Kitty present

Here is Anna enjoying her present from Robyn and Joe:
It's gotten much fuzzier, because she loves to wrap her paws around it and kick it into submission.

Candied Walnuts

I'm very pleased with the walnuts. I'll say this was actually cooking since it involved measuring things, breaking an egg, and using the oven. The recipe for 1 cup of walnuts uses 1/3 cup brown sugar and 1 egg white. Getting the walnuts onto the pan to bake is pretty sticky, but now that I've done it once I'll do it better next time. These are damn tasty.

Treats

I made treats yesterday. I won't say cooked, because I mostly melted chocolate, and some peanut butter candy. I dipped 3 trays of chocolate and peanut butter pretzels and 1 tray of regular chocolate and white chocolate pretzels. Then I made peppermint bark, which involved not only melting chocolate (and white chocolate) but smashing up candy canes. It came out pretty well this time. The first time I made it too thick so it was really hard to break apart. Also- broken up candy canes are very stabby. This time I made sure to spread the chocolate thin and it worked nicely.

I'm making all these treats to give to family. I got cellophane bags from the craft store so all the food can look pretty in its individual packaging. I'll probably add some curly ribbon for decoration.


Next up: candied walnuts and chex mix. The holiday snuck up on me so I don't think I'll be making pumpkin bread this year.

She sees you

Anna is watching you through the computer. Behave!

Meatloaf

Ever wonder how the cat's legs are arranged when in the meatloaf position? Wonder no more:

Still here

After I posted on Friday, I FINALLY got ahold of the doctor's office and FINALLY got my hands on a new prescription and FINALLY put it in the mail on Saturday. Finally. It really really shouldn't have been that difficult. I'm certainly not planning to go back to St. Luke's Internal Medicine again. They were astonishingly unhelpful.

As for our rent, we decided to get a 9 month lease. We had an appointment to go over the new lease, but it got canceled and we don't have a new appointment yet. So we've gotten nowhere with that. Donald's going to go ahead and pay the rent for next month at the same rate we've been paying, since there's no way we'll get a new lease signed by Sept. 1. Plenty of time to argue about stupid crap details in the sample lease Donald picked up.

Donald and I decided we should eat out less. We're spending too damn much money on delicious but unnecessary meals. Or maybe I just decided it- at least it seems that way with all the crap Donald's been giving me about it. :P In the time left before I'm sucked into tech rehearsals, I've been trying to cook more. For dinner Wednesday I broiled us a steak. KC Strips were on sale, so I got a great price. It was mostly a steaky success, but ended up overdone because somebody thought it was too red in the middle. Next time I won't listen to somebody, and he'll eat the damn steak however I cook it. I also made instant mashed potatoes and frozen green beans. For dinner last night I reheated the sides, and baked breaded chicken tenderloins. While the food I prepared was certainly not cooking from scratch, it's at least a step above frozen pizza. (Which we had Monday.) Gotta start somewhere. :)

Last Saturday Donald completely and totally surprised me by making me breakfast in bed. He said he was worried that I'd hear him and wake up. I've gotten so used to sleeping through the noises he makes while getting ready for work every morning, that I had no idea what was happening until he walked in with a tray. He made me scrambled eggs and toast with jam. It was great. :) It was also a little weird to be eating right after I got up. I've gotten in the habit of getting up and puttering around on my computer for awhile before eating breakfast. Just like I'm doing now!

Show's done

As I mentioned (very briefly) the preview of our show went fine. As anyone in theatre knows, a good preview is a bad sign. If a bunch of things go wrong in the preview, opening night will be fine. If your preview is smooth, something will go wrong on opening night. I figure there's some kind of universal balancing act going on there. Things have to screw up at some point. There wasn't any kind of disaster Monday night, but my light board did overheat and reboot itself twice. I was pretty unhappy with that. At intermission we moved the fan closer and raised the board up, so Act 2 was okay. The audience seemed to really enjoy the show. Success!

Strike yesterday went very smoothly. Taking things down is so very much easier than putting them up! Hooray gravity. With a bit of help, and a few trips here and there, I was finished and home by 2:30. Then I took a most glorious shower. It was even more satisfying because I knew that I didn't have to go back to the dusty place ever again! My lungs will finally be able to recover. I'm looking forward to not coughing up phlegm and being able to talk again wouldn't hurt either. My toe is feeling better too. I'm feeling very hopeful that my toenail is undamaged. Regrowing my big toenail would be a bitch.

So now it's on to the next show. I've started preparing for Aida at the Lyric. I also have a bunch of dishes and laundry to catch up on, and I need to go to the grocery store.

Absorbent and yellow and porous is he!

Friday I got to play with icing again. Lucy wanted a pineapple cake this year. Mom baked the cake in 2 round pans, and I took it from there. I got out the food coloring and the good ole' Betty Crocker icing and had a good time. It turned out nice and pineapple-y. The whole time I was making it the Spongebob song was in my head. ("Who lives in a pineapple under the sea!") The real pineapple was very useful to have as a reference. Mom cut off the top and stuck it on the cake before serving it Saturday.




When I went out to water my plants yesterday I heard rustling under the bushes. My first instinct was to squirt the sound with the garden hose, assuming it was a squirrel. Turns out, it was a teeny baby bunneh. It was cute, so I got my camera. It was also terrified, being a bunny, but too stupid to actually run very far. It was gone, or at least better hidden by the time I finished watering.

Yesterday I managed to drop a Rubbermaid container of Chinese leftovers on my right big toe, causing a great deal of pain. The edge managed to just hit the cuticle, which has now turned very purple. I couldn't even yell in pain properly, just sort of croak. It amazes me how much something so small can hurt. It just throbbed all the rest of the night, as I limped around at the show. (The preview went fine, I took many photos.) It feels better this morning, but I'm still going to keep it elevated as much as possible. Sigh. I decided not to post a toe picture, but I have one available on request! It actually doesn't look like much. :)

weekend pics

We headed up to the farm this weekend for my cousin's wedding. Here are a few pics:

Donald, dad, and me before the weddingThe happy couple
In the getaway vehicleThere they go, off to the receptionYep, they drove to the reception in a shiny new fancy (borrowed) tractor. No question here, they're farmers. :)

The ceremony was blessedly short. The church had very inadequate A/C, so they kept it short. The reception made up for it though, being nice and chilly. The food was good, the cake was very tasty, and I ate too many wedding mints. I can't help it! I love those damn things! I was told they're usually made of cream cheese and powdered sugar. Mmmmmm. It's always good to spend time with the family at my Grandma's house. Since Grandpa died, I wish I could get there more often to visit. My dad goes up pretty often though. All in all we had a nice time, but by Sunday we were ready to go home. As always, it was good to be back in my own bed again!

Certainly uncontaminated by cheese

I made a purse about a couple months ago. I fabricated it from the leg of a pair of pants I cut off for shorts. Since then, I've been intending to do some embroidery on the corner of the flap. I was going to do something with a leaf pattern, but my sample leaves looked crappy so I went with just swirls. Then I redrew the pattern about 4 times trying to get it just right. Once I had it the way I liked it, I drew it onto the purse with a pen. Yesterday, I finally got around to embroidering it. I'm very pleased with it, especially the way the variegated color thread turned out. I have 3 curls with crystals, 3 loops, and 3 little curls. The number 3 makes a nice asymmetrical pattern. The embroidery was fun, so I kind of want to do the pattern on something else now, but I don't know what.


Bonus kitty paw:

Dinner adventure

For dinner tonight I made "homemade" pasta sauce. I say "homemade" because it's actually just doctored Ragu. :) I browned hamburger and onions, and cut up zucchini. Then I added the Ragu, and various spices, and left it to simmer. I started to do some dishes. When I turned back to the sauce to give it a stir, a sauce bubble popped up and burned my hand. I squawked, swore a little, and ran it under cold water. Then I went back to washing dishes. After a few minutes, the water didn't seem to be draining, so I gave the disposal a spin which usually sucks the water down. This time it didn't. In fact it kept filling. Great. Then it came back up. Ew. I thought maybe some food was caught, so I stuck my hand in to check. Again, ew, but nothing. Crap.

I washed a few more dishes, having to stop every couple of minutes to wait for water to go back down. Naturally, it was 6:45, well after the time anybody would be in the landlord's office, so I left a message. About 7:00 I started the pasta. Donald got home when it was just about ready. I was getting pretty hungry, and he's usually ready to eat as soon as he gets home. I took the pasta to the sink to drain it, held the lid on the pot and turned it over to let the water drain out like I always do-- then dropped the whole thing in the sink. As I stared at my pile of pasta in the sink, it quickly slithered into the garbage disposal. And I just watched it go, as my stomach grumbled.

So my dinner has literally fallen down the drain, and I could do nothing but fill the pot with water again, and put it back on the stove to make more pasta. Then I had to get the old pasta out of the garbage disposal, because it chose today to not work right! I pulled the trash can over to the sink, sighed, and stuck my hand in the garbage disposal AGAIN. I immediately yanked my hand out of the garbage disposal because that pasta was still very hot! Slimy and hot! About half of the pasta came out through my ingenious idea of using a fork. Then I ran some cold water to cool off the rest, and dug it out with my hand. Several minutes and a new batch of pasta later, we got to finally eat dinner.

Moral of the story: fuck cooking.

Here's the pasta after entering the disposal:

Here's the payload in the trash:

And the cat just sat there, not helping at all:

A few snapshots from the wedding

Here's Mike and HeatherDonald and Kristin- hawt
A view down the pew
A truckload of stakes. We saw this in a parking lot after dinner Saturday. That's one efficient vampire hunter, buying in bulk probably saves a lot.

Chopped

Yesterday the lawn guys chopped up my plants. On one hand, there were some bloomed out flowers and grass there, looking raggety. On the other hand, if they had taken ONE moment to look at the area, they would have seen 8 little planting tags, and several non-weed plants. I was just thinking to myself that I ought to trim off the old stuff, but then it was too late. I spent the last month covering them up when it got cold, and watering them when it was hot. I was really enjoying looking at them every day, and watching them get bigger. I was just thinking that I should take pictures, so I could compare when they get bigger. Now I get to start over. The boss lawn guy was apologetic, and offered to pay for some new plants, so I went to the plant store, and replanted a few.

Here's the whole area, after chopping and replanting. You can see the tall stuff that I replanted. There is thyme towards the steps that is mostly okay, since it was very low to the ground.I planted new peppermint next to the old one. It might grow back, it still has a couple of leaves.

The spearmint however, hasn't got much of a chance. Just a bit of stem left.
My dad dug up these hens and chicks at my grandma's farm in KS and brought them back for me. This is the biggest one, the big "hen" is about 6" around. It sends out arms to grow the "chicks," then they put down roots of their own.

This used to be a hen. Unlucky for it, it stuck up and got thouroughly weed-whacked. There were bits of leaves everywhere.
There are several other hens scattered around. They're pretty small, so they escaped being completed demplished. The hen in this picture is only abut 4" across.

It was pretty disappointing to see my plants chopped all to hell. But they're plants, and should mostly grow back. I also planted a few seeds for flowers, but they may not come up. I don't think the dirt is the greatest in my planting area. I did find a lot of worms when I was planting though, and they're good to have in a garden.

Blackout has gone to the great cardboard box in the sky.


Rest in peace, kitty.

Jungle cat

I like the leafy shadows, she likes to sit in the houseplants.

More flowers

The sun was shining, so here are some pictures of my african violets that I took a few minutes ago: (click for big) The purple ones are less blue in real life.

Snowing again!

Dammit! It's supposed to get up to 50 degrees next week, but right now it's snowing again. At least it's pretty. :(

In pleasant news- I just added up how many hours I'll have worked by the end of this week, and it's 45. That means 5 hours of time-and-a-half overtime. Hell yeah.

Here's a picture I took when my african violets just started blooming at the beginning of December: (click for big)

I made a pie

I made a cherry pie for thanksgiving. It was verra tasty.

I just cracked myself the hell up

I don't know the origin of the internet phrase "I'm in ur base, killin ur dudes," but it still makes me laugh. Naturally, the internet took the joke, added pictures, and ran with it. On this page I found many variants, some great, some crap. http://www.knitemare.org/cats/

I decided to make my own:
(Click for big)

It cracks me up. :D :D Photoshop, I lurve you.

(Note: Donald thinks the phrase is from Quake)

It is good, in the sun