This whole post is more or less a commercial, so feel free to skip it.
I became aware of Mint awhile ago from a friend on twitter, and I thought it looked pretty cool. I promptly filed it and forgot it. However, it came up again recently when I discovered that the site was co-created by a co-worker of mine’s son. So I took another look at it, and I have to admit that it’s pretty nifty.
Basically, it is a free online application that allows you to track your finances, similar to Quicken or some other financial software package. You hook it up to your accounts, like your bank accounts and your credit cards, and then it pulls in information from them. From there you can see all your balances and make nice graphs and charts, as well as categorize expenses and set up budgets. You can also get text or email reminders about things, like when your credit card is almost full, or if you’ve spent over your budget in a category.
Then, Mint takes this a step further. It can analyze your spending habits and not only give you tips about it, but it can actually search out deals for you. For example, it can suggest credit cards with lower interest rates, or savings accounts with higher interest rates. This is obviously how they make their money, by getting referral fees, but do you care? It’s good for everybody.
So anyway, I just thought it was a neat little site that some people might be interested in.
So obviously all of my loyal listeners are wracking their brains trying to figure out what to get me for Christmas. Well, you can’t all get me bacon-of-the-month club memberships. On second thought, you could…packages upon packages of bacon arriving every month…but then again, if I’m too fat to type, you’ll miss my posts.
Well, if one person out there doesn’t want to get me bacon, how about Last Night on Earth, a zombie board game. $50 seems a little steep on the price, but surely it is worth $50 to try out various survival techniques. Also, you can play as the master of the zombies, and that just sounds cool. I don’t think I even need to mention the “epic CD soundtrack”, I think you’re already sold.
Okay, let’s be honest, ThinkGeek had me at the words “Zombies are officially the new black.” Truer words have never been spoken.
There is a show on the CW called Supernatural, and I’m here to tell you, this show is awesome. The show stars Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles as brothers Sam and Dean Winchester. They were raised as “hunters” by their dad, and basically go around disposing of supernatural baddies.
I wanted to write this post a long time ago, so that people would start watching this show and it wouldn’t get canceled, but I guess people were watching it anyway because it never got canceled, and I think it is in the final season.
This show gets better and better the more I watch it, and I highly recommend it. Obviously, two guys who fight supernatural creatures is sort of up my alley to begin with, but believe you me, there are PLENTY of shows with that premise that are wretched. The acting is good, and I could genuinely believe the two of them are brothers. Supernatural is creepy, funny, and (perhaps hardest of all) doesn’t come across as cheesy. Maybe this is because they don’t take themselves completely seriously. All of that is hard enough, but there are two other traps the show has avoided falling into, which are most impressive.
First off, the show manages to maintain the balance of throw away episodes and story arc. When the show began, there wasn’t much connection between episodes. The Winchester boys would show up, kick some supernatural henie, and ride off into the sunset. These kind of shows are great escapes because you don’t need to engage your brain. However, after a time, shows like this get a “what’s the point” kind of feel, and the writers usually transition to a more over-arching storyline to tie the season together. Sometimes when this happens, a show loses it. Some shows really are cut out to be single episode, stand alone shows. For example, I personally feel that Buffy worked better this way; in the last season, every episode was working towards the finale and it was awful. Supernatural somehow manages to have an overall storyline, with plenty of individual, stand-alone episodes and yet the stand-alone episodes frequently tie-in in some way, without seeming awkward.
The other trap the show manages to avoid is “villain escalation”. Often in books or T.V. shows (or even movie franchises), the heroes have to defeat certain bad guys in order to prevail. If the book or show is successful and a sequel is needed, the writers feel the need to out-do their previous effort. This usually results in a new, even MORE POWERFUL bad guy showing up. This happens time and time again, until the heroes are so powerful that the original bad guy wouldn’t have lasted a second against them. This is sort of the natural progression of things, and I’m not saying it doesn’t happen in Supernatural, but to at least some degree, anything from the first season is still trouble. For example, although they know how to deal with ghosts, an episode that has them fighting a ghost is still a good episode; you never feel like they should easily be able to defeat it.
I have only two quibbles with the show, one small and one large. The small one is that this show followed directly on the heals of Gilmore Girls, also on the CW. On that show, Jared Padalecki played a character named Dean. Then he comes over to this show and immediately becomes the brother Sam, NOT the brother named Dean. I understand he’s just an actor playing a role, but did Supernatural just HAVE to use the name Dean for one of its characters? This was very confusing for at least 2 seasons.
The bigger (biggest) problem with the show is that it is not available online! (legally) This is particularly a problem since it is on Thursday nights, up against Grey’s Anatomy and The Office. I think the show is popular, I don’t know the numbers, but there’s no way people are tuning in to it over Grey’s and The Office. Those people (like myself) are forced to try to catch reruns when they can, missing many episodes. What reason could their possibly be to stack your network’s best show against such heavy hitters, and then not make it available online. It’s like you don’t want me to watch it.
Well this season my friends, we’re putting our money where our mouths are (and by mouth, I mean this blog post). Sara has moved Supernatural to the top of our TiVo queue, over Grey’s and The Office. That’s right, you heard me. But the fact is, those shows are available online. Maybe this was the CW’s ploy, but I can’t imagine it’s working.
Okay, so final word on the subject. This was an outake from one of the episodes. The shot in the episode ended right before the “rising up”, but Jensen Ackles decided to take it to the next level. You can hear the camera guys laughing, but they let the camera roll:
EDIT: Okay, boo, they disabled embedding on that one, but it’s the best copy. So just click the “watch on youtube” link in the middle of the screen.
You can also check out some good clips (mostly) from season 2.
IKEA is one the greatest stores ever. If you haven’t been, you need to go. When it was easier for us to get to one, we used to go there as entertainment, or as like a tourist attraction for our out-of-town friends. Not only are the prices ridiculously low, but the interesting things they come up with, especially in terms of storage, are amazing. We have many things in our house from IKEA.
But now you can take it a step further, and check out some unauthorized IKEA hacks. Basically, people take items for sale at IKEA and treat them like raw materials, modifying them or combining them to make new, even more awesome products. Not only do the things look amazing, but the really cool part is the way people can look at something and see its potential to be something else. For example, check out the bench made from a shelving unit, or the more creative retractable coffee table. There are even speakers made from salad bowls. Here is an example of a children’s kitchen set created from one of their shelving units:
We have our own IKEA hack of a sort at our house. We were looking for a T.V. stand or cabinet, but we didn’t like the ones that they had. Instead we bought a small shelving unit, and bought doors for it. On one side we used the regular, opaque door, but on the other side we bought a glass door, so that our TiVo, DVD player, etc. could go on that side and the remote would still work. Then we threaded all the cords out a notch we made in the back. Not as inventive as some of the ones on the site, but I was still proud of it!
Tip: Scroll down to the Top Hacks category on the right to see some of the cooler stuff.
Over the weekend we went camping and it was fantastic. Beautiful, perfect weather every day. We had lots of family, lots of guitar playing, some playing on the beach and some of the best, most creative food I have ever had camping.
In years past, we had one person buy all the food and everybody paid them. However, that puts entirely too much responsibility on one person, both to buy, plan, and transport all of the food, but it also makes them the defacto food master to make all the meals as well. So instead, we came up with a new scheme that I think makes a lot more sense. Every person is assigned one meal, to do with what they wish. We gave some suggestions so that people wouldn’t have overlapping meals, but other than that it was fair game. This worked out well for a few reasons. First, when people were divying up the money last year, it seemed like a lot of money for food. Now, they are spending the same amount of money, but it doesn’t seem like it. I don’t know if that made sense or not. Second, it forces everyone to do the work of at least one meal. Third, it is still a lot easier than planning food for yourself for the whole week. You only have to think about one meal, and once that’s out of the way, you’re off the hook. Finally, as a side effect of #3, because people only have to focus their energies on one meal, they can come up with some fantastic stuff.
Case in point, one morning for breakfast we had fresh doughnuts.
This was followed later for lunch by fresh french fries.
Both cases involved using a dutch oven as a deep fryer; loading it up with oil and heating that oil in the coals. The doughnuts were then rolled in either sugar or powdered sugar. Seriously, this was straight out of “Dutch Oven Cookin’ with Cee Dub“! To be able to eat food like that while camping was amazing. The doughnuts in particular were a big hit; we consumed 60 of them.
Most of the rest of the food was pretty standard, however, that wasn’t the only campfire food experiment. There was also an incident involving jiffy pop extended over the flames on the top of a shovel, with gloves to protect hands. The popcorn came out fine, but it didn’t work quite as well as the one actually cooked over the stove. I also used some brilliant pudgie pie makers that were double wide, enabling you to cook two at the same time.
As for Evie, she greatly improved her steering ability with the tricycle. She can at least keep it going in the direction she wants, although it is no straight line. We also had a lot of fun inventing games to play with the parachute. Evie enjoyed it the most, but I think the rest of the campers enjoyed it the second most. It’s not everyday you see grown adults whooping and hollering and skipping to their loo (oh yes, there is blackmail video).
We also hit up New Buffalo’s legendary restaurant Redamaks, something that I’ve longed to do for years after seeing countless billboards. The result? It was actually quite excellent. As Sara said, “I’ve never seen a menu with so much fried stuff.” It was a little strange with the paper plates and plastic silverware, but the food was exactly what I needed at that moment.
Finally, what would a camping trip be without some jowling? Jowling is when you shake your head back and forth with your lower jaw sort of hanging loose, and then have somebody snap a picture. This leaves your face in all sorts of weird positions, like you have a crooked face, or a palsy of some sort, or got punched by an invisible prize fighter. For example…
Shane Halbach 