Take Care of a Plant!

Thanks to http://www.walterandersen.com/ for this lovely picture of one of the world's easiest-to-grow plants: the spider plant.

Remember when you were a kid and you had to take care of something in your garden? Were you ever told that you had to keep a certain plant or shrub alive before you could get your shot at a puppy? Well, now's your chance to re-test your green thumb!

Step 1: Get a spider plant. Spider plants are easy to grow, undemanding, and are known to clear up your indoor air really well. So get a spider plant, or better yet, find someone who has one and ask for some outgrowths. Spider plants are easy to plant, too, so you don't need to buy one.

Step 2: Give your plant a name. No kidding.

Step 3: Keep your plant alive. Talk to it. Water it. Tell it stories. Teach it statistics and give it quizzes. Again, no kidding.

Step 4: When you have plantlets and outgrowths, plant them again and name your team of spider plants! They could be the kids from The Sound of Music, the members of your favorite football squad, or just your dream names for your kids.

Step 5: Give away plantlets when you can to anyone who needs some sanity.

Microwave that Cheesecake!

http://www.cooks.com/rec/doc/0,1929,154168-242207,00.html

Yes, yes, it sounds strange. Raw eggs, sour cream, all blended together and put smack into the microwave. But it tastes like pretty good pudding, it isn't too fattening if you use light sour cream and light cream cheese, and it can make for a relaxing culinary getaway, too!

An additional tip: if you want extra exercise, make the graham cracker crust yourself! Grind up graham crackers, add sugar, and add melted butter - then mold it away in your favorite microwavable pie dish. The effort of grinding up crackers will allow you to let go of your tension - and if you're angry or frustrated with someone or something...well, you know what to do.

And one more tip: Whip it! Beat it! You'll have to beat your eggs together with your sugar, and into your cream cheese. Again, if you want to take your anger out on something, better eggs than anything else!

Oh, and one last thing: use brown sugar for your cheesecake!

Sketch a Constellation

It's time to draw in your journal. All you need are dots!

Remember how the ancients saw figures in the heavens and named the constellations? It's time for you to draw your own starry sky. If you want to make big, small, medium-sized, and pinprick stars, go ahead. If you want to stick to dots, that's good, too. All you need to do is to make a starry night of your life - and you need to label the constellations.

If your life were a sky, what would its constellations be? Use a page to show the constellations (you an connect the dots, too, if you like) and another page to describe them. You can go super duper technical and even name individual stars, or you can stay simple and tell the world about your constellations and why they're important to you.

There is only one rule: you can have EIGHT constellations, NO MORE, NO LESS. You need only 8 things that are important to squish (or spread) into your starry sky. This means you need to pick 8 things, whether they are people, events, words, names, or objects. What are the 8 things that are most important to you, the 8 things that you hold most dear in life - the 8 things that just pop up wherever you look simply because you keep on thinking of them?

If you don't want to use your notebook, put your journal entry on a sheet of paper, or use a graphics design program and print it out.

Keep this journal entry handy. It will remind you of what's important to you. These important things might be shallow, and you may want to keep on reminding yourself to look at the less shallow things in life - or they may be extremely important and deep, and you'll need them to remind you of what you are working for.

Recommended for Ages 3 and Up...

The "Up" in that recommendation means that anyone from 3 years to 103 years can put that Spongebob Squarepants Puzzle together, even if it's just 12 pieces of wooden blocks that lock together and make babies go, "Ooh!"

It's your turn to go "Ooh!" and it's your turn to put your own puzzles together.


Get yourself a box of puzzles. Buy one. Dust off the box of a thousand pieces in your attic or on the top shelf of your closet. Borrow. Don't steal.

Now, get your friends together on a Saturday night and have a puzzle party. Have some beer, wine, pop, soda, water, or whatever you'd like to drink. The bigger and more intricate the puzzle, the better.

Better yet, have a puzzle day at your office! Clean out a room (broom closet, unused conference room, someone's work cubicle) and leave the puzzle pieces there. Assign co-workers to come in every half an hour or quarter of an hour and add ONE PIECE to the puzzle. Now, isn't that a great team building exercise?

Do puzzles on your own and keep your brain running. Do puzzles with your kids for some bonding time. Jigsaw puzzles can help keep you sane, no matter where you are on the "3 and up" continuum.

* thanks to http://www.mainepuzzles.com for the photo

Your Own Dip!

Take some cilantro. Now, take some white onion. Get a big tomato or two.

Throw everything into a blender. Blend to your heart's content.

You have fresh dip for your chips! It's green, spiced up, and filled with lycopene, too! No need to run to the grocery store. This dip is great for tortilla chips, and for those long nights you need to spend studying writing your papers, finishing your reports, studying, or simply staring off into space.

Journal Keeping Time: Try a Tag!

All right. All you need is your notebook and a tag from this site: http://tagtillyoudrop.blogspot.com. It's the easiest way for you to get ideas on what to write about for your journal - all you need is to get a tag and start writing away.

Now, be truthful, and don't scrimp on the details. The key is to get a lot of tension out of your system by writing about things that you would normally blog about - but things that you might not want to talk about online.

Have fun!

So How Different is Pepsi from Coke?

You and your friends need to get together and do something that would make marketing execs proud. Well, you don't even need to contact marketing execs. All you need are a few cans of soda of different brands, some plastic cups, and maybe a blindfold, if you want things to be a little more accurate.

Now, you need to do some taste tests. If you're doing this on the weekend - which you probably should, as the office is not the best place for you to blindfold your co-worker and hand a plastic cup over for some drinking-and-scrutinizing-your-drink games - then you may need to have a to-do list, just so you don't get lost. Yes, office work can mess with your brain.

1. Set out a table with some chairs on your lawn, or somewhere in your house where you won't be disturbed or suspected of illegal dealings.

2. Set out some cups on the table, and divide the table into the appropriate number of sections. Say, if you are testing Coke vs. Pepsi, divide the table into 2; Coke vs. Pepsi and Dr. Pepper vs. Cherry Coke, divide the table into 4; and so on.

3. Do not pour out the soda into the cups until all your friends arrive and you are ready for some soda expertise work.

4. When your friends do arrive, choose one person to blindfold. Blindfold said victim. Ehem. Person.

5. Pour a glass of each sample drink for the blindfolded person, but never reveal the identity of said drink. Ask your blindfolded person to talk on:

* How the drink tastes (what does it remind you of? can you guess what the drink is? is it sweet, salty, bitter, sour, or tangy? what taste stands out?)

* What the drink smells like

* What food would go best with it

* Which of all the drinks tastes the best

* Which drink you'd rather feed your dog

6. Assign a secretary to write your findings down.

7. Keep those findings for future use (e.g. parties, parties, parties, etc.)

8. FINALLY: Answer the question - how different is Pepsi from Coke?