Mike, Jill, Lucy, & Wubie!

“Sometimes fyashyights get yost. They fall awound stuff.”
— Lucy explaining how household flashlights go missing
(“Sometimes flashlights get lost. They fall around stuff”)

What do ya know, another memory post. Please contain your excitement.

Once I was sure our new iMac was a keeper, I quickly ordered an extra 4GB of RAM. I took some pics while installing the additional RAM and decided to post ‘em here, along with notes on the installation process.

“There’s something brown in the town.”
— Lucy spots Wubie in the kitchen

We got a new iMac a couple of weeks ago. It’s pretty spiffy. The deal I made with myself on the actual purchase was:

You want a new computer? Fine—but only if you can pay for it with money made from selling stuff you already have. And make sure to sell the old computer while you’re at it!

Though I’d sold a few things to help pay for it, I hadn’t sold enough to cover the entire purchase—until this morning. Now, it’s been covered (and then some).

I had a pricey gadget that had been sitting in my closet for a while. I decided to post it on a few sites to gauge interest. One of the places I tried was Facebook Marketplace. Talk about a waste of time! Within a few hours of posting the item on Facebook, I received four messages. “Wow, that’s cool!” I thought as I opened the messages. All four messages were from different users with variations on the same scam:

“My (friend/cousin/sibling/etc.) would be very interested in this item. However, they are in (Nigeria/Africa). Can I pay you now? Would you take the following (goofy circuitous route) of payment?”

“Wow, that’s completely lame!” I thought as I deleted the messages.

Luckily, Craigslist came through for me. The prospective buyer and I exchanged emails during the week. Once I determined he was on the up and up, I arranged to meet him in an open public space (a mall). Rules I have on selling stuff:

• never let a prospective buyer inside your house
• cash only

If it’s an inexpensive/bulky item, I might meet them outside my garage. However, for higher priced items, I always meet them in a public space.

You never know who’s going to show up, so you’ve got to use your head and play it safe.  Anyway, the transaction went off without a hitch. Once it was completed, I had a bunch of cash and felt like a rapper for a second. However, I quickly reminded myself that this was money already spent.

Yep, the pragmatic polka singer in me usually wins out.

“I’m a princess who doesn’t need a crown.”
— Lucy, after much deliberation (and misplacing her tiara) adds a new princess rule

We visited my mom (Lucy’s Gma) last weekend. In addition to getting caught up (and getting our fill of soup and adobo) we got a big bag of frozen lumpia to take home with us. Score!

Lucy and I decided to take a few pics of the batch we cooked up today. I like to wrap my lumpia in lettuce before I chow down, something I picked up from eating eggrolls at vietnamese restaurants. The lettuce adds a nice clean, cool crunch to go along with the fried, warm crispiness of the lumpia.

Of course, you can’t have lumpia (or just about any of my favorite filipino foods) without vinegar. I made sure to snap a pic of the condiment squirt bottle I use for my vinegar. The squirt bottle is great because you can get as much vinegar as you want as you chow down w/o having to double-dip your lumpia in a shared sauce dish. (Once bitten into, a lumpia’s structural integrity goes downhill fast; double-dipping would leave lumpia chud in the sauce dish.)

I usually stick the following in my sauce:

• vinegar
• garlic
• soy sauce
• pepper
• chili peppers

Hungry? Some miscellaneous links:

• Burnt Lumpia (Filipino Food Blog)
• My video of my mom making making lumpia (with help from a baby Lucy)
• The kid chowing down

“I’m going to put stickers on it so they know that Bundle, the greatest helper in the world, likes to put stickers on things!”
— Lucy, explaining the thinking behind plastering something with kitty cat decals

I got my own cheap point and shoot camera off Woot so that I don’t have to pilfer Jill’s all the time. I thought I’d test it out by taking a few pics.

The guitar in these pics looks really cool but doesn’t play that well. It’s just a few years old, a cheapie Fender Telecaster, probably made in Malaysia or something.

It’s been relic’d to look like an old tele that’s been around the block a few times. When I was younger I thought telecasters were totally lame, thought they were ugly. Through the years they started growing on me. Today, I think they’re really quite the lookers. I love that stripped down, minimalist look. Like strats, the older and more beat up they get, the better they look.

These two pics are of the keyboard that came with our new computer. Computers are the total opposites of guitars. The worse they look, the worse they are. I usually try to get rid of my computers (especially desktops) after a set numbers of years.

Godzilla. ‘Nuff said.

“I’m eating chocolate that doesn’t stain my clothes or give me a mustache!”
— Lucy having a snack

I’ve been tweaking my morning smoothie, looking to simplify it, up the protein, and drop the carbs and sugar a bit. This is what I came up with for today. Despite the lack of fruit it tastes pretty good (to my taste buds, at least). I’ll probably use this as my main smoothie for the time being, probably swapping the egg for some berries every other day.

I still don’t really know what I’m doing, mostly just trying stuff out that I read about on sites and forums. However, it’s still better than what I was doing in the not too distant past (skipping breakfast and/or lunch, followed by non-stop eating at night.)

Ingredients:

• 80 g coconut milk
• 1 raw egg
• 1 scoop ground flax seed (I’ll probably switch this to chia seeds)
• 4 oz ice
• 1 scoop protein
• 2 oz spinach,
• 4 oz water
• A few drops of vitamin d3

Breakdown:

• 466 calories
• 17 carbs
• 37.5 protein
• 3 sugar
• 5.5 fiber
• 27 fat

“I’m a sardine cartoon!”
— Lucy acting silly at the kitchen table

“Here’s my house
With furniture and a mouse”
— Lucy singing as she plays with her dollhouse

A while back I read an article on “cowpooling”, where people join together to buy grassfed beef directly from a rancher at a reduced price. The article mentioned a group, the Bay Area Meat CSA, that helped do this.

So I started checking out the site on a regular basis and eventually decided to join seven other people in agreeing to buy 1/8 of a grassfed cow from a bay area source. The price we paid covered the rancher, the butcher, and miscellaneous associated costs.

So, last week I picked up my 1/8 of a cow, which came out to around 50 pounds of frozen steaks, roasts, and hamburger meat. I’d already arranged to sell half of it to my sister, so my eventual haul was around 25 pounds of grassfed beef for about $122, which averaged out to a little less than $5 a pound a really good deal.

I think we’re set for a while, but I’m sure I’ll be placing another order sometime in the future.

“Naked Time, Naked Time, Across the USA!”
— Lucy singing her own lyrics to the melody of “Booty Time” from
The Adventures of Ford Fairlane

Here’s another post on some stuff I sold recently, most of it via Craigslist (except for the iMac, which went to family). Craigslist is my main way to get rid of stuff these days. The main things I like about it:

• It’s free (how can you beat that?)
• It’s easy to post items
• It’s easy to get rid of large items (the customer just picks it up.)
• No shipping hassles because your customers are local

Occasionally I’ll use eBay, but that’s usually as a last resort. eBay is just too darn expensive (they really nickel and dime you to death with miscellaneous fees over there!) Also, the one or two times where I needed their support they truly, dearly just sucked.

Anyway…

It’s nice to have some open space. It’s actually quite amazing how much room you get back once you let go of a few bulky items.

“The trains are not racing. They’re crumbling—and it’s very frustrating!”
— Lucy, when her toy trains were being uncooperative yesterday morning

When the Amazon Kindle E-Reader was first released in late 2007, I thought it looked interesting. However, at $400 it was never a serious consideration for me. Over the next few years, its price dropped substantilly, but at a price just north of $200 I still wasn’t sufficiently enticed enough to pry open my wallet.

Earlier this year, the Apple iPad was released. This was another gadget with promise, though again at a prohibitive pricepoint. However, the release of the iPad was great in that it coaxed products like the Kindle (and the Barnes & Noble Nook) to reduce their prices. So on June 21, the Kindle dropped to $189—less than half its 2007 price. And it was still too rich for my blood.

Well, last week Amazon bought Woot, an online retailer that has gained notoriety by basically selling one item each day. Woot’s a site I try to visit every day, usually at 10 PM PST, the time their one product for the day goes on sale. And wouldn’t you know it, the day Amazon buys Woot, Woot offers a Kindle 2 for $149.

Well, though it wasn’t a “no-brainer” purchase (I guess $99 would have met this criterion) this was enough to get me to spend about an hour researching the product. And after completing my research I pulled the trigger and finally bought a Kindle. It arrived this past Wednesday, and so far it has been pretty cool. A few pics, observations:

Product box seemed sturdy enough.

The Kindle itself looked compact, sleek and stylish. At a little over 10 ounces, it’s a very appealing package for what’s basically a mobile library.

Selling points for me:

• Holds over 1500 books
• Battery lasts up to two weeks (with wireless off).
• In addition to the Kindle format, supports unprotected epub, pdf, and html via conversion with free Calibre software (this was a big selling point for me)
• Adjustable text-size (my deteriorating eyesight very much appreciates this)
• Built-in dictionary

When I finally decided to get the Kindle, I tried to justify the purchase by thinking, “Now I have a convenient way to access all those free public domain classics I’ve either forgotten about or never read in the first place.”

And I followed through with that pledge by dutifully downloading a bunch of classics at places like Google Books and Project Gutenberg. Yep—and those classics are currently sitting on my Kindle, unread.

Oh, I’m using my Kindle alright. And I am more than pleased with it. However, though I had aspirations of reading more substantial fare, the books I’ve read thus far are truer gauges of my maturity level:

• Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern (really funny stuff, especially the younger years)
• The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee by Sarah Silverman (more serious than I thought it’d be)

I suppose one of these days I’ll get to those neglected classics. Who knows, maybe the kid will end up reading them to me. But for now—at least I’m reading, right?

I got a new phone recently and have been a bit surprised at how much fun I’ve been having with it. It’s a Droid Incredible running Android. As you can see in this picture, it’s pretty customizable:

I’ve been wasting a lot of time playing around with different apps, looks, etc.. A fews of the apps I’ve been playing with:

• Misc Google Apps (Voice, Listen, Gmail, Goggles, Shopper, Earth, Places, etc.)
• Where (Location-based app for discovering new places)
• Layar (Augment your reality, dude!)
• Gmote (Remote Control)
• Ringdroid (Make your own ringtones)

I’m constantly on the lookout for cool apps. Any apps you consider essential for your phone?

BTW, here are a few other looks I’ve been using on my phone:

A while back, I got the urge to tidy up the garage. I actually made a fair amount of progress and was able to institute some sense of order in a place once chock-full of chaos and old t-shirts. However, “tidying up” is ultimately a futile endeavor if, at its completion, one still has a bunch of never used junk (and old t-shirts) lying around sucking up space.

That’s where TIDYING UP 2: LETTING GO OF CLUTTER comes in. Yep, this is indeed a very big step for many of us.  However, it’s something that absolutely has to be done (especially if one lives in a small condo) less one becomes cozy with the idea of being a slave to useless possessions and junk.

Selling things is a great way to start letting go of stuff. When sufficiently inspired, I usually have a few things up on Craigslist or eBay. However, selling things can be a slow process, not to mention full of hassles.

This is where donating to charities comes in. It’s a great way to get rid of lots of stuff very quickly and with a minimum of trouble. Also, the idea that others in need could benefit from my junk is very appealing to me. Here’s a pic of a bunch of stuff Jill and I donated just this week:

Yep, just looking at all those bags full of old clothes, toys, appliances, etc., going to a place where they can help people makes me feel good inside. It also puts less strain on the ol’ condo and garage.

Alas, after getting rid of all that stuff to free up some room, I went out and got a shiny new gadget (that will no doubt be a piece of dull unneeded clutter one day.) Below is a pic of my new phone, a Droid Incredible. Hopefully, I’ll get some good use out of it before it ultimately begins making acquaintances with the denizens of the garage.