NICKNAMES

If Laura, Kate and Sarah go out for lunch, they will call each other Laura, Kate and Sarah.

If Mike, Dave and John go out, they will affectionately refer to each other as Fat Boy, Dickhead and Shit for Brains.

EATING OUT

When the bill arrives, Mike, Dave and John will each throw in $20, even though it's only for $32.50. None of them will have anything smaller and none will actually admit they want change back.

When the girls get their bill, out come the pocket calculators.

MONEY

A man will pay $2 for a $1 item he needs.

A woman will pay $1 for a $2 item that she doesn't need but it's on sale.

BATHROOMS

A man has six items in his bathroom: toothbrush and toothpaste, shaving cream, razor, a bar of soap, and a towel.

The average number of items in the typical woman's bathroom is 337. A man would not be able to identify more than 20 of these items.

ARGUMENTS

A woman has the last word in any argument.

Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument.

FUTURE

A woman worries about the future until she gets a husband.

A man never worries about the future until he gets a wife.

SUCCESS

A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend.

A successful woman is one who can find such a man.

MARRIAGE

A woman marries a man expecting he will change, but he doesn't.

A man marries a woman expecting that she won't change, but she does.

DRESSING UP

A woman will dress up to go shopping, water the plants, empty the trash, answer the phone, read a book, and get the mail.

A man will dress up for weddings and funerals.

NATURAL

Men wake up as good-looking as they went to bed.

Women somehow deteriorate during the night.

OFFSPRING

Ah, children. A woman knows all about her children. She knows about dentist appointments and romances, best friends, favorite foods, secret fears and hopes and dreams.

A man is vaguely aware of some short people living in the house.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

A married man should forget his mistakes. There's no use in two people remembering the same thing!

I've uploaded 10 new pictures, complete with various comments, some of which I'll mention in this blog post.

http://picasaweb.google.com/rick.root/YardAndGarden2010#5477489948381492226

Of the most interest I think is the continued growth of the cantaloupe.  It got so big over the weekend that I felt the need to expand my trellis.

Wow!

My cantaloupe grew a foot last weekend!

That picture is from Monday morning.  It's actually a few inches higher now but it definately did a ton of growing this weekend.  It's been cloudy and rainy all week, but the sun is going to shine today and tomorrow so I suspect everything will burst again.

Yesterday, I planted a couple of Stevia plants, just because the idea of growing my own sugar sounds like fun. 

I also decided I need more than 5 basil plants, so I bought a $6 herb garden at Lowe's that has 36 little containers.  It came with 6 different herbs but I only planted Basil, Sage, and Chives - 12 of each.  It's sitting in the kitchen corner window where it gets light but no direct sun, a fine place to germinate seeds.

I also seeded 8 "small" sunflower plants (a colorful variety that only gets 4-5' tall), and 9 perennial lupines.  I did these in 2" Jiffy Pots.  The lupines will probably take 3-4 weeks to germinate because I didn't follow the "hastening" instructions.  I didn't feel like chilling them in the fridge, then nicking the hard seed shell and soaking them overnight.

Garden Number 3
Three canteloupe and a Big Boy tomoato.  The trellis is made from 6.5' steel T-posts and something I found at Home Depot called "Mason Ladder", which is made of a fairly heavy guage steel wire.  It's meant for re-inforncing concrete.  I also spray-painted it a dark green so it would be less noticeable from a distance.

Garden Number 2
This is the one that doesn't get enough light, or so I believe.  Maybe 5 hours.  The zucchini and onions seem to be doing very well, the mesclun lettuce was great.  The roma tomato plants look okay but aren't growing very fast - same with the cucumbers and muskmelon.

Insects Already?
Several of my eggplants have leaves like this - I haven't seen any insects on them but this sure looks like insect damage.  I took the opportunity to apply some Bayer Advanced Fruit, Citrus, and Vegetable Insect Control.  The instructions say to apply at transplanting - most of my stuff has been in the ground for 4-6 weeks, but hopefully it will still work to prevent future damage.  No, I'm not growing organic.

Roma Tomatos in the Topsy Turvy planters
I have two roma tomato plants in these upside down planters.  Both purchased at the same time, both about the same size and similar in their looks.  Both transplanted into the planters at the same time with the same Miracle Grow potting soil.  Both receive the same amount of water and sunlight.

One of them looks much better than the other, don't you think?

In mid-March, I bought a burpee garden seed kit at Home Depot.  It came with seeds, soil pellets, a container for the soil, and a little plastic container that would act as a greenhouse.  I thought it would be fun for emily to grow some things from seed.  The kit came with roma tomatoes, oregano, basil, cilantro, squash, beans, carrots, cucumbers, and canteloupe.  We seeded on March 21st, the first day of spring.  Amazingly, I only had to bring the garden inside once or twice due to frost.  I also put some bean seeds in a planter on the patio. 

While Emily found it to be marginally interesting, it actually gave me the garden bug.  So now, I have FOUR raised bed gardens, three in the wild area out front, and one in the back near the fence.

The first two are each 3 feet by 6 feet and made of 2x6 lumber.  I didn't really do any prep of the ground below, just filled them up with about 5" of miracle grow garden soil.  In garden #1, I tranplanted 4 bean plants and 2 squash that I'd planted from the seed kit, and also four eggplant and 2 "rainbow mix" bell peppers.  I'll probably end up removing 2 of the eggplants.  Garden #2 currently has 5 cucumbers and a nice trellis ready for them to climb, though they're still quite small since I grew them from seed.  I also planted some mesclun lettuce (which we've already eaten some of!), 2 muskmelons, a zucchini, 2 roma tomatoes, and some green and white onions (same thing really, the "green" onions are planted about 3" deep, while the "white" onions are planted at the surface).  Garden #1 only gets about 6-7 hours of sunlight, and garden #2 really gets only 5-6 hours of sunlight.  The zucchini, onions, and mesclun all seem to be thriving here, we'll see how the romas, cucumbers, and muskmelon do.

Garden #3 is one that I added just this weekend, it's 8 feet long and 2 feet wide, and made with 2x8 lumber so it's a little deeper than the other two.  I needed a place to put my canteloupe that I'd grown from seed and needed a sunny location.  I have a lot of trees around my hard to sunny locations are hard to come by.  I put in a couple of 6' steel posts and threw some heavy guage "Mason Ladder" wire between them to make a nice trellis for the vines.  I'll probably train two of them up the trellis and let the other trail out into the mulch.  The other resident of this garden is a Big Boy tomato, which was transplanted from a planter that Adrienne had originally planted from seed.  The canteloupe were also transplanted from a planter, but they'd been seeded in the burpee seed kit, so this was their second move.  They're doing pretty awesome.

Garden #4 is a 4 foot diameter raised bed garden made from a kit I bought at Walmart.  Essentially it's just about 10" of edging.  Also filled with miracle grow garden soil, I have a cayenne pepper and a jalapeno pepper plant here, both purchased at the farmers market and at a fairly good size (each about 15" tall when purchased).  In fact, the cayenne pepper already has 2 peppers on it, and both are covered with flowers.  I also have about 7 sweet corn plants growing in the other half of this garden (there wre more but I thinned them out a bit, and may have to thin a little more).  Behind this garden, in the ground by the fence, I also sowed another row of sweet corn, which I'll probably thin to 4 or 5 plants in a week or so.  I built another trellis here as well using steel T posts and heavy gauge mason ladder wire.  On the trellis, I planted a Himrod grape vine (a variety of white seedless grape).  We'll see how well that works.

We have some container gardening going on - we have several Topsy Turvy planters, one for strawberries (it has 15 strawberry plants in it!) and 2 for roma tomatoes.  We also have 2 roma tomatoes in a large pot, and 2 big boy tomatoes in pots as well.    And finally, we have 5 basil plants (planted from seed) that are in a planter on the porch and doing awesomely.

Oh, and we've got a blueberry bush on the porch, still in the pot we bought it in because it had flowers all over and and we figured as long as we keep it watered it'll produce better than if shocked it by transplanting it.  We'll put it in the ground in the fall.

Fun!

Some of you already know that I've gone a little crazy this year with gardening and other yardwork this spring. 

Adrienne and I had a small garden four or so years ago but found it difficult to maintain, neither of us had much time to do the things that are required to keep a good garden (like weeding).  Also, the garden was a bit on the crowded side.  We haven't really done anything since, until this year.

This year, it really started with me picking up some Elyeagnus (Ebbing's Silverberry) to put in the wild area between my house and the neighbors house.  Adrienne's mom is doing some volunteer work at Plant's Delight Nursery, and planted some other stuff in the wild area at the front corner of the yard, That's what really set me off, because I wanted some kind of symetry, so I ended up getting some Frost Proof Gardenias, and put in a nice little cast aluminum fencing (about 8" tall) in front of the Indian Hawthornes that I planted several years ago.  Eventually I also added some Cat Mint (aka Catnip) between the hawthorn's, and that side of the wild area looks a hundred times better.

We also took the small banana out of the ground and put it in a very large pot (along with some red and purple gladiola bulbs), and purchased a new banana tree at the farmers market, and put that in a more appropriately sized pot as well.  The old banana was replaced with a Camellia.  Apparently we didn't get the entire banana root structure out because a baby banana is coming up next to the camellia.

We picked upa nice black bench with a kind of arbor over the top and put it out by the front corner, under one of the trees, and Adrienne put up the "School Bus Stop" sign that she'd bought like 4 years ago.

That covers most of the non-garden related landscaping we did this spring, and I think I'll write a whole separate entry about the gardens.

More experimenting this weekend with pasta dishes.

This one turned out fabulous, especially if you like a good spicy pasta dish.

Here's what you'll need:

• 1 eggplant
• 1 red bell pepper
• 1 yellow bell pepper
• 2 zucchini
• 12oz pasta (like Al Dente Brand Spicy Sesame Linguini or Red Chili Pepper Fettucini)
• 1 tbsp cajun spice
• 1-2 pounds of spicy andouille chicken sausage
• olive oil
• 1/2 cup pasta sauce (any kind will do, I used Classico Tomato & Basil)

Cut the eggplant, zucchini, and peppers into bite sized pieces and set aside.  You may want to remove the skin from the eggplant, but you don't have to.  Cook pasta according to the directions, rinse, and toss in a bowl with a little olive oil, and set aside.  Add 3-4 tbsp of olive oil to the frying pan and heat over medium high heat.  Add eggplant, peppers, zucchini, and sausage, and about 1/8 cup of water (my pan was quite full so adding the water helped to steam the vegetables a bit).  Sprinkly on the cajun spice, and stir fry for about 8-10 minutes.  I covered mine when I wasn't stirring to help keep in the heat and moisture.  Add the pasta, and the tomato sauce, cook for another minute or two to make sure the pasta is heated nicely (in case it sat in your bowl for a while and got cold), and then serve.

Makes:  a lot.  Easily 10-12 servings.

Suggestions:

• Use less pasta for a dish that's richer in meats and vegetables (I used 12oz of pasta, but I think 8oz might've been the right amount). 
• Substitute or add other vegetables. 
• Stir fry some diced chicken or shrimp in a separate pan and add at the end instead of or in addition to the andouille sausage. 
• Top with grated parmesan cheese.
• If you can't get a spicy pasta like the two I mentioned, use regular pasta, but you may want to add more cajun or creole spices to the stir fry.  I also wonder if maybe adding a little shrimp/crab boil to the water when cooking the pasta would help make the pasta spicy.  Might be worth trying some time.

Nutrition-wise, this strikes me as a fairly healthy dish.  If you used 8oz of pasta and 2 pounds of sausage, like the Trader Joe's Andouille Chicken Sausage I used, and maybe 1/4 cup of total olive oil, you're probably looking at about 350 calories, 16g of fat, 26 carb, and 25 protein plus whatever is in the vegetables.  Those numbers are just for the pasta, sauce, sausage, and olive oil.  The vegetables only add about 40 calories per serving.

You could probably cut down on the fat by using less olive oil.  Maybe just some non-stick cooking spray, and a tablespoon of olive oil to toss the pasta with.

People have been talking about how improbable the Canes playoff hopes, but why?  Because we have 6 teams to pass, right?

I think what's more important is the number of points it will take to get into the playoffs, NOT how many teams we have to pass to get there.

I put the current games played and point totals into a spreadsheed, and used that to project the final standings.  I already suspected the 8th place team would have fewer points than normal because the eastern conference is weak this year.  The point totals are skewed towards the west.

Anyway, here's the projections:

	Team	Games	Points	Projected
1.	Washington	64	94	120
2.	New Jersey	62	79	104
3.	Pittsburgh	64	80	103
4.	Buffalo	62	75	99
5.	Ottawa	65	76	96
6.	Philadelphia	62	69	91
7.	Boston	62	67	89
8.	Atlanta	62	66	87
9.	NY Rangers	64	66	85
10.	Montreal	65	66	83
11.	Tampa Bay	63	63	82
12.	Florida	63	60	78
13.	NY Islanders	64	60	77
14.	Carolina	63	59	77
15.	Toronto	63	50	65

We could get in the playoffs with 89 points.  There are 19 games left.  We currently have 59 points.

15-4 or 14-3-2 gets us there.

It's still improbable, but we are 12-1 in our last 13 games against eastern conference opponents (12-3 overall in our last 15).

5 of those final 19 are against Boston (2) and Atlanta (3).  2 more against Tampa Bay, 2 against the Candiens, and 1 more against the Panthers.

This weekend's games against the Panthers and Thrashers are *HUGE*  (every game is HUGE, but we can afford to lose a few, as long as it's to a "top 6" or western conference team.  We cannot afford to lose to Florida or Atlanta.

Go Canes!

So, I haven't blogged since I started by diet and exercise program back in early november.  I managed to get through the holidays and a trip to Las Vegas, and I am currently down 23 pounds.  I'm working with a trainer twice a week, and at the gym 5-6 times a week.  Plus, eating healthy and logging my daily food intake.  It's going well.

Today, I started an appetite supressant called Phentermine, that my doctor prescribed.  It's a short term (1-3 months) assistant to help me avoid being hungry when I don't really need to eat.  Logging my food intake will be important, because since I'm working out, doing cardio and weight training, I need to make sure that I get ENOUGH calories.  So even if I'm not hungry, no skipping meals!  But it might help me curb the cravings between meals.  Today, I think it did, but one day is not enough time to make an assessment.  I definately feel its affects.  I don't think I'm "jittery" but I do feel somewhere between normal and jittery.  Alert?  I dunno.  At any rate, I need to keep track of my blood pressure while taking this medication, and go back to see my doctor for some blood work after 30 days to make sure I'm metabolizing the medication properly.

So I started at 290 when I weighed in on the morning of November 2.  I'm currently at 267.

I'll keep you posted!

So after several years of terrible eating and a complete lack of exercise, I've managed to get myself into the worst shape of my life.  Last weekend, I'd had enough.  Candy, that is. :)  Anyway, I went out and bought some comfortable pants because I'm tired of squeezing into the 40" waist pants that I'd been wearing.  Just admit you're a size 42, and move on.  Hopefully, I want be wearing them long.  Anyway, I started my diet Monday morning, weighed in at 289 pounds!  If you look at my blog from back in 2004, I was down to around 230-235 pounds, so I'm up 50 pounds in 5 years, probably 30 of that in the last 2 years.

I started off low-carb for a "shock to the system", and I dumped about 8 pounds of water weight in 3 days.  I like doing the low-carb thing, because I feel like it helps wean me off the horrible foods that I tend to eat.

Thursday afternoon, I joined a gym in Apex that's convenient - Lifestyle Family Fitness.  It's a nice place, great equipment, and no contracts.  I did 40 minutes on the treadmill Thursday night... didn't work out Friday because Emily and I went to the hockey game, Saturday I did 20 minutes of cardio and a leg workout on the weight machines, and did 30 minutes of cardio this evening.  I'm not low-carbing anymore - not really, at least.  on days that I'm not doing weights, I'm avoiding carbs, but on days I'm going to do weights, I'm just going to try to eat "good carbs" like fruits and whole grains.

Tomorrow afternoon is my first of three free one hour personal training sessions.  I'll let you all know how it goes.

This math test can predict your all time most watched film, mine was 'Saving Private Ryan'. Try it without looking at the answers. It works!

• Pick a number from 1 - 9.
• Multiply by 3.
• Add 3, then multiply by 3 again.
• Add the two numbers together to get your final answer (ie, if you end up with "32" your final answer is "5")
• See what your favorite movie is from the list below!

Good Luck!

Click through to continue!

I'll be in Ann Arbor this weekend for the Michigan-Penn State game (among other things).  And I think Michigan is gonna win.

With Michigan ranking 7th in total offense (averaging 37.3 a game), and Penn State being #1 in total defense, it should be very interesting.  Of course if you exclude Michigan's win over Delaware State, their scoring average drops to about 33 points a game, still good for around 18th.  Penn State's offense is much less impressive if you take Eastern Illinois out of the mix too (they won 52-3)

While Penn State has only given up 8.7 points a game, I think it's a LARGE factor of their schedule so far.

• Akron (31-7)
• Syracuse (28-7)
• Temple (31-6)
• Iowa (10-21)
• Illinois (35-17)
• Eastern Illinois (52-3)
• Minnesota (20-0)

They've had a REALLY REALLY weak schedule.  Michigan is better than all of those teams except Iowa.  And as bad as Michigan's defense seems sometimes, at 46th, they're not *THAT* bad.

My point being, I think we're in for an exciting game on Saturday!

Michigan 35
Penn State 31

GO BLUE!

Okay, I admit it.  I may have picked Michigan to win but I didn't really expect them to.  It is simply against my religion to pick against Michigan.

Anyway, some comments on today's game....

--
Matt Mille, former Lions President, was the color commentator for the game today.  The Lions have been one of the biggest jokes in football for the last 7 years in large part due to his "leadership".

I yelled "EAT IT, MILLEN" at the TV several times, the first when he said the notre dame guy didn't step out and the review came back and said he DID step out. :)

Millen provided in his tenure with the Lions that he doesn't know shit about football.

--

Tate Forcier for Heisman!

--

I found this interesting bit of analysis on espn:

Second guessing: Protecting a 34-31 lead with under three minutes left, Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis made a few curious calls. First, he handed the ball to fullback Robert Hughes on first down instead of Armando Allen, who had had a great game to that point. Hughes was stuffed for no gain. Then he threw the ball twice, both resulting in incompletions that stopped the clock and gave Michigan the ball back with plenty of time. The Wolverines also got to keep their timeouts, which came in handy on the final drive.

Now I will grant that if Clausen had made either one of those passes, Michigan might not have won.  But the fact is, those two incomplete passes left us with two timeouts that we probably shouldn't have had.  Michigan called timeout after the fullback run, and would've called timeouts after two more runs probably assuming ND didn't get a first down.  In either case, a first down would've been devastating, so Charlie Weis clearly made the WRONG call with the passes.

Regardless, this loss isn't gonna be good for Weis.  the ND/MSU Game could be interesting next week.  I'll be full on rooting for MSU in that one.

--

Noise - I've heard that the new construction is doing a wonderful job of keeping the noise in.  I think that was evident today when Notre Dame seemed to be having trouble hearing and called several timeouts that were clearly caused by crowd noise, as well as a couple of delay of games that I think were probably attributed to crowd noise as well.

Even in 1997, when the crowd was as loud as could be, I don't think it ever really caused problems on the field, so this excites me very much.. maybe we'll know longer be known as the quietest 110,000 people in football.

Door knobs are expensive! 

Our house is full of brass, and we hate it.  We started by replacing all the outlet covers with nice venetian bronze plates that I found at Lowe's.  The darker colors really go well with the decor.

Now, we've decided to replace all the brass doorknobs.  Of course, this also means replacing the brass hinges as well.

We found some inexpensive Kwikset knobs on ebay, 6 passage and 6 privacy knob sets, for $150.  I found 10 matching dummy knobs for our double-door closets in each bedroom and for the french doors to the TV room... about $75 for those.  60 bronze hinges for $0.99 each plus shipping, which also worked out to about $75.  I'm one privacy knob short so I'll probably just pick that up at home depot for $20... which will bring the total cost of this little project to about $320.

Of course, it could've been worse.

There are 20 interior doors.  Home Depot sells the bronze hinges in sets of 3 with screws for $9... that's $192 with tax.  The passage knobs are $15, the privacy knobs are $20, and the dummy knobs are $10... so for my counts, with tax, that's $353.

Total savings by going the ebay route:  $225, or about 41%.

Not bad!