I never was able to get the email addy to Burger on Niles, so I called and talked to the manager. She said she'd check into it and get back to me. Apparently, they have security cameras aimed at the register.

Nothing.

Oh well, I ain't gonna pursue the matter any more. I'll let you folks decide.

I joined up this group that allows for me to post something every day for the next year. I truly doubt it will be here, more likely the Photo blog, but we'll see.

In a way, I am sad to see this year go bye bye, but as it is ending (me being unemployed) I am definitely looking forward to the coming year. I should be getting a new SLR camera here very soon, A Fujifilm s700, which will allow for a much broader range of photography than my previous point and shoot, which actually has been broken for the last few months, but luckily still takes pictures (the screen has been toast). So that will be nice.



My eldest son should be moving into his new house (the house isn't, but it is new to him). So a lot going on. Here comes the New Year, ready or Not.

And probably won't be the last time either: I shall post a recipe.

For you see I was a dinner cook. I actually worked on the line (in a kitchen) for some of the better restaurants in Bakersfield, CA. many years ago for many years (8 and 1/2 to be exact)(and if luck has anything to do with it I shall get back into cooking for the County)

I shall call my creation Chickan and rice deliciouso.

Ok the ingredients:

1 can (12 oz or so) of diced Tomatoes - I used a Hunts brand with diced peppers, garlic and other goodies enclosed.
1 chicken wing, 2 legs and 1 thigh.
2 tbsp olive oil
1/4 cup canola oil
1/2 tsp dried crushed chilis
1 Tbsp Garlic Powder
1 tsp Black pepper
1 1/2 tsp ground sage
1 1/2 tsp thyme
3 Tbsp dried Parsley Flakes
1/2 Tbsp Cajun spice
1/3 cup white rice
1/2 cup water

Ok, a lot of cooking in my eyes has to do with technique. The way you do things while you are cooking matters, especially if you want a quality product. With this dish, you must be patient, number one, and attentive, number 2. It is a bit of a pain, I realize, for the time to fix this dish is about an hour to an hour and a half, altogether.
Procedure:
You take the rice and wash it in clear water a total of five times, draining the water each time. Then in a pot, you place the rice and add enough water to bring it up to the middle of your first knuckle. I use my first finger. No it isn't exact, but it works. You boil the water with the rice till the water is pretty much boiled away. I stir the pan enough times to keep it from sticking. During this time cooking the rice, I start the chicken cooking. I use a iron skillet, a rather good size and a lid to fit the skillet.

Take the 1/4 cup canola oil (or vegetable Oil) and place it in the skillet. Place the chicken pieces and under medium high heat, sear the chicken gently adding the Cajun spice and black pepper. Keeping an eye on the rice, once the rice is still soggy, but most of the water has gone away, add the can of tomatoes, undrained, to the skillet, then mix in the rice to the skillet.

You need to turn the heat way down. just a little below medium heat. You don't want the rice to stick to the bottom of the skillet. I use a pancake turner to stir the pan many times during the cooking process. Gently lifting the rice from the bottom of the pan and turning the chicken. You add the rest of the spices, the water, and the olive oil. It may take a little more water to keep the rice moist. Keep the pan covered unless you are gently stirring the mix.

The trick now is to know when the chicken is done. I wait until the meat just starts to pull away from the bone. You want the chicken cooked thoroughly, no red juices at all. The internal minimum temperature of the chicken needs to be 165 degrees to be safe. Once the chicken is done, serve up a couple of the chicken pieces and serve up the rice.

I'd say it makes two healthy portions. Bon appetite.

I have made this dish twice. I don't add any salt. You may if you want and perhaps add white wine instead of the 1/2 cup water. I save half of the dish to have for lunch the next day. I think the end result is well worth the work in cooking and prepping.

Update: As Of 6 / 18 / 2008 I have made this dish 4 times. I love it.

had a great Christmas.

This is a pure out rant. Something that really bugs me happened just a few days ago in the east side of Bakersfield.

First we went to a hamburger joint that uses carhops still to fetch the food out to the car (you probably can figure which business) in case you can't it is Sonic on Niles. We pulled in about 4:30 pm or so and was told to get into the drive thru, that the car hop was on a break.

That would have been great, except for the long line of cars that had beat us to the punch. We said screw it and went to Burger King a little down the road on Niles towards Bakersfield Proper.

Now for you guys working fast food that really really want to make your customers very upset do what this crew did. First, the girl ahead of me in line (There were only 2 of us in line) Apparently worked there at Burger King and wanted some bimbo from the back to wait on her. So the chick at the register had to slowly crawl to the back of the building and find this special individual.

So the special one and the girl in front of me are talking about parties and boys and then finally she orders her food. Ok great, we are finally making head way after me waiting in line for five minutes. WRONG!

This special child takes off apparently to get the girls order for her in person. I am waiting still for someone to at least acknowledge my presence there.

"Hey lard butt, I'll be right with you"
"You old fart, why did you come to our Burger King today? Can't you see were busy with our one customer?"
"There is a Sonic just down the street, try them."




Something would have been nice. Then a girl wearing what I thought was a managerial top (it was red) came to the register ahead of me, opened up the drawer and proceeded to mess with the money. I am still waiting for SOMEONE to say ANYTHING in my direction. Nothing.



I waited.

And I waited.

And I f**ing walked out with wife in tow.

We went back to Sonic and ate there. By then the car hop was back in operation. Man, I was p-o-ed. This all took place 12/24/07.

Now to find that managers e-mail address at Burger King.

the wrong editors. To tell you the truth, I don't know what the reason is, but I can not get a handle on CSS (Cascading Style sheets). It's 2007, almost 2008, I design web pages, albeit my own, and I feel one should know CSS by now. I am not going to spend a small fortune on a purchased Editor, so I have been trying Amaya and a few others to try and get a grasp on, what is for ma anyway, a very slippery subject. I equate it to trying to nail Jello to a tree.

So, just perhaps in my 2003 edition of Microsoft word is the solution. It will allow you to save your work as a style sheet that cascades. I haven't a clue how it will work. I shall keep you informed.

then there is no picture then there is ...

Yes, that is a refrence to the "old school" song of
Donovan, "There is a mountain". (I'm thinking some one must have been on some very good drugs when they wrote that song to have a mountain disappear then reappear)

Well, mainly due to my love of photography and the
photo blog of mine, I have a huge collection of Photos on the hard drive on this computer. I use Windows XP service pack 2 for the Operating system. I recently decided to take this collection and rearrange it into categories, instead of dates, as the software for the camera tends to upload load it to the computer. So I have a nature category, a Mechanical category, and so on.
I had tried in the past in using control and selecting 5 or 6 photos to move at once and XP software wanted to make copies of the pictures that way, so I was moving them one by one. Granted its a royal pain, but at least I wasn't getting copies that way. Then I went back to the old way, selected about 5 pictures, hit control and highlighted them, then moved the pictures into the new folder.

Poof!

All the rest of the pictures I had in the old folder disappear, maybe a hundred pictures or so. Gone. Luckily I have a backup of them, but those are the raw format, as they come out of the camera, not the processed images I had saved. Needless to say, a lot of work went into these images, and to have them disappear hurt. Granted I should have had backups of these images as well, which I am going to make post haste, for last night, some 3 days later, they all reappeared.

Poof!

Where they went and where they came back from I don't care. I am just so glad they are back. Computers! A double edged sword at best. GRRRRR!

As I read my last post about what happened when I was last unemployed and had way too much time on my hands.
9 - 11 Happened.
There I was at home, being woken up by my wife very early in the morning, her saying something about a fire or being attacked in New York. I needed to wake up and see this. I stared at the TV screen just as the second plane plowed into the side of the building and the smoke from the first hit was seen in the background.
I am sure I uttered an obscenity as my mind tried to comprehend what it was that I was seeing with my eyes. I turned to my wife and tried to come up with a question and she started to tell me what had been going on in the half an hour she had been awake, herself trying to comprehend what it was that was happening.
I spent the next few weeks glued to my TV, watching as others did the same, tried to figure out what took place that fateful day. Watched as they tried to put a good chunk of New York back together again.
I for one, shall never forget that day, horror filled. Unbelievable. Hoping and praying that none of us will forget.

time on my hands right now. It's crazy.
Me being unemployed, looking for work, yet also having access to the internet through a blazingly fast internet connection (DSL through Yahoo / sbc - Highly recommend it) and using a blazingly fast browser (Firefox - again, highly recommend it) and the internet as it stands right now at the end of 2007.
Christ, I have about 5 blogs going, a web page I am redesigning and updating and adding to and all kinds of other stuff.
My cup surely is running over at the time and I can't complain a bit, just I need to get caught up. Get caught up and get organized. Get organized and enjoy life as it comes, for sometimes it comes way too fast.

On a side note, it's my birthday to day. I turned 52. There was no way possible to believe when I was 40 I would be doing half the stuff I am doing now at 52. I am so blessed and fortunate to have good health to be able to do all that I do. Thank you dear sweet Jesus.
Whew!

to apologize. If you have trouble seeing some of my web pages with your particular browser. It isn't my fault though.

Ok, this is a little technical, but most of my web pages utilize standard HTML, easily 3.0, maybe some 4.0, and that is it. I have been utilizing this language for web page design for years. I know my way around it for the most part. The pages are handcrafted. But I am not alone in the design of my web pages.

I utilize Tripod mostly for the storage of my web pages and some at Yahoo. Its free, its easy to use (Usually) and it has worked out pretty good in displaying what I want in web page design.

The other day, just on a whim, I went to verify my HTML, and it came up with a lot of errors. Granted some of them were mine and I attempted to fix them. Others though were created by the fool that designed what ever runs in the background and throws up all the ads for Google that I don't want on there. I am guessing it is CSS, but I could be wrong. Either way, I have no control over what is presented there in that regard and is apparently keeping My web pages from verifying correctly and there fore may show errors on your web page.


By the way it is my birthday tomorrow. 52 years young.

I really hope you don't suffer from Gout. I have had to deal with this ailment for most of my life, at least the last 30 years. One thing I decided was that I wasn't going to take medication for this disorder and was going to control the problem with my diet.
I managed to work at a hospital for a while and came across some very informative literature on the foods that trigger the problem of Gout. I thought I might pass this list along in cases any one out there suffers from this painful condition.

Foods to avoid - these are high in purine content:

• Liver
• Sardines
• Scallops
• Mackerel
• Tongue
• Beer
• Wine
• Basically, all alcoholic Beverages
• Beef Consume
• Goose
• Wild Game
• Soups with peas or mushrooms
• Soups with Lentils or meat broth
• Yeast (both bakers and brewers)
• Bullion
• Gravy
  
  

Ok, now you also want to avoid fat, especially when you are having problems. Fat apparent keeps your body from getting rid of the Uric acid, which is what is causing the arthritic pain in your joints. That and drink lots of water. That will help you get rid of the acid.
I have other info on this condition, but I will make that another post.

Don't ask me why, but I felt the urge to past this note along:

Steam Burns Bad

With my experience cooking, I have discovered the hard way that steam will burn you a whole lot worse and a whole lot faster than just about anything in the kitchen. Granted, coming in contact with a burner that is hot or the side of an hot oven is bad, but steam will go deeper into the skin just as quickly, IMHO. Much worse than hot water or hot grease. Steam is the killer.

I like in the movies when some one takes a scalding from a stem pipe opened to hit them in the face and they come back fighting. Yeah right, They probably would be ... I'll take pity on you in case your trying to eat or something like that.

Anyway, be careful this holiday season with your cooking.




I knew there was a reason I shouldn't have labeled this picture. Uhm, I'm early for next year.

Ok so maybe you can't see it. But I can and right now it is driving me nuts. (Yes this blog is about me.)


I have had over the years of being on the internet, probably since April 1992, made quite a few web pages. I started messing around with HTML, the language computers understand that helps make one form of web pages, about 5 years later in 1997. So now I have a collection of different web sites at different places and nothing is really tying them together.

Then I up and start a new blog, which as of the beginning of this year I really knew nothing about (blogging - What the hell is that?)(Sorry, but I was focused heavily on a certain Message board for years and the rest of the Internet went by the wayside), so I have been playing catch up. This makes about blog 6 or 7 for me, some of which I have kept and others have gone bye bye, which only ads to the collection, and so it goes.

I shall find a way to get them all gathered up in a nice neat bundle but for now there is just the Sites map to go on.

I know it's no biggie in the grand scheme of things. doesn't have to do with world hunger or the environment heating up or not (Personally, I think Al Gore is off his rocker)(Sorry sucara)But there it is for all the world to see and read.

And I feel so much better.





Click here for a bigger image of this Picture - I think it's awesome. Just imagine a 110 degree day out, sun is baking down on you and you find this stream with this small pond about 6 feet deep and this cold cool clear water in the shade ...