Cooking By Numbers

Select what you have in your fridge, select what you have in your cupboard, and Cooking By Numbers will find recipes for meals you can make with those ingredients.  Don't think you have enough food to make something to eat?  Select what you have and you may be surprised what you can make!  Can't make up your mind about what to cook? Click I feel lucky and let the site choose for you. Cooking By Numbers

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Rep: Foreclosed owners should squat in their own homes

CNN has recently done a report on an Ohio Congresswoman urging people that have been foreclosed on to not leave their homes.  There are many laws protecting  the home-owner, and even evidence that many banks have "lost or destroyed" the paperwork proving they hold the ownership of the loan, letting many people off the hook if challenged. Full story here.
If you're poor and the bank is coming for your home, Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur has a plan for you. Just squat, she says. Yes, this Ohio Democrat is actually encouraging her financially distressed constituents whose homes have been foreclosed upon, to simply stay put. In a Friday report, CNN's Drew Griffin explored the case of Ohioan Andrea Geiss, whose home was foreclosed upon in April. "Behind in payments, out of work, a husband sick, she had nowhere to go," said Griffin. "So, she decided to follow the advice of her Congresswoman and go nowhere." In Lucas County, Ohio, over 4,000 properties were foreclosed upon in 2008, reports CNN. "So I say to the American people, you be squatters in your own homes," said Congresswoman Kaptur before the House of Representatives. "Don't you leave." She's called on all of her foreclosed-upon constituents to stay in their homes and refuse to leave without "an attorney and a fight," said CNN. "If they've had no legal representation of a high quality, I tell them stay in their homes," Kaptur told Griffin. Kaptur is a high-profile advocate of an increasingly popular mode of fighting foreclosures best known for it's key phrase: "Produce the note." By telling a bank to "produce the note," a homeowner can delay foreclosure by forcing the lender to prove the suing institution is actually the same which owns the debt. "During the lending boom, most mortgages were flipped and sold to another lender or servicer or sliced up and sold to investors as securitized packages on Wall Street," explains the Consumer Warning Network. "In the rush to turn these over as fast as possible to make the most money, many of the new lenders did not get the proper paperwork to show they own the note and mortgage. This is the key to the produce the note strategy." And Friday's segment on this growing foreclosure fighting "movement" was not the network's first. Earlier in January, CNN explored one person's strategy in demanding her bank "produce the note," only to find that the lender had "lost or destroyed" the evidence of debt ownership. Such a revelation can significantly strengthen a homeowner's position when asking to renegotiate a mortgage. That these banks, many of which received billions of dollars in government bailout funds, continue to boot defaulted owners from their homes, makes them "vultures" says Kaptur. "They prey on our property assets," she said. "I guess the reason I'm so adamant on this is because I know property law and its power to protect the individual homeowner. And I believe that 99.9 percent of our people have not had good legal representation in this."

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13 Things Your Waiter Won't Tell You

From Reader's Digest

Waiters share insider secrets about restaurant -- from what days to avoid dining out to how much to tip.

1. Avoid eating out on holidays and Saturday nights. The sheer volume of customers guarantees that most kitchens will be pushed beyond their ability to produce a high-quality dish. 2. There are almost never any sick days in the restaurant business. A busboy with a kid to support isn't going to stay home and miss out on $100 because he's got strep throat. And these are the people handling your food. 3. When customers' dissatisfaction devolves into personal attacks, adulterating food or drink is a convenient way for servers to exact covert vengeance. Waiters can and do spit in people's food. 4. Never say "I'm friends with the owner." Restaurant owners don't have friends. This marks you as a clueless poseur the moment you walk in the door. 5. Treat others as you want to be treated. (Yes, people need to be reminded of this.) 6. Don't snap your fingers to get our attention. Remember, we have shears that cut through bone in the kitchen. 7. Don't order meals that aren't on the menu. You're forcing the chef to cook something he doesn't make on a regular basis. If he makes the same entrée 10,000 times a month, the odds are good that the dish will be a home run every time. 8. Splitting entrées is okay, but don't ask for water, lemon, and sugar so you can make your own lemonade. What's next, grapes so you can press your own wine? 9. If you find a waiter you like, always ask to be seated in his or her section. Tell all your friends so they'll start asking for that server as well. You've just made that waiter look indispensable to the owner. The server will be grateful and take good care of you. 10. If you can't afford to leave a tip, you can't afford to eat in the restaurant. Servers could be giving 20 to 40 percent to the busboys, bartenders, maître d', or hostess. 11. Always examine the check. Sometimes large parties are unaware that a gratuity has been added to the bill, so they tip on top of it. Waiters "facilitate" this error. It's dishonest, it's wrong-and I did it all the time. 12. If you want to hang out, that's fine. But increase the tip to make up for money the server would have made if he or she had had another seating at that table. 13. Never, ever come in 15 minutes before closing time. The cooks are tired and will cook your dinner right away. So while you're chitchatting over salads, your entrées will be languishing under the heat lamp while the dishwasher is spraying industrial-strength, carcinogenic cleaning solvents in their immediate vicinity. LINK

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Laws of Work

  1. The first 90% of project takes 90% of the time, the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time.
  2. If you can't get your work done in the first 24 hours, work nights.
  3. A pat on the back is only a few inches from a kick in the butt.
  4. Don't be irreplaceable, if you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.
  5. It doesn't matter what you do, it only matters what you say you've done and what you're going to do.
  6. After any salary raise, you will have less money at the end of the month than you did before.
  7. The more crap you put up with, the more crap you are going to get.
  8. You can go anywhere you want if you look serious and carry a clipboard.
  9. Eat one live toad the first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.
  10. When the bosses talk about improving productivity, they are never talking about themselves.
  11. If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit. No use being a fool about it.
  12. There will always be beer cans rolling on the floor of your car when the boss asks for a ride home from the office.
  13. Keep your boss's boss off your boss's back.
  14. Arriving to work early sets an expectation that your less ambitious co-workers will not appreciate.
  15. Everything can be filed under "miscellaneous."
  16. Never delay the ending of a meeting or the beginning of a cocktail hour.
  17. To err is human, to forgive is not a part of company policy.
  18. Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he/she is supposed to be doing.
  19. Important letters that contain no errors will develop errors in the mail.
  20. If you are good, you will be assigned all the work. If you are really good, you will get out of it.
  21. You are always doing something frivolous when the boss drops by your desk.
  22. The people chosen to go to conferences are always the party animals with no intention of learning a thing.
  23. If it wasn't for the last minute, nothing would ever get done.
  24. At work, the authority of a person is inversely proportional to the number of pens that person is carrying.
  25. When you don't know what to do, walk fast and look worried.
  26. Following the rules will not get the job done.
  27. Getting the job done is no excuse for not following the rules.
  28. When confronted by a difficult problem, you can solve it more easily by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
  29. No matter how much you do, you never do enough, let alone too much.
  30. The last person that quit or was fired will be blamed for everything that goes wrong.

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