I love coffee, but...

I think I'd rather have the $20,000 and shipping costs that go with it.

My little soon to be eight years old espresso maker works just fine, thank you very much. So the crema's not haute-de-gamme, but if I get crazy for crema, I'll go to the coffee shop and get a couple shots from the expensive machine.

Want to see more goodies to cook up your espresso and coffee? Check out the links below:

www.espressozone.com
Capresso
Gaggia

I survived...

My son's fifth birthday party and I didn't even get a t-shirt. Ca y est...the perils of parenthood!

As usual, Bubba had the wide array of cake choices (carrot, vanilla layer, banana chocolate chip and chocolate cupcakes) and ice cream. This year, I had to decorate a cake (vanilla layer) with a theme (Transformers) and it was really difficult.

I could have taken a drawing and transferred it to the cake by painting the icing with the cool Betty Crocker food coloring pens, but I declined. I managed to find a Transformers mask on a website and I printed it and staked it out on the cake with two short skewers, so the mask loomed over one edge of the cake. I added miniature Transformer toys to the side of the cake and wrote "Happy Birthday Bubba" on the cake. He was so excited he refused the first piece of cake. We made him wait to open gifts until his friends finished eating their cake and ice cream. (He eventually did eat some cake later in the evening.)

This year, instead of tormenting the elderly relatives, we just invited the kids from preschool and some friends with young children. It turned out well until Bubba started opening gifts and all the kids swarmed him. The video I made was full of kids surrounding Bubba while he was opening presents. I didn't exactly invite the Miss Manners required number (one kid for each year plus one), so that probably contributed to the mayhem. Little Katie cried when she got swarmed by the other kids, but since she was the only girl at the party, she got to pick the first gift from the goody bag we set up for the kids. Thankfully, she left with a smile on her face and a couple of toys in her bag.

Cleanup was pretty quick for this party. No one ran with food, so it was quite pleasant. I am so glad it was only two hours.

Deviations

Somedays it seems all too evident that I start out doing one thing, and get diverted to something else. At work, this is due to prioritization. Nurses have to go see what's going on with patients who may be going somewhere that's not necessarily to therapy.

On my days off, like today, I start one thing and my course is deviated by another item. Case in point: I was off on Friday and I got a nastygram in the mail from ye old City re: a stop light camera ticket for Hubby. I paid said ticket early (Arrgh! That was painful, especially since he could not see the light change...another story.) No record of the check appeared at the bank, so I went to the bank, stopped the check, and then went to the City to pay the ticket again with a new check. I get there and they tell me it's already paid. Back I go to the bank to remove the stop. The good news: Hubby and I had lunch at a restaurant near the ticket place, so all was not in vain. (I love ChiliMac's slingers!)

My web surfing is often interrupted, too, by Bubba's entreaties to watch Dinotopia again, but luckily, I use that bookmarking/favorites function to save some interesting items. Here are a few of my recent favorites below.

US worst in preventable deaths (from http://www.reuters.com/)
No surprise here. The most money spent and not always the best results.

Unnecessary quotation marks
Where has this blog been all my life? One of my new favorites on a pet peeve.

Overhead in New York
Another oddball blog that creates some interesting mental pictures.

Billy Bob's Wild Ride
More in the oddball genre, but a good read nevertheless. Billy Bob's Wild Ride is a blog written from the perspective of a patient's liver. Nominated for Best Patient Blog from Medical Blog Awards at http://www.medgagdet.com/.

Happy New Year!

2008 is finally here.

Here are a couple of interesting links I've come across so far this year.

A shocking party
First, Tupperware, now Tasers. (from cnn.com)

De-jittering
Okay, so it's a made-up word, but...this article has some interesting points on anxiety (also from cnn.com)