I want to start out by reiterating the fact that swine flu CANNOT be contracted or spread by eating cooked pork products. Your ham, bacon, and sausage are all safe.

This morning NPR reported that the drop in recent pork sales has been significant and, I may be off, but I believe they said that so far sales have dropped by more than $4Million. That's crazy, and I could almost guarantee that 90% of that drop has been due to this latest flu epidemic being labeled with the word "swine".

Now, it's no secret that I love bacon, and am also a pretty big supporter of sausage – but I can't cut out pork just because of irrational fear. But I can eat less pork to do my part to send a message to the pork industry, that message being that I cannot and will not support an industry that still uses facilities and techniques that can be deemed both cruel to animals (regardless of whether they're grown for food), and also results in conditions that can serve as a breeding ground for disease and illness that can affect the human population.

The regulation of the food industry in many areas has been lax (to non-existent) at best, as we've seen lately with numerous cases of salmonella contaminated foods (peanut butter, pistachios), melamine contaminated foods, and now this.  Who wants to create a campaign to keep track of the worst regulated food markets and then boycott them completely?

I'll just start out by saying that, for some reason, oil painting completely intimidates me. Maybe it's the idea of anything I create being judged too harshly, or just realizing that I suck at it beyond belief. But in the back of my mind it's always been an interest. My grandparents were both artists, oil painters, so it's not like the concept or the supplies are completely foreign to me – but there's still that fear.

One thing I really enjoy though is watching Bob Ross paint (PBS Create runs his 'The Joy of Painting' TV series, I haven't figured out the schedule yet.) He makes the whole painting process look completely effortless, and it really is a joy to watch. Almost like watching Food Network when you're hungry.

One of these days I'll actually pick up some oil painting supplies and start covering some canvas!

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I added a link to water soluble / water mixable oil paints in response to Moose's comment about using mineral spirits to thin oil paints. 🙂

Ok people, the correct way to abbreviate "refrigerator" is "fridge". It's not a "frig". "Frig" is something I say when there are kids around or it'd be otherwise inappropriate to swear.

There was a note on the counter that said "Sunny D in the Frig -Enjoy!" … Please don't put things in my pseudo-curse word. 🙁

Current Snake Plant count:
@home: 3
@work: 1 (which can probably be split into 3-4 plants in a few weeks)

Also, as of about an hour ago, I now have 10 strawberry plants starting in my bedroom window. Why 10? Because that's how many came in a $3 packet. That's why.

I plan on giving 4-5 of the strawberry plants to my mom for Mother's Day, keeping 1 or 2 at home, taking one to work, and I'm not sure about the rest. I'd like to plant the majority in the back yard at my mom's house, and maybe put a couple in hanging pots to keep in her house, just in case the animals decide to tear up the plants outside.

That's all.

These are kinda gross… but I can't resist sour candy!

Sour Candy Body Fluids – Available from ThinkGeek

Every so often I go through a phase where I decide that since I like yogurt, I should.. I don't know.. buy some and eat it.

Lately though, I've noticed a tendency towards violence in your yogurt. It seems that I'm unable to open the lid without some of the yogurt spraying out. As you can imagine, this is embarrassing not just physically, but mentally – on several different levels. I don't remember ever having a problem with being attacked by yogurt in the past, so is this some sort of new "over pressurized yogurt" issue?

For now, I've come up with a solution – using the end of my spoon to stab through the middle of the foil lid releases the pressure and avoids all "yogurt spray" related incidents… which is good, because I really didn't want to have to switch to Dannon and deal with that "Fruit on the bottom" nonsense.

I hate waiting for my computer to start up when I get to work. It just takes too long, and usually I'm too tired and impatient to deal with it in the morning – so, for the longest time I've just left my computer on 24/7. For the past couple of weeks I've been very diligent about turning it off to save energy, but that reintroduces the inconvenience of waiting for it to start up every day.

The solution? Last night I set up a scheduled task on a server computer (that needs to remain on 24/7) to use the WoL (wake on LAN) feature on my computer to turn it on 10 minutes before I get to work. This seems to be the most elegant solution, since it alleviates both the power consumption issue, and the inconvenience of waiting.

I've also just set up a co-workers computer to do the same thing (with a different schedule). And I could easily scale this setup to a quite a few computers if anyone else finds the idea attractive.

It's a small energy savings, but it's better than nothing.

Also, for those of you that have screensavers that appear after x-minutes of inactivity.. turn that nonsense off! Change the setting from "display screensaver" to "power off monitor". There's no reason to waste electricity showing an image of a dog licking your monitor when you're not at your computer.