The centerpiece for today’s Sunday dinner will be these Asian lilies: Sumatra (dark red), Broadway (blush) and white Stargazers. Appropriate for our Chinese-style steamed breast of chicken and steamed veggies with saffron rice.
Click on the image to enlarge.
Today, Damsel and I prepared this sumptuous Italian mozzarella-stuffed meatballs served over angel hair pasta and topped off with Damsel’s killer Marinara sauce.
I prepared the ground meat from lean pork loin and beef round tip. I carefully trimmed the meats and blended the two together through the grinder.
Damsel added the herbs, spices and homemade Italian-style breadcrumbs. She stuffed each of the meatballs with ciliegine – a cherry tomato-sized ball of mozzarella cheese.
Oh yeah, this was excellent. Click image to enlarge. Do not drool on your keyboards.
Via Webster: opaque – (oh-payk’) – adj.
1 : exhibiting opacity : blocking the passage of radiant energy and especially light
2 a : hard to understand or explain b : obtuse, thickheaded
I cannot disagree with that second definition when it comes to the obtuse, thickheaded blockheads in Congress.
Via The Patriot Post:
If By ‘Transparent’ You Mean ‘Secret’…
After much bribery and arm-twisting, the Senate managed just before Christmas to pass its version of ObamaCare by a 60-39 vote (amazingly, without a single GOP “aye”). Now, the bill heads for conference deliberation televised by C-SPAN, just as the cable channel offered and Barack Obama promised numerous times.
Or not.
Democrats let slip this week that there would be no typical conference committee on the competing House and Senate versions of the health bill, as “leaders” opted instead for private negotiations with “key” congressmen and senators, none of whom is Republican. Once an agreement is reached, each legislative chamber will vote again and send the unified bill to the president.
Without a conference committee, a rule requiring public access to the conference report for at least 48 hours before a vote would conveniently not apply. That means even more liberty-stealing treachery can be slipped into the bill with little notice. Funny how the “public option” doesn’t mean that the public gets to know what’s in the bill.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) nevertheless had the gall to declare, “There has never been a more open process for any legislation in anyone who’s served here’s experience.” In response, Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto mocked, “Has a more false or awkwardly worded statement ever come out of anyone who has served as speaker of the House’s mouth?” [more]
I have programmed several favorite websites (other than the blogs) that I like to visit daily. One of those is the NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) website.
A favorite feature of mine, is the Very Latest SOHO Images page. On this page, I can see the solar disc in four different Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) wavelengths of light, two images (Continuum and Magnetogram) from the Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI), and two fields of view from the Large Angle and Spectrometric COronagraph (LASCO).
The Latest Images page is where I can see what’s happening on and around the Sun in near real time. Today’s EIT images tell me that there are active regions on both the left and right sides of the disc. The active region on the right will be rotating out of view soon, while the one on the left will move toward the center of the disc. The MDI images reveal no large sunspots – the remnants of sunspot 1035 are just coming into view in the upper left. The LASCOs reveal a couple of interesting things – there are Coronal Mass Ejections associated with both active regions seen in the EIT images and the planet Mercury passed in front of and below the Sun a few days ago.
When it comes to breaking all campaign promises, the Administration does the Nation the greatest disservice when it operates like a crime syndicate.
Via The Patriot Post.
This week, I received an email advising me that the DirecTV rates were going to increase next month. I guess that times being what they are, that I’m OK with the new rate. However, when I clicked on the link to see the new rates, they sent me to this helpful and informative document (tongue-in-cheek, of course):
C’mon, DirecTV . . . how about posting a readable rate chart showing old vs. new rates and something to indicate which package applies to me?
I wonder if Dish® Network does the same crap.
Click image to enlarge.
We’re looking forward to a couple of vacations in 2010 and have started planning them. One thing we like to do is pull up some of the photos we took during previous outings. I was looking through the Summer ’08 files when I found this nice rainbow road picture taken near Canyonlands National Park in Utah. Click on the image to enlarge.
