I am a master chef!

OK, not really. But I did cook dinner from scratch today, which is a rare and special occasion. Usually Nyron is the cook in the house and if it's up to me, we dine on fish stick and fries. But today I was idly watching Food Network which is where I get my vicarious chef fix, when I actually saw a recipe that looked simple enough for me to do well. It's a ground beef and macaroni and cheese oven baked pasta and I was able to do it with stuff I either already had in the kitchen or could get at the little grocery on the corner. The best part? I managed to do it without making an unholy mess of the kitchen, a feat Nyron has yet to accomplish. :)

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Web surf for a cure

Do people even call it "surfing the web" anymore? Anyway, I discovered this new search engine on TreeHugger calld GoodTree. It's a search engine that generates money for charities. How? Companies pay good money for their websites to be part of the thousnds of hits you receive whenever you type something in to your search engine. Goodtree takes $0.01 for each search page you visit and gives this to charities of your choice. $0.01 doesn't sound like much, but it builds up, especially for people who do a lot of reaserch online or are just bored sitting in front of a computer in their office all day - ahem. There's even a place on the website to keep track of how much you've raised. The "tree" part comes from your friend tree. If you refer the website to your friends and they use it, the running total of money earned represents everyone on your friend tree.

It's not as colourful of fancy as other search engines: very bear-bones. But it's a great idea. My favourite feature is the bookmark links. Instead of having to access the favourites drop-down in the toolbar, you can put links to your most commonly used websites right on the front page. I've made GoodTree my homepage at work and set up the links so that I can quickly access the Bank of Canada Currency Converter, which I use constantly to take Canadian dollar payments from students who were invoiced in Us dollars.

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