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Chiles Rellenos
Serves 2

Ingredients:
Entrée:
(4) Poblano Peppers
Mozzarella (Whole Milk)
(1) Egg

Sauce:
(1) Medium-Large Red Tomato
Garlic Powder
Onion Powder
Chicken Bouillon

Preparation (Entrée):
Wash peppers and sear in a dry pan over Medium-Low to Medium heat until skin is blistered (not burnt) and pepper has softened just a little. Rotate peppers to ensure all sides are seared.

Take off heat, place in Ziploc bag, and wrap in a kitchen towel for 30 minutes to allow the peppers to sweat. This makes removing the skin much easier.

Remove the outer skin and then slit the pepper to remove the seeds and veins. Doing this under cold water from the faucet can make them easier to handle.


Stuff with Mozzarella cheese or Queso Fresco if you can find it and close the pepper back up. Don’t get carried away with the cheese or it will leak everywhere.

Separate egg yolk from egg white. Whip egg white until it is thickened like a meringue. Pop the yolk and then fold it in with the egg white loosely.

Coat pepper in the egg white mixture and then drop into a pan over Medium heat with a thin layer of oil. The egg mixture browns pretty quickly.


Serve with sauce and rice when nice and brown.

Preparation (Sauce):
Wash and halve tomato. Boil until tender.
Drop tomato in blender. Add onion powder, garlic powder, and chicken bouillon to taste.
Blend
Pour blended sauce back into a pan and simmer for 10 minutes or so to allow it to reduce a little more.
Pour over chiles rellenos.


Enjoy!!!

Moon Dreams

Tap, tap, a tapping on my shoulder

I turned to find the moon basking

and with a subtle flourish asking,


"Sir, have I in someway offended,

you always visited so unrelenting

singing of dreams and finer things"


Eyes downcast, I mumbled response,

"No, gentle sir, but can't you see,

I am no longer foolish and free"


With an uproarious laugh, he mused,

"I do see what you believe to see,

but foolish is what you came to be"



© 2004 Mike

I'm Alive!!!!

Wow. It has been since November since the last time I posted a blog entry. I knew I had been neglecting my blog (and everyone else’s), but I really didn’t realize that it had been so long. Time flies when you are having fun. The first question that comes to mind is how do I catch up on 8 eventful months. I think the answer is that I can’t, but I will hit some highlights at the very least.

While not the most exciting detail, first and foremost, it is perhaps prudent to establish that I am in fact still alive. I find this to be a rather important point as otherwise the past 8 months would probably be a bit boring primarily revolving around worms playing pinochle on my snout as the kid’s chant goes. Luckily, that is not the case and in fact my world has been a rather delightful place of late.

On May 22, Ale and I were married on Ocean Isle Beach in North Carolina. Not a day has gone by since then (really since she was able to get her visa and move here in March) that I have not woken up and realized just how lucky of a person I am. My only frustration at this point is being able to adequately express just how wonderful she is and how complete life has become with her in my life. I can only just keep trying…and smiling!! :)

We are still working our way through the immigration challenges, but I will save that for another entry sometime as it cannot help but to devolve into a rather critical treatise of the current state of the process. Regardless of the frustrations, things are progressing slowly but surely and hopefully things will start to resolve over the next few months so we can focus on more enjoyable things.

Hmmm…what else has been going on…

I planted a garden this year with a co-worker who had an ideal spot on his property for one. I have not gardened since I was a teenager working in my parent’s garden. I can still remember the vehemence with which I swore I would never have a garden in a typically overzealous teenage fashion. While it has been over 15 years, here I am working in a garden again. It is doing fairly well despite a bit of a drought and the inept skills of its caretakers. Perhaps I will post more about that on another day in case anyone is having trouble sleeping.

Having been rather lax in taking care of myself over the years and now facing high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes, I have been working on losing weight this year. While I have not been very consistent in diet or exercise, I am happy to say that I am down about 15 kilos from where I started last year and am still going down slowly but surely. Hopefully, it will have some positive impact.

Our spare time lately has been consumed by projects like painting, pressure washing the house, replacing fixtures and a multitude of other little home improvement projects. Before and in our spare time we have been running around the countryside enjoying various diversions from hanging out on the beach in Wilmington for the Azalea Festival, the waterfront in Beaufort for Memorial Day, catching Cirque du Soleil in Raleigh, seeing the exhibit “Temples and Tombs” on loan from the British Museum at the NC Art Museum, visiting my parents in Georgia, to a number other little adventures.

I am sure I have left out numerous things, but suffice it to say that life is good. I have been blessed with the love of a wonderful woman and for that fact I am ever awed and grateful. Hopefully, I will do a little better at updating my blog now and actually have a little more detailed posts in the future.

Spam

After a recent post by A., I decided to cease deleting spam messages to my gmail account (which bordered on an OCD compulsion) and just really see how many I get per day...and more precisely in a week. I began this just before midnight on Friday exactly a week ago. I have started typing this just before midnight this Friday. At this very moment I have 335 messages in my spam box on gmail. Easily 90% of them involve Viagra, Cialis, and\or some other form of male performance or size enhancement. The remaining 10% involve drugs (prescription) in general, software, or just outright porn solicitations.

The biggest thing I am left to truly wonder is what kind of moron actually responds to these kind advertisements to make them profitable and\or worthwhile to continue to be such a nuisance and so frequent in occurrence. I have to assume that people do actually respond to them for the nuisance to continue.

I personally have always had an extreme hatred of junk mail, telemarketing, and spam. I have never returned a telemarketing call and have always cut short anyone I had the misfortune of picking up to hear the beginning of their pitch. I have returned some junk mail at times with coupons from another source just to know that they paid for the return mail as well.

While bemoaning telemarketing calls in the past before the "do not call" list, I was shocked and finally understood the motivation to find out that it was a multi-billion dollar a year business for companies that engaged in that kind of supreme annoyance. No wonder they are so persistent and willing to lose money on the likes of me.

The sad thing is that particularly in the case of spam there is a very real cost to the victim associated with the reality of trying to block this waste of human potential both in bandwidth requirements and temporary storage which is also projected into the billions globally.

In my former company of nearly 25,000 email users, roughly 1 million spam messages per month were blocked (which carries a distinct cost both in mail performance and software to perform the check)....and we still got a sad amount of SPAM to waste storage space.

Bad Day

Some days would be better spent in bed unacknowledged...



The corner of a coffee table is not a friend to a falling laptop while it is open!

God of the universe that is within us

Staring at the star specked sky
I am left to wonder at meaning
in this enveloping panorama
ever so steadily sliding by.

The scale is far too grand.
How can I comprehend infinite
when I am defined by limits,
but how can I fathom a limit
knowing not the other side?

Ten planets orbiting the sun,
we mere specks on an electron,
contained within the molecule
that we call the milky way.

Perception then is the quandary
and I am looking the wrong way
for I must be a vast universe
to the speck on an electron
that is contained within me

It must be beyond that speck
to know of what it is a part,
but I cannot help but know
that I am comprised by it.

As we are specks in God's universe
perhaps we are the all encompassing
God of the universe in each of us.
Eternal by the arbitrary measure
of time within an electron's orbit.

03/24/2004

50 Things About Me

Reading lists from other blogs it seemed like an entertaining thing to try myself.

1.) I am in love with a wonderful person and we are hopeful that we will be together in the near future.

2.) I enjoy cooking and am not a very picky eater. Fish is probably the thing that I am least fond of but even that is not a horrible prospect for me if it is on my plate.

3.) Shrimp are probably my single favorite thing to eat.

4.) I was born in Mississippi, raised in Georgia, and now live in North Carolina.

5.) I have set foot in 21 states in the US.

6.) I have set foot in Mexico, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the Bahamas.

7.) Needless to say I enjoy travel and hope to greatly expand my list of places visited (With A. to share them with me, of course :) )

8.) I like and get along with all animals, but I am more of a cat person than a dog person.

9.) I have never broken a bone (although I should have a few times)

10.) I have impaled my foot on a nail two different times as a kid.

11.) It took me 5 years to get my 2 year degree although I finished my 4 year on schedule after that mark.

12.) I spent much of my early childhood on a chicken farm with roughly 20,000 chickens laying eggs that had to be picked up.

13.) I don't remember not knowing how to ride a horse (or how to fall of one...heh) although I would be saddle sore quick nowadays.

14.) I have never had a reaction to poison ivy even after distinctly rubbing it on my skin to prove the point.

15.) My degree is in computer science.

16.) I am 33 and honestly kind of enjoying my 30's...at the very least it seems each year keeps improving.

17.) I tend to be shy in a group especially if they are strangers although I am not often timid. I would just rather listen.

18.) I am a Leo. (but don't believe in the Zodiac beyond its recreational value)

19.) I played the clarinet throughout jr. high and high school including sitting first chair, making district band every year of high school and qualifying for state band twice although the closest I got there was first runner-up. After school was over I have never really played again although I still own a clarinet.

20.) One of my gym classes in college was dance. We learned the basic steps to a number of styles like the Waltz, Foxtrot, Jitterbug, Polka, Tango, and several more. I don't remember how to do a single one....

21.) I had shoulder length hair and an earring in high school...I am now close cut and have long since lost the earring.

22.) I was voted most likely to rebel by my graduating class in high school.

23.) I smoke (but I am trying to quit...ack)

24.) I enjoy photography, poetry, theatre, art, architecture.

25.) I also enjoy white water rafting, primitive camping, hiking, boating.

26.) I would love to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. (although I am not sure if I will ever do this one)

27.) I have clearly seen most of the bone of my right middle finger (construction accident).

28.) I have a bad habit of either not thinking or over thinking most things. I seem to end up at one extreme or the other much too often.

29.) I tend to prefer deep vibrant colors.

30.) Although I am not color blind, I have difficulty really distinguishing subtle shades of color in dim or fluorescent lighting.

31.) I wear glasses (I have never been able to override by blink instinct to be able to wear contacts)

32.) I organized a pet show at the age of 11 (or so) including finding a "Corporate" sponsor to pay for trophies, a local business to host the show, another to setup tents, etc. We had a reasonable turn out and my cat at the time won the trophy in the innovative category of "cat with the loudest purr" albeit amidst scandalous claims of judging bias (also arranged by me consisting of a few of the local vets). It was for a scout badge that I later found out was supposed to have been a project for the whole pack.

33.) Key lime pie is probably my favorite dessert (although peach or blackberry cobbler is close)

34.) I am not a very consistent blogger, hence a supremely boring one.

35.) Did I mention that I am in love with a wonderful person? It certainly bears repeating! :)

Ummm...did I say 50...I meant 35...:)

Brine and Breath

I felt you in my dreams again
in a momentary touch that speaks
of today, yesterday, and tomorrow.

You whisper of weeping willows
and meandering mossy glistenings
hanging on a feverish dawn's blush.

I sighed the morning's tidal wash
of brine and breath overflowing
knowing the crashing wave's courage.

Touchmarks gleaming upon cheek
and lips scald with heat unchecked
as the horizon peeks in fiery envy.

Dreams, desires, or consumption
what is this momentary sensation
hope's despair, or life as a dream?


08/16/2004

Arabian Days

Under the sun's scintillating smile
morning's breath dries dawn's dew
upon dancing strands of lush green
gyrating in gentle rhythmic breeze

Pawing the ground with equine dignity
prancing playfully in fiery delight.
Bowed bay neck with head thrust high
starred forelock flashing the light.

Blue skies aching late spring's ardor
I mount bareback with grace of youth
mane entwined hands light upon crest
as she saunters testing the merging flow.

Muscles loosened by the morn's gaiety
easing quickly through gaits we sail
motions flowing into motions, fluidity.
Man, horse, joined perfection; centaur!

A toss of her head, eye's sparkling power
feeling the transition as we break free
flight without wings, racing the clouds
merged raw power hearing desert call.

Drinking the feral wind as we pass it by
guttural howls of delight escape unbidden
for the moment we are one; raw, primal
released of our earthly shackles. Free!

04/10/2004

Memory recalled and inspiration from: And God took a handful of South wind and from it formed a horse, saying: "I create thee, Oh Arabian. To thy forelock, I bind Victory in battle. On thy back, I set a rich spoil And a Treasure in thy loins. I establish thee as one of the Glories of the Earth... I give thee flight without wings." -- from Ancient Bedouin Legend (Byford, et al. Origination of the Arabian Breed)