Did you know?
The unpopped kernels in a bowl of popcorn are called “old maids”.
Blog tech news
Hi,
this posting will be a (long) report on new, changed and removed blog-things and some blog statistic results. It’s just a warning, if you thought I’ll post the next recipe, hehe.
(for my newsletter recipients: I test the text version this time and hope it works)
1) For those (only a few people as I saw) who subscibe via rss feed to my blog, the feedburner address changed, so please check the new one.
2) I worked (hard *gg*) on the performance of my blog because I saw in my blog-statistics, that most of my readers surf with modem (I’m really surprised!). Therefore I tried to make my blog load faster. Now it comes the part for puter-nerds: I could minimize the http requests on the start/home page from 80 to 16 (at its best) and the speed for 56k modem from almost a minute for loading my site to 21 secs (still too much, I know).
I’m a stats fan and have 4 statistic tools running in the background (google analytics *new*, sitemeter *since blog exists*, chcounter *since march 2006, statcounter *new*) what is way too much and very bad for the performance, I know.
I often read online that google-anal. (sorry for the bad abbreviation, haha) causes a bad performance on blogs/websites; I’m testing it at the moment to see if it’s worth it.
I compare all results for a while to see which tool I like the best. Until then, my blog may load a little bit loooonger…sorry for that. I hope I can decide asap which one will stay.
3) I found out that the weather display tool, that I had in the left sidebar was sucking too much of the performance, so I kicked it out 
I think, if you want to know my actual weather, there are many weather sites online to check. It was a nice gimmick, but often the reason for looong page load.
4) Yupp, what some of my visitors liked, the little flags in the left sidebar, the neoworx visitor counter, is also not a part of my blog anymore (although I paid for this tool til november this year). Too often I had problems with loading the script and it was more for the visual effect than for a reliable counter statistic. Dismissed!
5) New: you can click on the top picture with the blog’s name (the header); it links you now back to the home page from everywhere in the blog.
6) New: the header photo also is new, it is from the vacation in Croatia when we were sailing.
7) New: the calender which shows the dates with (new) posts in thick pink and today’s date in a box. The “last posts” section and all older posts are in the “archive”. You find it now under the header picture in the horizontal navigation under “Archives“.
New: the newsletter function. You can find the box to subscribe by email to my blog in the left sidebar. You’ll get an email when I made a new post. You can always unsubscribe.
9) New: after each post you have now related posts showing you the (hopefully) similar content.
For those who are a tech and stats freak, like me, I’ll post some of my stats from March until August 2006 here.
The following stats are the summaries from the last 6 months from my ‘chCounter’.
The browsers my visitors used:
As you can see, the IE is still used by most of my visitor, although my site looks better with firefox (my favorite browser so far).
The most frequent countries my visitor come from or surfed from:
A good argument to continue writing in english
The most frequent languages:
Wow, I didn’t expect so many different languages and the amount of Germans is higher than I expected. Hmm…
Most used screen resolution of my visitors:
I use No. 3, the 1400×1050 with my laptop, but as I know from other statistics the 1024×768 is still the most used. I wonder if this ever will change…
This one is weird…my visitors operating systems:
Weird…a question mark on second place…what may be more used than Mac that is not linux or windows…?
In the end my best (funniest) keywords from the last week, that people typed in search engines and they were brought to my blog:
1) “megadreisat” (I wrote a post about the German “who wants to be a millionaire” quiz show and ‘megadreisat’ was one of the possible answers)
2) “lonelyheartsclub” (UK needs love I guess *g* cool, but also sad that I have only two singles in my club yet (this was a hidden request guys))
3) “pharisaer recipe” (this search brought a visitor to my blog three times. I really should publish a recipe pharisaer ;))
4) “anja (…) chocolade” (:) just funny that someone typed this in…)
Ok, enough from my tech-attack. For now, hehe.
Please, if you think my blog could load a little bit faster and you are annoyed of the slow-load, let me know!
And I’m also happy for any tipps concerning my stats tools 
STEVE, I already wanted to get back to you!! Tomorrow hopefully…
Bye for now.
Ready for apple pie season?
It’s end of august but the days already become shorter and when the end of the summer is close you know it is apple pie time 
The people who know me remember the great pies from last year, which you can see here and here and also here and here *yumyum*
Yesterday my dad brought me the first ripe apples (Boskop kind) from our garden. This was a request for “I want you to make a pie”.
First I thought 4 (small) apples won’t be enough for a pie but luckily (or wise as I am) I bought a new baking tin last week. 
Half size = half size pie. Good if you’re making the pie for you alone or for at most two persons.
Excellent!
I made the apple pie with the great (plattdeutscher) name: “Boskooper Appel-Taart” (Boskooper apple gateau)
Boskoop is the name of the apple kind. I like them the most and our garden is full of boskoop apple trees.
I found a very easy recipe (old-fashioned…I looked in one of my cooking books *g* not online).
The apple pie was done after 1:15 hrs (incl. oven time). Not bad, huh?
In the past I often was asked for my cake/pie recipes and here it is (before someone asks):
For the shortcrust (German: Muerbeteig) you mix (best with cold hands and cold ingredients) 150g flour (1 1/4cups), with 100g butter (0.4 cup), 1 egg yolk, and 50g sugar (1/4 cup or 1/3??) to a dough. Form a scoop, wrap in plastic and put in fridge for 30 minutes.
Butter your spring-form (22cm) and sprinkle flour over it.
Take the dough, roll it out and put it into your form and press the edges well. If you have left-over dough you can make/form a nice (1-2cm) edge around the dough.
Clean and cut the 3 apples (Boskoop apples, ~500g (18oz)) into cubes.
Mix together with 2 tablespoons (EL) rum, 50g raisins (1.7 oz) and 2 teaspoons (TL) cinnamon and put all onto the dough.
Don’t forget to heat up your oven with 180°C (a little bit less than 375 F) (gas oven level 2), fan with 160°C.
Divide an egg and use the egg white to stiffen it (?) (steif schlagen).
Mix 30g soft butter (1/8 cup or 1.1 oz) with 30g sugar (same as butter) and the egg yolk til it is frothy (schaumig).
Slowly add 25g sieved flour (1/3 cup) and 5 tablespoons (EL) milk.
At the end fold in the stiff egg white and put everything on top of the apple mass.
Put the pie on the 2nd grill height from the bottom in your oven and bake for about 40 minutes.
Here my result (remember that I made the half size pie!):
Half the pie is gone…it was delicious. My dad said it doesn’t need the cinnamon in it. Good! Because I’m allergic to it anyway.
Have a yummy weekend everyone!
August 20, 2006 - 9:54 pmDaily intoxication
Have you ever heard of ADHS or ADHD?
I didn’t know the abbreviation til I read in spreepiratin’s weblog about it. She named it “Maenner-ADS” (invented word) and I followed her link.
ADHS is the name for an (in German: Aufmerksamkeitsdefizit-/Hyperaktivitätsstörung ), in english: Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
Spreepiratin wrote about it in a totally different context (men, ex-boyfriends and attention deficit problems, a funny read) *g* but I found out, that it is related to me (and probably to you as well). Now you may ask why…
First of all: nope, everything is fine with Nathan and me *g*
And, if you’ve now read the article what ADHD is…you may think….me…No, not because of the symptoms of ADHS that could fit to me: “Excessive speech” *lol* or “Answering a question before the speaker has finished” or “Failing to await one’s turn”
I’m fine.
No, I scrolled down the (German) article and stopped (only available in the German article) at “Wie Sucht “funktioniert”" (means: “how drugs work”). Besides nicotine, caffeine, cocaine, cannabis, and alcohol, cocoa is listed as a drug as well. Of course it got my attention *mmhhh-yummy*
It is said that cocoa contains “theobromin”, which can bring you into a state of intoxication (Rauschzustand) especially if you combine it with caffeine!!
Chocolate and Coffee (my main and daily love-and-happiness-substitute drug *g*) can therefore make me kind of drunk?! The only person who could give a statement about my (weird) behavior, hehe, is now about 5.488 km (3.410 miles) away *sad*
Furthermore it is said that cocoa has 4 substances that have different brain-stimulating effects. One of the substances is “Phenylethylamin”. Here it’s said that this hormone can also be produced by your body itself when you are in love.
Well, what happens if you are in love and you eat tons of chocolate aaaand you are a coffeeholic??? (Cola => mirror => pale => scared because science can be painful truth…)
Okay, cocoa is supposed to have these 4 substitutes and that is, as the article concludes, the reason for stuffing oneself with chocolate when you’re frustrated? That would mean I am frustrated very often, almost every day…damn…
hmm, at least I have a reason for my choc attacks now…:)
Obviously I am not happy then But I am! After I ate the choc
Hmm…, thank you, spreepiratin, for giving me (unintentional) a new view of my choc addiction. Now I will always think about the “side-effects” when I sit on my computer with a big mug of coffee and at least one (huge) chocolate bar…yum. Now I know why I often write this nonsense…I’m intoxicated…of choc-coff-double-infiltration *g*
Have a healthy day,
yours missyCola.
[as my older readers may have noticed, the ‘missy’ of little Cola is back. This is due to some blog (strategy) purposes…unique name, more than 4 characters, easier to find by search engines and so on and I start to re-like my old name]
Back in Eck with road trip story + new photo gallery
Aloha, how have you been? (Finally I finished this post that is already a bit old…sorry)
Nathan and I safely arrived home from our Europe trip (ehm…already 2 weeks ago…oops) and we are glad that the hot time takes a break in Germany. We had hot/humid weather the whole trip. Puhhh…. Yes, it was a very tough climate in Croatia. “Only” 36 Celsius but extremely humid. Our friends in Croatia said that it was an extreme heat wave and that it is normally not like that. I’m don’t want to know how bad the heat was inland, in Zagreb (the capital) for example… . Well, we had a great time with Ivor and Maja; friends from Nathan. We stayed at their house in Pula for 10 days. It was great!! Here a photo from our last dinner together on their terrace, with Nathan, Ivor, Maja (and me taking the photo)
We had fish (self-caught..of course), mussels and prawns (bought at the local fish market), plus salad, bread and very good Croatian wine.
Unfortunately I couldn’t post photos the last time, because we had only a slow modem connection. But now I’m back home and I can use with my speedy DSL connection, yeah.
In the last days/weeks I filled up my (new, not yet mentioned) gallery with the photos from our trip, because I figured out that it might be easier to link you to the gallery than to post (all) the photos in my blog (what would make it loading longer and longer…).
Nathan and I are pretty good with backpacking all over the place now…hehe…last year we did a Germany sightseeing trip (except for eastern Germany we saw almost everything). This year we planned on visiting his friends in Pula (Croatia).
The first stop of our journey was “Berchtesgarden” (south of Germany, alps). We camped one night to drive to Austria the next day. In Austria we stopped in St. Johann and hiked to the “Lichtensteinklamm”, which was discovered 1875-1876. You’ll find our photos from our travel through the beautiful Austrian alps here:
After driving the “Grossglockner-Hochalpenstrasse” (Grossglockner is the highest mountain in Austria) our trip lead us through Italy, where we stopped in Trieste, because I could get money from the Deutsche Bank there without paying transfer fees The funny thing was that I only had the street name where the bank was supposed to be. We didn’t have a map of Trieste. Trieste was pretty big, about 210.000 inhabitants and who knows Italys traffic will say Italians are crazy drivers. So we had to navigate through this unknown town. I drove and Nathan tried to read the italian road signs *g* what was very funny if you would have heard his pronunciation.
Ok, we tried to follow our instincts and followed a road sign for the financial district of the town. Very narrow streets and everything one way *grrr*. But then…voila!…We don’t know how we did it, but when we decided to park our car to walk around to find the right road, because we already were in the center, we parked, got out of our car, walked a few meters, turned around, and….in the next crossing road was the DEUTSCHE BANK. No stop in Italy without having a typical Italian Pizza! We found a nice Pizza restaurant (ok, we didn’t find it, it was right opposite of the bank).
After eating two big magarithas we moved on….leaving hectic Trieste toward Slovenia and then to Croatia! (Nathan was always happy when we crossed a country border and he got a new stamp in his passport)
By the way, Slovenia looked very nice. We didn’t stop but the landscape was beautiful and Nathan said it reminded him of New Mexico.
We arrived in Pula on Monday evening, July 17th. Pula is a very nice town on the Croatian coast. It is quite popular for vacation. Ivor and Maja live in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, but they have a nice house in Pula that the family shared for vacation. So we were lucky, because we could sleep in the main bedroom, which was very beautiful but I missed air condition or a fan I was so hot at night that I couldn’t really sleep the first nights. At 7.00 am the church bells started (almost every morning) to steal the rest of my night. Well, I was lucky to have my ear plugs with me.
In the 10 days in Pula we went to the beach (never go around noon, the heat will kill you, most people go after 4 or 5pm and it is still extremely hot til the evening!), we went on a boat tour to Kamenjak with Ivor’s family (VERY BEAUTIFUL!!) and fished from the boat (I almost got two big ones…almost…s***), spent lazy hours in the cleanest water I’ve ever seen at the Mediterranean Sea, had dinner parties with lots of great food (mostly fish, yum), went to a little reggae festival (by boat), went on two sailing trip with the (big!) yacht of a friend of Ivor (that was the best!! see some pics in gallery), went to many many bars to have a coffee or beer (in Croatia every day starts with going to a coffee bar to sip on your coffee, or even your tiny espresso, for at least 1 hour…strange but true) and had hundreds of hours sweat coming out of every pore of our bodies. I didn’t know if Australia was worse, but we survived *g*. What a great time…I didn’t expect that Croatia is so beautiful, although a friend (Kille) told me of its beauty (and the cheap vacation for us Germans).
If you know want to see the rest of the photos click the link to the gallery, our summer trip 06 (link removed, sorry). There are also some photos from Vienna (1/2 day visit only), where we went after Croatia, and Prague, where we stayed for a weekend. Prague was packed with tourists, so we probably picked the worst weekend in summer, but still it was very beautiful (except it smelled like pee everywhere and it was quite dirty compared to the place we’ve been before..). After Prague we went to Dresden (just for an hour to look around) and drove then non-stop back to Eckernfoerde.
Yes, we found out that two weeks of traveling was enough for us (it felt like 4 weeks), so we canceled Berlin, what we planned to see as well.
We were quite sick of big cities and traveling and sleeping every night somewhere else. Sorry Maren, I’d love to visit you! Well, next time then…
[Ahh, by the way, Maren: thanks for the post card!!!!! Very sweet of you! I read it to Nathan and he smiled at (?) the good (surprising) news.]
Ok, I think now you’re updated with some summer news and above all with tons of new pictures!
I hope you’re all well and you have a good summer as well.
I’d like to hear from you; please drop me a line…*smooch*
Take care, yours Cola aka Anja