Sometimes you wonder who still uses these?

So these were here around the house and I thought for a second, should I keep these? Then I realized, I have internet. I don't need them. Seriously, who still uses these?

Seems wasteful to print these at this day and age...

They are an obsolete item. Eliminated by the internet....they really need to stop printing them. On another note, this is what vegan pancakes look like! Not all that different really :) And fantastic!

Vegan pancakes 4tw! 

Sometimes you eat picadillo in England!

So I had the day off today, which was nice. We didn't do much though, just got some laundry detergent, grocery shopping, and then to the park with Sophie. Since I work from 11am-8pm usually, Geli usually cooks dinner now. But today, since I was off I cooked dinner. And I made some vegan picadillo!

Chopped up potaties, onions, and garlic!

The silver pot is the main picadillo, green pot is red rice, and the little pot on the left is Sophie's picadillo(sin chile). 

Vegan picadillo, almost done!

The final product! With a side of lemon+olive oil asparagus! 

Oh yeah, and at the castle today, this squirrel became my friend. I got the feeling it was just using me for my peanuts though...

Squirrel!! 

Sometimes you eat little bagels...

That is what Sophie decided to call Cheerios...and I gotta say, I like the name. I call it that now, occasionally. They look like little bagels to her, so that's what she calls them. And she loves it. We all do. We had not had cheerios in years. These are the regular ones(honey is not vegan). And I used to think the regular ones were not sweet enough, but these are perfect now! Not too sweet, just right! 

We can't stop eating them! We have gone through like 5 giant boxes in like 2 or 3 weeks! They are fantastic!

On another note, I really miss my telescope. Although, I didn't use it nearly as much as I would have liked, it was breathtaking when I did go stargazing with it! I am really itching to see a planet lately....too bad it is not even remotely an option.

Celestron Astromaster 114EQ. Nothing too fancy, but enough to get some killer moon views. And Jupiter looked awesome as well!!

Sometimes even in a Roman tower there are vegan cupcakes...

Today we walked around town, because I thought there was some sort of vegetarian event here in Colchester. Apparently, it was just a vegan booth at Trinity Square, and I misread the facebook even invite...so  yeah. I always feel bad when I see them at a booth, because they aren't just vegan. They are activists. They promote it, they talk to strangers about it, they pass out information, and we.....do nothing. But anyway, after saying hi to them we went to the Roman tower. It is about 1100 years old, and they built a church adjacent to it, but it is no longer a church, they turned it into a cafe(awesome!), and they have vegan cupcaked there every saturday morning. So we went to have some, with some tea...

Tea + cupcakes ftw! at an 1100 year old Roman tower!

Sophie and I, making hash browns for breakfast :)

On another note, Mari was awesome and scanned me some old family photos!! So I posted them on FB, and have been laughing and reminiscing most of the day about them...thanks Mari!!

Dressed like Jorge Campos!!! :D My favorite player of all time! 

Back when there was a football team in LA, the RAMS! 

Sometimes real patriots ask questions...

I finally finished the Carl Sagan book that Mari and/or Martha/Gustavo got me for my birthday! 3 months to read a book...shameful, I know. But it was awesome!!! At first I was a bit disappointed that it was not about astronomy, as I would expect from an astronomer. It is about science as a tool for deciphering truth...

My favorite chapter heading: Real Patriots Ask Questions

It always blew my mind when people think being a patriot means "supporting the troops" or "liking the president" just because they are our troops and our president. I don't get that...at all.

But anyway, this book was really awesome. Everything from talking about the psychology behind human gullibility, to the framework behind the US constitution, to the ethics of science and its implications. Again, very awesome book. Despite being 15 years old, incredibly relevant.

Sometimes your daughter eats a whole melon...

I love trying new fruit. Many times I don't, even when I see something I want to try, because I don't like getting fruit from very far away places. There's a couple reasons for that, and at the risk of diverging, I will briefly state them. It is not sustainable, and requires a lot of resources to bring your day to day food from the other size of the world. Apples from New Zealand, oranges from South Africa, and avocados from Chile, while living in the UK is not only wasteful and has a much larger footprint than necessary, but most of the time you also cannot be sure of the working conditions that the farm workers have to endure in some of these countries. There, back to the topic, these melons I had not tried before, are called Galia melons, and they were from Spain(see, we're not that strict!), so I went ahead and got some. They look like normal cantaloupe melons I was familiar with on the outside, but on the inside, they are green, like honey dew melons.

And I sliced it up, grabbed a couple pieces, stepped out of the room. I come back 5 minutes later, and Sophie had eaten all of it!! I don't even know how it all fit inside her...

As far as the taste, I really liked it. Sweeter than cantaloupe, but still very recognizably melon.

This week, Geli made this strange but fantastic pizza:

I can't tell you much about the sauce, because I don't know what was in it, but the pizza itself just had yellow bell peppers, asparagus, a bit of olive oil, some garlic powder, and maybe some salt. Once done, she poured that sauce on it, which was fantastic!! So there you go, pizza doesn't have to have tomato sauce or cheese to be incredibly delicious!!!

Sometimes, things just aren't how you remember them...

This has applied to a lot of things for me...some music, beverages, foods. This especially happened to us with soda. We were addicted, like everyone else in the world to drinking soda with all our meals, and without meals, just soda all the time. And then in Milwaukee, we just kinda stopped because as it turns out, soda companies ruin water supplies and work to privatize water supplies in other countries, which we are not cool with at all. So we stopped supporting them. And little do you know, much later, we try a mexican coke again, and it was...disappointing. We were wondering why we were even hooked on it to begin with. Granted we tried some micro(small company, smaller batches) organic sodas in Milwaukee, and had those every once in a while. They were superior to normal sodas. But I still don't think that is why we don't even like the taste of coke anymore. I think something happens mentally. We associate certain activities, like eating or drinking a certain thing, with positive feelings. And that helps us feel that we need to do that certain thing again, and again, and then we're hooked.

My latest disappointment was skittles. I used to love them in school. They were my vending machine snack of choice(after soda of course, you have to have a soda with you at all times at school, don't you?). We tried some recently and....disappointing. Very...

They actually kind of grossed me out haha. They probably taste the same as when I loved them. But I am no longer hooked on the sugar rush, on the put money in the machine get candy habit, and for some reason, not the same anymore.

Sometimes you get homesick...

Okay, so I miss family and El Paso/Juarez more than usual lately. Partly because I had been watching the Pumas games, and that reminds me of watching them with my dad. But also because of this:

Martha and Gustavo(and Mari?) sent us Chips a la diabla AND mazapanes!! And then Luis posts mariachi music! So yeah, I am looking forward to visiting!!! A lot!!!!!!!!

Sometimes there is still not enough time! Ah!

I have spent like 3 hours or more trying to finish processing these pics from the trip to the sanctuary. Part of it is I keep discovering things, and then going back to do them to the pics i had already "finished" so yeah...

And if I may say so myself, some of them came out really good, so I keep looking at them, and zooming in, and out, and I just really like the camera! haha

On another note, I was surprised that PCs like this, can still run! haha 128MB RAM ftw!!

Adobe Reader 6 and IE 6! lol

One of the before/after shots of one of the horses there.

Sometimes you feel like there is never enough time...

So the weekend is over, and I don't have time to say much. I have been processing all the pics we took today from the animal sanctuary. I'm about 30% done. For some reason, we took 300 pictures! I'll post them soon.

Meanwhile, here are some older before/after pics:

In conclusion, RAW files are still kick ass!!

Sometimes strawberries just aren't good enough.

To be first class berries. It is a strange concept really, and one I don't really understand. Apparently, if the fruit or vegetable is not as pretty, it gets relegated to a lower class of produce.

They do this in the US too, but the difference is that here, they sell the "second class" produce right next to the "Class 1" produce, just for less. I think in the US they just throw it away, or send them off to turn them into juice or some other processing. They do this for everything it seems. Sometimes, like with the potatoes, it says "no lookers, but beautiful mashed"...and they are way cheaper. Who needs their potatoes to be pretty?! The only difference is that they aren't as perfect looking. But see, the thing is that nature is not perfect. We are the ones that as a society want everything to look a certain way. Apparently, we even hold fruits and vegetables to certain visual standards. Don't get me wrong, I know not all produce is created equal. There is higher quality amongst one type of fruit or vegetable compared to another. But these cases, are seriously just cosmetic. Same grower, same field, just not as pretty....rather odd. But hey, I guess people wanting "pretty" potatoes and strawberries means I can get the "second class" ones for much less.

Sometimes you have to play toys...

"Let's play toys"
That's what Sophie says when she wants to play with her toys, and wants me to be there with her...playing. 

"Daddy, let's play toys, a lot. Okay?"

She understands the concept of a little bit now, and she doesn't like it. So when it is something she wants to do, she adds "a lot" to the end of it haha. 

Martha and Gustavo sent her new ones, and she loves them. So we were playing today, and I thought I would take some pictures of them. They remind me of my childood :) And just playing with plastic toys, talking and making sound effects. It was fun.

Dinosaurs! These are tiny! The camera makes them look big. 

Sophie says "This one looks like a turtle" about the blue one

Sophie: "I'm a goat"

"Daddy, the lion is talking to the monkey, ok? He says 'RAAAAAWR'"

This is supposed to be the elephant and hippo standing up the panther thingy haha

So I like playing with her, just there isn't always enough time. So sometimes, I catch myself neglecting her, but I mean, all she wants to do is play. At all times. She is insatiable(although reasonable, for a 4 year old). I play with her as much as I can. And I miss Paco when I do, it reminds me us playing "monitos"...

Sometimes in the morning, you see a miniature horse...

or three...

This morning, as I was on our usual walk to take Sophie to daycare I saw some miniature horses! Now, I don't know anything about horses or ponies. So I don't even know if these are ponies, juvenile horses, or some other type of miniature horses. But they looked funny. Very disproportionate! Look at the legs compared to their body...it is odd. 

Guy in the picture: "In the mornings, I like to walk my miniature horse. I feel that horses are man's best friend, not dogs"

Tiny horses and red buckets? I had so many questions!

And then, I just took this quick picture of the sunset from Sophie's window....

Also, this is a gem! lol



Old school!

Sometimes you can be Lord Chuy!

Okay, so we are goin to London 2 days in a row(June 8th and 9th). And I don't mean going to London and staying there for 2 days, which would be the better way, but since these are weekdays, it will have to be 2 round trips. 

So I was buying tickets for these events, and I am used to filling these forms out online. But the title this time made me laugh. I couldn't help it. 

You can be Hon? Lady? I was tempted to put Lord!! Lord Chuy! Or even better, it would say Lord Jesus!!! hahahahaha I will tell you more about these awesome events that are causing us to go to London 2 weekdays in a row later! It will be EPIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sometimes you discover ciabatta bread!

Bread is big here. There seems to be a lot of it at the grocery stores. Fresh baked. A lot of different kinds of rolls, bagels, loaves, pitas, pastries, buns, donuts, you name it! We had seen these ciabatta rolls there a few times, at least I had. And it wasn't until this past weekend that we decided to use them instead of hamburger buns for the veggie burgers we were going to eat this week.

Ciabatta rolls!

Let me tell you, they are fantastic!! Very soft and very flavorful! They were delicious!! We ate them Sunday and yesterday. Today I had to get a few things for today's dinner, so I stopped at the grocery store after dropping Sophie off in daycare. I could not resist, I had to get some more! And we had them for lunch again. Too awesome!!

Sometimes you witness a 4:30 am sunrise...

4:30 am, and it is bright out?! This past weekend we stayed up until past 5 am on friday and saturday night, and then it was hard to go to sleep, it was day out!

This is what it looked like when i stepped outside at 4:30am!

Apparently, we are very far north! And the further north you are, the more dramatic the shifts in amount of daylight to night time ratio gets. Which makes sense since we live on a round planet :)

It doesn't get dark until after 9pm, and apparently it is bright by 4:30am, and it is barely may! I wonder how it will be in July!! 4 hours of darkness a night? We shall see!!

Sometimes you just have to say "Goooooooya!!!"

I am not a huge fan of candy. Mexican candy, I do like, a lot of it. But normal candy, not really a fan. Things like jelly beans, gummy candy, hard candy. Most of it I really don't like. And it is usually ages in between trying them. Like I almost "forget" why I don't like jelly beans. And then I try one, a year later, and quickly remember why I don't like them.

But today, in a search for gummy candy without gelatin for Geli, we found some that I actually liked! It was not very firm, almost gooey, but really good! Which is odd, but again, they tasted really good, almost like really fresh gummy candy.

We also found these:

Strange, but delicious!

They are called Flying Saucers(I wonder why? lol). And they are church communion wafers(ostias!)!! haha In a slightly different shape, and 2 of them, glued together, and filled with a powdery candy that is sweet and sour, and almost a little bit like pop rocks! Again, these were surprisingly good!

I also got to watch the Pumas vs Chivas game! Direct from Televisa, off their website. They block US IP addresses, but apparently, not UK ones, so I can watch the games without issues. I usually don't, because of the time, 7pm games would mean 1am here. But Pumas plays at home at noon, so that is 6pm here, which I can totally do.

Not bad, eh?

Gooooooya! :D 

So the game was awesome. Very entertaining, intense, and the cherry on top was that Pumas won and is in the final now. Aaaaaaaand I get to watch the final next Sunday too(unless we are on a trip somewhere, which we might be), here at home, same time. 

Sometimes you realize we are all star stuff...

We are literally made of star stuff. Every atom in your body was forged in the furnace of a star...stop and think about that.

The Rosette Lula Nebula! NASA Image

If that doesn't make you feel a deep connection to the cosmos, I don't know what would. That is much more humbling, and beautiful than any fairy tale humanity has ever come up with*. This is one of the reasons people give to show the "goodness" of religion. It makes people feel connected, a deep connection to the universe we live.

What deeper connection do you want? You were once in a star. Literally...

*Even if this wasn't the case though, I still rather have the truth over some puffed up, sugar coated story that is not true.

Sometimes you p0wn the malware...

So today, after 2 hrs, I saved a PC that was sentenced to death from the get go. My motivation for saving PCs is simple. Avoid more hardware, since this is costly on the environment. So a PC I can clean, is another PC saved. This one was a bit of a dinosaur, but for our purposes, it still works, for at least another while. 512MB RAM, 40GB HD. Again, a dinosaur. But I felt I could save it...

The PC was in pretty bad shape. The call comes in "Yeah, I can't do anything on my PC, I get these popups about XP Anti-Spyware. It wants me to register and pay for it. Says my PC is infected." You may have seen this lovely type of malware. Posing as Malware removers, and of course asking to be "registered" and asking for the credit card information.

Of course the clients always wait until the PC does not function at all to call. Which makes cleaning them way more difficult, but that is of no concern to the user. The malware was auto launching whenever an executable was opened. Internet explorer, control panel applets, the malware remover, anything you open does not launch and instead launches yet another window of "give us your credit card to clean your PC".

This window launches whenever you run a .exe file

So I had her reboot, entered in safe mode w/networking, then remoted to the PC that way via our web based shadowing tool. Once I was on the PC I started by running the "deleter" and CCleaner. These don't remove any malware(unless it happened to reside in the temp files). But they make scanning much faster by reducing the number of files on the PC. They clear all sorts of temp files, and for ALL users, not just the one logged on. Not just Broweser temp files, but app temp files, and windows temp files as well. This must not have been done...ever! It was seriously deleting temp files for about 15 minutes!!

Then I ran some registry fixes that fix the "host" file, in case it was hosed. And applied a fix to the executables that weren't running. All this, while I tried to figure out the name of the process at fault(turned out to be xta.exe). So now, when the windows came up, I could quickly kill the process in the task manager. So now I could run .exe files again, install some malware removal tools, and scan...

24 minutes later, remove the infected files/registry keys. Reboot. And for $44(2hrs of my work haha), they have a PC in working order again. These are the things no one probably notices. I could have just recommended re-image/replacement after 30 minutes of trying. And since it is old, they would have just replaced it. But I don't do it for recognition, I do it because less PCs that are sold/manufactured, the less resources "wasted"...and that is something that matters to me.

Sometimes you hold the fort...

No time to say much today. Just that, I am the only one at work at 5am haha. So when I come in, it looks like this:

So I have to hold the fort till other people come in, and well, it is cool and all, but what if I get sick? haha

Sometimes you go looking for patatas...

My workday started off rather well...On the way back from taking Sophie to daycare, I quickly stopped at one of the many second hand stores around here, mainly to look for a "piggie" that Sophie has been asking for. I don't know why, but she wants to add a pig to her animal collection. So I went in to see if I saw one in the toy section, and instead I found these:

50p a piece, so why not? 

The new issues are like £4 or £5, and one has an article about filters(which I am currently looking into) and the other on wide angle lenses, which are super awesome. So instead of finding a piggie, I found these. Not too bad! And then, it would get even better! I didn't get calls for the 1st hour!

Sitting in "ready"! No calls! W00t! 

After an hour of nothing, it was calls non-stop, but then again, its always calls non-stop. So this free hour was sweeeeeeet!! And I am not making this one up...guess who called today? Anoob! lol In my 9 years of working answering phones(ouch!), I had never seen a noob! 

Are you a noob?

On a not so pleasant note, they do billing very strangely here. They had not billed us for the gas the while time we've been here, even though I called them, and notified them I had moved in, and setup the electric with them too. So what do they do? Send us a bill for 7 months of gas and 3 months of electric at once.

That just looks wrong....£634!!!

Yeah, I wonder how many people get this and freak out? I assume not everyone has $1100 to pay the gas/electric on a random month! They seem to bill twice a year for the gas, and quarterly for the electric. Weird huh?

And then, just some quick pics again tonight when Sophie and I went to the store for some potatoes(patatas in Spain!) and a few other things.

Good lookin moon! 

Moon again!

Sophie got a sticky hand from the machine! :) 

Sunset from the front of the house! Power lines usually ruin a picture, but here, I like the way they look, kind of like a spider web.