More than you really wanted to know…

Well, at least a Christmas treat. This recipe is one my mom has always done as part of her annual batch of Christmas cookies, and other than the spritz cookies is probably my personal favorite. It really doesn’t have to be a Christmas only cookie/bar, but maybe that is part of it’s appeal?

Toffee Squares

• 3 C Quick Oats
• 3/4 C melted margarine or butter
• 3/4 C brown sugar
• 1/4 C + 2 Tbsp dark corn syrup
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 1/2 tsp vanilla
• Food coloring, if desired
• 1 C semi-sweet chocolate chips
• 1/4 C chopped nuts

Pour melted butter over oats and mix well. Add sugar, syrup, salt and vanilla along with a few drops of red or green food coloring, if desired, and blend well.

Pack firmly in a well-greased 8 x 8 pan. (Glass works best) and bake at 400 degrees for 12-15 minutes. (The center will soft, but will firm up when cooling. Do not over-bake.)

Pour chocolate chips on top, cover with a large cookie sheet. Remove cover after a few minutes, when the chips are melted. Spread chocolate and sprinkle with nuts, if desired.

Once set, cut in to 1-inch squares. Store in air-tight container.

Yer not getting any nutritional info, cause well.. these ain’t. Any benefit you might get from the oats is pretty much drowned out by the sugar and butter and well, the chocolate. But so what? They taste wonderful!

Warning, the following is a bunch of .. well… whining.

I’m sick.

The first few days were… eh… not a big deal. Sore throat, sinus pressure, feverish. Went to the clinic Sunday to make sure it wasn’t strep. It wasn’t. “It’s probably a virus”. recommend some OTC stuff and gave me a prescription for a gargle that was the consistency of Elmer’s glue. Even if the stuff had tasted decent (which it definitely did NOT), I wouldn’t have been able to handle it - not with my overly-hyper gag reflex. Cripes, the nurse was barely able to get a throat culture as it was.

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Just over nine months ago, I got my first Palm Centro, shortly after it came out on Sprint. It was just what I was looking for, and fortunately my phone from work was with Sprint. Unfortunately, I’m now on my fourth.

When I switched jobs back in May, I had to get my own cell account with Sprint. Well, work would have done it for me, but I wanted it in my own name for a few reasons… I don’t want to have to switch again unless I want to (not that I plan on leaving this job in the foreseeable future), and I figured after some of the junk I’ve been through the last couple years it is one way to help re-establish my credit again.

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Ok, being sick this weekend has ben a joy. But one good thing to come of it, I’ve been going through my pinned posts from Bloglines and cleaning things up a bit. During one brief period of consciousnous early this morning I came back across the following sites that let you play around with photos.

wanokoto - this Japanese site (with a bit of off kilter English translation) takes your photo and ages it to look like it was taken back in the 40’s or something. The interface is bout as simple as you can get, you browse for a local file or plug in the url of a picture that’s already online and click the “convert” button. Here I took a panoramic shot of the Capital from my recent DC trip, and here’s how it turned out. To save the converted photo you need to right-click and save the image.

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I… have no idea.

Why does anyone write a blog?

Ok, there are lots of reasons. But what about the ones like this site, where it’s just my personal crud. When it comes to ranting, yea, it can be cathartic to write stuff, get it out there. We all would like to have that place where we can just let ‘er rip. But the stuff that really eats at you, the things you reaaaaaaaly want to say - you can’t. Can you?

At least not on a site where anyone knows it is you.

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So yesterday I had some issues accessing my site here, and my photo site. I was getting internal server errors, or finally after four-five minutes of trying, the page would load. These were the only sites of the number of sites I host that seemed to be having a problem…. which led me to believe it wasn’t really a sever issue per se.

After trading a couple emails with the folks at Dreamhost, they helped me track down what may have been the problem, my photos site was getting hit with an unusually high number of connections. Three IP addresses were responsible for nearly 3000 connections to my photo gallery yesterday. 74.6.8.100 had 389 connections, 65.55.212.161 had 720, and 64.1.215.162 had a whopping 1724!

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