Reading In The Dark

Everything, all at once.

2012-01-31T07:00:00.000-05:00

My cat groans in his sleep. What does this say about me as his person? I don't think Tex ever groaned in his sleep. Is he sending me a message? Is he unhappy? Unfulfilled? Frustrated? Tex would just smash something or crunch an envelop in the middle of the night. He communicated. Small Cat whines in his sleep. I don't speak Small Cat yet.

My project for today is to find out what happens when you abruptly stop taking your steroids! The instructions suggest to not do this but my Doctor told me to stop so there you go. It turns out turning red is a bad thing, oddly, people at work were complimenting me on my oddly, unusually healthy complexion. Normally I look like death, I have in the past been what china dolls were judged against.

And now I look tomato. A tomato with a ten second attention span, now I'm going to read my kindle book, decide what I'm going to wear to work tomorrow, go shopping for chicken pot pie ingredients, walk the dog, clean the cat box and watch some TV.

Screen Actors Guild Awards / SAG Awards results 2012

2012-01-29T21:59:00.000-05:00

Not only did you not know they were on or even care, but even if you did care, you didn't know what channel they were on. Quick answer, not one of the big four. Think basic cable, the show took up valuable air time on both TNT and TBS. Simultaneously. Take that Oscars (tm), two channels simultaneously. Kapow.

8:02 PM Start

Stupidness. I Does not bode well for the rest of the show. Shut up Ducky. Shut up guy I don't know. Shut up Emily Blunt. Actors : We aren't here to hear your life story listen as you read from your resume.

8:05. Michelle Williams or some one who looks like Michelle Williams. Its hard to tell, but she seems comfortable smiling so it can't be Williams.

Best Supporting Actor Film - Christopher Plumber, Beginners ( spoke for too long)
Best Supporting Actress Film - Octavia Spencer, The Help Love her dress, love her. I still wanted Melissa McCarthy to win. (spoke too long)

Best Actor TV Comedy - Alec Baldwin, 30 Rock. Short Speech. (movie star)
Best Actress TV Comedy, Betty White, Hot in Cleveland . Kept it short.
Best Ensemble TV Comedy - Modern Family, well better them than Glee.

Best Actress TV Movie or Miniseries- Kate Winslet, Mildred Pearce .Not in attendance. (movie star)
Best Actor TV Movie or Miniseries - Paul Giamatti . Not in attendance. (movie star)

Best Actress TV Drama - Jessica Lange, American Horror Story (movie star)
Best Actor TV Drama - Steve Buschemi, Boardwalk Empire (movie star)

This is never actually going to end, an hour and a half in we have nine trophies, a life time achievement and the In Memoriam . Jeezus.

OMG Larry Hagman looks like utter hell. Gawd.

Best Ensemble TV Drama - Boardwalk Empire

Best Actor in a Leading Role Film - Jean Deguerdan, The Artist
Best Actress in a Leading Role Film - Viola Davis, The Help

Best Ensemble Film - The Help
9:59 PM

Friday Cat Blogging

2012-01-27T14:00:00.000-05:00

Friday doofiness

2012-01-27T07:00:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I prepared - "prepare ye the way of the Lord...", does any one else hear that when you hear the word "prepare" sometimes I even chair dance, anyway, today I made the meat loaf (s).

That pretty thing is one part ground beef, one part ground chicken , one part ground pork, not sausage, one part mushrooms and a half a part chopped onions/celery/carrots plus some of my watermelon BBQ sauce and a package of onion soup mix and a healthy splash of worcestershire sauce.

That pretty thing became

These adorable things that soon became

These delicious things. I have nifty little lids for these and as soon as they are cooled they'll get popped into the freezer and wait their turn.I think the last time I did this I ended up with more loaves, but the last time I did this I had more room in the freezer and this time around the real estate is a little more pricey and there is a lot less of it. I really like being able to freeze left overs for another day but I don't have enough room right now for a lot of thinking ahead... Sadly, I'm going to have to start cooking for one. I really need to get moving on that chest freezer.

Lessons

2012-01-26T07:00:00.000-05:00

Why you should not go grocery shopping while hungry - You will go in to the store to buy a handful of small things to make dinner and you will leave the store with four bags of food to make days and days of dinners.

For instance, for tonight, I bought turkey sausage and cheese for pizza. These were the only things I went to the store for in the first place. Cheese and sausage. I left with two kinds of Asian-y sauces, lemon juice, a different cheese, chicken thighs, raspberries, mushrooms, ground turkey, chicken and pork. My pizza was very good and provided me with dinner for tomorrow night as well. I also ended up with meatloaf fixings and the ingredients for another crock pot recipe.

I should have eaten first.

I was going to make the meat loaf yesterday but I talked myself out of it as I had no meat and I was not excited about going to the store to go get some, this is when having a magic cupboard would come in very handy, because then if you wanted to make meatloaf, you could make meatloaf! Anytime, day or night! You get an itch for loaf and there it is. I imagine at some point you would have to fill out a lengthy shopping list at some point so the magic cupboard would know what to supply, but it would be worth the time investment. You wouldn't have to wait for it to be convenient, you would just have the idea and then bang meatloaf fixings! Of course the magic cupboard would also have to be refrigerated but its magic so you know. Handy.

While I was shopping for cheese and sausage, I also picked up chicken thighs and Asian fish sauce. I've never used Asian fish sauce but I had to buy an enormous bottle of it so I can be pretty sure I'll be finding many ways of utilizing for the near future. I am curious how it will be utlized with chicken thighs, the recipe is for a kind of Pan- Asian/retro/suburban fusion thing so if they were selling from a food truck I would think it was awesome.

Contractually obligated Oscar (tm) Nomination entry

2012-01-25T07:00:00.000-05:00

This year I saw of the nominated films, The Help, Bridesmaids, The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo and Harry Potter. Below are a list of the relevant nominations, I skipped the technical categories.

Best Picture

"The Artist" Thomas Langmann, Producer
"The Descendants" Jim Burke, Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, Producers
"Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" Scott Rudin, Producer
"The Help" Brunson Green, Chris Columbus and Michael Barnathan, Producers
"Hugo" Graham King and Martin Scorsese, Producers
"Midnight in Paris" Letty Aronson and Stephen Tenenbaum, Producers
"Moneyball" Michael De Luca, Rachael Horovitz and Brad Pitt, Producers
"The Tree of Life" Nominees to be determined
War Horse" Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy, Producers

I saw The Help and read the book, but as good as it was, I'm not sure its really the Best Picture, one of them, surely, but not The . I haven't seen any of the others but fora afew months a year I really care about Ranger baseball and I did want to see Money Ball. I see it has a run between The Artist, War Horse and The Descendents and I see The Artist winning. Unless it a The Descendents evening... I heard that TA was really good as was TD, EL&IC was very stupid, H was not much better, MiP is yet another Woody Allen movie, MB was supposed to be really good, ToL I heard was very confusing and WH was better on stage.

I just noticed. Other than "The Help" every damn one of those movies are about men or boys. Every single one. Changed my vote, I want TH to win.

Actor in a Leading Role

Demián Bichir in "A Better Life"
George Clooney in "The Descendants"
Jean Dujardin in "The Artist"
Gary Oldman in "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"
Brad Pitt in "Moneyball"

Jean Dujardin, no lines, no soundtrack padding, no net.

Actor in a Supporting Role

Kenneth Branagh in "My Week with Marilyn"
Jonah Hill in "Moneyball"
Nick Nolte in "Warrior"
Christopher Plummer in "Beginners"
Max von Sydow in "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close"

Jonah Hill?! I'm still horrified. Christopher Plummer for being really old.

Actress in a Leading Role

Glenn Close in "Albert Nobbs"
Viola Davis in "The Help"
Rooney Mara in "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"
Meryl Streep in "The Iron Lady"
Michelle Williams in "My Week with Marilyn"

I really don't want Michellle "Professional Widow" Williams to win and I don't want Davis' to win because I want her to keep really trying for great roles and superior scripts and not end up doing Tyler Perry crap because she can and she all ready has her Oscar (tm). Roony Mara isn't going to get it. I want Meryle Streep but Michelle "Hurt Me" Williams will get it.

Actress in a Supporting Role

Bérénice Bejo in "The Artist"
Jessica Chastain in "The Help"
Melissa McCarthy in "Bridesmaids"
Janet McTeer in "Albert Nobbs"
Octavia Spencer in "The Help"

Sadly, with two from the same cast, "The Help" is going to cancel itself out. I want Melissa McCarthy to win but it isn't going to happen, so Berenice Bejo for the win.

Directing

The Artist" Michel Hazanavicius
"The Descendants" Alexander Payne
Hugo" Martin Scorsese
"Midnight in Paris" Woody Allen
"The Tree of Life" Terrence Malick

Very heavy hitters, Michel Hazanavicius for the block.

Writing (Adapted Screenplay)

"The Descendants" Screenplay by Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon & Jim Rash
"Hugo" Screenplay by John Logan
"The Ides of March" Screenplay by George Clooney & Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon
"Moneyball" Screenplay by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin. Story by Stan Chervin
"Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" Screenplay by Bridget O'Connor & Peter Straughan

Aaron Sorkin. Like he isn't going to win.

Writing (Original Screenplay)

"The Artist" Written by Michel Hazanavicius
"Bridesmaids" Written by Annie Mumolo & Kristen Wiig
"Margin Call" Written by J.C. Chandor
"Midnight in Paris" Written by Woody Allen
"A Separation" Written by Asghar Farhadi

"Bridesmaids"! Yay! Kristin Wigg! Wooo! SNL! SNL! SNL!! And it goes to "A Separation"

Oscar Nominations 2012

2012-01-24T09:39:00.001-05:00

And the nominees are...

As seen on TV

2012-01-24T07:00:00.000-05:00

Another food related thing I did this weekend. I went to a food truck and got myself dinner.

According to the TV, eating at a food truck is exciting and the food is outstanding . I stood in the rain and that was not exciting ,and the food, while good, it was not outstanding. Maybe if the truck was not parked so close to my house or if they more of a menu, it might have been different. The BBQ chicken was just fine but maybe I should have found a truck serving some sort of over priced, pretentious ethnic fusion not found in nature, instead of down-home home cooking in the gas station parking lot, it would have been better. Or maybe all of it it just food from a truck.

This morning it was really cold. Almost painfully so. Now the fog is like pea soup and its almost balmy.Mother Nature wants me to be miserable. This is why I am still sick and why I finally went to see my doctor after being sick for a month and a half. Shehe put me back on antibiotics and another cough medicine.I've dosed myself with both of them and I don't feel any different, the antibiotic should kill all the bacteria I am carrying around, good and bad and its strong enough that I should be noticing the die off by tomorrow morning.

2012-01-23T07:00:00.000-05:00

Last weekend I worked. This weekend I didn't! I slept late, I watched TV , ordered my peppers and tomatoes from an untested source and went hunting for lamb. I had so much time to not work, I could plan and prepare for a meal my only prior exposure to was reading about in a magazine (Real Simple)

KNowing I was in the market for lamb I tried to think like a wolf.

They don't let wolves into grocery stores. They also do not let lambs into my grocery store so I had to move upmarket. Way upmarket. Covered parking up market, I'm pretty sure that the reason I couldn't find the shopping carts was because instead there are people who carry your food around for you, that kind of upmarket market. It was so thoroughly upmarket they had lamb, not the lamb I was upmarket marketing for, but close enough. I have a boning knife for a reason.

My inner wolf and I brought my kill home and got to work. Pork shoulder is pork shoulder is pork shoulder. Its just a matter of who bones it and what bones you deal with. In this case I took my handy fish boning knife and made my chops into chunks.

The recipe:

Lamb, Apricot and Olive tagine - AKA pretty standard lamb stew with apricots and completely unnecessary olives and no potatoes.

1 1/2 pounds lamb shoulder, trimmed and cut into 1 inch pieces or 1 1/2 lbs of lamb shoulder chops, chopped
4 carrots cut into 1 inch pieces
1 medium onion, chopped
1/2 cup dried apricots halved
1/2 pitted green olives (not necessary)
2 cloves garlic, chopped
2 tablespoons all purpose flour
1 teaspoon paprika (not necessary)
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
kosher salt and black pepper
1 cup couscous (not necessary)

In a 4-6 quart slow cooker mix together the meat and vegetables and spices and flour. Add 1/2 cup water. Cover and cook until lamb and veggies are tender, 7-8 hours on low, 4-5 on high. Ten minutes prior to serving, prepare the couscous.

I used store bought potaotes as my side. The stew was a lot sweeter than I had thought it would be, my guess is thanks to the carrots and apricots, I was afraid it would be too hot and I wouldn't enjoy it. It turned out to be delicious. Instead of adding water to the slow cooker per the instructions, I made broth from the bones and used it instead, it was a little work but I think it made the dish better.

Friday Cat Blogging

2012-01-20T14:00:00.000-05:00

Small Cat is sleeping hard in a box, trying out method acting to better his chances of getting cast in the next Sarah McLaughlin/SPCA ad

Feeling it

2012-01-20T07:00:00.000-05:00

I totally would have posted yesterday, all about my travels with getting my house clean. A lot of talk about cleaning the kitchen and the bathroom and vacuuming and general tidying. Very fascinating, I'm sorry you missed it.

Just your luck my computer decided to be a butt head. So instead of re-visiting this painful time in our history, I'm instead going to post a picture of my new hero

You've heard of the Lion in Winter? Meet the Iris in January.

Joy

2012-01-18T07:00:00.000-05:00

In honor of being extremely over my hacking cough and painful bruised rib, I decided to bring out the really big OTC gun - My home made chicken soup. I am awaiting my immediate curing. I had two heaping servings a couple of hours ago and it should be kicking in momentarily.

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Not kicking in and while taking a break for a fit of coughing, noticed I was not cured. My hacking cough and intransient rib pain have not abated. The soup is terrific but apparently not the miraculous cure I had thought it would be. Perhaps it needed more chicken fat, it ended up with a lot of non healing chicken bones but not a significant amount of super healing schmaltz. When I am healthy I am aggrieved by chicken fat, when I am sick I crave it.

I am so tried of being sick, even this obnoxious state of sickesque as I have been for the last month, I fear that this state is my new baseline. On the upside, it reminds me of school and being young enough to be truly sick now, years later and years older, I'm not truly sick and yet I feel sick.

I also feel as though this is all apart of some sort of a test that I am failing. This morning I finally got my long promised new computer at work. I had heard that it is a terrible thing and the new computer would kill me but I was hopeful. They set it up after I went home on Friday and left me with little more than a scrap of paper with some code scribbled on it without any explanation of what to do with it. They also left it unplugged, so while it worked for two minutes after I arrived at my desk, it soon stopped. I did not know why. I thought it was going to kill me louder, or at least in my more interesting way. I mean making me want to take a long nap isn't very exciting. I always want to take a nap. Maybe its going to kill me in my sleep.

Instead of falling into a computer generated shame spiral - I didn't do anything but I didn't do anything either. And not a cool CGI one like Pixar, an uncool one like Japanmation. I decided to believe that the office gnomes were busy messing with me. Again. And then I called the head IT woman, actually I called "a" IT woman and got her and then she had a temper tantrum because of how my computer was left at me.It still sucks being yelled at even when its not your fault, it feels like it. I love being screamed at by management.

We decided that everyone who is not her in her department and my boss are completely inadequate and stupid and working against her and she was right and they were wrong. I told her she was right and everyone is working againts her. It made her happy and she sent a minion to fix my machine.

Self Service

2012-01-17T07:00:00.000-05:00

In honor of MLK Day I decided to do a little service for others - but first I had to do some service for myself : I cleaned out my kitchen cabinets 1)because it was time and 2) I knew that I could find some donatable stuff if I just looked. I could not look until I could see.

Here is where we started:

I'm not proud, this was a bad situation. I didn't know what was in there and I couldn't find anything. I had long given up being able to find anything when I needed it and picked up some Ikea tupperware that I kept in a separate location.

After much work this is where I ended up

Now I can tell what I have and I know where it is. I even moved my Ikea tupperware in with the rest of the plastic. Everything has a place and everything is in its place. If if I want a pot, I gots a pot, if I need a container of a certain size, its not a question of "where" its a question of "which".

There was some collateral damage. I thought I was going to find more to donate but it just wasn't to be, some stuff I couldn't give away it was so nasty and I don't think even Goodwill wants my used butter containers. I did find a few things to hand over and I all ready had some donatables from a prior cabinet clean out so I still can get some service points. I made a itemized list and bagged everything up, first thing Monday morning I handed it all over the Goodwill. My recycle box runneth over.

I moved on to the next project, I cleaned out my food cupboard. It didn't want any photographic evidence of how bad that looked. While I was cleaning it out, I discovered that I had three half empty bottles of peanut butter. I don't like it and and Dogger can't eat it and I hate throwing away food. I was able to open up a lot of space with my cleaning projects but not so much I wanted to take up space with stuff I don't eat. I remembered that I have a lot of pine cones in the attic. I think I had a Martha moment several years ago and collected them for a project that never happened.

Now I had a project. I had some pine cones, peanut butter and some bird seed.

Its not exactly in line with traditional public service, but birds need love too.

After all this clean out, I watched some TV and on TV I watched Two Fat Ladies and in between meals made up of game, artisanal cheese and fresh caught seafood, they made Beef Stroganoff. I don't have access to fresh caught or just slaughtered or artisanal anything but I can get my Stroganoff on. It called for more meat than a single gal on the go really needs, but it also afforded me enough left overs to feed myself for days and I was able to freeze some too. It was really good and not all that hard to make and all it called for sour cream, onions, mushrooms, port and good beef. I substituted fajita meat and instead of the called for button mushrooms, I scored some lovely baby portabellas on sale.

The last thing I did was reward myself with some nice dessert.

The crust looks funky because apparently el cheap-o store brand pie crust wants to be used right now and does not like to kept waiting. Whatev, it was still good.

Golden Globe Winners 2012

2012-01-15T21:09:00.000-05:00

Best Supporting Actor Drama - Christopher Plummer, Beginners
Best Actress TV Comedy - Laura Dern (Garbled)
Best TV Series, Mini-Series or TV Movie - Downton Abby
Best Actress Mini-Series or TV Movie - Kate Winslet, Mildred Pearce
Best Actor TV Drama - Kelsy Grammer, Boss
Best TV Series Drama - Homeland
Best Score - The Artist
Best Original Score - Madonna, "Masterpiece", W.e
Best Performance TV Series, Movie, Mini-Series Actor - Edris Elba , Luther
Best Actress Motion Picture, Comedy - Michelle Williams, My Week with Marilyn
Best Supporting Actor TV Series /Mini-Series - Peter Dinklage, Game of Thrones
Best Animated Feature Film - The Adventures of Tin-Tin
Best Screenplay - Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris
Best Actress TV Series, Movie or Mini-Series - Jessica Lang, American Horror Story
Best Foreign Language Film - Iran, A Separation
Best Actress TV Series Drama - Claire Danes, Homeland
Best Actor TV Comedy or Musical - Matt LaBlanc, Episodes
Best Supporting Actress Motion Picture - Octavia Spencer, The Help
Best Director Motion Picture - Martin Scorsese, Hugo
Best TV Series Comedy or Musical - Modern Family
Best Actor Motion Picture Comedy or Musical - Jean Dejuardin - The Artist
Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama - Meryl Streep, The Lady
Best Motion Picture Comedy or Musical - The Artist
Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama - George Cloony , The Descendents
Best Motion Picture Drama - The Descendents

10:55 pm

Friday Cat Blogging

2012-01-13T14:00:00.000-05:00

Friday 13th

2012-01-13T07:00:00.000-05:00

Friday the 13th. Lovely. You get a Friday, which is wonderful in itself, but at the same time, you get the 13th, which defines "not wonderful" which even when it falls on a Tuesday, makes a day which is more or less meh under the best of circumstances veer into blergh territory normally reserved for those Mondays where it sleets but not snows.

This time its a Friday and I've had a really long week and I really deserve a long weekend and as luck would have it, we're going into a three day weekend - the last three day weekend until freaking April. I am going to totally embrace this Friday. Even if a piano falls on my head. The next time we get a day off is Good Friday, which according to some sources the originally date was a "13th", which is why the day is unlucky. But I think that assumes they were using a modern calendar and not what they were using at the time. But its a nice story.

Okay. Alec Baldwin dropped some weight and fixed his hair and he's looking kind of hot. Not his really, lets be serious, unnatural Betelgeuse era hotness, but much hotter than his recent 30 Rock era pudgy lukewarmness as he was beginning to look like a cruise ship. Go Alec.

Spring

2012-01-12T07:00:00.000-05:00

No, those aren't blingy condom packages! I got my seeds! I know right now they don't look particularly interesting right now but I see TV cooking show approved flat Italian parsley and organic Italian oregano and the most pretty double bloom morning glories! Totally not condoms.

I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to do with the herbs since in my experience they are expensive and come pre-crushed and dried in little jars. Imagine my shock when the seeds were so cheap and available on the open market like tomatoes or hoodies. The small fortune I've spent on store bought varieties had given me in the impression that herbs are somehow more special and hard to produce than cancer drugs or decent scripted network television. I'm interested to see at what point in their growth cycle the little jars form and how they end up crushed and dried. Does it happen during the day? is it only over night? How about the labels? Do I make those or do they also just appear. How long does it take the little jars to come ripe?

I'm more comfortable with the morning glories. I plant a lot of seeds, pay very little attention to them, plant other, faster growing, sexier plants around them and some of the sad, unsexy seeds will come up and create saddish vines and even fewer of them will live long enough to flower. In this case I don't have a lot of seeds so I'm a concerned that these might not work with my gardening philosophy or be as easy to grow as my cheaper seeds in prior years and I might have to pay attention to them.

The problem with this is that historically, my potted plants do best when I treat them a like a mother turtle treats her young, I turn my back as soon as they are planted and never see them again. When I do show them proper care and attention they turn yellow and die. My attention causes potted plants to lose the will to live. Best case scenario is to dump the seeds into pots, cover them with dirt, water them a couple of times and forget what they are and hope for the best.

A more useful cat

2012-01-11T07:00:00.000-05:00

If they can breed dogs to do just about any task imaginable, why can't they breed a cat that wants to be a pillow? Dogs want tear out the throats of weasels, to herd or pull carts or eat bad guys. Dogs have resumes. Cats nap a lot. I don't get that while cats are happy to sleep all day and lounge around why no one will make the leap to creating a pillow cat? I want to spend the day napping and lounging! They can be spread out pillows and teeny cat ball pillows! they conform to the available space! They are ideal for the job. They are naturally warm, very soft, very fluffy, squishy yet with a comfortable level of firmness and they create a lovely white noise as well. I don't see why this is not happening.

They make cats that collapse when you pick them up and they won't make a cat that wants to be a pillow? Neck pillows! What about Cat Heating Pads? warm? solid? a little weight to them? Why is this not something we have all ready?

I mean, otherwise, what good are they? Even otherwise useless yappy little dogs will tear up a weasel! Cats aren't nearly as annoying and the best they can do is chase bugs and maybe the odd mouse if they even know what a mouse is. I really think its time to get moving on the pillow cat idea.

And also? Cats could be bred to be massage therapists! They all ready "make biscuits" as a way of helping bring up their mothers milk, why not exploit this naturally occurring skill to mankind's benefit? Cats have very strong "fingers" and I think they could be bred to know musculature and how to work with it. Can you imagine a litter of trained massage cats working out those knots on your back? And again, warm and that's very therapeutic and comforting. I see a lot of potential here! It would totally solve the homeless cat situation! And medical costs? Shredded! Its about thinking outside the cat box.

Doing my thang

2012-01-10T07:00:00.000-05:00

Well, Monday wasn't nearly as productive as the weekend was. My big accomplishment was bringing in the paper and feeding the animals and walking Dogger twice. I'm not quite up to reintroducing our evening walk yet. I did fork over for a stroll around the back yard in the rain and then a bonus meander around the front yard so I don't feel like I'm bringing her down with me. I'm going to take her out later too so I might be approaching curb buster territory, in dog person land, I don't want to make enemies.

A little later I went all the way downstairs and I watered my mushroom and after I got myself back upstairs, noted that my aloe plant is sprouting baby aloes so I am being somewhat productive, not weekend level productivity but certainly not falling asleep in front of the TV level sloth.

I could vacuum the living room but I don't want to hit my peak too early in the week and spend the rest of the week trying to look busy. With that in mind, I'm concentrating on filling the dishwasher because it seems like a good, manageable task that I can do over time and not burn myself out. I'm keeping myself busy watching Cooking Channel pretty much all the time, my new hobby is DVRing shows and then watching them and then, drum roll please deleting the episode because I don't "have" to save it! I have access to those shows all the time! I don't have to stock pile them for a rainy day! Whee!!!

I also now have DIY all the time so maybe I'll build an addition or something.

Resolutions

2012-01-09T07:00:00.000-05:00

Friday, Accomplishday, Sunday... Saturday was a very good day.

I decided to jump ship from Dish to Direct in order to save some cash and as it turns out, "some" is $30 a month - Not a huge amount but over the course of the year it means $360 and that is substantial. Its going to go up in 2013, but that's how the industry works. I'll pay that for a year and then I'll jump ship to Dish and take advantage of their Welcome Back Deal - for two years and then I'll jump ship again.

I've discovered that my $30 a month was mostly paying for a more ergonomic operating system. It was not paying for some channels I really like and as it turns out, are basic channels everyone else gets! Even on the cheapest packages and the only reason I did not get them was that I had been a client for too long, new clients got them and were paying less for them and that made me mad. I was also mad because I haven't been able to watch TV upstairs since last April and Dish wouldn't send some one out to fix it, insisting that the only service I need was me to play with my remote. I tried to explain it wasn't a "mental" problem with the system, it was a "physical" problem brought on by a snapped cord. I pay less and now I have all the channels I've lusted after and I can watch my bedroom TV again.

I got an early start on Saturday because the technician from Direct arrived on time.I welcomed him in my pajamas. I had scheduled the visit between 8a-12p but who knew when they said 8a they meant 8a? I thought I would at least have a chance to brush my teeth before I let the guy in. Its a good thing he got there early because he was there for five hours! If I had scheduled the visit for the afternoon he would have been there all night. Can you eat dinner in front of the guy? Do you make dinner for two? Whats the etiquette?

He wasn't the only one working. I took all the Christmas stuff down, this doesn't sound like a lot until you realize I spend the month of December in Santa's Workshop.The outdoor stuff was out of the yard but not put away and was living in my entry way blocking my front door. Its all boxed up and in the attic. This also took about five hours.

After the tech finally left, I started on the cabinets. I started with the cabinet next to the stove and cleaned it out. My loss is Goodwills' gain. I didn't find a lot to donate, but no one needs two hand mixers and there is only so many food choppers one needs and how many plastic strainers are necessary? Getting this space opened up, allowed me to move my most used pots and pans from cabinet 3, opening it up to house some small appliance's that I don't use as often. I'm still not happy with it but I think after I clean out the other cabinet, I'll be able to rehome some of the stuff from cabinet 3 and make it look nicer. We haven't even spoke about the cabinet over the refrigerator yet. There is a lot of real estate up there and I know I could be using it better.

Also, I did the laundry.

Friday Cat Blogging

2012-01-06T14:00:00.000-05:00

Picture It

2012-01-06T10:00:00.000-05:00

Orinental New Years

Doctor Who

2012-01-06T07:00:00.000-05:00

I do not have pneumonia or a broken rib. My Doctor was over joyed. I am coughing all the time and it does hurt. So clearly, I'm on the mend. My cough syrup actually worked when I took it a second time, it also made me throw up but dose three stayed where I put it.

I'm fatigued again, last night I looked at the clock because I thought it was late and it turned out to be a quarter after eight. I was in bed by nine. I had been staying up until ten, so it feels like a step back - and yet, apparently, I am not ill. Today I feel asleep in front of the TV at 5:30. Still, not ill.

Okay, I am more than my health, back to Resolutions! I decided to keep it to jobs, clear work that has to be done instead of some over arching Change . So far I've decided on three jobs I want to do get done.

Job one - is to empty and clean out the cabinet next to the stove. Its full of stuff and I think it needs to be edited and some cuts are going to be made. I think I did this at some point in the past but it really needs to be done again and perhaps with more vigor. I would like to be able to store some of my bigger pots and pans in there.

Job two - is going to be the cabinet next to the back door. I want to recycle all the re-used containers in there and donate or maybe more appropriately, throw out anything that is not useful or same how has lost its lid. When all that is done, I want to get new square containers that are easier to store. Round is nice, and I'm certainly not going to remove all round containers, but I want to move on with the more efficient square containers. This will be a big job.

Job three - will be the cabinet over the refrigerator. I'm pretty sure I haven't looked in there since I moved in and it has somehow become full of things that I don't use because I can't get to them because they are where they are and I think the space could be better used for other kinds of storage.

No Truth in Advertising

2012-01-05T07:00:00.000-05:00

Just because something is supposed to knock you and your cold out cold does not mean that it will. I did not fall immediately into a drug induced sleep and neither did my cough. We stared at each other in the dark and scared the cat.

At some point I did sleep because I woke up to Small Cat trying to remove my ear. I did not know he suddenlydidn't like the ear or if this was a cumulation of years of hate, he never said anything about it and I know the ear has never said anything to me to defame the cat but Small Cat just hated that ear. Or maybe, it wasn't hate maybe he was expressing love! He was kind of stroking it, with his claws but not in such a way as to claw it off my head, more like seeing if he could remove it, or maybe he was petting me . Tex never did that, either tried to remove my ear or pet me. Tex may have had issues but he wasn't into any weird shit like Small Cat.

And now my head hurts.

I was able to put a resolution into the out box. I was successful in finding the x-ray place ( odd, how much easier things like this is when you bother to do the homework first) and got the work done. Now I have to wait to hear from the doctors office. Its going to be either A) Its not broken and I need to man up about it or B) It is broken and I'm really just going to have to man up about it because there isn't anything they can do about it.

Try, try again.

2012-01-04T07:00:00.000-05:00

Another day another resolution. Tomorrows resolution is going to be that I will find that damn radiology clinic that I could not find today. I will also write down the address. And its name.

I have been ill.

I was successful picking up my fancy new cough medicine though. I really needed a success by that point. Supressent in hand, I'm pretty sure its going to take care of a lot of things I need because its suppose to be a rock star quality narcotic, um, cough suppressant, uh, codeine.

I hope it does work because yet another one of my resolutions is that I will get rid of this cough - it has way, way, out stayed its welcome and I am ready for it to pack up its Jersey Shore caliber outfits and go back to wherever it came from - And while its packing up it can take its attendant alleged rib issue its been wearing like a bad weave. I know it hurts like a son-of-a-bitch but I don't know why. Is it possible to sprain a rib? It might be like a sprained ankle, you know, they hurt way worse than an actual break and for longer. You can't do anything for a sprain and even if it is a break there isn't anything they can do for it. They all ready gave me codeine, what more can I ask for?

Hair Don'ts

2012-01-03T07:00:00.000-05:00

I have several resolutions I want to take care of but the first and the easiest was No More Gray Hair in The New Year! . I went with a new brand this time around because as much as I like the other guys, the resolution was "no more gray hair" and other brand was just not good at that.

So. I have "no more gray hair", resolution resolved. But, now my hair is darker than its been since I discovered Sun In back in '86. I'm like the worlds oldest Goth Girl! I also am now sporting a 'do that would make Side Show Bob proud. There is such thing as "too much conditioner", if you had ever doubted it. Now my hair has more body than the fat lady at the opera and more life than a green house. If I had flat lifeless hair this would be super but as it was, it was all ready shopping in the Big Girl section at the store and frankly did not need more life.

Tomorrow, more resolutions.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! 2012!!!!

2012-01-01T00:00:00.000-05:00

HAVE A SAFE AND HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM ALL OF US AT THEDIANAVERSE TO ALL OF YOU!!!! HAPPY,HAPPY,HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!

2012!!!!!

Friday Cat Blogging

2011-12-30T14:00:00.000-05:00

Small Cat wants to get this party started .

Spring in the winter.

2011-12-30T07:00:00.000-05:00

I am not just sitting around watching TV and playing with my cleaver. I am also reading my mail

Did you know they make blue potatoes? I'm sure I have said nasty things about them in the past, but this year I want them and I want them bad. Not bad enough to buy them from Burpee, but bad enough to do a quick Google search to find them cheaper. And I did! A third of the price too! for more! Suck on that Burpee! and while I was cheating on Burpee, I learned that another fancy variety of spud I had wanted from them is not as pest and disease resistant as I would like. The more you know... I think the rest of the seed potatoes I get this year I'm going to get locally. And there will be "the rest". This spring should be spudtastic.

I know those look purple but they are blue. They are the official carb of the DNC.

Leave a message!

2011-12-28T07:00:00.000-05:00

Hello Children!

I'm pretty sure I'm writing to an empty room. This is always the slowest, lowest readership time of the year. You are not around your computer and have other ways to keep yourselves occupied - perhaps you are spending your winter break Occupying , which is terrific and more power to you! or you are just sleeping late and catching up with your DVR - whatever. I feel you.

In honor of all these things keeping us all busy, and because it seems that none of the sites I read on a daily basis are active until after the New Year, I also will be taking off. More or less. I'll be around but not posting on my regular schedule, because if no one else is putting in the effort, and I don't want to be the lone grade grubber making everyone else look bad with my dedication to providing new content to the masses. Totally.

Oh, I got a cleaver for Christmas. I will never be laughed at by food again. Roll away from me now... whack, whack, whack! Tonight, for the first time, I had a normally insolent chicken breast call me Ma'am. I wanted it cubed and damn it, it cubed.

Friday Cat Blogging, Christmas-Style

2011-12-23T07:00:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas Eve Eve!

Recovery

2011-12-22T07:00:00.000-05:00

I worked all day and spent only briefest of time face down on my keyboard, went to Broskey and Alphagals' for Broskeys Birthday and had a fab time, came home coughed up only a minimal portion of spleen, thought about emptying the dishwasher, didn't. Went to bed.

Health.

2011-12-21T07:00:00.000-05:00

I finally got in touch with my doctor who got me in touch finally with some antibiotics. I'm feeling much better all ready.

I'm feeling so much better that I was able to (finally) wrap Broskeys birthday gift and then I spent an extended period of time digging around in the attic for another gift and even after all that, I was still able to go to the store to pick up some things I had been needing but not able to get because I needed to be asleep by 7:30. This is a lot! I haven't got this much accomplished in a single evening since, since, two weeks ago? And I did a grand total of almost nothing.

I'm feeling so well that when I went to the store, I actually remembered to buy everything I needed! I now have adequate bathroom paper products to make it through the new year. I have a lot of paper products now, I have stacks of toilet paper and mounds of paper towels. I can spill anything and clean it up immediately. Lately I've been just letting the animals take care of spills, because I can't - a much more environmentally responsible solution to household spills, but sticky if the animals aren't through enough quickly enough.

But, here it is after eight and I'm not all ready asleep! And I can do this and follow interact with Dogger while following a TV show without getting helplessly confused and anxious. Wow. And I'm pretty sure I'm not high on cough suppressant.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BROSKEY!!!!!!

Ow.

2011-12-20T07:00:00.000-05:00

Dogger just doesn't understand I want to collapse on the my chair and read my magazine and be still, ideally, with Small Cat in my lap. Dogger won't let me just be! She wants to sit in the door way and whine and whistle and whimper while Small Cat and I are trying to relax.

If I go and get Dogger so she can lay next to my chair and be still, she wants to jump and spin around and be active. I want to recover which precludes "activity". To calm Dogger down, I take Dogger outside to pee, but the outside is cold, and she wants to wander around. I want to sit on my chair and heal, I can not heal in the yard. I bring her back in the house and she wants to play. She does not get it! Small Cat gets it, he wants me to be still so he can curl up on sleep. He does not "get" coughing.

In addition to all this my teeth hurt. It feels like the second day with braces or I spent the day with Helga the Nazi Hygienist getting a very through teeth cleaning. And my head hurts. On the upside, I did buy approximately a metric ton of kleenex so I do have a handy solution to this pain but I also feel that I do not want to look like Rudolph, even in the privacy of my own home. And blowing my nose scares the cat.

Oh, and my entire rib cage hurts. Front and back. Cough. Cough. I called my doctors office today to say I have these symptoms and should I come in and in any case could they please write me a script for a cough syrup that could make all this stop. I need two, one for night and one for day. I could get one at the store but they have a bad habit of being great at stopping coughs but not great for the rest of my health. OTC is for young people.

We were all at lunch and some one said something funny and I laughed and then I had a fun coughing spasm. In front of my boss.

Boss Buddy - Is she all right?
Boss - Why are you looking at me? I'm a social worker! You're a nurse! Is she all right? Be a nurse!
Boss Buddy 2 - Lets move on from here.

I feel the need to point out that BB2 was my boss for years. Clearly, I was fine but damn.

In sickness (mine)

2011-12-19T07:00:00.000-05:00

Hello! I'm hack, hack, choke, gag back! And depending on when you catch me, I may or may not be about to die. For example, right now I am not going to die but earlier, I really was ready to go towards the light.

I was able to stay up until 10pm Saturday night but that might have had more to do with Mucinex that I'm not taking anymore. The Mucinex by the way earned a big FAIL by the way. I don't think it helped much and it made me speedy. I didn't have access to the directions while at the store but it says quite clearly that it should not be taken by individuals with high blood pressure and thyroid disease - They don't talk about that in the adds and it might have well come with a sticker that said "Diana! Don't buy this! , so of course I did . IN my defence, I did not feel well at the time.

I do not feel well a lot of the time. I closed on the house refi on Friday while feeling not well. I'm sure there were a lot of questions I should have been asking but the drive there and then having to sit up the whole time was just making me very tired. It would have helped if I had been notified more than twenty minutes ahead of time that I was closing! I told them I would not be closing in twenty minutes and that we would have to reschedule the appointment . So we changed it to 2:15.

In their defence, they did call every number in the building trying to reach me. A lot of people wanted me know that a lawyer had called for me. Oddly, no one thought it was for a benign reason. Do I seem like someone who would have lawyers after them for non-benign reasons? I was a little concerned by their concern.

Hack, hack, cough, choke, gag

Friday Cat Blogging

2011-12-16T14:00:00.000-05:00

I have been a very patient kitty Santa, for Christmas I want my own everything!

Sickness

2011-12-15T07:00:00.000-05:00

Still sick. I have much more voice but much more sore throat and sore muscles and a new and improved constant hacking cough. Yay? progress? On the upside it is now 7:39pm EST and I'm not surprised by this and feeling like it must really be much, much later because I am so exhausted.

As long as I don't swallow or breath deeply, I feel almost normal.

Tomorrow I'm going to check out the gas station to see if they sell hot chocolate. This morning, after I recoved from the triathlon of brushing my teeth - I had to stand up, I had to hold my hand up while griping the toothbrush and I still had to keep myself upright - I picked some up at McDonald's and it set me back some bills. I know I said large but I know I did not say drain my wallet. They must think morning customers are just stupid. I, at least can say I'm sick so I have that going for me. The minute I'm feeling better though, no more McDonald's hot chocolate for me.

Typhoid Ace

2011-12-14T07:00:00.000-05:00

Okay, my side of the story.

Monday night I was digging through a box of left over Christmas decorations and ran across another box that as it turned out, contained a cat sized Santa suit. A complete cat sized Santa suit. I thought that since Tex had enjoyed wearing it that perhaps Ace might also enjoy being festive.

Tex was a supermodel and he traveled with his own personal hair and make-up people and he knew his key light. Tex loved getting his picture taken and even seemed to enjoy wearing costumes. I have over a thousand pictures of him throughout his life time, attesting to how genuinely photogenic and co-operative he was. Ace is not a supermodel. Ace is barely an adequate model. He's young, he'll learn.

Anyway, the costume comes with a hat and a beard= but I want to make it clear that I at no time put the beard on. I didn't even make him keep the hat one once it became clear that Ace is not a hat person, I respect that.

He did look very cute in the coat and it was a bit chilly, so I left it on. I decided that he would thank me when he noticed how toasty warm he was. Well, after a while it became clear that he is by nature, cool, and he didn't really like being warm and he was laying on the floor looking really festive but oddly flat, fine, I took the coat off. It turns out he can be seasonally appropriate or walk but not at the same time. Who knew?

And then later I went to bed. I woke up with laryngitis, a sore throat, a stuffed head, a raging chest cold and a headache. A normal cat would have just thrown up in my shoes.A real curb buster our Ace. I'm not sure that being some sort of feline Typhoid Mary is a marketable skill, but Ace has it in spades.

Joy!!

2011-12-13T07:00:00.000-05:00

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!

Let earth receive her King;

Let every heart prepare Him room,

And Heaven and nature sing,

And Heaven, and Heaven, and nature sing.

Joy to the world, the Savior reigns!

Let men their songs employ;

While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains

Repeat the sounding joy,

Repeat, repeat, the sounding joy.

No more let sins and sorrows grow,

Nor thorns infest the ground;

He comes to make His blessings flow

Far as the curse is found,

Far as, far as, the curse is found.

(I have never heard this verse)

He rules the world with truth and grace,

And makes the nations prove

The glories of His righteousness,

And wonders of His love,

And wonders, wonders, of His love.

Why am I joyful?

Those are the cards and the dog cookies and they are going out,out,out! I mailed out the last two cookie boxes and I finished up the cards and mailed them out all ready. I am giddy about labels! The treats and cards for the people at the office are set to be delivered tomorrow. Yay!!!!

Adding to the pile.

2011-12-12T07:00:00.000-05:00

Did lots of Dogger-centric things this weekend ( made cookies, took Dogger to see Santa, made her Christmas cards), did not spend a lot of time with Dogger. I also saw every single house on the Historic District Christmas Tour of Homes. All eleven, on foot thank-you-very-much. In order. In order damn it! No skipping around for me. They call me hardcore.

All this did not kill me, no it only made me stronger. I took this new personal growth and bought plastic sheet protectors and a binder - No. I did not steal these items from work, where we have lots of them that no one keeps track of other than myself which would be easier and cheaper but morally wrong, and put all my recipes that I've run off the computer or tore out of magazines. Prior to this burst of organizational do-gooding, they were folded up in the front of a cookbook. On topic but it wasn't easy to find things. Now it is easy to find things. Yay.
I also put up my creche set and brought out my Christmas paper. No word as to when I'm going to to wrap anything, but its good to be prepared, because I might just get crazy and wrap stuff. I think I would rather just tell people where their gifts are and have them go get them. Maybe play hide and seek or something or "guess which gift is meant for you". I think that one would be fun and telling. Good for the environment too. I think its something to pursue, maybe I'll alert Moveon and the Conservation people.

I made more dog treats because there is nothing I need like more dog cookies on premise. I got rid of most of them but there are still some on the shelf and I thought they were lonely. To cure this, I made some big cookies for the big dogs. It didn't make near as many as the little cookies for the little dogs. Double edged sword, that. I also experimented with a cookie sheet I bought that looked like it would make neat, shaped cookies. It didn't. It made un-neat, shapeless cookies that made me sad. Lesson learned.

Another lesson learned? LABELS I can make labels for my cards! I don't have to struggle with my lousy handwriting, I can just print out labels and be done with it! It was a real light bulb moment. I went through my list from 2004 and added all the lose envelops I have scattered around and made a nice, neat list of everyone I know. Yay me. And NO, labels are not impersonal.

Friday Cat Blogging

2011-12-09T14:00:00.000-05:00

Small Cat is very tired of being asked about spots on the carpet.

Pack up your troubles

2011-12-09T07:00:00.000-05:00

And how was your evening? I only have two more boxes to get mailed. One, I have cookies but no address and the other I have an address but no cookies. Pro-tip: Packing tape is something that you get what you pay for and it is no place to save pennies. Lesson learned.

Checking my lists

2011-12-08T07:00:00.000-05:00

Yay! One more thing kind of off the list, kind of part one of a multi-part project done!

I bagged up the cookies!

before

after

left overs!

I came out with eighteen bags. I had them all made and discovered I had sixteen instead of seventeen as planned and I was not happy but I resisted the urge to destroy the dinning room even though I had all ready put everything up and thought I was finished with the endless circles around the table and the counting to twelve by twos over and over and over again - eight flavors times sixteen times each - and without any self directed rage at all, simple filled another bag and then I decided that I could send my friend on Facebook with the brand new dog, cookies from this batch, because if you are filling one bag you might as well fill two. And she didn't need special puppy cookies anyway, I think the dog is at least half grown.

I think with the left overs I could still fill a few more I inadventanly forgot someone or three with at least six of the eight varieties and still have some extras for Dogger.

Today at work I wantonly misused state resources making ingredient stickers for the bags only to forget a couple of add ins, so tomorrow I'm going to miss use state resources again to make corrected ones. Wantonly

And now I need to get address labels made - hello more miss use of state resources! then I need to remember to insert Christmas cards into the packages, which will get me going on getting the cards out, another Yay!

Sing a song

2011-12-07T07:00:00.000-05:00

I decided to go shopping for some new Christmas CDs for work so to avoid another day listening to boy choirs squealing in Latin. True, most of those squealing boy choirs are my squealing boy choirs but after eight hours with them it makes you almost not vomit when someone slips in a Yanni. Almost. To correct this Yanna positive climate, I bought Brian Seltzer and Ella Fitzgerald. Seltzer rocks the Grinch song.

Today we listened to a selection of perhaps the most funereal Christmas music recorded. It seemed designed for play as the musical accompaniment burying your murdered Grandmother on Christmas Eve, in a dungeon. It made me dream of the soothing sounds of protestants in flip flops singing Ave Maria in August - another CD we listen to too often. Its only been two days and I am already a little over our selection. I am also over being the designated office Christmas Music DJ - hense the squealing boy choirs. They feel my pain.

While I was at Wallyworld again - it turned out Dogger was down to food crumbs, which I didn't notice because it was thick crumbs, two meals worth of thick crumbs. It also trues out that my Wallyworld in Knightdale is the worst Wallyworld in the world. The one in Garner is much nicer. I had gone out to hit the Sam's Club, also, by the way, better run than my Wallyworld in Knightdale. I discovered cat dust in a 42 pound bag. I like this, how many of those plastic boxes do you really need? I mean, unless you are building some sort of extension on your house with them... I imagine you could fill them with cement and do something with them but, really, the bag is a better choice, much less waste. In the future, this will be my go-to dust buying method.

Earlier, speaking of Dogger and her food. Dogger woke me up at 1:15am. I feel much better about my dog mama-ing skiliz - I heard her whimpering through a closed door, up a flight of stairs, under three blankets and deeply asleep.I went out in my pajamas and a heavy coat and discovered that at 1:15 it was surprisingly muggy and featured a rather lot of pedestrian traffic. You miss so much hidden behind your burgler alarms and locked doors. Dogger made like a whole herd of goats and left my front yard looking like a new recruit. Then she dry heaved for a while before puking her little doggy guts up. Fortunatly, for Dogger this time it wasn't her guts, this time it was her food.

She seemed fine in the morning but when I left she had made herself into the smallest dog ball ever. I vowed to come home and if she hadn't unballed herself, we were going to the vet. I left her under a blanket. Happily, when I came home at lunch she had unballed herself and kicked off the blanket. She was very hungry at dinner and everything else seemed to be coming out okay too. I always worry when Dogger has any kind of health complaint because Dogger doesn't usually do best case scenarios. Thankfully, this time she did. Thus far.

Making a list.

2011-12-06T07:00:00.000-05:00

Dog cookies - done. I was going to make a couple of batches of red and green stars but I did a quick count and I don't really think the padding is necessary, in fact, I might end up having to cut the number of cookies each because I'm afraid they might not all fit in the bags - a real trauma. Also, I ran out of room in the refrigerator for more cookies.

Of course, the dog cookies aren't "done" until I get them into the mail but before I get there I need to figure out how much of each make it into the bags, get all the cookies bagged, get mailing boxes, prep the boxes for mailing, get the long distance cookies in the mail and get the rest to the office. I also have to make ingredient list and come up with labels. I'm trying to think positive thoughts.

I had to stop with the cookies because it was time to start decorating for Christmas - its about priorities. Decorating the tree is a big job so I asked my parents and niece and nephew to come over and help with the job. It was really fun. Later I decorated the mantel and the next morning I got the out door stuff taken care of. On top of all that, I got my cards into their frames.

I can't wait do go back to work so I can get some rest.

You better watch out

You better not cry
Better not pout
I'm telling you why
Santa Claus is coming to town
He's making a list
And checking it twice;
Gonna find out Who's naughty and nice
Santa Claus is coming to town
He sees you when you're sleeping
He knows when you're awake
He knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake!

O! You better watch out!
You better not cry
Better not pout
I'm telling you why
Santa Claus is coming to town
Santa Claus is coming to town

Joy

2011-12-05T07:00:00.001-05:00

Apropos of nothing, I have to say, when left to my own devises I make a really good chicken pot pie. I would have started on this earlier but Dogger and I were very happily dozing on the couch admiring the tree and the mantel. We would still be there except I got cold and I decided that Dogger and I needed to go to Walmart.

I tried to avoid a trip to Wallyworld but after touring three thrift stores looking for a table for my office Christmas tree, I gave in to the inevitable. I found my table and a couple of rows over, shipping boxes for cookies. Two birds one trip to Wallyworld. Score. Sadly, it was a low score.

And then I went to check out and I lost the game. I walked up and down the row of check outs, most of them without a checker because why staff up for the holiday? I thought I found the best of the long lines and settled in for a wait.And waited and waited and waited. It turns out I found the only Wallworld employee in the world who had never seen a WIC check before. I thought working at Wallyworld made you eligible for WIC checks and this girl was completely befuddled. An hour later I was going to just leave but I really didn't want to have to make a second trip back to that place if I didn't have to. I all ready have to hit Sam's this week and I don't want to give those people anymore of my time than I have to.

Tuesday, I'm going to get back to work and get the cookies in bags. I took a good look at the bags I got and they seem small and I see some stress and over thinking ahead. Maybe I'll think about getting my cards addressed instead.

FRiday Cat Blogging

2011-12-02T14:00:00.000-05:00

Christmas Carol fu!

2011-12-02T07:00:00.000-05:00

I did not make cookies. I came home, took Dogger on a brisk walk through downtown, returned home and fed her and changed clothes.

And then I sat down in front of the TV, just to rest a spell to catch up with my DVD and in short order decided that the TV was very annoying. I decided that what I would really rather do was watch the tree. It did not help that Small Cat joined me.

Small Cat likes me much more in the winter. So long story short, I fell asleep in front of the TV and didn't do anything useful. I will be useful though, I got my cards! and it turns out they are lovely! and exactly what I wanted. The opening is a bit on the smaller side, but I think its going to work out. I should be loading those cards right now. My to-do list gets longer every day.

I was going to go out and get dinner, but instead I made a cherry tart for dinner. I had a huge, awful lunch so I think it all evens out. I had thought that Burger King was the height of lunch timeself loathing but I was wrong, Pizza Hut buffet is the worst and not in a good way either. Its disgusting, it was like eating grease covered mattress. On the upside, I think my new and improved lack of appetite comes at the ideal time! All I have to do is think about that meal and immediately become nauseous! Christmas Cookies? yuck!, brownies? gawd! , pie? blergh . Yay!!

1. We wish you a merry Christmas,

We wish you a merry Christmas,

We wish you a merry Christmas,

And a Happy New Year!

Refrain

Good tidings we bring for you and your kin;

We wish you a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

2. Now bring us some figgy pudding,1

Now bring us some figgy pudding,

Now bring us some figgy pudding,

And a cup of good cheer! Refrain

3. We all like our figgy pudding;

We all like our figgy pudding;

We all like our figgy pudding;

With all its good cheer.2 Refrain

4. We won't go until we get some

We won't go until we get some

We won't go until we get some

So bring it out here!3 Refrain

5. We wish you a merry Christmas,

We wish you a merry Christmas,

We wish you a merry Christmas,

And a Happy New Year!

And a Happy New Year! Refrain

Days of whine and cookies

2011-12-01T07:00:00.000-05:00

11/29 - Another day, three hundred and fourteen cookies. And as it turns out, the secret to increased bulk in broth cookies is "add more flour". I also learned that playing Christmas music in the background is a good way to make the whole tedious process less tedious. It turns out doing the entire tedious process total silence was a bad idea, it actually adds to the tedium.

Also, eat a slice of excellent pie before you start said tedious process.

Tomorrow I make bacon cookies and after that, banana and after that a batch of milk cookies, a batch in red and a batch in green. These will be larger stars. See , "tedium".

11/30 Well, yet another day, I was thwarted by my Google Tool Bar disappearing and not coming back. It wouldn't be a big problem except that the tool bar has custody of the spell check and I really need the spell check feature. Even while dealing with this lose, I still managed to produce two hundred and sixty-four more cookies. I went off the rez a little though, instead of going with my scheduled bacon cookies, I went crazy and made banana instead. I was surprised that about a cup of creamed bananas did not add significantly to the amount of dough I ended up with and in the end the yield was less than I wanted. I'm going with the idea that the cookies will be more dessertish in nature due to the addition of some molasses and vanilla to the mixture so maybe they won't need as many. I've also changed my mind about the bacon cookies, I'm still making them but I think they are going to be bacon/cheese cookies. High yield city.

Oh, and after I made the cookies...

And so it begins...

Aunt Cooking

2011-11-29T07:00:00.000-05:00

Tired now. The beef boullion didn't make as mnay as the other vaireties.I think its because the broth no matter how beefy, doesn't add bulk, and bulk is good. The parsley and mint took up more room! and prodused more cookies.

I'm going to have to think of something else to add to the mix to up my count of these. I guess I could add wheat gern or something, thats healthy as well as bulky but I don't want to go to the store and buy anything. I guess I could just adjust my cookie yeld expectations and embrace the seventeen dozen cookies I did end up with.

Next year? Bigger cookies.

Think Small.

2011-11-28T07:00:00.000-05:00

Gawd, I'm hungry, and its not because I haven't eaten, I had dinner. I'm hungry because I have two pies in the refrigerator and they are calling to me. I had dinner and I finished up pie number three and still the pies are calling to me. Bastards.

One of the pies is a nice polite little key lime pie. A good pie, a no-pressure pie. I know it isn't the siren. I know this for a fact because I had a piece and I'm still hearing voices. The offender is the Greek walnut pie. A pie that tastes so good while at the same time being so bad for you, that you have just gained a pound because you are thinking about it. I'm hoping it loses its voice soon.

I'm being strong. Mostly because there isn't much there and I want to save it.

For good.

I need to put a dress on and visit with it though because I am in the midst of Operation Aunt Cookie and I need the room. My freezer is full of actual people food, so I am pulling the refrigerator off the bench and putting it into the game. When I was planning OAC, I thought about how many I would need : Lots and lots. What kinds I would make: Lots and lots. What shape they should be: Small. If you want to make a lot of something it pays to think small.

I thought small would be good because a quick survey of the dogs I make for discloses that they are overwhelmingly small dogs, small dogs need small cookies - Another reason to make smaller cookies is that the small the cookie the higher the yield. I like a high yield. And smaller cookies are lighter cookies and shipped costs are up.

And then I started to makes these small cookies. And make them. And make. And make them. The smaller the cookie the higher the yield - Sounds great until you come face to face with making these big yield small cookies by hand. Over and over and over. When I make the bone cookies each batch consists of a hundred and forty-four cookies, not counting whatever the oven takes as its own. Fine. These demon small cookies are running about three hundred and twelve per batch. 312 individual cookies. By hand.

My arms are tired and it takes days to get a tray filled. I have to take breaks! I'm going to have to man up because I have a long way to go to finish the job. I have four varieties made thus far: cheese, turkey gravy, mint and parsley and peanut butter. I had planned to get two additional varieties done today, but the idea gives me the vapors and arm cramps. So, Monday is going to be beef bouillon, Tuesday will be chicken bouillon, Wednesday will be bacon and Thursday will be banana. Whew. I'm going to be tired but my upper body will be oddly toned.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

2011-11-24T07:00:00.000-05:00

Downtowners

2011-11-23T07:00:00.000-05:00

I had to use the machine like a phone today! I felt bad about that but my boss had a health issue today and I needed to find out the gory details (quite literally) . It is a phone after all and if I can arrange to go another few days without using it I'll make up for the time I used today. Like a week without using it.

Dogger and I took a lovely walk today. We went all over downtown. We started at the post office and treked all the way to the tip of Fayetteville Street to the convention center and then back up Wilmington. I've never walked the route although I drive it everyday. I got a chance to check out some store fronts I've never been able to really look at as well as being a looky lou in the windows of the condos ( attention first floor residents, your windows are on street level! Your exorbitant monthly condo fees do not guarantee invisibility) and got a chance to check out a price list for some empty units. If I had 265K to play with for a glorified closet, I would keep them on the list. If I had 265K.

Along the way I saw fliers for interesting events they have scheduled, of course about half the fliers were for stuff that happened months ago, but I did learn about a pig pickin' on December 2 and Winterfest a couple of days later. I also found the ice rink and a Starbucks I didn't know about it.

I like walking downtown and I wish I would have started sooner, its quite nice and there is almost no chance of encountering loose dogs and gosh, its cleaner then the nabs. Dogger seems to really enjoy having new sniffs to check out, as much as she clearly enjoys it, she was being a bad girl. Years ago when we were in Puppy School and when we walked the neighborhood I trained her to sit at corners. We would come to a light or a cross walk and I would say "Dogger, sit" and Dogger would sit. We worked on this a lot for a long time and she eventually did it on command. And then she hurt her knees and sitting on command was off the table. I had thought that enough time had past that we could go back to her sit on command habits but apparently, this is not the case. It would be just so cool if she would though, the audience downtown would be so impressed. Dogger seems to suffer from stage fright.

Santa Talk.

2011-11-22T07:00:00.000-05:00

The Experiment is moving along. It has now reached pornographic stage of development, food porn if you will. If I was really clever I would have arranged for a time lapse camera to keep an eye on it for me, I could hook it up to the Internet and instead of a wildly successful puppy cam I could have a even more wildly successful shroom cam! It really seems to change hourly and every day its completely different. It is much more interesting on a day to day basis than a watermelon and I thought watermelons were fairly breath taking, growing and development-wise.

Its too bad that the Experiment is not something I eat, I would enjoy growing another one, m maybe over the summer when the basement is humid as all hell and well warm enough . Maybe I can be a fungi foster parent? Who here likes mushrooms?

I decided that the booklet that came with the kit is not providing the constant reassurance and 24-hour-handholding that I require, so I went online to see what information was out there. It turns out, a lot and there is a lot of information that is not in my booklet, for instance, I need to be on the look-out for "gills" on the mushroom head. My booklet wants me to be mellow and chill and keep up my misting schedule and just let things be. I don't like to let things be. I want to know every minute of every day that the Experiment is progressing within normal parameters and it is not actually a block of styrofoam with a skin problem.

My research showed me that the Experiment is fineish, its not ready to be harvested and won't beby Thanksgiving, which was not in the plan anyway, but would have been nice, and the block doesn't have enough brownness, which I think speaks to how young it is, I'm guessing- but it looks like a mid- December hand off is very doable. I am hopeing however for an early December drop date because I am not looking forward to having to bring it with me in the car if I go away for the weekend. Its like having a very delicate, very young pet that requires my almost but not quite constant attention all day. I could not leave it alone for the weekend under any circumstances. I have enough pets.

In the interest of his - and it is a boy all right, delicate nature, I moved it from point A to point B to now Point C because I think that the indirect light it was in may have been too indirectly direct. I noticed that its dark side seems more successful than the light side. If the dark really suits it, I may move it to the back of the basement where the light is very, very indirect and where due to the proximity to the water heater, there might be more of desirable humidity for it. We can't have him catching a chill.

Weekend Adventures

2011-11-21T07:00:00.000-05:00

Saturday morning it was so cold! I was wrapped up in a coat and gloves, by Sunday afternoon while I was raking the yard it was so warm I wanted shorts.

Mother Nature wants my nose to run forever.

I was up early on Saturday because I went to Durham to the DPAC go see The Rockettes! The real, live Rockettes, not Rockells, not Rockbelles, the genuine-Live-From-Radio-City Rockettes! They aren't your high school drill team or even the Kilgore Rangerettes. The real deal. Anyone who has ever tried to fake their way through a half-assed kickline, is, in their hearts, trying to be a Rockette, And failing. It doesn't matter how many awards they have won or how sharp your drill team is, they are not the Rockettes.

My Mother and neice and I and a couple thousand other women ands girls had a great time. I do not understand where the men were though. A couple of dozen hotties in tiny costumes and there were three men in the entire audience! Hot chicks cavorting in tiny costumes and there were no men. I mean the Rockettes are hardly a burlesque troop but gee whiz. They were fantastic though and the show was great. They are going to be in Durham for a while, Local Raleigh readers and if you have a chance you should go see the show, in addition to the really fun show, it feature terrific if computerized stage craft, interesting lighting and beautiful costumes.

It was a weekend of firsts. My first Rockette show as well as my first home made pizza! They sell those blanks at the store and I never bought them because they seem expensive. I found one at Poverty Barn and waited for the right time. The time came. I bought some cheese and a handful of pepperoni and a can of tomato paste and did my thing. I added my own herbs and spices and a sprinkling of turkey. It was so good! It wasn't swimming in cheese soup or cluttered with crap I don't eat. It couldn't have been better. The next time Poverty Barn has them I'm going to stock up.

Friday Cats Blogging

2011-11-18T14:30:00.000-05:00

TGIF

2011-11-18T07:00:00.000-05:00

And next week is Thanksgiving! Are you freaking out ahead of time or are you planning on saving your freaking out for the actual day? I suggest going halfsies.

I'm going to make three pies, one I know only through its recipe, one that I'm only guessing will work because I'm substituting B for A and one I know works. Both A and B require a disturbing amount of egg separating and tempering. I feel fat all ready and I haven't even sat down at the table yet. The closest I've come to using the exerbike is moving it from one location to another, twice.

Speaking of food, I was finally able to get my scallops into the larger part of my chowder. Before I added them, I sauteed them with parsley, fresh garlic and white wine. Nummy. MY chowder is now certifiably fab-u-lous. When Lent is looming, I'm going to make it again and be set for the whole 40 days. I might even explore my clam juice options.

I also need to be working on my Christmas Dog Cookies. I am definitely cutting back on the varieties this year because I think I'm cutting it too close to make as many as I have in the past. I'm also pretty sure I should have started all ready and I have a small concern that they may turn out to be Happy New Year Dog Cookies but I want to avoid that. I also have to start worrying about Christmas cards, I have the photos and I've ordered the cards but they warned on the site that they are shipped on the slowest possible boat and so that is another thing to worry about. I can see myself doing cookies and cards simultaneously. Festive but furious, and I'm not sure I want to work that hard and I haven't even thought about my decorations yet.

But first things first, tomorrow I'm going to see the Rockettes.

Hearts and fungus

2011-11-17T07:00:00.000-05:00

The Amazing Experiment seems to be changing or growing and development or it has Amazing Experiment Mumps or it's growing toad stools. Its hard to tell with Amazing Experiments, I'll keep you updated.

I had to use the not-phone today. It was only for a couple of minutes but I feel like a total back slider. I thought I was making the number larger so I could read it at the Real Phone but it actually dialed it instead and I was forced to speak with a vendor but its Its okay though because I didn't use any of yesterday's 7.5 minutes so today I had 15 whole minutes to burn through. Tomorrow, hopefully I will do better. The vendor explained that instead of actually showing up at 4:15, as we had agreed on, they are going to be there at some point between 4:30-6:30! I am hopeing its more the later than the earlier because there is a cool 99% thing I should go to because honking and waving at them seems so not enough.

I have just bothered both animals. First I bothered the cat while he dozed on the bed, by dozing on the bed. I thought that he would like some quality time with Mummy but he did not. Then I went to see Dogger and stretched out on her futon - I also thought she would like some quality time with her Mummy but she also did not. My animals can not share.

Speaking of Small Cat. I got a notice from Catster alerting me to the fact that it was Small Cats birthday. He is three, which also alerts me that Tex has been gone for three years. As much as I lurve Small Cat, I miss Tex so much some days. Tex was a cat evil super genius and Small Cat is well, super but no genius and he is certainly not evil. At all, and I think Tex just got me in a way that Small Cat just can't. I think it was the evil super genius aspect that made him so good at reading people. Small Cat loves everyone, Tex loved me.

Enough about Tex. Small Cat is going to be in a calender! The Animal Rescue lady at work wants Small Cat to be Mr. February in her animal rescue groups' 2013 calender! I can either submit a picture I have a work featuring his little chest heart or I can take another picture of him with his little heart front and center. I almost told her that Dogger also has a heart on her chest but I didn't want to be a calender hog. I can now say almost all my pets have appeared in calenders. Clearly because I am so awesome.

I hate everything II

2011-11-16T07:00:00.000-05:00

The upside of having a cell phone I can not use as a phone, is that in two years when the contract is up, I won't need to sign up again as I will haven gotten so used to not having a phone I won't feel obligated to turn around and pay out the nose for the privilege of carrying another useless paper weight around! Yay! Two years!

Speaking of phone issues. I got rid of the useless add-ons on my home phone as well. I get fee-ed and taxed to death with my local service - Thank you AT&T! you 1% and financial supporter of fringe right wing candidates! That I decided to see what I could do to my bill. It turns out I was paying almost as much in fees and taxes as I was for the service, so I cut everything but phone calls. No more call waiting, no more voice mail - that thanks to my stupid phone I can't access anyway, no more anything>/i>. Sorry friends and family and robocalls, its the return of the busy signal and endless ringing from here on out. I looked for alternates but most services were either very sketchy or only wanted my long distance service - I have a long distance services that I like well enough, of course, I liked it better when I had cell service so I didn't have to use it, but still...

Anyone know of any goof lefty phone companies that provided local service? I'm also about to clean house of my satellite provider as well. I could move to the competition and get all the channels I want and pay half - for a while, and then it would shift to its regular price that they are very uncomfortable putting into print for some reason. But it would be at least a year of really, really cheap and after the second year (I presume) I could switch back to what I have now.

Oh, the one bit of pro-Diana I have to cling to while I hang balloons for my pity party.

I stopped a jackass from illegally dumping a couch on Dix campus on Monday. I was eating my lunch and this former Ryder truck drove up and parked. Then I heard the back door open and I watched the driver pull a dirty white couch out of the truck and casually slide it down the embankment into the creek! I jumped out of the car and stood there alight with my righteousness and I told him to Put It Back! and to Put It Back Right Now! Hands on hips, hair un-pony tailed. The guy came from around the truck he said "I didn't have anywhere to put it, I'm just storing it there" and I said "BULL SHIT. Put. It. Back . Right NOW!" and he did and drove away. I'm sure he dumped it elsewhere. But not right there and not right in front of me. Damn it.

What I would have done had he come at me with a tire iron or worse, I do not know. What I would have done had he not been a pussy, I also do not know.

I hate the world.

2011-11-15T07:00:00.000-05:00

Today I learned if I want to keep my phone I have to stop using it as a phone. I have to go back in time to when cell phones were for emergencies only and use it accordingly. It's not my computer - can't use up that data time! Can't use the phone, most preserve those precious shared minutes! and its not my friend, it lied about both.

I now have to wonder what I'm getting for my money. Phone use? Well, using for a mere sixteen minutes a day was using it too much, and to stay within my allotment I can use the phone seven minutes a day. Data? about that... as it turns out, its just for show. Other than making my purse heavier, exactly why do I have this thing? Its costing me way too much to end up as a paper weight, but that looks to me where this is heading. This is not what I signed up for.

Before I sound ungrateful, I'm not, I'm very, very grateful for the chance to have it! I just have to remember my place and what it is and what I am and use it accordingly - spareingly, rarely and only when I have no other choice. In the future folks, the magic word is: UNLIMITED. Now, I'm going to go back to my land-line and my dial up connection. The nineties were nice.

Chef Me

2011-11-14T07:00:00.000-05:00

Why do we dress our poultry in fetish suits?

I made my turkey breast! Yay! It took a lot longer than the TV chef had said, her's was smaller I guess, while mine was I'm thinking, much more culinary than hers. I know this because I had to remove all these yucky turkey parts, and she didn't. I think they involved turkey procreation and I think some where on its little fetish suit should have come with some sort of warning label mentioning those. I wanted a "G" rated bird and I ended up with a hardcore freak in a fetish suit.

Okay, step one, after I peeled it out of its fetish suit.

before

A turkey breast is almost like a whole turkey but no cavity but it still comes with the stuff so its almost like a real turkey but without all the excess turkiness that some may find too much.

Several hours later*

Actually, this was the first time I took it out of the oven, its just the last time it was photogenic. I kind of hacked at it after that, it took a little while longer than the directions had suggested and what the girl on TV had indicated. When it was done, it was browner and significantly less attractive due to the hacking I did to search for pinkness. It was however, very, very good and juicy and it was delicious. Put flavored butter under the skin it really makes a big difference.

Stage three

All is not lost though! It worked hard, it was a major player in that turkeys life and it was a good life! For real. After it turned in a good days job, it went on to its second job as Soup Stock! The carcass went on to do great things

This soup is so good it cured me of things I didn't even know I had yet! The meat you see there isn't actually the turkey's meat because I wanted it to do some multi-tasking, so I needed to hold it back for the time being. The meat is from a whole chicken - the worlds smallest chicken and yes, ladies, I chopped up that little bitch up without cutting off any of my fingers - I had been warming up for this, but I manged to keep all my original parts. I also was able to use tomatoes I froze summer before last and a handful of pepper slices

And what was left Turkey after the soup? Almost nothing.

Remember, remember that day in November.

2011-11-11T22:40:00.001-05:00

November 11 marked the official end of a brutal, vicious, deadly conflagration that destroyed Europe and solved nothing while sewing the seeds of another vicious, deadly conflagration that destroyed Europe; and because it was over for a long time and we moved onto to other, sexier wars, a few years later it was demoted to Arbor day and then a few years after that it was promoted to Veterans Day. Yay soldiers.

There are no more WWI survivors in America. You would think we should be prompted to remember it officially. You remember WW1? Killed millions, introduced chemical warfare? Had the sad fate of sharing the lime light with the flu pandemic and the Russian Revolution?

That World War One. Lest we forget.

Angry Girl

2011-11-10T07:00:00.000-05:00

You know what some ambitious Angry Bird player could do if they wanted to make a quick buck? They could set themselves up with a store front and all they would have to do is solve Angry Bird levels. Their customers would simply hand them there phone and standby while the expert delivered them from whatever bird hell the customer was stuck in. Whatever level you are having a problem with, tearing your hair out over, crying over and they would just solve it! Can you imagine? I would pay money to move on and out of Angry Bird hell.

The expert or experts, after the business caught on and you know it would - would be battle tested professionals and would know in what order to wreck what and they would just let you move on to the next level and the rest of your life. The freedom! I can really imagine people mailing their phones in just make it stop.

I mean back in the day we figured out how to fix our Rubik cubes, I can't believe no one has come up with a way to hack Angry Birds and force it to let you leave a level behind or how to add that extra bird that you so desperately need, or a way to remove hard hats from frogs. Is there no industrious fourteen year old out there who sees a need? No angry virgin with time to kill and a plastic girl friend to impress in a basement somewhere? Come on!

For instance. I've been stuck on level 3-10 for approximately, eight hours, after all this time and so many thousands of tries, I can now tell from about a third of a second in, how badly I am not going to win this level this time. I have more or less mastered the tiny initial bird, and most times I can knock out the top level birds right off, if I am really cooking with fire also the bird on the ground. I hate that bird. That is the part I am good at. I have not yet figured out why the yellow bird is involved at all, he has speed but no purpose, mostly I over shoot the mark with him and he bounces uselessly out of frame. With the two final egg dropping bird I can usually knock out two of the remaining three birds, I can not get them all. Ever.

I have checked the cheats and the tips and the walkthroughs. I have watched the videos on You-Tube and all I can say is that those people are my heroes. I hate them, but they are my heroes. If Angry Birds were created by decent people, they would have mercy, they would say Hmmm. After three thousand go-rounds, you get a free pass to the next level! but they are not decent people, they are evil people who want you to spend eternity in their avian purgatory.

Merry Tuesday!

2011-11-09T07:00:00.000-05:00

Angry Birds is a stupid, stupid game but since I am teetering on the razer edge of the end of my data allotment, it is all I can do with my phone. I have spent the last two days having to look at web pages and log onto my email from my desktop computer! The horror! Its like being sent back to last year!

And then I came home from work! And it was Christmas! Well, not really Christmas but I got a lot of neat stuff in the mail. I got my mammogram report and both the girls are doing fine and I also got my doctors' report from my physical and I am going to live another year and if I am feeling particularly hateful while at the same time, in a giving mood, I could bring my lab report to the Red Cross and force to to let me give blood because I am clearly not anemic. Spin this Asswipes.

I also got my Great Experiment! Yay! I'm so excited! It is going to be like having another pet for a while but its more like a fostering situation - I get to enjoy it for a while but before he becomes a real responsibility, it will go to a forever home.

Also in the mail? My refi paperwork! Yay! It really is a Christmas Season miracle

I decided to put the turkey into the freezer as it was totally thawed and I am not ready for it yet, its going to be I think a Friday thing, because we have it off and I'll have plenty of time to work with it and maybe make myself some side dishes to go with it - if I play my cards right, a little cooking then could save me from a lot of cooking in the coming weeks - when I am supposed to be making dog cookies. Lots and lots of dog cookies and I may have also volunteered myself to make even more too. This years cookies are going to be star shaped because it ups my over all yield without having to actually to increase how much I produce and most of the dogs on my list are smaller breeds any way.

And even the few who are larger, they are treats not meals!

Oh, and my finger wound has finally stopped bleeding and I may only need to wear a band-aid for another day. If its very good, I may go without a band-aid over night. For a small wound it is just a bitch! its a good thing we walk on our feet and not our hands because I would have a serious limp.

Little Chicken

2011-11-08T07:00:00.000-05:00

My turkey breast is starting to unthaw, slowly. I haven't taken it out of the fetish suit it came in yet because I'm not going to cook it until Friday and I think it should stay in its original packaging as long as possible. I might even slip it back into the freezer Tuesday if it seems to thawed out and worrisome. Thursday night I'll make its vegetable raft cum rack and then I'll slip my fancy compounded butter under its skin and slather the top with more of it. On TV it turned out beautifully.

One of my cooking shows told me to use the butter because it would make the meat taste really good, the other told me why the meat taste better with it. As it turns out, white meat is very lean and meat that is very lean tends to dry out in the cooking because there isn't any lubricant, i.e fat, to keep it from getting dry. Dark meat has more fat and thus it is juicier. We add butter under the skin of the breast to make fake fat! See, TV is good for us.

And now I know how to make compounded butter! Which is apparently the best thing since sliced bread and I should have had a roll of it my freezer always and how have I lived with it all these years? I would guess, I have been eating frozen boneless, skinless chicken breasts and they don't require compounded butter, or they do but we eat boneless/skinless to avoid extra fat as well as the evils of chicken skin. So, yes, I have lived without just fine, TV chefs. All compounded butter is, is just flavored butter, you can add garlic and rosemary and salt and pepper or you can add honey and mustard to it. Its like a wonder tool. You make it ahead of time and keep it rolled up in your freezer.

I have also been talked into attempting to make my own chicken broth. I don't know where I'm going to put the broth when I'm done, and Im not a huge eater of soup, but maybe I'll make some nice chicken noodle soup and keep it around instead of Raman. Who knows?

Because this is also the start of Dog Cookie Season so maybe I'll wait on the broth- perhaps until after Christmas and by then Santa will have brought me a new stock put because my existing pot, I think, is developing some kind of pot dementia and that it may not really want to simmer things for hours. It gets mad and gets burny and impossible to clean and I think its time for a new one, Santa. And a double boiler.

I got notice that my Great Experiment is set to arrive today. I haven't worked with this kind of thing before so I hope I don't mess it up. No guts no glory.

The bloody gourmet

2011-11-07T07:00:00.000-05:00

No photo blogging today, sorry. I am too, really, I tried to slice the side of my finger off earlier today and the bandage is not making typing easier. Also, its still bleeding and I'm pretty sure you are not supposed to get your keyboard wet.

Anyway. I am going to see how well I can type one handed. Badly, as it turns out, almost as badly as with the aid of the band-aided finger. Lovely. I cut my finger cutting up the Jack O Melon. I felt bad because I wantonly threw away the rind of the ice cream melon, so I decided to offer it up my not throwing away the Jack 'O Melon. Did you know that melon rinds are slippery? Yes, yes they - knives just slide right off them into innocent finger flesh. Now my finger is wearing a burqa. And throbbing.

After I successfully chopped up the melon ( and bled all over the bathroom before staunching the blood flow and discovered that off brand band aids are for crap) I went a step further and put the pieces into a processor and really ground them up, I thought they they would be more composty if they were in really small pieces, also the smaller the pieces the less likely for the garden to turn into some sort of all you-can-eat rat buffet. I'm not sure what ground up watermelon rind is going to do foe the over all health of the garden, but every little bit counts. I hope. The road to hell and all that.

I also improved my fish chowder! I bought some scallops at Wallyworld and I simmered them in a pan with some garlic and parsley and butter and white wine and then added it all to the soup I had put aside for dinner. I'm going to thaw out the larger portion and do the same with it. Nummy.

Also on the subject of food. I need a door mounted spice rack. I have a lot of bottles and jars and boxes now and I can't see easily see what I have. The lazy susan is nice, but my spice needs have expanded. My spice collection expands because I watch cooking show and they make demands. One of those demands is that I make a turkey breast very soon. The turkey breast the girl on TV had as her example was huge and completely defrosted. Do you know how small and completely frozen turkey breasts are in real life? and I think hers was from a steroidal weight lifter turkey, because mine looks like it came off a fourteen year old anorexic super model turkey. It could also be that she clearly got hers from an actual butcher and I got mine from the frozen meat section at Wallyworld. She also demanded I buy sage but at least at Wallyworld it was cheap, although there is a chance that it is actually marijuana. Score.

Friday Cat Blogging

2011-11-04T14:30:00.000-04:00

Small cat would not look me in the eye and kept his back turned to me the whole time he was in costume. Too bad, because I think he would make a terrific Cindy Lu Who for the holidays.

Photo Geeking

2011-11-04T07:00:00.000-04:00

The Internet is full of peoples cats in costumes. In response to this geekery, I present pictures of my dog.

Daisy, as Sky Masterson in a radical re-imagining of Guys and Dolls

Daisy as the Headless Horseman's' Horse, Halloween 2012

Daisy as a giant Hot Dog, Halloween 2010-11

Not a costume, Daisy's' new winter coat. Doesn't she look great?

Oh, and in case you think I do nothing but dress up my dog. I also cook.

Home made watermelon-chocolate chip ice cream made with a home grown watermelon. This is by far the best of the tree varieties of watermelon ice cream I've experimented with. It does still have a bit of ice crystal-ness to it, but it gets made without the benefit of an ice cream maker, which I'm sure greatly adds to the creamy nature of ice cream not frozen slowly in the freezer. This recipe turned out much better and made more ice cream than the others, it also included heavy cream, eight egg yolks and two cups of sugar and it introduced me to the concept of "tempering". If you do it right you end up with a lovely mixture, if you do it wrong you end up with scrambled eggs. Note the lack of scrambled eggs in the above picture. I'm sorry! I felt all rock star when I did it right.

Roomies

2011-11-03T07:00:00.000-04:00

Welcome my new room mate!

Fern!

Fern has been an outdoor pet since I bought her last spring from the mental patients at the hospital who had raised her from whatever ferns start off as. I brought Fern home and did absolutely nothing for it, I occasionally remembered to water in its direction but other than re-potting it when I brought it home, I have done nothing for it, and it thrived! Look at it! Its gorgeous! And then it got cold.

I do not want Fern to die. If the intractably mentally ill can keep fern alive, the very least I should be able to to do is not kill it. So I brought fern in. I've never spent this much time with fern.

Once it became clear that fern had to be re-homed, I had to figure out where in my home fern was going to live. If it wasn't for Small Cat, fern could settle just about anywhere and be a happy plant and most likely, would live through the winter and be able to escape back outside in the spring. But, there is a Small Cat and Small Cat thinks fern is a cat toy.

Fern is not a cat toy and small cat needs to learn about boundaries. I tried to teach Small Cat to not eat fern because fern lives here too and it would be mean to eat fern. Fern now lives in the back entry way. In back entryways defence, it gets some lovely indirect light and it is significantly warmer than front entry way, which is an icebox. I'm not sure how I feel about having a fern in my back entry way, it seems rude. And now its in the way. I went from having no interaction wither fern to having perhaps too much interaction with it. I'm pretty sure fern is going to die from too much me.

I thought about putting fern in the basement with the other plants I got from the hospital, but I'm not sure how happy a fern would be unwatered in the dark all winter like the other plants I don't think are going to like it either, but I am hopeing they will fall in to some sort of horticultural coma over the winter - and that's what happens when a plant is left unwatered in the dark all winter, right? Its their fault for not being as pretty as fern.

Hi, my name is...

2011-11-02T07:00:00.000-04:00

I noticed to day on our walk that no one said "hello" to me. Not a soul and we were out in prime time for people greeting, everyone greeted Dogger like a long lost friend. We walked passed a woman and her child "Hi Dogger!" we walked passed a group of older guys standing on a porch "Hey Doggy!". I was invisible. When people do greet me, they call me by Doggers name.

Oh, well, she has a better personality than I do anyway. At least I always know where I know random people from who come up to me at the store. People I should know but can't remember who they are or where I know them from, call me "Diane or Donna", people I know because I see them every few days because we live blocks from each other, call me "Daisy". It makes it easy to figure out where I don't know them from.

On to other things. My Jack'O Pumpkin was a hit, or the just couldn't figure out what it was but it must have been not something anyone wanted to mess with because no one stole it or tried to destroy it! Yay! I also got rid of most but not all of the nasty fake fruit roll ups I bought to give out. I thought an early scouting party had spread the word I was only handing out fruit rolls and to avoid my house but later on a whole group of teeny children and their Mothers came by and they seemed to like the roll ups just fine. I think they liked them because they had Scooby Doo on them. One party asked where Dogger was. I think I would have gotten a lot more kids to my door had I just parked Dogger outside with the bowl of treats.

Certainly would have limited my exposure to the cold and rain. Dogger, for her part, spent the evening sprawled on her futon. Spoiled thing.

Oh, speaking of being spoiled Free Cooking Channel is back! Woo! I thought something was up when DIY came back but Cooking Channel is the real deal. Everything is years old and features weird disco inspired cooking music, but yay! Two Fat Ladies, French Cooking at Home, Bitchin' Kitchen! My DVR has something to do again!

Now, I'm going to Target to see if there are any discounted dog costumes I need. Doggers' hot dog is showing its age and there were some really cute entries this year that featured tiny riders strapped to the dogs back and I thought those would be great for her because the costume wouldn't involve her deep, difficult to fit, costume-busting chest.

Dive right in

2011-11-01T07:00:00.000-04:00

In honor of it being winter, I thought it would be a good time to try a chowder recipe I found last summer, it was too warm then to make it but its perfect now.

Grandpa Thrills Fish Chowder

In a soup pot, using as little water as possible (I would substitute white wine or fish stock)

1/2 cup diced carrots
1/2 cup diced celery
1/2 cup chopped onions
1 cup cubed potatoes

(I would substitute - a frozen bag o' veggies, they even sell a "soup starter" variety with the needed vegetables, or you could buy the whole shebang in a can and add an additional can of potatoes)

Add to the veggies and the cooking medium

1 can condensed cream of mushroom soup
1 can condensed cream of celery soup
1 can (12 oz) evaporated milk

(I substituted two cans of soup instead of the suggested 1 can of each, its nicer to have left overs. I would also buy the nicest store bought versions you can find, it makes a difference)

Stir to combine, cook until almost boiling

Add

1 pound skinless fish, cubed
pepper to taste
celery salt to taste

(I added in addition to the above, liberal amounts of powdered garlic and dried parsley, and a touch of cumin and a squirt of lemon juice and salt to taste. In the future I would also use 1/3 pound of three different meats, say, a firm bodied fish, clams and maybe musells)

Cook stirring, for another 7-10 minutes or until fish is cooked.

How To Cave A Watermelon like a Jack'O Lantern

2011-10-31T07:00:00.000-04:00

Just in time for Halloween!

First, get a watermelon, in October. The watermelon should be ripe, but not too ripe, because the riper your melon the thinner the rind, if the rind is too thick and carving will be a nightmare, too thin and it will collapse.

You will need

- a watermelon, size is up to you. How much watermelon to you want to eat?
- a big, sharp knife
- a good sized serving spoon
- a pumpkin carving tool
- a large bowl

The first thing you will notice about your watermelon that unlike a pumpkin, is that it is not naturally hollow.

You have to cut a larger "lid" for your watermelon than you would for a pumpkin. This is also where the large serving spoon, pumpkin carving tool and large bowl come into play. Hollowing out your watermelon isn't actually all that much work and this is a quicker job than I had thought it would be. Watermelon is also significantly less slimy than pumpkin and there is no yuck factor to deal with.

Continue to remove as much melon as you can. I was not prepared for how wet the interior of the melon was. I kept having to drain puddles of water out of mine, even after I had scraped it as clean as I could.

Once you have removed the flesh, move on to carving.

An eye here, a nose there. Just like a pumpkin. Only cooler , I put newspaper inside the melon over night in the refrigerator to help sop up the excess water.

Much red-er, none of that cheerful orange glow nonsense! The deep, scary red eyes are much more haunting.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN !!!!!

Friday Cat Blogging

2011-10-27T20:23:00.001-04:00

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The game

2011-10-27T20:22:00.001-04:00

I would have a real entry today , but to be honest, I wanted to watch the game on a working T V. Go Rangers!!!!

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Another brick in the wall

2011-10-27T07:00:00.000-04:00

I came home, I put on my little Rangers shirt and I planned my evening around watching the game. I even went to Target in my shirt to spread the Ranger love, apart from trying to proselytize to my fellow customers, I needed to get my 2012 calender for work and I heard they had some nice ones in the $1 section.

In years past, I had to pick out what kind of calender I wanted and sometime in December a new calender magically appeared - as office supplies tend to do. But then last year, my boss decided that the tax payers of North Carolina should buy my sticky notes, pens and printer ink but they should under no circumstances be asked to buy my calender! She removed the all ready delivered calenders that the unit had ordered and replaced them with versions she bought at the Dollar Store. I wonder if she wrote them off her taxes?

This year I didn't even get the form for ordering the state sanctioned calenders. I hope the wacky right wing taxpayers for whom my boss stands get warm glows of satisfaction as a result of my being denied a decent calender - Oh, wait I'm a tax payer and we don't get to pick and chose what our tax dollars go to because God knows I have a long list of things I object to having my state and federal tax dollars wasted on and I demand a refund for the Shrub Years as well.- I do not object to buying every other state employee a calender. I do not see a huge savings in denying calenders to seven people. Freaking Tea Party idiots, they should be afraid, the more money I save buying discount calenders the more I have to donate to Democratic candidates and left-wing organizations and the more often I have to buy my own office supplies because they are such hateful bitches, the more I donate. Keep it up assholes, I've been saving up.

We are the 99% you jack-holes! You will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes. I think tomorrow in honor of having to buy my own office supplies because you hate me, I'm going to Sam's and buy some soup for the Occupiers.

I came home with my el cheapo discount calender and found that The Game had been rained out! I'm wearing my shirt and everything! I have my rally flag out too! This means that Thursday I have to put my shirt back on and make sure my rally flag is on stand by and try to get my groove back.

GO RANGERS !!!!!!!!!

The time it is a changing. Soon.

2011-10-26T07:00:00.000-04:00

On the way into work this morning I decided I would have chicken wings with watermelon BBQ sauce for dinner., by the time I left work for the day I had forgotten all about the chicken wings and decided what I really wanted for dinner was pizza.

I casually passed my street and went to the store and did a little wandering around and waited at the check out but really didn't care and then went on my way home. I got home, took Dogger out to pee then fed her ,then fed me. While I was waiting for my pizza to heat, I changed clothes and caught up with my DVR. All very casual. I can do whatever I want because it stays light for hours, I can take it easy. I don't have to rush around, I don't have to to do anything.

In a couple of weeks there will be more more trips to the store, no more casual post-work schedules. I will come home, I will change shoes and I will walk Dogger. Quickly. Its going to get dark early. Its not as pressing as it was, I'm not afraid to take Dogger out after dark any more but I do like taking her for a longer walk than our pre-dawn and evening walks around the block. I really don't love rushing home to hurry Dogger out the door for a brisk march around the nab. Its not really relaxing or enjoyable.There is an upside to all this rushing, after the initial flurry of activity, Dogger is much more likely to get her third walk of the day and I suddenly get a lot of house work done and even I get even more exercise in because suddenly riding the exerbike is much less of a chore - its too hot for the summer but once the house cools down, its a great way to get warm.

When its warmer and lighter I skip riding the bike and walk her later as to limit our exposure to hot air and hotter pavement and if I'm not walking her until seven, I'm not likely to take her for another walk at nine. I'm really going to miss casually coming home and watching TV and changing clothes and making dinner or maybe, instead, running errands or going by the store after work. Tomorrow after work I think I'll go by the really nice Poverty Barn and check out their Christmas lights and then maybe hit the Sam's Club and then, eventually, head on home. Slowly.

Fix up

2011-10-25T07:00:00.000-04:00

The back yard is officially back to being a "yard", the with the harvest of the melons complete and the removal of the voluminous vine, the cultivation season is officially over. Over the winter, the next step in the post-tree fall yard recovery is going to be turning the non-cultivated portion of the yard from the missile site it is now back into a lawn. It is to dream the impossible dream.

But before all that gets started, I have two lovely melons waiting for me to do something with them. One is going to be a pumpkin but I haven't decided how I am going to exploit the other one. I may be radical and just eat it.

I pulled up the watermelon vine and returned the yard to its natural condition. I looked out the window a minute ago and I am all ready praying for snow. On the upside, now that its winter I have no real reason to go out there and I don't have to look out the windows. Speaking of windows, I have brand new curtains for the downstairs bedroom! More ways to not look outside! I'm excited even if you are not. In fact, it makes the discovery of the sheers even more fortuitous. I bought rods for them but I underestimated just how wide the windows were and had to make a quick substitution.

I'm going to need to return the short rods because I'll need the bamboo poles I substituted for curtain rods back in the shed for the spring. I think the windows look so much larger now

The new curtains ( not pictured) are full length, fully lined and insulated. They are useful and beautiful. The windows are going to look huge. I'm not sure what kind of light control they are going to offer but I can always get some pull down shades to keep the light out if it is a problem.

Yay, Monday.

2011-10-24T07:00:00.000-04:00

Okay. I would have had a new entry for today except that I was gone all weekend and then I got back and had to wash the dog and then her stuff and then me - Pro-tip, do not take a shower at the same time you are doing a load of luandry because your shower and your washing machine do in fact, use the same water. There isn't some special "laundry only" water supply. Its all the same water and you can't use it all at the same time, no shareing allowed. Not very friendly at all. The city of Raleigh loves me though, I just paid for a whole new water treatment plant.

Oh, and I had to not watch the Lamegers, so I watched Bridesmaids instead, which turned out to be a lot more touching than I had thought. I thought it was a The Hangeover for girls but it really isn't. Kristin Wiig is so good.

Okay, the dog is clean, I am clean, the dogs laundry is clean, my movie is watched and the Lamgers aren't as lame as they were last night - thus far.

Friday Cat Blogging

2011-10-21T07:52:00.001-04:00

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Real food.

2011-10-21T07:00:00.000-04:00

My plan was to "watch" the game on my phone and actually watch Bridesmaids on the TV, but here I sit, the TV not even on. I'm not sure I want to start a movie at this late hour of if I could even sit still long enough to watch it. As late as it is, and it isn't late, I've missed the window of opportunity to start a movie.

I have places to go and people to see and stuff to move from one place to another. I also wanted to find a compost tumbler because now I think I need on. I can't have a compost pile because of my pre-existing rat and cockroach issues and I don't produce enough vegetable peelings to kept a proper pile fed. I could however, probably keep a garden tumbler maintained - I am totally willing to sacrifice and allow fast food places to pollute my meal with salad if it means I could take the leavings home and feed them to the compost-er. I'm good like that. I mean its not like the lettuce and tomato they put on those burgers are meant to be edible or anything, they are just there for looks. I worked at a fast food place and you do not want to know what the shelf life for a sliced tomato can be, trust me. And those salads? I made a lot of those but I do not remember ever throwing one away.

I'm also avoiding the game because I'm pretty sure I'm bad luck. The games with the Tigers were not televised in my market and so I couldn't watch them and they won the series, most likely because I was not watching, They did do spectacularly well in the game that brought them to the series, but I was not watching at that point!, I didn't tune in until after and they only scored a handful of times after that.

I watched the game against the Cardinals on Wednesday, and they lost so I am going to experiment and not watch tonight's game to see if it makes a difference. If they win, I'll stay away, if they they lose, that will be two in a row and its hard to come back from that so I won't watch because I really,really wanted us to win and I have spent years watching them lose all ready.

The prison system also wants to recover my couch and build me a personalized fire pit.

Back to the composting bins. I was under the impression that as a state employee, I could buy them cheap from the prison system and I think once upon a time I could. Those times are past because I went to the site and they weren't pictured. I could get my prescription glasses done through them if I wanted and I don't think I want. I am surprised that since this is offered that it is not mandatory and part of our insurance coverage. Perhaps right hand does not know what left hand is doing? Hands not available for comment.

The prison system also wants to recover my couch and build me a personalized fire pit and sell me shirts and hats with their logo on them.

Thursday

2011-10-20T07:00:00.000-04:00

I had read on Facebook that the game started at 7:05 - and something does, in Dallas, I'm guessing there is great televised joy and much excitement but here in the rest of the world, the game actually starts at 7:30 . Imagine how terrified I was to tune in to the game and instead find Two and a Half Men! I mean really. I should sue someone for emotional damage.

I thought about just "watching" the game on my phone, via keeping an eye on the score and not actually watching the game itself. Its easier that way, I should probably, just to learn the gross differences in the uniforms because most of the time I'll be watching on the dieing tube in the office and it doesn't really differentiate between colors, everything is just variations of lime green and violet. I do know the Rangers wear either blue or red and I assume a team called the Cardinals most likely wears red. These are not colors that work well in a noxious acid lime green and violet environment. I need to know the difference because in the last games, I credited the Rangers with a really sloppy error that was so bad even I recognized it was both sloppy and an error and it turned out it was the other teams sloppy error. Oops. Later in the same game the Rangers did almost the exact same thing, but they did it the right way - It turns out that two players can go after a ball and not knock their heads together and then drop the ball in tandem. Good game, Tigers.

Its times like this that a lap top would be a nice edition to my merry band of apliences. It would be so much easier if I wasn't shackled to the computer in a room with a bad TV - but if I was free of the desk top, the office would be just Doggers Room and I'm not sure how I feel about having a 100% dedicated Dog Room. Are there such things as dog ladies? Do guys get shit for being pet owners? No, they do not. If a woman has three cats clearly she will never marry and she probably dresses them in onesies when no on is around but if a man has three dogs, he's a dog lover, good for him and I bet he will make a great Dad.

Speaking of Dogger, I tried to take her on a walk but she preferred to get her exercise by jumping around and trying to climb her leash instead, so we toured out back yard and I played and lost and lost and lost some more on Angry Birds. This is a bad evil game and I wish I had never started with it. I also wish it would let me skip level 18 and move on with my life.

LETS GO RANGERS!!!!

Walk like a dog

2011-10-19T07:00:00.000-04:00

Much less drama on today's walk, we didn't walk the same walk as yesterday either, it probably helped that I changed my route and avoided those posers on New Bern. I had been avoiding my own neighborhood form months because of the presences of dogs, more specifically, unleashed dogs, my new paranoia. In all the years Dogger and I have been walking down these blocks, we have been bothered by only two dogs ever - right up until recently, when we meet a new unleashed dog almost every time we go outside.

Dogger never seemed too put out but I was left hyperventilated and horrified by what could have happened. Dogger doesn't want to meet new dogs, Dogger prefers her friends to be of the two legged variety and frankly, she believes herself too good for these four legged interlopers. People are more her speed. In our perfect world the dog parks would be Dogger Parks and she would be just for her and her two legged friends. The parks would be full of people for her to play with and charm and everybody would be happy.

In the past, we both saw leashed dogs as being more or less okay, but now, any dog makes me uncomfortable and I turn the other direction. I don't think Dogger would have a problem with a dog on a leash being in the same place as herself, but I do. All dogs are potentially off leash - weak leashes, broken collars, people too stupid to move away when asked... They all pose a potential threat.

If I can't shake this soon, Dogger will be taking her walks in my back yard. I do however have great hopes for the winter. I have convinced myself that once it gets cold that all the leash-less dogs will disappear. I don't know why I am clinging to this fantasy but I just know that this is true.

My guess is that the last time we got set upon by dogs it was because the owner was chatting with a friend with his front door open and his dogs just ran right out into the street. If it was cold, I doubt he would have been standing there with his door hanging open. I hope.

Dumbness

2011-10-18T07:00:00.000-04:00

Testosterone fueled douchebaggery is the most douchey of all douche behavior.

While walking Dogger, I watched two young guys throwing a football across the street. If you walk twenty yards down that street you come across a huge empty field just begging for two guys or an entire team of guys, to throw a ball around. Its vast, empty and right there.

But these two DB need to toss that ball back and forth across the busy street, One of the 'bags over throws a pass and it ended up inside the ten foot fenced yard across the street. 'Bag two made to jump the fence and would have if DB number three, the putative owner of said fence, hadn't told him forcefully to not jump the fence - as is his right - provided he is the property owner - as he was on the porch next door. I have no proof of ownership and he might just be a troll.

The two guys and now their posse want their ball back. Troll says No. The DBs and their posse are irked. Troll calls the cops. 'Bags and their posse retreat and throw another ball across the street. I'm taking Dogger back and have to cross this gauntlet.

Because I was annoyed with all of them. I hate 'bags and troll was pissing me off. Why do white people have to be such assholes? I was all ready rehearsing my withering take-down speech to these jackasses and one of the 'bags make some noise about not throwing the ball because of the "white lady". I tell the guy it would be a bad idea to hit me with the ball.- because lets be real, black lady, white lady, it would be a mistake to throw the ball at a pedestrian. I didn't say the "Throw the ball at me. Hit me with the ball. Act like you are going to do either and I will call the police and scream assault. First you trespassed on the trolls property then you tried to hurt me, cops are going to come and not all of us are going to spend the night in our own beds." part. The posse scared me into silence. Douche Bags.

I get to the troll and tell him the cops are only going to make him give the 'bags their ball back. He needs a kick in the ass for being a troll, but the grossly self-entitled, no respect for other peoples property 'bags need a smack for being such disrespectful sacks of shit. In truth, the troll, if he is the owner, could legally shoot the 'bags for jumping his fence and leave them for the dogs - but they have to be inside the fence, so he did them a favor by stopping them before they got into real "I Wuz Jus Protecting My Property, Offsir" territory.

The other day I witnessed my eighty year old neighbor lady read the teenyboppers across the street the riot act for the exact same thing. The message being the next time they touch her yard the speech will come from another authority figure and she's not going to fire a warning shot.

2011-10-17T07:00:00.001-04:00

Lets see. Friday night I went to The NC State Fair and then first thing Saturday morning, I went on a tour of Churches downtown, which was a lot more fun than it sounds, then I went to Occupy Raleigh , which was also a lot more fun than it sounds. This time instead of putting on emphasis on teaching us the hokey poky, we heard from very pissed off people as well as our real, live, North Carolina Secretary of State - who was also very pissed off - at us for not getting our outrage together sooner! They did such a good job at this rally that the next time they do something, I'm doing it as well. They did such a good job getting and keeping people riled up that later, people who were not me got arrested.

From my experience at these things, you pretty much have to punch a police horse to get arrested, but there are those who need the street cred a demonstration arrest carries. In this case they were told to leave and the protesters, predictablly, said you know "Hell No We... etc." Because the movment is not about going home and going away, they got busted. More power to them.

Oh, and then...

And this time I want us to win, last year it was just an honor to be there blah, blah, blah. Everyone was just thrilled and thankful that they were just playing in the World Series, that asking to actually, win seemed rude. This? year, I want us to not just play in the World Series, I want us to WIN the World Series.

Friday Cat Blogging

2011-10-14T14:00:00.000-04:00

TGIF

2011-10-14T07:00:00.000-04:00

I now have a ghost detecting app on my phone. I suspect that this will bring my cat and I closer together.

I also have an app that will allow me to set a timer to make the phone ring at a given time. I also now have Netflix on my phone so I can ignore the movie I've had for two weeks even when I'm not at home, speaking of when I'm not at home, I can now book hotels through Expedia, from my phone! I don't go anywhere and I can't remember the last time I booked a hotel room from a land line, but now, I can see how much a room in Phuket would run me while I'm standing in line at Walmart, and thanks to the lovely price-line app I downloaded the other day, I can price out flights to Rome while I listen to the Lunar Enhanced screech racial obscenities at me as they rage about the brutal murder of their very much alive son. Today's woman must be able to multi-task.

There is this book I really want on my Kindle but it costs too much so I might get it a hard copy of it instead - which defeats the Kindle, but $11.99 defeats me.

I haven't bought pumpkins yet. I think the failure of my pumpkin vines hurt me on a such a deep, weird level that I am now projecting my feelings of sadness on all pumpkins. My ambivalence about autumnal decorating is the manifestation of that hurt. Pumpkins just kind of make me nauseous now. I feel like I've been through a bad break up and I don't want to get involved with other gourds again so soon.

Is it fate that not ten minutes after I finally found my Ranger shirt, they lost the game?

I've decided to give Whitney a chance. I'm going to watch it for the first time this week on a TV with a working tube. I like her but I don't like-her-like-her yet and so far I like the boyfriend better. The show is not called The Boyfriend, this is not good for the future of the show.

This is going to sound stupid, but I know Free Agents was going to fail because there was too much set-dressing and the costuming used too many prints, the sets and the costumes should not be what stays with the viewer. They also threw too many speaking parts at us too fast, It was hard to figure out who was supposed to be the focus of the show and that is confusing to a new viewer, "is it that loud girl and those two guys or is it Hank Azaria and that girl who looks familiar?" as a viewer I don't want to figure it out. New shows need to stick to a small core group until the season progresses, and then slowly introduce us to the rest of the people who make up that world.

Three Dog Night

2011-10-13T07:00:00.000-04:00

I think my dog uncovered a crime scene. Its fun living in the city. First she sniffed a plot of grass, every blade of grass and then she followed the sniff into the parking lot and that's where she showed me the blood trail! I was like Oh this is great! That's blood. Yeah. Some one was bleeding. Super. and she's like Hmm. O-. The only sign that anything happened there was a discarded flea collar in the grass.

Dogger didn't even want to pee on whatever she was sniffing! Dogs love to pee on their sniffs! Its what they do, they sniff and then they pee on it. Sniff, pee, sniff, pee. They can do it for hours, Dogger could leave pee every few yards all the way to the moon. She doesn't need oxygen to sniff, she would sniff atmosphere, she'll find those aliens, figure that whole thing out, Big Bang? creation of the universe? she would take care of that. Girl dog is that good. First dog in space my Daisy.

It wasn't the first time I've wished she could talk, because after the amount of time she spent investigating the scene I'm pretty sure she knows what went on, who was there, who was bleeding and why, and what it was all about.

She was all Dude, I don't think you want to know. One adult male he smelled like cheese? and two unneutered female dogs, one in heat, big dogs, and two younger males with a dog, wearing dirty clothes, smelling like earth and meat and arousal were very upset here. Their dog was male, not fixed, um, flea collar was his,one of the females ripped it off. Very upset. One of the younger human males was afraid and he paced around a lot, he was very upset, he sweated a lot, very scared, see here? urine, human, hmm, diabetic? The other male was injured by the female dog and the other man, see here? two sweats, one dog, one blood. There is a lot of blood on the grass and the dogs, lots of dogs have been here. The injured ran to the hard ground. Dude it was ugly.

And suddenly, the constant sirens I hear at night make sense.

2011-10-12T07:00:00.000-04:00

Sorry, I would have been here soon but I had to call a couple of North Carolina senators and threaten them with return to North Carolina if they don't vote for the Jobs Bill. I don't think anything is scarier to a pol that makes it out of North Carolina than the idea of having to return permanently to North Carolina. One will vote for it and the other is an obstructionist, Rethuglican bag of shit.

Before that I had the wild and uncontrollable desire to make pie-ish things I don't know how to make pie-ish things but I know that I wanted more than anything to go to the store and buy pie dough and pie filling. I did that. I was a bit thwarted though because Kroger hid the pie filling, this causes to believe in Kroger World black people don't make pie and don't need filling or that black people do make pies but they grow their own pie filling. I'm sure some do, but all? I doubt this. and if they do not grow their own pie filling, the only pie they make from store bought filling is cherry pie. I have these memories of shopping at other grocery stores, other Kroger's even and having many, many, many choices and an almost endless supply of things to fill a pie with. Perhaps white people make more pies, I don't know.

I made three pie-ish things. Two lovely round ones and one kind of oblong pie-ish thing. I am also not really hungry, I wasn't hungry before either I just really, really wanted to make pie-ish desert food.

I was in baking place because I'm stressing. I stress bake. I am waiting for election results and the Ranger game to get underway. They won last night at the bottom of the eleventh inning, big time. 7-3.

Speaking of contests, the Democrat control Senate just betrayed their president and their constituents. Way to go. When will the party learn that maintaining discipline and punishing bad behavior is a good thing? You don't vote the way the party wants and every cent the party gave you for your campaign has to come back, you don't run as a democrat again and you get nothing from the party or its machinery ever again. The only thing the rethuglicans do well is maintain discipline in the ranks. We don't, and we let crap like this happen over and over again.

If a dem pol votes with the party line 100% of the time, they get 100% of whatever funding the party hands down, a dem pol does not votes with the party less than 85% of the time, they don't get funding because they aren't a Democrat. Name and Shame. Out with the old and in with the new.

2011-10-11T21:39:00.000-04:00

Dems lead all school board races; Margiotta out; one runoff possible - Elections - NewsObserver.com

And the bond issues passed!

Finders Keepers

2011-10-11T07:00:00.000-04:00

I found something I was looking for and I lost something I had gotten used to looking at.

As of Saturday, the garden is done. I ripped out the beans and took down the trellis and laid the hoses out to dry. I also took the timers in and removed their batteries. Next step is to till the garden up and plant the winter cover. I'll do that next weekend when I'm not touring downtown Churches, attending another Occupy rally and going to the opening weekend of the state fair. I think I'm going to have to set an alarm or lower my expectations.

This weekend while I was taking down the beans I managed to find enough still on the vine to eat at dinner, and they were lovely, I realized I I haven't eaten anything from the vine since I came back from vacation and discovered the mother load and got involved with freezing. The two remaining watermelon are still in situ and seem to be growing. I don't really know what one does with watermelon in October but I'm holding out hope jack-o-melon for Halloween. How about some lovely watermelon borsch?!

I found something too, but not in the garden. When I came to see this house the very first time, the first thing I noticed were the very pretty curtains in the windows, that I later learned were sheers, I think they sold me on the house. When I bought the house it was decided that the sheers while decorative, needed to be laundered. Then they disappeared.

I tried to recover from the lose by buying new sheers. New cheap sheers. New cheap sheers that were too short because somebody there did not want me to have full sized sheers. It wasn't really a problem for the first few years because I had short curtains, it would have looked weird with sheers that went to the floor. It would have looked like my windows' slips were showing and that would have looked even more stupid than the long drapes/short sheers look I had for the last few years.

I do think that there was a reason I never settled on sheers I really liked, it was because the One True Sheers were close by, waiting for the moment I would finally find them in the corner of a closet in the bottom of a box under another box. I would look like less of on idiot if the box they were in didn't plainly say "sheers" on the side - in my defence, there was an air pocket between the bottom of the top box and the bottom of the sheers box and I could have easily stuck my hand in and not felt the sheers. Multiple times.

Now all the windows have sheers, very nice sheers, thick, embroidered sheers that I could never afford if I saw them at the store, and these are not the kind you pick up at the dollar store - and I have enough left over sheers that the single windows are probably going to get two panels each, like the big windows. Very lux. And I think they will improve my forty-year-old windows R value. I'm thinking if I layer them I might not have to wear a hat indoors this year!

It also makes me think that I'm going to rethink the roman shade idea for the downstairs bedroom. I think now I am warming up to getting curtains in there instead, I mean, I have the sheers, I might has well make use of them.

VOTE VOTE VOTE

2011-10-10T20:36:00.002-04:00

Raleigh area readers, Tuesday October 11 is an election day! We vote tomorrow for mayer, cuty council and school board. Out with the racist Tea Baggers and in with the Smart People.

VOTEVOTEVOTEVOTEVOTEVOTEVOTE

Occupy Raleigh

2011-10-10T07:00:00.000-04:00

Well, I left early, I need to fess up. I left because 1) I object to being categorized as "marginalized" merely because of my gender "Well, if we have ten men lined up and one woman, we go with who is the most marginalized". Fuck you. and 2) The band played Four Dead in Ohio/Nixon's Coming as a dirge and that song is not a dirge. It is incandescent with rage, it is the musical version of the St. Crispin's Day speech. Gawd. You play that song to get the crowd hot and angry and ready to turn buses over and to start this thing by whatever means necessary not to make them think about the day Grandma died.
Anyway. I also object to trying to explain parliamentary procedure to 350 people in the middle of a park and I also think Jazz Hands to show I agree and hugging myself like a frustrated three year old because I don't is really, really, really lame. If you want to know why they are still occupying Wall Street its because everything is a damn vote.

On the upside, congrats Tea Party. Thanks to your efforts you have created a nation of very angry proto-Socialists. Good Job, jack-holes. My real fear is that the whole Occupy movement is being bankrolled by the same right wing money-men who bankrolled the Tea Party to further splinter the left and confuse the center and enrage the right. I fear the advent of Occupy candidates running under the Occupy banner and not as Democrats. Because that's what pissed off Democrats do because we are just that stupid.

Anyway. Photo-Blogging!

Want!!!

2011-10-08T16:48:00.001-04:00

Lighted disco balls that play carrols!!!

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So scared.

2011-10-08T16:28:00.001-04:00

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How to blanche green beans

2011-10-07T07:00:00.000-04:00

How to get more mileage out of your green beans or How To Store Green Beans

1. Get a lot of green beans. I like to start by planting some seeds and hopeing for the best.

2. Harvest the green beans.

3. Collect the green beans and place them in a pretty bowl.

4. Prepare the green beans. I like to rinse them off and snap the ends off and split them in two. This takes a long time, almost as long as waiting for them to grow. It reminds one why people invested in servants back in the day. It also reminded me to ask Santa for one of those those spongy floor mats they sell at Bed Bath and Beyond . After standing there snapping each indiuval bean I decided that one-bean-at-a-time was getting really tedious and that I should try to speed this up a bit. I introduced a knife and a cutting board to the equation and made to cut the ends off of more than one bean at a time - A truley revolutionary idea. I soon discovered that this would be a labor saving miracle if I had beans of uniform length, which I did not. My beans aren't those uniform length bean bots they produce at factory farms, no my beans are all natural free form beans and they are allowed to grow like they want as long or short as they want. Damn it.

Back to hand snapped beans.

Done,

Now you take your beans and add them to a boiling pot of water. FOR THREE MINUTES.

After they sit in the boiling water for THREE MINUTES, remove them from the heat and put the beans in a bowl of ICE WATER for THREE MINUTES

After the THREE MINUTES remove the beans from the ice bath and freeze. You have now successfully blanched your green beans. Go you.

Little dog lost

2011-10-06T07:00:00.000-04:00

I was mulling over the chances I could could squeeze another few houndred words out of the aging process of my green beans and my doorbell rang. There was a young woman standing in my car port asking to speak to me and, much to my shock, she did not appear high or schizophrenic or part of a Bonnie and Clyde style thrill killer couple. She was however, brandishing what looked like a rope.

As I went out in the dark to speak to her I wondered briefly who would play me in the Lifetime TV Smart Women Foolish Choices in Jeopardy Movie made about the last badly planned minutes of my life.

As it turned out, the rope she was brandishing was a leash and she was not going to use it to tie me up! Score! She wanted to tie up a dog. The young woman had corralled a loose, lost dog, with the help of one of the feral cats, who it turns out is also a Border Collie, who wisely chose that moment to use itself as bait and hid under the car causing a diversion and allowing the dog to be eventually captured. By me. With my dog leash. To be held in my backyard.

The girl was very concerned about the dog. Very. So concerned she promised if I kept the dog over night she would take the dog to the shelter in the morning - but, she teaches and has to be at work at 6:45am. Oh, and as concerned as she was, she had to go to a birthday dinner and needed to bounce. She left me her name and number and the dog.

I answered the door and now I have a scared dog tied up in my backyard. I vaguely recognized the dog as did the woman across the street who has seen the dog all over the nab. The girl reported that before the dog was playing in traffic, it was following two guys, one of which might have allowed the dog they were chasing away was his girlfriends and either the dog or the girlfriend was named Beauty. But in either case, they were not responsible for the dog.

The girl took responsibility for the dog and then handed that responsibility over to me. The girl took off for her dinner and I called Animal Control. And waited. And waited and called again. The WCAC is not a no kill like the girl said it was, its a hold for five days and depending on the census at the shelter the animals are either A) gassed or B) adopted out shelter.

Animal Control did make it out and now I feel like a dog killer. I called the girl and told her that the dog was taken care of and she's off the hook for dog duty. She kept the dog from getting hit by a car and now I get to feel like I just sent it to the gas chamber. I'm not answering my door anymore.

Lost, found, safe?

Update. This all happened at about 8:30pm. at 10:45pm my door bell rings again. Having learned nothing, I answer the door. It is the original dog finder and ta da! the dog owner who is pisssssed about the dog.

It does not help that dog finder has been really haranguing the woman about her poor dog safety practices. I give the very upset dog owner the number I called to get the dog picked up. They go away. I go back inside. Ten minutes later the bell rings again and it is dog owner again and she is pisssed that I gave her the "wrong number". I did not. She was mad because when she called, instead of answering the phone "Dog Jail" they answered it with "communications". She called them back and got the number of the actual dog jail but not before she got mad at me for giving her "that number" instead of the dog jail number.

I RESCUED YOUR DOG, LADY, WATCH YOUR TONE.

I tell her that the number I gave her was the number I called that resulted in a truck coming and getting her dog. She then accused me of having her dog inside my house. I told her I can't have another dog, and that the dog finder and I did what we thought was right for the safety of the dog, what with cars and other dogs and people and all.

I was told the dog was safe! and didn't need protection. I wasn't sure when the dog was the most safe or not in need of protection, when it was playing traffic or when it was seen running around loose without a collar many times. She made me feel like a dog kidnapper. I hope she gets her dog back, quickly, because if she comes back here to give me shit again, I'm going to set my dog on her.

Don't roof and drink.

2011-10-05T07:00:00.000-04:00

Go Rangers! They knocked the Devil Rays out of the play offs! I believe the Rays are from Florida and they are named like an expansion team, like the Marlins, if you have to explain why your mascot is a bad ass, your mascot is not a bad ass. Your mascot is a fish.

Speaking of bad ass things that are really lame and slimy. There is a house down the street getting a new roof. Super, it needed a new roof and new flashing and new downspouts and new chimney I would imagine. They have been there since last week! I got a new roof some years back and I remember they had it torn down to the studs and then they rebuilt it and they left. They were professionals and they worked very hard all day and, they, did work all day and then they moved on to the next job. I know they weren't here for a week. And I know they did not drink on the job.

These guys are learning the job while they drink on the job. They are also working all day but they spend a good part of the day walking up and down the street to the gas station and buying beer.There is occasionally a supervisor on site who tells them things like "When you get that laid down you hammer it. Now you hammer it. With the hammer, son, not like that, with the blunt end" and then they all laugh because the boss man said "blunt". The beer is finished the roof is not. Right now in fact, they are sitting on the porch of the house drinking more beer and being loud and the roof is still not finished, I don't know what they could possibly be celebrating - and I have my doubts they are celebrating the Rangers victory.

I have a feeling that place is going to end up with several rather creatively placed "sun lights" and the fact that the roof will double as a spaghetti strainer will just make the whole house just that much more marketable when the time comes.

Yesterday, I asked the very nice, professional handy man while he was installing my Thank You Jesus new sump pump about those workmen down the street and he called them "Jack Legs" and told me about the beer runs . He also just had a new roof put on his place and you can be damn sure there was no on the job learning or porch sitting or drinking at his place either.

Winding Down

2011-10-04T07:00:00.000-04:00

I think my office TV might be on its way out, the tube is about out of steam. I'm pretty sure that commercial tomaoto sauce is not green. I also don't think that there is a lot of violet and neon green in the Italian countryside, not to say that they are too tasteful for violet and neon green, I just don't think that the sky is neon green there or the trees violet

. Clearly, I am going to have to fix this situation, I have a TV upstairs I'm not using because the satellite people are being obstinate about fixing the broken cable that snapped during the storm last April. They seem to be convinced that all I need to do is mess with the remote adequately and magically my service upstairs will be returned to normal. I tell them the cable is snapped, I can see it outside my window but they persevere in the notion that they do not have to send a technician out and that whatever is wrong is wrong because I pressed the wrong button on the remote. Yes, I pressed the TORNADO button on accident. Dickbags.

Speaking of things that are green, I'm pretty sure that the beans are done. I didn't harvest at all Sunday, and on Monday when I went out, instead of another day of Green Bean Christmas, I scored eight. Eight green beans is what I was "harvesting" back before I went on vacation, before I experienced Green Bean Christmas Season. This weekend I am going to start the process of pulling the plants up and out, It is going to be arduous but I also need to get the garden tilled before I plant the over wintering ground cover in and I can't do that before the beans are gone.

It makes me sad to think about it. The plants were so green and vigorous this summer but now they are aging badly. They were Jen Garner but now the have morphed into Lindsey Lohan. I think I'm going to just shred the vines up and drop the leaves back in the garden, they seem to rot away really neatly and I'm sure add lovely plant material back into the soil.

It makes me a little sad that the bag of beans I have in the refrigerator is the last batch for this year. I did try some of the frozen ones for Sunday dinner and they were really nice, I of course, steamed them too long but other than that, they were tasty. And by the by, they do taste different that the frozen factory bags o'beans you buy in the store. Humph.

The watermelons are still soldering on but I'm not sure how long they are going to last either. I have two left and every day I snap off flowers and bean melons to help the plants focus whatever energy they have left on the two adolescent melons. I've noticed the vines are getting a little peaky and that can't be good for the fruits. The weather is rapidly cooling off as well and I don't think that melons are really excited about seeing the leaves change. They might be harvested sooner than I had planned, if so I'm voting they become ice cream.

do the right thing.

2011-10-03T22:27:00.001-04:00

http://www.dccc.org/page/m/1d63c917/1be73ee7/46b9ecd7/4e0ce25a/2950764499/VEsH/

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How to make Watermelon BBQ Sauce

2011-10-03T07:00:00.000-04:00

First, find a recipe , one that isn't this one unless prefer sweet, ultra mild BBQ sauce that without intersession would double nicely as a marinade or an aperitif. Otherwise, do more research on common recipes and see about adding watermelon to them.

Anyway. Second, get a watermelon, preferably a big one.

And then start chopping and seeding 6 pounds of watermelon . I'm thinking now that it would be smarter to pulp the watermelon prior to putting on the heat, I believe that it would help it cook down more efficiently and make for a better sauce.

I have no idea if this is 6 pounds but the pot seemed to weigh less than a healthy full term newborn and about half of my cat. By this scientific method, I say 6 pounds. Little known fact, as raw watermelon cooks, it smells like cookie dough.

Its hard to get a weight of a watermelon because the weight includes the rind. The rind is heavy. I do not have a scale in the house and even if I had a kitchen scale, your average kitchen scale isn't set up for pounds of food.

Next. Cook that watermelon for hours. 2-3 Hours on low. At that point, add the rest of the ingredients ( tomato paste, onion powder, garlic powder, brown sugar, dry sherry, lemon juice and liquid smoke). Taste it, panic because it still tastes like sugar water and add about three tablespoons of cumin and three tablespoons of red pepper flakes. If that is too much spice, add some molasses, if still too mild, add more until you get what you want.

Uncover and cook on medium for an additional three hours. It is messy.

Add corn starch until mixture morphs from a marinade to a sauce. Remove from heat and cool,

Separate into smaller containers and freeze.

Its not a bad sauce. It has an unoffensive, ultra mild taste that might appeal to a mid western sensibility. I added dried red peppers to it and more garlic and onion powder. I should have added cumin and if I had pepper flakes I would have made liberal use of them. Its a nice sauce, its not going to burn your mouth or take away from the taste of the meat, I found it was very nice in stir fry and was surprisingly good with fish. Send me your snail mail addy and I'll send you some sauce.