Baby food. That’s what Brett calls Indian food, because so much of it is mashed up and tooth-soft.

I love Indian food. I have it for lunch sometimes, so Brett doesn’t have to eat it for dinner. (He and ginger have a problem with each other, and so many Indian dishes start with onions, garlic, and ginger. Poor pita redhead!) Today I walked over to India Cafe I and got myself some buffet take-out: dhal makhani, sag paneer, rice, some chickpea-potato-tomato-cilantro salad thing, and naan. Yum! I’m so happy.

I love Indian food for it’s vegetarianness and its rich spiciness, but most of all I love it for its dairy fat. There’s ghee in everything, and if not ghee there’s almost-too-much of some kind of oil. Or cream. It’s just plain wonderful. I wish I could eat Indian food more often.

Wait! I can! I live in Fairfield, Iowa!

I think I’ll start having India Cafe take-out every workday for the next couple of weeks. OH yeah.
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Monthly category archives in my blog now match the individual archives. This means that when you click on, say, April 2004, you no longer feel like you’ve been redirected to another site entirely because it’s all matchy-watchy. You like this very much. Trust me.

I also tweaked the style sheet for Iowa Chicks Knitting. Apparently this was done for CSS practice because in spite of all the time I spent doing it, it does not look better. Just different. *sigh*
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I highlighted my hair last night. I’d bought the box last week, but kept thinking of growing out bad haircolor and kept delaying. Then, after everyone else went to bed last night, as I was sitting knitting a scarf and watching Red Cap on BBC, I noticed that every female on the show had lovely highlights, and it occured to me that I could always go to a hairdresser for some low lights to help it grow out better.

So into the bathroom I went, after putting on an old shirt, and I busted into my box of Feria for brown hair and went for it.

It was cold in the house last night, so the product closest to my scalp (and therefore body heat) worked the best and the fastest. The stuff at the ends barely lightened my hair at all.

Additionally, I used the weird little product applicator brush thingy (it looks like a cross between a mutant toothbrush and a mutant hairbrush) and it basically left blobs everywhere. This is why I have a giant, weird-looking BLONDE!!! patch on my right temple.

The stuff’s supposed to stay on for 30 to 45 minutes, but after observing my remarkably mediocre application I figured it would be better just to wash it out. But first I needed to get the left side of my head (I’d started on the right) to lighten up a little, so I wrapped my head in a plastic bag and slapped a hot washcloth on the left to heat it up for a few minutes.

Then I got a towel and some shampoo and the conditioner that came with the kit and washed my hair in the sink.

As I’d blown my hair drier of twelve years up last Friday, I had to wait for it to air dry. Then I noticed that it was much blonder than I’d expected after only leaving it on for twenty minutes, that I’d actually not done too bad a job achieving the “chunky” look I was after (on the right side of my head, at least!), and that I liked the reddish-bronze color the highlighted sections had become.

All in all, not a terribly bad hair catastrophe! It’s obviously done-at-home-from-a-box, and it’s obvious I didn’t have the sense to have a girlfriend apply it for me, and it’s obvious that it was way too cold in my house to work properly, but in the final analysis I have some big fat chunks of lighter hair all over my head. If you don’t look too close it kinda turned out okay.

This is what I want to know: why can’t you buy bottles of the conditioner they put in hair color kits seperately? It’s the best, silkiest, most wonderfully effective conditioner in the world, but you can only get it in color kits. I think this is bizarre. Obviously they know how to make a super-conditioner, so why won’t the sell it? Even if you can only use it once a week or twice a month, people would still buy it because it rocks!

The latest version of WisBar Advance is utterly fantastic. I’ve been running it for a few days (I even paid for it) and I really like it. It does everything the last version did, and it’s got a few new tricks as well including sounds and more buttons with pressed states.

I read the skinning FAQ today and updated my best skin ever: the skin previously known as Buddhanet… I haven’t even installed Dashboard on my e400 yet. I think it might be the end of an era, and I feel a little nostalgic. On the other hand, making Dashboard skins took all damn day, so it might not be an entirely bad era ending.

WA2 now lets the menu bar (the bottom bar on the screen) be skinned too and it looks awesome, check it out:
Continue reading Om skin for Today & WisBar 2.0 →

MarsWare Technologies’ WeatherPanel 2.0 is out!

The icon sets are fantastic; tapping on an icon from the Today view brings up a forecast screen; and it now supports animated icons! There’s a host of other yummy new functions too numerous to list.

WeatherPanel is now the most robust and stylish weather plug-in available. Check it out if you haven’t before or rush right over and download your upgrade if you have!

I got my new toy today (DHL managed to deliver at about five to five) and I’ve been playing with it for hours.

The screen is brilliant. The cute little device is thin thin thin. The boot screen is adorable. It’s fast, it’s sleek, it’s just plain wonderful. I’m in love.

Oh the joy of a new plam! Woot!

Now why didn’t I find Learning Movable Type: Tutorials and Tips for Beginners six months ago, when I really needed it? Huh?

Driving back from Colorado, my cell phone rang. It was my brother, calling to say “Mom’s in the hospital; you should call her.” Since it was one in the morning local time, making it eleven in Portland, I decided to wait and call the next day.

I arrived at my computer after a break to see an IM from Jay, “Mom’s home now.” So I didn’t call. My mom and I almost never speak on the phone. We’re probably the most non-phone-talking mother/daughter team in the world. We can literally go years without speaking on the phone. Weird, huh? It’s not like we don’t adore each other, we’re just not phone folks.

Anyway, today Jay IMed me here at work saying ‘mom’s expected to be bed-ridden until January, you should call her’.

January? WTF? So naturally I stepped outside and called her.

She’s got the same thing Josh had: a viral infection in the fluid sac around her heart: a pericardial effusion. She said that quite recently she was so weak and oxygen-starved she was unable to both walk across a room and speak a sentence at the same time. She said she couldn’t inhale properly, the sac had swollen so much it was putting pressure on her lungs. She was unbearably weak. Now they’re wanting to have her in for an evaluation to see if she’ll be able to go back to work after the first of the year.

She sounds exhausted.

My beloved aunt Sue is there with her, to be her legs. I told mom I’d call them both back after work.

Josh, I’ve heard, is back in the hospital with his illness, or was again recently. Hope he’s all right too. Damn viruses.
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Last night I went out to dinner at Regina’s with Mr. Brett, Joe, Bo, and Tahmi & Jason. I had two cocktails, tuna medium rare with wasabi aoili, and a slice of key lime pie. Delicious!

I had lots and lots of fun, and I’m really glad all those fine folks came out with us. It was really great! Several random people walked by during the course of the evening and wished me a happy birthday. Birthdays are so fun! I wish I was having another today.

It was especially great that Brett was willing to go out; week night outings to Regina’s aren’t really his idiom, if you see what I mean. What a great hubby. We didn’t get home until ten, which is way past his bedtime! I love him oodles.

All in all, a lovely birthday. And now I’m 36. Whodathunkit?

In which there are two Wisbar Advance 2.0 themes.

It’s fall! Leaves are turning, the nights are crisp! (Farmers are running heavy equipment all hours of the day on all sides of the farm…) To celebrate the season I bought McDeb’s great Autumn 2004 theme pack yesterday to help my PPC get into the autumnal mood. (Five bucks, ten themes, plus two wallpapers? Who could resist?)

I made WisBar Advance skins to go with my two favorites, numbers 2 and 10. Download custom Wisbar Advance skins for two of Deb’s ten Autum Themes here!
Continue reading 2 WisBar Advance Themes →