Cheryl on the Web

There’s nothing like biking across town and up a huge hill in order to get to my bi-weekly German class on time to bring out the youth in me. Though, given the huffing and puffing that accompanied the trek up the hill, the amount of youth I demonstrated is perhaps questionable. If nothing else, I should at least improve in biking up hills in addition to learning some German, given that this course is 2 semesters long and runs until May next year. (more…)

Today I made mini zucchini muffins, which are - in my variation - no relation to zucchini bread. They are light-colored with a “refined” (read: subtle but sophisticated) taste, consisting of zucchini with hints of parmesan, lemon, and nutmeg. Having made non-sweet muffins now for the first time, I have to say I love them. They are a great substitution for potatoes or rice in meals where meat should really be the main focus, and they are healthier than sweet muffins since there’s no sugar - not to mention that in this particular case each mini muffin contains the equivalent of at least one thick zucchini slice!

I’ve got a muffin recipe book full of recipes for various muffin types, both sweet and non-sweet. The next non-sweet ones I want to try are the pesto muffins, mmm. I liked the zucchini muffins I made today, but they are better with a meal than just by themselves I think, even though we ate them today as a sort of appetizer to our meal. If you want the recipe, let me know :)

No one really believed they could do it. Of the 5 sports analysts on my favorite midnight ESPN sports talk show (Around the Horn), only one picked the Rockies to make the playoffs a few weeks back. And here they are, living the American dream of the up-and-coming underdogs - and giving the Philadelphia Phillies a good beating in the first 2 games of their 5-game playoff opening series. That’s what I’m talking about, I believe in you, go, Rockies!

Tim came home with a PS3 (PlayStation 3) this weekend. It took us a little while to figure out where to put it since it is aesthetically equivalent to a 12 x 5 x 9 inch black box - read, not that easy to hide in what we otherwise would consider our aesthetically pleasing living room. We connected the box via a high-definition cable to the TV and via an optical sound cable to the sound system (and of course remembered to plug it into the power outlet as well). Then, full of anticipation, we turned it on. (more…)

For those of you looking for interesting Internet surf destinations to add to your list (since I’m humble enough to realize I can’t satisfy all your needs), I’ve added 2 sites to my Blog Roll (in the right-hand column), have a look.

This morning at breakfast Tim and I tried to watch the latest Dutch news broadcast online. Pretty much all of the stations in Holland put their news broadcasts online after-the-fact and you can just stream the video, it’s great .. in theory.

Both the sites we tried this morning (RTL and NOS) failed to actually play any video when browsed from my Mac, not in Firefox and also not in Safari. *Learn to do your job* I felt like screaming at the people responsible for putting these sites together - not everyone is using Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows XP! In fact, about 35% of people are using something else nowadays. It’s not that hard to make a site that at least works in Firefox for the Mac. I even have a special program on my Mac that lets me view Windows Media Player videos and these 2 news sites still don’t work!

Some sites are going to learn the hard way that if they can’t cater to the browsers used by the web browsing population out there, their Windows-centric websites are going to be left in the dust. Have you got a website to add to my list? Post a comment.

For all those looking for American or British food products in Germany, I ran into this web page that links to a number of websites where you can order the supplies you need:
http://www.gfra.de/usfood/shop.htm

In particular, I noticed right away that one of the sites sells canned pumpkin and will ship up to 30kg of products to Germany for just 5 euro: http://www.foodfromhome.de/index.php?section=2&subsection=0&g1=0