Yum! Homemade arroz con carne made with that special ingredient you can't buy in stores: love. :-) December 17, 2006 11:18pm

It's 2:14am on Monday as I type these words. Yesterday (Sunday), I literally went to bed before sunrise and got up around sundown. So I'm officially becoming a vampire now. Works for me anyway. I like to dress stylishly in black and lure innocent victims back to my castle. Got that part down. Just gotta work on the blood sucking part. Hehe.

So I finished the previous blog entry around 6:30pm last night (Sunday) and left the house in time to catch the 7:00pm screening of Copying Beethoven at the local artsy movie theatre in nearby Bethesda. One of the lines from the movie (where actor Ed Harris plays the fictionalized character version of Beethoven):

"The vibrations on the air are the breath of God speaking to man's soul. Music is the language of God. We musicians are as close to God as man can be. We hear his voice, we read his lips, we give birth to the children of God, who sing his praise. That's what musicians are."

Nice quote--love it! Anywayz, after the movie, I went across the street to Barnes and Noble (surprise, surpise, I know) and as usual came upon yet another book to add to my list of must reads: Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day.

Yeah, I know content is the most important part of a website--I should know since I've been creating the content for DCFlamenco.com for ten years now. And yeah, I'm on a very respectable page two listing in Google for the search term "flamenco." But you know how it is with technology: you gotta keep up with the times or you'll get left behind. And while I've dabbled on and off in search engine optimization for years, I've never really approached this in a very systematic and effective manner. This book maps out a step-by-step process to do just that in literally an hour a day. And so one of my goals for the coming year, is not only to improve my search page ranking for the term flamenco but also for other important flamenco keywords and continue to keep up with the high quality content my website is known for.

And besides...I'm going through a computer geek phase which seems to come and go every couple of months: behind the scenes I've been trying out some new web-related software to add some cool new features to improve my website. Pssst! I'll gladly accept some cool PERL scripts as Christmas presents. Right now I'm looking for professional quality mailing list management software. You may have noticed that there is no sign-up form for my newsletter: I"m maxed out on the number of subscribers permitted in my current online freebie mailing list service which is a good thing: it means that my website is getting more and more popular, yay! But it's time for me to upgrade.

By now, you're probably asking, "OK, that's interesting, Miguelito, but what's with the food pic?"

Glad you asked. :-) So after the movie, I was sipping my usual doppio at the bookstore cafe. It was around 9:00pm. I got a call from a dancer friend asking what time I'd be home. Turns out she wanted to bring me some homemade South American food--awww how sweet! So two hours later, my friend drove up to my house and delivered what she promised. I'd tell you her name, but I think it's more fun to keep it a mystery. Hehe.

Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway), the homemade arroz con carne was heavenly. It was also my first meal of the day considering I woke up around 4:00pm. It had been a great weekend already with the flamenco gigs, the holiday party and getting to sleep in. The late night dinner delivered to my door was the cherry on top of this sweet sleepy Sunday. :-) Tomorrow, I'll open the second Tupperware of food and take some pics for you. Hehe.

Same plate: minutes later. December 17, 2006 11:25pm

So here are the holiday party pics I promised you earlier. Enjoy!