Why I Oughta...

I don't know who Dr. Oeter is, but he needs to hire a fresh pair of eyes in new product development.  Something about this doesn't seem quite right.   But...it still seems better than Jumbo Fudge Sticks . (UPDATE:  Seems the good Doctor doesn't do things very healthy.  His pizzas were recently rated as the WORST for you health-wise .  Guessing Sauce'nCake isn't great for you, either!)

A few weeks or so back I changed what this site looks like on mobile devices.  Using Blogger-in-Draft, there's a pretty simple mobile-friendly template.  Just takes a few clicks and all of a sudden my blog looks like this on Android and iOS devices (and other's, I'm sure...but at this point who is using those things?).   Should be easy to navigate, fast to load and optimized for your handset. Oh, you Blackberry users.  Be quiet.  I'm just bustin' your chops!

*Looking for the recipe?  You can skip the story & find it here:  Tom Thayer's Italian Beef Recipe With the Bears in the NFC Championship game, Chicago is all orange & blue all the time.  Both papers are draping themselves in the Bears flag, the local newscasts seem to be leading with a Bears angle, and there sure are a lot of Bears jerseys at Menards today. But...there's also something else going on:  party planning.  Based - solely on ONE DATA POINT - it seems like everyone MUST be looking for recipes to make for the various parties they are hosting tomorrow.  That one data point is the seemingly random popularity of a recipe I posted almost a year ago:  Tom Thayer's Italian Beef Recipe .  Over there on the sidebar of my blog, Google Analytics displays the top posts - based on traffic - for the past week.  There are a few usual posts that get a bunch of search traffic and a few "current" posts.  But...this particular one has never appeared before. 

One of the Christmas presents we gave our family was personalized outdoor door mats.   Using this post by Martha Stewart as my inspiration , I set out to make mats with names on them - while Martha's uses numbers.  We started with plain mats from Ikea.   The ones we bought are called Trampa and run less than $10 each. Just like M artha say s, I first started with creating a border.  For these, I used blue painters tape to make an edge that would remain un-painted.  From there, because I was doing names, not numbers, I had to create a stencil.  I did this by printing out the name on paper, affix it to a piece of posterboard and pricking holes through the posterboard to create an outline of the name.  Using a pair of sharp, small scissors, I cut the letters out - leaving behind custom stencil. I popped the stencil in the middle of the mat and taped everything down. Then came the easy part:  spray painting the mats.  Being careful to protect the mat I used a piece of scrap cardb

Equation Boy/Man surprised me one afternoon by inviting me to see the Bulls that night.  He said the tickets were "good".  I had no idea how "good" they were.  This photo shows where we were located:  on the floor.  Like...actually on the floor.  Baseline - right next to the Bulls bench. Those of you eagle-eyed Bulls fans can date these photos based on who is in a suit and who's dressed, right?  Pretty nice view of the game and a lot of inter-team discussions.  As the team left for half-time, they had to walk right by our seats.  Pretty rad.  Thanks again, Marc!

Right before Christmas, I spotted chestnuts and roasting instructions at Trader Joe's.  When I was in there this week, chestnuts were again prominently displayed.  These weren't raw, but rather steamed and peeled.  Are these for snacking?  Are chestnuts going to be "hot" in 2011?  Are they tasty? The TJ's buyer must be awfully close to whomever controls the chestnut racket, right?

I spotted a huge pallet of these in Costco the other day.  You send your kid to school with one of these in his lunch bag, I can guarantee he'll grow up to be a stand-up comedian.