Thursday, February 25, 2010

I was really going well for a while there....

...Then I got bored and stopped writing.
Not busy, my "busy" involves being on the computer most of the time anyway.

Anyhow.
Little cat, little cat is at the shelter - they're not very full, kitty should be able to stay a while.
Pity this place is no-pets, she looked pretty good in the recliner.

She's not out in the cold, though. She was only a kitten, she had ice in her fur the second time I found her and brought her in ... poor baby, how tiny must she have been a month ago when I first started seeing pawprints in the snow?

Okay. Other news.
Once more I insisted on making a recipe I cannot make. Apricot turnovers. Delicious, but stupid - when you put a cup of cheese in pie dough, weird things happen. They worked out, more or less, but only after a lot of muttering and threatening to just turn the whole batch into Cheez-its instead of bothering with this whole apricot filling nonsense.
But did I mention they're delicious?
Even when they're a boiling mess of sludgy apricot magma oozing through cheesy fissures in a far-from-triangular glob of crust.

Made more chicken Parmesan to reassure myself that the basics of cooking food (dip this, mix that, put in pan, stick in oven) have not been lost to me.

Tomorrow is tiramisu. I have a feeling I may have to make more chicken Parmesan soon.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Little cat, little cat....

So, for about two hours last night I had a cat.
It was nice.

I had just finished an incredibly productive night of tweeting a running commentary on Friday the 13th (I SO did not know Kevin Bacon was in that), when I heard meowing.
I'd heard this voice before, from a stray out in the carport, but aside from eating the bits of pot roast I'd thrown out for her she'd kept her distance.
Plus, you know, she'd been outside.
This was close.
And getting closer. I looked out the peephole and there she was, coming up the stairs. We don't make a habit here of leaving front doors open when it's 9 degrees out, so someone must've taken pity and let her in the building.
I did likewise, opening the door and uttering the universal invitation for cats - "tk tk tk, c'mere."
She looked me over for a moment, then oozed her way in, purring nonstop to make sure I didn't change my mind. It worked.

No collar, but she clearly wasn't feral, not in the skittish and wild sense. She looked young, acted young - when I held her she pressed up against my chest and let me squeeze her down into a little ball of fluff between my arms like kittens do.

She didn't let me out of her sight, though she was certainly out of mine several times - she'd be walking around me, rubbing against my legs, and then suddenly she was gone and she'd reappear behind a piece of furniture on the other side of the room. How do they *do* that?

All I had on hand was Puppy Chow and the chicken I'd baked a few hours ago, so she got that.
Now, Ed hearts Puppy Chow, but kitty did not heart Ed.
She didn't actually seem to notice her at first, since tortoises don't have fur, or make sounds, or really even give off body heat...But then ...
"Holy ****, it moved!!!"
I wish it had been bright enough in the room to take a video, her reactions were priceless.

"Wait, weren't you supposed to be feeding me?"


"Is it ... dead?"


She finally just ran out of the kitchen, so Ed had to be banished to the bathtub for the night.

Kitty drank a ton of water, ran around a bit, drank more, ate some chicken, ALWAYS purring.
This building doesn't technically allow pets (Ed doesn't shed or make sounds so she's easy enough to hide), so I decided I'd better get her back outside before she got too comfy.
(WAY too late for that, by the way)
Gave her a grand tour of the laundry room, walked around the halls a bit, tried to get her to go outside but she just looked at me as if I were off my rocker. Took her back inside. Remembered she couldn't stay.
I got her to go outside by walking out ahead, pretending I'd stay out there, but I finally just picked her up because the snow's well over a foot deep in places. We walked around the building a few times, with me hoping she'd get tired of me and jump out of my arms at some point like a good kitty, but she just held on for dear life the whole time. It was late, it was windy, it was cold, I set her down in the carport. I'd seen her hiding under the cars before, I hoped it was warm. At least there wasn't snow there.

Of course, she just followed me back to the door. She actually ran ahead of me if I started speeding up.
I snuck in and closed the door in front of her. She stared at me through the glass and waited for the door to open.

I had nothing that would help her, nothing besides the food and water I'd already given her, so I just tossed some more food in a cardboard box with a blanket. I went back outside and she was gone, walked around the building again with no sight of her, so I put the box in a warmer-looking place near a wall.
She was sitting on the sidewalk and watching me.
I came closer, but she ran. I sat down, and she came up. I picked her up and put her in the box. She found the food, ate, wolfing it down and looking up every second like she wanted to follow but had to finish eating first. I went home. If she was still there in the morning, I'd take her to a shelter, though her odds probably wouldn't be much better there. She'd been hanging conspicuously around the area for weeks, after all; no worried owner had come to collect. She probably did alright on handouts and pity. Still, if she was there ....

The box was there this morning, no kitty, no food. Too cold and windy for pawprints to follow.

I hope she's warm.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Happy Valentine's Day

Please enjoy this heart crudely made from red sprinkles and Mocha-Frosted Chocolate Drops:

Best cookies ever, by the way. Make some

Friday, February 12, 2010

Vengeance

I decided to restore my faith in my ability to fry things by making something very simple and not very fried.

Mmm, chicken Parmesan.
Looks like a mess, tastes oh-so-good.




Take that, stupid quail eggs.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Quail Fail

Soooo, it's one of those nights.

When I decided to wrap weird cheese batter around quail's eggs and fry them, I knew there was a good chance something was going to go wrong.

Oh, but how.

The recipe wasn't entirely clear on the consistency required of the batter, and since I was making 1/3 of a recipe it took a little doing to divvy up the eggs. Now, if it'd been earlier, say 5:00 PM instead of 8:00 PM, I might've just used my common sense and said, "no way that stuff's gonna stick to an egg no matter what you do with it." As it was, though, I just grabbed another handful of Doritos and said, "it'll set up."

At 9:00 PM, once it had properly chilled for an hour, I took a look at it. Actually seemed sloppier than before, which is entirely possible given it was mostly liquid and breadcrumbs.

And oh yeah, I was supposed to dip the eggs in this glop, dip the glop-eggs in egg white (hah! Egg soup, what fun!) and then chill another 20 minutes.

Hadn't read that far.

I knew this stuff wasn't going to end up like anything resembling something you'd want to eat no matter what, so I decided the chill time could stand to go down by 10 minutes. Heated the oil, dropped the first revolting dumpling into the oil. Oil wasn't *quite* hot enough, ended up with a grease ball.
The second one actually turned out pretty well.
The rest looked like this:
(The whites are torn up a bit from my prodding at them to see if they were even cooked)
They used to be so pretty....

Moral of the story: Do not fry food after 9 PM. Just don't do it. And when you do, for the love of God don't eat it. And when you do, have plenty of orange juice on hand to wash it down.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get some more Doritos.

Welcome to the blog of someone who hates writing blogs

I do. Can't stand it. Otherwise I'd have many more posts than I do now.
I don't like writing at all, really, keeping track of things, talking to people.
To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of people.
That's why I'm going to set my goals small. I currently have on person following this blog. For the rest of this month (next time I'm choosing a longer month), I am going to see if I can bring that number up to 10.
I have no idea how to go about this. I have:

22 followers on Twitter (one of these is Philadelphia Cream Cheese, who started following me after I tweeted about cream cheese recipes for half an hour)
7 Facebook friends (two of whom are actually raccoons)
14 LiveJournal friends (all of whom I neglect woefully)

I just don't get how some people pile on the Friends. Let's face it - most of 'em aren't all that interesting.
Maybe it's that attitude right there that's causing me problems ....
Well, that and the fact that I never actually write anything.

Since the attitude isn't changing any time soon, let's work on the writing.
I know I'm capable of it. I managed a proper 50k-word NaNoWriMo novel, even though it's 50k + words of absolute drivel. I write huge blocks of text when I'm not paying attention. It's this consistency thing that gets me. Every day? There are people who update blogs, tweet on Twitter, TALK TO PEOPLE every single day?
Good God, how do they do it?

So. I'm putting my gecko in charge of Giving Me A Disapproving Look When I Start Slacking.
He's great at it. Look:

Ed is in charge of Giving Me Something To Write About When I Can't Think Of Anything Clever.
I mean, LOOK at her:
Bless her speshul little heart, she just walked around trying to eat those squash seeds off her face for the longest time till I took them and threw them out.

So. To sum up: Me write things. Me make frendz. Me NOT ignore frendz.
Wish me luck?

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Ahhh, quiet.

It's a beautiful, quiet Saturday. For the first time in a long time I'm just going to spread all my paper out on the floor and finish these drawings I've been putting off. A Harpy for Dreiks on deviantART, a gecko-dragon and a tortoise-dragon because it just needs to be done, and some fanart as a break between the other three.

Wish me luck!