I made a few changes when I made it: I cooked it in my crock pot after I cooked the meats. It went on with raw potatoes around noon and was ready by dinner. I also used regular potatos instead of sweet potatos because I didn’t have sweet taters. The cilantro is a MUST!

I made my own meme, you can grab it if you were looking for something to write about. I won’t tag you, so don’t worry!

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Name something about yourself others probably don’t notice:

I am always on time. If I’m late (which is next to never), I will call and let you know WAY ahead of time. And because I’m always on time and never early, one of my biggest pet peeves is someone who is consistently not punctual. To me it is like breaking a promise. If someone is late, I feel like they are assuming my time is less valuable than theirs and that I’ll be ok with waiting. I’m not. With that said, I also don’t like call waiting. If you click over to answer another call (which I would NEVER do), don’t put me on hold for longer than 15 seconds. I’ll hang up. I also say at least 1 cuss word under my breath every time a light turns red on my time.

What does this say about you?

I’m impatient?

What is the worst purchase you’ve made in the last month?

Definitely this CD. AWFUL, Y’all. Awful.

And these huge glasses. Ugly, Y’all. Ugly.

What was the best thing you purchased in the last month?

Lot’s of things! I bought this for myself for Christmas. Got a screaming deal on it on eBay. I’ve wanted it for the longest time. Thank you PayPerPost, for the beautiful new bedding!

The second best thing I bought was some Fruitcake. I miss the german fruitcakes my grandmother used to serve this time of year. With coffee? Ohhhh! We called it Stollen, but it was basically the same thing as a fruitcake, only better because Germans know how to do it right. In Fayetteville, there were german grocers everywhere, but here you have to order german goodies online and pay out the wazoo for it. That’s one of the things I miss about home– the german traditions I grew up with.

But I don’t recommend the “Bimbo” brand fruitcake. Eck.

What noises do you hear right now?

My Boxer is farting non-stop. Eck. And I have a smoke alarm doing that annoying beep thing it does when the batteries are low.

What’s the best meal you had all week?

OMG! I cannot believe how absolutely delicious this recipe is. I made it with fresh cracked wheat bread. Apparently you can make it just veggie and it is scrumptious too, but I went for the meat. It sounded weird to have the mangos in this dish but if you make it, don’t change much about the recipe and I promise you will LOVE it! Trust! It was absolutely amazing. Jeremy said it was one of the best meals I’ve ever made. And I’ve made some yummy stuff, so that was a nice compliment. Needless to say, this is going to become a regular on the Stepherz menu:

Brazillian Stew– will share the recipe on my next post. Promise. Go ahead and warm up your crockpot and bread machine!

What was your favorite family moment this week?

Well, tomorrow is going to absolutely ROCK, so I’m guessing that this isn’t the highlight of the week. I’ll tell you about that later. But baking german lemon cookies with Bella last night was so much fun! We spilled sugar all over the kitchen floor. Yellow food dye too. We licked spoons and giggled and had a blast baking cookies for our fellas!

I loved this book so much that I read it in a week. I cannot recommend it enough. The women in this book had such amazing, depthful, and inspiring relationships with one another. This is a book about women, for women. There were dark sides, but that’s what I liked most. It was true to life, really. This wasn’t a book of fluff (although those are fun too!). It was hard to read sometimes, but I think it’s one of those books that sort of adds to your life in a way.

I haven’t read one like this since Sula or Beloved by Toni Morrison. If you want to read a book that will be with you for a very long time, do pick up a copy of A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini. If you read it, do drop me a line and let me know what you thought!

I assumed that I was the only one who never knew about Google’s “terms” on paid blogging/review writing/bought links. But judging from my last post, many of us don’t understand it. Unless, of course, we are forced to learn about it the way I did.

You won’t get in trouble if you use google’s ads to make money (pay-per-click) or if you advertise your etsy store or anyone else’s store. You aren’t breaking any rules unless, like me, you take money to write about businesses or websites on a regular basis. Not only do businesses pay me through PayPerPost.com to tell my readers about their site, but they are also paying for my links to them. Which is the “illegal” part. Basically, the higher your pagerank the more good you do for these businesses and it funks with Google’s search results somehow. To me, it should be a free for all, like any advertisement. Why do you drink Pepsi? Because you know about them. They paid for you to know their name. That might have a negative impact on RC and Coke, but who cares!? It’s a free country! If you have the money to pay for the links so what if it changes how Google’s search results go? It’s all part of the game. Only, the little guys profit off of such advertisement instead of the big rollers (like Google). It’s kind of like marijuana– the goverment (Google) doesn’t want it (blog advertising) to be legal because then they can’t tax (profit from) it. Basically Google is being a poor sport, in my opinion.

I probably don’t understand it all myself, so I’m not really one to go teaching. The blind leading the blind. But I do know that Google punished me so harshly that I went from a pagerank of 4/5 to a pagerank of ZERO! That’s a little too much, in my opinion. I’ll get over it, but I think about all those businesses and individuals who are REALLY hurting because of Google’s harshness. There are families actually standing in welfare lines because of it! There are people who lost thousands and thousands of dollars because of it because now they have to start new blogs/websites/online businesses. It’s no big deal for me because I only wanted to earn some Christmas money, and I was able to do that. But there are people out there who were making their livings and were reliant on their EARNED pagerank to have a successful online business. Google squashed them. It’s almost like they have a monopoly on something they have no right to.

And the whistleblower thing I learned about today just brought back all of those yucky feelings I had managed to supress about my 0 pagerank. Here’s what Google says:

“We work hard to return the most relevant results for every search we conduct. To that end, we encourage site managers to make their content straightforward and easily understood by users and search engines alike. Unfortunately, not all websites have users’ best interests at heart. Some site owners attempt to “buy PageRank™” in the form of paid links to their sites. Buying links to improve PageRank violates our quality guidelines.

Google uses a number of methods to detect paid links, including algorithmic techniques. We also welcome information from our users. If you know of a site that buys or sells links, please tell us by filling out the fields below. We’ll investigate your submissions, and we’ll use your data to improve our algorithmic detection of paid links.”

I feel like Google is being a bully. I don’t think they care as much about the quality of search results as they do about someone else making the money besides them. Just an opinion. It may not be the most educated one, but it’s mine. I had a pagerank of 4/5 because I guess I earned it somehow. But I won’t scoff at a business for being in a place that they can buy the same pagerank, not earning it. If we lived like that, why haven’t we all stoned Paris Hilton yet? Really!

I’m sure it’s more complicated than I could/want to get into. I just know it stinks and I am even more disappointed in the whole thing since I read this morning that Google is encouraging people to tell on one another. Bully-boy tactics.