R, since we’re talking about a bunch of memory sticks that each hold at least a hundred megs). It may also pay to think about dumping video not only straight to the DVD recorder, but also to AVI files for future editing purposes. At that point, I’ve got to start figuring out an organizational system for keeping track of everything, which starts to make it sound like a project at the station.
I think it’s safe to say I’ve been getting plenty of use out of this camera. (The statistics above don’t include the tape that I recorded over and over and over again with footage from various video and computer games to create the flash movies in the Phosphor Dot Fossils section.) I also now have the docking station (shown in the above photo) permanently hooked up to Zen, and editing software on the same machine, so I can continue to throw gobs of video at you. (Considering how massive the “multimedia” column to your right is becoming, I may have to figure out something, like a second blog just for the high-bandwidth stuff. 😯 )
So was this camera worth the money a year ago? Oh hell yeah.… Read more

It’s been one hell of a week, to put it mildly. First off, flying solo again at work, and we had a hellacious round of storms and tornadoes on Sunday night, for which the station’s coverage kicked copious quantities of butt. (See the work blog for examples of how we’re “POPping” that coverage – I’ve added quite a few brand new spots.) But that has meant epic-length work days. And last night when I got home, something was wrong – I think it was the fact that every receptacle that’s supposed to drain water had backed up. Toilets overflowing, bathtubs and sinks filling themselves, mass hysteria. So the inevitable call to the plumber went out this morning; I stayed home longer today to meet him when he finally appeared in the afternoon with his robo-rooter. Just snaking that thing through the pipes blasted some clogs out of the system, but there was still something amiss. So there was no choice but to dig up the yard – it was time to blow the hatch. … Read more