Task 53 - Plant a Vegetable Garden.

(53) Plant a Vegetable Garden

Today I noticed the first tomato's growing on my tomato plants from my co-worker. I am very excited.

Task 54 – Make a Cheesecake from Scratch

(54) Make a key lime pie of cheesecake from scratch

Every summer I make a nice meal for my family for the 4^th of July weekend. This year I have planned a special meal and decided I wanted to make a cheesecake with Blueberry topping as the desert. Having never made one I decided I had better try it before the big day.

One of the ladies at work who is an amazing baker had made a cheesecake and shared it that was out of this world and I knew she would share the recipe and here it is:

New York Style Cheesecake

Ingredients:

1 Box Graham Crackers
1 Stick of Butter
4 (8oz) Packages of Cream Cheese
1 ½ Cup of White Sugar
¾ Cup skim milk
4 large eggs
1 cup sour cream
1 table spoon Vanilla extract
¼ cup all purpose flour
1 21oz can of Comstock Blueberry Filling

Cooking Instructions:

1.   Preheat oven to 350˚F Grease a 9” spring form pan

2.   In a medium bowl, mix graham cracker crumbs with melted butter. Press onto the bottom of the spring form pan.

3.   In a large bowl or kitchen aid mixer, mix cream cheese with sugar until smooth. Blend in milk, and then mix in the eggs one at a time, mixing just enough to incorporate. Mix in sour cream, vanilla and flour until smooth.

4.   Pour into prepared crust

5.   Bake in preheated oven for 1 hour. Turn off the oven, and let cool in the oven with the door closed for 5 to 6 hours (this prevents cracking)

6.   Remove from oven and coat top with the blueberry filling.

7.   Chill in refrigerator until serving.

 



Movie Review – “Love & Other Drugs”

Movie: Love & Other Drugs

Rating: êêêê

Set in Pittsburg, 1996. Jamie Randall (Jake Gyllenhall) is working in an electronics store as a sales man who talks and flirts with women of all ages convincing them to buy phones and stereos. He also flirts with the store owner's girlfriend, Christy (Nikki Deloach). Jamie and Christy sneak into the back room for sex only she accidentally calls her boyfriend on the intercom phone and he hears everything. After getting punched in the face by his boss, Jamie runs out of the store flirting with a shopper on the way out.

Later that night, Jamie is having dinner at his parents’ house with his faimly. His father and his sister are doctors and his bumbling brother, Josh (Josh Gad), is rich from owning a medical software company. At dinner, Josh and his wife fight and he brings up Jamie getting fired to divert attention. The family gets on him for dropping out of med school and Jamie brushes it off and brings up that Josh is going to help him get a job as a pharmaceutical sales rep.

With Josh's help, Jamie goes to work for Pfizer. After several seminars and sales classes, Jamie goes out practicing his sales pitch and trying to get doctors to prescribe Zoloft and Zithromax. He is rebuffed constantly by doctors much to the dismay of his partner and mentor Bruce (Oliver Platt) who sees Jamie as his ticket to the "big leagues" of Chicago. Bruce wants Chicago so he can be near his wife and kids. Bruce tells Jamie if he can get Dr. Knight (Hank Azaria) to prescribe Zoloft instead of Prozac then all the other doctors will follow his lead. After trying to chat Dr. Knight up several times unsuccessfully, Jamie flirts with his receptionists and sneaks into the back medicine cabinets to steal all of the Prozac samples and throw them in the dumpster and replace them with Zoloft.

Unable to raise his sales he pays Dr. Knight a bribe of $1,000 to let him shadow him. Dr. Knight goes in to see patients and Jamie dresses the part and pretends to be an intern. Jamie spends the day babbling about how Zoloft is better than Prozac. One of Knight's patient’s is Maggie (Anne Hathaway) a 26-year-old woman diagnosed with an early onset of Parkinson's disease.

Maggie tells Dr. Knight that someone broke into her house and stole all her medication and she gives him a long list of refills that she needs. While there, Maggie asks Dr. Knight to look at a weird lump on her breast, which turns out to be a spider bite all while Jamie watches.Later in the parking lot, Maggie stops Jamie while he is throwing away the Prozac medication that he stole from Dr. Knight's medicine closet, and punches him in the face for pretending to be an intern and for looking at her breast. She takes his picture with an instant Polaroid camera and leaves.

Jamie finds Josh who has split from his wife  at his house and looking for a place to stay for a few weeks while he finds a place to live. Jamie calls Dr. Knight's receptionist who he is flirting with and having sex and gets Maggie's address and home phone number. He calls Maggie and asks her out for coffee. At first she says no, but then she gives in and meets him. The date is basically him being charming and her being rude.

After 10 minutes, they head back to her apartment and have very casual sex. Afterwards, she kicks him out right away and we see a montage of Jamie getting booty calls and him and Maggie having sex everywhere and whenever she calls him. Maggie even once shows up one night at Jamie's apartment, stark nude under a coat for sex, only to have Jamie's brother/roommate Josh, wakening where he was sleeping on the living room couch, see all of her.

Later at work, Jamie is throwing away the Prozac pills in a parking lot dumpster when he looks up to get punched in the face by Trey (Gabriel Macht), the hot-tempered rep for Prozac. Trey is the top seller in the region and gives the doctors and staff big kickbacks for pushing Prozac. He says he knows what Jamie is doing and that he will take him down if he doesn't stop. Trey and Jamie fight some more and he leaves Jamie on the ground after telling him to stay away from Maggie.

Jamie doesn’t listen and gets takeout food and goes to see Maggie at her downtown loft. After briefly discussing Trey and their relationship, and Maggie's Parkinson's they start to have sex but Jamie is unable to get erect for the occasion. After a few kind words from Maggie, they just hang out and she teases him that he should use some new erection drug that his company has developed. The next day before Jamie leaves, Maggie begins having problems with tremors in her left hand, which she hides from him as she pushes him out the door. Jamie approaches Bruce about the new drug and Bruce says he will look into it.

At work, Jamie gets the green light to sell Viagra and suddenly he is extremely popular and the doctors pursue him.

Back at his apartment, Jamie tried to convince her to have a relationship with him. She says no and leaves. The next day, Maggie is helping senior citizens onto a bus to go to Canada to get cheap prescription drugs when Jamie shows up and they argue about their relationship before she leaves. Jamie waits in the parking lot for her to come back and the next day when the bus does come back Maggie is touched that he waited for over 24 hours and consents to a relationship but that she gets to hate him and slam him to her girlfriends when he dumps her.

Back at her apartment after having another round of hot and heavy sex, Maggie talks about how she use to be a painter but since her diagnosis with Parkinson's, she has switched to photography/collages. Jamie talks about how he dropped out of med school because he has ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder).

One night after networking at the bar, Jamie comes home and in the throngs of passions he starts to hyper ventilate and tells her that he loves her and that she is the first person he has ever told that to.

A few days later, Bruce and Jamie are talking about an upcoming conference in Chicago and Jamie says he doesn't want to leave Maggie because of her illness. Earlier in the day, Maggie realized that she ran out of meds and couldn't get to the pharmacy in time to get a refill due to the wait in the clinic. After a fight Jamie attempts to leave but Maggie starts to cry and throws her glass of water against a wall for she cannot stop her tremors in her left hand. Jamie comes back and consoles her.

Jamie asks Maggie to go the conference with him. She accepts and while at the conference she gets invited by a woman who sees her hand tremors to a Parkinson's convention across the street. She is moved by the people (mostly elderly and middle aged) and their stories about dealing with Parkinson's. Maggie texts Jamie to come over and join her and while at the refreshment table, Jamie meets and talks with a middle-aged man whose wife is in the final stages of the disease (stage 4). Jamie asks for advice and the man tells him to make a run for it. This shakes Jamie and, after the convention, Maggie tells him how much she loves him and how happy she is that he is with her.

We see Jamie researching all about Parkinson's Disease and pushing Dr. Knight for info on specialists to help her find a cure or at least slow the progress of the disease. Over the next few weeks, Jamie starts taking Maggie to specialists and seminars across the country, paying for her to have tests done and maxing out his credit cards on hotel rooms and airfares. At one doctor's office in Boston, Jamie gets angry with a receptionist because their appointment was re-scheduled and they had flown in to see the doctor for only that one day. While he is yelling at the receptionist, Maggie walks out and Jamie runs after her. They fight and Maggie breaks up against Jamie's wishes.

Jamie is depressed but Dr. Knight talks him into going to a pajama party at another doctor's house. Jamie and Josh show up and Josh hooks up with someone right away. Jamie takes Viagra and has a three-way with two female co-workers. Jamie wakes up later in pain and sees that he is having a bad reaction to the Viagra. As his brother drives him to the ER, Josh tells him that he doesn't envy Jamie's random empty sex life and that he misses his wife and he is going back to her.

The next night, Jamie goes to meet Bruce for dinner at a restaurant and runs into Maggie who is on a date with some rebound guy. After some awkward conversation, Bruce shows up and says that Jamie has been promoted to the Chicago office. Maggie congratulates him and hurries off.

During dinner, Bruce tells Jamie that he didn't get promoted and that he just received a raise. Jamie goes home and starts to pack to move to Chicago when he finds a video that he and Maggie had made of them talking in bed and realizes that he wants to be with Maggie. At her work her boss tells him that she has left for a med run to Canada and Jamie speeds off after her.

Jamie flags the bus down on the highway and gets them to pull over at a rest stop and convinces Maggie to give him three minutes to talk. He tells Maggie about how she makes him a better person, that he loves her and needs her. She starts to cry and says that she will need him more. He says that’s okay and she says she can't ask that of him. He says "you didn't" and tells her that even if in some alternate reality there was a healthy version of both of them with no worries or problems that he would still choose their reality and problems. They hug and kiss and the movie cuts to yet another montage with a voice over from Jamie. It shows Maggie and Jamie living together and Jamie studying for med school.

In the final shot, there is an image of a video of Jamie talking about living everyday to the fullest and how money isn't everything and you should follow your dreams.

Movie Review – “Rite”

Movie: Rite

Rating: êêêê

Michael Kovak(Colin O'Donoghue), the son of a funeral director has two options become a funeral director like his father or join the seminary. Having grown indifferent to his father he decides to join a seminary to escape his life and get a college degree. On his way to the course completion, he is overwhelmed by a strong lack of faith and submits his resignation. His religious beliefs are further jolted when he sees a young girl haplessly dying in a road accident caused unintentionally by his mentor Father Matthew (Toby Jones) who was trying to convince him to stay. He reluctantly performs the ritual to absolve her sins as she dies in his arms as Father Matthew looked on. His calm handeling of the situation only further convinces Father Matthew that Michael is special. He urges him to go to Italy to take an exorcism course hoping that he it would strengthen his faith in Christianity.

In Italy he attends classes taught Father Xavier (Ciarán Hinds) and befriends a Reporter covering the class for a story named Angelina(Alice Braga). Father Xavier soon becomes aware of Michael’s skepticism and sends him to an eminent Jesuit exorcist, Father Lucas Trevant (Anthony Hokins). Father Lucas’s techniques though questionable and unorthodox are quite effective. He witnesses the exorcism of a sixteen year old pregnant girl who was raped by her father but still seems unconvinced believing instead she can be treated by medical means.  Father Lucas explains him that it takes multiple sessions over a long stretch of time to completely free a victim from the daemon inside them. Despite witnessing some supernatural occurrences during the aforesaid exorcism, Michael is as skeptical as ever. After the second exorcism, the girl’s condition becomes critical as she is moved to a hospital and strapped to the bed for her safety. She soon dies and the daemon finds a new victim in Father Lucas. On her deathbed she forsees the death of Michael’s father back in the US. Overcome by his loss and the erratic behavior of Father Lucas he turns to Angelina for help.  Realizing that father Lucas is now possessed he must overcome his own doubts and apprehensions in order to fight and destroy the ominous forces. With Angelina’s assistance Michael is forced to perform the exorcism on his own. After repeatedly rebuking the daemon during a long hard fight he completes’ the exorcism and frees Father Lucas. Successful, Michael leaves Rome, returning to the United States and to his life.

In the final scene back in the US we find Michael Kovak has discovered that his calling is as a priest as he enters a confessional to hear a young girl’s confession.

Task 53 - Plant a Vegetable Garden.

(53) Plant a Vegetable Garden

After a conversation with one of the nice ladies at work about gardening she kinda snickered that I had planted my tomato garden only recently and told me that she had started her's in february. This tells you a little about my gardening skills.

She was kind enough to have given me some of her plants and I have been continuing to grow them for the past month. They have shot up exponentially and mine have barely grown. They have also started to flower. I am amazed at how they are growing compared to my store bought tomato plants. My herb garden is also growing nicely and i have chive and parsley in addition to the basil.

Sprinkler Factory Undercurrents Opening Reception

Sprinkler Factory Undercurrents Opening Reception

38 Harlow Street
Worcester, MA

The historic Sprinkler Factory is home to a vibrant and flourishing artistic community, and boasts one of the largest exhibition spaces in New England. Juried fine art and craft shows are scheduled throughout the year.  Every first Saturday of the month the resident artists of the Sprinkler Factory open their doors and welcome the public to the facility.  During these open house events you can meet the artists, buy their work, sign up for classes and tour the facility. http://www.sprinklerfactory.com/

This past Saturday they hosted the opening reception for “Undercurrents” in the gallery at the Sprinkler Factory.  “Undercurrents” is an exhibit of the new works by the members of the Blackstone Studio.  It featured works by Lisa Barthelson, Sally Bowditch, Nina Fletcher, Mary Keefe, Kathy Murry, Karen Nunley, Jackie Ross and Lynne Welsh.

While there I checked out the glass studio of Elisa Minasian. She is a glass artist and offers a variety of classes. It was a very interesting visit and I am definitely going to sign up for a class and try my skills at bead making and if I enjoy it work my way up to something cooler. She showed us examples of work people have done and I was blown away. One artist made bee’s no bigger than the real thing and so amazingly detailed.  She has a website you can visit to learn more about what she offers. http://www.somethingphishyglasstudio.com/

Movie Review – “Black Swan”

Movie: Black Swan

Rating: êêê           

Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is a ballerina in a New York City ballet company whose life is completely consumed with dance. She lives with her obsessive former ballerina mother Erica Sayers (Erica Hershey) who exerts a suffocating control over her and blames her for the end of her own ballet career. When artistic director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) decides to replace prima ballerina Beth MacIntyre (Winona Ryder) for the opening production of their new season, Swan Lake he must pick from his many talented dancers in the company. Nina sees Beth having a breakdown in her dressing room and leaves. Nina wanting so badly to be like her sneaks in and steals her perfume, earrings, a nail file and a tube of Beth’s lipstick.

Nina isn’t his first choice because she is too perfect and tells her the position has been given to someone else. She shyly says ok and begins to leave. Before she can Thomas slams the door and asks her why she gives up so easily and pulls her into a passionate kiss. Upset by his unwanted advance she bites him he realizes she does have what it takes.

Leroy tries everything to make her a more polished dancer and not so mechanical and precise by slowly opening her up and making her more sensual and bring out that fight she has inside he witnessed in his office. Nina has competition though: a new dancer from San Francisco, Lily (Mila Kunis), who impresses Leroy as well.

Swan Lake requires a dancer who can play both the White Swan representing innocence and grace, and the Black Swan, who represents guile and sensuality. Nina fits the White Swan role perfectly but Lily is the personification of the Black Swan. As the two young dancers expand their rivalry into a twisted friendship, Nina begins to get more in touch with her dark side - a recklessness that threatens to destroy her.

Over the next several days, the stress of the role get to Nina. She begins seeing a darker version of herself in random passers-by. When Nina's mother is helping her dress for bed she sees scratches on Nina's back.. Nina says it’s a rash and her mother becomes angry and hints that Nina hasn't scratched herself like this since she was younger.

The next day as the dances are practicing one of them runs in, crying hysterically. She runs to the teacher who comforts her and asks what happened. She says Beth is in the hospital after an accident when she got hit by a passing car. Later, Nina is sitting at the edge of a fountain with Thomas and he tells her he believes that Beth threw herself into oncoming traffic.

She goes to practice and still cannot get the passion of the Black Swan into her performance and Thomas is frustrated by her dancing and leaves her in the studio. Lily happens to be nearby and offers Nina a shoulder to cry on as a supportive friend.

The next day, Thomas asks Nina if she needs time off after a comment from Lily that he should take it easy on her. Nina berates Lily for telling Thomas that she'd been crying. Lily says she was just trying to help. Nina tells her she doesn't need the help and Lily walks away irritated.

That night Lily comes to Nina’s house to apologize and invites her out. At first Nina refuses but finally accepts to rebel against her mother. Nina and Lily go out but Nina is so uptight that Lily offers her a pill to relax, saying it would only last a few hours. Nina at first turns it down but is reassured by Lily that the pills will only last a few hours and downs her glass. The two have a crazy, drugged night of clubbing with two guys. Nina finds herself hooking up with a man in a bathroom and rushes to leave and Lily runs to catch up with her.

They both return to Nina’s where they have a night of passionate and intimate sex. Lily begins to orally pleasure Nina and she sees Lily morph into herself and then back to Lily, which scares her. Lily doesn't stop and the two continue to have sex before Lily says, "innocent girl" before morphing back into dark Nina, who raises a pillow to smother her. Nina wakes up the next morning with a hangover-like headache to find Lily gone and realizes she is late for rehearsal.

When Nina arrives at the ballet studio, she finds Lily in her costume, practicing her routine with the rest of the troupe. Nina claims she says she was only filling in because Thomas had asked her to. Nina then questions Lily about why she left her house the night before, and Lily claims she went home to her place with Tom where they spent the night, and that last time she saw Nina was at the club.

A little later, Nina is being fitted for her Swan costume.Lily walks in and says Thomas made Lily Nina's alternate. Enraged and afraid, Nina finds Thomas and begs him not to make Lily her alternate, convinced that Lily is trying to steal the role from her. He tells her that the only person trying to sabotage Nina is "Nina".

In a fit of hysteria, Nina goes to the hospital to find Beth sitting motionless in a wheelchair, now a mere shadow of the woman she used to be. Nina quietly places a note and the items she stole on the table when Beth suddenly stirs and grabs Nina's arm. Beth is angry and asks what Nina is doing, and then she looks down and sees the items on the table. She asks Nina in an amused but irritated voice why she stole from her. Nina says she just wanted to be perfect like Beth

As Beth looks at the items and grabs the the nail file. She continues to say she's nothing as she suddenly stabs herself in the face with the file repeatedly. Nina finally grabs the nail file from Beth's hand and runs fearfully from the room to the elevator. As she gets in the elevator, she drops the bloody nail file.

Nina returns home, dashing hysterically into the kitchen to wash her hands which are covered in Beth's blood. She calls down the hall for her mother’s studio.  As she peers in, she imagines her mother's paintings moving and talking to her. She runs in and starts tearing everything down until her mother walks in asks what she's doing. Nina runs past her mother to her bedroom, with Erica close behind. As she tries to reach Nina, Nina slams the door on her hand, breaking it. Nina barricades herself inside. As Nina stands there, her skin begins to shift and take on a bird like texture, her eyes start to turn red, and her knee joints violently invert to the same shape as a bird. The hallucination disorients Nina and she falls and hits her head on a bed post which knocks her out.

She nearly misses her opening performance when her mother tried to protect her from her delusions by locking her in her bedroom and arrives just in time. She finds Lily in costume talking to Thomas in the hall, prepared to take the stage. Nina confidently tells Thomas that she is ready to perform with Lily asking what's going on behind her. Thomas follows her into her dressing room and says that he's already told Lily shell be performing. Nina says if she doesn't take the stage then the company will be marred with controversy, after Beth's incident. Thomas looks slightly amused and impressed at her audacity and tells her to get ready.

Nina goes on and is just as timid and rigid in her performance as she was during rehearsals. During a lift, she loses her concentration which causes the lead male to drop her center stage. Thomas enraged asks what the hell that was all about. Nina's inner diva comes out and she blames it on the dance partner. When she enters her dressing room, Lily is sitting at her dressing table putting on makeup. She taunts Nina and they begin to fight. Lily morphs into Nina off and on as Nina struggles against her. Nina pushes Lily into the same full-length mirror Beth destroyed and it shatters. As the fight escalates further, Nina grabs a piece of the mirror and stabs Lily in the chest. Unsure of what to do, Nina hides the bleeding body in her bathroom and then puts on the Black Swan's makeup. She takes the stage and begins to dance with passionate abandon. As she dances she begins to physically transform into a large Black Swan on stage. She dances the part better than ever and the crowd is amazed, giving her a standing ovation as the piece ends.

Nina runs off stage and, in front of everyone, kisses Thomas passionately after finally seducing him with her movements. He smiles and tells her to go back out for a second bow. After leaving the stage again, Nina goes into her dressing room to change for the next act and realizes the blood is starting to pour out from under the bathroom door. Nina places a towel over the growing pool of blood and then hears a knock at the door. When she opens the door... Lily is standing there. She apologizes for how things turned out between them and congratulates Nina on her amazing performance as the Black Swan. Nina is shocked and bewildered as Lily smiles and walks away. Nina turns around and removes the towel to find there is no blood. She turns to look at the broken mirror pieces from the smashed mirror still on the floor then suddenly moves her hand to her abdomen. She's bleeding, and she reaches into the wound and pulls out a broken shard of glass. (In her unhinged and delusional mind, Nina had stabbed herself before the Black Swan dance, imagining it was Lily). Despite her wound, she dresses for her final act as the White Swan. Nina dances the second act beautifully, which entrances the audience so that they don't see the small stain of blood growing in the mid-section of her white costume.

In the final scene of the last act, the White Swan goes to the top of a large structure to commit suicide. Nina does this with grace, looks down at the suitors below, and then turns and falls in slow motion onto the mattress below as her mother sits in the audience, smiling and crying. When the curtain falls, Thomas is overjoyed and newly infatuated with Nina. He is smiling in adoration as he kneels to congratulate her, a crowd of ballerinas gathering around the star. Nina doesn't speak, but instead just smiles and listens to the praise. Lily suddenly gasps - the first to notice the immense blood stain forming on Nina's costume. Someone calls for help, and Thomas frantically asks her, "What did you do?!" Nina calmly and quietly utters, "I was perfect". The crowd continues to roar with applause as Nina dies and the screen slowly fades to white....