Ok, I’ve known of this cake recipe for a few months, but I never tried making it until tonight. The reason I say it is dangerous is that you can have a decent hot chocolate desert in under five minutes. Any time of the day, your diet can be blown out of the water. So for sharing the guilt. 😉 Don’t skip the chocolate chips….

MINUTE CHOCOLATE MUG CAKE

4 tablespoons cake flour(that’s plain flour, not self-rising)
4 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons baking cocoa
1 egg
3 tablespoons milk
3 tablespoons oil
3 tablespoons chocolate chips(optional)
a small splash of vanilla essence
1 coffee mug

Add dry ingredients to mug, and mix well
Add the egg and mix thoroughly.
Pour in the milk and oil and mix well.
Add the chocolate chips (if using) and vanilla essence, and mix again.

Put your mug in the microwave and cook for 3 minutes at 1000 watts. The
cake will rise over the top of the mug, but don’t be alarmed!

Allow to cool a little, and tip out onto a plate if desired.
EAT! (this can serve 2 if you want to feel slightly more virtuous).

I’ve been having some problem with my laptop’s battery. The life I expected just wasn’t there. I would like to be able to take my laptop places, sit down for an hour or two, get some work done, or just browse the net. Battery life has been under 1 hour. Sad really. You buy a laptop so you can have freedom to use the computer where and when you want, but you are then limited to finding a electrical outlet to work.

Well, to ease that situation, I was able to get a longer lasting battery (I hope). I’ve been running on battery power alone for about 20 minutes now. Taking the battery down to 0 will allow my computer to have a better indication of remaining battery life. Right now it says I have over 2 hours remaining. We will see.

still going…
Update when the battery runs out.

Since I can’s seem to sleep (to be fair I did sleep away most of the day, and now I am bothered by my raw throat again) I thought I would blog a bit.   Continuing in my countdown of the original 8 crayon colors I had in my first box of school crayons.  

I had crayons before school of course, in fact I had my favorite crayon.   I would take it with me where ever I went.  Me and my purple crayon.  I would use this crayon to write my name.  For some reason, I liked to write my name.  I’m not sure if this is the first word I learned to spell/read or whatever, but I wrote my name a lot.  I wrote my name on bookshelves, pool tables, coffee tables, dining room tables, furniture,  in cupboards, and of course on paper.  I always wrote with my purple crayon.  The funny thing is except for the pool table and paper, I never wrote where others could see.  I wrote under tables and shelves, in cabinets and cupboards, on the back of the furniture.  I would write my name in all of my ‘places’.  

I used the dining room table as a fort, I wrote my name.  I would ‘camp’ under the coffee table, I wrote my name.  I would hide in cabinets and cupboards and I would write my name.  Kind of like “Kilroy was here” only I wrote my name.

Until we moved, my parents never knew how many places I wrote my name, and since we left the house, I’m sure they didn’t find it in the permanent places in our old house. Mom removed all traces of my name from any place she found it. I’m glad she didn’t make me do it. I still wonder if my name isn’t out there somewhere in purple crayon still hiding after all these years.

And even when the Crayola company calls the color Violet, the crayon color has always been purple to me….

Or the continuing story of 1 guy and his truck.

I have a small bed pickup (2004 Chevy Colorado, crew cab), and I do use this thing as a truck. I bought it to be a truck, and to move people (hence the crew cab), and that is how I use it.

A couple of weekends ago it was used to carry 5 people to an animal park and haunted house. Approx 4 hour drive (not including the animal park) and everyone got home safe. Today it was used as a truck. Moving a few pieces of furniture needed for the latest stage production, I visited 3 houses and pick up 1 coffee table, 1 stereo rack, 1 couch, a couple of posters and 1 folding table. Not all in one trip, the couch took up the rear bed with the gate down.

This is not the first time I’ve used my truck to move various things for the theater, or myself. Over the past four years, I’ve moved lots of firewood, plywood, refrigerators, dishwashers, washing machines, stuff from my daughter’s apartment, equipment needed for a magic show, stage flats, and almost anything else that could fit in the bed.

After 4 years, I still like this truck. Even with gas being $4.00 a gallon, I like this truck.

I hope to keep the truck for a good long time, and I plan on driving it until it drops. Still get around 25 miles to the gallon on the highway (no load), so it isn’t really too bad to drive to and from work. And I guess for the next few years, the people I know will say, I know somebody with a truck, and he doesn’t mind moving things….

When I sign in to my google account, on igoogle they ave a neat little gadget that gives you links to 1 or more wikiHow articles. Today’s was how to separate an Egg. Very informative article on this somewhat delicate procedure. Now a few years ago I wrote a little post on how to crack eggs one handed. I can’t recall were I put it so I will have to enter it by memory — This is a slightly humorous post, and it may or may not be funny to you. So now that the disclaimer is out of the way, on to breaking eggs one handed.

We’ve all seen in the cooking shows, on movies, or TV where someone is making eggs and cracking them, dropping the egg in the bowl, or skillet and then discarding the egg shell. I’ve tried this many times only to discover that the eggshell is calmly sinking in my bowl of eggs. these could be large pieces of egg shell, or the smaller bits that you only find when eating the finished product. So I always thought that there should be some sort of lessons on the art of cracking the egg 1 handed.

So here goes.

1) It all starts with the egg. Make sure that the egg fits your hand comfortably. If you have small hands, you don’t want to try cracking the Grade A super-duper large eggs with one hand. This will just make a mess. You should grip the small end of the egg with your index and middle finger. Use both, you don’t want to give the egg the finger do you? Grasp the larger end of the egg between your palm and thumb.

2) Make sure your thumb is positioned toward the end of the egg. Give the egg a sharp tap on the side of the bowl you are using to deposit the eggs. You may want to start using a bowl that you will be putting the egg shells in, sometimes this stage will cause shell fragments to drop in the bowl. With practice this is not usually a problem.

3) Pull the egg apart by expanding and slightly straightening out your fingers. Make sure you are holding the egg over the bowl at this point, it may come apart on your first try. If your egg isn’t opening, hit it again.

4) Open the egg just enough to allow the egg to drop through the expanded opening. This allows you to keep a good grip on the egg shell. Do not shake the egg to get everything out until you get comfortable holding the egg in this manner. Shaking the egg shell may cause shell fragments to fly all over the place (take cover when shell fragments are flying).

5) Dispose of empty shell and try it again. Practice, practice practice.

6) What to do with all those eggs? I would suggest in the early stages of your practicing, that you will want to stick with things like egg sandwiches on Melba Toast, Brownies with nuts, Cookies with nuts, Cakes with nuts, and any other egg dish you can think of that also contains explainable crunchies. Can’t be wasting those eggs just because you couldn’t dig out all the shell fragments can you?

Now, the question is, should I post this to wikiHow?

I think that I shouldn’t be in the light booth for this show Electrical gremlins have been following me. It started a couple months ago when two computers had some problems. One was just falling short on the power and would cause all sorts of strange errors when I started heavy processing. The second had problems with the video. I normally can get things going quickly, but it took a little time. Then I had 1/2 of a house circuit go out during a storm. Not the whole circuit with a tripped breaker, just 1/2 of it. Something caused the switch wiring to short.

Now on to the theater. Two bad spotlights were the start of it. Replaced a bulb and one still didn’t work. Strange happenings on one set of lights, they just didn’t want to work. Got that straightened out enough to run through the show, but it is a bit of a hassle. Today was the biggest gremlin. Our monitor system (let’s the booth and backstage hear what is happening) decided to have a lot of massive interference. Then I switched jacks and it would work for a bit, but it mostly gave up the ghost. We were running the lights based on stage locations and actions, not the words. I’m glad I didn’t mess up.

The gremlins stopped doing their electrical havoc, and decided the heavy rains needed to come inside. Yes during the middle of the second act, there were leaks over the audience. I hope for the last three performances, the skies stay clear, and the electrical gremlins stay far away.

I’m moving up in the world. I now have semi high speed internet. I have a internet connection through my cell phone company, and it works!!!

For those who don’t know, I live out in the middle of no where. I have no chance of getting cable, DSL, Fiber Optic, and even our local wireless. I could get satellite, but I would need to cut down a few trees, since I live in the woods and have no clear southern skies. I’ve been using a dial-up connection for years. Now have speeds at least 4 times as fast, sometimes more. I think if I get a good external antenna for the receiver, I will approach DSL speeds most of the time. I am just impressed by this.

I’m going to be checking some things out over the next few days, and if all works out, I will be getting rid of my dial-up account, or at least going back to the free 10 hour deal with ads. If I get rid of the dial-up completely, I may get rid of my land phone at the same time. That would more than pay for my high speed connection. Cool stuff, no install fee, the hardware was free with rebates, and I didn’t have to cut any trees.

In an extensive lookup, I was finding a lot of information on electric ranges.  It seems like my range has a common failure type.  I can’t believe that the number of stoves that fail by turning on as high as they can go.  I’m going to have to do an all out search for an old style stove without any electronic stuff.   I’m going to try to find all manual controls.  This may mean not having a smooth top cook surface, which I really like.  Maybe I could find one with a safety feature that actually turns the oven off if the temp gets too high.  This is really a pain.  For now, I have to unplug the elements in the oven, so I can use the cook top.  I could probably get by with this for quite some time, but eventually I’ll need to cook a pie, cookies, or even a pizza.

I’ve been steaming about this most of the evening. For supper I put in a Lasagna for dinner, set the timer, the temperature and walked away. An hour into the cooking time I smelt something burning. I checked the stove and there was a blinking light. I opened the oven, and it was much warmer than the 400 I set it at, and the broiler was on too. I couldn’t turn the thing off either!!!!! Dinner almost ruined (very brown on top) and a stove that would not turn off! I had to turn off power at the breaker box to make sure it was off.

Now it is an older stove (10-15 years?), so you can expect a thing or two to go wrong after the use it got. But really, a failure of some part causing both elements of the stove to turn on and continue heating? Shouldn’t it fail to the off position (no heat)? I found out the cause of the problem, and the part is around $100 dollars. I should be able to put it in myself. My concern with this is that the thing will fail again in the ON position. At that much money (1/3 to 1/5 the cost of new), I may want to research new stoves, and find one that fails on the off side. I find this a little dangerous, especially now that I’m getting older. Fixing this problem will give me another 10-15 years, and by then I may have some concentration problems. Bad enough I won’t remember I put the tea-kettle on, but the stove being on when it looks off bothers me.