Emily Bloss

I have to get rid of some of my open tabs in Opera.

• Use a paper clip to put on a bracelet , in case you don’t have somebody around to help you.
• Mmm. Overnight turkey recipe.
• An easy way to share pictures? I didn’t try it yet but it sounds good.
• I want to make Sioux Indian Pudding for Thanksgiving.
• A neat idea for web fonts but it didn’t work in my Linux version of Firefox.
• Review of various web font embedding services.
• Top 10 Foods to Fight Cholesterol
• Ten uses for your body after you die. I would like to be useful. I’m done with it, so why not have it benefit someone else? It’s recycling!
• Recipe for home cured bacon. MmMMM!m
• Neat gift idea.
• Backup for Linux.
• Complete Android Guide – maybe someday we’ll get one! Plus how to turn your Android into a fully-automated superphone.
• The Virtuous Life from The Art of Manliness website. A lot of good ideas here, courtesy of Ben Franklin.
• Recipe for Chinese Hot and Sour Soup.
• 10 Ways Your Brain is Sabotaging You
• Avoiding Environmental Health Risks
• Top 10 Codes You Aren’t Supposed to Know
• Dollar Bill Origami
• New York Fossils – I’m hoping it can help identify the fossils I brought back from vacation.

Wow! Opera is much faster now.

We’ve wanted to sky dive ever since we met. This weekend we are finally doing it!! We have reservations to jump out of a plane at 18,000 feet. Woo hoo!

This time we went to spend the day with Trav’s cousins, and we had a lot of fun! They were staying at Summer Bay Resort in Clermont. While John was cooking lunch on the grill, we were watching two guys riding jet skis on the lake. They were starting to get pretty close to each other and when they came around and circled real close, one guy dumped it over. Then he couldn’t get it flipped, so they had to come tow it away with a tiny rescue boat. Rather amusing!

After lunch we went swimming, plus me and Melissa participated in the line dancing… here we are doing the Cupid Shuffle!! There’s no sound, so you’ll just have to sing along in your head – to the right, to the right, to the right, to the right, to the left, to the left, to the left, to the left, now kick, now kick, now come on baby kick, now walk it by yourself, walk it by yourself! Etc.

For dinner, we went to a local seafood place called High Tide Harry’s, on Semoran Blvd just up the road from the airport. We chose it because it had pretty good reviews, and they had to pick up their daughter at the airport. We got Melissa and Kat to try alligator, and they liked it! The place has great ambiance, and the food was good. I had a bowl of blue crab stew and a salad, along with hushpuppies and the appetizers of gator and fried okra. Yum!

And here’s Mandy with her fishbowl of Long Island Iced Tea. 32 oz! We all helped her finish it… it was actually pretty tasty. I’m glad somebody got that special drink because it’s pretty darn fun.

Just down the road from the resort are tons of gift shops, many with huge, garish decorations on the buildings. On the way back, we decided to stop at one of them. I scored a dolphin mood necklace and two very pretty anklets. One is the Del Sol kind, where the string turns a different color in the sunshine, and the other is made of paua shell dolphins. Here’s the outside of the shop. It looks hazy because the camera lens fogged up with the humidity and I didn’t have time to wait for it to clear… had to hurry up and shop!

I’m liking the Orlando area very much – we’ve had a lot fun there recently!

Recently I found the site dipdip.org (5 things the world shared today), and they featured a video which I really like…

Richard St. John: Secrets of Success in 8 Words

Passion, work, focus, persist, ideas, good, push, and serve.

The other day, we took a drive over to Orlando to visit with Trav’s brother Mike and his family, and to give Bleys some stuff he needs for his apartment. We had a great visit! Here are a few pics from the resort where they are vacationing.

We hung out at the pool for a while, then went up to get ready for dinner at Agave Azul. Yay! I’m happy to report it was just as good this time. I got the Pollo Mole – it was seasoned very well and I enjoyed it a lot. Trav had the fajitas and reported them to be excellent.

Since they have over 200 kinds of tequila, I felt like I wanted a drink with tequila in it. After marveling at the $65 shots of Anejo and thinking about sipping a glass of straight tequila (could I smell it without my belly doing a flip?), I decided on the Purple Margarita. It has tequila, cranberry juice and Chambord (a black raspberry liqueur). It was delicious! Kind of expensive but worth it. It’s in the pic below.

Mike decided to order all 5 desserts they had on the menu, for 8 of us to share. I was SOOO full when we left there! And we got some pictures for LickYourPlateClean.com, tee hee!

At the end of July we went on Trav’s birthday trip for this year, to visit family and friends in Pennsylvania and New York. It was a fun and relaxing trip! We drove straight through both ways – 22 hours up and 26 hours back.

The first two days we spent at Trav’s dad’s house. On the way there, we were out in the sticks and saw a sign on route 80 that said “Highest point on Route 80, east of the Mississippi” and Trav said, “Hey look, we’re in the middle of nowhere, and I can see my Dad’s house from here!” It’s so far out, Google Maps doesn’t even know the way to his house. We drove through some quaint little towns on the way, so that was nice.

On Saturday we made a bunch of cream cheese penguins, for the family reunion we were to attend on Sunday. It went really fast with 5 people – we had quite the assembly line going. I had an idea for a transport box which may  have worked if I had been more precise, and if we hadn’t been driving for 3 hours to get to the reunion. My sandal also came flying out from the back and smacked the box right in the middle. I took dental floss and strung it in a cardboard box, making square sections for the penguins to stand in. Here’s how it looked when we got to the reunion. Oh, the carnage!

The family reunion on Sunday was a lot of fun. We picked up our niece Alia and took her with us for the day of visiting. At the reunion, we got to see a bunch of people from Trav’s mom’s side of the family. There was lots of good food (including a few raspberries plucked off the bushes) and many friendly people. They held a mystery package auction to raise money for next year’s reunion and we played bingo for little prizes. I got some nail art bling for winning a game of bingo. Whee! I’m also pretty excited about getting some rocks with fossils out of the creek. We have no rocks in Florida and I got to bring home some really cool slabs of slate. Pictures to follow later.

After the reunion, we went to visit Trav’s Frewsburg Gramma and his dad’s side of the family. That was a lot of fun, too. More food! More great people!! I snapped this pic of Alia’s newly dyed hair while we were there. I just love how this one turned out… she’s such a pretty girl. We also had birthday cakes there… Janelle made an eclair cake which was delicious and not too much trouble to make. Let’s see if I can remember… mix a batch of whipped cream with french vanilla pudding. In a cake pan, make layers of graham crackers and pudding mixture, then melt some frosting and pour it all over the top. Refrigerate and you’re all set. Mmmmm!

The next two days we spent visiting with friends in Jamestown and Frewsburg, New York. We also did some work for one of our oldest and very best customers, setting up a new laptop and cleaning up his PCs. Here we are sitting on Ralph’s $70,000 Harley:

Ralph took me for a little ride on his bike and I must say, it was very comfortable!

One of the places Trav likes to go when he’s home is Johnny’s Lunch. They serve Texas Hots there – hot dogs and hamburgers with a kind of chili sauce and piled with onions. Yummy! They’ve been around since 1936 and show no signs of slowing down… the place was packed the whole time we were there.

We met John & Carol and Rick & Terry at Patsy’s on Monday and for supper we had Lena’s pizza. More yum! They have the best pizza.Then on Tuesday we went to The Rio in Frewsburg, to meet with up with some of Trav’s old school chums and family, too. That was a really fun night. They had good food and we laughed and laughed together. Here are the family members that showed up:

The last two days we spent at Trav’s dad’s house. For my birthday, we went to a couple of wineries and sampled & bought some really good wine. After that, Syl and I went shopping at the thrift stores in St. Mary’s, and I scored a bunch of nice jewelry and a new dress which has been dubbed my “couch dress”, because Trav thinks it looks like something a sofa would wear.    It’s a very pretty dress and I can’t wait to wear it on a Friday night when we go out dancing.

On the way home, we went on what is apparently the second most congested highway in America. During rush hour. On Friday! It took us several hours to go 35 miles on Route 95 South in Virginia, near Washington, D.C. I’ve never seen traffic like that before, and I hope I don’t again any time soon! It all worked out, though, and that brought us to Fairfax and Richmond, where we stopped to visit with a couple of Bleys’ friends. We went with Langdon to a place called Noodles & Company which had really good food at reasonable prices – college students know all of the best places! Lex took us to a little downtown diner where I got a slice of green tomato pie, which was interesting and tasty.

The rest of the trip home was pretty uneventful… we slept and drove in shifts and arrived home around noon on Saturday. I just love getting home to see Sadie and the kitties. They were very happy to see us, and we were so happy to see them! Luckily, Trav’s dad has three very friendly cats so I didn’t get too homesick this time… I had somebody to pet. Plus we were pretty much on the go the whole time we were there.

In all, a great vacation.

Last night, one of our dance friends brought along a video camera to film birthday celebrations at the Elks. They also happened to capture us doing a merengue dance, so as soon as we can get a copy of it, I’ll post it! People really seem to enjoy watching us do that one. Must be because we have so much fun!

I’ve had a particular tab open in my Opera for months now… it’s very sad but I can’t seem to get it out of my mind and I don’t want to forget.

The site below has a series of pictures from a little island that’s 2000 miles away from the nearest continent, where lots of albatross chicks are dying because the parents pick up plastic floating in the ocean, believing it’s food for their babies. The pictures show the contents of the chick’s bellies.

Midway – Message from the Gyre

I’m not sure why it affects me so much … it makes me want to do something about it. Perhaps my next calling in life will be to help clean up the Great Garbage Patch. And here’s the Wikipedia entry for lots more info.

Today we started assembling a puzzle, and as I sorted to find the edge pieces, I wondered what other people do when they find pieces still hooked together.  So here’s the poll!

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Here’s the puzzle – I got it (still shrink-wrapped) at a yard sale for $2:

The colors in it are just beautiful. We got the most fun part done this afternoon – the edge. We’re finally set up to do puzzles without them getting wrecked by the cats. The last time we were at Lowe’s, we got a piece of plexiglass which we can clamp onto the kitchen table. It works quite well so far… now we just need to find time to complete it!

And we only have to go to Orlando to get it! We went over to visit Bleys and ended up discovering Agave Azul.

The food was delicious! I had a combination plate with chile relleno, chicken enchilada and picadillo taco. Trav had beef fajitas and Bleys had chicken fajitas, which they said were good. The homemade tortillas were very tasty and with the appetizer chips they served a yummy ranch-based dip.

The restaurant is beautiful. The entrance has a fountain of stone wall with a curtain of water and the decor is of soothing blue and earth colors, with nice tables and cushy, comfy booths. I can’t wait to go back! I’m going to get the Mole de la Casa next time. Mmm!