Category Archives: Lite

Winter ArtHop

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I am very tired of driving.

On Friday, after work I left Walwood and the overzealous front door swung back too fast and destroyed a piece of pottery that I bought for myself for Christmas. So already I was starting the weekend a little grumpy and bent out of shape. Thankfully it was the only thing that suffered damage so that’s at least a blessing in and of itself.

On Friday we attended ArtHop in Kalamazoo. ArtHop is a frequently held Friday event throughout downtown Kalamazoo. Many downtown galleries and art installations open up and host residents and tourists alike. Many places provide snacks and some provide complimentary glasses of wine. On most wintertime ArtHops it’s bitter cold outside and blazing hot once you get into these art installation galleries. Even with the front door open a shop can be jammed packed with people and be significantly warmer inside than you think. Dressing for these events is a challenge because you want to make sure you dress properly for the bitter cold and have a way to throw off layers if you are going to spend more time in the thick of a gallery or browse some curio shop. This season the weather has been off. Winter ArtHop was in the middle of mid-40’s temperatures, so that changed the playing field a lot and made the whole layer-up/layer-down switch almost pointless. There were lots of interesting art to see and all of it could be purchased but I didn’t see anything that I thought I had to have, or anything I wanted to give as a gift. Some places show off their interiors or use ArtHop to push their services. Some places just have unexpected things inside them, such as this:

Galloping Too Fast

And other places don’t actually have any art to sell, but use it to push their business. A few of these included salons downtown that specialize in fancy personal styling. The people behind the desk have exceptionally fancy hair and other places just push DJ’s:

Trying too hard

After we left these places and started to traverse the walking mall right smack dab in downtown Kalamazoo we realized we had run out of time to do the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts or Park Trades Center. So we instead toured the one place that didn’t have running hours because it doesn’t have walls. Bronson Park, right in the center of town (image by youngavenger) :

Christmas Tree in Bronson Park

Right along with this tour it struck me that I was outside at night and it was a cloudless night. Unfortunately the environment wasn’t good for actual skywatching. There were really only two objects visible in the entire night sky and that was the Moon and a very bright star. Originally I thought it was Venus, but after I used my iPhone’s StarWalk app I discovered to my chagrin that it wasn’t Venus but rather Jupiter.

After our time downtown and not seeing any convenient place to find a restroom we went back to Walwood Hall and dealt with our need of restrooms there. We were originally going to head to Red Robin down in Portage but since we were so close to downtown we changed our mind and went to Olde Peninsula Brewpub instead.

Remarkable

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Several months ago I went to a UA Outlet and bought for myself a few new shirts. A blue polo and a pink one. The pink shirt had the pink ribbon embroidered on the right sleeve and it’s rather hard to see unless you are staring right at it. I brought the shirts home and started to wear them as part of my regular workplace wardrobe.

I have to admit that while I wear the pink shirt I receive a remarkable number of compliments from women. They go out of their way when the see me wearing the shirt to compliment me on it. At first it was a surprise and now it’s become a kind of game to see if it keeps on happening or not. I don’t know exactly why they respond the way they do. I have some good ideas, perhaps it’s that men usually don’t wear pink unless they are gay or particularly secure in their own sexual orientation. I don’t think they see the pink ribbon on the sleeve because it’s hard to spot unless you really are looking for it, but it’s a definite possibility.

Something to note for men, whether you are straight or gay, that the right shade of pink can draw an unbidden compliment from a woman, so if you are straight and looking for attention from said woman, it can’t hurt. If your gay, well, enjoy the attention even if it won’t go anywhere beyond social niceties. 🙂

Working Out

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My workout regimen is a nightly two hour long cardiovascular adventure.

I start the first hour on the treadmill and over time I have increased the angle on the treadmill deck progressively all the way up to where I now use it, at five degrees of inclination. I set the speed at 3.8 miles per hour, which is enough to get my heart pumping but not enough to take my breath away. I read once that if you were going to use walking as an exercise that if you are short of breath or breathing so that you cannot maintain a conversation well, that you are exercising beyond your capacity for maximum cardiovascular benefit. At some point walking has to drop away and give up to running. I was doing some running on a Nike+ program but when I started to run into joint aching that was a pretty clear signal to me that perhaps I need to stretch out my expectations of running, at least in the short-term. This time on the treadmill, at least by the computer in the treadmill declares that I burn around 745 calories for the entire hour.

The second hour I spend on the Elliptical Trainer. This machine replicates the general motion of cross-country skiing mixed with stair-climbing and walking. I set the time to be an hour and the “difficulty” to 14 out of 20. I don’t really know what the units are for the Elliptical trainer when it comes to its “difficulty” and I think that each machine manufacturer has it’s own concept of this. When I finish with this exercise I’ve burned about 845 calories.

I do this every single night, except on Sunday. That’s the day I select to rest and recover. So far it’s working very well for me. I do have some mildly entertaining problems, first of which is that I sweat a LOT. Even when I wear UnderArmour, which is supposed to wick sweat away. I find myself soaking my entire kit to saturation and then the sweat starts to rain off of me. It’s not just a little either, not a pitterpat, but more along the lines of a light rainstorm. I try to keep from swinging my hands too much so I don’t accidentally splatter nearby people who really would rather not take a shower from me. The sweat gets going on the treadmill but goes out of control on the Elliptical machine. It runs down my face and into my eyes and stings. So I’ve altered my kit and now I have a towel with me. I mop myself up every two or three minutes and by the end I’m wringing what I imagine to be about 300 to 500 milliliters of water out of myself. They say Cancer is a water sign, of this I have no doubt. Along with my issues with water, it’s getting colder outside. No longer can I work out, then dash outside to hop in my car. I did that once, and when the 40 degree air hit me it took my breath away. Evaporation consumes a lot of energy, in moments I was shivering. Now I take my time, change, wear more seasonally appropriate coverings so the short jaunt outside to my car isn’t so breathtaking.

What has it done for me personally? Well, I’ve lost a lot of weight. I started this adventure at 280 pounds, and I was wobbling around there and 278, back and forth. Mostly that was my sedentary lifestyle expressed in my weight. At this point I was hypertensive and really on the road to later disaster and I knew it. Now I weigh in at 242.6. I have lost 37.4 pounds. It’s interesting to see where it loses first. The first zones that showed immediate and surprising (almost shocking) improvement were in my legs. I used to have what I affectionately described as thunder-thighs, because I keep a lot of my weight there. That has since started to drop away. The next place was my ass, which as pretty much disappeared. Then I started to notice the drop in my face and neck, and oddly enough, my wrists and arms. The most resistant area for weight loss is the obvious regions, right along my trunk and back. So I still have a belly and love-handles, although the further I go the more I am noticing that I’m starting to develop an actual body-shape that is in line with my overall goals. I’m never ever going to look like the other gym bunnies, and I’m okay with that, but I am tired of being fat, and that fat made me tired. In a way I’m tired of being tired. That leads into the next expected-but-still-a-surprise personal result for me, my energy level has shot way up. All this exercise has also done wonders for my mood. When I carried all the weight I was always tired and irritable and generally a moody bitch. Now that I’ve shed a lot of that, I find myself not so quick in the grouchiness arena. Exercise physiologists say that regular exercise has benefits for mental health in addition to what it does for the body and of that I believe them. Body image is very important to me and it struck me square between the eyes a few days ago. I was about to head into the gym and I was wearing too much bulk, so it wasn’t terribly cold and so I stripped down to my UnderArmour Heat Gear Tee. Almost always I want to put something else on over that because I’m self-conscious about how I look with such form-fitting clothing on but that day I tossed off the layers and didn’t give it a single thought. When I got half-way to the changing rooms at my gym and noticed that I just had on my heatgear tee, and that I was okay with that, that feeling was like a blossoming reward for all the hard work I had been doing. It’s only going to get better, and I have another 42.6 pounds to lose. When I get to 200, then I’ll be just right where I want to be.

Working out this way is exceptionally dull work. I get out of work at 5, get to the gym around 5:30, and I really don’t get started on the machines until 6pm. Two hours of working out push my days to 8pm before I can even think of going home. While I’m working out I found that mental diversions really help. Listening to Podcasts works okay, but often times I get transfixed by the timer on the machine and then it just drags on and on. Reading on my Nook Simple Touch is better, especially when I can make the text very large. I sweat too much, and so the Nook has fallen out of favor in this use because I don’t want to drown it in sweat and short it out and kill it. What works best to keep my mind occupied while my body chugs away is my iPad. I’ve found that Flipboard, DC Comics app, Uno, Bejeweled 2, and Qrank really work well to keep me entertained so the time just flies on by. When I’m working out at the Anytime Fitness in Kalamazoo, they offer free Wifi so it’s great and very easy. When I’m at the Anytime Fitness in Portage, they don’t offer free Wifi, so I have to create my own Wifi through my iPhone. It’s not too bad, but I do wish I could get Wifi down in Portage as well.

When I began this new regimen I started out dreading my afternoons, schlepping off to the gym and huffing and puffing and sweating like a rainstorm. Now I think I might be getting addicted to working out. It’s not that I really like it, but it’s an odd sort of craving I have now. It’s good for me and is one of the reasons why I’m dropping weight so very quickly and I really don’t have a problem with that. I just wish I had more hours in the day to do the other things in my life. But if trading some fun for what I’ve been able to do for and to myself over these past few months is very much worth it.

Surprised Doctors and Busy Bees

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Surprised Doctors and Busy Bees

Two days ago I went to Sindecuse Health Center here at WMU, which for those who don’t know me very well are the “Company Docs” that provide non-urgent medical care free of charge to University employees. I went in for a blood pressure screening.

Some history is in order to explain why my blood pressure is so important to me. I have a hereditary predisposition for hypertension that I inherited from the males on both sides of my family. My father has controlled hypertension and my maternal and paternal grandfathers both died of associated circulatory failures, heart attacks and strokes. So I am very aware of my blood pressure and like to screen myself for it every once in a while. My biggest problem with it is that my blood pressure is linked to my body weight pretty much directly. I am 6 foot 3 inches and when I weighed 280 pounds (very overweight) my blood pressure was 149/93. That put me smack dab in the middle of hypertension. I am young enough where the doctors gave me an ultimatum, either address this issue now or they’ll write a perscription for me which will start me on the drug treadmill that I can never stop running on once I get started. A pretty direct message if I don’t say so myself.

The fear of the drugs, and in a way the nebulous fear of hypertension on its own was a good portion of my recent decision to finally address my weight issue. I started at 280 pounds and currently I weigh 245 pounds. I have another 45 pounds to lose, as my goal weight is 200 flat and even pounds. When I went for the screening the doctor asked me why I wanted the screening and then I informed her that I had lost a lot of weight recently and wanted to see if my blood pressure was still linked to my body weight, as I really deep-in-my-heart know it truly is. She of course went from one hot-button statement to another. Someone comes in out of the blue for a blood pressure screening is one thing, but rapid precipitous weight loss? It could have been a medical emergency, a very bad sign. She did ask, and I told her that I had simply had enough of weighing so much and being so fat and lazy. Truth to be told, it wasn’t anything really new that I have done to myself except perhaps listen. If you ask any medical or weight-conscious professional about how to lose weight they will yawn, stretch, and mutter “eat right and get plenty of exercise.” It has to be exceptionally dull for these people, they keep on saying the same thing over and over again and people don’t want to do that, they want something magical and instant. So telling her that I was working out every single day and eating better helped calm down the red-button-mashing she was on the edge of with me. My blood pressure at 245 pounds is 136/88. I have lowered both the systolic and diastolic numbers and now I am not hypertensive anymore. I found a chart that doctors use to explain to patients what their blood pressure measurements mean and this chart tells me that I am now regarded by the medical community as “high normal” when it comes to blood pressure. I used to be hypertensive, now I am not. I know that anyone can live for years in a hypertensive state, but like a machine with too little oil, eventually that condition will wear out all the parts, especially the kidneys and the blood vessels in the brain and lead to a sticky and quick end – either renal failure or a stroke, if not something else equally as hazardous and unpleasant.

While my screening was underway, the doctor asked if I had any allergies. I told her that for the past few years I have not suffered from my hayfever or my allergy to poplar-tree pollen1. She asked what I had done to do that, or if I was taking any OTC medications and I told her that I simply included local unfiltered honey as a sweetener to my breakfast in the morning. She looked at me with a curious light in her eyes, as if she had never heard anyone do this before. There is an old-wives-tale/superstition that local honey can alleviate allergies, especially if those allergies are linked to pollen. The honey I buy is from Meijer’s markets and it comes from Onsted, Michigan. It’s local enough apparently to do the trick for me. I apply one serving (21 grams) of honey to my breakfast cereal every morning. I have not had the runny eyes, the clogged nose, nor the inability to swallow properly that usually comes when I’m in the thick of my seasonal allergy attacks. It could be all a giant placebo effect, or it could actually be helping me. Either way honey is good for you, and as a replacement for table sugar it makes a great sweetener all around. Cereal, Coffee, Tea, anything really that needs some sweetening. I keep on telling people about the benefits of local unfiltered honey and every once in a while I win someone over who adopts it as their sweetener of choice. If you have a choice between table sugar and honey, one is more ‘natural’ than the other, just on that basis it makes sense to me.

So I am in the middle of losing weight and so far I’m doing quite well. I haven’t had any injuries and I blew past my old plateau of 260 pounds long ago. I feel really good, I have a lot more energy now than I did before, in so far that I don’t feel so sluggish all the time and nearly everything else in my life has improved. My mood, my digestion, and yes, all the other parts of me that we don’t talk about in pleasant conversation, those have improved as well. When people ask me what diet I’m on, I tell them it’s the oldest one in the book. The one that doctors and fitness people yawn on through when they say it, “Eat right, get plenty of exercise”. I’ll write up my “diet” in another blog entry for those that might want to try it.

  1. Poplar Tree Pollen looks a lot like loose tufts of cotton flying in the breeze. Little white fluffs of childhood terror, at least for me. ↩

Buddhify

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First Look at Buddhify

I read on, I think, LifeHacker about a new app called Buddhify and since the price was right, about $2.99 I decided to buy it and give it a go. I’ve meditated in the past, here and there in little bursts and have had a surprisingly easy way of letting go. I have to admit that I haven’t done it in a very long time and like any machine that goes too long on one path, eventually I feel all hot and dry. It’s not the pleasant meaning of hot, but a more parched and wearing-down kind of hot. So this morning I was listening to A Way With Words podcast mostly because it was in my Podcaster playlist. I paused the program and after finishing a portion of my regular morning tasks here at work I decided to open up Buddhify and give it a whirl.

I used the first program which for me was a clairity meditation that concentrated on hearing. The program is lead either with a male voice or a female voice, that is a feature I really do appreciate. Whenever I can have the option, I prefer the male voice, what a surprise. The app is written by and produced by a company in Britain so the accent follows along. I find it easy and comforting, it’s different enough to be novel and keep my attention but not jarring enough to shake me out of my meditation. I chose my first one from the home set, which you can do if you are sitting somewhere with your eyes closed. This is something that I can do relatively easily at work, as long as it doesn’t last too long and people get the wrong idea that somehow I’m napping on the job, which I am not. During the meditation I found it very easy to follow along and about three-quarters of the way through this short program I actually felt my consciousness change. It felt a fair bit like physically falling, but my body hadn’t changed state at all. Really the best way I can relate it in words was that I slipped into a really relaxed and comfortable state. It’s very much like the quietness that overcomes me in the ledge right before and right after sleep comes over me. There is this area, where I can be fully awake and aware and control myself but the “agitated mind” hasn’t woken up yet. I don’t form plans, worry, or dwell on thoughts in this state and I value that feeling. This of course would make everyone who enjoys meditation smile as I am sure they understand perfectly what I am trying to describe.

As I continue using Buddhify, which I wholly intend to do I will keep on writing down my experiences and blogging about them. If you have an iOS device, I really recommend that you plunk down the cash and buy this program. It actually does something you don’t expect and that novelty should be treasured. That you can get it for so little a price is very surprising. So far I’d rate Buddhify a 5 out of 5.

Nook Simple Touch Firmware Update 1.1.0 Review

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Barnes & Nobel Nook Firmware 1.1.0 Update

I just got an email from B&N regarding my nook, that there was a firmware update available for my device. I couldn’t help but download this update immediately and see what it was all about. The download clocks in at 110MB and takes just a few moments to copy to the Nook drive on the device once you plug it in. I was waiting in vain for the display to go to sleep so I hit the sleep button on my nook and it dutifully went to sleep. I pressed it again and the nook software update boot loader appeared. The nook took about three minutes to load the firmware update and once it was complete it went back to sleep using the default “authors” screensaver.

I woke up my device and started to poke around the edges looking for what was updated. Of course I glanced at what B&N1 was pushing:

  1. Breakthrough E Ink® display – best just-like paper reading, even in bright sun
  2. 25% faster than any other eReader ” Best-Text™ Technology for sharper, ultra-crisp fonts
  3. Longer battery life -read for over 2 months on a single charge*
  4. Ongoing enhancements and other performance improvements

As I was playing around with the device it struck me just how fast everything was responding to my touch. In previous firmware iterations I would have to tap several times for the interface to respond to my touch. Now it is much more crisp and fast. Another thing that has markedly improved is the speed with which pages are painted on the eInk display.

From the points above, some of them are new features, some aren’t. #1 is just what the device has already, so the firmware didn’t deliver anything for that. #2 is very subjective, I wasn’t expecting the update to the nook firmware so I didn’t spend any time eyeballing the fonts. On my nook the only font I use is Helvetica Neue, after falling in love with it from my exposure to people who were mad about typography here at work. The speed of the text, which is the other part of #2 was patently obvious. The speedup is very noticeable and very welcome. Point #3 is generally true, my nook simple touch has a kick ass battery life, perhaps the update will lengthen the battery performance but I haven’t been using it long enough to judge that point yet. And of course, there is #4, which apparently hides a whole host of interesting mystery items. I have to imagine that somewhere there is a technical document that details all of these updates that were glossed over in point #4. Perhaps if someone from B&N reads this, they could comment. That would be nice.

In the end I think that B&N should apply this patch to all the nook simple touch devices they have on display in their stores and they have done a really great job addressing things that at first you didn’t think you had a problem with, but once addressed you find you really appreciate. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on a review unit of the new nook tablet and then I can write up a review of that. It should be a lot of fun, as I can compare it to the iPad and the original nook color tablet. I’m looking forward to it! 🙂

  1. http://www.barnesandnoble.com/u/Software-Updates-NOOK-Simple-Touch/379003175 ↩

New Drying Machine

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This past weekend my very old Kenmore Clothes Dryer died. It was showing distinct pangs of death during the Halloween Movie Marathon of course but I ignored those. I couldn’t ignore the hum, no start, and hot electrical smell. When the machine had well and truly died I figured I would go out and get a replacement machine.

I started looking at Sears. They had a Whirlpool, pretty much an updated replacement for what just died on sale for $404 bucks. Before plunking down my cash to buy it, I thought I would wait for Black Friday sales to begin. Then everyone pretty much joined the same chorus together and said it was silly to wait and that those sorts of things aren’t usually included in Black Friday sales. Of course I was also a little irked by Sears because they wouldn’t haul the old machine away for free, they charged $10 for that.

I went to Lowes and found they had the same machine, same price, and they had free delivery and free take-away. Already a better deal than Sears. Of course while we were looking at machines we noticed one for sale that had more bells and whistles than the one we were looking at first. Another Whirlpool of course, but bigger and more eco-friendly. The list price on this new one was $699 but since it was the last one Lowes had, it it was “Last Years Model” they knocked the price to $491. I added a 4-year warranty to the mix for $99 and bought a 3-wire electrical hookup to boot.

Before the new dryer arrived I decided that I should pull the old one out and tear into it to see how it was set up. The vent came right off the back, as I half-expected it to, and I was able to clean the 40 pounds of lint-bunnies out of it. I then tore the electrical panel off (unscrewed it, there wasn’t any tearing really) and it was the same industry standard block there that was on every other dryer I looked at. Altogether a very dull arrangement, anyone with eyes and hands could do this work. This thing required absolutely zero skill.

There are some oddities in my home, the laundry service has a breaker and a fusebox. It’s overkill. But there it is. The wires are directly tied in, there isn’t a plug at all anywhere for “plugging the dryer in” to, so I took the wiring off the old dryer and simply re-attached it to the new dryer. I have to return the plug-bit for a refund later today. So when they dropped the dryer off they offered to set it up for me and I declined. When they got into my basement, they saw why I was willing to do it myself, mostly because of the wiring and vent and nodded and left. I popped the vent on, moved it back to where it belonged and assembled the wiring. I screwed it all together, screwed on the service entrance shield and that was that. I turned on the breaker and I closed the fusebox control so it was on as well. I turned on the dryer and the lights came on, the chime sounded, and I ran some clothes in it just to see and the drum went around.

All in all a very exciting and then very dull thing altogether. Upon reflection I could have probably hauled the dryer home all by myself in the Santa Fe and done all this work on Saturday, but at least this way I don’t have to deal with the dead dryer and have it clogging everything up or have to haul it somewhere to get rid of it. Lowes took it away, and frankly, for all the rigamarole I had to go through, it was worth it just for that.

The one thing I did learn was that buying new hookup wiring for these devices is dumb. Just unscrew the old stuff, pull it out, and then put it back together afterwards. Save yourself an easy $20. It’s not like old copper wire is somehow less worthy than brand new copper wire. If it was aluminum, then fine, yes, but copper? Come on.

Halloween 2011: Greek Lemon Chicken Orzo Soup

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This recipe is very easy to pull off, and comes together very quickly. I have modified it slightly away from the browned chicken chunks and replaced those with pulled poached chicken.

Greek Lemon Chicken Orzo Soup

Ingredients:

  • Chicken Broth – 8 Cups
  • Orzo Pasta – 1 Cup
  • Chicken Breast – 1.5 Pounds
  • Chicken Eggs – 3
  • Lemon Juice – 1/3 Cup
  • Lemon Zest – 1 Tbsp
  • Parsley – 2 Tbsp
  • Cornstarch – 2 Tbsp
  • Water – 1 Cup
  • Salt and Pepper

Procedure:

  1. Poach Chicken: Bring roughly two gallons of water to a vigorous boil. Add whole chicken breasts to water, reduce heat to medium and cover. Boil for 10 minutes. When time elapses, turn off heat completely and leave for 20 minutes. When done, remove from water, drain, let dry 5 minutes, pull chicken breast meat apart using two forks into fine pulled fibers. Set aside. Dump water.
  2. In pot, add chicken broth and bring to a boil.
  3. When broth is at boil, lower heat to medium and add Orzo pasta. Cook for 15 minutes.
  4. When time elapses, add the pulled chicken to the pot.
  5. While pot is cooking, whisk eggs together, add lemon juice and zest.
  6. Temper the eggs with a ladle of broth, then add egg mixture to broth.
  7. Lower the heat to low, if the soup doesn’t thicken to your liking whisk the cornstarch and water together and add that to soup to thicken. You could add a white roux if you wanted instead of the cornstarch, up to you.

It’s best to prepare this soup immediately and eat it promptly. The orzo will continue to expand until they burst, greatly damaging the texture of the soup. If you enjoy this recipe, please let me know. 🙂

Halloween 2011: Chili con Carne Recipe

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Some recipes can best be expressed by an integer. That number defines an ingredient unity that runs through some of the vest best recipes. It makes it a snap to remember the ingredients and how to cook the meal in general. So with that, here is the recipe for my Chili, which has, by the way, the unity number of two.

Chili con Carne – Single Batch

Ingredients:

  • Ground Meat – Two pounds, any type of protein according to your preference. Meat must be browned, at least to 140 degrees.
  • Green Peppers – Two, roughly chopped. Set aside.
  • Onions – Any globe type, two, roughly chopped. Set aside.
  • Garlic – Two tablespoons of minced garlic.
  • Beans – Two 40oz. cans of Kidney Beans – One can light red, one can dark red. Not picky, up to you.
  • Tomato Sauce – Two 29 ounce cans of Hunt’s Tomato Sauce
  • Tomato Paste – Two 6 ounce cans of Hunt’s Tomato Paste
  • Beef Stock – Two 14 ounce cans of non-MSG Beef Broth (for those allergic to MSG)
  • Chili Powder – Two tablespoons
  • Cayenne Pepper Powder – Two tablespoons
  • Red Pepper Flake – Two tablespoons
  • Black Pepper – Two tablespoons – Fresh ground
  • Kosher Salt – Two tablespoons
  • Sriracha Sauce – Two tablespoons

Procedure:

  1. Brown ground meat. Season optional, but recommended. Several grinds of pepper and a pinch of salt is recommended. If you use 90/10 ground chuck, you may wish to add a tablespoon of a cooking oil to browning.
  2. Chop vegetation, set aside.
  3. Open up all canisters, as you open a can, add contents to pot.
  4. Add vegetation to pot.
  5. Add browned meat to pot.
  6. Add all spices to the top, in any order you prefer.
  7. Stir vigorously until all the ingredients are integrated. The paste will be the most resistant to mixing.
  8. Put lid on pot, insert into standard oven, at 350 degrees. For first hour, pot is covered. Second hour, pot uncovered.

To multiply this recipe, multiply the number of batches by every ingredient. Cooking is best done in the oven itself, not on a burner/stovetop. For doing multiple batches in the oven, multiply the total cook time (2 hours) by the number of batches, and split that number in half for the covered/uncovered periods. If this Chili is done on the stovetop, you must stir very very frequently otherwise it will collect at the bottom, scorch, and burn, ruining the entire batch. If you had to use the stovetop, arrange a double-boiler, keep the water layer filled and double the cook time.

The Chili can be cooled and stored, it improves very well over time, peaking in a few days after cooking is complete. Chili can be frozen solid and kept technically forever in that state. While refrigerated, it can last about a week before having to be disposed of.

If you make this recipe, I would appreciate feedback on what you thought about it. Be forewarned, there will be gas. 🙂

The Bible is Hilarious

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LiveJournal 9/10/2003 –

If, according to old testament law, you should kill someone working on sabbath, for example carrying something – then the person doing the killing is carrying a stone, and therefore must also be put to death. Since you cannot stone someone to death without someone doing the stoning, and since stoning itself represents work, then the natural solution to what Exodus suggests, if taken literally, is that the entire population of people who follow this law should whittle themselves down to one very righteous individual standing alone, holding a rock.

I love the Bible.