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I drop my iPhone onto parking lots about once a month. I bought the inCase slider case when I purchased the iPhone and it’s definitely worth the $35.

The case is hard plastic on the outside with two grippy silicone runners on the inside. I speculate that they provide some shock absorption. The case’s small bottom portion also detaches easily so that I can use my home stereo dock.

After 6 hardcore drops onto concrete the case finally gave out and cracked at its thinnest point. I immediately ran out and bought a replacement. Yay inCase. Good job on this thing. Absolutely no complaints.

My auntie used to make this for me and Mom after we got home from school and work. As it simmers, it turns into the richest sour, salty broth with meat that falls off the bones and wilted leafy greens.

One note about ingredients: When it comes to kinds of onions, potatoes, etc. just get the good ol’ kind (yellow onion, russet potatoes, etc.). This ain’t no fancy dish. Also, sorry if all the exposition is annoying. But you can cut and paste and edit, right?

Ingredients

• 1 package beef neck (Usually three or four pieces of neck about 2 inches wide and 7 inches long. I’m guessing a pound and a half?)
• 1 or 2 tbsp. vegetable oil
• Salt and pepper
• 10 cups water
• 1 package Knorr’s Tamarind Soup Base (aka Sinigang Sa Sampalok Mix, available from Asian markets or online)
• 4 or 5 tomatoes, quartered (Or more if you like. They dissolve into the broth and make it delish.)
• 1 onion, julienned (I don’t actually vary my cutting angle, it’s just important to cut from root to tip rather than across.)
• 4 or 5 cloves of garlic, sliced (No razor blade required, 3 mm slices are fine)
• 2 inch piece of ginger, sliced
• 1 or 2 potatoes, halved the long way and then sliced into 1-inch pieces
• Fresh green beans, a large handful, trimmed. Cut into bite size if you don’t care to eat Flip style.
• Leafy greens, a bunch or as much as will fit in the pot. (Kangkong is preferred; it’s a Filipino veggie like spinach but without that dry feeling and the leaves are longer and skinnier. Some people use spinach which I haven’t tried yet – worried about that dry feeling. Lately I’ve been using sliced Chinese cabbage which works fairly well but isn’t as green as I’d like. Sliced bok choi is good, too.)

Cooking

1. Salt and pepper the beef neck all over. Heat vegetable oil over medium-high in a dutch oven or big soup pot until it starts to smoke. Brown beef necks on all sides you can, 4 to 5 minutes each side.
2. Pour the water into the pot, add soup base and stir. Add the tomatoes, onions, garlic and ginger and some more pepper. There’s more than enough salt in the soup base.
3. Turn down the heat and simmer – ideally for 3 or 4 hours. If you’re pressed for time just make sure the beef is cooked all the way and proceed to step 4.
4. 30 minutes before serving add potatoes and green beans.
5. 15 minutes before serving add leafy greens. Maybe a bit more pepper. We like this dish spicy.
6. Serve in a bowl with steamed rice on a plate.

Eating

• Spoon soup over rice and eat with fork and spoon (Flip style). This means spoon in the right hand, fork in the left. Back of fork pushes food onto spoon.
• To cut greens, meat, etc. into manageable pieces turn fork and spoon upside down. Use fork to spear while spoon pulls off yummy bits that will fit.
• Also use spoon as usual to grab extra broth and small yummies in bowl as needed.
• This keeps in Tupperware in the fridge fabulously and gets better the longer it sits. The best bowl is the last, with all the garlic and ginger chunks and pepper bits at the bottom.
• Give your doggie the bones. They’ll love you.

A lot has been going on. 2 weeks in Madrid and Athens with Gene and Tami; started a very intense Summer session at Cuesta college; continued playing in Magnolia, the band I joined a couple months ago; gave up on Palm and got an iPhone; going camping this weekend with Rick and a bunch of friends …

I *will* update with pictures as soon as I get back on track with my work, school and music schedule! Promise.

I was lucky enough to get student licensing and save quite a bit of money on Adobe CS4 Master Collection ($525 instead of $2,499!). I use Adobe Illustrator for web design and am quite pleased to see that they addressed my biggest concerns in this update:

• Better gradient control
• Gradient transparencies without opacity masks
• Selecting all objects on an artboard via menu instead of hunting and clicking

They have a number of tutorial videos to showcase new features across all Adobe programs at Adobe TV.

What a holiday-filled week it’s been! Rick and I went shopping for our Thanksgiving dinner supplies on Monday. He allowed me to take this picture of him in a Santa hat:

(I also have a picture of him in a leprechaun hat from St. Patrick’s day a few years ago. Am thinking of collecting pictures of Rick in strange hats.)

For Thanksgiving dinner, I planned to cook the turkey, stuffing and gravy from scratch and go with pre-prepared for rolls, mashed potatoes (the frozen ones from TJ’s are pretty good), sweet potatoes (microwave-in-bag), creamed corn, cranberry sauce (again, thank you TJ’s), pumpkin pie and whipped cream. The stuffing started out promising. Fresh marjoram, thyme and sage with minced and sauteed onions and celery. Sandwhich bread cut into 1/2-inch cubes and toasted in the oven. I put it in a casserole dish to bak during the last hour of turkey-cooking time. But the turkey took an extra hour to cook and I had beer and a headache and … it ended up burned. D’oh!

The gravy, which was to be made from drippings that cooked in the bottom of the pan with coarsely-chopping onions, celery and carrots, turned out fine. Even though I burned the veggies by not adding enough chicken broth in the first hour. While I napped on the couch, overwhelmed by all the burning, Rick supervised the last hour of turkey-cooking and turned out a juicy, well-roasted bird. Thank goodness. And then I burned the rolls in the toaster oven. Double d’oh!

Not too bad for a first on-our-own Thanksgiving, though. I had back-up stuffing in a box in the cupboard. And there were still rolls left over that I have managed to not-burn everytime we have leftovers.

I used the rest of the weekend to start on Christmas. Rick helped me put up LED Christmas lights from Costco:

View the rest of my Holidays 2008 pictures here.

And, I also got the jump on addressing and signing all my Christmas cards. Only have to get a few more Christmas presents and I can relax and enjoy the season. Woohoo!

I’ve been successfully using GTD with my Treo for 2 years now. This project/action management system served me well throughout downsizing and selling Mom’s house, transitioning from full-time employment to freelance, and moving to Los Osos from Los Angeles. Yet, I’ve always felt a niggling dissatisfaction due to having to use Palm Desktop to successfully sync my Calendar, Memos, Addresses and To-Do List with my Treo. And with the increasing number of mysterious application errors and lack of active development, the Palm Desktop problem has been coming to a head for a while now.

Answer: Missing Sync.

Missing Sync is a reliable, simple sync solution between Treo and the Mac OS apps: iCal (events and to-dos) and Address Book. It also includes Notebook, an application that handles Memos seamlessly. Instead of using a dated, buggy Palm Desktop to manage these buckets I can use the snazzy Mac OS apps.

• iCal lists calendar search results line-by-line. Since I track my working hours in the calendar, this makes invoicing easy. No more paging through weeks, searching for project numbers/names visually to count up my hours worked.
• Address Book integrates nicely with Pages and Numbers, meaning I can generate mailing labels without having to export/import from Palm Desktop to Address Book first.
• Missing Sync’s Notebook application behaves well, like any Mac app should, and not like Palm Desktop’s 1997 weirdness.
• iCal can subscribe to public calendars, keeping me updated on US Holidays and Basecamp projects. This feature has been around forever but I’ve never been able to use it with Palm Desktop.

Upon reflection, all this seems rather DUH! But I could never figure out how to make it work before Missing Sync. Well worth the $39.95!

I took my Canon SD 870 IS to Burning Man and a couple uses after I came back, the lens wouldn’t retract anymore. Since the cost to repair these cameras is usually around $200 (close to the cost), I thought I would try to repair it at home.

Before I cracked the case open and attacked it with Dust Off, though, I Googled a solution! Banging the side of the camera hard against the palm of my hand was successful. Whoo!

I think I’m done traveling to LA for quite a while. Between Sushi Decompression, the Long Beach marathon, business meetings and seeing family I have already been down to LA 4 times this month and I. Am. Done.

Sushi Decompression on the 4th was a ton of fun, though. Seeing everybody wearing clothes, clean and with hair was quite a treat (as was the after-party at Robert’s house – thank you for hosting!) Here are some pics:

On the 18th, Rick and I celebrated Oktoberfest at The Old Vienna Inn with a couple friends. It’s a huge party, everyone eats family style and we met a very cool couple from Riverside who were celebrating their 1st wedding anniversary. Rick forced everybody to have Jager shots and a good time was had by all. The food was amazing, too (from what I can remember)

By the way, History class is going quite well. We had a test recently and I scored 60 out of 60. w00t! Who would have thought I’d do so well at a subject I always said I’d hated?

No plans for Halloween as of yet. The thought of relaxing, watching movies and passing out candy is quite appealing, though.

And for your viewing pleasure, here’s a picture of Rick’s cat, (Fat Man) Puddin’:

Rick and I went down to Long Beach on the 11th to pick up my running number, timing chip and and attend the TTES pasta party. Training with the American Stroke Association’s Train To End Stroke team was a great experience and has changed my life. The pasta party was full of fun people, good food and was a great source of support for the marathon the next day.

I finished the half marathon in a little over 3 hours (I swear 20 minutes of that was waiting in line at the 2-mile portapotties!). Gene finished the full marathon in a little over 6! I’m so proud of the both of us. But I don’t think my knees will let me do anything like it ever again