Christine Hudnall

Okay, I’ve been playing with a new plugin - Live Comment Preview.

Somewhere along the way of me tinkering with my styles sheet, comment template, and live preview template, I did something that I should not have, because comment author name, email and website address text areas have disappeared.

If you are seeing them, please let me know. I’ve cleared my cache and thought I undid all the changes that I made, but I am still not seeing those areas. Looking at the time now, I doubt I will find them tonight - so - I’ll try again later.

If you do decide to leave comment - Please - include name and website address in with comment - I will correct them as soon as I figure out what I did. I’m sure it is something simple, I just can’t think anymore at this point.

Guess this would be a big Oops!! :-)

So, I walk into the house this afternoon and smell some good smells coming from the kitchen, well of course I had to go and investigate what it was.

There, on the counter, hanging upside down is an Angel Food cake in its cake pan. Cool, that is my favorite cake - plain, no sauces, no whipped topping, nothing but the cake please!

Hmmm, I know that bottle underneath it - no, she didn’t use that bottle, she wouldn’t dare. If that breaks, I am so not going to be happy!! (She, by the way, is my mom.) I know, you are probably saying “What bottle did she use that could cause such a fuss?!”

Well, it was my bottle of Courvoisier Cognac that I use when I cook certain dishes. Yes, I know, it is just a bottle, but come on, my Cognac?? The olive oil bottle was there, use it!

That really did happen, but in all seriousness, I wasn’t worried as much about the bottle breaking per se, but that my animals would be drunker than Cooter Brown for the next week from the cognac. Okay, maybe I was worried about it being that particular bottle a little bit, I mean, hellooooo, that is some good cognac! :D

So, yes, I am now a year older than I was yesterday, although I don’t feel it, pray that I don’t look it, but according my birth certificate, it says that I am. Isn’t it funny, that when we are growing up, we strive to look and act older than we are, but once you hit a certain birthday, it is a compliment when people tell you “You don’t look or act your age”.

Now that I’ve had my fish and chips with malt vinegar for dinner, a nice slice of delicious angel food cake, I’m ready to relax with hopefully no more phone calls and watch The Secret of Roan Inish, then I get to look forward to part of my present that isn’t even due out until tomorrow, which of course (I know you just are waiting to know) is the newest cookbook by one of my alltime favorite people, Ina Garten, called Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics: Fabulous Flavor from Simple Ingredients. She has class, style, smarts, wit and much more, how can you not love her?

Wishing Ina all the best with the newest book as I head of to get lost on an island off Ireland. :)

May all of your birthdays be as wonderful as mine…

On a storm chasing forum I belong to members were talking about gas prices. Out in Oklahoma City, at one station, regular is down to $2.07! WOW, that just is amazing to me, considering here in Florida we are no where near that. So, it got me to looking online to see if I could find cheaper priced (not quality!) gas.

Well, I found a site that gets updated daily, and it is a site that seems pretty trust worthy, I mean, after all, it is Motor Trend.

What is great, they have a widget that I am including here - I’ll leave this post up, but I will add a page also, so that once this post gets buried in archives, just go to the page and grab widget, or use it from my page.

If you don’t want to do that, just go to Motor Trend site and you can look up all over the United States, you do have to know the county and city name. You don’t have to know the zip code though! http://www.motortrend.com/gas_prices/index.html.

Good luck and I hope that this is able to help others!

Cumulonimbus storm clouds over Highlands and Okeechobee Counties, Florida

It all started the week before last when I dragged my Mom out storm chasing with me. I was not able to get any structural shots of the storms, but I was able to get some cloud shots. We drove down some roads that we probably should not have and browsed on some that we look forward to going back to. We missed the hail in one storm we went through, and got caught in rain so thick in another that we had to turn around and find a different route.

There is one not so pleasant thing about chasing around my neck of the woods, it is not always easy finding roads that go where you need them to. Take east-west for instance, we can go south to 98 or 70 or north to 60 if we want to go east / 64 if we want to go west, but there are not other roads that take you all the way. And some of the back roads, well, I wouldn’t want to break down on them, especially not if Baby Firefly or any of her family could be around. ;)

Down in the tropics we had been watching some waves, some low pressure areas, a couple not doing much except dumping rain where they do not need any more rain, but others a little more persistent and turning into Tropical Storm Nana, Hurricane Omar and Tropical Depression Sixteen.

Cumulonimbus storm clouds over Highlands and Okeechobee Counties, Florida

Family wise, the one we were watching was Omar. A week ago this past Thursday we got a phone call from one of my cousins, her and her husband would be stopping the next day on their way down to Fort Lauderdale, to catch a cruise ship. Would just be stopping for late lunch/early dinner type thing. Where they were headed, in case you haven’t guessed it by now, is the Caribbean. Have a wonderful time, but keep your eyes on tropics, especially the area right below Puerto Rico and the islands. (My mom was able to meet them at Olive Garden, but unfortunately I wasn’t able, which stinks, it has been I think, 3 or 4 years! But I sent info about storms with Mom and of course, sent them newest updates as well as link to the National Hurricane Center.)

Of course, I went online and found the destination map for their cruise and what do we see, they are supposed to be heading to St. Thomas and St. Maarten as part of their stops. Sent off an e-mail on Monday, the 13th, not knowing if they would be able to read it (turns out yes, but no replies because it cost a small fortune to do e-mail on board they found out).

TD Nana is the one between Africa and Lesser Antilles - moving W-NW @ 7mph. TD Fifteen (if it keeps up - soon to be TS Omar) - is the one that is causing problems over the islands right now. It is below PR, but is causing Flash Flood Warnings since yesterday - moving NW @ 2mph (it is just drifting as of right now).

I read the map again of where they are heading and what stops, for how long, etc., and see now that they should have left one island and heading toward St. Maarten, I switch over to the Hurricane Center site, then pull up the satellite loop. Hmmm, it is now Tuesday, and TD 15, has not only become Tropical Storm Omar, but surpassed it turning into Hurricane Omar. Luckily their ship has a bridge cam, so of course we would check it, and finally, it showed that they had turned around and were heading to Grand Turk, which was on their list, but as last stop before heading home. (Stop by Dewdrop’s blog and you can see all the satellite images that she grabbed and I forgot to as I was watching - Duh!)

Thankfully Hurricane Omar buzzed right by the islands on a course for the Atlantic, could almost hear the sigh of relief from those that live in the Caribbean as it squeezed on by. So, off I go to look at the bridge cam again and now they have them down at Ocho Rios, Jamaica. So, I go and look at the satellite loop again, gee, isn’t that Tropical Depression Sixteen sitting out there? It really did make me wonder about who makes the decisions as to change course on the ship, when I next saw that they were over at Grand Cayman.

Here is what my cousin had to say about the cruise, in e-mail to me before reaching home:

Cost a small fortune to do email on board! So Frank paid bills, and I stayed off the computer. LOL!

All is well. We disembarked this morning about 9:30 and are now about 50 miles south of Savannah.

Cruise was great. We changed course (a very smart move!) just south of the Turks and Caicos as our itinerary had us heading straight for St. Thomas and St. Maarten - right into the storm. We were supposed to visit those two islands, then circle around and visit Grand Turk on our way back to Florida. Things got a bit bumpy (not real bad, we just all looked drunk as we tried to walk - LOL!) before the powers that be granted us permission to change course to avoid Omar. (duh)

We headed back to Grand Turk and made that our next island. (Our first was Princess Cays - a very small island on the southern tip of Eleuthera, owned by the Princess Cruise Lines.) Grand Turk was a lovely beach, small shopping area, but only 4 hours because of our change in itinerary made our stay all too short.

Next we visited Ocho Rios in Jamaica. Crowded. Seedy. Overrun with people hawking anything and everything. We hadn’t scheduled a tour (as we weren’t prepared for that island) so stayed close to port. Margaritaville does serve the best margaritas that I’d ever had, so the island wasn’t a total loss! Actually, we’d like to go back - perhaps only once - but to book a tour to see what else the island has to offer. We may be disappointed, but I’d hate to base an opinion on what little we saw.

Then on to Grand Cayman…. LOTS of shops - too many to visit with as hot and humid as it was that day. We did “go to Hell” and found they didn’t even have hand baskets! But the coral there looks like cypress knees sticking out of the water. Blacker than the ace of spades, but white inside where it has broken off. Definitely not lava, as lava is black in its entirety. I did take pictures and will post as soon as I have a little more time. We also went to the Tortuga Rum factory. Never had flavored rum before but it was delicious. Will definitely add it to our holiday stash.

We left Grand Cayman about 6 pm Friday, and arrived back in Ft. Lauderdale at 6 am Sunday. Saturday was just a nice relaxing day at sea - or it should have been if we’d not had to have our suitcases packed and outside of our room by 6 pm - BEFORE we went to dinner! Yikes!

Yes, I was busy keeping up with the storms, but also, worrying about Dewdrop (see link above), because she had a procedure done on her back, but there had been no relief yet, even after she finally started to rest. So, of course she has been on my mind and in my prayers. And then one of my sisters decided to drop by for a mini vacation and as I’m trying desparately to get out a blog post (this one) that I started back on the 9th of October, I am waylaid once again.

Between family, storms and things not working like I wanted them to inside the blog, this post is now coming to you today, 12 days after I started it! Gee, could I get any slower.

And for those that have looked and kept seeing a locked post (passworded), this is the post, nothing secretive, just wasn’t ready to be seen by all. Happy now Chris?! ;-)