The Ultimate Cell Phone

I saw the draft menu item in the blog's admin panel and found this post which I'd started writing in 2007 (I think) and never finished:

I don't have a cell phone. I have, in the past, owned and operated a cell phone but I no longer have one and haven't had one for almost a year now. This is partly because of apathy (I can't be bothered to go out and research and find the best one for me) and partly because of need (I don't need one - no one ever calls me).

I have however, spent time thinking about what I'd like in a cell phone and what would be my ultimate cell phone and I've discovered that all I would like it to do is receive and place calls. I've heard about watch cell phones and this is probably what I'd want. Something that does the basic and exact functionality that it is supposed to do and is so amazingly small that you don't need a pocket to put it in - you can wear it on your wrist.

My dilemma at the moment is that I want one gadget that will do it all. It will be a cell phone, PDA and MP3 player. The PDA needs to have 802.11g and Windows CE. The cell phone, well it needs to receive and make calls, and the MP3 player needs a fair amount of memory for song storage. So far I don't think the animal exists. I will wait.

The Village People

If you want a really good laugh you need to watch a couple of the original Village People music videos:

 

 

Rock Shandy

A rock shandy, pictured above, for those who don't know is:

• Half Sprite
• Half Soda Water
• A dash of Angostura Bitters

I remembered drinking them on hot British summer days and wanted to try one again in the Arizona desert but I couldn't for the life of me remember the name of this drink so couldn't track down what went into it.

When I finally identified the ingredients and their proportions a couple of weeks ago I went out and got everything and was very disappointed with what I made. Turned out that the soda water that I'd bought was orange flavored and I hadn't noticed that little subtext on the bottle.

Today I put the right stuff in the glass and it was the perfect refresher after a hot day.

The Unproposed Marriage - Toastmasters Speech #3

Do you know that you never asked me to marry you?
Do you know that you never asked me to marry you?

Madam Toastmaster, fellow toastmasters and honored guests. On a balmy Saturday afternoon four years ago my wife asked me this question:
Wife: "Do you know that you never asked me to marry you?"
Me: "That's ridiculous. How could we possibly be married if I didn't ask you to marry me?"
Wife: "Okay, describe the place and time and how you proposed to me."

I was silent for a while. Then a while longer. Then I realized that she was right. I had never asked her for her hand in marriage and yet, we had successfully become married. In my defense I was very busy.

We'd been dating for a while. Let me rephrase that. We'd been half-dating. Each time we went out the first thing she'd say to me was "remember, this is not a date because my parents would never allow this." In public I was not permitted to hold her hand. If we went to a restaurant I would have to find a table in the corner while she scouted the area to make sure that nobody she recognized was there. Then like a fighter pilot she would swoop in, sit down, put up a wall of menus and duck down behind them. If we went to the movies then she would come over and sit next to me when the lights went down and would even let me hold her hand.

While we were half-dating she was in the process of completing her papers to immigrate to the United States and she wanted me to come with her and I wanted to go with her. On the immigration forms there's a question "Are you married?" with the options of Yes and No. There was no option for "relationship unapproved by parents." US Immigration is fussy about that. We agreed that the only way we were going to do this .

I went full steam ahead to arrange a legal marriage. In my mind a marriage was an hour off work at lunchtime where you rushed down to the courthouse with some identification and signed some papers and you were married. Nothing complicated in that.

It turned out that the courts were so backlogged with marriages that you had to make a reservation and the earliest was three months away. I started looking for alternatives and found a priest who was the Chaplin at my old school and whose daughter, coincidentally, had gone to school with my wife. I ran this idea past my whatever-she-was and she pointed out that as a Hindu the church wasn't her first choice of venue for a marriage. However, she agreed that we didn't have any alternative.

Now came the biggest hurdle. Luckily I didn't have to do that. My wife had to tell her parents that she had 1. had a boyfriend and 2. that he was not Hindu and 3. and that she was soon to marry him. Her mother cried for three days.

Initially her parents were not going to come to the wedding but on the day my father-in-law called and asked my wife is she was really going to go through with this. She said yes and he asked if the wedding could be pushed back by a couple of hours so that they could make it. We got married with everyone there and my wife was able to tick the box on the immigration form that said married.

Let's return to the time where my wife has insensitively, but accurately, pointed out that I had never asked her to marry me. Once I realized that I was in a corner I said "will you marry me?" Her answer was "no, you need to do this properly. You need to put some thought into this and make sure that it's in the right setting." Over the ensuing years, when the subject came up, I would immediately ask her to marry me. Each one was rejected because I hadn't put enough thought or effort into it.

Yesterday, I finally put some effort in and went off to Costco and spent a lot of money on this ring. The reason that I bought it from Costco is because if she says no I can always return it and get a refund.

[Walk down aisle towards my wife and get down on one knee.]

Prea will you marry me?

Wife: No answer but there was a lot of smiling.

Ladies and gentlemen I think that smile is a yes, thank you.

Chocolate Cherry Banana Orange Smoothie

I think that I've finally cracked how to mix the chocolate flavored whey protein powder into the smoothie. In an earlier blog post Zumba Chocolate Cherry Smoothie I just threw the powder in and set the speed of the Vitamix to high. The protein powder mixed in well but also drew in a lot of air making the smoothie thick and airy and not a great drink.

This evening's smoothie started off with my typical core ingredients:

• Banana
• Frozen dark pitted cherries
• Acai berry juice
• Water (same quantity as Acai berry juice)
• Cube of ginger
• A navel orange

I mixed that on high speed for about 45 seconds and then I set the speed to the lowest setting. I took the lid off the Vitamix and slowly poured one scoop of the protein powder into the middle of the vortex and it mixed in perfectly. No bubbles, no extra thickening. The smoothie was refreshing, easy to drink and had a nice twist of chocolate flavor on top of the cherry which is the dominant flavor and on top of that it was a good jolt of protein.

Stars and Stripes as Shade Cloth

Some years ago +Daniel Marlow (Twitter) kindly gave me a 5' by 8' US Flag. For a couple of years it hung in my garage until I moved and then it lay folded in my new garage for a year until I desperately needed some shade cloth for my Ramada against the afternoon sun and hung it up. Take a look at the photo and see if you can see the potentially disastrous mistake I made if the bottom anchoring of the flag were to come loose while I was barbequing. Yes, the flag would have caught on fire like it almost did yesterday when the wind detached it from its anchor. With my accent it would have been pretty difficult to convince someone that it was an accident.

I'm now trying to work out if I should buy more flags to cover the rest of the area or get some real shade cloth. Perhaps I should put a Union Jack where the Stars and Stripes is in case it catches on fire...

Semi-Dwarf Navel Orange

We bought this semi-dwarf navel orange from Costco around September 2012 and planted it immediately.

It remained green throughout the winter and has been getting plenty of water but doesn't seem to be making much progress. I was expecting it to have grown a bit more by now with all the sun and heat and water it's been getting but it still remains at about the same size.

Here is an image from around when it was planted taken on 25/September/2012 about 8 to 9 months ago.