StringGrrl sees the World

One week into replacing my outmoded and under-performing Droid Razr smartphone, and traveling with the Motorola DROID Turbo I have to say that the phone is living up to the hype. Battery Life The battery on this thing is touted as having 48 hours of use time and 675 hours of standby time. No way that I have the patience to test the claims regarding the standby, but today (Friday) my battery dropped to 20% by 6:00 PM, after having unplugged it from the charger at 8:00 AM Wednesday. Granted I did not live on the phone during the whole time, but I did use it exactly as I would any given weekday for work and home.  That is including a fair amount of time on and off WIFI, HSPA+ (I am roaming in Europe right now), and 3G. I have consistently forgotten to switch on and off the WIFI as I went about my business further afield from the hotpot or office WIFI. And needed it often for maps, updates, searches for train connections, photos, videos, etc.  Form  I have th...

View not far from the Geocache January 2015 When I set this cache years ago, I established a challenge to the cachers to send me their pictures from the GZ so we could see the grandeur of Lake St. Clair (only said with a little sense of irony, it is a dwarf among the great lakes but still plenty grand.) Simple overlay of Lake St. Clair in color scaled to Lake Zurich (Zurichsee) in BW similar view September 1 2014 I thought it would be a nice oppurtunity to see the seasons change in Michigan if more people would take their pictures from the same point, more or less. However, not very many contributions have been collected. July 2014 StringGirl with Greg WhimpyKid http://www.geocaching.com/track/map_gm.aspx?ID=5671180

Two pots of Chili- Left Vegetarian, con Carne on the lower right Frequent traveler StringGirl gets sick of eating in hotels and restaurants all the time, so on occasion she stages a kitchen takeover at the house of a colleague of The-Self-proclaimed-Die-Expert. To start of 2015 with a bang we whipped up a batch (or two) of chili while visiting Germany. To make life really interesting we put together both a veggie chili as well as Chili Con Carne. Chili 2-3 dried chili peppers (if available ancho, pasillo, cascabel) 1.5-2.0 kg Beef Brisket/flank/skirt/round  (rinderbrust/hose/nierenzapfen/unter-obershchale) 0.5-1 kg Ground beef (rindhackfleisch) Sea salt Black Pepper Cooking oil 2-3 large sweet onion minced(yellow) 2 jalapeno peppers minced (if available) 2 poblano peppers minced (if available)  ½ -2/3 cup commercial chili powder (I have a preferred formula from home that I will bring along) Cayenne pepper cumin 4 cloves garlic minced or use press 800 g...