This baby is available on our eBay, Etsy, and at supersweetshirts.com.
Ingredients
1 medium uncooked onion(s), cut into wedges
2 medium uncooked leek(s), trimmed and sliced
1 medium sweet red pepper(s), sliced in half, stem and seeds removed
1 medium yellow pepper(s), sliced in half, stem and seeds removed
2 tsp olive oil
2 item(s) rosemary sprig
1/8 tsp table salt, or to taste
1/8 tsp black pepper, or to taste
1 1/4 pound(s) uncooked boneless skinless chicken breast(s), four 6 oz pieces
1 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
Instructions
Preheat oven to 375°F.
Put onion, leeks and peppers into a roasting dish. Add oil and toss to coat. Add rosemary; season to taste with salt and pepper.
Place chicken on top of vegetables. Sprinkle with vinegar, season to taste and transfer to oven.
Roast until chicken is browned and cooked through, and vegetables are tender, about 25 to 30 minutes. Remove from oven and slice peppers. Serve.
The preparation is just like it reads, you will be placing the pepper halves in the dish whole. Then once the dish is done cooking, you pull the peppers out and slice them.
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| 6 Points, not counting the potato. |
This was a tasty dinner. If you can’t afford the points to add the baked potato, then just make extra peppers, or substitute another veggie to go along with it. The baked potato is 4 points, then instead of butter I used a tablespoon of Daiya Chive and Onion vegan cream cheese. It sounds gross, but its amazing. You can find it in the organic section of your local grocery store. 1 Tablespoon is 1 point. I love Daiya products. I’m not a vegan or vegetarian, but I try to stay away from dairy, this product is usually better tasting then most dairy, and you can’t beat the points!
1) One simple home screen – I love this. There is just one screen with the essential icons, all right at your fingertips.
You can still put whatever wallpaper you want and all that jazz. This is just a demo of the layout. I love having these icons like this on the screen. The bottom left is where you apps are housed.
2) Awesome app organizing – Smart Launcher will automatically put your apps in categories organized like this:
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| The apps are put into categories that are listed on the left. Categories like Communication, Internet, Games, Media, and Utility. All customizable. |
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| My favorite feature of the app organizer is the search feature. By just clicking the search icon, I can quickly get to what I’m looking for. I can’t tell you how many times I used to have to search through pages of shit to find the app I was looking to use. |
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| By clicking the “G” icon, all my apps staring with “G” appear. |
3) What about my widgets? Another thing that always bothered me about the standard android layout was the 5 pages of home page to scroll through. I like widgets, but I hated placing them all over the place. Smart launcher gives you an awesome option for your widgets further simplifying your experience.
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| Button for widgets |
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| (I have no idea who “The Prince” is, just clicked a random spotify artist for display.) The widgets page allows you to place as many widgets as you want thus giving you what you had before, but here you can get it when you want it. |
You have nothing to lose trying this out. If you don’t end up liking the layout, simply un-install the Smart Launcher app. There are other themes to play around with in Smart Launcher as well, not just the Ubuntu theme. One thing to note, is that the widgets page is only available in the pay version of Smart Launcher. It’s only $1.99, once I fell in love with the free version, I wanted the widget page so I just bought the thing.
Once you download the Smart Launcher app and Ubuntu theme for Smart Launcher, you simply open up Smart Launcher. It will prompt you asking if you want to use smart launcher “always” or “just this once’. Just click “always”, remember if you don’t like it you can un-install the app in seconds. Once Smart Launcher opens, your phone layout will change to the same format as the pictures, but different looking in terms of its presentation. Go into where your apps are stored and at the top right you will see 3 dots, click it. Its the “preferences” menu. From here it will show you the Ubuntu theme you downloaded with the option to click and install the theme. Click it and you are done. If you try this out, tell me what you think. Personally I love it.
(If you end up liking the free version of Smart Launcher and decide you want the pay version, un-install the free one first before getting it to avoid confusion.)
I love to cook. Actually I should correct that statement. I love to cook if its making pizza or grilling. Nicole had gotten me this awesome grilling book I wanted for Christmas called, “The Grilling Book.”
The book is gigantic and is loaded with amazing pictures from tons of grilling recipes. I’m making a goal to try and cook one of these recipes a week until I have cooked the entire book.
The first dish I will be making is “Chicken Skewers with Coriander Marinade and Lemon Salsa.” Stay Tuned, I should be cooking this sometime this weekend!
We here in Buffalo, NY are currently experiencing an actual blizzard. Everything is shut down, major roads are closed, and its pretty much a lazy day. I picked up the Roku remote and flipped through my recommendation list on Netflix. This list is usually pretty absurd due to the variety of things that get watched in this house but one thing caught my eye. You can almost guarantee that if you show me a sideshow of images and one of the images just so happens to be someone with mulleted curly hair and a Tom Selleck mustache doing karate, I’m probably going to look at that with interest. The film was called “Overkill”, and it was a colossal pile of awesome shit.
“A Tokyo cop is sent to Los Angeles to help an LAPD detective break up a yakuza (Japanese organized crime syndicate) ring operating in the city“- IMDB
You knew the movie was going to be awesome when the beginning sequence set the stage with a police chief narrating the introduction to the story with an over the top voice straight out of an old gangster movie. The movie basically revolves around this California cop “Mickey” who looks absolutely ridiculous. He is constantly either shirtless or wearing completely unbuttoned vests with no shirt on underneath. He occasionally wears this generic wind-breaker coat, but still ceases to put on any shirt under it. The best is when he is just casually doing work at the police station, as everyone else is adequately dressed accept for him. He looks like a male exotic dancer throughout the film. There is even a scene were he has to go undercover as a male stripper and performs. Any normal person filming this would have at least had him act semi awkward performing his dance, but this guy goes all out like he had been doing it for 10 years. His dance moves reminded me of when Slater used to break it down on “Saved by the Bell.” The guy clearly had dancing in his skill set.
Basically Mickey is noticing increased activity from the Yakuza (Japanese Mafia) and wants to put a stop to it. They make it clear that nobody else at the police station even cares about it accept for him. He states multiple times that he doesn’t want California to turn into 1920’s Chicago and that he would defend California himself if he had to. Mickey and his partner then break every law on the books to get information on the Yakuza. The movie is loaded with terrible action scenes where you barely get to see guns fire. The would do quick cuts and you would often see people bleeding from areas they weren’t even shot in.
Perhaps the most ridiculous sequence in the movie is the last 3 minutes (this doesn’t even really spoil anything). In about 3 minutes, Mickey quits the force. They show him walk into a karate school where he watched the sensei perform with a sword for maybe 20 seconds. Mickey is then shown in his living room, soaking with sweat holding the sword and yelling while doing simplistic strikes with it. Then Mickey is working at the Sushi restaurant of the kid he meets in the movie. It was like a terribly done montage to make Mickey “just a little Japanese”. They cap off this 3 minute sequence by having the kid that owns the Sushi Restaurant ask Mickey if he would ever be able to walk again (he was in a wheelchair). The scene quickly changes to the beach where Mickey places the paralysed kid onto a horse, and they literally go riding off into the sunset. A paralysed kid riding full speed on a horse…….
This is a great film to laugh at and wasn’t bad enough to make me turn it off. If you end up getting stuck home because of a blizzard, I would recommend this for a good laugh.
| “The Body Count is Overwhelming” |
Here are a few things that you can do to protect yourself from the NSA:
1) Stay away from the Cloud: I would think this would be common sense. Anything personal that you may have should always be kept on your own server or data center. This includes the SaaS apps (software as a service) that are so easy and available for everyone such as Gmail and Office 365.
2) Encrypt your email: A few months ago it was released that the NSA was working on a computer that would decrypt encryption. I haven’t read anything about it since, but all emails should be encrypted if there is anything personal in them.
3) Hide your web browsing: This is a major one. Not with just the NSA, but corporate America in general. My stepfather was telling me a few days ago that he had read on the news that Airliners have possibly been tracking IP addresses s that when you checked on a price for a flight and then came back after shopping around, that the price was higher than before. This is a bullshit practice and can easily be avoided. It’s sometimes creepy when you are bopping around the internet and you get adds for super obscure items you probably purchased recently. I hate it. To avoid all of this, use Tor. Tor takes your internet communications and bounces it off a series of networked relays so they can’t see what sites your visiting. It also keeps webmasters from knowing where you are browsing from. Tor has its limitations and is basically bare bones web surfing, but its nice to know that option is there.
4) Protect the Internet: The internet is that last frontier. Not only our government but governments across the world are constantly trying to gain control or regulate the internet in one way or another. Always be aware of legislation that sneaks passed main stream media that aims place regulation on any aspect of the internet, whether it be net neutrality or SOPA, any sort of regulation or censorship of the internet should be shot down immediately.
Realistically, you are probably not going to do a lot of these things as we live in a society that is tricked by convenience and ease. We live on social media not realizing that when you make a bitstrip on Facebook that not a single person ever laughs at, that your signing over your personal information. Every app, every nonsense thing you take part in ends up being way more expensive than you realize. Know that you have options, and know what they are.
Please stop posting bitstrips if you haven’t already.
Thank you.
When not making shirts for you folks and during the off times that my daughter is asleep, I basically spend my personal time on the computer. I’ve been teaching myself to code, researching the ins and outs of networks, and really learning loads of stuff each day. One thing that I found that kept annoying me was Windows. Most of the stuff I was reading referred to Linux. At first, I would mess around with Linux on Virtualbox. Virtualbox is awesome because it gives you the option to run a second operating system on your existing one. So I had Windows 7 and I was able to play around with Linux. After a few days I said, “Screw it.” Enough of Windows.
The more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me. I hated Windows 7. I hated Windows in general. My sister and I would argue, Windows vs Mac all the time, and I would stand by the side of Windows and defend it. Don’t get me wrong, I hate Mac still (and Apple in general) but I am finished with Windows. I’m not some fanboy that hates Apple and loves Microsoft (or vice versa). I Just want something that works, works for a long time, and doesn’t rip me off with new bullshit releases that break the bank. I fancied myself over to the Ubuntu website and downloaded the ISO, burned it to a DVD, and soon enough, I wiped out my old operating system and said “hello” to Ubuntu! Its like complete freedom. Let me tell you why Ubuntu is so awesome.
1) Its free
2) You don’t have to buy an Office Suite, it comes with OpenOffice.
3) You are free from virus’s (I know its still technically possible but super rare, just like with Macs) so you don’t need a bunch of shit anti virus programs that eat up RAM and fail to catch anything because they are constantly out of date.
4) Any bugs that you come across, you won’t have to wait years for a fix. Ubuntu is open source, fix’s can be tracked down in Ubuntu.
5) You don’t have to yank your hair out restarting your system all the time, you almost never have to with Ubuntu.
6) Load of free software for anything you need at the click of a button. The Ubuntu Software Center on your desktop has tons of great stuff, all free.
7) You can still run your favourite Windows programs if there isn’t an alternate Linux version. There is a great program called “Wine” which you use to open any Windows program you would like to use.
8) All upgrades for Ubuntu are free of cost.
9) If you get stuck with any problem, just join the Ubuntu forum. The people in there are awesome and can help you with any issue you have. I’ve found that the issues I’ve come across were all quick fixes from the command terminal.
10) No more bullshit defragging the hard drive.
Using Ubuntu on the VirtualBox gave me a taste of what it was like. I started reading some books on it, and doing some basic research. Then I decided that there wouldn’t be a better way to learn than just diving in, getting rid of my old operating system, and forcing myself to learn this one because it would be all I had. So that is what I did. I love it. My computer is super quick, I haven’t come across one limitation yet. If you have some spare time on your hands, check out VirtualBox and mess around with Linux. I’m going to start doing some basic tutorials on some thing with this blog. I am not an expert by far, but I’d love to share what I have picked up and learn/interact with other users. More to come!
7am: Nurse/Bottle
7:30am: Playtime
9:00am: Morning Nap (1.5 hours)
11:00am: Playtime
This is the most ridiculous thing ever. Of course, before you actually have the kid in real life, one would read a plan like this and be like, “Oh OK, that seems reasonable.” You than have the kid in your possession and this schedule is perhaps the dumbest thing you could ever read. I’m amazed that people even get hired to write books that have these mindless simplistic plans laid out. We try to stick to a schedule, but sweet Amelia Rose does not have it. She sleeps when she feels like it.
Last night was another experience where we tried sticking to a schedule/routine that Nicole had read about. Establishing a routine for your baby. A specific time of the night that the baby goes into its room,the lights are dim, the changing occurs, the soothing, the baby massage, swaddled up and rocked to sleep. This ritual happens, she falls asleep and we both go down stairs and enjoy some adult time. A glass of wine and a movie under a blanket. 15 minutes later we glance over at the baby moniter:
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| Paranormal Activity Amelia |
Not only is this the most frustrating thing ever to see after the lengthy sleep routine prior, but it’s also super creepy. She doesn’t even move for a while when she starts this! She just stares at you. I know what your thinking, “Oh she will just go to sleep.” Never has that happened. It starts with this…..then it goes to crying….then screaming. With the baby being too young for the cry it out method, we have no choice but to go back up and start again. With Nicole bearing the brunt of similar rituals during the afternoon, I volunteered my services and went up stairs. I slowly open the door, thinking of myself as the dad coming to the rescue! I will pick up my baby and rock her in my arms, she will be so happy that I’m there comforting her, making her feel safe. Of course that image is shattered when I pick her up and she screams bloody murder. I stay calm, I rock her and sing her sweet songs while she screams louder and louder. Now its starting to look like one of those movies where a crazy guy kidnaps someone and is completely crazy singing songs while the victim is screaming and crying, desperately trying to escape – a true horror scene. OK so not exactly that intense of a scene, but I certainly didn’t feel like a hero. After about a half hour of this, Nicole enters the room to see if I wanted to switch because my ears were on the verge of bleeding. The baby is transferred into the arms of my wife and immediately stops crying.
Unfortunately now that this behavioural pattern has been discovered, we can’t solve it that way. Now if she does this, I have to rough it out until she stops and falls asleep which is usually about an hour…
This has happened the past three times now for me. Fourth times a charm!? Back to my original point, these books can piss off! If your lucky enough to have a kid that sleeps, it will sleep. If your unlucky, then your kid won’t sleep. There is no book for that.
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| The Life Aquatic Shirt |
This shirt was a surprise this year and I ended up selling a bunch of these to the point where I had to pull it temporarily while I caught up. Hope everyone enjoyed their shirts and has a happy holiday!
And now for my first non commercial blog post in a while: “WTF”
So our baby has finally started to breast feed. She didn’t take to the fleshy mounds at first and was a royal pain in the ass. All of a sudden, she loves it. This is great and all for my wife who no longer needs to pump out ever ounce of milk the baby consumes and makes her life a lot easier. The baby frequently will just fall asleep while feeding which is an awesome option…..until its time for me to put her to sleep. I have to do the traditional rocking and singing while she kicks and screams until passing out. Its wonderful. Its bonding.
So my wife and I were sitting around after the baby finally went to sleep. I said to her, “I wish there was like a fake boob that a man could strap on that had some milk in it, and then the baby just nurses like normal. That way I can just easily put her to sleep.” We then laughed about how retarded of an idea that was, and then out of curiosity, I looked it up…..and sure enough:
This by far is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve seen, and talk about confusing your kid. I don’t think I’d be able to use this without feeling bad. It reminds me of this:
supersweetshirtblog.com 