Here are my little spooks:

This is from a few weeks ago, when Noah won the Raven Award for his class. The Raven Award is given to the student who exemplifies the characteristics of a Sam Houton Raven - character, kindness and several other attributes. In years past, the teachers gave out the awards, but this year, Mrs. Agnello is letting her students choose the Raven Award winner, and apparently my sweet Noah won by a landslide. Here Noah is with a couple of the starting players from the Bryan Vikings HS Football team, who presented the award to him:

We have a bevy of new bloggers in my channels at b5media - and I have to say, I love them all. Cyndi is a mixed media artist, and a girl after my own heart - Mom, check out her groovy hair - it will bring back memories. Hopefully good ones, but maybe not. Ha ha! Anyway, check out her blog at Layers Upon Layers, I am trying to help teach her about trackbacks, and send her one, so she can’t say she’s a virgin any longer!

I’m posting this for my daughter to read - and any other daughters out there who need an enlightening read. Marshall and I posed on AOL 5 or so years ago, as a 16 yr old girl, just to see what was out there. We were both horrified - it was very eye opening. Within about 20 minutes, we had about 17 men on IM, sending naked pictures and working it with everything they had. Scary, scary stuff. Read on:

After tossing her books on the sofa, she decided to grab a snack and get on-line. She logged on under her screen name ByAngel213. She checked her Buddy List and saw GoTo123 was on. She sent
him an instant message:

ByAngel213: Hi. I’m glad you are on! I thought someone was following me home today. It was really weird!

GoTo123: LOL You watch too much TV. Why would someone be following you? Don’t you live in a safe neighborhood?

ByAngel213: Of course I do. LOL I guess it was my imagination cuz’ I didn’t see anybody when I looked out.

GoTo123: Unless you gave your name out on-line. You haven’t done that have you?

ByAngel213: Of course not. I’m not stupid you know.

GoTo123: Did you have a softball game after school today?

ByAngel213: Yes and we won!!

GoTo123: That’s great! Who did you play?

ByAngel213: We played the Hornets. LOL. Their uniforms are so gross! They look like bees. LOL

GoTo123: What is your team called?

ByAngel213: We are the Canton Cats. We have tiger paws on our uniforms. They are really cool.

GoTo123: Did you pitch?

ByAngel213: No. I play second base. I got to go. My homework has to be done before my parents get home. I don’t want them mad at me. Bye!

GoTo123: Catch you later. Bye

Meanwhile … GoTo123 went to the member menu and began to search for her profile. When it came up, he highlighted it and printed it out. He took out a pen and began to write down what
he knew about Angel so far.

Read the rest after the jump…
Continue reading ‘Kids Online Safety’

My hubby sent me this from the fabulous office he is currently working in, at Virginia Living magazine - if you think YOUR day is bad, check out this poor mans day:

Rob is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers in Louisiana. He performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs. Below is an E-mail he sent to his sister. She then sent it to radio station 103.2 On FM dial in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, who was sponsoring a worst job Experience contest. Needless to say, she won.

Hi Sue,
Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother. Last week I had a bad day at the office. I know you’ve been feeling down lately at work, so I thought I would share my dilemma with you to make you realize it’s not so bad after all. Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job.

As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It’s a wetsuit. This time of year the water is quite cool. So what we do to keep warm is this: We have a diesel powered industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of equipment sucks the water out of the sea. It heats it to a delightful temperature. It then pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose, which is taped to the air hose. Now this sounds like a darn good plan, and I’ve used it several times with no complaints. What I do, when I get to the bottom and start working, is take the hose and stuff it down the back of my wetsuit. This floods my whole suit with warm water. It’s like working in a Jacuzzi.

Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my ass started to itch. So, of course, I scratched it. This only made things worse. Within a few seconds my ass started to burn. I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done. In agony I realized what had happened. The hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit. Now, since I don’t have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn’t stick to it. However, the crack of my ass was not as fortunate. When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into the crack of my butt.

Read the rest after the jump!
Continue reading ‘Having a bad day?’

Yum - Lunch today.

Cheese Fondue

1 tbsp. butter
4 oz. Gruyere-Emmenthale cheese
1 c. dry white wine
1 tbsp. flour
Pinch of cayenne
Pinch of nutmeg
4 tbsp. kirsch

Put in fondue dish and keep heated.

My directions - heat wine and kirsch and add a bit of garlic - bring to a boil in the top half of a double boiler. When it is boiling, set it over the bottom half of the double boiler, with boiling water in the bottom. Add the cheese (mixed with the flour) by the handful, stirring after each handful. Top off with pepper and nutmeg. Yummmmmmmmm. Serve with crusty bread chunks and apples, and eat in the kitchen at the stove (or pour into a fondue pot for a bigger production). Did I say yum?

I do lots of these, but found these via a forwarded email:

1. Reheat Pizza
Heat up leftover pizza in a non-stick skillet on top of the stove, set heat to med-low and heat till warm. This keeps the crust crispy. No soggy micro pizza. I saw this on the cooking channel and it really works.

2. Easy Deviled Eggs
Put cooked egg yolks in a zip lock bag. Seal, mash till they are all broken up. Add remainder of ingredients, reseal, keep mashing it up mixing thoroughly, cut the tip of the baggy, squeeze mixture into egg. Just throw bag away when done easy clean up.

3. Expanding Frosting
When you buy a container of cake frosting from the store, whip it with your mixer for a few minutes. You can double it in size. You get to frost more cake/cupcakes with the same amount. You also eat less sugar/calories per serving. [edit: I always add a half stick of butter and a bunch more powdered sugar to inflate a can of frosting. Works great!]

4. Reheating refrigerated bread
To warm biscuits, pancakes, or muffins that were refrigerated, place them in a microwave with a cup of water. The increased moisture will keep the food moist and help it reheat faster.

5. Newspaper weeds away
Start putting in your plants,work the nutrients in your soil. Wet newspapers put layers around the plants overlapping as you go cover with mulch and forget about weeds. Weeds will get through some gardening plastic they will not get through wet newspapers. [I do this too]

6. Broken Glass
Use a dry cotton ball to pick up little broken glass pieces of glass- the fibers catch ones you can’t see!

7. No More Mosquitoes
Place a dryer sheet in your pocket. It will keep the mosquitoes away.
Continue reading ‘Kickass Household Tips’

In reading a post today from Suzanne at BlogHer, I both agreed, and was a little alarmed (can you do that?):

So why do we have corporations jumping all over each other to show that they support women by donating to breast cancer charities when they can really do more good by working to prevent heart disease and strokes? The sick truth is that breast cancer is a sexy illness to exploit for fun and profit. Do women want to look at pictures of fatty hearts and clogged arteries when they shop for soup, yogurt, make-up, umbrellas, BMWs, Cartier watches, gym shoes, umbrellas or any other of the many fine products that donate during October to breast cancer causes if you buy it? Does anyone? Not so much. Is it easy to fit “Help fight chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the #3 illness killing women every year” into a marketing campaign? Not so much. However, the words “breast” and “cancer” sure catch the eye quickly, especially when marketers can add a curvy silhouette next to it. (Subliminal message: “Don’t let hot women die!”)

I certainly have noticed, this year above all prior years, the massive marketing campaign for pink products. And, well, I am a sucker for pink stuff, and if I can use that little voice in my head to rationalize buying that little thing - well, I will. This year, I have bought pink labelled Campbell’s Tomato Soup (which I buy and eat regularly anyway), some pink handled Kitchen Aid kitchen shears (which I was in the market for anyway - darned kitchen gremlins always stealing my shears), and some pink hot rollers and a pink straightening iron (was in the market as well - after all, I am a beauty writer). I somehow have managed not to toss my perfectly good Kitchen Aid mixer and go out and buy that precious pink one - but I have thought about devious ways to get away with it, I will admit. So anyway, back to the original topic - Suzanne has a good point there - the corporations are definitely increasing their visibility and their bottom lines by offering a percentage of profits towards breast cancer whatever (research, support, blah, blah, blah). However, breast cancer is one of the few cancers that does not seem to reflect someone’s lifestyle, and therefore those people who are victimized it are not much more than that - unknowing, unwilling victims. Fatty hearts and clogged arteries are things that are a direct result of ones lifestyle, and are preventable (for the most part). Lung cancer, a HUGE killer, is mostly related to your lifestyle as well (not always, I know this). Breast cancer appears to be a genetic problem - it runs in families, and if your mother had it, you are darned likely to have it too. Breast cancer kills - it is not just a little lump that you can lop off and you are all good. For these reasons, breast cancer deserves some support. I do not believe, as Suzanne apparently does, that it all boils down to “not letting hot women die.”

Besides my (yeah, maybe unhealthy) fetish for pink stuff, one of my dearest friends is a breast cancer survivor. She got sick right after my husband starting to mend from his battle with MRSA, and due to the fact that he needed so much care, I was unable to help Selina out as much as I would have normally. She has been through a long and painful, stressful, and emotional battle with her cancer, and 2 years later she is weaker in many ways (although stronger in others) and flatter chested (a staph infection ruined her chances of reconstruction), but she is a champion with a sunny disposition that you would be hard pressed to find in the healthiest person around. She and her husband were role models for my husband and I before she got sick (you have never met kinder, more helpful people in your life), and they are still the same people today. Weaker people would have let their problems defeat them, but not her. I offer my support of breast cancer research and support in honor of Selina, and in hopes that I can help repay her for the kindnesses that she continues to show to me and my family day after day.

So, it is with that spirit that I will continue to support and promote companies that support breast cancer causes, as I truly believe, that for me, it is the right thing to do. Pink out!

The master time waster has wasted a few more hours that might could have better off been used getting some shut eye. But anyway, Hsien, get off your Bloglines and come see my pretty new site. Hahahahaha!

Now, I need to add about 1,984,382 links to my blogroll, but that is going to have to be left to another day. Monday is calling, and I must prepare my pink outfit for lunch with Selina tomorrow - as we are getting passionate!

Aaah…Life is good. But Jeremy is back from Toronto. Check with me tomorrow about my Inbox.

Over the last couple of years I have gone from a brand spanking new blogger to - well I don’t know just what I am now. I blog, yes, but have become more involved with the admin side of b5media as well, hence my sore lack of updating on this blog and the others I write). I really love supporting the writers and helping out with the details that everyone else hates to do. Patient, detail oriented - sounds like a former nail tech to me. Anyway, Darren Rowse, one of the owners of b5media and the inspiration and possibly the driving force behind what has made problogging what it is today, wrote the kindest thing about me over the weekend, and I like to keep these niceties for posterity (and let the 5 relatives that read this blog know about it…ha ha). Darren included me in 5 bloggers he would like to meet:

Christina Jones - Ok - you’re all going to hit Christina’s link and wonder whether I’m a closet beauty product user - but it’s not the topic of her blog that makes me include her - it’s who she is. Christina is another b5 blogger/channel editor/project manager and is someone who has gone above and beyond the call. I admire her for many reasons but one of them is her ability to get things done. One of my many weaknesses is that I can be quite disorganized and impulsive - in this way CJ is my opposite. She’s also is compassionate, funny and passionate about the things she does.

I don’t know about funny, but passionate I have handled. And the funny thing is, I am probably one of the most impulsive people you ever knew. There have been several occasions at b5 where my passion has just about taken over my sense, but thankfully, in the end, all was right with the world. I just wanted to say thanks to Darren, you are always an inspiration with your genorosity, your knowledge and your kindness. I think we will get to meet sooner rather than later, and I can’t wait (and am darned sorry it isn’t on a groovy cruise this month!). And just admit it, I know you are a closet product junkie.

And for my five relatives who probably don’t know (or care??), b5media just took on some venture capital funding to the tune of $2,000,000, so watch out for great things to come! With any luck I will have an official title and a full time “real” job at b5media in the next couple of weeks, Project Manager. I am looking very forward to seeing where this goes, it will no doubt be quite a ride!! Come and join us!