Olives!

I was doing my shopping at Leisure Coast and saw lots of fresh olives.  I'd never seen them before so I wasn't sure what they were at first.  Since I'd never tried them I thought I'd get some.  When I tried one I realized why they don't commonly sell fresh olives at the grocery store.  They're very bitter.  

I went online and found out about how the Greeks used to hang them in bags over the sides of their boats until the bitterness leached out.  And current methods where someone's grandmother hits each one with a rock to open the olive so you only have to soak them for a few days.  Some methods use lye, some salt water.

I used my mortar and pestle to crush the olives.  Some split really easily and with those I took the pit out right away.  Some it was easier to leave them attached.  Now they're soaking in the fridge.  I figured the first couple days I'll rinse with plain water, then salt water.  Then I'll decide what spices I want to use with them.. 

SOPA Strike

http://sopastrike.com/

Words with friends...

Did you know that, the words "race car" spelled backwards still spells "race car"?

And that "eat" is the only word that, if you take the first letter and move it to the last, spells its own past tense, "ate"?

And if you rearrange the letters in "Tea Party Republicans," and add just a few more letters, it spells: "Shut the fuck up you free-loading, progress-blocking, benefit-grabbing, resource-sucking, violent hypocrites, and deal with the fact that you nearly wrecked the country under Bush and that our president is black, so get over it."

Garden Art

It was in the clearance bin at Leisure Coast.  I thought it was cute.

With every upgrade comes some "unsupported" features

We finally decided to sign up for XBox Gold.  We've had an Xbox for almost the last 10 years.  Got our first one in Feb of 2002.  Never really felt a need for the yearly subscription.  Lately I've been wondering about the additional online content in some games, and they've filled out the service with more from Zune and Facebook, etc, so when John's brother tried to persuade him to join so they could play Magic, I said to go ahead with a family membership since it was cheaper than two singles.

We tried to join my hotmail account to the family membership but Xbox said we were from different regions and while I could be added to the family membership, I couldn't use it. (??)  I contacted support saying the problem was probably that I created my Live account when we lived in the US, while John had created his after we moved to Australia, so could they just migrate my account.

I guess that is not a reasonable request.  I would have thought that moving from one modern, English speaking country to another (and that is not to infer that there aren't plenty of non-English speaking modern countries - just that the same language should make it simpler, no?) would be easy... but due to licensing and copyright blah blah blah, Sorry, you can't move.

And it wasn't just MS.  I've neglected my blogging for a while, but thought now was a good time to get back to it.  Years ago I signed up to the blogger/google analytics more so for the interest in statistics than the fantasy that I could make money from blogging.  Turns out I've made around $7.50 in advertising revenue over the last 10 years (!!), but my account was on hold pending verification.  I figured now was a good time to migrate that account as well.  No, sorry.

So, in addition to my new Live.com account, I have a new gmail.com account and a new url for my blog.  I'm not sure I want to really give up the old accounts.  Just like I'll have dual citizenship with the US and Australia, I'll probably keep dual country accounts.. (primarily because you can't do very much with Zune in Australia and a wonderful friend of mine has helped me set up a vpn connection to his server in the States so I can appear to be there while using the service).  If anyone needs my new xbox gamer tag, let me know.