Cream Cooled By Means Of Ice... With Sesame Seeds!

Today I was reading Linda's Refrigerator (I discovered this blog a couple days ago - it is a dream come true!) Anyway... through this blog, I learned about sesame seed ice cream today! It is served at Ichiban on the northeast side of Indianapolis (and all kinds of other places).

After learning about this curious flavor, I was of course itching to go to Ichiban to try it out. But then I came across this recipe for black sesame seed ice cream and am now just anxious to make it myself!

Swagbucks is just so nice.

Sometimes I when I really want some swagbucks but don't really need to search for anything, I start asking the swagbucks search engine questions. Like tonight I just asked if they wanted to give me any more swagbucks. And lo and behold, they did (even when I mispelled their name)! Such a deal!

Haven't You Always Wanted To Be A Swaggernaut?

I spent my spring break in the good old Michiana region. Instead of frying myself on some beach in warm, sunny Florida I decided to go hang out in an office. But not just any office... the iMedia department of Life Action Ministries! Not only did I get to hang out with some great people, I also learned some valuable information that has given me a whole new reason to get addicted to surfing the web! I discovered that while I surf the web to find out all kinds of interesting little tidbits and essential information, I can earn prizes! By simply entering a question, a word or even just a letter I can type my way to electronics, stickers, gift cards and so much more! I hope you all are just dying to know how you can do this too because I am just dying to pass this information along to you!

Here is how you join the excitement - become a member of SWAGBUCKS! But... you should do so by responding to my email message. If you did not receive an email from me, let me know and I'll send you one (I can only send 10 email invites at a time).

Let me give you a brief explanation of how Swagbucks works and why you should be jumping up and down with anticipation to join!

This is what the swagbucks home page looks like:

It's a search engine and so much more! When you join, you will be given 30 swagbucks (sbs). You can earn more sbs by searching, finding codes and putting it into "Gimme," shopping on-line (2 sbs for every $1 spent), playing on-line games, testing products, filling out on-line surveys, asking questions, twittering, inviting friends (when you refer a friend, you receive sbs whenever they do), and who knows how many other ways!

To give you an idea of how much sbs are worth, a $10 Barnes & Noble gift card is 1,250 sbs (this is what I am working toward right now). I'll warn you that swagbucks can be kind of addicting because once you see this image below you will want to see it again and again! (You win sbs randomly when you search, not every time.) And you get to be famous for about a minute every time you win sbs! If you look close enough, you can see my image right below the purple "Shop & Earn" bar.

Are you dying to join yet? If not you should probably call me and I will talk you into it. If you are ready - great! You should do it! And if you want to be really nice, you can do it by joining through the email that I sent! Happy Swaggernauting!

Happy First Day of Spring!

To celebrate the first day of spring, I balanced an egg during the vernal equinox which conveniently occurred at 1:32pm. (Last year it was 7:44am and in 2008 it was 1:48am). Vernal means "of or pertaining to spring" and equinox means "equal night."

While this whole egg balancing thing may be nothing new to some people, I just recently learned about it (or maybe I just started caring about it). According to Chinese legend, you can balance a raw egg on its end as a result some special gravitational pull that occurs during the equinox when the sun passes over the equator. Now, there are some skeptics out there and here's a little blurp from Urban Legends on About.com:

If you look at it skeptically, however, you have to wonder about the fact that there's an another equinox every year on the first day of autumn — how come there's no talk of balancing eggs in September? Secondly, while it's true that on both equinoxes the earth's axis is perpendicular to the sun so day and night are of equal length, there's no scientific reason to suppose that such an alignment exercises a perceptible gravitational effect on solid objects here on earth. Thirdly, if the equinox can cause this curious anomaly, why doesn't it cause others? Why don't we see people running around standing broomsticks, pencils, lollipops, and foot-long hot dogs on end? Food for thought.

With a few grains of salt

I'm not saying it can't be done — standing raw eggs on end, I mean — it certainly can, but the trick takes patience, eggs of just the right shape, a pinch of salt if all else fails, and — and this is the biggest "secret" of all, mind you — it works equally well no matter what day of the year you attempt it.

But I would just like you all to know that around 1:20 I was just messing around with the egg, getting my props ready and although I was not trying too hard, the egg did not want to balance itself. But then... at 1:32, I pretty much threw the egg up and it landed perfectly balanced on its buttush! Amazing, huh? Mom got one to balance also but when Courto came home around 4:30 she had no such luck. So perhaps there is something special about the gravitational pull at that minute that the sun passes over the equator...

Please excuse the horrendous type issues.

Happy St. Patty's Day!

In honor of St. Patrick's Day I decided to make some green peanut butter cookies. Not sure why they had to be peanut butter but Nealy had the thought to make green cookies today too and she also envisioned making peanut butter cookies. Crazy, huh? They don't look terribly green in my picture so you'll just have to use your imagination a bit!

I also painted my nails green and am listening to some Irish tunes as I eat some green ice cream!

Living In Phantasmagorical Days

I'm quite a fan of dictionary.com's word of the day for March 10, 2010:

PHANTASMAGORIA.

My School Hiatus

Last Friday afternoon I headed out to begin my little spring break adventure in Michiana. As I drove north on U.S. 31, I pulled over to take a picture of this roadside restaurant signage. Not so sure if I'd like to stop and eat there...

I arrived at the Life Action Camp shortly after 5:00 attend a retreat that Carrie was speaking at. I ended up being able to stay in the new cottage with Carrie, Katie and Joy. The next day we had some delightful snacks during our session. These veggie fry/chips express pleasant time we had at the retreat.

As soon as the retreat was done on Saturday, we flew into wedding mode planning/shopping. While at Office Max I ran across these amazing erasable pens and highlighters. They do a top-notch job.

Carrie has a Bible study on Monday night and invited me to come along. We had a bit of time to kill before the study started so Joy and I ran to McDonald's and got a Shamrock shake!

On Tuesday I got to go to one of my favorite places in Niles, MI - The Paris Soda Shop! Joy, Maggie and Gideon joined me and we had a splendid lunch!

I got a chocolate phosphate and a rueben sandwich. (Popcorn is a free precursor to all meals.)

Carrie and I did the very exciting task of grocery shopping on Tuesday night. I don't think I've ever had a hen and I've never noticed how cute they are - they're like little individual turkeys. I can't wait to make one sometime soon!

Today I managed to complete one of the fastest and most successful parallel parking attempts in my entire driving career. Parallel parking is a very intimidating activity and I've tried to avoid it ever since I started driving. But in the last couple of months I have been entering situations where this is a required skill. I've noticed Niles has rather long parking spaces and their Main St. isn't too busy. So I thought I'd give my parallel parking skills a bit of practice. I was so proud of my speed and accuracy! You would appreciate it a lot more if you got to experience it with me, especially since my picture makes it look like there was no car behind me. But trust me - there is!

The reason I parallel parked was to visit a little book store in Niles. It of course had some nice things since it is filled with books! I almost purchased the book below because I like the illustrations... and I like pancakes!

Wishing You A Non-cornball Day!

One of the things I love about graphic design is that I get to research. And when research happens, wonderful tidbits are learned! Like today, I am doing some research on the classic game of jacks (I'm working on a packaging design) and I came across these words: platitudinous and cornball. Please try not to have a cornball day by saying platitudinous words. I recommend paying a visit to dictionary.com just to listen to the pronunciation of platitudinous.

My post was looking a little bland so I decided to put a picture on here for you all. When I typed in "platitudinous" and looked at images, Obama's face appeared. Perhaps he says too many platitudinous things.