How We Celebrated Valentine's Day

For Valentine's Day dinner, I made Shrimp Fra Diavolo. It's a recipe from my 'America's Test Kitchen' book, which as far as I'm concerned doesn't contain a single non-delicious recipe. It was my first time cooking with raw shrimp, and also my first time lighting alcohol (brandy) on fire.

Just about now, I am wishing I had remembered to buy a fire extinguisher!


It was really, really delicious, and the perfect thing for my true love. He said it was the best thing I had ever cooked, in his opinion. "Or at least, in the top five!" Which is probably more realistic, because that Boeuf Bourgignon was pretty amazing, just sayin'.

It was perfect for him because he loves pasta, shrimp, and spiciness. There are 2 tsps (THAT IS A LOT!) of red pepper flakes in this baby! But somehow it had a lot of heat, but didn't burn, and also had a lot of flavor. Ahhhh, ATK, I love you. Oh, yeah, and Danny too! haha.

So, on a different note, this is the 300th post, and no new blog yet.

The problem is that the upstairs computer is our server, but it was just recalled, so we can send it in and get a brand new one. Which is good, because there is a major problem with it: the wireless no longer works. As in, it receives its internet through a plug. Weeeeeird. Haha. For now it's just been a desktop-laptop, but to get a brand new computer would be awesome.

But unless we change things around so my downstairs computer can be our server, when this computer leaves us, so does my new blog.

We could just get some free web hosting site and combine it with some redirects to work around this issue until we get the new computer.

The other big problem is that before we do anything to the downstairs computer, Danny wants to reinstall a better version of linux. The one we have is basically just a media-shell type thing. It's fine, but probably regular ubuntu would be better for my computing needs.

The other big problem is with adding an email/RSS subscription widget. It's weird that wordpress doesn't automatically download with that plugin, but whatever. So far, it keeps asking for FTP information when we try to install the plugin I want, but the server is not an FTP server. Why does wordpress want an FTP host to download the plugin? Danny thinks it's just to change the file permissions, which is something he could easily do a workaround for. But that's not a great long term solution because I imagine there will be other plugins I will want to download, and while he can do command line workarounds easily, it would take me fifty times longer and I would most likely mess something up.

I guess I could just start the new blog without a "subscribe!" button, but I daren't do that. I want my parents to read my blog, and while some people are comfortable copying and pasting URLs into their blog readers, my parents get my blog as an email subscription and I don't see that changing. I guess they *could* make it their homepage, but...yeah, no. I need this plugin, by golly!

So basically, getting my new blog up and running will involve reinstalling an operating system and reconfiguring a server, which is too much work to do right now.

This is how my true love and I spent our Valentine's Day evening, by choice. Oh the nerdiness. But it was fun, and that's what matters.