Blue Peanut Butter, Hamster Dancing, & Explosions

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Would you eat it?

First, a few weeks ago, I read an article about blue peanut butter. Yes, you read that right – BLUE peanut butter. Apparently, someone decided that Blue Dye No. 2 *may be* chemically similar to compounds that bind to cancer-causing chemicals, limiting their ability to mutate DNA.

To figure this all out (I’m still wondering about how this came up in the first place…..who has the time to think up this stuff?????), they fed Rainbow trout (okay, I think it’s funny that they fed a *rainbow* of colors to something with rainbow in its name…..I’m not a fan of animal testing, or, rather testing on sentient beings since fish apparently aren’t animals, but, still, I can definitely appreciate the irony of it) known carcinogens AND then some of the trout also got one type of dye or another (of course, some got *none*) and they tracked what happened. The experimental process was definitely not as cut and dried as that, but, I don’t want to get too wrapped up in that part of the story.

Now, I’m all for using food to help us with our health…..and, this *is*, after all, the same dye they use for blue m&m’s.

But, Blue peanut butter?

It seems sort of unnatural, doesn’t it? Not to mention….I’m not convinced that eating chemicals on purpose is really that good of an idea if we can avoid it. Obviously, if we are eating m & m’s, we know that we are adding a bunch of unnatural stuff to our diet – at least I don’t think of M & M’s as healthy/health promoting food…..but, there IS natural peanut butter out there without anything added to it….so, if I’m going for a peanut butter fix, I’m thinking that I won’t be picking up the blue peanut butter DESPITE this “fantastic breakthrough”.

If I want to get my blue nutrition (nutrients that only come from blue things), I will find something like a blue berry…which isn’t actually blue – it’s purple. There aren’t any natural foods that are truly blue.

Maybe that’s nature trying to tell us something! Blue is for rainbows and crayons (i.e. not something to eat)….let’s leave it there and find colors that are actually in our foods to promote health!

Post Holiday Work is always a killer

Aside from the whole blue peanut butter thing bouncing around my mind for a few weeks….things have been strange around here lately. Well, more than usual. January is usually a not so fun month at work – we are seriously discussing suspending all ordering from our Christmas ordering deadline until after Christmas in 2009 and going forward. We’ve avoided this for 9 years, BUT, people don’t seem to want to accept that I don’t make everyone work 24/7 from Christmas through New Year’s….particularly when we are logging so many hours for the week or 2 BEFORE Christmas.

To be honest, I don’t know any company that has their employees working crazy long hours between Christmas and New Years – I’m sure there ARE companies like that….but, my company likes to RETAIN employees….which means that we need to treat them well and not work them into early graves (at least that is my theory…I could be wrong).

So, January is usually a mess with us trying to get everything that built up during the holiday season (but wasn’t guaranteed for holiday delivery) out. This is the one time of year I just dread work…because I know that it’s so crazy every day.

Website moving….Killer or stronger-person maker?

With that in mind (or, maybe WITHOUT that in mind), the powers that be decided to move our websites to a new (much better) server. Moving is NEVER easy….I would really like to NOT be here when we move websites….because it’s rarely simple and problem free. So, why are we doing it when it’s already crazy at work? I have no idea.

I really had my hopes up when we first started the move. Generally, we move one site at a time – making sure everything is fine before we move the next site. So, we moved a couple sites and everything appeared to be okay. Then, we moved Legacy Journals (Friday)…it was down most of the day yesterday. Today, I can’t get into the site admin area and can’t seem to pull up any of shopping side of the site (which is a subdomain). The design gallery is completely down (because someone had the FANTASTIC idea to revamp that at the same time we were moving sites), and I just wanted to cry this morning when I saw what a mess things were.

I’m not a crier usually…..but, it’s pretty much like launching a massive explosion when LegacyJournals is offline – which I can’t decide is better or worse than it being *partially* online but completely un-navigatable (since some pages are there, others aren’t….some have an error page, some have a completely blank page).

So, this afternoon, I’ve been trying to figure out what happened. Every time I look at it, I want to THROW UP. This was NOT the site we wanted to go down during the move. Of course, isn’t that the way it usually works?

All the while, my youngest has been playing Club Penguin on the computer behind me. She found this “Cool new song” (isn’t it cute when everything is new?) called “Hamster Dance”….so, to accompany my website-moving frustration, I’ve had the ever pleasant sound of a continuous Hamster Dancing loop.

Of course, that leads me to happier things (not the hamster dancing, per se…THAT leads to insanity)

My son was accepted to ISU – his college of choice. We got the letter from the college yesterday. There is a little catch, but, he will start school June 15. AND, he got first at the wrestling meet yesterday. He didn’t even have to go to a second round for any of his matches. So, that was pretty awesome as well. GOOOOOOOO, Micheal!!!! <woof, woof, woof, woof!>

Until next time……

watch out for blue peanut butter, that crazy “new” hamster dance….and exploding web sites. : P