Sun 22 Aug 2010
Posted by Rein under Me-time, mind fluff, Waffling
1 Comment
It will take ages to post something decent in the beginning but I have figured out how to put new posts in my blog from my new toy. An HTC Wildfire no less but with ittybitty touch type keys which are a pain to use with my xxl hands to say the least
I already sacrificed my nails but I can’t trim my thumbpads. I’m going to grow special tiny calluses
on the side of my thumbs I think and carry an extra spare fully loaded battery
Whew this will do for the moment…
Sun 15 Aug 2010
Posted by Rein under Food, Home alone, Me-time
[2] Comments
Then I would be able to make you all drool again (except for my vegetarian friends, I’m afraid ). Still feeling the dent in my pocket after the Japanese Splurge, I opted to take a look in my deepfreezer instead today. Lo and behold, there still was a piece of rabbit lurking behind all the chips, pizzas en fishfingers! Leftover that didn’t make it to the ‘neighbour dinner’ we had quite some time ago, I remember now. Well, there’s only that much rabbit 2 women can eat under the disapproving stare of their offspring
As there’s still no offspring here (*sniff* I miss them, especially as it’s Mother’s Day here in Antwerp – yep, only here, we’re special 
), there won’t be any disapproving looks either.
I made it in my tajin (best buy ever, seriously!) with a surrounding of carrots, onions, prunes, bayleaves and potatoes. No defrosting, just bunged it in with the carrots and onions first, with a generous splash of olive oil. Let it brown, covered on high heat for about 5 minutes, add prunes, bayleaves and the main ingredient, a bottle of brown beer. Grimbergen this time. Heh, to be honest, I use that most of the time, it’s one of my favourite ‘stew’ beers 
Add some ground pepper, salt and the roughly chopped potatoes. Let it come up to boiling again and then turn down to half, so it just keeps on simmering. No need to look after, the tajin drips on the meat and keeps it just right.
Three quarters of an hour afterwards you will be presented with this:
Rabbit stew
As you can see I pricked the potatoes and they’re just right As they’re usually the last to be ready, the rest will be good too.
I know it’s a weird time to eat ‘dinner’ (it’s 15:41 here now) but during the holidays (and certainly when I’m on my own) we eat when the mood gets us, be it once or five times a day – my body just has to put up with it
I’ll let you know if anything was left
_______________
Report (21:27): it’s all gone now (just had the last bit as a nibble before bed ) and boy, was it good! Sometimes I amaze myself with my culinairy concoctions 
Uh-oh, I just realised that that also means I had about 15 prunes… I bet no-one wants reports on that, do they?
Sat 14 Aug 2010
Posted by Rein under Food, Green bits
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In just a few days the grapes have begun to ripen, or well, change colour. My brother has told me I should be watering far more to get bigger grapes, but there are so many bunches that I will have an overload already. I will try to prune properly next year, so there will be fewer, but better proportioned bunches next year. I’m already trying to figure out what to do with this year’s harvest – maybe try grape jelly? I haven’t got the space to put up a still anyway
Loads of grapes - and some brown leaves
Sat 14 Aug 2010
Posted by Rein under Food, Home alone, Me-time
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That’s what most of my daily life revolves around: “What are we having for dinner tonight?” Sad, really, but well, you have to eat to live
Yesterday I was so totally out of ideas for dinner, that I went to the local Japanese and told them “Just give me a taste of everything!”, which resulted in ‘dinner for 1′, which costed (ouchie!) 30 euros… I will only buy this once I think >_<
It could have fed 2, even taking my big appetite into account, but I managed to finish it. I don’t think Japanese the next day is as good as Chinese the next day, anyway…
Japanese dinner for 1 - could have fed 2, really
In this photo going around the clock, starting top left: ‘ordinary’ inside-out rolls – crunchy but very nice rolls with a dot of sauce (cocktail???) – enormous cone, had to use hands for that – 2 more ‘ordinary’ rolls, but right side out – also crunchy, tasted a bit different from the other one but couldn’t define difference (egg?) – 3 sushi rice balls, one with salmon, one with white fish, one with prawn – I think tuna in a tangy dressing/marinade – carrot spaghetti I wonder how they got those very long threads – pink ginger flower – green wasabi, nosewatering strong – tuna – salmon – flattened squid tentacle slices, chewy, not much taste .
On the menu this box was called: Sushi, Sashimi, Maki, Temaki combo, 25 pieces, for 1 person. They also added a little container with soja sauce, a pair of chopsticks and a little bag of kroepoek (prawn crackers). Those I ate later in front of the tv
It was a very nice dinner, but very pricey, come to think of it 
… 30 euros doesn’t sound a lot, but when you ‘translate’ it back to the old money, it’s 1200 Belgian Francs – wowee, 20 years ago that paid for the foodbill of a whole week! Is life getting that expensive, or are we just not paying attention any more to what we spend our money on? This will be only repeated on very special days I think and even then we will be taking something a bit cheaper
Sayonara!
Sun 8 Aug 2010
Posted by Rein under De Meiskes, Familie, Family, Home alone
[2] Comments
It’s that time of the year again – where my daughters go abroad for a few weeks to visit their dad and I’m left at home with the cat, feeling empty-nested…
This time I have had instructions on how to fill my days constructively though, so no wasting time behind the pc playing games of facebooking or any such trivia Only allowed to check mails and chat with them when they’re online – and knowing their dad it will be far, far less then what they’re used to
So what’s on the agenda today? Making a start with my bedroom – that’s the main project of these weeks and well overdue, really, I hope I will be able to finish it – putting the fish tank back in order, even if we’ve only got the one clown fish now (Ziggy has been returned to the shop as he had outgrown the tank and kept jumping up out of the water and bumping his head on the light O.o) and baking bread. For a Sunday that will be plenty.
So girls, enjoy your holidays and we will see each other on the web
Thu 24 Jun 2010
Posted by Rein under hobby, tips and tricks, Tutorial
[4] Comments
Beware, some maths is involved
I have had enquiries on how to make the never-ending card, so I cobbled a kind of tutorial together. To make it easy for everyone to understand – as there are people who use centimeters and some use inches – I’ll show you the pictures with dimensions. I’ll add lengths in cm for clarification (when you type ‘convert cm to inches’ in Google, they should give you a very detailed conversion, just round off I would say )
The things you need to get the basic never-ending card is a square card or twice a square piece of cardstock, a cutting knife, a ruler, some double-sided sticky tape and some patience.
Here’s the card with all the dimensions:
It looks complicated, but it isn't, really
Impressive, no?
The maths goes like this:
A = B+B
B = C+D+C
Now for starters, you need to cut your card in half so you have 2 squares (or start with 2 pieces of square cardstock). The length of the sides of your square = A (in my example 12 cm). Cut each square in half lengthwise, so you have 4 rectangles, measuring A by B (my example 12 cm by 6 cm).
Each rectangle now needs 2 cuts (D) which will make for easy folding. Turn each piece sideways and measure half of the width off left and right , top and bottom.
A = 1/2 B + B + 1/2 B
So your length of your card is divided:
½ B (3cm) + B (6cm) + ½ B (3cm) = A (12 cm)
Now draw lines so your single piece of card is divided in three: 2 small rectangles each side and a square in the middle.
Those lines you need to measure off again.
C + D + C
where C for me was 1cm and D 4cm, those who measure in inches can make C about half an inch, just make sure the card won’t rip, as now you need to make an incision over the length of D. Just scoring won’t do, as we have to fold back and forth. C will act as a hinge.
Do this for all 4 pieces of card.
Take two of the prepared card pieces and lay them next to each other like shown , put a square of double sided sticky tape where the pink dots are.
Bottom cards with sticky tape
Take the other two bits of card and place them like shown and stick them on the other two cards.
put on top so open ends cross
Believe it or not, your card is finished (bar the decorating )
Let me show you with cats, how they fold then – front:
front
and back :
Back
Inside :
Inside
Inside 2
So, all in all, there’s only 8 cats, but you can fold it whichever way, so different cats come together – as you can see in one of the former posts
I hope the ‘algebra’ didn’t throw you – otherwise, just yell and I’ll see if I can explain differently
Tue 22 Jun 2010
Posted by Rein under hobby, Me-time, Recycle
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Recycling is the word...
Wed 9 Jun 2010
Posted by Rein under hobby, Me-time
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just the card for a crazy cat lady
But when it’s finished it’s quite fun folding, folding and folding again. The only problem now is finding enough ideas to decorate them
Sun 9 May 2010
Posted by Rein under Fantasy, Me-time, The Sims and stuff
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That’s why I’m no good at the Nintendo or the Wii, but I do like the Sims. Got most of them and the expansion packs, but like I said, I don’t play them how they’re supposed to be played. I use them to build and create instead I’m also a member of TSR. That’s a never ending source of member-made CC (or custom content to the non-initiated ) and overall cheaper than buying the stuff in the online shop of The Sims itself
It’s only since I have the Sims3 I know of the existence of TSR – also because I was so used to all the additional stuff of the Sims2 that I asked around online. A Facebook friend (yes, the network works ) pointed me to the custom sites and the rest is history…
Now I’m starting to learn to create my own custom content – I’ve already mastered patterns and paintings, but meshing is still beyond me. I should start on those tutorials for real one of these days Today I submitted the latest – a so-called child’s painting of Knijn. It always takes some time before it actually appears on the site, but I’m going to give you guys a sneak preview In the game you can even change the frames, to suit it to the room of your house.
Sun 9 May 2010
Posted by Rein under Me-time, mind fluff, You need to see this!
No Comments
I learned a new word today: Favicon. Wiki tells you all about it. In short, it’s just a “Look at me, I’m your favourite website!” thingie that appears in front of the url in the web adress bar. Of course I had to have one.
But what? It being only 16 by 16 pixels, you can’t expect to put part of the Sistine Chapel on it So I opted for my old time favourite, the little rabbit I’ve been drawing everywhere since I was a (very small) kid. Yep, I was a tagger avant la lettre Can’t see it properly you say? Well, here it is, ten times bigger. So when you see ‘Knijn’ popping up, you know I’m around too
Meet Knijn, our official favicon for the site! Hasn't changed in 45 years, wish I could say the same
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