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Showing posts from July, 2005

Someone hit me

Went out a while ago to work in my garden. A very dumb thing to do, I was feeling fine until I came in, then the minute I hit the front porch I tried to throw up, I stopped sweating and I didn't feel good at all. Grabbed some powerade we had in the fridge, grabbed the rolly chair and hid out in the office until I started sweating and I felt better. I'll go back out when it cools off and do the watering then. I did get the spinach seeded tho. I was going to have salad with dinner, but the yellowjackets wouldn't leave the lettuce patch, so I'll have to wait until later to get some. Dinner is being done in stages. The chicken got done and I was too wiped to do a side dish. Didn't feel like twice baked potatos, so I'll figure something out later as we just had the chicken. I did get the chicken processed. I got 5 meals out of it, the one we had tonight, then one lemon chicken, 1 asian flavored, 1 dijon mustard and 1 honey mustard. I'm going to wait until cools

Fields near our home

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This is looking towards where we live: What we see on the drive down the road:

Seed harvest

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Harvested the spinach seed, ended up having to use a larger jar to store them in. I'll plant some tonight for a fall harvest of spinach:

Another warm day

Already 77F out, supposed to get up to low to mid 90s. Luckily the fire danger is not too bad. So far this year the fire season has been pretty mild. Hit Winco last night. Picked up 10lbs of chicken hindquarters. I'll process those today. I'm going to make "Dump" chicken packages, where you put the chicken in a zip lock bag and "dump" ingredients and then stash them in the freezer. This way I'll have a number of chicken dishes I can just pull out and cook and not have to worry about HOW I'm going to season them. I also picked up 15 pounds of potatos. I'll make up a big batch of mashed potatos out of those. I'll portion them off and look at differnet seasonings for those. Then into the freezer. I also picked up bread flour and regular flour. I'll package up a number of bread machine mixes, so all we have to do is pull out a package, add the wet ingredients to the machine and then pour in the dry. Another session I'm planning on (proba

A good day for iced coffee

And it was a sign that Safeway had a half gallon of half & half on sale for $2.49, the same price as a quart of half & half, so we bought the half gallon and I now have a pot of coffee cooling off and in a little while we'll be up to our ears in iced coffee. I'll brew up another pot in a bit and stash it in the fridge for tomorrow. We picked up a new phone yesterday at Office Depot, a VTech twin pack, a main phone and an extra. We had to take them back today, they didn't want to take a charge. We traded straight across for another set and this time they are working. Hubby talked to the company and they said there were some that had bad batteries, seemed the first set had them. These will be nice since they only need one phone jack and we can have one in the living room and the other will go in the office. While we were at the mall we hit the new Ross Dress for Less. This time they had stuff in my sizes. For $33 I walked out with a 2 piece suit, a very nice short s

Forgot to mention

Got a call from my doc yesterday about my lab results. Seems my white blood count is 2200, which is way down. She said there were enough of a certain kind of cell that I'm not in any danger of getting really sick again, but she isn't too happy about the results. My thyroid levels aren't budging as yet either, so she REALLY isn't happy about that. On the PTU, my levels were usually better even during the 1st month. We COULD up my dose of methimazole to 3 a day, but since the 2 a day is keeping my WBC down, I don't think she or the endo is going to go for that. She'll be sending the results to the endo and a copy to me, so I'll know better what's going on. I'm going to hold out for one more month on the meds and in the meantime insist that the endo gives me the name of the best surgeon up in Spokane and I'll talk directly to the surgeon about the possible complications of the sleep apnea. I'm also going to go directly to the Stanford Sleep Cen

Another warm day

Tho there are a few clouds rolling thru. There is a prediction of possible thunderstorms, but with our luck, we won't see any around here. I miss the thunderstorms we used to get. Did the chicken in the slow cooker, used honey mustard for seasoning this time around. I need to plant more onions, I pulled the 4 that were the largest (all about the size of a golf ball) and used those, along with a handful and a half of garlic. Running low on garlic. I buy it in the big containers from Costco, they are already peeled. I usually freeze most of it in ziplocks, but now that we have the vacuum sealer I can freeze them and not have ice crystals on them when I use them. Didn't do much last night, watered the garden, watched some TV (Tripping the Rift is back, season 2. They changed the voice of Six. Not happy with it, they are using Carmen Electra this season and she doesn't have the right voice. Now Six seems to be rather immature. I liked her in the 1st season, she was definately

Not fair!

Apparently there was a magnitude 5.6 earthquake Monday night, felt locally and I didn't feel it at all. I never feel earthquakes, even when I lived in California. During the summer my mom would call home occasionally to see if there was any damage to the house and I'd go "H'uh! Earthquake? Oh, well the pics on the walls are a little wonky, but that was about it." Never felt it. Totally jonesing for pizza yesterday, so we got the take out special from Pizza Perfection. It's 2 for 1 so I can get my pepperoni with extra cheese and hubby can have gyro meat with ground beef and garlic sauce on his. Now I have lunch for the next couple of days. Hubby is getting nervous driving the Subaru around. He's so used to being low profile he didn't think that the car would now be high profile. He's also not to sure about the kitty cat theme. He's now thinking more Siberian Tiger, which makes some sense since his Chinese astrological sign is Water Tiger. He

And a cat it shall be

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This is what happens when an artist friend decides your car is a cat and you let her near it with tempra paints: We've been getting confused looks, strange looks and appreciative honks since Sunday :D Since it is tempra paint, it can be washed off. If D comes up with a design hubby likes, he may let her do it permanently. On the way back from the gathering on Sunday, we saw Moscow Building Supply had free pallets, so we grabbed a few and I finally have a compost bin set up: I still need 1 more pallet to form the one side. I don't want to get rid of the black bin, so it will live on whichever side isn't being used at the time. My one set of neighbors toss stuff on my compost pile during the year and they usually have kitchen waste that goes in the bin, so the black bin is handy for them to use in the winter. I need to pick up a few more pallets to lay on the ground where I have my garden work area to form a floor. It will make working out there in early spr

YEE HAW!!!!

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WE HAVE LIFT OFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Quiet Sunday

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Will be out at friends this afternoon at a planning meeting for next Circle. We'll be hanging out and doing potluck. I still have to figure out what we'll take to share, I've already pulled out some beef to go on the grill. We'll be taking Mister out with us, we have a nice spot picked out to bury him. It's above the pond and right near where Patches and Adric are buried. It's a very pretty spot. Mister will like it. Friday night I mixed the leftover potato stuff with chopped up pork roast, topped with real chedder cheese and tossed that in the oven. Since I had the oven going, I put in 10 of the biggest potatos I had in the bag. Those I baked and when they were done, cut them in half, scooped out the potato and set the skins aside. I mixed the potato with some garlic powder, italian seasoning and a coupel cups of shredded chedder. I then filled the potato skins with the mixture and put them back inthe oven for another 15 minutes. Took them out and let them

In Case of Emergency

From Snopes.com: In Case of Emergency Claim: Paramedic advocates cell phone users store emergency contact information in their address books, but such entries leave phones vulnerable to attack. Status: Multiple — see below: * Paramedic advocates cell phone users store emergency contact information in their address books: True. * "ICE" entries in stored in cell phones allow viruses to access those units and drain them of their credits: False. -snip- ---- Hubby sent me an item that came to him via email. This is a darned good idea. I've now got a couple in case of emergency (ICE) numbers in my cell now. I have mine labled 1 ICE Home and the other 2 ICE Hubby cell. If hubby isn't at home he has his cell. Even at home he has his cell. By numbering them they default tothe top of my address book. The site gives the hint to put a space in front of the entry and that will also default to the top of the list. It is also a darned good idea to have a card

A bit cooler today

Currently 87F, getting very windy and partly cloudy. It hit at least 100F yesterday according to most of the thermometers in town (some were showing as high as 104F). Not sure what the official high was, the weather station is out at the airport surrounded by lots of wheat fields and tends to be a few degrees cooler then in town.They are still predicting thunderstorms today with not a whole lotta rain in them. We're still under a red flag warning for fire, even tho the humisity has rised a lot. Things are still very dry and we've had no rain in a while. Couldn't stand the thought of even thinking of turning the stove on yeasterday, even if we waited til sundown, so we hit Winco and grabbed some fried chicken, 6 pack of beer and some ginger ale. Got home and had shandy's (half and half of beer and ginger ale) and ate chicken. Hubby hid out in the office with the air conditioner. I went in every once in a while, but for some reason I couldn't stand being in the cold

PHEW!!!

It's a scorcher today, currently 94F and they are predicting 96F as our high. The area is also under a fire watch, humidity is 10%. They are predicting possible thunderstorms tonight and tomorrow, hopefully if there are any there is LOTS of rain in them. Otherwise we're looking at dry lightning and very dry fuel. Update on the ice cream. The splenda version freezes a lot harder then the sugared version when placed in the freezer overnight. I was able to scoop the regular with very little problems (and it had been in the freezer since Monday night), but the splenda version was darned difficult, I ended up making flakes. Out side of that it still tasted good. Had friend over last night to try them. In a side by side comparison she prefered the regular over the splenda, tho she did say if she hadn't been comparing them she says the splenda version was good, tho not quite as rich as the regular. I'm thinking if I was going to make the ice cream to have and store, I'l

RIP James Montgomery Doohan

James Doohan, best remembered as Scotty from Star Trek, the original series, died this morning at 5:30am at his home in Redmond WA. A number of years ago he came to the UI to give a talk, I got to meet him afterwards and he was the sweetest guy I'd ever met. We're going to miss you Jimmy.

July 20, 1969

On this date in 1969, the first manned moon landing happened. I was in 2nd grade at the time, living on base at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard where my dad was stationed. When Apollo 11 was launched, my parents got my brother and me out of bed in the wee hours of the morning and plopped us in front of the black and white TV and we watched in total facination as history happened right before our eyes. When the astronauts arrived a the moon, we were again glued to our TV set. Check out Google today, they are honoring the day with a neat header. If you clicke the header it will take you to Google Moon . You can see where all the moon missions landed and if you zoom in you can see what the moon is made of.

Run, don't walk to your nearest bookstore or library

and lay your hands on the Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich if you haven't already read them. Stephanie is a gal from the Burg who lands a job working as a bail bonds enforcer (bounty hunter) by blackmailing her cousin Vinnie. Complicating everything is she isn't the best bounty hunter in the world, is afraid of guns and can't choose between Ranger and Joe Morelli, the two guys in her life (tho personally I think she should just chose both :D ). Rounding out the cast of her adventures are her Grandma Mazur, Lulu the ex-hooker and the assorted residents of the Burg and her own family. The series is up to number 11, Eleven on Top and even tho I haven't finished reading it, I am anxiously awaiting number 12 hehehehehehe

MMMMMMM YUMMMM!!!

Ran the first batch of ice cream thru the ice cream maker. OMG!!!!!!!!! Talk about chocolate orgasm, this ice cream was better then sex :D This was better then Haagen Daz by any margin. I'll be running the batch I made with splenda thru the machine tonight. I probably could have done it last night, the freezer bowl was still pretty frozen (when I washed it out, the water that touched it kept freezing to it. I tried to dry it and the towel froze to it and I had a fun time getting it off LOL). I really do need to get a 2nd freezer bowl. I found one at the Cuisinart site for $25, looked to see if I could find it elswhere online, most of them listed the bowl at a higher price. Have to see if I can find it locally, tho we'd gotten the ice cream maker from Gottschalks online. May have to check around next time when we go to Spokane. Didn't make it to the big garden last night, too hot. B and I will go over this evening as both of us need to put in some time there. I do want to

Il Divo

The first time I'd heard of these guys was on the PBS Captiol 4th show. The minute they started to sing, they reached deep down inside me and tugged. The tears started flowing, the song was so beautiful. Hubby has a client who has their CD and he borrowed it from her today. I may wear it out tonight, I've been playing it over and over. Very rarely does an artist or groupbring me to tears like this, not even Luciano Pavarotti and I love to hear him sing. They are definatley on my must get my own copy and everything they put out list.

Flamingo Day

There needs to be a pink flamingo smilie. HEY BRAVENET WE NEED A PINK FLAMINGO SMILIE :D Today is supposed to be a scorcher, luckily I'm in air conditioning and hubby has it set up in the office. I have 2 batches of Alton Brown's ice cream mix in the fridge today. One regular as written, the other with splenda instead of sugar. I'll pop one in the ice cream maker tonight, the other will go in tomorrow. I've got banana chips in the dehydrator, they are taking forever to dry. One batch is plain banana, the other was dipped in honey I thinned out with water. Going to stop at the big garden on the way home tonight and cut spinach and do a little weeding and some watering. My garden at home will get some attention later in the evening.

3:08 am

and I'm still awake :P SIGH!!!!! Had a nice mug of hot cocoa and am only mildly sleepy. Luckily this time its a weekend night, so I can sleep in no problem. But this is getting really, really old. Hit the grocery store again, this time Rosauers. Got chicken hindquarters, 2 packages for the price of one. So we got 8 pounds for $5. Not quite as good a price on what we usually get at Winco, but they haven't had the bags 'o hindquarters for a few weeks now. We did go back to Winco to pic up some peanuts, bananas and the half & half and heavy cream for the ice cream. We looked for the dairy at Rosauers and about had a heart attack over the pices. The dairy at Winco was half what Rosauers wanted. Made a big pot of sweet corn and shredded chicken chowder. It was one of hubby's favorite at a little restaurant he used to go to in China Town when he still lived in Vancouver BC Canada. What I came up with was pretty close. No measurements I'm afraid, but the recipe I c

He got dosed with the flea and tick stuff this morning. He really doesn't like that, it goes on the back of his neck where he isn't supposed to get to it, tho he doesn't seem to have a problem scratchig at the stuff with his back foot. The stuff seems to work, we haven't found any ticks on him since the frist dose last month. It's the Hartz stuff, whihc is way cheaper then the stuff you get fromt he vets. We were looking at $45 a month for 3 cats (tho when researching we discovered you can put any of that stuff on elderly, sick kitties), The Hartz stuff was $8 for 3 doses, so for 2 cats for 3 months we paid $16. KiKi is the next kitty to get dosed. Never made it to Lewiston yesterday. The budget was going to stretch thin as it was, not too mention we weren't up for high 90F temps. So we did our grocery shopping at WinCo. Got just about everything we needed, except the half and hald and heavy cream we needed for making ice cream. That will probably have to wait

Lazy day so far

Slept in til 10:30am, got up, grabbed a cup of coffee and have been surfing since. I did get the bed made and some laundry in the wash. I went to get dressed and discovered I had NO clean cotton undies. I was down to sexy frillies, which are fine, but when the weather is already 85F outside (and 86F inside) I want comfy cotten undies. Hubby is crunchng the budget to se if we can go down to Lewiston today to hit Costco. Looks like we might not be able to go. If not, we'll do some shopping locally and hope the next paycheck will let us go down. If we go, we'll take Ms Ella so we can do a photo shoot on the way down. Still working on the photo shoot to get pics of her and her friends for the We Are Not Afraid site. I would like to get it somewhere that is identifiably Idaho. Have to give it some thought. We are thinking either the east entrance to the university or one of the welcome to Moscow signs.

Kill Bill vol.1

Watched it last night. All I can say is WOW!!!! Very enjoyable movie, tho I'm still going to slap Tarantino upside the head for a comment I heard him say in an interview that parents should take their very young children to see it. It is NOT an appropriate movie for children. We are going to keep an eye out for volume 2, I want to see if The Bride gets her revenge. Hubby put his old mother board in my computer. He got a new one, along with some other hardware for his 'puter. He's getting to digital archiving (to transfer tapes and records onto CD so people can listen to their favorite music without fear of ruining the original media. Esp items that are no longer in print) and we will figure out how much he'll charge people once he gets everything figured out and up and running. We already have a standing request for transfering family videos from several friends. In the meantime my computer is now a bit faster, Diablo II runs smoother and I have more memory then I know

PHEW!!!!!!

The fire dept just left. A little while ago they drove up. Now the library is right next to the chemistry building and we are used to seeing the fire dept show up several times a year for various reasons. Once in a while they come here, but usually the fire alarms in the building have been triggered. Since we didn't have any alarms, I figured they were going next door. Nope. They were gathered at OUR front door. Our stack supervisor popped out to find out what was happening as no one had come in yet. She talked with them for a few and came back in to say they'd gotten an alarm from the telephone room in the basement for a hydrogen leak. So the guys come thru and the chief said we may have to evacuate. So we wait and wait and wait. Probably not much more the 5 minutes or so, but it seemed much longer. While I was waiting I gathered my stuff up just in case. They finally come back up and say that there was someone down ther refilling batteries and neglected to tell anyone. Some

Stocking up for winter

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Or at least for later in the summer: My first attempt at preserving my garden veggies. These should taste yummy later on in the year. The brocoli turned out yummy. I broke up the florets and popped them in the microwave for 30 seconds. Didn't need to put butter or anything on them. Next spring I am definately going to plant LOTS more and a lot earlier. Had another bout of not getting to sleep last night. Seems to be a once a week thing of late. Finally got up and surfed for a short time, then booted up Diablo II and played that for a couple for hours. Got back to bed after 3am. Very, very sleepy today. The air conditioner is going to stay in the office for at least the week. It isn't that heavy to move, but it is a pain in the ass to do so. If we keep the bedroom closed and the reflective insulation covering the windows, that should help keep it a bit cool. We can open it up once the sun starts going down and set the fan up in the window and let it run until bedtime. It is

From my garden

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My day lilies are blooming: To my surprise, I actually got some brocoli: Tonights harvest: The salad will be part of tonights dinner, as will the little bit of brocoli we have so far. Next year I'm going to get it in earlier and plant a lot more. The peas I will blanch and then seal in the vacuum bags and start saving it for later. I should be getting more peas soon, they seem to be producing great guns and some more that I planted a few weeks ago are finally sprouting. Now I just need to get out and water them every night.

I've said it before, I'll say it again

It should be mandatory by law that doctors put posters of Tom Selleck or some other sexy guy up on the ceilings of their exam rooms. If one is going to be flat on their back for "THAT" exam, one should have something to keep ones mind of of it. Luckily for me, my doc hates having that exam as much as I do, so she gets it over with as fast and as painless as possible. So last night I made sure I had dinner done and eaten well before 8pm and then nothing but water afterwards as I was supposed to fast. Turns out I didn't need to, I've had enough blood drawn in the last 6 months that my blood sugar numbers and cholestrol numbers are fairly current. Doc says they are absolutely perfect and she doesn't want to check my cholesterol again until after I finally do something in regards to the thyroid. I will be dropping in there on the 21st to get my thyroid panels done and a white blood count to see what things are doing on the medication. This at least gives me time to f

I hereby daclare, Mondays are Pink Flamingo days

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Mondays are icky days, so spend the time with pink flamingos to brighten ones day:

Crap!

The news is they've positively identified the remains in Montana as those of Dylan Groene. At least his family is now going to be able to go for closure.

Lazy today

Sorta busy weekend, when I haven't been sleeping LOL About the only thing I really plan on doing today is getting the living room in better shape, tho it is a matter of picking up a bit of clutter and finding new places to store a couple items. Then it is vacuuming time. The kitchen is pretty much done, a few dishes to do and that is it. Maybe mop the floor. Friday I cut up a 6 pound beef bottom roast and put it into Alton's jerky marinade. Marinaded it over night and yesterday put it in the dehydrator. Since there was so much I did it in two batches. When it was done I stored it in a container in the fridge. This morning I split it into 4ths and vacuum sealed 3 of them and those are stashed for furture snacks. Been updating my Accuchef cookbook. Finally figured out al the ways to put recipes in it from other sources. So I've been going thru my archive of emails from the Accuchef users list and importing recipes when I have a moment. I also inputed all the recipes for th

London

Positive thoughts and prayers winging it's way to London. I think the dickless bully boys who perpetrated this crime are going to find themselves surprised when the British refuse to roll over and play dead. Nastier people have tried that before and failed.

I wonder

if Idaho accepts applications to be on a firing squad, I'll bring my own rifle and ammunition. News on the Groene case is horrifying. Court documents released the notes from the officer who interviewed Shasta about what happened. Her answers place Duncan at the scene of the murders and the kidnapping of her and her brother. He took the children and repeatedly molested them. They are still awaiting DNA evidence from the remains found in Montana. If they are Dylan's, Duncan will be up on 4 counts of murder along with the kidnapping counts. Right now he's sitting in jail on the kidnapping charges, no bail and a lot of people on the outside wanting to see his head on a pike. The police are being as methodical and as by the book as they can in the investigation, esp to see if there was anyone else involved (Shasta's statements say he was the only one she saw). They are doing evrything they can to make sure this slime doesn't walk for any reason. This morning didn't

Can't sleep again

I've been having more problems of late getting to sleep, this is getting old. So far the news on Shasta is pretty good. She's been reunited with her father. The news on Dylan is not so good. They found some remains in the Lolo Natinoal Forest over in Montana. Watching the news tonight, the folks at a gas station over in Kellogg ID are beating themselves when it was discovered on a security cam that the slime ball and Shasta had been there 6 hours before she was found in Coeur d'Alene. They shouldn't be beating themselves over it. I very much doubt anyone would think that slimy, piss poor of an excuse of DNA would be so brazen as to walk into a public place like that with a little girl whose pic is plastered all over North Idaho. Weekend went fine. We got the old fridge out and the kitchen rearrainged. Hauled in some untility shelves for the time being, until I can get some better ones for the kitchen. Harvested some of the sugar snap peas, I think I have enough to

Shasta has been found!

Shasta was found at the Coeur d'Alene Denny's restaurant about 2:30 am this morning. The man she was with is a convicted sex offender from North Dakota. He is now under arrest and Shasta is safe. So far there is no sign of her brother Dylan. Police fear that he is dead. CNN story here.

Amber Alert

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Mood: sticky to keep up top Here is another photo of Shasta: An updated photo of Dylan: There is an Amber Alert for these 2 North Idaho children. Shasta Groene stands 3-foot-10, weighs 40 pounds and has long auburn hair and hazel eyes. Her brother, Dylan Groene, is 4 feet and 60 pounds, with a blond crewcut and blue eyes. They are missing after an apparent triple homicide at their home. Edited to add: Kootenai County Sheriff's Office (Idaho) 1-208-446-1300 Kootenai County Sheriff's tip line at 208-446-2292 or 208-446-2293. You can also email investigators at kcgovtips@hotmail.com. FBI Offers $100,000 Reward 6/30/05: Still no sign or any clues as to what happened to these children. I've changed the date for this post again with hopes they will be found safe by the end of July. They've bene missing way too long, SOMEONE knows what happened to them. I dearly hope and pray they will come forward a