Monthly Archives: June 2012

LIFE NUGGETS

Varsity

June 30, 2012 – 4:13 am

varsity logo

Var­sity was trend­ing on Twit­ter Wednes­day after Pres­i­dent Obama stopped by the loca­tion to eat. I didn’t even want to read the tweets about the President’s move because I knew what was com­ing. The hate.

I’m an Atlanta native and grew up BEGGING my mom to go to the Var­sity. Every time we passed through Atlanta, I would bring up the idea to go there to eat. I love the Var­sity. The food is deli­cious. It’s your typ­i­cal din­ner food – greasy, salty, and sin­ful. The Var­sity also pulls at the past with their carhops and 50’s décor.

Var­sity is a pop­u­lar des­ti­na­tion and I’ve never seen it NOT filled with peo­ple. It wasn’t until col­lege when I dis­cov­ered peo­ple that dis­liked the Var­sity. One of my first ques­tions to peo­ple new to Atlanta was,”Have you been to the Var­sity?” Since I grew up lov­ing the place, I wanted to share my love with new­com­ers. Well after col­lege that changed and I refrain from bring­ing up the sub­ject. I can’t stand there and let peo­ple bash the restau­rant that I love.

Wednes­day I par­tic­i­pated in a debate over my beloved restau­rant with a cou­ple of my frat broth­ers. One was for it, one against, and the third wouldn’t try it because of all the bad mouth press he had heard.

So I thought it only right that I head there today with two other Var­sity lovers, my brother and sis­ter, and doc­u­ment my expe­ri­ence in honor of our heated deci­sion on Tweeter.

my brother and sister

varsity menuvarsity fries and onion ringsvarsity food - it's here!varsity frosted orange

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MUSINGS

The new Zack Morris — Peter Bash

June 28, 2012 – 8:59 pm

Source

Like most 80’s babies, I grew up with Zack Mor­ris and the rest of the Saved by the Bell crew. I fol­lowed them all the way to col­lege and  watched every spe­cial episode. I can’t say that I had a huge crush on Mr. Mor­ris. He was cool and I would def­i­nitely grab a burger with him at the Max. If I had a crush on any­one, it would be A.C. Slater oh A.C. and his yummy muscles.

Source

The Saved by the Bell crew has now moved on and so has my crush on Mario Lopez. I still can’t deny that smile but some­thing about him just turns me off. While he’s all smiles in front of the cam­era, I imag­ine he’s not all that nice in real­ity. I could be com­pletely wrong but he seems like a diva. Diva on a man is in no way attractive.

Source

So, last year I replaced my crush on Mario Lopez with his for­mer costar Mark-Paul Gos­se­laar which was easy with his new show Franklin and Bash. Franklin and Bash are a lawyer team who use uncon­ven­tional ways to win cases. After being on their own for so long, they are now part­ners to a larger firm. To add in some con­flict, 2 of the 3 part­ners are plan­ning their end at the law firm.

Source

Last night I couldn’t help but lust over Gos­se­laar, who plays Bash, as he walked up the stairs to the court­room. I gasped when he pulled his jacket back to expose his must-be-tailored white shirt. I imme­di­ately texted Bear and apol­o­gized for lust­ing after Gos­se­laar. It was that serious.

The role of Bash is per­fect for Gos­se­laar, I’m sorry to say that he’s play­ing an adult Zack Mor­ris. The show isn’t as campy as Saved by the Bell but he essen­tially play­ing the same role.

The schemer

If there was one thing that Zack Mor­ris was famous for it was his abil­ity to turn any sit­u­a­tion into a scheme. While he might not be sell­ing class rings that will turn your fin­gers green, he uses his smarts to help manip­u­lates wit­nesses within the lines of the law  to help win his case. It’s the per­fect job for the for­mer Zack Morris.

The lady’s man

If Zack wasn’t schem­ing he was chas­ing the ladies, par­tic­u­larly Kelly Kapowski. Of course, there was some schem­ing involved in some of his attempts to get a date. In the first sea­son of Franklin and Bash, Bash was heart­bro­ken from his ex-girlfriend but it wasn’t long before he was chas­ing after other prospects.

The phil­an­thropist

Mr. Mor­ris wasn’t all about him­self. While he was look­ing for ways to fur­ther his agenda, he would also make sure to help his friends. Zack has a big heart. Bash and his best bud Franklin also have big hearts. They like to help the lit­tle guy and they use their wits to make sure the lit­tle guy doesn’t get taken advan­tage of in the court of law.

Over­all, I like the show. If I was a lawyer, I would prac­tice Franklin and Bash style. Doing your job with­out tak­ing your­self too seri­ously. Plus, they have some pretty awe­some par­ties. Can I get an invite?

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ADVENTURES OF BEAR AND OTTER

Adventures of Bear and Otter

June 27, 2012 – 11:24 pm

He’s Bear and I’m Otter. He’s Bear because well he looks like a bear, sleeps like a bear, and some­times eats like a bear (no he hasn’t caught salmon from the river but I wouldn’t be shocked to see it). He got this nick­name way before I came alone but once he told me about it, I eas­ily saw the con­nec­tion to this mas­sive furry beast.

One day I became Otter. Why? Because he said so. I per­son­ally don’t see the asso­ci­a­tion between me and an otter but he does. And that’s all that mat­ters right?

Though a real bear and otter would be ene­mies in the wild, here in this house, we love each other and learn from each other. And it’s always an adven­ture of sorts.

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ADVENTURES OF BEAR AND OTTER

Death to Comic Sans

June 27, 2012 – 10:50 pm

We don’t nor­mally argue.  We debate. We dis­agree but last night we going into an argu­ment* over a font. Over one par­tic­u­lar font – Comic Sans.

I was brows­ing through my Face­book time­line and came across the newest thing – because there’s always a new thing to post on your time­line – which is this Wake Up cam­paign. The cam­paign is try­ing to expose some of the ridicu­lous beliefs and ideas that our soci­ety has fallen for. I like the idea behind this cam­paign but the thing that I couldn’t get beyond was the use of Comic Sans on some of the images peo­ple created.

I started to talk about my dis­like for the font and why peo­ple shouldn’t use it. Usu­ally, Bear would agree with me and see my point of view. Tonight though he wanted to play devil’s advo­cate. He thought that I had no bases for hat­ing the font  and telling peo­ple not to use it. He claimed that I was a hip­ster and all my hip­ster friends were try­ing to gang up on a font that was just mind­ing his business.He threat­ened to change my font set­ting on my com­put­ers to Comic Sans (I just checked my email and received a mes­sage from him writ­ten in Comic Sans). I didn’t send threats back but just growled and glared at him. I was sec­onds away from a rumble.

Comic Sans is prob­a­bly one of the most hated fonts. There’s a site devoted to snitch­ing on peo­ple who still use it on their web­sites. Another site that dis­cusses why peo­ple shouldn’t use Comic Sans and this site by Comic Sans fights back against the crit­i­cism.

Source

Why is the font so hated? Peo­ple overuse it and mostly in inap­pro­pri­ate sit­u­a­tions. I see how peo­ple grav­i­tate to Comic Sans after get­ting bored with Arial and the dreaded Times New Roman. Both of these fonts are bor­ing and are forced on us either in school or at work. So, when you can pick your own font for that email to a coworker, friend, or fam­ily mem­ber, you pick Comic Sans because in some way it’s fresher than the norms.

Every font has a per­son­al­ity (if you don’t believe me check out the video). Arial and Times New Roman are overused because they have a pro­fes­sional per­son­al­ity. Comic Sans, a font cre­ated specif­i­cally for comic book con­ver­sa­tion bub­bles, does not carry a pro­fes­sional per­son­al­ity. It was writ­ten for comic books! Not for your emails and def­i­nitely not for any place that requires a lot of text. No one will take you seri­ously when you write some­thing in such a goofy text.  Comic Sans should not be used at all even though peo­ple give some exam­ples of how it should be used. There are other fonts out there. Please give them a chance and let Comic Sans retire.

Just for Bear, I’ll leave you with this video.

*Note: The day before post­ing,  I ref­er­enced our argu­ment to Bear. He claimed I was the only one argu­ing. Typ­i­cal Bear.

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MUSINGS

The pain of not being where you want to be

June 26, 2012 – 2:19 am

It’s been a lit­tle over a month since I’ve been out of school. The race has begun to find a new job before the stu­dent loans come rolling in.  This time around, I’m actu­ally look­ing for a job that allows me to exer­cise my talents.

For too long there was a vague­ness that sur­rounded my future. Now that the cloudi­ness is gone and I can finally see the future that I want for myself, and I am in a rush to have it. Every day that I sit at my desk and do the same stag­nant things, I feel like I’m dying a slow painful death.

It was never really a doubt on whether my cur­rent posi­tion was for the long haul or not. It was some­thing to pay the bills and give me some expo­sure to the cubi­cle life. With my master’s degree in hand and a new found con­fi­dence, I am ready to set foot into the world beyond this place. I am ready to cre­ate, build, and collaborate.

The past cou­ple of weeks have been par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult to nav­i­gate through. I’ve found it hard to explain this to the peo­ple in my life who are right where they want to be in life. They have long left behind the strug­gle for their place in the job mar­ket. They don’t have to leave their job at the end of the day think­ing about how much time they wasted doing some­thing that didn’t make them happy.

Once I was out of grad school, peo­ple assumed that I would have all this free time. But I don’t. I’ve thrown myself into my writ­ing. I’ve thrown myself into a search for my dream job. The hard part starts now. I have to cre­ate my own dead­lines. I have to cre­ate my own assign­ments. I have to stand firm when peo­ple invite me out for sum­mer fun. My desk­top is still being occu­pied dur­ing every free moment.

This week I’ve felt so alone in this fight but then I read this arti­cle on the Write Curl Diary. In it GG Rene cap­tured every­thing that I was feel­ing over the past cou­ple of years. And though she was just vent­ing about her sit­u­a­tion, I felt a bit of relief. I never thought I was alone in this strug­gle but to see some­one else’s feel­ings, feel­ings that I too share, made every­thing a lit­tle bet­ter. I don’t know, I guess I felt jus­ti­fied in my feel­ings. I finally had per­mis­sion to feel this way.

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LIFE NUGGETS

$50 food challenge: What I brought and What I’ll eat

June 23, 2012 – 10:50 pm

Receipt from $50 challengeIn short, I did it! The chal­lenge isn’t really over until I (we) eat for the next two weeks with­out going over bud­get. I still have roughly $6 left (I rounded down) so I can pop into the store and get any extras like milk or fruit.  Oh and I didn’t use any coupons but I did buy accord­ing to the sale’s paper.

What I brought:

Meat

6 lbs. Chicken (legs and thighs)
2 lbs. Smoked sausages
2 lbs. Ground beef

Veg­eta­bles

Frozen spinach (1 bag) and broc­coli (2 bags)
Frozen straw­ber­ries
Baby car­rots
Bananas

Dry and can goods

Angel hair pasta
Ziti
Baked beans

Dary

Frozen yogurt
Shred­ded ched­dar cheese

The hard­est chal­lenge for me was mak­ing sure that I brought enough meat for the Bear. He is a true meat and pota­toes guy. While I would be able to eat most of my meals meat­less, I know he would throw a fit.

The next hard­est thing for me was pick­ing cuts of meats that I knew would fit within my bud­get. Orig­i­nally, I wanted to make pot roast but to get a size big enough for left­over would have placed me way over bud­get. I usu­ally buy chicken breast but legs and thighs were more cost effective.

My great­est buy would have to be the 6 lbs. of chicken. To make it really last, I cut the legs away from the thighs. The thighs were shoved into sand­wich bags and then into a larger freezer bag. I could get one meal out of the chicken legs and then the thighs will account for at least two sep­a­rate meals.

What I’m eating:

Break­fast

Oat­meal Smoothie with a hand­ful of nuts (Mon­day — Fri­day)
Sausage and eggs (Weekends)

Lunch

Stir-fry veg­eta­bles and orzo (Week 1) w/ car­rots and grapes
Spinach pesto orzo (Week 2) w/ car­rots and grapes

Din­ner

Spicy coconut chicken
Chicken and pasta
Bbq que­sadilla
Spaghetti
Baked ziti

Bear eats lunch at work. He’ll also have left­overs or his beloved sand­wiches to eat on his days off. I only have five sched­uled din­ners, which will give us left­overs for two or three days. I didn’t want to out­line every din­ner that we would eat over the next two weeks because I know we would change our mind. Also, we might eat out at least one or two times dur­ing the next two weeks. It wasn’t a part of the chal­lenge orig­i­nally but I have to be real­is­tic. And when I say eat out I’m not talk­ing about drive thru food but sit-down-at-a-table food.

I’ll try to post some of the meals we eat over the next two weeks. At the end of the two weeks, I’ll come back with a final update.

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uncategorized

The $50 grocery challenge

June 22, 2012 – 3:19 pm

It’s been two months since I started using EEBA. I love their sys­tem of using enve­lope to bud­get. It has really cut down on the hours I would spend bal­anc­ing out my spread­sheet. It also helps me to slow down on my spend­ing when the green bar starts to shrink.

At this time in the week, I usu­ally start cre­at­ing my gro­cery list. I start by check­ing my funds and then devel­op­ing a menu based on how much money I have. Rea­son­able right? Well my enve­lope for food only holds $50. I usu­ally can get by on $40 a week on food but $50 is push­ing it for two weeks. So instead of con­sult­ing my sav­ings account for a loan, I decided to take this as a challenge.

Can I sur­vive on $50 worth of gro­ceries for the next two weeks?

My plan of attack:

  1. Menu plan: I usu­ally plan my break­fasts and lunch menu for the week but rarely din­ner. Since the BF is mov­ing in at the end of the month, I can plan to eat din­ner at home instead of some­times at his place.
  2. Check the weekly ads: I will base my list off what’s on sale in the weekly paper (I shop at Pub­lix). Most of my pur­chases are meat, veg­eta­bles, and fruits so I’ll pay close atten­tion to those sec­tions of the paper.
  3. Coupons: I’ve never really found a use for coupons. The things that I wanted never had a coupon for them but I’ve decided to give them another try. Sherry from Young House Love  shared some good links to coupon­ing sites. These sites are usu­ally so clut­tered that I can’t find any­thing use­ful but the one’s she linked to seemed more organized.
  4. Shop my kitchen: I have plenty of starches in the pantry and frozen veg­gies in the freezer. I’ll save a ton of money if I use what I already have.

I’ll come back Sat­ur­day with my list, my meals, and results of my shop­ping trip.

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GOALS

How to find your dream career

June 19, 2012 – 11:47 pm

Grow­ing up there are so many career options avail­able to you: fire­fighter, singer, dancer, police offi­cer, dinosaur, and more. As you get older, you might start ask­ing your par­ents and other adults what they do for liv­ing. Then you start get­ting answers like accoun­tant, engi­neer, pro­gram man­ager, ana­lyst, con­sul­tant, and direc­tor. By this point in your life, you are dis­tanc­ing your­self from the grand title of mas­ter dinosaur and real­iz­ing that you might have to pur­sue some­thing different.

The prob­lem now is what’s next? It’s not like you are tak­ing classes in account­ing and engi­neer­ing so how do you know you want to be an accoun­tant or engineer?

In high school, I had this grand idea that I would be a doc­tor. The specifics of what kind of doc­tor changed fre­quently but I knew that I wanted to work in the med­ical field. Why? Mostly because of the money but also because I wanted to make peo­ple feel better.

In col­lege, I majored in Chem­istry and quickly real­ized that I was in over my head. It was at that time I real­ized that I needed to have a heart to heart with myself. I needed to dis­cover what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

Now I’m a huge believer in you should do what you love because life is too short to do some­thing that you hate. So, I set aside the lure of money and decided to fol­low a path that would make me happy. So how do you find a career that makes you happy? I remem­ber sit­ting in a room ask­ing myself these questions:

  1. What do you love to do?
  2. What would you love to be paid to do?
  3. Who cur­rently does what I want to do?
  4. What do I have to major in to do this career?

That seems sim­ple enough but some­times the answers don’t come that eas­ily. Or you could be like me and need to nar­row down the field to focus on a par­tic­u­lar career path. So once again, I found myself ask­ing questions:

  1. What classes inter­ested me?
  2. What assign­ments did I enjoy doing?
  3. What job can I do that is sim­i­lar to this interest?

With these ques­tions, be hon­est with your­self. Don’t let out­side influ­ences deter­mine in what direc­tion you want to go. I didn’t rely heav­ily on my sup­port sys­tem to help me answer these ques­tions. I knew that the answers had to come from within me not any­one else.

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LIFE NUGGETS

Pictures from Father’s Day

June 19, 2012 – 11:29 pm


Father’s Day Cards


Father — Son moment


Food moments


Her facial expres­sions are awesome


Fam­ily portraits

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MUSINGS

The most expensive coffee I’ve ever brought

June 16, 2012 – 1:39 am

I found myself within the shop­ping cen­ter of the Super Tar­get. Of course I’m a huge lover of Tar­get and I know to stay away from the store espe­cially since I can’t leave with­out buy­ing some­thing. And espe­cially since one of my goals this month is to avoid shop­ping.

But I needed to get my Star­bucks fix. I recently was upgraded to green so I could get a free refill on my order. Now I didn’t need all that cof­fee. Two rounds of deli­cious grande iced cof­fee? No, one will do but since it was free – why not indulge?

To get this free cof­fee I needed to waste some­time in the store. Because it’s a Super Tar­get, I could have eas­ily brought my gro­ceries. But nah I’m ded­i­cated to the gro­cery store by my house. Plus I didn’t want to wan­der around the store try­ing to fig­ure out where every­thing was.

I could tell that I was get­ting myself into trou­ble. My thought process was lead­ing me into a dark place. A place where I would fail my no buy chal­lenge. There was no return though. I grabbed my cof­fee and walked into temptation.

The trip started with cloth­ing of course. I checked the clear­ance rack in hopes that if I saw any­thing it would be cheap. Before I knew it, I was in the dress­ing room try­ing on 6 or 7 things. I can eas­ily talk myself out of buy­ing some­thing once I try it on. I only walked out want­ing to buy two things – some shorts and a shirt both polka dots mind you.

Now a trip to Tar­get isn’t com­plete with­out a trip through the shoe aisle. Before I left for Miami, I was in the mar­ket for some brown heels. I actu­ally went to this same store to look for some sum­mer heels and it was a mess. Shoes were scram­bled every­where. There were shoes out of place, out of boxes, and out on the floor.

After a cou­ple of weeks, things didn’t change in the shoe aisle. I went through each row and casu­ally looked for just a size 9. There were none to be found. I started to fall in love with a shoe and decided to just set­tle on the 8. I was sure it wasn’t going to fit but I wanted to test it out. I tried the shoe on and it fit! An entire size smaller and it fit! I quick snatched them up and went back between the rows in case I missed an 8 ½ or 9.

First I found an 8 ½. Luck was in my cor­ner. And there right above the 8 ½ was a 9. To me this was a sign from the uni­verse that I had per­mis­sion to buy this shoe. And because I’m an adult that makes wise deci­sions, I kept the shirt that was only $7 and put the polka dot shorts back. I walked out of Tar­get with new shoes, a shirt, and of course my refill of iced coffee.

Oh by the way  totally didn’t need that much caf­feine – I was amped for the entire day.

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