yeah that’s right. 2 posts in one night. i found two neat-o sites today and wanted to blog about them before i forgot:

• dailylit.com: this site lets you pick a book (mostly classics) and they’ll email you or update your rss reader with a new section each day. so you know exactly how many days it will take you to finish right from the start. you can also click a link on your email/rss entry to have the next section delivered ahead of time if you have some extra time or just can’t wait to find out what happens. you can pick what time you want it sent as well. pretty nifty. i’m starting out with uncle vanya and plan to move on to all those other books my russian teacher always told me to read but i never did. ah yes, reminds me of a song…

Hardly education
All them books I didn’t read
They just sat there on my shelf
Looking much smarter than me
-modest mouse, education

they played that song live, and it was uber fantastic, by the way.

• toggl.com: this is pretty much a dream come true for anyone who bills hourly and does most of their working online. set up your clients and tasks, and each one has a start and stop button which lets you basically punch in and out of each project. it sounds like a hassle, but i’m the type of person who would rather do 10 minutes of work for free than spend the time it takes to track those 10 minutes. who knows how many hours i’ve thrown out the window. no more.

end of nifty link round up.

another appearance from aunt shirley. after roughly 3 hours of wedding/reception good times, we needed to change up the entertainment so we visited aunt shirley who explains how beer causes health problems and diet pepsi causes brain damage.

also, i’m proud to say that a google search for aunt shirley returns 888,000 results, #4 of which is the aunt shirley. who knew that aunt shirley would one day be internet popular.

surprise! new look!

i set up a wedding blog for a friend last week and it made me realize how much css i’d learned since i updated the layout of my blog last, so i decided it was time for a face lift. after many hours of fighting with css (we have a love hate relationship), visiting and re-visiting my bff for figuring things out, finding this very helpful wordpress tutorial site, and consulting some smarty pants friends and husband here it is. yes, those are rounded corners. and yes, the text does gracefully disappear behind the header, which remains static (thanks to daniel’s guidance). and no, i still have no idea how to control the order of my links in the sidebar.

so i don’t know about anyone else, but after a long/not so good day, driving home listening to music can be rather therapeutic. i’ve driven a good number of lousy day commutes while filling my car with the sounds of modest mouse. and sometimes you have one of those days where the music just can’t get loud enough, and you can’t sing along loudly enough to truly enjoy the therapeutic effect.

this is why i payed an obscene amount of money to see modest mouse tonight at the ryman auditorium. and lucky for me, it was loud enough this time, and i had about 2000 other people to sing with me. tres dos perros, black cadillacs and float on - yes.

a few notes on the show:

i’m glad people decided to stand up, even though we all had seats. there’s just something that makes me feel not right (old) about going to a concert and sitting down the whole time.

a rundown: 2-3 percussionists at all times (yes two drum sets including one with a rack of cymbals 6 feet high), several guitar players, upright bass, trumpet, accordion, the banjo made several appearances, fiddle, bass (at the same time as upright bass) and every percussion instrument you’ve ever seen. oh and a keyboard in a coffin like container. 2 semis full of stuff.

the lead singer, isaac, sweats like no one i’ve ever seen. i’d estimate i’ve been to 200 concerts or more. concerts in the summer heat in a tent in the middle of nowhere. concerts in too small venues with too many people. metal concerts. and this guy outsweats the best of them. i mean, i’ve seen pit stains before, but i wasn’t aware that one person could change their entire shirt several shades darker with sweat. wow.

i’m totally frightened and moderately enamored with this sweaty guy. i’ve read that he’s crazy. you can sometimes tell on the album that he’s either very passionate, or losing his mind. i’m still not sure what it is (maybe the sporadic convulsions?), but he’s on my top 10 list of people that i NEVER want to yell at me. yet, he’s kind of endearing at the same time.

many times, i think we could possibly be leading parallel lives - i swear i had my tix on the fridge for 2 months and seriously considered photographing them as well.

QUESTION: if you’re at a show, and no one has come and no one has gone in your immediate area, how in the world can it possibly start to smell like a skunk? just wondering.

until you’ve spent some time with aunt shirley, you can’t fully understand her brand of comedy (which she, of course, does not realize is comedic at all). once you’ve met her, it all makes sense. or perhaps ceases to make sense…

anyway, we were at the wedding reception this weekend and sat at a table with aunt shirley, the mother of the bride, for a while. she told us a story, about ten minutes long, about how she called up my mom one day to see if she wanted to travel to the west side of erie to go to big lots and find a stellar deal on something. my mom agreed, but said she’d have to drive separately because she was getting groceries after the big lots shopping extravaganza.

aunt shirley followed my mom to west erie. keep in mind aunt shirley has lived in this town all 58 years of her life. after shopping, she made a wrong turn out of the parking lot. below is the chaos that ensued:

mile 20 is roughly the shopping center. instead of going east (back to our town, named NORTH EAST), she went west. after 10 miles this did not seem right, so she stopped in a gas station in girard and said “is this erie?” they told her to go south and get on I-90. she went south, but apparently missed I-90. after another 40 miles, she decides to stop and ask again (plus she is low on gas and needs to use the rest room). she goes in and asks “is this erie?” keep in mind, she has found herself 1/3 of the way to pittsburgh at this point. they tell her to get on 79 NORTH and then take 90 EAST to get to NORTH EAST. she takes 79 north, but misses 90 east and has to drive home through the city. except that she’s not sure she’s in the right city so she stops again, on 26th street to ask if she was in erie again. here’s an analogy for you
nashville : broadway, west end, hillsboro :: erie : state, peach, 26th
26th street is not a small street. its one of the main streets that runs through erie. 26th street takes you to the AIRPORT - and she still had to ask if she was in the right city.

i just don’t understand how you can get lost in this part of the country. as long as you are in the right state, go north until you get to the lake, and then turn RIGHT. that is it. works every single time. i suggested this and my suggestion was received with a glazed over stare. we’ll blame the iced tea that we spiked and then gave to her…

what follows is the last minute or so in which shirley recapped her adventure and i realized (10 minutes too late) that i had a video camera

also, all of you erieites need to check out five french fusion restaurant (website coming soon!) next time you want a really great meal. its in north east, connected to presque isle winery on route 20. just make sure you don’t get lost on the way

before we get to the video coverage of this weekend’s events, i thought i’d write about a book i read on the way. the book is the 4-hour workweek by timothy ferriss.

just for starters, timothy ferriss is a total douchebag. in the first chapter or so he goes over how he became some kind of martial arts champion in china by finding a loophole in the rules where if you push your opponent off the platform three times in one match, you automatically win. so that was his whole strategy. he trained for four weeks at pushing people off the platform and won. that’s really lame. no wonder he’s single.

ok so i managed to put that behind me and continue reading. the book has some interesting ideas. the thing that stuck out the most was the concept of creating “mini-retirements” throughout your life instead of saving every penny up for an actual retirement. this makes sense to me - i’ve always had a bit of a problem with the whole dave ramsey school of thought where you work your butt off and penny pinch most of your life to “enjoy” your retirement later. and if i die before then, then what did i actually accomplish? plus there’s the whole idea of how your health tends to deteriorate as you age, so maybe it’d be nice to see europe sometime before i’m 60?

i will say this book was a little easier to digest because i’m working from home now. i’d say chances are slim that the plan he lays out for getting your employer to allow you to work remotely would really work. however, the flip side of that is, if you aren’t happy enough with your job to want to be there 40 hours a week, then why are you wasting your time there? he talks about how losing/quitting a job isn’t as big a deal as everyone makes it out to be - he’s right. try it a few times and soon it won’t even phase you anymore

i also liked how he made it a point to try to get the reader to understand that you can live outside the 9-5 mentality. i know i do this - even working from home. i feel like i have to find something to do for every minute between 9-5, whether its efficient or effective or not, because its so much a part of our culture to stay busy during those hours that you feel like you’re cheating the system if you aren’t.

so overall, the plan of the book is this: set up a business that is essentially run by itself, via outsourced/automated partnerships and then use that as your main source of income while you figure out what you love to do. not really a new concept, but i suppose not many people have written out a plan for it like this.

now that i’ve finished reading it…i kinda feel like selling everything in my house and moving to europe for 6 months…or maybe 12?

i’m in PA right now - we made the trip up for my cousin’s wedding this weekend. as you may know, i can count the number of sane relatives that i have on one hand (my cousin being one of them, thus the reason for the 600 mile trip home to attend her wedding). this trip home, i decided it was time to employ the video camera function of my camera to capture the true essence of the chaos of my family. i have a slow internet connection here, but rest assured, you will be viewing the aunt shirley videos soon enough. aunt shirley: lost in west erie, aunt shirley: why the surgical general hates beer for women and aunt shirley: celebrate good times will all be posted once i get back to tennessee.

just a taste of family life here in PA: one of my uncles that isn’t too crazy whom i haven’t actually spoken to in several years greeted me by saying “where do you live now?”, “Tennessee,” i respond to which he replies “well i guess they don’t have sunshine there because you are as white as a piece of paper.” nice to see you, too. so, um, is that like 92 bright or 98 bright paper?

confession: when i have multiple windows open in firefox, and google analytics is one of them, i still giggle every time when it shortens the page name to “google anal…”

bigger image here

this afternoon, utilizing my new firefox plug in that lets me see my google reader feeds in my gmail inbox (thanks, john!), i was overjoyed to see that one of my favorite food bloggers published a post on one of my favorite veggies ever, zucchini! much to my delight, i starred it, thinking i’d save it for a rainy day. a rainy day when i had a lot of zucchini in the fridge.

after getting home, i opened the mail that was sitting on the counter. after sifting through it all, i realized that the most gigantic zucchini ever was sitting on the counter, right next to the mail (i’m really oblivious to things sometimes). see for yourself:

clearly this means it is time to try out some new zucchini recipes. so i did. i tried the zucchini side dish mentioned here as a snack/appetizer to hold us over until dinner was ready. so easy - brown almonds in oil, add zucchini and cheese and BAM! this seriously is one of the easiest, tastiest side dishes i’ve ever made, you’d be surprised. (note: the other night, in what i consider to be the height of my dorkiness, i actually watched a video about chopping/cutting things up in the kitchen and specifically thought “why would i ever need to julienne something?”. booya.) unfortunately, it was so tasty i totally forgot to take a picture.

now, i have 3/4 of a zucchini left to try to recipes on….