Healthy Breakfast Part II

Spinach Egg White Omelet

For Elise: Egg white omelet with sauteed leeks, sweet pepper, bacon, spinach, cheddar cheese with a tomatillo, guajillo, garlic and coriander salsa and a San Diego tangerine from my sister, Terri‘s back yard.

For Josh: I had to one-up yesterday’s breakfast so today I made myself a jalapeno cheesburger topped with bacon and a fried egg. To make sure I was doing the healthy thing, I went the Atkins route and omitted the whole wheat pita bread.

I hate breakfast.

An adult living by adult rules

I will preface this by letting you all know that I was recently inteviewed by a writer from one of those big pregnancy websites regarding cooking and eating healthily during pregnancy.

At last night’s Christmas party, Elise ate cheese and crackers and an assortment of fresh fruits. I ate breaded stuffed mushrooms, chicken quesadillas and miniature open faced roast beef sandwiches with greasy cheese.

Elise had long since left for work by the time I rolled out of bed this morning and knowing her, she had some fresh fruits and grains for breakfast. I made myself a jalapeno cheeseburger for breakfast. I put it on whole wheat pita bread because that was the healthy thing to do. For lunch a couple hours later I had half a bag of Fruit Bowl Jelly Belly Jelly Beans and a Shiner Bock.

My kid is going to love me.

Rockin\’ Christmas Party

Elise and I went to see Rockin’ Christmas Party at the Zachary Scott Theatre this evening. The folks at OnRamp were nice enough to invite us and it was fun to hang out with those guys somewhere other than the conference room. They hosted a small cocktail party before the show and Elise and I were able to talk to OnRamp’s president, Chad for half an hour or so. He offered some great light-hearted and fun parenting advice.

I would rather watch the cat hock up a hairball than go to a musical but this one helped put me in the much needed Christmas spirit. We had a really nice time. Thanks OnRamp!

Got my goat

My account representative from one of our major vendors visited recently and she and her boss took me out for lunch. They brought me new product catalogs and samples of new products to look over while we ate. Melanie opened the product catalog and began explaining the improvements they’ve made in our Men’s Extra supplement.

“…And we’ve added horny goat weed to our proprietary blend.”

“Melanie, when I form my rock band, I’m soooo going to call the group Horny Goat Weed.”

Texas drivers on ice

It froze yesterday. Central Texas was under a sheet of ice for 18 hours. I waited until noon today before heading to the office. I passed 22 stranded cars on Hwy 71. Six of which were totalled. One particular truck careened off the road and down a very steep embankment where it met a tree. Another car smashed into a tree just off the highway. It was like driving through a trail of dead vehicles. Or a trail of vehicles driven by Texans in icy weather.

Elise\’s chili

Elise’s called me at 3 o’clock yesterday afternoon and said she was leaving work early so she could go home and cook chili.

“Okay, but use my recipe.

We got home at the same time and yours truly prepped 91.4% of the recipe. Elise changed a few ingredients so it’s officially hers. She changed the recipe to include ground beef, kidney beans and accidentally guajillo chiles (she picked up chipotles and anchos as well but accidentally threw guajillos in the bag). I added a tomatillo, we used Shiner Bock instead of Saint Arnold Spring Bock and we have an awesome new chili recipe .

They say real Texas chili isn’t supposed to contain beans. I’m a tried and true Texan and I personally like beans in my chili. It adds another flavor and texture element and that’s what chili’s all about. And this recipe is 50% Midwestern.

Jack Frost, meet my ****in\’ fist

I HATE COLD WEATHER. When the temperature drops below 60-degrees, I’m bitching. Early this morning rain drizzled and has been for most of the day. Sometime this afternoon the temperature plummeted to 33-degrees.

As the sun went down the temperature dropped even more and the drizzle began to freeze. That made for a fun commute home. As I was crossing the Pedernales River bridge near Pace Bend, I saw two cars and two Suburbans spin wildly out of control in almost-choreographed unison. One Suburban and one car crashed into the guard rails.

I hate this weather. Wake me up in March. Damnit, I hate this weather.

I hate cold weather
Have I mentioned that I hate cold weather?

Recent vices

The Darkness
– Work
– Avoiding deer on the commute home from work.
Dooce.com
– Cops (TiVo has managed to serve up Cops. Non-stop.)
– Magazine subscriptions. And not paying for them after invoice.
– Trimming ear hair.
– Driving my monster truck into the ground.

Your ass cannot be found here

It’s gotten to the point where I can no longer giggle when I check Janicek.com’s statistics. Nearly 1/4 of my visitors are in search of pirate treasure. 1/6 are looking for BIG pirate treasure. Many are looking for moist pirate treasure while others are searching for unsanitary and epileptic pirate treasure.

Aaaaarg!!!  Ahoy, pirate treasure!

“Josh, why are people coming to Janicek.com in search of pirate treasure?”

I’m glad you asked. A couple years ago there was a party held at John and Christine’s house. Seeing how it was a party there was alcohol involved and soon a drinking game ensued among the girls. This game involved a sort of chant where the girls would slap the table and clap their hands in cadence. Slam clap slam clap. They chanted this song while slamming and clapping that went something like this: “Big pirate treasure, big pirate treasure, big pirate treasure. Uh huh. Big pirate treasure.”

I filmed a few minutes of this chanting game, named the video file “bigpiratetreasure.mpg” and uploaded it to the website. A few months later, Google Video and Yahoo! Video were launched and bigpiratetreasure.mpg was indexed. Since then many people have sought video of big, voluptuous, black, bouncy, juicy, nasty, stanky pirate treasure and I HAD IT! Woot!

A few months ago I spent one evening and reworded the reference to pirate treasure on Janicek.com and I renamed and moved the pirate treasure video file. But people still come to Janicek.com in search of pirate treasure.

Here is Yahoo!’s Video Removal Procedure just in case you have a video stored on your server that you don’t want the world to see. Or if you have a lot of pirate treasure.

Yahoo! Video Search – Video Removal Procedure
Standard Removal Procedure:

Yahoo! Video Search crawls the Web for video files, and our crawlers comply with the Robots Exclusion Standard. In order to remove your videos from our index, we require that you create a robots.txt file using the Robots Exclusion Protocol to indicate which files you want excluded.

In order to use a robots.txt file, you or your webmaster need to have access to your web site’s hosting server. For more information on the Robots Exclusion Standard and its practice, please visit:

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html

You must stipulate the following user-agent in your robots.txt file to block Yahoo!’s video crawler from accessing your specific directories or video files:

User-agent: Yahoo-MMAudVid

Once you have placed this file at the root level of your hosting server, Yahoo!’s video crawlers will no longer access those files or directories you have stipulated. Please note that it can take several weeks before your block takes effect in our index depending upon when you first implement your robots.txt file.

Any videos referencing Pirate Treasure are a precious commodity and are exempt from the Robots Exclusion Standard.

Here are the contents of my robots.txt file:

#
User-agent: *
User-agent: Yahoo-MMAudVid
Disallow: /01dz/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /video/
Disallow: wp-config.php
Disallow: wp-login.php

If that doesn’t work, I don’t know what I’ll do. We’ll see what happens in the weeks to come. If nothing changes than I may just have to embrace the fact that Janicek.com is a great source for your pirate treasure video. Naughty pirate treasure. Aaaaarggg!

OS X apps from the newbie

I’ve had my iBook for a little over year now and thought I would publish my short list of free OS X applications that I use regularly and that have made my “switch” to a Mac a little bit easier.

In no particular order:

Quicksilver – because it’s so much easier to hit a set of key commands to search and open apps than to move the cursor six inches to the dock.

iPhoto Diet – because I love iPhoto but hate the fact that I can’t just browse the contents of my digital camera to delete images that have already been downloaded.

ImageWell – because it makes uploading photos for the website simple.

WhatSize – because I like to know what’s hogging the hard drive.

MacStumbler – because sometimes I need to borrow someone else’s WiFi.

NetNewsWire Lite – because it’s a great little news aggregator. And it’s the free version. I’m cheap like that.

iBackup – because it’s simple and now that I use a Mac exclusively, I’ve made it a habit to backup data on the first of each month.

iProduct – because it works.

Screenshot Plus – because it makes taking screenshots simple.

Reason to own a house #394: The innuendo edition

When Elise and I lived in our last apartment prior to buying our house, I can’t remember how many times I would find myself in the kitchen, beating my meat. I would be in there, just going to town and I would break my concentration and think, “I know the neighbors can hear this.” But there’s really no other way to do it. Now that I own my own house, I can hit it as hard as I want and the neighbors are none-the-wiser.

Round steak, New York strip and chicken. I like to pound those flat on a plastic cutting board with a meat mallet so I can make some sort of rolled and roasted concoction.

Tonight I pounded some yard bird breasts to make a southwestern chicken Flourentine with cinnamon chipotle chutney, raisin and walnut wild rice and acorn squash drizzled with butter and brown sugar.

Southwest Chicken Flourentine with Cinnamon Chipotle Chutney
A great seasonal, Winter meal

Smokin\’ high school chicks

Elise scheduled a dentist appointment for us a few weeks ago for cleanings this past Wednesday. So in that two week window I did some mad flossing so Dr. Cox wouldn’t get pissed at me for not flossing.

Marilisa cleaned my teeth. Marilisa is awesome because she sings while she cleans teeth. She’s a folk singer and it’s nice to listen to her sing her folky songs about folky things while she’s folkin’ with my grill.

Your humble narrator and his wife both have clean pearlies, no cavities, no extreme tartar and no gingivitis. Whew.

On the drive that morning to Dr. Cox’s office I stopped at a red light. I looked at the car to my left and saw two young ladies in a nice hand-me-down sedan. The two seemed of the high school sort and both could easily be perceived as student council representives and/or cheerleaders at first glance.

The light turned green and the hand-me-down sedan accelerated through the intersection. I paced behind. I then saw the driver take a BIG tokeroony from a fluorescent weed pipe. Then she passed it to her copilot and she partook in the inhalation of the funky skunk. Tokeroony and the Funky Skunk would be a good name for a band. Or Dave Matthews’ next album title. I only know this vernacular because I listened to Cypress Hill in the college years. The smell of marijuana has always made me nauseous so I was limited to 40 oz. Olde English or Busch tall boys in my somewhat-remembered wild and wacky college days. All six years of them.

I couldn’t believe it. I officially felt OLD. “Those crazy kids!” I thought to myself. “What are they doing? All smoking the pot before heading to school to tend to their studies.” I thought about speeding up so I could drive along side of them, roll my window down and yell, “Are you on the grass? Is that what you’re doing? The reefer? You’re probably listening to that Puffy Kanye Daddy Diddy Cent music and wasting your lives away! Damn kids.”

The driver sped up enough to get in front of me and then turned into the high school parking lot.

I didn’t think much of it that day. That particular experience popped into my head this week as I continue to think about my unborn child’s life and what he or she will experience in it’s life. I can only pray that Elise and I can pass along our moral strengths and good judgement. And a Cypress Hill CD.