Last year I bought myself a pressure cooker in order to do "Lazy Man's Ribs".  You pressure cook some ribs for 20 minuts or so, then you stick 'em on the grill and cook on the barbeque sauce.  It works great, and the ribs turn out pretty good usually.

One thing I've found pretty easy to make is Jamaican Pulled Chicken.  Basically, I buy up some boneless, skinless thighs and breasts and pressure cook them for a half hour, drain the juice and put the chicken into a bowl where I mash it up good (the meat is usually falling apart by now anyway).  Then I mix in a jerk marinade made from the recipe on the side of McCormick Carribean Jerk Seasoning.  The recipe involves cider vinegar, soy sauce, and olive oil.  Then I throw the stuff into the crock pot to soak in for a few hours.  It's awesome.

I just released the latest version of my coldfusion bloging software, BlogCFM.  That's what powers this blog.

It's free and open source.  You can find out more at www.blogcfm.org

I released CFFM 1.10 yesterday and followed it up with CFFM 1.11 today.

Numerous bug fixes, made the code more CFC oriented and somewhat cleaner, and (with 1.11) added language support.  Several people have volunteered to write translations which should be available soon.

For information and a demo, go to www.webworksllc.com/cffm

The project page is at www.cfopen.org/projects/cffm

CFFM is free, open source software.

We visited Topsail Island this weekend.  When Adrienne was little, her dad had a good friend whom he taught with at Eastern Michigan University who had a vacation home on the island.  This was back in the mid 80s.  Anyway, Adrienne and her family took several summer vacations at Topsail Beach, and since we moved to North Carolina, they've been kind enough to invite us down to visit as well.

When we went to Myrtle Beach earlier in the year, Emily was afraid of the ocean - as she always has been.  The waves scared her.

However, she is obviously over that fear now, as she found playing in the waves was a lot of fun.  I've always enjoyed it too =)

At any rate, Adrienne and I also had dinner at Latitude 34, an "up-scale" restaurant on the south end of the island.  We had eaten there for our first anniversary back in 1998, though it was under different management then, and a different name - Beauchaines.  The menu is fancy, but being an island restaurant, you don't have to dress up to go there, thank goodness.  Who takes fancy clothes to the beach?  Well, the service was great and the food wasn't too bad either.  Check it out if you're in the area.

We had a great time - I'm really glad that they invite us down, it's always a pleasure to visit.  I think next year we're going to plan a week long trip and rent a place with Adrienne's dad, step-mom, sister and brother-in-law.  Plenty of nice 4 bedroom second row places nearby for around $1000 a week in the summer.

I am no longer a real estate mogul.  We closed on the old house today. 

Yay!

On my way home from bowling tonight, I stopped by Target to pick up something bronze for my wife.  I know it's silly, but one has to stick to traditions, even if you don't generally exchange anniversary presents.  After wandering throughout the store, I found a bronze light switch cover in the hardware section, and some Neutrogina "Instant Bronze" sunless tanning spray in the lotion aisle.  Decisions, decisions.  Well I bought both.  And a card.  She got me a card too.

In the checkout line, I also decided to satisfy my sweet tooth and I picked up a Dove Dark Chocolate bar.  It was delicious, and it's the reason why, at 11:40 PM, I am still awake.

The Tiger game ended over an hour ago - I would've normally gone straight to bed.  But between the chocolate and the looming thunderstorms, I can't sleep.  In fact, I'm wide awake.

At least it's raining.  It was 98 degrees here today.  The local rock station gives away a case of Bud every hour when the temperature is above 96.1 degrees.  At any rate, since Erin is here and we're not under watering restrictions, I can at least water my lawn most days in the morning.

Well, I've just found a bug in my blog software - actually probably configuration issue, so I think I'll work on that for a while.

okay, so not all spam is easy to fight.  Much of it comes from outside the United States, sent by professional spammers, advertising companies that operate outside of the United States and have no legitimate contact information and no real way to punish the spammer.

However, today i received a poorly formatted spam message alleging to be from someone at Microsoft.  The email itself was advertising a Shreveport company called AAA Trinity Audio.  A "legitimate" company with an online store powered by Yahoo.

Upon investigating the email headers, I saw that it was actually sent from a Mindspring/Earthlink personal DSL account:

I also found out that the web site was hosted by Yahoo's web site hosting division.

Well both Yahoo and Earthlink have rigid anti-spam policies, so it was actually pretty simply to report this schmuck to his internet provider (Earthlink) and his web hosting provider, Yahoo. I don't imagine it will take long for his web site and online store to be disabled and for his internet access to be disabled.

Well, we took our new boat out to the lake for the very first time today!  Karen (my sister) ended up getting a trailer hitch for her Ford Escape since my truck is out of service.  It did a reasonable job of pulling the little boat.

Anyway, in case I didn't mention it, it's a Glastream 172 Cutlass - a 17' bowrider with a 140hp mercruiser inboard/outboard engine.

Although it took us about 10 minutes to get it started, and I still dont know what we did to actually get it going, it ran fine for the entire day.  We were on the water for about 3 hours, doing nothing but tooling around the lake.  It was nice.

Jordan Lake is a pretty big lake, and it's pretty rough on any giving day.  I don't think we'll be doing much skiing, but tubing should be fun.

EDITED 7/18 - Added picture gallery!

So, the old house is almost totally empty now.  The only things left really are the wheelbarrow, some planters that we want to keep, the bird house and bird feeders, a broken TV/DVD combo, and the boat.  I'm keeping the boat there until we close, at which time I'll move it to the storage place.

I spent some time over there today, fixing the drywall in the pantry, and yesterday I cleaned up the mess in the laundry (long story, involving a full jug of Tide and a loose cap).  Tomorrow, we're going to get the rest of the stuff, and paint the wall in the laundry closet (the one with the tide all over it), and then it's pretty much done.

When my truck had about 65,000 miles, with the looming expiration of the Ford Premium Care warranty, I began to worry a bit.  I want to keep it for a long time, so I ended up purchasing a third party extended warranty from Continental Warranty.  It wasn't cheap, but it covers the truck for another 4 years, 48,000 miles.  Since I don't drive it every day anymore, I think the 4 years will probably come first.

Anyway, I've now got almost 72,000 miles, so my Ford warranty just expired, and it looks like my transmission has failed.  Had a fun time driving it to the dealership today.  They took it out for a drive and called me about an hour later.  "Internal failure of some kind".  In order to determine what's wrong, they have to actually tear down the transmission, so they called to authorize that.  If what's wrong with it isn't covered by my warranty, that's $400 right there.

We'll see how good this extended warranty turns out to be.  I'll keep you posted!