Home Sweet Homemaker

We tend to eat more steak and seafood when we are “actively pursuing” the South Beach Diet lifestyle. Shrimp was on sale this week and that’s what is for dinner tonight. I’ve always meant to learn what those numbers mean on the front of the package. Turns out, it is really quite simple. I think the only reason why the numbers throw me off is because the use of the slash(/). It makes me think I need to divide something. The numbers mean exactly what they say: 26/30 means that you will have between 26 and 30 shrimp per pound. My package was 26/30 and was 2 pounds, which means I should have between 48-60 shrimp. I counted 58 shrimp so there you go.

As I was thawing the shrimp, I noticed a little tiny chart on the back that I could barely read which I found helpful. It is the average number of shrimp per serving based on size. A little bit of “googleing” found that the accuracy of the terms given to shrimp (Colossal, Jumbo, Extra Large, Large and Medium) is questionable depending on the manufacturer. The term “Large Shrimp” may result in numbers anywhere between 21/25 to 31/40. That is a pretty large variance, so my nowhere near professional advice would be to rely on the numbers instead.

I have wanted to try running WordPress locally for a while, and now that I have a computer that isn’t a hand-me-down decade-old machine I can do it. Wow, it has proved to be so helpful. I am currently working on a web site for a start-up ministry and instead of hosting the testing phase in a subdomain of this blog, I can run the testing site locally. Then I can update the subdomain as needed when I want to share with the board of directors what I’ve done do far. Because I had only been working on my local host, I was able to have a “wow” factor at the meeting when I shared how the site was coming along. The launch date for this particular website is January 31st so more on that later!

I had no idea what I was doing when I installed WordPress locally. My friend Franklin always tells me that these things can be done, and basically gives me the right terminology to google it for myself! I knew that I needed XXAMP for Windows and this tutorial was extremely helpful. I’ve now got three installs going: one for Praise & Pray Ministries which is a site in creation, one for Crossroads Baptist Church which is an existing site, and one for testing PHP in general. Now I can play around with a theme or plugin, and know that I am not messing anything up. I back up theme folders regularly in an entirely separate place on my computer as well as the “live” sites.

I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions. I’m sure I resolved to change something in 2009, and probably made some list of things I was going to do differently, and who knows where that list or any like it have gone. Instead of looking at what needs to change this year, I choose to celebrate some accomplishments of 2009. Okay, “accomplishments” may be too strong of a word. Here’s some stuff I finally got around to doing:

1. We hosted our first Pampered Chef party which is something I have wanted to do for years but never followed through until now.
2. I finally joined MOPS. We eat potato casserole and chili at 9:00 in the morning, but it’s cool.
3. The new web site for our church was launched after a ridiculous amount of time and energy talking about it!
4. Completely silly, but I bought some boots, which I’ve wanted for years.
5. We painted the living room and dining room and hung curtains after living here for 7 years!
6. I conquered the sewing machine. Exaggeration, but I did became a little bit more comfortable with sewing.
7. I started Bible Study Fellowship (although at first I completely resisted the discipline and structure it required).
8. I finally rolled over my 401K after almost 5 years of thinking about it.
9. We saved some money and I now have a crazy fast laptop instead of my husband’s hand-me-down college machine!

This casserole can be prepared the night before. Just pop it in the oven in the morning. It served us well when we had out of town guests at Thanksgiving. We ate it with coffee cake, and together they were the perfect breakfast. The recipe is from my mom and serves about 12. We usually add freshly ground pepper to individual servings.

Ingredients

1 pound Hot sausage, cooked and drained
5 slices Bread, cubed or torn
6 each Eggs, beaten
1 cup Cheddar, grated
1 teaspoon Salt
1 teaspoon Mustard
2 cups Milk

Instructions

Grease a 9×13 pan. Cover bottom of pan with bread pieces. Sprinkle cooked sausage over bread. Mix eggs, cheese, milk, salt and mustard together. Pour mixture over sausage. Sprinkle extra cheese on top. Cover in foil. Bake at 350°F for 45-60 minutes.

When trying to upgrade the church web site to the latest version of WordPress I encountered this problem:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2354671 bytes) in ../public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/http.php on line 1331

After several days of putting it off and simply not upgrading, I finally found the answer at Lancelhoff.com and it was much easier than my last WordPress problem. All I had to do was open the wp-config.php and add the following line below the other define lines:

define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘64M’);

See more details about this problem and solution here. Thank you, Lancelhoff!