Aside – Page 94 – Amanda Unvarnished

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· 15 Sivan 5780 (Sunday 7 June 2020) · 2 minutes to read

Breakfast turned out to be an unmitigated disaster.

First, the back story. We’re trying to cook more, because the diet recommendations from John’s doctor lean towards the Mediterranean diet. This means good food, but it also means very much less processed stuff, which means more cooking because things like veggie trays and pitas with hummus can’t be meals all the time. So, this means I’m experimenting with more cooking, which I really like to do but haven’t had a chance to do for a very long time.

So this morning, scrambled eggs. Not that hard. Except cook with olive oil instead of butter. And here’s where things go south.

Turn the burner on, set it to medium. So far, so good. And then we get to measuring the olive oil. You don’t need that much, and not a lot was my plan, but I learned too late that the bottle has a huge pouring opening so guess what happens?

By the end of it, John’s eggs were burned and had way too much olive oil, the frozen onions definitely didn’t work out, my eggs were burned, there’s a huge mess that still has to be cleaned up, and we’re just going to order something.

Thankfully John was a good sport about all of it. I’m still very pissed off and a little upset about it all though because scrambled eggs aren’t supposed to be hard and if scrambled eggs turned out to be such a huge disaster then God only knows what other stuff will turn out like.

I’m sure a year from now I’ll be better at all this but I was really looking forward to both of us having a nice breakfast and I really am trying to get the hang of cooking everything and it was extremely disappointing to have things turn out the way they did.

904 S Pugh St, State College, PA 16801(1106ft)

64 °F Partly Cloudy

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Amanda CAARSON

· 27 Iyyar 5780 (Thursday 21 May 2020) · 1 minute to read

WPEngine is once again reminding me why I started the project to move my personal site and John’s personal site off of their platform.

Don’t get me wrong. They’re great if you want something you don’t have to manage and that you need stability for, like a business site, and/or especially a site with ECommerce.

But I’m fighting with Indieweb stuff again, and I’m reasonably certain that they still don’t have data on any of these plugins, so I’ll end up spending hours on the phone with them to try to find out why I’m once again having issues with only certain micropub things. I need to just get down to it and finish setting up the other server.

904 S Pugh St, State College, PA 16801(1106ft)

43 °F Mostly Cloudy

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Amanda CAARSON

· 1 Iyyar 5780 (Saturday 25 April 2020) · 1 minute to read

I am on the phone with Sprint, and holy hell these people are the Hotel California of cell providers. First, I try to give them a lot of money, and they come up with some shit about having to enter the card number via the phone’s keypad because they apparently can’t take the number over the phone. Well, after the inevitable accessibility discussion, I get transferred to someone else who’s trying their damnest to keep me from leaving. "We have these other plans," "this other phone," "Are you sure there’s nothing we can do to keep you from leaving." No. I just want to pay the damn bill. Just let me pay the bill. Look! It’s money! You can have it if you just leave me alone and stop making my life difficult. I’m going to celebrate when I cancel this account and port the number over to something that has better coverage. Sheesh!

921 S Pugh St, State College, PA 16801(1106ft)

57 °F Mostly Cloudy

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Amanda CAARSON

· 12 Adar 5780 (Sunday 8 March 2020) · 2 minutes to read

I’ve spent this weekend playing with a Linode VPS in an attempt to install my own copies of various indieweb apps, (Compass, Quill, Own YOur Swarm, ETC.), and I’m somewhat ashamed of myself for letting my server administration skills atrophy as much as they appear to have done.

I mean, I get it, I spend most of my time involved with HTML and the like, and not necessarily the server side of things, but at the same time, damn.

I intend to correct this deficiency. I’ve grabbed a couple of books on Ubuntu, (most of my server experience has been with Redhat and so I was never as familiar with Ubuntu in the first place), and I’m giving myself a crash course as fast as possible.

Once I’m a little more confident, (and really, now that I’m writing all this down I think that’s what it comes down to), I’ll move my personal site and John’s personal site off of WPEngine.

I think we’ll need to do that if we want to use Compass with the Simple Location plugin, and anyway I think I’d rather trade the inconvenience and often necessary calls to technical support and custom NginX rules and everything else I’ve had to do to get indieauth working along with other indieweb stuff for the inconvenience of managing my own server.

820 S Pugh St, State College, PA 16801(1109ft)

59 °F Clear