I need Halloween candy anyway, so I’ll be buying fresh veggies (I’ll be watching my soluble vs insoluble fibers for our IBS, which has been behaving pretty good lately with the prebiotics and digestive enzymes), flour for homemade bread and pasta (the processed AP kind, not whole grain, which has given me numerous IBS attacks), and lots of whole milk for butter, yogurt, and cheese (oh and some whole cream too).

I doubt I’ll be able to get hubby to not bring his beloved processed frozen lunches, but maybe if I make his favorite meals, I might be able to get him to carry leftovers a few times.

I’m just glad the challenge doesn’t require not using electricity at all (I had enough of that with Hurricane Ike!)

I don’t know all these early-evac folks’ stories, maybe some of them have elderly family members, or a family member dependent on machines for livng (had my son lived, he would have needed power for daily peritoneal dialysis). But I saw a few commenters writing they would probably evacuate because they didn’t want to be without power with a toddler — one lived NW of Houston!, while the other lived further south than I do, and I’d evacuate from where she lived.

On the flip side, there were a few coastal commenters wondering if they should evacuate…um YES!

As for me, although I’m nervous about the four trees surrounding my house, I’ll probably ride it out just to avoid another panic-induced mass exodus. However, if the evacuation goes much smoother with the new Contraflow plan, and Ike makes a sharp turn north to threaten Houston, AND becomes a category 4, I might do a last minute evacuation. But no way would I prevent people south of me, that are in more danger, from escaping as long as they leave in their allotted priority timeslot. I got into a comment-argument with someone in the NW part of Houston defending their right to evacuate anytime they wanted, the coastal folks be damned — she didn’t exactly say that, but AFAIK she might as well had said it exactly like that! It reminds me of the scene in Titanic where they locked the gates preventing the below-decks from escaping.

Meanwhile, I started freezing water bottles to build up thermal mass, and have cool potable water. I’ll check NHC’s 5-day forecast right before hubby leaves for work, and if they have Ike shifting north towards my area, I’ll take hubby to work so I can fill up both tanks on the truck, and see if the supplies have started flying off the shelves yet.

Now that I finally figured out what was causing those painful gut attacks, I wanted to blog about it. But, I was also thinking about trying out monetizing a blog. From what I read, blogs now do better if they’re tightly focuses — or a niche blog. Well, I was blogging whatever here, so it certainly wouldn’t qualify as niche, so I started a new one just for IBS, called IBS Nurse.

I wanted to put some unobtrusive ads on it, so I found a new server which allowed sub-domains, so I started another blog too: Shreela’s Online Money Experiment.

And I even started a Squidoo Lens: Diagnosing Gut Pain, which was quite a learning curve. I think I’m most proud of the movies for Celiac Disease and IBS, and the Digestive Enzymes voting section I just added. I may or may not make money from that Squidoo Lens; there’s a lot of stuff I’m not comfortable linking too (like IBS cures that are just expensive enemas — repeated enemas are unhealthy, and only a temporary cure for IBS-C, why not find what’s causing it so you can prevent attacks instead? And take supplements that’ve been tested like probiotics instead). But I’ll never know unless I try it, so I’m sticking with the Squidoo Lens on Diagnosing Gut Pain because it might help someone else find what’s causing their gut pain after their doctors rule out the more serious conditions.

I did manage to get a few things planted in my garden during this time, but even though I put in compost and manure, they still did poorly. I can’t convince my husband to till with the rototiller to loosen up the gumbo soil because he says it’s pointless. So I’m going to try container gardening for Houston’s second season (starting any time now).

So that’s what I’ve been doing lately 8^)

I was cocktail waitressing at a fairly popular nightclub during the
early evening on a slow night. On the slow nights, they ”closed” down
half of the club by having the lights turned off.

A couple we’d never seen before went straight for the back corner in
the dark ”closed” area, and started making out in a round booth that
was the VIP booth on busy nights. Me and the other waitress took turns
walking all the way to the other side to see if they wanted to order,
but they acted like we were interrupting their makeout session, so we
slowed down our trips.

A little while later, one of started to make the trip again, but
returned to the open area after noticing they were about to ”engage”!

We enjoyed eating the ice there because it was soft, so we always
had ice handy during slower times, so one of us chunked ice across the
room at the couple. I swear I can’t remember which one of us did it
first, but after the shocked giggles, the other one chunked some ice
too.

At first, nobody else there knew what we were doing, because we
tried to cover our throwing motions. But because we were giggling so
much, some looked over and caught us.

It didn’t take very long before all the other customers in there
were chunking tiny soft ice pieces at the couple. Not all hit them
because it was such a long distance, but I bet at least 1 in 4 hit
them. They’d look around a little at first, then all of us would look
away…la la la.

Eventually the bartender ratted us out to the manager who had
finally come out from the office. He chewed both of us out quietly for
a few minutes — we were still on the floor, but the customers kept
chunking ice while we explained how the woman’s top was up and we
actually saw her boob a few times, and he was working on her lower
parts when we started throwing the ice.

With all the customers laughing because they were still taking turns
chunking ice, the manager finally started laughing himself. So that was
the end of our chewing out, because it’s hard to chew someone out when
you’re laughing.

The customers really were into chunking ice by that time, and no
longer took turns. It was like a minor hail storm by the time the
public nookie couple left. Everyone cheered, bought each other drinks,
and it was one of our better nights in drink sales for slow nights. Ah
camaraderie against pervs LOL

I think it’s much smaller than a traditional dryer too.

They also have a manual washing ‘machine’ I’ve been wanting. I received the email from them that they were finally in stock again, but after going to their mini-washer webpage, there was a note in red about how the frame didn’t fit correctly. So I wrote them to let me know when they receive the properly fitted washing machines from the manufacturer. I mostly want it for when there’s a power outage, which happens frequently on the coast because there’s so many thunderstorms (or worse).

They used to have some electric mini-washing machines too, but they’re not on the washing machine webpage anymore. Apparently these people sell out certain things quickly. So when I see an electric mini-washing machine, I’m ordering it ASAP.

Many people–including me–think Bill Marler is a modern-day superhero for his tireless work fighting Foodie crimes of poisonings…
Haphazard Gourmet Girls – What’s Bill Marler Eating During The Chowpocalypse?

After reading Marler’s interview snippets, I read the entire interview at Haphazard Gourmet Girls, and it was fascinating to read how passionate he is about food safety. Marler mentioned drinking alcohol quite a few times in the snipped quotes, but it made more sense in the HGG post, because drinking alcohol can decrease, or even prevent food poisoning.

“Mr. Marler cites a food poisoning outbreak with oysters, in which those who had drunk liquor while eating their oysters didn’t get ill with a norovirus, but those who hadn’t imbibed, did.”

I didn’t know about alcohol and food poisoning, and was able to find a few articles about it:

Red wine can ‘prevent food poisoning and stomach ulcers’ – Daily Mail UK

The Claim: Drinking Alcohol With a Meal Prevents Food Poisoning – NYT

Food Poisoning & Drinking Alcohol by David J. Hanson, Ph. D.

We’ve been drinking red wine for the resveratrol, which supposedly boosts the immune system; and because red wine lowers alanine aminotransferase (ALT), which seems to decrease the chances of fatty liver, and I’m guessing possibly even heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease.

Now there’s another reason to drink red wine with dinner: Preventing or decreasing food poisoning. Our single glass might not be as effective for preventing food poisoning as preventing fatty liver, heart disease, and boosting the immune system. But I get pretty buzzed just from the one glass, so I’ll still have to depend on my food safety practices, and avoid whichever foods are poison du jour thanks to our incapable food czars.

by Joss Whedon
starring Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, & Felicia Day

I sub to quite a few sites that run their feeds through FeedBurner, and none of them ever set my security alarms off. The next time this happens, I’m going to click on Why was this site blocked? button to see which one of my security programs/addons triggered this, and the reason it blocked it.

Update: It happened again, so I clicked on the Why was this site blocked button, which led to a page on the Google domain (I’m using Google Reader as my feedreader); which had this to say about why Awful Plastic Surgery’s redirect is allegedly not safe:

Safe Browsing

Diagnostic page for 85.255.118.253/ind.php

What is the current listing status for 85.255.118.253/ind.php?

This site is not listed as suspicious.

What happened when Google visited this site?

Google has not visited this site within the past 90 days.

Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?

Over the past 90 days, 85.255.118.253/ind.php did not appear to function as an intermediary for the infection of any sites.

Has this site hosted malware?

No, this site has not hosted malicious software over the past 90 days.

Next steps:

• Return to the previous page.

If you are the owner of this web site, you can request a review of your site using Google Webmaster Tools. More information about the review process is available in Google’s Webmaster Help Center.

Umm, that doesn’t look like a very bad theat, so why did Google censor block it?

LiveMocha teaches visually and with audio, using already learned words when teaching about singular vs plural, and male vs female. Plus we can learn at our own pace, and repeat lessons that are difficult. I think the way LiveMocha is set up to instruct other languages is brilliant.

But, I can’t read many of LiveMocha’s pages using Firefox 3! Here’s an example of the site menu that’s not too terrible:

I can at least read the first few lines of each menu link to know what the link is for. Perhaps this problem is related to my having configured my smallest text size to be larger than usual, but most sites don’t have a problem with this because they’re coded fluidly to accomodate visually impaired viewers.

Here’s what the message inbox looks like:

Both the message tools and the message headline are borked!

And it happens to the tools area in the messages themselves also:

But look how the page footer runs across the center of the message, including mashing up the links.

So I check out the Help link to see if these issues have already been addressed, and here’s what I get at the help section:

OMGWTH?

I did find something about FF3 issues on LiveMocha’s blog; they are aware of their site not working properly with FF3, and apparently are working on it. Someone commented on one of their blog posts that it’s also borked in recent releases of Opera too.

I’ve seen another very brilliant site that was totally borked in FF2: Associated Content, which I’m not linking to right now because AC is down at this time (I haven’t been to AC in a while because it’s so frustrating to navigate a borked site, so I’m not sure AC being down is a temporary thing or not). But, the similarities between LiveMocha’s and AC’s borkedness remind me of each other a lot. In fact, I woudn’t be at all suprised to find out LiveMocha and Associated Content used the same CMS software. If that’s the case, how stupid that a CMS programmer doesn’t know how to program for anything other than Internet Explorer!

(Associated Content was working the entire time, I had made small changes to a security program while trouble-shooting something else, since doing that only affected about 10% of websites, it took me a while to notice something was off, then backtrack what changes I had made earlier. But AC, and some of the other sites are loading again now that I changed the security setting back. And I was somewhat pleased to find that much of their site’s layout is now a bit more navigable (at least divs aren’t stacked on other divs on most of the pages); the Community page is the only one I’ve found that’s still borked (the left-menu floats over the center column, then moves around as the sub-menu is hovered, egads!).

It’s not like we’re in the last millenium when Firefox and Opera users were a small minority! You’d think CMS programmers would want to code compliantly so that their customers’ sites would work on all the major browsers, instead of just the high-risk-of-infection Internet Explorer (I’ve been infected twice since ’98 when I used IE, and I can’t remember how many infections my husband caught because he used AOL and IE for years until I finally weaned him off). From what I read on many blogs, tech-news sites, and forums, many others feel this way also, yet there’s still major websites like LiveMocha and Associated Content only working properly for a single browser.

If my suspicions about using the same CMS are even a little close, I hope LiveMocha and AC, and whatever other unfortunate sites that were suckered into buying an out-dated junk CMS get together and sue the snot out of the CMS company — not for money, but to force the CMS programmers to make the CMS compliant for all browsers, including coding it so visually impaired viewers can still use the site without breaking it when we have to enlarge the text size!

LiveMocha, I will still continue to learn Spanish from your almost brilliant site, for it is helping me learn Spanish better than short-term courses. At least the lessons pages aren’t borked (whew!)

PS: I want to clarify my visual impairment; most things start to blur if they’re more than a few feet away from me, but smaller text starts to blur at somewhere between 18-24 inches. With my monitor being aproximately 24-36 inches away, depending on whether I’m sitting forward or leaning back, most text is blurry. My glasses are too strong at this close distance, and blurs the text in the opposite direction. So if I wear my glasses, I have to sit about 4-5 feet away from the monitor before I can read the text. That’s why I turn my text size higher, so I won’t have to sit 4-5 feet away.

Sometimes it will open with an older session, and occasionally there’ll be no menu bars, just the tabs area. I can’t figure out a way to pull up any menu bars without the main menu (File, Edit, View, ect…), so I have to close and restart. Other times it will start with an older session, but at least my menus are loaded. My husband’s noticed his sessions load sporadically too.

And either Firefox 3, and/or Enhanced Cookie Manager are no longer saving my protected cookies like I’ve grown used to over the last few releases. I’m having to sign in to regular sites every time I load Firefox. Enhanced Cookie Manager was supposedly compatible with Firefox 3, so maybe some new security/privacy enhancements have been put into FF3 or ECM that need tweaking, but I’m not ruling out FF3 being buggy because it’s human nature to blame the new release when someone’s miffed at it 8^P

Under Options | Privacy | Cookies, I’m configured to accept cookies, and to delete them after they expire. Under Options | Privacy | Private Data, I’m configured to Always ask me before clearing private data. The Cookie Manager doesn’t appear to have changed with the release of FF3.

I just want FF3 to stop eating my cookies and sessions.