Suzanne Calling

A while back, I posted Tasty Thursdays on MomDot , the blog of a cool lady, Trisha. It was a win-win, she has some great traffic and nice people who hang around and it helped me focus and write down a bunch of the recipes I've been doing for years. The recipes I put on MomDot stayed at MomDot. If you look through my archives, there is a post listed for nine months before I really started blogging. It's a link to many (but not all) of the columns I wrote. My thought process was that she'd asked me to write about food to generate traffic and it was important to still do that, KWIM? A few years later, just four of those original posts still exist. I post a LOT of pictures of the food I make on Facebook. Frequently, a friend or two will ask for the recipes and I'd put them in my notes. However, after three years, it's getting harder to sift through there for the older food postings. So the time has come to post recipes here. At one time, I didn't do it, thi...

Nigerian Scams. Irish Sweepstakes Scams. We've heard of them for years, but they're getting more insidious. Sunday night, as I was going to bed, I saw a weird message pass through my friend feed on Facebook. A 'friend in the computer' had posted earlier in the day and it was clear that she was at home in the northern US. The fact that a wall post went up at a late hour was odd (and I forget the actual gist of the message, just that it was out of character) When I got up the next morning, it was clear she'd been hacked. Not the sort of hacking that happens when your kids found you didn't log out of FB on your iPad sort of thing (which happens to a friend pretty much weekly with amusing results). No, this was the one that's going around where the scammer poses as your friend and says he or she is in a foreign country and needs your help. At the time that this scammer got into M's account, a handful of her friends who live further west were pinged i...

GameTeen's last day of the school year is Thursday. As a small school, they're having an end of the year bash. They are providing hamburgers and hot dogs and parents are invited to come and bring the other items. This means my intended end of year thank you gift will be delivered tomorrow. Lunch for fifteen: Marinated grilled chicken breasts, fruit salad, green salad, baked ziti and garlic bread. I'm even keeping the one teacher who keeps kosher in mind, making sure that no dairy gets used in anything but the ziti-so he can opt for meat or vegetarian fare. I'd love to be able to have it catered from their favorite restaurant, but I think this will be just fine. :) Back to the kitchen!

This Outlook thing has really been interesting. For work, our email is all done through Outlook. The good part is that I can't access it from home. The bad part is that I can't access it from home, too. We currently use a proprietary scheduling product, but we are pretty sure we'll be losing it in the near future. So, the hunt is on to find a program that will do scheduling for us, similar to the one we already use, but with the added ability for people to 'check in' on a laptop when they arrive for appointments. Others are working on finding alternatives, perhaps even paying to have something built, but I'm sure there's something already available that does what we need. I'm just not familiar enough with the Outlook product base and add-ons to say 'Hey, this does what we need.' They're paying me, but I'm learning useful things that have practical applications outside the job...

Songs of My Youth I loved this song when it came out, and enjoyed hearing it played often on WABC that year. When I started working at the college radio station, when I got the "Good Gold" show, which was a past top 40 format, I think I played this one as often as I could get away with before Jim Green would hassle me about Good Gold didn't mean I only played Andrew Gold. My trusty Joel Whitburn Top 40 Hits (not the one pictured, but similar), informed me that his mom was Marni Nixon, a woman I knew to be the singing voice for Natalie Wood in 'West Side Story' and Deborah Kerr in "The King and I" What I didn't know until yesterday is that he was born in 1951 and his sister, two years later-just like in the song. Top 40 hits book Andrew died yesterday at 59 years old. Besides this hit, he had a busy career backing up some of the biggest names in music on their biggest hits, including playing all the instruments on Art Garfunkel's "I Only ...

Take him on a bar shop and order a 32 ounce drink. It was good: The bonus is that there are recipes for other yummy Bacardi drinks on the back of this bucket.

The other day, I mentioned that I was tweaked about hearing of an alternative nail product that could provide the protection of a gel manicure, without making my already soft nails weaker. Today, I had some pampering in the form of a manicure with the CND Shellac UV nail polish . Here's what it looked like an hour later when I arrived at work: I spent the good part of the afternoon handling paperwork very gingerly, because I didn't want to smudge my nails. If I didn't think about them, I was fine, but if I looked at them, they LOOKED WET! See, this was taken out in my car at 5 tonight, almost six hours after I got them done. They've got that 'just painted' look: I'd done a bunch of reading about the different brands of UV Gel polishes, and this one looked top notch to me. (I love OPI colors, but apparently, finding a salon with it locally is near impossible-plus the feedback was a little better for the Shellac). In fact, I read most of the informatio...