Yesterday and b2s “kidnapped” me so I wouldn’t be home alone all day. It was fun. We ended up going to a Lone Star Steakhouse for lunch with (had planned on going to Outback, but apparently they aren’t open for lunch). They have tastey chicken sandwiches. Afterwards mj went back to work and the rest of us went to a bookstore, stopped at the liquor store, and then went back to their place to hang out for a bit.

Around 6 we left to go to and ‘s place for movie night. We spent most of the night playing Sceneit? and drinking. I had a few of Bae’s tastey-secret-recipe vanilla Dr Pepper drinks, and was pretty toasted through the second half of the game (and did better that way). Michael showed up just after 11, and we stayed until a little after 1.

When I got home I brushed my teeth and went right to bed. Probably should have had more water, I felt awful this morning ;) I’m better now, it was worth it.

An ‘Ogg’ is a tactical maneuver from the network game ‘Netrek’ that has entered common usage in a wider sense…

Vorbis, on the other hand is named after the Terry Pratchett character from the book Small Gods. – http://www.xiph.org/xiphname.html

After reading Small Gods a few months back I wondered where they got the names. Nanny Ogg is a character in the Discworld series and so is Vorbis, coincidence? Today I finally took the time to look it up.

Last week, while waiting in a lobby, I picked up a magazine and started flipping through it. I came upon an article about a blogger who signed up with “Google Adsense” and today makes $150/day off of advertising on his popular blog, this was enough for him to quit his day job. Wow, cool, I certainly don’t have the kind of traffic that’ll pull down $150/day, but I do get my fair share.

This past weekend I signed up for Google Adsense. You get paid per click, based on a secret formula. I threw ads up on a bunch of my website pages to see what would happen. Do people actually click these things? The short answer is yes, some do. Of all the ads I put up about 0.7% clicked through. And how much did I make from Saturday-Thursday? $3.27 so far (see report).

Now I’m working on fine-tuning it. Google doesn’t automatically tell you which sites people click through links on, but you can set it up to monitor up to 60 specific pages for clicking activity, which I’m going to start doing. I don’t want ads that are completely irrelavant to my page topics there, and although google is usually pretty smart, the ad for eyeliner on my Lilo splash screen how-to was a bit much, so I took it down. I also took down a bunch that I figured people visiting my page wouldn’t be interested in, which made almost my entire “computers” section of my site ad free. Most of my “writing” pages still have ads, and I kept all ads on WallaceAndGromit.net, because they are all on topic and I think people would honestly be interested in them (even I’m interested in them, it’s all for cool wallace and gromit merchandise! I suspect a majority of my money comes from it.).

Google doesn’t send a check until you get up to $100, so it’ll be a long time before I receive a check in the mail, but this is a fun project. Google Adsense is neat!

Something that is not so neat is President Bush. I wasn’t going to listen to the State of the Union address because without much intoxication I knew it would just piss me off. But we left PLUG last night, and got in the car just in time for it to come on NPR. Sigh. Well I was right about it upsetting me, I HATE THAT GUY! Rawr.

Michael left this morning and will be gone until late tomorrow night at a mountain retreat with work. It’s nice to have some time completely alone I guess, but sleeping alone sucks. Tomorrow some friends are “kidnapping” me for the day, and then we’ll go to movie night, which should be fun, I won’t be stuck at home all alone for another day %)

It’s lateish, I should find something for dinner.

Since I have cut beef out of my diet again I decided it’s time to once again expand my dinner menu. Right now we eat:

Tacos: homemade soft tortilla shells, refried beans or Morningstar Farms meatless crumbles, lettuce, tomato, chedder cheese, sour cream.

Spaghetti: homemade tomato sauce, cooked pasta, parmesean cheese, side salad, garlic bread

Cheese Ravioli homemade tomato sauce, cheese ravioli, side salad, garlic bread

Spinach Lasange: no boil lasangne noodles, homemade tomato sauce, mozerella, ricotta, spinach, egg

Rice and Vegetables: Rice, Parma Rosa sauce packet for rice, steamed veggies (generally broccoli and green beans), fresh biscuits

Swordfish Steaks: Swordfish steaks, cooked in a frying pan with garlic and butter sauce, mashed potatoes

Baked Potatoes: Baked potatoes, sour cream, cheddar cheese, chives, steamed broccoli.

Boca Burgers: Boca burgers and rolls, swiss, lettuce, tomato, onion, condiments, french fries or macaroni and cheese

Chicken & Broccoli Manicotti: Cooked manicotti, chicken, broccoli, cream of chicken soup, bread crumbs, egg, Colby-Monterey Jack cheese, milk

And then we have pizza once a week or so, usually on Friday with friends. So 10 meals. It gets a bit boring, and when my main courses get boring I look for other foods to entertain my tastebuds, which is usually a deliciously fattening dessert. Bad!

When I went to a used bookstore with a couple friends on friday I hit the cookbook section. I’ve browsed online for recipes in the past, but never had very much luck, there are just too many recipe sites, and too many people contributing, it’s impossible to sort the good from the bad, and very hard to just browse through a bunch of different types recipes. So I figured I could pick up a few cookbooks to give me some direction. I browsed for a bit and picked up The Art of Cooking for Two, which has a few recipes I might try, like “Kidnapper’s Cassorole” and “Baked Broccoli Egg Supper” and “Chicken Tandoori.” It also has some easy fish recipes, which is cool since usually I just cover fish in garlic and butter and cook it in my frying pan, which is delicious, but only one meal. I also picked up Sunset’s Vegetarian Cookbook. This is probably my favorite purchase, I’ve found a bunch of recipes in here that I’d like to try. But when I picked it up my friends said “eww” … and I don’t blame them, look at the cover (click to enlarge):

What is that disgusting looking roll thing? There are tons of delicious recipes inside the book, and photos that are MUCH more colorful and appetizing. Strange that they picked that one, perhaps they are trying to keep the vegetarian cooking secrets! But it is a great cookbook, I’m looking forward to making some Mushroom-crust Quiche, Sesame Tofu Sticks and Cheddar cheese popovers, yum!

For many years I had self-esteem problems. It’s a pretty common thing, especially for geeks, so I don’t feel so bad about admitting it anymore.

Since leaving high school in 1999 I’ve tried to overcome the self-esteem issues. I had a breakthrough almost 4 years ago when recovering from a bad breakup, for a couple months I spent time focusing on how great I am, and built my self esteem up to a point to which I could finally be passed off as normal. This change in self-esteem has touched all aspects of my life and relationships, and in the past couple years I’ve gone even further, and today I can easily say that I’m very proud of myself and happy with how I’ve “turned out” in life so far.

There are some things that I can’t seem to convince myself of, like that I am good at writing. I touched upon this briefly in an entry a couple weeks ago, when a publishing house representative told me I had a talent for writing. Just today a friend of mine read over a report I’m putting together and said “you definately have a flair for writing!”

But it’s not getting through. Every time I read something I’ve written I think “wow this sucks, I can’t write.” I get nervous about my grammar, my spelling, run-on sentences, being coherent, using words like “so” and “anyway” and parenthesis too much.

I think this stems from when I was very young. I was always very good at puzzles, so in Kindergarden teachers thought I would do very well in school, but when I got into first grade I had trouble learning to read and my parents were told that I had dyslexia. This didn’t come as too much of a shock, because both my parents are dyslexic, and they were just happy that I was in a good school that could treat it properly. Until I was in 3rd grade I was in special ed classes, and then they declared that they had done as much as they could for me and let me go back with the rest of my class. I do admit they had done a good job, but I forever did lousy in english. I always thought I sucked at anything related to writing.

So (There I go again! Using “so” all the time! And now parenthesis! Arg!) I’m trying to find ways to overcome this loathing of my own writing. Looking back at some of my journal entries from 2002 has helped, I’ve definately improved since then. But what else can I do to convince myself I don’t suck? And why is my brain being so bad about accepting this?

Michael made a fire downstairs, going to snuggle by it and read for a bit now.

Today Michael took me to The Franklin Institute! I’ve wanted to go since I saw a PBS special about it a few months ago, and since both of us were feeling restless here at home we figured it’d be a good day.

And it was! Even with all the kids running underfoot I had a really nice time. Got to climb through The Giant Heart and see all the rest of cool exhibits. I think my favorite part of the day was visiting the planetarium, I love planetariums and I hadn’t been to one in years. When the actual museum closed we ended up going to see Forces of Nature in the IMAX, and I have to say that I was pretty disappointed, probably because we watch too many documentaries so we were bored with their dumbed down presentation of volcanoes, earthquakes and tornados.

It was a great day %)

*Yawn* I was going to write more but I’m so tired.

My feet get cold. Dead cold. I think I inherited bad circulation from my mother. When my feet are cold my whole body is cold, so I often wear socks. I am not a big fan of socks, they aren’t thick enough, what I needed was slippers! So for the past few months I’ve been looking for some good slippers, I found them at LLBean.com. Last week I ordered myself a pair of original style Wicked Good Slippers. They arrived today.

(I’m also wearing my L. L. Bean flannel pajamas in that, yay Maine!)

These slippers are wicked good.

Tomorrow I have the day off. I’ll spend the morning doing work-related stuff (working on and printing my resume yet again, talking with the temp agency and such), then in the afternoon I’m going out with a couple friends for Mexican food %d Then in the evening it’s movie night! Yay!

Last night I was finishing up work, packing up my bag and walked to the front door. It was snowing.

SNOWING? That wasn’t in the forecast!

Worst of all, it was 5 pm, and traffic in this area is bad.

Did I say bad? It’s worse than that. Traffic in the Philadelphia area can be a nightmare, and the currenty job I’m on happens to be in a traffic epicenter. When it’s not rush hour it takes about 25 minutes to get to where I am working, which isn’t bad. But during rush hour it takes at least an hour, most of which is spent in very slow stop and go traffic.

It took us a half hour to go .4 mile last night.

This morning I got up and called the snow line at the company, they weren’t opening until 9:00 because of the snow. “So we’ll leave at 8, no problem.” I thought.

At 9:45 I wasn’t so sure. Ended up calling the temp agency telling them I wouldn’t make it in. We still hadn’t gotten there and Michael had to go to work too! It was such a mess. Not to mention the foul mood it’s put me in. How can people stand to be in traffic for 2 hours? I can’t imagine working in that location full time.

I’ll be working there again tomorrow, but my hours are earlier, which means I have to get up earlier, bleh. I hope the traffic is better an hour earlier.

When I was 13 I started getting very severe heartburn. I was lucky to have a father very familiar with acid reflux to notice the symptoms and show me the bottle of tums. After one especially notable spaghetti dinner, where my chest hurt so much that I cried, I finally let my mother set up a doctor’s appointment for me.

Because my father had acid reflux, and the average time of onset is early teens, that’s what the doctor diagnosed me with. He suggested that I change my diet (hard when you’re 13) and keep some tums handy. When Pepcid AC (the first preventative heartburn drug to hit the over the counter market) came out the doctor told me I should get into the habit of taking it an hour before I eat anything that gave me heartburn. He also told me that surgery was an option if the heartburn continued to be “makes me cry” bad.

All through high school I carried around Pepcid AC and had a pocketful of tums, I just got used to it.

After I left home I stuck with it, when I lived in NY same thing. But while I was living in NY another stomach ailment showed up, lactose intolerance. I’d always had trouble with dairy (I had already cut back on it when I was younger because they thought it had something to do with my migranes), but this was a real stomach problem with it, gas and upset stomach. I decided to limit my dairy intake even more.

Then I went to a friend’s father’s birthday and had a delicious steak. I was sick for 2 days.

Then I went out with another friend to get a Rochester “burger garbage plate.” I was sick for over a day.

Wait, I see a pattern here, my stomach has problems with beef! Looking back there are more times when I can see that’s what caused whatever sickness I was having, but it’s with these two that I finally made the connection.

When I moved here to Philadelphia and moved in with Michael I cut all beef and pork from my diet. We began eating healthier, cooking our own food. We still ate out often and a bottle of rolaids followed. But then we started not eating out so much. About 4 months ago I realized that the same bottle of rolaids had been in the bathroom cabinet for months, that’s unheard of! I used to go through a bottle every few weeks. I was feeling so much better not having heartburn so often that I even stopped my 10 year habit of carrying around anacids everywhere.

I felt so good that I started eating pepperoni and beef again. Boy did I miss pepperoni pizza, and steak? MmmMmm! I missed steak. It seemed like things were going good, I was feeling good, and expanding my diet felt really great.

Slowly I started taking more anacids. On New Years I got some really bad heartburn when I was drinking. This friday my heartburn was almost enough to ruin my night, and with too much dairy on top of it I was forced to go to bed. Now I’m back to getting heartburn a few times a week! Damn it!

So it looks like I’ll need to go back to my no beef or pork diet again. Giving up pepperoni and steak once was hard, doing it again… sigh. I have a vegetarian cookbook that I got from my parents, a lot of grain-based meals that I might want to try out. I need to avoid too much dairy and too much soy as well, since both give me stomach problems when I eat too much of them.

I hate my stomach.

The snow started a little before 10 am yesterday, and is just now stopping. We ended up with 10 inches (25.4 cm).

I spent part of the day working on CSS stuff, I should really pick up a book on CSS, the stuff at csszengarden is pretty amazing, I’d like to make princessleia.com have such a dynamic design, so just changing a css file can completely alter the layout.

I also finished Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and started on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Still fun, they aren’t losing their charm (which surprised me). All while snuggled by the fire with Michael and Caligula.

Michael took this picture last night:

And I took this one of a tree outside this morning:

I love snow.

Ouch x_X

I know quite well that I shouldn’t have too much dairy, it makes my stomach miserable. But every once in a while I binge and relearn how awful it makes me feel, like last night.

It was movie night at our house, and we had a few friends over, we were having fun. I had 4 or 5 pieces of very cheesey pizza with some beer, then I started on the death drink: Milk + buttershots + kahula. Boy did that taste good going down, sorta like one of those Dunkin’ Donuts Coffee Coolattas. After I finished that I thought I’d try some orange juice and vanilla vodka.

About halfway through the orange juice and vanilla vodka drink my stomach started feeling upset. I went for the tums, ate about half a dozen, and sat back down with friends to watch Black Books. But my stomach really felt bad, so I got a glass of water, the bottle of tums, and went to “lie down for a little bit.” By the time I woke up it was 3 am, everyone had left, and Michael was coming to bed.

Now I feel… sore. I think I slept on my hand when I crashed into bed. I really didn’t drink that much, but the rollar coaster my stomach went through exhausted me.

Well it’s my own dumb fault. No more milk-based alcoholic drinks for me!

Today they’re predicting at least a foot of snow:

…WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT THROUGH SUNDAY MORNING FOR 10 TO 15 INCHES OF SNOW…

Yay! I’m so excited, we haven’t had a snow storm yet this year, and I love snow storms %D