Daily Dose

iMedix: Health Focused Social Network

6 Comments / Daily Dose, Health and Wellness /

I got an invite to iMedix today and joined right up. It’s a brand new health focused social network and when I say brand new, I mean it. They’re not even in Beta yet! And for an “alpha release” I was pretty impressed. Some of the functionality isn’t up and running yet (like adding links and adding friends) and in a couple of areas clicking the submit button meant I was trapped in a waiting for a response loop, but that happens to all sites once in awhile.

Right now there are only 9 communities in iMedix but they’re a solid 9 communities:

ADHD
Allergies
Anxiety
Asthma
Cholesterol
Depression
Diabetes
Obesity
Pregnancy

There’s one little feature that I really like about iMedix. I like it so much probably because it was on my “in my dreams” list for the place I used to work. You write a blog post and then you select which community you want your blog post to appear in. So if you belong to Depression, Pregnancy and Diabetes – you send your blog post to the community/communities it applies to. Or you can NOT send your blog post to any community at all – just leave it alone, in your space. Beautiful. I am guessing that when the share a link functionality is up, that it will work the same way. I hope so.

I’ve got 3 invites left, if you want one leave a comment and it’s yours.

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Fine Charleston Dining – Part 2

1 Comment / Daily Dose, Family Funk, Foodie, Travel Log /

I don’t know what in the heck is going on with my template all of a sudden – do any of you in firefox see weirdness? I pulled the last post because I know it was fine yesterday, before I published. But pulling that didn’t seem to solve the issue. And I don’t think I did any fiddling with the template yesterday. Weird. Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yes, more Charleston dining experiences. Last weekend we hit two more restaurants that were new to all of us. Both were very good and worthy of future visits.

First, we hit the Sunfire Grill & Bistro for dinner on Saturday evening. It’s just over the old Ashley River Bridge if you’re coming in from the North Area. I believe it is in the old Steak & Ale building. We arrived at 6pm and it wasn’t the least bit crowded, but it wasn’t empty either. It’s a dark restaurant, “date atmosphere” but there were quite a few large groups and just a few couples.

Jenn ordered Shrimp & Grits and seemed to enjoy it quite a bit. She ordered a chocolate something or other cheesecake for dessert and ate almost the whole thing. Which means it was good since she was stuffed from the main course. Michelle ordered some sort of seafood combination platter with Tilapia and shrimp and she ate a surprising amount (Michelle rarely does more than pick at her food at a restaurant), TW ordered the crap crab soup as a starter and was pleasantly surprised by it and a grilled cheese for her main dish – unfortunately they brought her the child’s grilled cheese instead of the special gourmet grilled cheese but she was happy with it. For dessert she ordered some sort of chocolate chip cake that she liked very much. I ordered a black bean burger and potato salad and both were very, very good. TW forced me to order a slice of strawberry cake and everyone enjoyed it. There was some mango syrup drizzled around the plate and it was a nice touch.

For breakfast on Sunday, we drove around the corner from Jenn’s apartment (and when I say around the corner, I mean it – she could walk there almost as quickly as we drove) to the Sunflower Cafe. Typical breakfast fare and everyone seemed to enjoy what they ordered – everything from Beignets and country ham to pancakes to omelettes. (One thing to mention – when they say something is dusted with powdered sugar, they don’t mean dusted – they mean coated. If that troubles you, then you should consider asking them to go easy on the powdered sugar or leave it off entirely.)

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Driving in Panama

Daily Dose, Family Funk, Memories, Travel Log /

When I saw Marvia’s post about driving in Panama I laughed out loud and then I sat back and let the memories wash over me. There is NOTHING like Panama driving and the only thing I’ve found that even comes close is driving in the Philippines.

Marvia is right – turn signals aren’t to be bothered with. Brake lights and head lights are also not important, (except I did get pulled once by a nice Panamanian police officer who spoke no English and wanted me to know my right brake light was out. Gee thanks dude – the other 300 cars on this road right now don’t even have brake lights, but hey, that was nice of him.) Also, the honking. Honking can mean 50 different things and usually something like “hey dude with the flowers, or the bags of oranges – I want to buy some and I’ll stop right here in the middle of the road while you bring them over, we haggle over some money and then I’ll take off without looking to see if anyone is attempting to go around me because I’ve sat here so long – and then I’ll honk the horn again because my mom’s auntie lives over there and she might have seen me driving by.” Horn honking in the US means nothing and is just an annoyance to me – at least in Panama, it meant something interesting.

That traffic she talks about, hahaha, oh yea. Bad. One of the worst experiences of my life was sitting in the middle of The Bridge of the Americas for 2 hours during dry season. I can’t describe it. It was. not. good. Thankfully, I did not have a child with me at the time. I’m pretty sure I’d have abandoned the car and walked home.

Marvia followed a bus to the bus terminal, hoping she’d get to where she was going – I’ve done that! Though actually it wasn’t a bus, it was a nice American couple and I figured eventually they would drive to one of the military bases and from whichever one it was, I could get home. It worked – took me 20 minutes out of my way, but hey, at least I was not lost.

Ah Panama, how I miss it.

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Job Changes

2 Comments / Daily Dose, Day to Day, Work /

What an odd feeling. I woke up this morning and had absolutely no idea what to start working on. I had a wee bit of this feeling on Saturday and on Sunday but since we were traveling, it was easy to just move through my morning and not get fixated on the jobs I was no longer doing. But this morning, that was odd. More than odd, but difficult to explain.

For more than six years I’ve been following a very specific routine. As soon as I wake up, I feed the animals, nuke a cup of day old coffee or a fresh cup of tea, I read my email and then visit a certain website and read a dozen or more message boards. Six years. The number of days I’ve deviated from that can be counted on two hands. Six years is a long time.

I’m not sure I can say that I miss those boards. I obviously miss some things about them, like hearing about the “regulars” and their lives and venting with my coworkers (though it is nice to not feel a need to “vent”.) It’s the change in routine that I was missing more than anything else this morning. I am a creature of habit. Now I have to create some new habits. That’s weird. And challenging. And interesting. Did I mention weird?

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101 Things Update

1 Comment / 101 Things, Daily Dose /

So it’s 101 things update time. June was moving pretty slowly there for awhile but the last couple of weeks just flew by. Amazing how that can happen.

We saved a good chunk of money in June, which was good since we’re about to spend a considerable amount of money this month and in August. (Do you know how many birthdays we have to celebrate in August? You might since I’ve blogged about this issue before!)

Let’s see – what else did I do in June?

* An audio book was scratched off the list.
* I started to clean out my spurls and bookmarks but realized spurl has not been working properly for quite some time so I gave up, imported it all to del.icio.us and then was so overwhelmed by the mess of tags that I gave up. I really need to go through my del.icio.us but I hate the UI so I’m avoiding it.
* See that section way down at the bottom, the one related to work? Well I think I might have to scratch what’s left there since I have a new job. I’m not sure. I probably still need vacation sometime in the next 452 days, don’t I?

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Another chance at a free BlogHer pass

Daily Dose /

I was really sorry to hear WhyMommy is not going to be able to attend BlogHerCon 07 after all. Cancer SUCKS. She’s a nice and thoughtful woman so she’s running a contest to give away her BlogHerCon pass. (Runner up can have her reservation at the sold out “W” hotel). All you have to do to win is write a blog post.

“Survivor.” Write a post this week about a person who inspires you, a person who has survived cancer, or motherhood, or her own personal challenge, and link back to this post so that I know you’re interested in the BlogHer pass. I’ll pick a winner at random on Friday morning, send you the information you need to get registered for the BlogHer conference (FOR FREE!) and then you too can display this nifty little button on your sidebar.

Get busy writing and get your post submitted to WhyMommy!

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