Hard Boiled Eggs

I mentioned last week about removing the background from a picture of a bowl of hard-boiled eggs, and that's what you see below.  The truly amazing thing is that all twelve eggs are already peeled and are still perfect, which I've never been able to do before.  Since I was making deviled eggs, this perfection added to their curb appeal.  I used the recipe at the link below, which adds eggs to boiling water, cooked for exactly 11 minutes and 30 seconds, and then transferred to an ice bath.  To remove the shell, I first broke the top and the bottom of the egg with a light tap, and then rolled the egg on its side back and forth a couple of times to further crack the shell.  Starting at the top, I just used my thumb to lift the shell pieces from the egg.

I'm not sure if I got lucky this time or if this method is the best ever.  I'll find out next time we're invited to a party.

https://www.southernliving.com/recipes/classic-deviled-eggs

Smoked Cherry Old Fashioned

Hilton Head Distillery is worth the visit, both for its eclectic cocktail options and its friendly bar.  The drink below is a Smoked Cherry Old Fashioned, which is made with rum, cherry syrup, and cherry bitters.  Instead of the normal Solera Rum, I had them make mine with their bolder Ghost Pirates Gold Rum, which has aromas of caramel, warm oak, vanilla, and a subtle hint of baking spices.  

https://www.hiltonheaddistillery.com

Merlin Bird ID

Merlin Bird ID is a cool smartphone app that can identify birds by their image or sound.  As you can see in the screenshot below (taken on Hilton Head Island), using my Pixel 7's microphone, it found four birds, with the American Crow being the most recent it heard, highlighted in yellow.  It also displayed the 222 different birds that Merlin users had identified that day on Hilton Head.  It's available for both iOS and Android, installable from the link below.

Big shout-out to Dan and Grace for turning us on to this awesome app!

https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org

Hot Sauce Vending Machine

Just in case you're expected to bring home a gift after a long business trip or just want to add some heat to your in-flight meal, the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky (aka, CVG) airport has the world's first hot sauce vending machines, one in each concourse.  They feature the award-winning Dude, Seriously brand hot sauce, other local sauces, and other top brands.  The complete list can be found at the link below.

https://www.dudeseriously.com

The Start Of Something Big

Gourmet Chef Elaine is a master at growing indoor plants.  They grow so big that they finally need to be replaced, and she does that by snipping a piece of the plant off and starting a new plant, as you can see in the picture below of her spider plant.  It only takes a week or so for the roots to appear, and then it's ready to be transplanted to a small pot of dirt.  And the cycle continues...

Mortadella

We watch a lot of cooking shows, and occasionally a chef will use mortadella in a recipe, which I've never eaten.  When I noticed our local Meijer's "Grab-and-Go" had prepackaged mortadella, I gave it a try.  While visually different than my favorite lunch meat, bologna, the taste is very much the same.  Mortadella is made using only pork, while bologna can have pork, beef, chicken, and turkey.  The fat in bologna is emulsified into the meat, where pork cubes are added to mortadella to give it the distinctive mottled look you see in the picture below.  They use different spice blends, with mortadella being more coarse and bologna very fine.  More info is included at the link below.

https://www.thespruceeats.com/what-is-mortadella-4777012

Removing Backgrounds

My first attempt to replace the white background in my image with a transparent one (i.e., no background) using my favorite free (I love free) Online Image Editor website could not get every bit of white removed, so I went looking for alternatives.  The one I found worked best was remove.bg, which is at the link below.  I just uploaded the image, and it automatically scrubbed every bit of white away, perfect for my requirement.  The free version provides a lower resolution (576x433) download, but they have paid plans for maximum resolution, and that includes a pay-as-you-go option for $3 for 3 images.  For my needs, the lower resolution is fine.

A day or so later, I wondered if it would remove the background from other photos and was surprised to find that it works pretty good.  For example, I uploaded a photo of a dozen eggs in a bowl sitting on our kitchen counter, and everything but the bowl of eggs was removed.  You'll see that picture in an upcoming blog.  

https://www.remove.bg

Creating Line Art

I've been looking for a way to generate black and white line art using AI (Artificial Intelligence) and found the bigger names (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok) lacking.  Then I heard about the Canva app, downloaded it to my Pixel 7, and gave it a try.  Using the prompt "A black and white line art of the words thank you done very expressively", Canva generated the images you see below, of which the first one best fit my needs.  The image had a white background, but I required a transparent background.  That bit of magic will be covered in tomorrow's blog.

Links to the Canva app for iOS and Android are below.

https://www.canva.com/download/ios

https://www.canva.com/download/android

In Plain Sight

The image you see below is from the check-in process for my chiropractor, and I've seen this for more years than I can imagine.  I have dutifully clicked on various descriptors and body locations each time, even though they change infrequently.  But a few appointments ago, I noticed the option to choose "click here if you have no change in symptoms", which is a nice little time-saver.  

According to the Perplexity AI chatbot, this is caused by two phenomena.  The first is "inattentional blindness", which occurs when a person does not see something fully visible because their attention is focused elsewhere.  The second is "selective attention", our brain's way of tuning into what matters and ignoring background distractions.  All part of what it's like to be a human.

Understanding Freezer Capacity

The sign you see below is from a Lowe's in College Station, Texas, that I ran across while shopping for microwave ovens.  I'm not sure if our local Centerville, Ohio, has the same signage, but I'll check it out the next time I visit.  A rancher in Texas probably needs to know that an entire cow will take 40 cubic feet of freezer space, make 210-270 meals for their family of 4, and last for 70-90 weeks.  Certainly, that's nothing I have ever concerned myself with.

Blue Bunny

Gourmet Chef Elaine and I don't eat a lot of sweets, but when we do, we like portion-control options.  We shared the little Blue Bunny Mini ice cream cone that's shown below while catching one of our evening TV shows.  It's enough for 4-5 bites each, and that's plenty to satiate our need for sweet.

https://www.bluebunny.com

Watermelon Margarita

Good fortune was smiling on me at Gringo's in College Station, Texas, when I found out that day was the last day of the year for ordering their specialty Watermelon Margarita, shown below.  I opted for the Tajin rim to spice it up a little, and the larger, chalice-sized goblet.  Things are truly bigger in Texas.

Gringo's has a free (I love free) vanilla and chocolate ice cream machine that's a hit with the grandkids.  They always seem to have some extra room in their tummies for ice cream.

https://www.gringostexmex.com

Nitrogen Pipeline

Another new encounter while walking around the Pebble Creek neighborhood in Texas is the "Nitrogen Filled Pipeline" sign, shown below.  I did a little digging (metaphorically speaking) and found that these pipelines exist to support Texas's oil, gas, and petrochemical industries.  Nitrogen is inert and non-reactive and is injected into oil reserves to push out additional oil, prevent explosions in pipelines and storage tanks, and test and dry pipelines.  A lot of interesting information on nitrogen can be found at the link below.

https://periodic-table.rsc.org/element/7/nitrogen

Bigger In Texas

While walking around in the Pebble Creek neighborhood in College Station, Texas, I noticed they have oversized drainage storm drains, which I measured at ten feet wide.  Texas utilizes oversized storm drains because it experiences heavy rainfall, the ground is generally flat, and the risk of flash flooding is high. The extra capacity is a safeguard against the powerful, fast-moving storms that are typical of the state’s climate.

https://pebblecreektx.com

Easterwood Airport

Easterwood Airport (CLL) is a regional airport in College Station, Texas, serving Texas A&M University and the surrounding area.  Unlike the 171 gates at Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) airport, which will expand to 202 in the next couple of years, CLL has just two gates and is owned by Texas A&M University System.  The airport is named after Lieutenant Colonel Jesse L. Easterwood, a U.S. Navy pilot and early aviator from Texas A&M University’s Class of 1909.  As you can see in the picture below, you can watch as the baggage handlers unload your bags on the carousel, which gives me a comforting feeling that my bag is not lost (or mishandled).  Although small, it's a very nice airport.

https://flyeasterwood.com

Butter And Pepper

The gnocchi pictured below came from a grocery store, which explains why its size and shape are so much more consistent than my homemade recipe.  I made a lot of different sauces for gnocchi, but the simple addition of a little butter and pepper is all it really needs.  Add a little medium-rare steak, a bi-colored ear of corn, and a glass of wine, and this quickly became a meal to remember.

Hydrant And Stick

The fire hydrant and stick come to you from Williamsville, New York, a cute suburb a few miles northeast of Buffalo.  At first, I thought its purpose was to alert snowplow drivers because running into one is not good for either the hydrant or the plow.  However, Gourmet Chef Elaine pointed out that perhaps a bigger purpose was for firefighters to locate a hydrant to fight a fire.  Well, either way or both, if the snow reaches six feet deep, even the stick is not going to help.  

70

On this day back in 1955, Earl and Rose Marie Moorman welcomed their second son into the world, me.  They gave me a wonderful childhood, sent me to Our Lady of Mercy grade school and Chaminade High School (which in my senior year became Chaminade-Julienne).  I lived at home during my first three years at Wright State University, allowing me to have minimal debt after graduating.  Mom and Dad passed away way too early, and I've missed them for more than half of my life.  I never thought I would make it to my 70th birthday, much less have all the blessings of family and friends I enjoy so much.  

Draining The Igloo

The only issue we have with the Igloo cooler you see below is that it doesn't have a drain plug, so when it's time to get rid of the water, we have to remove everything in the cooler first.  Or so we thought.  All it takes is turning it on its side, where the hinges are, and the water gushes out.  Never would have guessed that in a million years.

Big shout-out to my brother-in-law Albert for showing us this not-at-all-obvious feature!

Halloween Gone Wild

The display you see below is from a local Home Depot store.  Why anyone would shell out hundreds of dollars on a hideous front-yard Halloween display is totally beyond me.  What's worse is that some neighbors leave their twelve-foot skeleton up year-round, changing their costume to match whatever event is happening at the time, such as Christmas, St. Patrick's Day, or Cinco de Mayo.  Tacky knows no bounds.

https://www.homedepot.com

PB&BJ

A snack of Peanut Butter and Jelly hits the spot just right, and my twist is to use Blackberry Jam (hence the title of this blog) instead of the usual grape variety.  As you can see below, I like to use a little more jam than peanut butter and a thin-sliced, multi-grain slice of bread to make believe I'm being extra healthy.  Of course, the peanut butter is the smooth kind.  I never liked the crunchy kind as a kid, and I still don't now.

Altafiber

It has been almost 2 years since I blogged about Altafiber (the rebranded Cincinnati Bell) starting to run fiber down the major streets, and I've been (not so) patiently waiting for them to begin stringing fiber on the access poles, as you see them doing below.  Now I have to wait until they're ready to offer service to our house and allow us to save $50 per month over our current Spectrum Internet.  Hurry up, folks!!

https://www.altafiber.com

Golf Ball Picker Upper

New to the practice green at Walnut Grove Country Club is the ball sweeper you see below.  You attach an empty bucket to the rear, and as you push it across the green, the golf balls are gathered at the center of the diagonal pipes and conveyed into the bucket.  In under a minute, you can collect an entire bucket of balls without bending over.  This is genius!

https://walnutgrovecc.net