Last night we got what appears to be 1/2"-1" of snow. (It's hard to tell with the drifting. I can still see grass in my back yard.)

One of the neighbors decided that 11:30pm was a good time to bust out the snow blower and clear the massive accumulation before glaciers could form and bring forth the dawn of a new ice age. That's how I assume he justified the noble deed of waking up the neighbors (me).

Luckily, around 6:30am, another neighbor decided to bookend my sleep cycle with snow blowers.

Me? I'm gonna let that shit melt on its own.

(Note: Last year I posted ONCE, almost exactly one year ago. This year I might shoot for two posts. YEP!)

It's currently -13°F here.
The Walgreens display is telling everyone that it's actually 32°F!

We wish Walgreens. We wish.

Last night I cooked up the beets from last week's CSA share. I made a huge salad of kale, and a beet the size of a baseball.

lol beets.

This is Bit (yes, that's the best name I could come up with):

Bit is a rechargeable (I keep wanting to type "wireless" after that, but he is NOT wireless) amplified speaker.
I won Bit from Republic Wireless (republicwireless.com) – my current cell phone carrier.

Bit has a weird combo-usb/audio cable. One end is a normal micro-usb connector (if you don't know what this is, it's the connector that most phones use to charge now), and the other end splits to a full size usb connector and 3.5mm (headphone) plug.

When Bit is charging, his eyes glow red (I assume the surge of power is overwhelming and leads him towards thoughts of world domination – or at least taking out all the humans), when he's unplugged from a power source he goes back to his docile blue-eyed self, just playing some tunes and chilling. Because robots.

Oh, and his arms move. (Not on their own. He's semi pose-able)

Today is my new boss's first day.
How do I feel about this? Not quite sure yet.

I'm amazed at how, before he even started, people were upset, worried, etc. about this.
Some people seem excited, and I can understand that, it's something new, there's a lot of possibility here. But getting upset and worried? Why? In order to do that, you would need to be imagining worst-case scenarios. You would have to be putting effort into imagining that things that haven't happen WILL happen, and they will be bad.

When I imagine the future, I try to imagine things going well, but realize that I can't be completely complacent, that I'll still need be ready to react in case something goes wrong.

There's an interesting disconnect between the brain and the nervous system. While the brain can understand that a thought is just a thought, the nervous system will react like it's actually happening. If you imagine something stressful, your body will react like it's actually encountering stress.

If we compare a positive person, and a person imagining a negative situation in 2 scenarios, the results are pretty clear.

Negative future outcome:
Positive person is just chilling, waiting to see what happens. Negative person is being stressed out by how they imagine the stressful situation will play out. Then something stressful happens and both the positive and negative person are stressed out by it.

Positive future outcome:
Positive person is just chilling, waiting to see what happens. Negative person is stressed by imaginary situation. Nothing bad happens. No further stress.

In the negative outcome, the positive person gets stress out, that's natural… but the negative person gets stressed out TWICE!

In the positive outcome, nothing bad occurs… but the negative person still had to experience stress! They chose to make their life less awesome.

Another interesting thing about imaginary stress is the imagination itself. I don't know about you, but I know my imagination can come up with outcomes that are more horrible than anything that would ever actually happen to me.

Last week's CSA share included eggplant. I'm pretty sure I've never had eggplant.
I thought it would be fun to try making eggplant parmesan, but being too lazy to look up a recipe, I decided to wing it.

It was probably the second or third slice through the eggplant that it hit me that this would not be enough food. It was an Asian Eggplant, which is long and skinny. I kept slicing and ended up covering about half of the bottom of a 9×9" baking dish.

Nope, needed more food, so out came all the veggies I had.

The "eggplant" parmesan quickly became, "eggplant/zucchini/summer squash" parmesan. And then I tore up a handful of green beans too. Why not?

A handful of cherry tomatoes (these were delicious tomatoes), some spaghetti sauce (just enough to cover, I probably should have used more), some parmesan cheese (in a jar, none of that real stuff for me), some mozzarella (I think I'm going to break my record for parentheses in a post), and a ton of fresh basil.

30 minutes covered at 375°F, 10 more minutes uncovered (oven off, I knew it would retain that heat for long enough) to brown the cheese a little, and viola!

It was good.

Except the beans. I regretted those as soon as I put them in.

I am currently so backed up with unread email, RSS feeds, everything.
(spudart doesn't like posts that start with "I": tweet 1 / tweet 2)

I half ignore Twitter, and completely ignore Facebook – making me, of all people, almost an outsider in the online world. A world that I was a part of when it was still not-so-cool.

Do you remember dialing into BBSs? Telneting into MUDs? Did you do those things?

Facebook. Blech.

This isn't really a post. It's 2 minutes of me typing complainy-sounding nonsense.