• Photos and Shutterblogs - The Never-Ending Bloga - Uncategorical Weirdness

    Am I The Last Person To Discover Google+’s Enhanced Photos Feature? Now with MOAR LOLPeacocks

    I was cleaning out mail from some of my Gmail.com accounts and realized that even deleting almost all of the unwanted mail still left 11G of stuff stored in there. At some point, I must have enabled the photo backup feature and WHOA. It had EVERYTHING on my iPhone, everything in Picasa. If you take a lot of pictures of a Christmas tree from the same angle, you get an animated, twinkly Tannenbaum (with people dancing around it if they’re decorating). It’s actually kind of a pretty effect – Christmas Eve 2013, singing Silent Night with guitar accompaniment, you get…

  • Hawaii - Traveling Along, We're Adventurers

    Maui: Sun And Fun Finally

    More vacation meanderings – again, this post will go live about the time we return. Wednesday, 19FEB 2014 The tradewinds dropped the last couple of days, and today, finally, it dawned clear and sunny. After some essential sitting-around-the-condo-drinking-coffee time, we packed ourselves up and went a few miles north to Kapalua Bay to snorkel for the first time this trip. I own a snorkeling guide and also found a copy of Maui Revealed in the bookshelves, so was able to identify a good first snorkel spot quickly. We’ve been to Kapalua before, and although there’s a parking lot it usually…

  • Hawaii - Traveling Along, We're Adventurers

    Maui: Beginnings

    By the time this post goes live, we’ll be home, or almost home. On most trips, I start out declaring that I’m going to blog often and keep up to date, and then I fall off after about 2 days and never post Part II or whatever. Mostly this is because we get busier the later it gets in the trip, and partly it’s because David doesn’t think it’s a good idea to blog about not being home, because burglars or something (as if they read my blog, everyone knows my only readers are me, my sister, and a bunch…

  • Dear Mom - Hot Off The Presses - Only in Utah...

    The Souper Bowl Of Caring Is Full Of Tears

    You may have heard about the Utah elementary school that took lunch trays away from kids whose lunch accounts had negative balances, after a Salt Lake “nutrition manager” came in to investigate why so many accounts were in arrears. This bean counter is now on leave, and the cafeteria manager and workers are being blamed for handling the directive badly. Yes, they let the kids build up the negative balances, so they could EAT THE SAME LUNCH as the other kids. And then they scrambled to apply what is reportedly district policy, because in Utah authority is generally not questioned,…

  • Hot Off The Presses - Parish: Holy Moly (ECUSA) - Politics, Schmolitics

    Remembering Pete Seeger: The Banks Of Marble

    My friend the late Fr. Paul Brouillette was huge Seeger fan and fellow banjo player; he once played and sang this in church. He was that kind of guy, and today he welcomes his hero to the celestial jam session. I once heard a young Occupy Chicago protester sing it via a live Internet feed. Still relevant, still rousing the rabble, Seeger’s passing means the banksters have one less whiny folksinger to criticize them.

  • Dear Mom - Food, Glorious Food

    Carrot Cake Recipe : Alton Brown : Srsly Good Eats

    Carrot Cake : Alton Brown So this was the recipe that I started with to take to Mitch and Gloria’s on New Year’s Day. I originally thought I’d bake it as a bundt cake, but didn’t have a pan. However, I did have a springform pan, and I jazzed it up with some chopped pecans and a little orange juice/butter/rum sauce that I reduced down by half. I didn’t really have a recipe for the sauce, just started with about half and half rum and orange juice, with a couple of tablespoons (or more) of butter, with just a little…

  • Dear Mom - Today

    Happy Snowy New Year

    A cold white blanket of snow covers Burbclavia; we managed to get to the gathering place to celebrate the new year with family and eat yummy chili with all the extras, and the obligatory lox ‘n bagels. My nephew Josh is in town and brought his girlfriend Ashley; FIL Shel and Linda made the trek and so did my BIL Dan and his girlfriend Tammy. Mitch and Gloria put on a really nice buffet and of course Rosie the pooch princess provided entertainment. Things got raucous (or at least very loud) when Josh showed us this crazy trivia game called…

  • Books - Movies

    Reading and Writing and Eating and Sleeping

    Not too long ago, I got an email from Amazon: We’re pleased to announce that the Amazon Associates program is again open to residents of the State of Illinois. We’re now able to re-open the program because the Illinois State Supreme Court recently struck down legislation that had forced Amazon to close the program to residents of Illinois. Amazon strongly supports federal legislation like the Marketplace Fairness Act that’s now pending before Congress, which is the only constitutional way to resolve interstate sales tax collection issues. Well, now. It seems like I have to re-apply if this email is to…