Insert Witty Title Here

This is not meant to be a comprehensive review. It is just an experience that I've had with meal subscription boxes that I have never seen mentioned in the glowing reviews you see for these services. Last summer, I tried Blue Apron for a month. This summer, I am giving Hello Fresh a try. Its been several weeks since I started, and I can honestly say that Hello Fresh falls into one of the same traps that Blue Apron does: The meals take too long to prepare.

Every Hello Fresh recipe card claims that the meal only takes 30 minutes to make, but I have yet to have one of these meals take less than an hour. For example, a few weeks ago I was preparing the serrano steak meal. The recipe card called for pealing a mango, slicing the fruit off the pit, and cutting it into matchstick sized pieces. That alone took me 30 minutes to do. And I was so preoccupied with the mango that I burned the rice. At the of it all, the meal was quite tasty, even without the rice, but after a long day of work, I'm usually too tired to put so much effort into food prep and too hungry to wait the 1-2 hours it typically takes me to fix these meals before eating. Plus, after you are done, there is a whole slew of dirty dishes that have to be cleaned up.

It can be really hard to cook for yourself when you live by alone. Preparing a normal recipe leaves you eating left overs for days until you are sick of eating what was once a favorite food. I've tried freezing leftovers, but there is only so much room in the freezer, and I'm so tired of the food that I avoid thawing it out to eat the remaining leftovers. That's why I like the idea of services like Hello Fresh and Blue Apron because it adds variety to my diet and helps me avoid falling into a meal rut. But in the end, some of the recipe's are just too complex and they all take longer than 30 minutes to prepare.

If you are good/experienced at cooking or you have someone to help, then maybe you can prepare these meals in the advertised time span, but for a single person who is not adept at slicing, dicing, mincing, zesting, pealing, and picking individual herb leaves off their stems, the prep for these meals can be rather tedious and time consuming.

I found a clipping in my parent's kitchen with this recipe that sounded yummy. Apparently, Mom pulled it from a magazine but never got around to trying it out. I figured, why not give it a try while I'm home for the holidays?



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Meant to share this last week, but time just got away from me. I noticed this really cool flower blooming in the yard. I was too lazy to run inside and grab my dslr, so I just snapped a few shots with my iphone.



I wish I could have gotten a few more angles to fully capture the beauty of it, but the phone's camera just didn't want to focus. Oddly, it only focused when I took the photo with instagram. Unfortunately, this photo came at price...I woke up the next morning with terribly itchy bug bites all over my ankles and thighs, and behind my knees. It drove me crazy for days and the anti-itch cream I have was practically useless. I got some relief from benedryl in the evenings, but I think that was only because the stuff knocks me out. You cant feel yourself itching if your unconscious, right? ;-)

Hopefully, a real post will be forthcoming. I've been meaning to post for a few weeks now, but just haven't had the time.

This is just a quick post before dinner to wish you all a Merry Christmas! :D

theiconquest theiconquest theiconquest

The Icon Quest is a graphics-centered interactive community.
Enter challenges, make icons, earn points, become the ultimate icon maker!

The first challenge hasn't even been posted yet, but I'm already having a blast in my guild's community. You don't have to join a guild if you don't want to, though. Its totally optional.

The other day, I was looking at my journal while logged out, only seeing the public entries, and it kind of made me flinch. Lots of ranting and complaining and so one. :/ It made me wonder what sort of skewed image of myself I am portraying to the internet at large. I can think of all sorts of reasons why things have ended up this way...most my positive posts remain F-locked because they contain personal info, or I just forget to switch non-personal posts from locked to public. I guess the only time I think to change a post's security setting is when I'm pissed and want the whole world to know it. :/ So in addition to going back and unlocking some posts that don't have any personal info, I am making a HAPPY post today.

Happy thing #1: I changed my layout. Really, truly changed it...not just swapping out the header. This is the first real layout change I've had in over four years. Like my last one, this is also from thefulcrum. I like it, but its going to take some getting used to. Its so....white. I feel kind of like I'm in a visual limbo without the black that bordered my page for so many years. I've also finally fixed the table in my profile info. I was viewing my profile on my iphone and noticed the Garfield image was partially duplicated/repeated and it just looked stupid. It bugged me that all this time I thought my profile looked fine, it actually looked messed up to anyone viewing it on a web browser other than Firefox. But, the problem is finally solved. Hooray!

Happy thing #2: The time change!! Sure, I lost an hour this weekend and I'm having a hard time getting to sleep at nights (but that's not all that unusual since I've always been a night owl). The important thing is I get daylight in the evenings again. Yaaaay! It feels wonderful to get home from work and be able to enjoy the natural sunlight coming in through the windows. Spring forward FTW!

Happy thing #3: The weather...its not too cold, not too hot, just right. Some of the natives say its unusually warm for the time of year, but to me, this is nice. I don't need to wear a jacket, but I'm not sweating either.

Happy thing #4: Its spring break! And with the students gone and not in classes, everything is so blissfully peaceful. Because, yeah...I'm at that point in my life where school holidays mean nothing to me work vacation-wise. Instead, its a vacation from the traffic all those students generate.

And that's it for now...I am actually starting to get a bit sleeping. I guess I'm finally acclimating to the time change.

I had been putting off upgrading my laptop to OSX Lion for a few months because I knew the version of Photoshop Elements I've been using was not compatible. And if I was going to buy another photo-editing program from Abobe, I wanted it to be full blown Photoshop. But I just couldn't justify spending spending over $600 on a program that I would use primarily for making icons. I searched around trying to find CS5 on sale somewhere, but all I managed to find was the educational discount that I do not qualify for because I am not a student nor a teach and no longer work for an educational institution.

At that point, I put the idea on the back burner because Snow Leopard has served me well and I had no pressing need to upgrade to Lion. Cue arrival of my shiny new iphone 4s with its shiny new 8 megapixel camera and the shiny new icloud that allows you to sync photos and all sorts of other things from your iOS5 devise to your computer, all done through the internet without the need for cables....in theory. While music and apps I downloaded on my phone showed up in itunes on my MacBookPro, there was no syncing of my iphone's photostream with my iphoto library. I did a little bit of digging, and come to find out, syncing of photos via icloud can only be done on devises running iOS5 and OSX Lion. *le sigh*

I was back at my original conundrum of not being able to find Photoshop on sale at a price I was willing to pay. Right about this time I was looking through old comment notification in my inbox, when I came across a comment on one of my tutorials where the person was just so grateful to have found a tutorial that wasn't Photoshop specific. And that kind of galvanized me to stick with PSE, so I immediately called my Mom and told her I wanted Photoshop Elements 10 for Christmas.

So yesterday afternoon, I sat down with my MacBook Pro and installed PSE 10. After that, I bit the bullet and installed OSX Lion from the app store. It took FOREVER for it to download, and another long while for it to install. After it finally finished installing, I went through a quick setup where I enabled icloud and was eager to fiddle around but my computer was soooo incredibly slow because Spotlight had to re-index all my files in the new OS. It turns out that takes a couple of hours to do and it was already after 11 pm, so I ended up just going to bed and letting it run overnight.

I didn't get to really explore how things work in Lion until this evening after work, and of course, one of the first things I checked was to see if the photos from my phone have synced. They haven't. The main reason I upgraded to Lion is to sync my photos and it doesn't work! Cue me sighing in exasperation and going on another Google hunt to see what could be causing the problem. I had a suspicion and it turned out to be true. In addition to needing Lion, you also have to have the latest, greatest version of iphoto in order to sync photos over icloud. I only have the second latest, not quite the greatest version. So here I am, having to spend another $15 on iphoto 9 in addition to the $30 I already spent on Lion. I'm still waiting on iphoto to download, and from what I've read, I'll have to run another software update in order for the photo syncing to work....hopefully. All this rigmarole and jumping through hoops because I'm too lazying to connect my phone to the computer and manually download photos from one to the other. This better work, or I'm not going to be a happy camper.

ETA: It works! Huzzah! 181 photos just downloaded to iphoto on my Macbook! :D

Ugg, I feel like such a ditzy klutz right now. When I went through security, I forgot to take out my ID. When I got into the line at the metal detectors, I just followed the people in front of me, who got into the wrong line so we had this TSA woman talking to us like we were idiots. And because it's warm in FL but colder where I'm going, I'm having to carry around my heavy coat instead of just wearing it. Just what I need, another thing to juggle. I got my stuff all out of order on the conveyer belt leading to the baggage scanner. As a result, the laptop was the first thing to go through and the laptop bag the last to go through. I usually put those through right next to each other so I can grab the laptop and put it back in the bag straight away. But in the rush of trying to grap my laptop AND coat AND shoes AND ziplock baggy with my liquids to clear them out of the way to make room for other people's stuff, I got completely overwhelmed and confused. So when I saw my laptop bag come out of the scanner immediately followed by a MacBook Pro I reflectively picked it up and then I hear the guy next to me say, "I think that's mine." I looked down and saw that my laptop was in my arms. *headesk repeatedly*. I felt like a complete idiot. Since then I have had my suitcase fall over at least two or three times. And I was a complete klutz trying to wash and dry my hands in the restroom. Please let the the rest of the trip go more smoothly.

Merry Christmas!!

Hope you all have a great holiday!