Today is the sixth anniversary of the day Keri and I met! It has been six wonderful years full of grand adventures and amazing experiences. We won’t get a chance to celebrate until Keri gets back from her Vipassana retreat (http://www NULL.dhara NULL.dhamma NULL.org/ns/index NULL.shtml) in Shelburne Falls in 12 days. We both signed up for the retreat but unfortunately they weren’t able to accommodate my deafness (most of the meditation instruction is on audiotape) so I’ve decided to stay home and have a retreat of my own here in East Providence. I plan to spend most of my time reading, writing, and meditating. I will be limiting my time on the computer to blogging, email, and work related use.
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The New Year 2007 brought a lot of changes for me and Keri....
We hosted Soupy Sunday once again and everyone had a blast! Good company combined with puppet shows, live music, and soup makes for a great time. The first Soupy Sunday soup was totally random with everyone bringing at least one ingredient for the soup. This time around we decided on sticking more or less to one of our favorite recipes.
The soup du jour was White Trash Taco Soup. Keri and I first got hooked on this soup about 3 or 4 years ago when her brother, Thompson, made it at his house. Let me tell you, it is DELICIOUS. Why do we call it “White Trash Taco Soup”? It’s the “secret” ingredient… one can of cheap beer. Preferably, Pabst. Last night’s version was a bit more upscaled with some Sam Adam’s Oktoberfest which works just fine.
Recipe: White Trash Taco Soup
Ingredients
1 can of cheap beer
1 large can of chopped tomatoes
1 can of olives
1 can of sweet corn
1 large onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, minced
3 packages of Taco Seasoning
3 cups of water
1 1/2 cup of dried beans (red, kidney, black) or 4 cans of – beans
Instructions
First, boil the beans until tender and strain. Put aside.
Second, sautee the onion and garlic. Add to the pot with 3 cups of water.
Add everything else including the beans you’ve cooked or canned beans if you do it that way.
Additional spices can be used: paprika, cumin, pepper, etc. This is all up to you here.
Add that beer in there.
This soup really doesn’t take long to cook. As long as the beans aren’t hard, it’s good to eat.
Serve in a bowl topped with Fritos and grated cheddar. One dollop of sour cream.
Diet type: Vegetarian
Number of servings (yield): 12
My rating:5 stars: ★★★★★
The entertainment for this Soupy Sunday consisted of impromptu jam sessions on the guitars and drums and several improvised puppet shows with puppets we made during the day. If you haven’t watched the video above what are you waiting for?!
Keri has set us up with a blog on Wordpress.com here (http://soupysunday NULL.wordpress NULL.com/) so you can subscribe to the email notifications about upcoming Soupy Sunday events. We’ll be using that in conjunction with Facebook Events to help coordinate the soup ingredients etc et al.
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Soupy Sunday A few days ago Keri and I had an idea...
Suppose you want your Wordpress installation to have one layout and CSS styling for some pages be completely different from the layout and styling for other pages. For example, you might like to have a members only section have a completely different style than the public side of your site. Some Wordpress users suggest using multiple installations of Wordpress. Another way to do it would be to have two different headers and two different css files used in conjunction with page templates. Another advantage to this technique is there is no need to edit any of the HTML or add any additional CSS classes or IDs.
For more information and how to do it go here (http://kerimariondesign NULL.com/one-theme-two-stylesheets-a-wordpress-tutorial/).
Today I decided to create a free theme for Wordpress based on my current blog theme. The design and customized CSS is all mine but the theme coding is from the Cutline theme by Chris Pearson (http://cutline NULL.tubetorial NULL.com/). The Cutline theme is my favorite Wordpress theme to customize since I’ve been using it for so long and know the code inside and out. For this design, I’ve added a few customizations: a favicon, drop cap styling, and a wrapper for a more organic “outside of the box” header design.
The Crows theme is FREE. Visit Keri Marion Design (http://kerimariondesign NULL.com/free-stuff/themes/) to preview the theme or download (http://kerimariondesign NULL.com/freethemes/Crows NULL.zip) for your Wordpress blog. If you decide to use the theme, feel free to comment on this post or drop me a line with your blog url.
Special Instructions:
Drop Caps:
To use the drop cap styling, start your post in HTML view in the post editor. Before the first letter of the first sentence add (without the outside quotes) “<span class=”cap”>” and immediately after that first letter add (without quotes) “</span>”. It should look like the letter “T” in the first paragraph of this post.
Favicon:
I included a favicon with this theme. To use it you will need to copy the file “favicon.ico” from the images folder and paste it into your root directory then upload it.
A few days ago Keri and I had an idea inspired by our friend Melissa. She had told Keri about her college days and how on Sundays she and her friends would gather together to make soup and while the soup cooked they would perform a play. What a cool thing to do! We just had to do something like that. And so, Soupy Sunday was born.
What we did was have each person attending the party bring one ingredient to add to the soup. It didn’t take long for our huge cast iron Jambalaya pot to fill up. So many ingredients, in fact, that we had to start a second (non-vegetarian) soup in our cast iron wok. While the soup cooked and Keri’s bread baked in the oven a bunch of us formed an impromptu jug band in the living room. The sounds of spoons, conga, steel drum, guitars, and castenets filled the air. Ah! Fun!
The soup turned out to be delicious even though we didn’t follow a set recipe. The two soups both had a vegetarian base made with sauteed onion and garlic, tomato, herbs, dandelion and other greens, macaroni, celery, and cauliflower. The vegetarian one had vegan “Italian sausage” added to it and the non-vegetarian had chicken and hot peppers. I had the vegetarian, of course. Click on the pictures below to see the larger version.
The vegetarian Soupy Sunday soup.
The vegetarian Soupy Sunday soup.
The vegetarian Soupy Sunday soup.
I’d like to thank everyone again for coming and for the clean up help. Much appreciated! Keri and I plan to host another one soon and the soup will most likely be our famous taco soup. Yum!
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Soupy Sunday 2! We hosted Soupy Sunday once again and everyone had a...
Get the Flash Player (http://www NULL.macromedia NULL.com/go/getflashplayer) to see the wordTube Media Player.
Last night Keri and I went to see Andrew Bird perform at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel in downtown Providence. The videos here were taken by various people in the audience and I snagged them off youtube for your viewing pleasure! The concert was awesome. *note for facebook readers* If you can’t see the videos then visit the blog here.
I asked Keri last night to teach me how to make Focaccia bread today. This is the result of my first attempt. Lately, she had been baking this bread a lot since it’s very easy to do and tastes delicious. The bread is half devoured already with a bowl of homemade potato leek soup.
After making and kneading the dough, I mixed up a quarter cup of olive oil, fresh thyme, herbs de provence, and Italian seasoning. I brushed this atop the dough and sprinkled freshly grated parmesan cheese over that before putting it in the oven.
Click on the pictures to see them full size. [Read more →]
Fall is here. The leaves are changing. The houses in our neighborhood are decked out in Halloween decorations. The scent of wood fire fills the evening air. The ground is slightly damp from last night’s thunderstorm.
It’s quiet tonight and we’re busy creating here at the Mauran Avenue pad. Keri’s working on her latest series of pencil drawings (http://www NULL.kerimarion NULL.com/). I’ve just finished designing the current theme for the blog. It’s only temporary until I’ve gathered all the imagery I need for the next theme which will be based on my paper journals. It will be a real challenge to see how well I can pull off the design. For now, this current theme will do just fine.
Later tonight is the U2 live webcast at the Rose Bowl. The full concert will be broadcast on youtube (http://www NULL.youtube NULL.com/user/U2official#p/u) for those interested in watching. I’ll be kicking back with a couple cans of ‘Gansett and enjoying the show.
I was on reddit (http://www NULL.reddit NULL.com) the other day and discovered this great FREE font creation site, Fontcapture (http://www NULL.fontcapture NULL.com). I thought it would be fun to take one of my carved rubberstamp alphabets and turn it into a font. Click here to download the font I made, TimesNewStamper. This font only has lowercase letters, numbers, and basic punctuation. It is free for personal use.
If you don’t have a scanner you’re not completely out of luck. The template they provide is in .pdf form and is editable in Adobe Illustrator or any .pdf editor.
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New and Improved! Here’s the new and improved design for my old blog...
A few days ago my Mom sent me a dvd of a peace conference she set up in California. The dvd and case turned out surprisingly well. However, she asked me to make a custom case for one very special recipient, President Barack Obama. As it turns out, Mom has a friend in D.C. who will be meeting with a lobbyist this weekend and has agreed to pass the dvd/letter on to Obama. Sweet!
For the case construction I used matboard and two sheets of handmade paper. The images are toner transfers that I designed (with Keri’s help) in Adobe Illustrator. I used Chartpak pens to do the transfers. In the foldout view, the left side has an envelope I made using a regular envelope as a template. The cd is attached by a handy little foam button purchased in sets online.
I was sitting outside on the porch when suddenly I heard these loud noises in the air above me. I got up to look and saw hundreds of crows flying this way and that. A Murder. I raced inside and grabbed the camera to get this shot. For more crow imagery, please visit my Crow stamps gallery.
Get the Flash Player (http://www NULL.macromedia NULL.com/go/getflashplayer) to see the wordTube Media Player.
Keri and I went to see these guys perform last night at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel in downtown Providence. They are awesome! If you ever get a chance to see them perform go for it. Gypsy Punk is so much fun. The last gypsy punk show Keri and I saw was at Monterey Live where Fishtank Ensemble was performing.
A week ago marked one full year for us here in Lil’ Rhody! It’s hard to believe that much time has gone by. We made it! I usually look at a one year milestone as a kind of confirmation of success for what the endeavor I’ve undertaken. I think this is especially true when it comes to a major life change like moving across country from everything you’ve known for 15 years. The first six months here were probably the roughest. Very few new friends, very little work, and then the onset of winter when we were confined to the one heated room of the house. That was probably the hardest part and the biggest source of doubt that we’d made the right decision in moving out here. In my mind anyway. To combat the doubt we only had to remind ourselves of that cramped little apartment on Del Monte.
A couple pics from the garden. Keri and I try to get over there every couple days to give it a good watering and to see if we can harvest anything. Yesterday we were able to harvest two yellow summer squash and a ton of basil. We used both in last night’s deep dish pizza. Yum!
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more on the artificial life and then some on the real life Check this (http://www NULL.telegraph NULL.co NULL.uk/earth/main NULL.jhtml;jsessionid=KEG0KWHGV4PS3QFIQMGSFFWAVCBQWIV0?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/02/01/scigenome101 NULL.xml) out. It’s...
life Just got back a little while ago from beers at...
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