utenzi

In what is quite a surprise to me, my favorite of the new shows is Chase , an NBC police procedural about the US Marshal Service. A lot of the appeal is generated by the female lead, Kelli Giddish , who stars as U.S. Marshal Annie Frost. It's difficult to believe that the actress is only 30. She looks and holds the screen like a performer with a lot more experience. Just look at all those "determination" lines around her mouth and eyes! Talk about sexy. Or is it the gun and badge? LOL the leather jacket doesn't hurt either! Lone Star , another series with a Texas hook, seems to be canceled after just two episodes. It was a very good show but I had already decided to stop recording it. The story line just looked to be getting too convoluted and The Event is my show this season for convoluted plot lines. I don't need two like that. I've already deleted from my record list Running Wilde and No Ordinary Family , both after just watching one episode. They were ...

A few pictures from last night's hike at Occoneechee Park. The sunset was pretty. This picture was taken through the trees as we were sitting at the Quarry Overlook. It was in the low 70s when we were hiking which was a huge change from the low 90s that we'd been used to hiking in. This change in the weather was quite welcome. Even more welcome was the 36 hours of rain we'd had from Sunday afternoon until quite late Monday evening. I'd not mowed my lawn in over a month. At my house it'd been around 7 weeks since I'd had any rain. My back door wouldn't lock. I thought there was some kind of water damage to it and it'd warped. Since my area is pretty safe I just didn't bother locking it. And then when leaving for work on Monday, the lock worked again. I guess the door was so dry it changed shape! I'd never had that happen before. This second picture is the group of us leaving the overlook with the sun shining through the trees behind us. Tonight af...

A recipe I was following the other day asked for ground lamb. Now I don't know about you, but where I live ground lamb isn't typically stocked in stores. Actually, lamb of any stripe is difficult to find. So then the question became should I use ground beef or ground pork. I didn't even bother to contemplate ground chicken or turkey. Ickers! What I would have liked to do would have been to have a mix of 75% pork and 25% beef but given that the packages of ground pork were 1 pound each, I would have had to make enough to feed an army. I could have bought a pound of pork and a pound of beef and just used a quarter of the beef but that wouldn't have been quite enough. In the end I went with just using 2 packs of pork and nixing the beef entirely. Sorry cows! Or like actress Clara Peller used to say in those Wendy's commercials , Where's the beef? So that's what you see over there on the left. Just ground up piggies. Quite a bit of fat in them. At the beginning ...

Dogs are dangerous. See my lip? Torn up it is. Do you wonder how it got that way? Just take a gander at the picture below and you'll see the oaf that inflicted the injury on my person. The obvious conclusion was that I was lifting the dog, it struggled, and my mouth got struck during the fracas. But no, it wasn't like that at all. All I was doing was sitting in a chair eating my dinner and the dog tried to jump in my lap. Do you see the size of that damn thing?!? Needless to say it didn't fit and my mouth got whacked by the dog's head during the attempt to fit onto my lap. Dogs! Another interesting thing about that picture. Until I saw the picture up there I didn't realize how different the wear pattern was on my teeth. It looks like I use the teeth on one side of my mouth a lot more than the ones on the other. Odd. I'll have to pay more attention when I'm biting things and see if I can notice myself preferring one side over the other. In other matters, that...

How's this for a pair of bugs. One small and kinda cute in a buggy way and the other huge and icky. It's like a hummingbird bug. It hovers at a flower and that long tongue goes in then off it flies to find another flower. *shudder* As Roxanne points out in the comments, the "cute bug" is a cucumber beetle and apparently they're bad news. Since I took the picture at a botanical garden, it's not my problem. :-)

Last weekend I went on two hikes and both of them were road trips to the west of me. And both times there were at least two roads closed on my route. Since I just look at Google Maps and write down which roads to drive on---when something is closed it's really not a good thing. I got lost multiple times and it took a hell of a lot longer than it should have. So after the second hike I decided it was finally time to buy a GPS. And so I did. Amazon had one of their specials on a Garmin on Tuesday and I snapped it up for $99.99. It arrived on Friday afternoon. It's very pretty. As you can see in the picture above, it's a Garmin  nuvi 855. Touchscreen, talks to you, and even has voice recognition too. Gotta love it. I used it for the first time today while driving to Duke Forest for some hiking and it was great. I wish I'd bought one of these gadgets years ago. I've never used one before so I don't know which features they all have and which ones aren't standard...

I delayed my evening hike at Occoneechee a little bit tonight. As a result, it was getting pretty damn dark by the time I was doing my second loop around the trail. That's what made it weird that this big boy was still on the trail. My vision wasn't very good since in the low light I had trouble seeing slight color variations. As a result, I almost stepped on the snake. His sudden move to get away is what made me notice him. Otherwise I'd never have seen him at all. And isn't he pretty? The darkness made it a lot easier to take macro shots of this plant. The flash lit up the parts I wanted to take the picture of and the rest of the scene was too dark to be seen. Nice. I love how startling white the puffy parts are. It's like a dandelion top.