New Apartment, New Job, New Life

I know it has been since the edge of forever that I wrote an article for the blog and for that I apologize.  It seems my life quickly entered one of those transitional periods where everything seems to change at the same time and it left me with no time for the blog.  First I was able to get a full time job with The Fresh Market which was a major boon, then my wife and I finally succeeded in finding a great apartment downtown.  It's over a 3 car garage which gives me a place to park the car and the apartment itself is just cool.  Built in 1941 it has a great vintage feel from the original stained wood windows to the wood floors throughout.  So now on top of working full time, I was working towards moving.  After moving we settled in and all too soon we were heading towards Thanksgiving.  Now that is over I feel that things will loosen up to the point where I can start writing again finally.  I have never given up on the blog, just lost sight of it for awhile and ever since the web site creation I knew I was on to something good so I'm not about to let it go even if I slack from time to time.  Don't worry, I'll be back soon...

Back From Alaska

Salmon Cannery (Nushagak?) c.1935

Well it was a long 3 months while I was away for work but I'm finally back home with my family.  For those of you who are new to my blog, I've been working at a Salmon cannery in Dillingham, Ak for 5 years now as the Head Night Watchman.  It's an interesting job and I get to meet many new people from around the world, until this year that is.  The Government decided to end the J1 visa program which allowed foreign college students to come to the US to work in the Summertime.  This meant we had American college students in their place and as the night watchman I was run ragged with all their drunken boobery. 

So where do we go from here?  Obviously I'm taking some time to be with my family before I immerse myself fully back into the blog.  When I do start writing again I'll go back to the format of vintage ads mon, wed, fri and recipes tue & thu.  Saturdays are freeform and Sundays are my day off to go to church.  I am still amazed at how far this blog has come in less than a year and even more heartwarmed that I still get readers even though the blog went inactive while I was in Alaska.  Thank you all for sticking around, we'll be back with our regularly scheduled programming shortly.

My Birthday After Report

I had a great day for my birthday but it was a busy one.  First I made a Black Forest Cake for the first (and last) time in my life.

Then I put up a Hungarian Pot Roast.  Part of my ancestry is Hungarian and having tired for the moment of the Southern Cooking routine I started gravitating to Hungarian cooking.  Dad has an excellent Hungarian cookbook from New Brunswick, NJ dating to the 50's after the refugees came over after the Hungarian Revolution.  These recipes are quite true to form and not the "adulterated" type you see on the internet.

After dinner it was time for the cake and Happy Birthday to be sung.  I rather enjoyed the fruits of our labor today, especially the cake.  It is quite rich and sweet, best taken in smaller slices, however all the flavors meld together most harmoniously.

I will be posting the 2 recipes next week on Tuesday (Black Forest Cake) and Thursday (Hungarian Pot Roast).  Until then I bid you a good weekend and GO BRONCOS!

Birthday

Today is my birthday, I'll betaking a day off from the blog so I can bake a Black Forest Cake and make Hungarian Pot Roast for dinner.  Don't worry,  I'll post the recipes next week :)  Cheers!

Behind the Scenes...

So what really happened you may inquire, to cause me to abandon the blog for so long?  Well as you may remember, I was transitioning from Entrecard to Project Wonderful.  I had just completed a spiffing month with over 3,000 pageviews and having reached my wits end when it came to server issues with Entrecard I was ready for a change.  That was early November.  At the same time I was in the last few weeks of my wife's visa process and I was required to concentrate more and more on that and the blog started suffering.  After I transitioned to Project Wonderful I enjoyed a few days of great pageview numbers but I noticed an inconsistency in that Analytics would count 100+ pageviews but Project wonderful would count just 11.  Honestly I don't know what the issue is with their system of counting but I realized early on I made a huge mistake in canceling Entrecard. 

After that I made a few bad decisions with regards to the blog and readership dropped off with the resultant crash in Pageviews.  In one week I went from a solid 150/day to just 12.  About this time I was readying for my wife's flight over to the USA and, consciously or subconsciously, I just shelved the blog in a fit of depression over what had happened.  I spent the last month doing nothing with it but I am ready to pick up the banner again.  On a positive note I have page rank now and that is generating some search traffic, however I am still fighting with Entrecard to get my blog listed again.  In the meantime, Project (not so) Wonderful has delisted my blog due to low performance. 

I'm not giving up on either one, I will e-mail Entrecard every damn day if I that's what it takes to get them to approve my blog again.  In the meantime I will get back into the flow of writing articles and eventually, traffic will take care of itself.

Where's BrSpiritus?

I tell you it has been a crazy last couple of weeks and I realize that I have been away from writing for some time now.  First it was the run up to my wife's flight over here to the USA and I can say she arrived safely.  I spent most of my time with her, helping her to adjust to the the USA and we went out clothes shopping as North Florida Fall is here and her clothes are not warm enough to cope.  I was just enjoying spending time with her for the first time in over 1 1/2 years so, understandably, the blog suffered.

About the time my wife finally was getting settled Thanksgiving arrived, and with it a plethora of cooking including a 12lb Amish raised turkey smoked on the grill and a vintage recipe for Amish Apple-Sausage stuffing.  It was the best Thanksgiving we have had in a long time and I'm so happy my wife was able to share it with us.  Today we will be getting into the overhead in the garage and taking down the boxes of Christmas decorations.  I don't know if we'll get around to decorating today but we'll certainly get through arranging all the decorations and seeing what still works after years of storage.

I will get back to writing on Monday and I apologize for getting away from the blog for so long.  It was never my intention to leave it in the lurch but on the flipside I hope you can understand that family take precedence, especially when you have been apart for so long.

Special Edition: 5 Years of Love

I never ceases to surprise me how fast time moves on.  By the time my wife gets to read this, she will be in the USA after over a year and a half of waiting for her Visa to be approved.  Truly though is the amazing fact that as of today my wife and I have known each other for 5 years now.  We met back in 2006 on MySpace, the now defunct social network that was all the rage back then.  I had a friend of mine who was sharing my apartment at the time and trying to talk me into going to the Philippines.  I guess to spice up the offer he told me to go to MySpace and just look for girls in Cebu which is what I was doing at the time.  I had a few fits and starts with different girls then one day I found this one.  She interested me because there was no town listed where she was from but I saw she had worked in Davao so that was where I assumed she lived.  I had a bad taste in my mouth when it came to Davao, mostly because of the martial law that was in place there a few years back, however I took the chance and sent the friend request anyway.

Pagerank!

If you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the blog you'll see Google assigned me a pagerank of 2.  I wasn't really expecting this for a couple of months yet.

Happy Birthday to My Wife

Venice and I in 2007

It's birthday time for my wife as she turns 31 today.  It's a shame we are so far away from one another, her in Davao and me in Florida, as I would like nothing more than to be by her side to celebrate this day.  We have been married now for over 4 years and I love her like there is no tomorrow for she is Astrid, the star of my night, helping me navigate the tempestuous seas of life.  Happy Birthday My Love, mahal na mahal kita.

About Myself...

Your Author, BrSpiritus

Today we were supposed to have a recipe featuring cornbread but the idea went down the commode when I opened the bag of cornmeal and found meal worms.  Ugh! Why do I have the worst luck buying cornmeal?  It was this way in the Philippines also but at least there I could halfway understand since cornmeal wasn't in high demand and God only knows how long it was sitting on the shelf.  This is the South though, the Confederacy, and I still get wormy cornmeal?  What gives?