I was at Charleston Sweet Gourmet today picking up my weekly fix of chocolate covered espresso beans when I spotted this retro looking bag of toffee from Holy City Chocolate, made right here in Charleston.
“Toffee!” goes my brain. My Canadian brain automatically thinks of Mackintosh Toffee. It was a slab of hard toffee candy that came in a red box decorated with a Scottish tartan pattern (not at all like the current offering, and I don’t ever remember it being called Mack Toffee). Just give the box a good smack to break it into smaller bite sized pieces and munch away.
So I decide I need to give this toffee a try and pick up a bag of the dark chocolate pecan (also comes in a peanut version).
Inside the bag are several chunks of toffee covered with a layer of dark chocolate and crushed pecans.
Good stuff. Toffee is one of those confections that you have to eat slowly unless you want to risk breaking a tooth or pulling one out chewing. This one isn’t super hard so you can probably crunch away without too much worry. It does get a little sticky though. Just bite off a small piece, lick the chocolate and pecans off, then let the rest of it dissolve away in your mouth. Savour the sweet yummy toffee goodness. The toffee can get a little rough so if you’re one of those people prone to cutting up the inside of your mouth on sharp edged foods, you’ll want to be careful with this stuff.
Pick up a bag and give it a try.
Donating into second place
Last year I got first place in the department blood donation contest. Shortly after that, my doctor told me during a routine physical that I was a little anemic and that maybe I should slow down on the blood donations.
This year, donating every 10 weeks (rather than every 8 weeks) landed me in second place in the blood donation contest. A shiny new plaque to hang on my wall for my efforts.
yay me!
Cupcake Camp Charleston
Yesterday’s inaugural Cupcake Camp Charleston was pretty epic. It was hard to count, but I’d guess somewhere around 200 or so people showed up to sample the cupcake offerings. The actual area where the cupcakes were exhibited was kind of small with only 4 or so cupcake bakers at a time. The lines ended up getting pretty long, but a few bakers sent out trays of cupcakes so people in line would be able to get some. That’s one aspect that will probably have to be changed for future Cupcake Camps.
Despite the lines, the general mood of the gathered crowd seemed pretty happy. It’s probably hard to be upset when cupcakes are involved I suppose.
A lot of people came to eat cupcakes
Cupcake Camp Charleston was a really fun event, and I think a good time was had by all who came. Like last year’s Barcamp Charleston, it sounds like people are already looking forward to the next one.
Time to restart the blog?
The blog has been running for close to 7.5 years now on MovableType, starting with MT 2.1 or something like that. Over that time it’s been updated and downgraded by beta and release versions of MT. Now it’s getting to the point where odd glitches happen and cause problems with getting entries published that I think might be related to DB clutter. Some of them I think are also caused by process reaping performed by my hosting provider. In any case, after all the things that have been done to the database, I’m thinking it’s time to clean things up.
Time to decide.
- Do I leave things the way they are and remain mildly annoyed?
- Try to migrate entries and comments into a fresh DB?
- Freeze this blog and start over fresh with a new instance of MT?
I could probably shell out more $ and move to a Dreamhost VPS. That would probably get me away from their process reaping and solve most of my problems. I would also have the flexibility to do a few other things too. Also the path of least resistance.
Trying to migrate to a fresh DB would leave things intact, but require a lot of back end work to figure out just what needs to be moved over. It’s the kind of thing that appeals to the geek in me though.
Freezing the blog and starting over with a fresh instance would be pretty easy. It would also give me an opportunity to transition over to either MT5 or OpenMelody (because I like to be on the bleeding edge) without having to worry about breaking things more during an upgrade.
Driving in the dark
The last light on the dashboard of my car burned out this weekend. So now, when I’m driving at night, I can see where I’m going but not how fast I’m going.
When they first started burning out a couple of years ago, I used Velcro® to mount a small LED flashlight to light up the dash. Works well enough. Now I’ve been thinking about how I can wire up a string of LEDs to the car to illuminate the dash. Doesn’t seem like it should be too difficult.
I’ll put it on my list of Things To Do When I’m Bored