7 Things in 7 Days: Day 4

I loves me some ice cream.  There are many, many desserts on the planet.  They’re made with great ingredients in many cases (and nasty ingredients in some cases, such as Twinkies).  But none come close to Ice Cream for dessert rankings in my world.  I love ice cream.  If I was on an island and had to pick only one food, I’d pick ice cream with a perfectly balanced nutrition bar in it.  The downside of the island appears to be that it is in the arctic circle because otherwise the ice cream is totaly not going to keep.

My favorite flavor of ice cream is mint chip ice cream with Andes mints.  Get some.

More Pictures

Tonight we went to visit a friend who is working at the Berry Patch Farm. I took some pictures of the sunset.  Wow.  This was a really neat trip up north of Denver, but really beautiful and fun as well.  It comes highly recommended!

Check out the photos on my flickr page.

7 Things in 7 Days: Day 3

Laugh. If you don’t laugh it makes me uncomfortable. When I get nervous I start cracking jokes about anything in site. I could be at the proctologist’s office in the room getting ready for the exam and the used kleenex [please, Lord, let it be a kleenex] in the trash can would be the prefect prop for a story about that one time when so and so did such and such and we’d all laugh and everything would be OK.

I get on the phone with folks and we’ll have to discuss something serious and I can’t for the life of me keep a straight face I must tell a joke even if we’re discussing something like death, disease or a major world catastrophe. I am not trying to belittle the topic, I’m trying to cope. Sometimes when I write satire for this blog (or in an email) the purpose is to get people to think. But rather than come out and be brutally intense, I’ll make it an attempted piece of humor because I find it disarms people.

I probably am not as funny as I think I am, but I try. If everyone’s laughing, everyone must be OK.

Mushroom in Our Garden

Flickr Photo

This mushroom was in our garden yesterday. This macro shot just happens to really be cool to me. Jessica finds it disgusting, but she eats mushrooms of other varieties and I don’t care for them. How ironic!*

*No, I’m not calling Jessica an iron.

Habanero Hands

Yesterday at lunch I picked a young habanero pepper with my bare hands.  I didn’t think anything of it because it was a quick pick followed by putting the pepper on a paper napkin and then a quick hand wash.  Evening time came and I cut the pepper up (again, bare handed) and roasted it on my grill after de-membraning it.  I cut the membrane out because I’m completely scared of a whole, raw habanero – I ate one once and then unate it hours later.   By the time dinner was over my hands started to itch in certain spots.  About 10:30, after having washed my hands probably 15 times throughout the evening I rubbed my eyes because I was getting tired.  Doh!

I can confirm that rubbing your eyes with chili oils on your hands is a bad choice.  I can also confirm that cutting up a lemon and immediately rubbing the acidic juices on the oil infested parts helps neutralize the base of the peppers.  This was chemistry 101 all over me 😉
I would recommend using rubber gloves for all intense peppers as well as when doing dental work.  The roasted habanero fruit was great on my bratworst with some sautéd onion and orange bell pepper.  It had some heat, but not what I was expecting.  The moral of the story is that Icy Hot has capsaicin in it.  Capsaicin is found in peppers… and peppers and Icy Hot should not be placed on sensitive parts of the body 🙂

7 Things in 7 Days: Day 2

I have more blogs and email addresses than any sane person should have.  By blogs I mean sites running on blogging software.  I have email addresses all over the internet and I think that if I were to check them all regularly… they’d have less spam in them at any given time.

I just started another blog yesterday morning, but I’m not about to post the URL here because it would be highly offensive to the ‘Highly Offended, Legalistic Christian Jerk’ [that’s probably a hint but it won’t do you any good on Google, yet].  I have a blog about theology, one about design & development and also one about me being a closet environmentalist.
I have email addresses all over the place including Yahoo, hotmail, gmail, randypeterman.com and various other places that I’m not going to reveal.

7 Things in 7 Days: Day 1

There is a meme going around the internets wherein people are revealing 100 things about them in 100 days.  I’m shallow or something because I can hardly think of one thing to tell people about me in one day let alone one hundred.  So, therefore I’ve shortened mine to a managable list.  Today’s nifty thing about Randy that should scare the pooh-pooh out of people is:

I often tell people I’m a horrible liar [when the conversation mysteriously goes that direction].  I then go on with a story about my mom telling me and my cousin not to go down to the corner store and buy candy when we’re done with our paper routes and then we did anyway but we ate all of the candy before going inside – my mom walked outside to find my cousin cramming the last of the junk into his face and I got in trouble.  But the truth is that that is a lie.  Not the story about me and my cousin, but the truth is that I would lie to the judge and jury [not really if I ever go to court] if I thought it was a good joke.  I love a good joke and so if deception is part of the joke at first, I could boldly, blatantly and smilingly lie to impact the humor of the punch line.

This has, of course, backfired on me a few times like when I was in college and my friends were at another college.  I called up my friend Robin and told her that Jessica and I were alloping. That was all good and fun until my other friend, Sean, said that it really hurt her and that she was crying in the middle of her college classes.  Furthermore my ex-girlfriend Cindy was Robin’s roommate and Cindy, probably hating my guts or looking for a way to get back at me, corroborated with Sean and said that Robin had been all broken up about it.  In the end my accomplice, Sean, had turned the tables on me and got me all broken up about hurting Robin… lies are from the devil.

And if my girls ever read this: I know the truth about every lie you’ve ever told me – be afraid, be very afraid.

Feeding the Addiction

My buddy Craig gave me another gift yesterday: Home Coffee Roasting.  I am officially going to be joining the ranks of Coffee picky persons [AKA: Snobs].  This book has color charts to compare the roast depth to your beans (I’ve successfully roasted a ‘moderately dark’ roast).  It also covers a wide variety of techniques, beans, regions that coffees are grown in as well as types of roasters and the history of coffee.  This book is cool!  I haven’t finished reading it yet, but I’m so impressed with what I have seen so far that I had to share.

Dead Man’s Chest

Last night Jessica and I saw Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest.  Go see this movie.  It is worth seeing in the theater and it is as good or better than the first.  I can’t say that about a lot of sequels, but this one adds to the character development, has an engaging plot and includes some twists.  They’re making a third movie, and I hope it keeps going because I’m quite excited about it and I haven’t even seen the trailor 🙂

Oh, and the soundtrack rocks!  Zimmer is a brilliant composer and has quite a range.

The special effects are as amazing as we’ve come to expect in the last 10 years, and the acting, as before, is lots of fun.