Chicken and dumplings

Someone recently mentioned this dish and it made me crave it a lot. Cheap to make too, I used chicken frames, onions, garlic and carrot to make the base stock. Added some frozen peas, beans and corn. The dumplings are flour, baking powder, salt, milk and a touch of oil. Should be relatively low cal, it's certainly very tasty.

The most useless stats

I decided randomly to use feedburner for the blogs. Random cause I have no idea if that good or bad, just sounded like a consistent service people can use. So that's what you get if you use the Subscribe by Email box on the blogs. Feedburner has 'subscriber' stats. Most useless things I've ever seen. Period. It might vaguely relate to how times the feeds are checked for new stuff. But it's not actual subscribers because I refuse to believe that real subscribers go from 30 to 3 to 32 in the space of 3 days.

You call that a Staff Function?

My place of work is having a staff function. For $65 per person, you can go hang out with other staff people. They offer a live band for entertainment and finger food. There is a cash bar. Someone is hoping to make one hell of a profit here. Or for $65, you could go to a nice restaurant in town, have a good dinner and some wine or beer. It's a no brainer which appeals more to me. Give me a nice restaurant and proper dinner, not finger food and lots of people I don't know and won't want to talk to.

Worst game dialogues - LOL

The dialogues here are bad. The guy doing the faces is hilarious!

Grrrr

Blogger is currently semi-busted. I had to switch to old editor mode to make a post. And stop using blogger in draft, that is failing even more.

Sigh, I hate it when my tools go bust.

The tribute to Elizabeth Sladen --- Sarah Jane Smith

Video in two parts The first part The second part. Be warned, this may cause sniffles or worse.

More Mimi and Eunice

I adore Mimi and Eunice.

April has been a good month for stats

Warning - this is very boring.

I finally had a really decent month for hits across the various story blogs. For the first time ever, one topped 1000 for the month, more like 1200 and still climbing. Several others are well over 500. All of the ones I actually update are being looked at far more often this month then previously.

Will it continue? I hope so but there is no way to tell. If it stays up for a couple of months, I'll be such a happy happy camper. In the meantime, I'm pleased that a few more people finally discovered them.

I've never really cared if this blog is read or not, this is the random blog. Two of the other blogs are short story types and I expect the stats to drop when there is no story running. But the other three, well, it's nice to see they are gathering an audience. And the two short story ones have also had an extremely good month.

Spam email - I doubt he read that blog...

I ran across your blog (insert one of the story telling blogs here) and thought that it might be a good match for us.

We pay bloggers to write blog postings on their blogs and link those blog postings to our clients' websites. This improves our clients' rankings in the search engines, so they are willing to pay for your services.

If you had actually read the contents of the blog in question, you might ask the question of yourself, how exactly would a paid for blog posting fit here? Perhaps we should be discussing banners or text ads instead?

But no, clearly they did not read the blog in question. Because it would be painfully obvious that any paid for blog posting is going to stand out for what it is. A sell out.

Sorry, you can't offer enough money for that. No way.

How to steal like an artist

Another interesting article from the files of LifeHacker - How to steal like an artist

Some very interesting things.

29 ideas for staying creative

http://paulzii.tumblr.com/post/3360025995

An interesting post with some good ideas.

Next week == good

Starting Friday - public holidays on Friday, Monday and Tuesday. I've set up to take Friday of next week off so it's a 2 day week. And the next Monday is a public holiday so that is a 4 day week.

Maybe I'll have a chance to get caught up on the million and one things I mean to do...or maybe I'll procrastinate again. We'll see

This is me all over.

From http://mimiandeunice.com/2011/04/18/narcissist/

dropbox app

Well, I finally got with the program and started using my Dropbox - a way to upload files and share between multiple devices.

It is nice, I must admit. I started a little story text file on the iPad and uploaded it. Now I've edited it on the iMac and resaved. And it all worked fast and smooth.

Improvement on the dog situation

The one dog who was throwing up and not eating seems to be much better now. She rushes to the kitchen if you vaguely look like you might do something with food and she's nearly her old obnoxious self when getting ready for a walk.

The other dog needs his ears cleaned, which is a pain in the bum but nothing fatal.

It's a worry

We have two dogs, and they are 13 and 12 years old. For their size, that's a fairly old.

One of them has been throwing up and some nights this week refusing food. Dogs refusing food more than a day is a worry.

The other has been having problems with his ears but he's been prone to that for years.

Gotta love it

Originally found at So much pun

Can't stop the rain

I live in a place where we've had pretty dry years for quite some time.

This wet season has been seriously wet. At least some rain most days, several parks around have been lakes for a few weeks now.

And I've had enough.  Enough I say. Rain Rain, go away already.

Not that hard DAMNIT

Spell my name right! Especially if you are sending an email asking for a favor or information. It's only 4 freaking letters, how can you manage to miss it?

Easy steps to freaking yourself out

1. Go to local rainforest township to clear some plant debris from property
2. Develop a small itchy bite mark a day after step one
3. Remember that rainforests can have paralysis ticks
1. a paralysis tick nearly killed one of our dogs
2. tick bites itch like crazy
4. Now worry about is that bite a paralysis tick and did any travel home with us? Will one of the dogs get a tick?

Yasi did a lot of damage to trees to the Paluma property. And the house? One screen got damaged, a lamp shade fell to bits but that might have been ready to happen anyway.

My favourite cute news feeds

I love lots of these things

http://stuff.icanhascheezburger.com - general cute stuff
http://noms.icanhascheezburger.com - cute food

http://failblog.org/ Fail blog

most painful spam ever

 "blow up your penis now & see results in as little as 7 weeks Guaranteed"

Hmm, shouldn't that be blow up your penis now and feel the results instantly?

If penis enhancement drugs worked as advertised, men should need a third 'leg' along the front. :)

Cyclone Yasi

Was very big and quite nasty. But the eye didn't pass over town, and at the last I heard, no fatalities due to the storm. Lot's of damage. Power is out over a great deal of north Queensland at the moment. I have an iPad which I charged up just before the power failed. So I can stay in contact for awhile at least. But the main computer must wait for power to be restored over town. Our house had minor damage from the storm. Ross wants to check the roof. But it must mostly be ok or there would be more water around.

I am scared

There is a major cyclone building up off the coast of Queensland.
They anticipate it will be *very* large and *very* dangerous.

And the predictions have the eye going right over my city.

http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDQ65002.shtml

I can talk the talk

but fail at walk the walk.

I know that blogging is one of those things you mainly have to do for love. But I've gotten so accustomed to having comments on blog posts in my story blogs that I'm really nearly ready to abandon the lot of them.

After I cry about the whole thing that is. Sad, I know.

Definitely no fun

Living in north Queensland, we regularly have alerts about cyclones.

Currently there is one for Cyclone Anthony, still a fairly long way away but predicted to hit the coast almost directly over town.

Another good Mimi and Eunice comic

 I'm also really fond of several of the offerings from http://icanhascheezburger.com/

This includes LOLCats, LOLDogs, Very Demotivational, and failblog. They add up to at least one smile a day.

Cartoon for the day

Mimi and Eunice - definitely worth a read

Cute thing going around Facebook lately

The instructions

1 - Go to wikipedia and hit random. The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band. 2 - Go to quotationspage.com and hit random. The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album. 3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”. Third picture no matter what it is, will be your album cover. 4 - Use photoshop or similar (picnik.com is a free online photo editor) to put it all together. 5 - Post it with this text and tag the friends you want to join in.

Mine was
Band name - Secret Rendezvous
Title of the album - Marry your equal

And my first album would look like

That worked well.

Compelling reading

A friend told me about PostSecret years ago now. The secrets are sometimes sad, sometimes scary, sometimes too much information. Some are very simple postcards, others are elaborate pieces of art.

Telling those secrets must be heartbreaking sometimes and incredibly freeing at others. You may laugh, you may cry but you are likely to read every card from start to end.