Mary Anne Carter
Mary Anne has her own blog now
Monthly Archives: February 2011
Feb 28 2011

Tell Me About Hillcrest

by Mary Anne

My nephew and his new wife, Cari, are in Southern California to visit her family. I have not had the chance to meet her yet, but I am sure she is a very special girl if my nephew chose her for his wife. We have traded comments on Facebook and I talked with her on the phone a few times, so we have been slowly getting to know each other.

Although i have been to California several times, I’ve never been to San Diego and am very curious about that area. I asked Cari about the San Diego Hillcrest Area and she explained that was one of the best gay-friendly areas in California, probably second only to the San Francisco, Castro Area in the number of gay friendly hotels, bed and breakfasts and cozy, elegant inns.

I bet that part of San Diego has the best restaurants, too. Cari admits that she has not spent much time in that part of San Diego and has never embraced a lifestyle of eating out for dinner and going to shows several times each month. To be honest, I think most married couples get into a rut, staying home and eating boring home cooked meals and watching a lot of TV. I think that is why so many men get fat after just a year or two of marriage. They sit home and eat and become couch potatoes.

Categories: Fun, Life, Travel | Comments Off

Feb 28 2011

How Dumb?

by Mary Anne

I have a cat! Actually, I can’t imagine not having a cat or two to keep me company. They are wonderful housepets.

Categories: At the Office, Fun, Life, Pets | Comments Off

Feb 27 2011

Fund Raiser

by Mary Anne

Tomorrow night is the big fund raiser concert for my songwriter friend who has cancer. I promised go in early with my girlfriend and help set up the silent auction displays and set up the food backstage for the performers. Part of the auction set up includes crowd control measures, as we have to keep an eye on the merchandise and make sure that people walk around the tables in the same directions so we don’t have a log jam.

I never knew until today that the metal poles used for crowd control and keeping people in lines are called stanchions. The picture above shows two stanchions with a velvet rope, although you can also use ribbon, tape and chains instead of rope.

Another form of crowd control is the use of barricades, such as large plastic cones, plastic barrels or wood sawhorses to help direct vehicles or prevent vehicles from entering an area reserved for other people or other uses.

The cool thing is that I volunteered to help my girlfriend and my sick friend, and I ended up learning some cool new things, too.

Categories: At the Office, Local | Comments Off

Feb 25 2011

Learning Asian Cooking

by Mary Anne

I’ve always loved Asian foods and have decided to teach myself how to cook the Asian fusion style of dinners. This recipe I found on the McCormick Spices web site  for Asian Style Sour Beef Short Ribs is made in the crock pot, so as it cooks all day long the entire house smells deliciously tempting. If you like the German Sauerbraten or sour beef, you might also like this version. The Asian twist comes from using short ribs for the meat, rice vinegar, soy sauce and bok choy. It was very easy to assemble the ingredients – even the surprise of using crushed ginger snap cookies. I hope you like it.

Categories: Around the House, Cooking | Comments Off

Feb 24 2011

Webhosting for bloggers

by Mary Anne

Now that I’ve been blogging for a while, I find myself sometimes answering questions from other people at work about how they can start their own blogs.  Naturally they want to save as much money as possible, and they want it to be as easy as possible.  That makes it interesting because most of them don’t even understand what website hosting is, or that there is special software involved.

Since I’ve started blogging, there have been developments in the fields that I sure wish were available “back then.”  For example, the best webhost for bloggers not only offers free domain names, but it also makes it easy for bloggers by giving them my favorite blogging software – WordPress.  If I were to start from scratch in this type of project, I would find the cheapest way to get started other than the free sites, and as I get better with blogging or need more features or services, then I could always upgrade later.

Categories: At the Office, Business, Computers and/or Internet, Life, Technology | Comments Off

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