Salad recipe! sort of!

At the request of my girlfriend, I'm posting some food we made recently.
This is the plate I ended up with (click to embiggen):

+1 internet to you if you can identify all the ingredients before reading the rest of the post!
...
Anyway
It's got raw cucumber, avocado, carrots, and lettuce, along with a hardboiled egg, cheddar cheese, ranch dressing, steak (of some sort, i think it might have been strips of flank or skirt), topped off with the cooked-down drippings from the steak as well as some salt and freshly ground pepper.

THIS.
WAS.
AMAZINGLY!
DELICIOUS.


Since a big part of the dish was the steak, I spent some time seasoning it with.....
oh yeah I forgot I put raw onions in my salad, too.
But I seasoned the steak, on this particular occasion, with some apple cider vinegar, garlic powder, salt, ground black pepper, and cayenne pepper powder.
Once the steak was done there was a lot of steak juice left over so I decided to cook it down to use on top of the salad.
After I took out the steak, I added some more salt, some red wine vinegar, a little bit of sugar, some worchestershire sauce, and some more garlic powder to the steak juice and let it simmer down slowly while I stirred it.

This is a fairly well-balanced meal for an active person, with fiber, fresh, raw veggies, lots (kinda) of protein from the egg and steak, and some carbs from the avocado and ranch. Eat with some fruit and top with some seeds or nuts and your nutritionist would be PROUD.

Toothache Relief?

So I never had my wisdom teeth removed, thinking I could use the extra wisdom (hilarious, I know), so now every few months or so they rub up against my other teeth and it starts to feel like my TEETH ARE GOING TO EXPLODE OUT OF MY HEAD.
So usually I would just go to the dentist and he would say there's nothing he could really do and give me some mild painkillers and it would be over in a few days.
At the moment, however, I don't have any insurance, so I had to figure things out for myself!

After a little experimentation, and a lot of research,
HERE'S WHAT TO DO IF YOU HAVE A TOOTHACHE THAT NEEDS SOME IMMEDIATE HOME RELIEF:
wash out mouth with some antiseptic mouthwash
dip a q-tip in some high %age rubbing alcohol and liberally rub it all around the affected area
dip a q-tip in some VANILLA EXTRACT (this is what made all the difference for me) and liberally rub it all around the affected area
rub ora-gel all over the affected area
take a low-dose of a pain killer/anti-inflammatory such as naproxen (aleve), ibuprofen, acetaminophen (tylenol), or asprin
If you're having trouble sleeping because the terrible tooth pain is just THAT bad, don't be afraid to drink some nyquil or some equivalent medicine with detromethorphan, which is a psychological dissociative, meaning that it can cause your body to feel distinctly separate from your mind, and in combination with the acetaminophen already in nyquil, this will give you some significant pain relief and allow you to sleep very well.

REMEMBER: I'm not a physician, nor a pharmacist, and I don't guarantee any of this will work, and please PLEASE READ AND FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS ON ANY MEDICATION before you take it.
Just.... please don't sue me?

ANOTHER VIDEO

This time, a "Black and Yellow Garden Spider"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argiope_aurantia

Argiope Aurantia, for you spidernerds. Saw this one outside my front door and decided to feed her a few grasshoppers and record it. My little sister and I sound like dorks because we are.

"HE'S PRODUCING WEB!"

Had an interview today for a job in the semiconductor industry.
They want to send me to CHINA for three weeks as a part of a two month training thing.
Isn't China supposed to be the communist evil on the other side of the Pacific?
If I go, should I be worried about being abducted, or robbed, or murdered in a communist riot? I mean, I've been overseas before but never as a part of a job. Although I have been to Turkey before, and it was only one year before they were put on the US governments list of
"PLACES DANGEROUS TO AMERICANS"
I haven't even gotten the job yet, so it's really not a big deal anyway.

tl;dr
is China dangerous for Americans?

Boating on Lake Travis!!

HEY another video I took! I think this was around my birthday, and we decided to take the boat out and show Lake Travis who's boss.
Just in case you're curious, it's a 1976 Chrysler Sport Fury (16 ft) with a volvo penta inboard/outdrive 2.0 liter inline 4 engine with bloody 110 horsepower.
Next step: towing skiiers and wakeboarders. after winter is over of course!

So like i promised, here's the dog going after a balloon!
I know I'm a dork but whatever.

Dog and the balloon

Teasing the dog with his most favorite of toys, a balloon. I'll post a video of him going bonkers and chasing and biting balloons when I get a chance.

JOGGING IN THE EVENING IN THE HILLS OF AUSTIN:
"Wow, it's like an oven up on top of this hill"
run
     run
         run
              run
                   run
                        "Wow, it must be negative degrees in this valley"

First blog post!

Just testing this out.... Walked the dog a few times today, he's making good friends with the dogs in the building next door. Pics of the dogs together soon?