Andy and Darcy’s Blog

Now that summer is over, I may spend more time blogging. Maybe.

This blog is mostly a random smattering of stuff I’ve done. Yeah, and I’m feeling concise today, so hopefully pictures are worth a thousand words.

It’s fall and going on winter. Here are fall colors at Good Earth Village.

While I was at Good Earth Village, I stained eaves and underhangs. This fulfills all my desires for painting and home improvement in general. And I didn’t get stain in my hair!

We made a trip to the Mall of America. We had to take Andy’s mac book pro back to an apple store. His first one was a dud. It takes a considerable amount of time for them to conclude that a mac book pro is a dud so I was very hungry. We then had dinner at the first restaurant at MOA we could find with no wait, Tiger Sushi. Below is a caterpillar sushi.

And here is our first snow.

I saw this article about a copy machine for entire books. The result is a bound paperback book. Today I feel like technology is really headed in the right direction.

We were. Just for fun. Here are 1, 2, 3, and 4 days of photos!!

And just so you know. If you visit Canada, bring some gifts for Canadians. They gave us the impression at the border that Canadians really, really like gifts. We left without making any Canadian friends so I have to attribute this to our lack of gifts.

Andy hasn’t got around to it, so he gave me the go ahead to post this hilarious video.

In case you didn’t know today is International Talk like a Pirate Day, or ITLAPD for short. In honor of this Google has put up this page.

Here is the original Talk Like A Pirate Day page, lots of good stuff.

So have a wonderful day, me hearties!

Joss Whedon is brilliant. He has brought us Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly (as well as Serenity, the glorious Firefly movie). Buffy and Firefly rate as my all-time favorite TV shows. It’s really too bad about Firefly.

Oh yeah and you know who else is brilliant? Neil Patrick Harris. That’s right Doogie Howser, MD. Darcy and I recently started watching How I Met Your Mother, where Neil plays Barney, an awesomely masochistic friend of the main character. If you haven’t seen it, I’d highly recommend it.

So where is this going you ask? Well imagine if you will a scifi-comedy-musical. Did you? First thing you might have thought of was the Buffy musical episode, Once More With Feeling, but wait… thats not the one I’m going to share with you now. So sit back, get a cup of tea, put up your feet and get ready for a very enjoyable 42 minutes. I present to you (via Hulu)…

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

I really enjoy the Food Network, or really just food shows in general. As many of you know food is a passion of mine, I love it. Right now one of my favorite food shows is Jamie at Home. It is hosted by Jamie Oliver, who is an English chef. He at one point hosted The Naked Chef on Food Network and has had other reality type food shows before his latest venture, Jamie at Home. The basic premise of the show is he cooks from his garden and makes rustic, great tasting food that is simple and delicious. Each episode focuses around a specific ingredient, like potatoes, onions, eggs, things like that. The recipes that he develops are out of this world.

How about Crispy and Sticky Chicken Thighs with Squashed New Potatoes and Tomatoes or Potato and Chorizo Omelet with a Kinda Parsley Salad or even Balsamic-Baked Onions and Potatoes with Roast Pork, just brilliant.

I highly recommend watching this show it is so good. You can see it on Food Network at 9:30am on Saturdays.

Whilst we’re on the topic of food television, I’d like to mention another show that me and Darcy have recently started watching, America’s Test Kitchen. This is totally different from Jamie at Home. First of all it is on PBS and takes a more scientific approach at cooking and improving classic recipes. Their motto is “We make recipes 100 times, so you only have to make them once.” The show provides techniques and tricks to preparing recipes as well as equipment reviews and tasting panels. I encourage you to check it out. This one is on daily at 5:30pm on PBS (KTCA).

Well enough about food for a while, I’m gonna go cook some. I’m gonna make some zucchini bread, with a recipe from Elise at Simply Recipes.

Discovery Channel has been coming out with some really good commercials lately. The first one we blogged about had a very warm and fuzzy feel to it. This one is more choreographed to the music, and I think they did a pretty good job on it. So here it is.

Discovery Channel Commercial - Ain’t Nothing Wrong With That

A while back, I signed up for free ebooks from Tor. Tor was doing a promotion, and the free ebooks have been coming for about 14 weeks now, one a week. Next week is their last week, so this brings me to the end of the weekly books.

I have pretty much given up my entire reading list to concentrate on reading the books from Tor. It is kind of fun having new books being delivered to my email every week. I have read some really good ones, some enjoyable ones, and some really bad ones. For a while these books were really piling up, and I had completely abandoned my reading list. But as of a few weeks ago I am all caught up.

My favorite books that Tor has introduced me to are:

• Old Mans War (John Scalzi)
• Spin (Robert Charles Wilson)
• Mistborn (Brandon Sanderson)
• The Outstretched Shadow (Mercedes Lackey)
• Four and Twenty Blackbirds (Cherie Priest)

In their last email they mentioned that they are going to make all of the books available one last time, and I wanted everyone to know that! So sign up if you are interested. I think that they have a complete list of their free books on Tor’s myspace page.

My other reading interest is now goodreads.com. One person described it to me as “facebook for readers”, and it has been amusing and entertaining. I can now give my unsolicited opinions about books that my friends have read or are reading. And then there is the trivia. For several weeks it was been my passion to answer all of the trivia questions out there. But that has subsided now that I have Word Twist (which you should check out as well).

After enjoying the commercial so much, I was very amused to see this cartoon. I just want to make sure everyone saw this brilliant xkcd.