Bad Zipper >:(

The zipper on my pants completely died this morning. You know when the zipper undoes itself automatically and both sides around the zip are open? Yeah, that's what happened. I'm glad I have a long shirt on today. I'm gunna hafta sew something tonight. I have another pair of pants that are too short, so I'm thinking I might just add some length to them and perhaps a side panel (or two ;) ) to make them look like they were made that way. I have an idea in my head that I want it to look like, but I seriously doubt that will actually happen.



Addendum:

Today the OED had an awards lunch. Last year we all went, ate Sonny's and each brought home a certificate. Yay! This year, we went, ate some Sonny's and each brought home a few certificates, and three awards. Two awards were for the whole team. Yay! They were the Survivor award and the best team ever award (that's not what it was called, but that was the point). I got an outstanding customer service award. :) One of the best parts was when we were leaving, someone gave us a tin of cookies to take with us. Score! We made an awards table when we got back to the office.

Unhappy

I'm so busy now that everyone has broken links and the realization has set in that they should have been telling us to update their pages months ago or doing it themselves.

Some people are just being babies about it though. It's not my fault. Don't bitch to me.

Evil cat
The Robot
High ground
Purritos
Scary cat
B &B
Drunk friends
Help!
Mixed breed
Underdog
I was going to eat that.
The Blues Brothers
Yay
Boy, I say boy!
Jesus
Kool-Aid
I’m gunna drag her on over to Oak Street...

I'm in a bad mood

I'm going to see Mimi tonight to help her. That means I need to call Lauren & Andrew. :(

I'm really good at complaining.

Reasons I Love Andrew

This is a new section of the blog called Reasons I Love Andrew. I will add at least one new thing everyday.

It's still having a bug in Firefox, but I hope to clear that up soon.

Happy birthday to me!

I like being crafty. I made red velvet cake truffles for Nicole’s birthday present. They weren’t that hard, but they were a bit tricky. I melted the chocolate chips in the microwave and “painted” it into ice cube trays and put them in the freezer. I read online that chocolate shrinks as it freezes so the cups would just pop out. Lie. I only broke a few though. The next thing was to crumble the cake and mix icing into it to make it pastey. That part was easy. And messy. But not as messy as piping the filling into the cups. After a messy situation with a sandwich bag bursting, we moved the filling to a gallon bag. It lasted a little longer. I ended up piercing the bag with all of my fingers and a seam burst towards the end and red velvet cake was everywhere. It looked like I killed something. And I did this twice :) Topped with pink sprinkles and placed on a pretty plate with a cover, they looked pretty. Apparently they taste good. Andrew wants a “sampling of cakes” for his birthday. But unless they make smaller boxes of cake mix, he might just get one kind. But I have time to come up with something.

The recipe I followed said to dip balls of the cake mix in the chocolate, but making cups was more fun. I think it might be too much chocolate though. The cups would be good filled with anything. Dark chocolate cups filled with cake might be good too.

I love Andrew :) We are going out for pizza at Momo’s tonight (not the grown-up store) and friends are coming over for games after. I heart dump cake. Last night there was a February birthday celebration at Peter & Laura’s. Addy is too cute singing Happy Birthday. Laura liked the dog we got her and I got fabulous gift cards :) and Nicole liked the candy/cake. I think it’s funny that Papa didn’t know it was my birthday :)

The entire state internet/intranet is down. No one has email, internet, intranet or anything happening on a state server. When your job is internet, then there is nothing to do. That’s why I can type this big post. I’m not currently busy. Oh, I will be when we’re up and running again.

It’s like a tiny disgusting snail kiss.
Puppies!
Big ears
Winston
I like Huskies
Heck yes
Squishy
Fuzzy
This pup is beefy
Bulldogs are awesome
So are itty bitty dachshund puppies!
And bassets

I got the blues da na na na na

I cooked a nice (RE: I set the table nice) dinner for Andrew last night since he is feeling kind of blue. Let me tell you it was one sexy table. I converted out tablecloth to a runner and broke out the battery candles and the two tapers that bleed funny colors that Mom just gave us. I didn’t cook so well, but it looked nice. Justin, Ryan and tall Andrew came over too. But not for dinner.

Work is still really busy, but I really need to tell about what happened. So I made a right hand menu. Woohoo, I know. Here’s the backstory and an explanation. The server we are working on has been uber slow lately. I mean creeping. I don’t know if that’s the cause, but it couldn’t hurt to blame it. After all, it’s just a server. Anyways, in the new look of the website, everything is getting a right hand menu. We make them, put them in a folder and then link to an instance of them in the pages that need them (so we have one file to edit instead of editing several pages). I made one and linked it to the pages that need it. I noticed something and had to make an edit to the menu file. No biggie, I do it all the time. What was weird though was that the edit was not showing up in preview mode. Refreshing and dumping cache was not helping. I asked a coworker and my boss both of which had no idea what was wrong. The file showed correctly in the WYSIWYG editor, but not in a browser. It sounds a lot less strange that it was. John eventually fixed it by renaming the page that was linking to the menu and then renaming it back. I <3 John.

• Killer smile
• Sunshine
• Uh oh
• Bunny mag
• Spectacularly awesome
• Scarred
• Give blood
• Hopscotch
• John Lennon or Harry Potter?
• Resale value
• lowl
• Grumpy
• Back in the well
• Rehab
• Punk
• Evil is cute
• Poor Amy Winehouse
• Larry King
• This is an excellent point
• AFV breakdown
• Awesome
• This is a terrible pun. lol

Happy Birthday Nicole!

It’s been busy at work this week and last week. We are converting everything to a new design and structure. I like it. The beta server has been really slow though, so it’s taking a long time to do anything. Which is why I have not updated in a while.

I’m almost all better though! Woot!

Also, everyone love on Andrew because he is the best!

Pictures will come later today if I have time :)

Chairs and kudos

So I got a “new” chair at work. There is a corner of the building where office things go to die. Two days ago, one of the big cushy conference room chairs was out there. The seat had ripped, but it was an otherwise good chair. So I asked if I could scarf it up to replace my squeaky chair. I brought the duct tape today and it’s good as new!

On another great note, I was able to sleep on my back fairly comfortably last night. Woot! I feel so much better today. I don’t feel as tired.

You know you frequent a place of business too much when you send them an anonymous letter and they know who you are. As I was filling out the survey from Bruegger’s, I figured I would send in a feedback form since I was already on the website. I praised the employees and said how much we love going there. Apparently, the corporate office sent the email to the store. Rebecca asked me about it this morning. The regional boss asked her if she knew who could have sent it and she was all like, “Pfft, I know. :)”

Links

• Zombies ahead! We totally need this in Tally!
• Spidey cat!
• I know a few people who feel this way.
• Go away!
• We don’t need no stinkin’ fence!
• Curse you!
• It’s been a while since the last Chuck Norris joke. Too long.
• Procrastination chart
• I didn’t believe that there are idiots like this out there until I saw this video.
• I know why they are 25 cents
• I’ve heard of this before, but it’s a terrible, terrible thing.

Today is very tech heavy (read:nerdy)

This is for all you Internet Explorer fans (and a nice laugh for all the haters).

I don’t know how many of you saw the exploded black blog of yesterday. Obviously if you did, you can see this now and I fixed it. If you didn’t, then I’m betting you either use Explorer or you visited late yesterday afternoon. Here’s the long story.

I made this (the one that you see) design up in Photoshop. I really like it. I think its pretty and vector-y. Since I use only Internet Explorer (IE) at work, that’s what I designed the blogger template in. All fine and dandy. Until, of course, I looked at it in Firefox. I don’t even know why I had to open Firefox. But as soon as I saw the stacked, black, exploded page with really no trace of what it should look like in it, I about had a fit. It had taken me a long time to code the design into blogger. It took me until this afternoon to make Firefox and IE look the same. It didn’t take too awful long to get the Firefox version to look ok. But, and here’s the frustrating part, there still was a 8 or so pixel difference in IE that was throwing the alignment off. When I’d fix it in IE, Firefox would push everything to the right. When I’d fix it in Firefox, IE would push everything to the right. I learned a valuable lesson. IE has no idea how to handle margins and padding correctly. It also will accept and implement crap code (I did it on purpose as a hack). I’ll explain.

I was missing a “}“ initially. IE was like “Whatever” and Firefox was like “Nope. I can’t handle this” so it exploded the page. I found and fixed that fairly easily. Then I was left with the problem of the right column inching itself over 8 pixels. I tried every combination of margin and padding on every div box that I could think of. When one would work, the other wouldn’t. For a while I was over thinking it; adding something more complicated than I needed to (I was adding a div box just to space the columns correctly trying to float it without stacking it. After multiple failed attempts at it, I realized that I could get rid of the dev box, remove padding and margins from another and just make the other wider with the background set to repeat-y). Yay! It was much nicer code. But the problem with Firefox/IE and the 8 pixel drift was still there. This is when I learned the second lesson.

Adding a float:left to the css fixed the drift in IE but created one in Firefox. Getting rid of the float fixed it in Firefox, but messed it up in IE. After trying to figure out a way to have Firefox ignore the float style, I found an interesting tidbit of info. IE is stupid. It ignores errors in code. Firefox is smart. It ignores code with errors. Awesome, I just needed to code something bad enough that Firefox will ignore it but good enough that IE will still recognize it. So, I deliberately messed up on commenting the float out. // instead of /*. Firefox ignored it because it is not a correct command and IE accepted it because it has no idea what it is doing.

With all the money Microsoft has, you’d thing that they would come up with a browser that I can’t trick with a backslash.

Links:

• I think hamsters are cute
• The cat in the middle’s face is priceless in the second picture from the bottom.
• This cat totally looks like the Grinch
• These are the cutest rabbits I have ever seen.
• Dog training for dummies
• Wolverine

Busy busy busy

So yesterday was crazy busy at work. From at least 10 until 4:45 or so, there was back to back stuff to do. The only breaks I took was to change the YouTube song from one Muppet Christmas Carol song to another. A big Commission thing came in that took precedence over everything else, so that got done before lunch, but not much else did. I got to eat with Kelly today. It was fun. I like Kelly. She gave me my Consultis Xmas gift. It is a book just like Andrew wanted. Sheesh. She also gave me some yummy candy. lol

After lunch was a barrage of requests from marine fisheries. When they get going making changes, there really isn’t anything to stop them! j/k. I heart Gus. I accidentally made an entire page of edits from the wrong reference. I was completely done before I realized. Oh man, that was totally a wasted hour. Law stuff cam in as did Birding trail stuff. Lots and lots and lots of stuff today. And I have to do it all twice because of the redesign. I love working at FWC. :) It makes me happy.

Apparently, the La Fiesta on the Parkway is having some trouble. Well it’s just nice that they have activities for roaches; most restaurants aren’t that thoughtful.

03A-07-1	Critical. Observed potentially hazardous food cheese cold held at greater than 41 degrees Fahrenheit since 10:30 AM discard leftovers at 2:30 PM.
04-01-1	Critical. Cold holding equipment incapable of maintaining potentially hazardous food at proper temperatures. Cooks line prep table. Service unit.
08A-29-1	Critical. Observed uncovered food bag of sugar in holding unit/dry storage area.
08A-29-1	Critical. Observed uncovered food in freezer.
09-05-1	Critical. Observed improper use of bowl/plastic food container or other container with no handle used to dispense food sugar that is not ready-to-eat.
10-04-1	In-use utensil for nonpotentially hazardous food ice not stored in a clean, protected location.
32-15-1	Critical. No handwashing sign provided at a handsink in wai6 station used by food employees.
32-16-1	Critical. Hand wash sink in wait station lacking proper hand drying provisions.
35A-05-1	Critical. Observed roach activity as evidenced by 25 live roaches found under dishwasher.
35A-05-1	Critical. Observed roach activity as evidenced by 20 live roaches found under meat grinder.
35A-05-1	Critical. Observed roach activity as evidenced by 4 live roaches found on walls in meat room.
41B-03-1	Critical. Observed unlabeled spray bottle.
45-36-2	Critical. Hood suppression system tag out-of-date. For reporting purposes only.
47-06-2	Critical. Observed extension cord in use for non-temporary period. For reporting purposes only.
53A-09-1	Critical. No currently certified food service manager on duty with four or more employees engaged in food preparation.

This is the creepiest Santa I’ve ever seen. The caption under the picture was “I can’t believe my Mom gave me to him”. This cartoon is funny.

Microwave meatloaf

The OIT Thanksgiving Luncheon yesterday was fun. I got to talk to Rita and Kevin and Glen. :) I brought cranberry sauce. I also managed to dip my hair in the cranberry aftermath. It was a big sticky mess. Gini was awesome and put the messy dish into her bag so I’d stop getting it all over everything. I heart Gini.

Andrew is the best husband ever. He did a load of dishes before he left for work yesterday. When I got home I did the rest (with his wonderful help). We had thawed some hamburger that we needed to cook, and I didn’t want to dirty more dishes, so I googled "microwave ground beef" and found a recipe for meatloaf in the microwave. Somehow though, I got it in my head that meatloaf goes in the oven and I started to mix it in a not microwaveable dish. Crap, that’s one dirty dish that was unnecessary. Then I transferred it to a bowl to put in the microwave. Dirty dish #2. Well, the recipe called for shredded cheddar cheese which we didn’t have, so I took 2 slices of American singles and tore them up. During the microwaving process, all the cheese came to a boil and leaked over the edge of the bowl and burned itself to the microwave plate. Dirty dish #3. I wasn’t sure if it was done after I cooked it for the recommended time, so I flipped it out of the bowl onto a plate. Dirty dish #4. Cut it with a knife, used a fork to eat it and got a glass to drink from. Dirty dishes #5, 6 & 7. All in all, it would have been less to wash if I would just have ovened it in the first dish. It tasted good though. It even had a crunchy crust. I’m not sure if it was just the cheese that eeked out and burned though. I was so excited about the microwave meatloaf that I completely forgot to make anything else, including the asparagus that we eventually threw out this morning. It was the epitome of low-carb meals; a big domed lump of meat.

Recipe:

• 1 lb of hamburger
• ¼ cup breadcrumbs
• ¼ cup milk (I used water)
• 2 tbsp ketchup
• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• 2 tsp dry onion soup mix (I used 2 tsp powdered mashed potatoes and some garlic powder)
• 1 egg
• ¼ cup shredded cheddar cheese (I used Kraft Singles)

Mix everything into a ball and microwave covered with wax paper for 10 minutes. Let stand 10 minutes before serving. I suggest putting it on a paper plate so you don’t burn it to your microwave like I did.

Links

• Thumbs
• Buddy system
• Pwned
• Drab Man Group

Top Chef

This is day 2 in a row that I spilled coffee all over myself. I think I’m addicted to the caffeine.

Last night was the start of Top Chef. Andrew picked his favorite and she was the first to go home lol. It should get better when there's less people.

I was going to give Andrew a raspberry on the tummy last night and he accidentally pushed me off the bed. By accident, I elbowed him in the ear. As I was falling, all I could think about was twisting enough to be able to avoid getting stabbed in the back with the corner of the bedside table. I managed to do that quite well actually, but I still landed hard on a pile of shoes and a belt and having the three hundred pound flashlight hit me in the back. My leg still hurts today. No visible bruise, but it sure feels that way. Andrew's ear is ok.

We might be going to Nguyen's housewarming party on Saturday. Fun! I like Andrew's co-workers.

Links

• Diet
• Not a good decision
• Cookies
• Small bed
• Socket dog
• Wayne Manor
• Harry Potter 8
• Jamie is in Call of Duty 2?
• Who ripped who off?
• DaVinci’s Locker
• Leave a note
• Casual Friday
• Sunk
• Ooh!
• Peanut butter
• 42
• Dog will what?
• Poor planning
• Biology fail
• Too busy for stamps