Things to fill in the cracks in care packages
There are some odd things that are either expensive, impossible to find, or of very poor quality that would be worth squeezing into the voids of care packages. I guess this is a blog post for you mom!
Batteries. Both AA and AAA batteries here seem substandard and yet are just as necessary. They are small and heavy – perfect for making those flat-rate boxes feel more worthwhile.
Small cans of diced green chiles. We have not seen any here. Also artichoke hearts and green chile enchilada sauce.
Packets of hot chocolate. We have not found hot chocolate here. Ovaltine is around but that won’t fool Jordan.
Zip lock baggies. Believe it or not, these are not very common at the stores we go to often. We reuse ours often but still seem to always need to make a trip to someplace that might have them.
Tupperware or similar containers. The ones we have found here are cheap. Carrying a soup to work always ends up leaking. I really should have thought of this when I was in the US and bought some good containers.
Some candy. Peanut butter cups, Butterfingers, Peppermint Parties, and Twizzlers are some that we rarely see and really like.
As I think of things I will update this list of care package goodies to fill in boxes.
Hotpot horse meat
See that plate of thin slices of meat? Yep, horse meat. We often go to The Bull restaurant and have Asian hot pot for dinner. We can have a healthy and filling meal for under ten dollars each. You choose the type of broth you want – I usually get the spicy type. Then you pick the meats, mushrooms, vegetables, noodles or other things to add to your pot. But it wasn’t until recently that we decided to try the horse meat.
They have a good selection of meat available. We get the sirloin every time. It is cut thin like the horse meat in the picture. Pork also comes thin sliced and frozen like that. Sometimes the beef shin or chicken is picked and they are thicker strips of meat. As you can see, the horse meat is quite lean. It is a little gamier than beef is but nothing like mutton or even venison.
We almost always get two side dishes – a plate of peanuts and a plate of cucumber slices in a soy sauce and vinegar marinade.
I like the glass noodles, tofu, a few types of mushrooms, regular or spinach noodles, and of course – meat. A little green onion, cilantro, and sesame sauce to dip into and I am in bliss.
Hot pot is fun because you cook in the pot right in front of you and you can customize every time. Make as thick or thin as you like, order more of anything you run out of.
I am getting hungry thinking about it!
Twenty years ago…
Twenty years ago it was 1992. I turned 18. I graduated from high school. I spent all summer in Naples, NY at Camp Cutler. I think that was the year I ran the archery range.
Meanwhile, President George Bush (the first one) vomited in the Japanese Prime Minister’s lap. Russia and the US relax nuclear tensions. The world learns where Bosnia and Somaila are. Well, maybe not where they are but that they exist. Los Angeles riots after the acquittal of police officers involved in the Rodney King beating. Galileo is excused for his sins by the Pope. Bill Clinton manages to become President. Prince Charles and Princess Diana announce they are calling it quits. Planets outside of our solar system are detected.
I went to Finger Lakes Community College. I joined the timbersports team. I got a job on campus as the recycling coordinator. I lived in a motel a mile from the school. I didn’t have my driver’s license – I rode my orange and black GT mountain bike everywhere. My hair was long.
Insulated Chinese pajamas
With a few trips to China under my belt, I have seen quite a few older Chinese people out in their pajamas.
While in Suzhou last week I saw a shop that had a number of PJ outfits and it got me thinking. It helped that the gym the tournament was in was really cold. I decided to get Pepper and I each a set of insulated pajamas. …and slippers.
For Pepper and I, seeing people out in their pajamas has always been something to laugh at. Not any more. I wore the pajamas for the final game of the basketball ACAMIS tournament. It was the first time I was warm in that gym.
The set I got say words on them like a Valentine’s day card montage. Be mine. XXOO. Love. Candy. Honey. Kiss me. Sweetheart. Forever. Hugs and kisses. Lots of love. Sweetie.
Pepper’s set has one legible word. Man.
I’m not going to lie… I got them as a funny gift and in just a few days the family is practically fighting over them. Jordan was home sick today and even wore one of the tops all day. I got home and changed into my pants. Pepper has worn my top around the past few evenings.
We have a kitten
It has been a few weeks that we have had a kitten. It turned out to not be easy to find one. We tried the black market where we had seen animals on prior visits but that vendor doesn’t come in the winter. Good. Hearing the meow sadly in the cold would have almost guaranteed us coming home with a full pride.
She hasn’t had a name stick. We tried Spanky, Rascal, Loki, and a slew of cat related god names from many cultures… I guess Jordan is calling her Kit-Kat now.
Korean barbeque
One of our favorite places to eat out is a Korean barbeque place just a short walk from our apartment. We usually order the bacon-like pork to cook at our table. A couple of bowls of bibimbap, rice, soup, sides… It is a fairly cheap meal that will even give us leftovers.
Birthday dinner
Pepper took me to Veranda for my birthday dinner. I had my first steak since August. It was a much thinner cut than I usually prefer but it was quite good. We went home and watched Resident Evil 4. Steaks and zombie movies is about to become a tradition!
What brings people here
Tiffany asked a fun question. She wanted to know what search terms people used that delivered them to this site. So here are the 6 most popular over the last 365 days. (I condensed similar searches.)
- Heather Thomas – One blog post about an 80′s movie with a couple of stolen pictures is my best post?
- Print your own Monopoly money – my second most popular post is providing links to another site.
- Kate Nauta – apparently I need to blog more about women in movies to get more blog traffic.
- letter blocks – a picture that I took!
- mustache types – another stolen image!
- french doors – my own content!
Here are some of the more humorous searches that land people at zieak.com.
- white buffalo
- amish beard
- dumpster diving
- corona in a can
- cat stinky face
- freak in the room
- mickey mouse phone
- lesbian barbie
- dirty toilets
- starling recipes
- C3PO porn
- chlorine and yeast infection
- wife beater shirt
- aluminum foil armor
How to host a beer tasting tournament
In a few days I turn 38. Pepper asked what I would like to do to celebrate and we decided to host a beer tasting. Her sister had taken part in a similar event which gave us the idea. We have hosted beer tastings before such as a vertical tasting of Alaskan Smoked Porters from quite a few different years or the tasting we did last year of winter beers.
For that tasting we just concealed each of the beers and everyone got a small sample to try. then they wrote their impressions and rated the beer from 1-10. We then calculated the average for each beer to declare a winner.
For this tasting each beer would be paired with another beer and you would just need to choose the better of the two which makes the event more like a tournament. Each beer that wins by popular vote would move on to the next round. This should make it easier that comparing a beer to one you tasted 10 sips ago.
We came up with a guest list and estimated just a one ounce sample per person. We decided to do single elimination with sixteen different beers. If you want sheets to use for the bracketing this site has easy links to brackets of all sizes.
You’ll need:
- Quite a few beers
- Bracket sheet for each person
- Writing utensils
- Small tasting glasses
- Something to disguise the bottes (or cans) as you pour
The beer that we had at our party:
- Altan Gobi from Mongolia
- Budweiser Dark from Czech Republic
- Gem Draft from Mongolia
- Beck’s from Germany
- Cass Red from Korea
- MB Amber a Ulaanbaatar microbrewery
- Corona from Mexico
- Red Stripe from Jamaica
- Baltika №7 from Russia
- Sam Adams from USA
- Tiger from Singapore
- Brauhaus Crystalweiss an Ulaanbaatar microbrewery
- Tuborg from Denmark
- TsingTao from China
- Ikh Mongol’s unfiltered beer, another Ulaanbaatar microbrewery
- Bavaria from the Netherlands
The four beers to make the semi-finals were Budweiser Dark, MB’s Amber, Sam Adams and Ikh Mongol’s unfiltered beer. Sam Adams won the tournament but by only a few votes against MB’s Amber.
WordPress blog hacked
Quite a few weeks ago I noticed a few things amiss on my blog. Then one day my mom said that the site was down entirely. I contacted my host and they indicated that my .htaccess file was the problem so they renamed it. The site came back up. But some of the problems I had noticed before didn’t go away.
Before you go on you might be here because you think your site is compromised. Check here.
My web traffic had declined tremendously.
My RSS feed title had been changed to something spammy.
Search results for my site gave the site title as spam.
For instance, instead of “Ryan McFarland’s blog » Print your own (Monopoly) money” the page title would show as “Windows Email Server — Discount -137% price off” or something like that in the search results. My page was still at the top of the search results but nobody would follow that link.
Here is an example from someone else’s blog.
That is the first result for a search for “Day-Lab Ice Blue Necklace $28” (Link goes to their page.)
The first thing I did was check my blog template files. But nothing there seemed out of the ordinary. But a look at my source code on the resulting pages was messy with spam words. What the heck?
I scoured the net looking for a solution. It looks like since I still used the “admin” account for my login for the site that I was the victim of a brute force attack that got my password. Perhaps it was a compromise of my ftp password. My web host announced a security failure and reset everyone’s ftp passwords.
I tried everything listed on this source for how to fix a different hack of WordPress blogs. But none of them seemed to be the source of my problems.
Finally I found it. A file called style.php in my theme was packed with nasty spam links. The clever name was easily overlooked when I was scanning through template files looking for the culprit. There should be a style.css file. I deleted all of the text in the php file from the WordPress template editor and the problems cleared up. My results in search engines cleaned up quickly.
What I find interesting is that other blogs are still linking to me according to the incoming links list on the WordPress dashboard:
I’ll try and contact those site owners to have them try and clean up their sites too.
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