Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

While I have oft touted the merits of my hosting company after my horrible experience with Featureprice, lately I’ve been frustrated with the need for more disk space, as well as a Perl module which isn’t installed on the server and is causing MT-Blacklist to fail. I went in to look at all my pending comments the other day, and spent two hours cleaning out spam. All that time netted me about a week’s worth of clean comments – and I had several more months to go through.

After some serious research on Webhosting Talk, I checked out Site5.com* and decided to go with them. They seem to have a great reputation and their package – 5 gigs disk space, 90 gigs bandwidth, 12 domains, one-click installation of a bunch of programs, ssh access – far exceeded what I currently have, for a lower price.

Anyway, part of their promotion right now is that they will attempt to transfer all the stuff to my new account from my old hosting company, which is yet one more thing less I have to do. If the site goes down sometime this week, it’s because I’m switching the DNS records to Site5.

*Disclosure – that’s a referral site link. If you sign up with them through it, they’ll put credit on my account.

The live oak trees outside are filled with little green worms who shower down like rain. Hub went outside to check the mail and came in with a worm on his shirt. The girls were fascinated with it, so I took it off the shirt and put it on Jo’s hand. They played with it for the next hour or so, transferring it from hand to hand and watching the worm as it inched along. They named her Suzy. Suzy the worm. Suddenly, Suzy had something come out of her. “Mommy, I think Suzy frew up,” announced Caroline. I looked and thought it might be a little bit of worm poo. Then Suzy developed red blotches and started oozing liquid. The writing was on the wall – someone played with Suzy too hard and squished her. I told them Suzy was dying and said they played with her too rough. The girls were striken. On their own, they removed their bandaids from booboos earlier today and curled them into tubes to place over Suzy’s inert body. They stacked them up. Jo composed an epitaph. She planted an invisible note at Suzy’s grave that said, “Dear Suzy. Please know we are sorry and we loved you very much.” Caroline repeatedly lamented, “We had a worm named Suzy, but we killed her already!” Jo asked what Suzy’s soul looked like, and if it had gone to heaven yet.

Kids are amazing.

I updated my quilt gallery with a couple more that I’m working on.

Recent pics of the girls are in the gallery.

Dinner tonight was Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic, courtesy of Alton Brown’s recipe.

1 whole chicken (broiler/fryer) cut into 8 pieces
1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons olive oil
10 sprigs fresh thyme
40 peeled cloves garlic
Salt and pepper

Remove chicken from the oven, let rest for 5 to 10 minutes, carve, and serve.

Harvard University has up a series of Implicit Association Tests which are pretty interesting. They’re supposed to discover if you have subconscious prejudices. I think they work based on the same psychology quiz which asks you to name the colors, rather than the words.

My results so far:

– Your data suggest little or no automatic preference for White relative to Black
– Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for Bush relative to Kerry
– Your data suggest a moderate automatic association between African American and Weapons
– Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for GAY PEOPLE relative to STRAIGHT PEOPLE

That last one’s a stumper, since I didn’t think I really preferred either, but it’s all interesting.