Delete

Do you ever write a post for an hour, post it, and then decide you’d like to delete it a few days later? I do that quite often. Maybe I should stop being so indecisive. I don’t even know how many memories I’ve erased to date!

I wish I read pharmaceutical inserts more often

So for the last year and a half or so, I have had above-average blood pressure.  Initially, I blamed it on stress, but the fact is, I am not stressed all the time!  I’m usually very giddy and happy.  Does being happy give high blood pressure?  Not that I’ve heard of.  I am healthy.  I avoid junk food, I quit GMO foods and aspartame, I cook my own foods almost all the time and I use only very little oil, sugar or salt in my cooking.  So what’s happening?

My chest has been hurting on and off for the last year.  It got so bad to the point where I recently went to ask the doctor to check if I had breast cancer.  Yes, I got THAT paranoid.  I have a reason to!  This hurts more than when I was going through puberty and I was “growing.”

In addition, I have been gaining weight (not much, but still), even though I consciously consume 1400 calories a day along with some form of exercise.  Sure, I do not work out 6 hours a day anymore like when I was first started university.  I don’t have that kind of time anymore, but I haven’t worked out like that years after my first year of university and my weight never really increased for years… until the last year or so.

Something strange has been happening to my body since the last year or so.

For the last while, I have been exposed to the news of pregnancy among members of family and friends.  I can’t deny that it didn’t affect my mind set in some way.  No, I do not want a child at this exact moment, but it did get me thinking… Yes, I do want a child one day, and I would hope to be pregnant before I’m 29 or 30.  I have a few years.  Currently, I am on Tricyclen Lo.  I have been for about 6 years now.  The reason I mentioned them is because for the longest time, I’ve always heard of the potential side effect of sterility due to pills, but back then I did not care to think much of it.  You don’t care so much until you are in the kind of mind state as I am right now.  I used to think that anything is better than being pregnant, and if it does happen accidentally then I would highly consider an abortion.  Clearly people do change.  Now I’m worried if I had screwed my body up by taking those pills.  I hope not.

Now that I have concerns, I started doing research on these pills, including this particular brand.  I went through a huge forum of comments from people who have taken this particular brand and majority of the people complained about weight gain, breakouts, sore breasts, etc.  Weight gain? check.  Breakouts? nope.  Sore breasts? check.  The there was a huge handful of people who commented on how it took quite a while for their natural cycles to return.  Uh oh   Oh and there was this one woman who almost died of a stroke due to blood clots caused by taking the pill.  She was apparently under intensive care for a while.  Eep! I then went to Google “getting off the pill.”  Most of the experiences of people getting off the pill have been positive, other than taking a while for the body to resume back to normal.  Oh, and I should note that I had quite an education sex education while doing these searches.  Haha.  I learned a lot about my own body.  Clearly I have not paid attention when they taught it in school!  One of the sites that I went to listed a few of the side effects of taking these pills, but ended with a sentence in bold telling me to “READ THE PHARMACEUTICAL INSERT OF THE PILLS YOU ARE TAKING.”  So I immediately opened a new package of the pills, took out the insert and actually read it for the first time ever.

I wish I had done this earlier because I probably would never have started these pills.  Among the listed risks related to these pills, the ones that struck me most were the following:

1) Some women who use birth control pills may be at increased risk of developing breast cancer before menopause which occurs around 50.  These women may be long term users of birth control pills (more than eight years) or women who start using birth control pills at an early age.  [This is scary because I’ve worried about stuff like breast cancer – hence I made my doctor check if I had it recently due to my pain!  More than eight years is what’s considered long term? so, if I stop now, I may be safer?]

2) Users of birth control pills have a greater risk of developing gallbladder disease requiring surgery within the first year of use.  The risk may double after four or five years of use.  [My mom had gallbladder issues and required surgery.  I was on these pills for 6 years, so… my risk may be doubled now for gallbladder issues.  Shitty.]

3) There may be tenderness of the breasts, nausea and vomiting.  Some users will experience weight gain or loss.  [Ooooh, so it WAS this stupid thing that gives me my chest pain and scared the shit out of me!  while I’m at it, I’ll blame my weight gain on it as well since I do feel it has been hard to lose weight using the same methods that used to work for me before going on the pill.]

4) Occasionally, users develop high blood pressure that may require stopping the use of birth control pills.  [WHAT??? Arghhhh! well then, I guess this does it for me.]

What does this all mean to me?  This means: I have decided that this pill creeps me out way too much now.  I have this feeling that my good days with this pill are over.  It is doing more damage to my body than it can justify for it’s benefits.  I also do not want it’s benefits to stay with me for the rest of my life if sterility is also a potential risk.  Initially I had considered stopping in the next half year… I might do it sooner because the pharmaceutical insert is sitting next to me right now with the risks that I actually experienced highlighted and reminding me how I failed to read this years beforehand.  Also because I don’t want my family doctor to see me for my next physical appointment and tell me that I need to take anti-hypertension pills.  Those things are for life!

How to Confuse an Idiot

How to disable the RFID chip in your credit cards

If you have a credit card, you could potentially be at risk.  Since about 2005, RFID enabled credit cards such as Mastercard’s Paypass and American Express’ ExpressPay was introduced.  Some credit card companies allowed customers to have the option of having a non-RFID enabled card, but many companies simply sent their customers an RFID enabled card along with a notice that their old card will cease to function in about 30 days with no option of opting out of the new cards.  Convenience was the key reason credit cards use this technology, but is it safe?  Since I am writing about how to disable RFID chips, the answer is obviously NO.  Someone could easily buy an RFID reader off eBay for about $20, plug it to a laptop and walk around stealing your credit card information.  All they need to do is walk close enough to you to read the cards in your wallet.

If you do not want to be a victim of credit card theft via RFID and your credit card company refuses to issue you cards without the PayPass or ExpressPay option, you have a few options:

Option 1: Break your RFID chip using blunt force.

Reflect light off the surface of your card to locate the RFID chip.  There should be a small rectangular indent where the chip is located.  Once you found the chip, hammer that chip using a ball-peen hammer OR place a square-head screwdriver over the chip and hammer the screwdriver.  The impact will break the chip rendering it useless to readers.

Option 2: Remove your RFID chip via surgery.

Locate your RFID chip and cut it out using your choice of sharp objects.  Shawn chose to use an exacto-knife.  Be careful not to accidentally remove your fingers while you are at it!

If you have one of those credit cards that come with a security pin chip, then you are out of luck for disabling the chip without breaking your card.  For those cards, the RFID chip hides behind the security pin chip.

For the sake of satisfying our curiosity, we sacrificed a perfectly good card.

Unless you are able to cut the back of the card and remove RFID chip without touching the security pin chip, this method WILL break your card, so do so at your own discretion.

Option 3: Short circuit the RFID chip via radiation.

I’ve read on the internet that some people were able to short circuit the RFID chip by microwaving their credit card for one to two seconds.  I have a feeling that the microwave would be able to break your card’s magnetic strip and security pin chip as well, so do this one at your own discretion.

There are also RFID chips inside passports, but I think you might get in trouble for tampering with those…

How Obscene!

Catfish Lasagna

Okay, just to let you all know, this “lasagna” does not contain pasta.  Now you might argue that I cannot call it lasagna because it really isn’t lasagna… well, I’ve had an eggplant lasagna at some hippie vegan restaurant in Toronto and they used slices of eggplant instead of pasta, so there! if they can do it, so can I 🙂

Catfish Lasagna

Ingredients (serves 3):

– 6 large catfish fillets (I used Cajun marinade, but it’ll taste just as good even if you use nothing but salt & pepper)

– 1 can of (real) crab meat

– 1 bunch of enoki mushrooms, chopped

– 1 tsp of masago (aka. flying fish roe.  OPTIONAL)

– 2 tsp Parmesan cheese

Directions:

1) Mix the last 4 ingredients together.

2) On a lightly oiled baking casserol/pan/whatever you like to use, place half of the catfish fillets down.

3) Cover each fillet with crab-mixture evenly.

4) Place remainder of fillets on top of the crab-mixture, making a “sandwich” with the crab meat in between the fillets.

5) Bake at 375 F for 25-35 mins, or until fish flakes easily.

The crab meat goes very well with catfish.  If you like seafood, you should try this recipe.

I’m a sick girl

As some of you may have guessed, I spent the last while on hiatus from my blog to learn to like my phone.  I hate to say this, but the damn iPhone is so far so good.  I really cannot find any complaints except for the on screen keyboard where I believe my fingers are way too fat for.  I find typing with my single right index finger easier than any other method, much like how people tend to type with one finger when they first learn to use a keyboard, but we’ll see with extended use if I can get better at this typing business.

Damn Apple sure does know how to get money from you.  $1 at a time that is!  Stupid apps.  Stupid convenience of saving your credit card number into the system.  Argh, I don’t want to think about how many $1’s I’ve spent already clicking apps away on the iTunes store on stupid things.  I guess I’ll get to see how stupid I am on my next credit card statement.  I hate you Apple!  Even though Shawn DID make an app as well for the iTunes store, which by the way I just realized today that it was not available in the Canada store.  I wonder if Shawn is aware of that.  In case you are interested, Shawn’s app is a puzzle game for the iPhone called Chain 3.

Anyways, I found these videos while surfing on Buzzfeed a few days ago.  I think they’re the funniest thing ever!  Okay, either you’ll giggle everytime you watch it, like me.  Or you’ll think I’m a sick sick girl…

Exploding Hamster
Exploding Kitten

I approve! I think all cute things should explode!  🙂

Oh, I also just downloaded an app called Pocket God.  Thats right, you guessed it! it’s a game where I get to exercise my skills and rights as god to insignificant little people who apparently live in my phone.  I get to poke them, and flick them, and throw them into a volcano whenever I want.  I also get to control the weather and explode them with lightning if I want.  Since I have just gotten this app, I really suck in being god.  All I learned to do was flick them into volcanoes or feed them to the sharks.  I haven’t figured out how to make them do other things at my will yet… gimme more time.  This god thing is not an easy job you know!

You know what else I got?  I also got me this really cool app which many of you may have heard of already: Midomi.  It’s that magical program that can figure out whatever song is playing on the radio.  All you have to do is have your phone listen to a bit of the song playing from the radio, and within seconds, it will be able to tell you what song is playing!  Tres incroyable! It is not limited to only English songs either!  I had it listen to some Cantonese songs I had chillin’ in my laptop and it was even able to tell me what song it was in Chinese!  It is even supposed to be able to work with you humming or singing a song out into the phone.  I tried doing that too.  I was humming a Lady Gaga song, but the program wasn’t able to figure it out even though I was doing my best humming that I could!  Well, I guess even great things have to have their own limitations too!  I forgive the program for not deciphering my humming.  It’s okay.  There there.

Please DO NOT EVER buy an HTC :(

Pretty, shiny objects… I can’t resist.  Well, I can now! at least for phones!  For the past few years, I’ve been hopping from cellphone to cellphone as the newer prettier models come out.  HTC seemed to be the company that shat out pretty looking phones the fastest, and being a sucker, I couldn’t resist getting my hands on a couple of them.  What a mistake!  I’ll show you the culprits that I got myself involved with:

Specimen 1: HTC Kaiser (Lifetime with Kuini: 3 months before she gave it to her brother who uses it to today while going nuts every so often when it acts up)

DO YOU SEE? DO YOU SEE?!!!!!

Specimen 2: HTC Touch Dual (Lifetime with Kuini: a little over a year.  Day abandoned by Kuini: tomorrow (Jan. 4, 2010))

DO YOU SEE?????????!

I was fooled by the appearance.  At first use, the phones were GERRREEEATTTT! The Kaiser was a lot of fun.  It’s keyboard was easy to use and everything about it was good. The Touch Dual was even better, with the exception of the screen being smaller, it worked really well.  Its keyboard along with T9 allowed extremely efficient typing.  It was wonderful and at the time, I never thought I’d ever dislike it… ever.  EVER!  You see, I’ve been playing around with pda’s since I was 12 (I was a spoiled little geeky girl), and I love gadgets.  I used to be absolutely opposed to the idea of having a pda and a phone in one device with the reason being if one craps out, it will take the other with it leaving me with nothing.  I finally decided to give up my stubbornness and give into new technology… too bad HTC was my first.  Both HTC’s ran on Windows Mobile.  Ever since Palm decided to go on a long hiatus from making standalone pdas, I’ve left and learned to use and like Windows Mobile.  Having Windows Mobile now together with my phone made life even more technologically efficient than it used to be when I carried around two different devices.  How great is that?  My phone can do everything!!! Play music, movies, hold my data, tasks, calendar, games (lots and lots and lots of them), pictures, videos… my new favouritest toy!

My love for the phones ended when I realized the major flaw in HTC devices.  You see, HTC  is great.  They have pretty phones and they give their phones so much capability, it can do anything!  however, HTC is cheap and they never gave the phone a proper processor and drivers that would allow it to do all of those wonderful things it’s supposed to be able to do.  In about a month’s of usage, the Kaiser started showing signs of “The Downs.”  It was slow in responding to anything.  It was so slow that I didn’t even want to use it as a pda.  Just to make this clear, I only gave this phone to my brother not because I am mean and I want him to have a horrible device, but because he asked very nicely and I explained the issues and he still wanted to have it to play around with.  Now, why did I get an HTC Touch Dual after having a bad experience with the Kaiser?  Well, because I’m stupid and an optimist and I somehow had a hope in me to believe that due to the uprise of unhappy HTC users and their numerous complaints and threats of a lawsuit against the company (HTC CLASS ACTION) that HTC would have made better working phones.  Much like how I ended up watching all the seasons of The L Word even though season 2 was horrible, season 3 was worst and season 4 was no better…  I keep watching, hoping that it will get better.  That was what I was doing with the HTC phones.  I was hoping.  Anyways, so I was wrong again, the HTC Touch Dual turned out to be worst than the Kaiser.  Not only is it slow at being a pda… it didn’t even know how to be a phone!  It was seriously a phone that did not know how to be a friggin’ phone!  For any other phone, the second you hang up, you will be ready to dial the next number.  Nope, not for the Touch Dual.  You hang up, and instead of letting you dial the next number, the phone hangs for about 30 to 40 seconds to realize that maybe you’ve hung up and you’d like to dial another number.  What a stupid phone!  and recently, its problems got worst by deciding to hang when I press the “answer” button and then hang up on the person while it takes its goddamn time to think!  And sometimes, it will have trouble waking up from sleep mode and I’d have to pull out the battery to restart.  What a stupid stupid phone!  argh! it makes me angry thinking about how stupid this phone can be!  Now you might blame me for installing weird crap on my phone, causing it to act this way.  Not a chance that it was my fault!  I’ve factory reset this phone numerous times hoping it’d solve it’s down’s syndrome, only to have it work nicely… for a day… before it acts up again.  Lesson here?  NO MORE HTC’s!

My nagging and complaints and fights with my phone in the recent few months have resulted in me getting an iPhone.  It was between that or a Blackberry.  Shawn has a Blackberry and loves it.  It is very fast and efficient as a phone, and great for typing.  I’ve always been reluctant about Blackberries and iPhones, but for a stupid reason.  I see so many people on the streets with them that they are almost uniform-like and I didn’t want to be part of that “uniform.”  However, upon researching about them, I now believe that there is definitely a reason why these two makes are the most popular phones.  People use them because they are good phones.  Not just glitz and glamor, but function as well.   Unlike the HTC which is all looks and no brain.  Now that I have an iPhone, I am happy that I do not have to deal with a stupid stupid phone anymore, but now I have to deal with a new problem: I now have to learn to use something I’ve always been intimidated of: Apple.

Alana promises me that I’ll love the iPhone for sure.  I don’t know yet, because right now, I feel like an old person trying to learn how to use a computer.

Shepherd’s Pie with Parmesan Garlic Mashed Potatoes

Just so you know, I never properly follow instructions on any recipe.  Aside from baking sweets, I believe that recipes are only there to give you a rough skeleton of what you can do with certain ingredients.  I like to use intuition and common sense to decide how much of each ingredient to use.  So for the recipes I write out here, unless I find the quantity of a particular ingredient very important, I usually don’t bother adding quantities.  Missing an ingredient? just make one up as a substitute!  or add whatever additional ingredients that you’d feel would be good with the recipe!  whatever you do, just don’t do what Shawn does and put mozzarella cheese in place of hard boiled eggs… that… just… does… not… work.

Ingredients:

• Cooked ground beef (I used vegetarian ground beef because Shawn does not eat meat.)
• Diced celery
• Chopped onions
• Sweet Peas
• Dried Basil
• Potatoes (I like to use Yukon Gold because it has a nice sweet taste to it)
• Salted Butter (or Margarine)
• Broth (any kind, meat or veggie)
• Minced Garlic
• Grated Parmesan Cheese
• Milk

Shepherd’s Pie consists of 1) a bottom layer containing the veggies and meat and 2) a top layer consisting of mashed potatoes.

*Note: if you aren’t using vegetarian minced meat, please make sure you drain the oil from the cooked minced meat before starting.*

STEP 0: That’s right! Step 0!  Which really means, the step you should really do first to make your life easier by the end of this recipe!

• Place washed potatoes into a pot of water and allow to boil until soft throughout.

*You can peel the skin, but you lose a lot of the potatoes’ taste to the water if you boil the potatoes with skin off.  I prefer leaving the skins on.  Plus the skin contains a lot of nutrients and fiber.  Nothing wrong with that!

STEP 1: Making the “Bottom Layer”

• In a frying pan, saute some minced garlic until cooked and fragrant enough to kill vampires.
• Add the rest of the veggies (onion, celery and peas) and saute until onions are soft.
• Add the cooked minced meat and mix it up with the veggies.
• Add some dried basil and toss.
• Salt and Pepper to taste if necessary.
• Place mixture onto a baking pan and spread evenly to cover the bottom.
• Allow mixture to bake in oven at 350 while you make the mashed potatoes.  I’m assuming your potatoes are already sitting in boiling water ready to be mashed.

*I added a tiny bit of broth in this step while sauteing the meat and veggies because 1) I had it lying around and 2) it will help make the bottom layer moist.

STEP 2: Making the Parmesan Garlic Mashed Potatoes (“Top Layer”)

• Assuming you did Step 0 and the potatoes are now cooked and soft throughout: drain water from potatoes and place your potatoes in your favourite mashing bowl.
• Add butter to the potatoes and mash.  Add just enough butter so that the potatoes aren’t dry, but not dripping with oil.
• Sprinkle Parmesan cheese to your liking, and mash.
• Add a bit of milk and mash.  I needed to add milk because the Parmesan cheese makes the potatoes dry.
• All mashed up and good?  Take the bottom layer out from the oven and spread the mashed potatoes over the meat layer so that it is evenly covered.
• Place the creation into the oven and bake at 350 until the mashed potatoes start to develop a golden brown colour.

I’d post a picture but the lighting is bad and my phone sucks at pictures.  I realize how much “words” are in this recipe.  I promise my future recipe posts will be clearer to follow.

Need a Sugar Daddy?

2009 is coming to an end, in a couple of days we’ll be welcoming 2010. What plans do you have for the new year? Will you do the popular “I’m hittin’ the gym and gettin’ back in shape” and make up excuses to stop one month later? or will you be doing something different? Perhaps you have plans to find a man, get married and have triplets by the end of next year? That was the conversation I walked into this morning. I work with a bunch of interesting characters. Anyways, the conversation of finding a rich man came up and someone suggested going online to find a sugar daddy. Surely enough, the second we got to a computer, we looked up SugarDaddie.com. Not good enough… so we Googled for more sugar daddies. You see, we have a coworker who is interested in nothing more than a rich, young, handsome man. We tried to help her out today, and this was the absolute best deal we came up with:

Papi, the 73 year old Sugar Daddy!

Unfortunately, Miss Picky said he was too old. Whatever… if she can put up with him for a few years and gain his entire inheritance, then she’s set and she can shut the hell up 😛 I’m kidding… this Papi man is creepy. His profile was funny though!

See, this one of the many reasons why you should not put your profiles and pictures up on the internet. It becomes public and people can and will blog about it. Ooohhh Papi 😀

For those of you innocent enough to not know what a Sugar Daddy or Sugar Baby is, here are some definitions for you. Yay! new words!

Sugar Daddy: A wealthy, usually older man who gives expensive gifts to a young person in return for sexual favors or companionship.

Sugar Baby: A woman who provides companionship and/or sexual relations for a wealthy, older man in exchange for expensive gifts and/or money; a “gold digger”

For those of you who are heterosexual males, here’s one for you too:

Sugar Mama: An older woman who buys extravagant gifts for a person and may/most likely will receive sexual favors, in return.