who the – what the – HUH?

The time to trim bushes and do yard stuff. I do not enjoy the yard stuff, although I used to, at one time in my life. I haven’t felt like doing much of anything lately.

I have eaten too much crap / junk / (aka snickers minis) in the past few days. These are things I should not even be eating – with little nutrition content and high sugar / crap content. (on the positive side, the peanuts have nutritional value). -?- Does that even count?

I don’t have much else going on right now, but hope to have something to share at some point in the near future.

I SHOULD take the dog out while there is a pause in the rain, but I have a feeling he is not going to want to be out in the cold (to him it is cold outside at 45 degrees). Of course, he is “ninety-eight” years old — if the 7 -to- 1 / dog -to-human years thing is true.

… that–that’s about it.

I get a magazine from the Food Network Food Network Magazine (imagine that)… and it has an ad for Philadelphia cheese cake (and other products)– which I am going to share here (hopefully not getting in trouble by any copyright police — as I do have good intentions, and I am publishing it exactly as they had (*although I added comments*), with brand names and all of that stuff).
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Philadelphia Vanilla Mousse Cheesecake

Prep Time 20 min. – Total Time: 6 hours, 15 min. (includes refrigeration – serves 16 (*unless one of them is me*).

40 Nilla Wafers, crushed (about 1 1/2 cups)
3 Tbsp. butter (or margarine), melted
4 pkg. (8 oz. each) Philadelphia Cream Cheese, softened & divided
1 cup sugar, divided
1 Tbsp. + 1 tsp. vanilla, divided
3 eggs
1 tub (8 oz) Cool Whip whipped topping, thawed

HEAT oven to 325°F. Mix wafer crumbs and butter; press onto bottom of 9-inch springform pan.

BEAT 3 pkg. cream cheese, 3/4 cup sugar and 1 Tbsp vanilla with mixer until well blended. Add eggs, 1 at a time, mixing on low speed after each – just until blended. Pour over crust.

BAKE 50 to 55 minutes or until center is almost set. Run knife around rim of pan to loosen cake; cool completely in pan.

BEAT remaining cream cheese, sugar, and vanilla with mixer in large bowl until well blended.Whisk in Cool Whip; spread over cheesecake. Refrigerate 4 hours. Remove rim of pan before serving cheesecake. Garnish with fresh berries if desired.

this recipe is also on the Kraft Foods website: http://www.kraftrecipes.com/recipes/philadelphia-vanilla-mousse-cheesecake-115039.aspx
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In the photo, it was shown with blueberries on top… and it looked really, really good. I hope to find the time to make this soon…

ISSUE – my high cholesterol makes it nearly impossible for me to really get to enjoy the cheesecake. Philadelphia brand may want to kill me, but I do wonder if this recipe would work with the soy cream cheese. While it is pretty good, I do not know if it will cook or set the same. It does not taste exactly like CREAM CHEESE — but it is fairly good considering that it is a soy product.

I will make it as the recipe instructs, and then at some later date make it with the tofutti and I will let you know (and link back to this when I do).

Ok, so for the most part, the blog is working again (read that as it functions). I cannot figure out with the piecy CSS in wordpress how to get the right menu looking “right”, but I can live with how it is for now.

I also have to get the blogroll to list more than just “about ten” randomized bloggers… (hm).

I’ve been quite busy lately, and for the most part I am happy with the template I am using… it does look different than the rest of the site, but really, I feel it is close enough. (That is to say – you know you are still on my site when you go from one page to the next). [[SHRUG]].

I guess I am getting lazier in my old age, because at one point I would be spending every waking minute trying to balance everything out.

Looking forward to going back to posting normal stuff …

I am testing templates today — bear with me, as it may look a bit OFF from time to time.

testing this – I found a flash media plug-in for Wordpress… which means I may not have to give up on wordpress!

testing the sidebar -wordalizer attempt.

There are some things I have learned that I am not liking about WordPress. They don’t let me have Flash on a WP page? Even on my own server? REALLY??? I have to investigate this… because Flash on my own server – has no reason to be denied? (sigh).

I may make the weblog a page one navigates to (click) – and keep the index page as it was before – then work on my page styling. At least that way, I can have my headers (flash for holidays) — ?

Honestly, I haven’t posted THIS much about pain in the ass page design crap since I started using evil Blogger. (b!tches).

–| FEBRUARY 6 |–
May have found a solution to the anti-flash crap. Testing it today!

Ok. So Blogger, in their infinite wisdom, had decided that publishing through FTP to my own server / domain is taking up too much of their bandwidth? However that is supposed to work out… I mean I don’t host on their server??? What the hell ever.

So, I am moving my weblog to WordPress… something I should have done a LONG, LONG time ago.

It may take a bit of time and tweaking, but I will get it all moved over. In the mean time, the formerly posted posts can be found through this link. (Also note that a link is on the right side of this page, until I get all the old posts from stupid blogger imported into WordPress.

I appreciate your patience while I get everything back in order — but have no way to determine how long it might take me to do. Blogger, you suck.

WordPress — I look forward to using you and so far, setting up has been easy peasy… BUT getting it to publish where I want it had proven to be a bit of a pain in my ASS. Once that was resolved, I moved on to RELOCATING the old (BLOGGER) posts by importing them to WordPress. The only thing left would be to figure out how to get the comments to move… or (sadly) be forced to let them go.

The files for the comments made in the past are indeed still on the server, so I COULD manually copy and paste them all… but I am not so sure I want to go through all of that. I might be able to hand type in links to the old commenting system (or the comments people made in the past) — I will look into it… my readers had a lot of worthy input and I hate to completely lose what they had to say.

Once that is done, I can work on the template. While the one I am using now (which will change soon) is nice – I like it’s simplicity – I will need to make the site all match (page by page…) This will include fixing some font sizing issues I have noticed in the older posts (where I was using a smaller font to make some text stand out for some reason– I now forget what that was).

TO: BLOGGER – you suck. I don’t understand how using FTP to publish to MY OWN DOMAIN even affects your server in any way shape or form — but WHATEVER. Good riddance you b!tches.

Every now and then, I get burned-out (internet-wise). I sit down, open the browser, and decide that there is nothing left to read; so I close the browser and find another way to occupy my mind and my time. After a few (days, weeks, months, who knows?) time, I spend time searching for new (to me) and interesting (possibly only to me) sites. I decided that I would share some of the sites I have recently discovered, in no particular order. Click. Enjoy! Feedback is welcome, as always.

1 The Printed Blog The world’s first daily newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other user generated content. Sadly, due to cost issues, it is not currently being printed… maybe with enough readership and help (ie, money) it can live once again. As it is now, 16 issues are available for each of a few different cities.

2 The Periodic Table of Videos Shared primarily for having a different layout; not only are there videos here for every element, but the site plans to offer “films about other areas of chemistry, latest news and occasional adventures away from the lab.” My kid is taking Chemistry in school, so I thought this would be useful to her.

3 The Morning News The Morning News is an online magazine, published weekdays since 1999.

4 Best Ever Recipes The best recipes on the internet. (Submit your own–become famous!).

5 The invisible internet Invisible or Deep Web: What it is, How to find it, and Its inherent ambiguity. Seeks to change the way people share and interact with news from the world around them. This reader-submitted content website is designed to function as YOUR HUB for connecting us with blogs, articles, photography, music, events and other content that YOU deem worthy of sharing with your own community. (Many city editions are available for download).

Well, if nothing else, that took up a bit of your idle time. Happy Reading!

I feel unwell, and the dog is SICK. It is my day off; the first one I’ve had in a while, since I have been picking up any available shift lately, and I am beyond tired.

Normally, I have trouble sleeping. Normally. I was sleeping SOUNDLY this morning, and around FOUR O’CLOCK, the dog comes into my room, moaning and whining. I know what this has meant in the past, so I get up to let him out. Then I look into the livingroom and find crapnel, circling around in a spiral pattern. The only term I can think of that can give you an accurate image would be “crapcircles”. It mocked me. “Ha ha ha! Good morning to you, sir!”

“SH!T,” I think, quite literally. I spent the next twenty minutes picking up droplets of crap, spraying carpet cleaner on the darkened spots of carpet, and scrubbing the carpet in smaller circles with a brush, and disposing of paper towel waste in a plastic bag. Once that task was completed, evil whispered in my ear, “Check the room that serves as the office.” I wandered into the “office” and turned on the light. More crapcircles.

Sometime around 5:30am, I finished cleaning up the crapnel from the floor. My very light beige / near white / carpet seems unstained… but I am not entirely sure yet. I have the Bissel Carpet Steamer out and ready–I just wasn’t wanting to use such a noise-inducing machine when there were people sleeping. I have an appointment and an errand to run today, afterwhich I will steam-clean the areas affected by the dog.

This is not how one should start his or her day.

Regarding my previous post (the one demonstrating my mini-mid-life crisis), I was asked why some such part of my site is taking up too much space in the browser window. (more or less, here you will find a screen shot of the word exchange).

I am fully appreciative when people alert me to random issues with my site (and believe me, there are many issues), and I actually encourage them to do so. If they find an issue and know how to fix it, I applaud them when they not only point to the problem, but also offer a solution.

The problem now is, I have run a “cross-browser” check, checking the browsers I CAN actually check, and have not replicated the described problem. (Of course, I do not have AOL), so if she was indeed using AOL, I have no way of checking that without installing AOL, which I will not be doing at this time, since I no longer use AOL and do not really want to have such software occupy over 100 MB (I don’t know exactly what space it requires) of my hard drive.

Being that I needed to test my site across many different browsers, I decided to utilize the tool found at browser shots dot org, and found out that in most of the browsers (or at least the most commonly used ones), it appears normally, (or as it should). This can be found here, for a limited time. I am sure they will not keep this available for very long due to server space and other related things.

It frustrates me when I hear that my site has some display issue that I can neither replicate nor view myself. I cannot fix what I cannot see, and cannot understand what I cannot see. Since I cannot see what she saw, I have been unable to fix the problem. However– if that was the first time that issue appeared to her, since my site has not been re-written (but merely had been recolored and had a new graphic placed for the header), I think it might be more of a local issue with her browser. [?] This is not my way of saying, “It’s not you, it’s me”… I have not made any major changes to my site in years [2003], and quite honestly, I am not even really finished with the changes I started in 2003.

I am working on it, I promise.