One of that Damned Mob Of Scribbling Women.
Spring is coming! Yay!!!
Here are some pictures I took today. There are some LOL cat worthy ones, too. I haven’t uploaded them to flickr yet, but I’ll update the post when I do. Creative Commons, non-commerical, attribution, so yes, you can use these, just give me a link back. The full size (5MB or more) will be at my flickr account.
Photo by Yours Truly
Photo by Yours Truly
Are You Effing Kidding me? Photo by Yours Truly
I said No. Photo By Yours Truly
Suzy Jones, Politician: Today, in this great country of ours, we face a crisis. The world will be destroyed if we don’t act. The Zombie Apocalypse is coming. We cannot let those shambling, groaning, mindless creatures gnaw on our bunnies. Pets and small children should be in the basement. The streets are not safe.
Policy Wonk A (PWA):
PWA’s claims rated “Pants On Fire times 10.”
PWA replies: Ferd Smith stands for protecting our beloved bunnies from Zombies. Suzy Jones wants bunnies to die in the basement.
Top Google results for “Is the Zombie Apocalypse coming?”
- Best Zombie fighting weapons (sponsored link)
- Top 10 ways to Zombie-proof your basement.
- Securing a room in a dwelling without a basement
- Hot Zombie babes
- How to protect your bunny from Zombies
Ferd Smith, Politician: Zombies are attacking bunnies in greater numbers everyday. We need to arm the citizenry with anti-Zombie ammunition right now. Give everyone anti-Zombie guns! I guarantee you the streets are safe for bunnies.
Policy Wonk B (PWB):
Policy Wonk B Video Clip Rated “Pants On Fire Times a Billion!”
PWB replies: Ferd Smith says our bunnies are not in danger. Suzy Jones believes in protecting sweet, innocent, fluffy bunnies.
Top Google Search for “How to find your missing pet”
- Zombie-Repellant, 10 Gal. (sponsored link)
- Top 2 ways to Zombie-proof your basement NOW!
- Securing a room in a dwelling without a basement
- XXX Zombie action XXX
- Obedience school for bunnies
The pundits have been eaten by Zombies. Jones and Smith accidentally run into each other outside the Senate. After a brief scuffle they talk and realize they actually have the same goal. They fight Zombies together and save the world for our bunnies.
Here is a picture of Abu, a Blue Abyssinian. He was the smallest of his litter, by the way. Fully grown, he barely weighs seven pounds. Besides being a beautiful cat who demands attention when HE wants it and who lines up with the dogs for treats, he is smart and blindingly fast.
He is also, not to put too fine a point on it, cunning and determined. Some of you may recall his three days stuck in a tree, requiring the immortal hero Raul climbing said tree to put him in a sack and bring him down. (Side note: Ignore those websites that say not to put your stuck-in-a-tree-cat into a sack. Having observed a professional tree-climber 30 feet up a tree, there is no other way to get a cat safely out of a tree, for the cat or the tree climber.)
Abu is an indoor cat. Cats live longer when they’re indoor cats. Indoor cats do not decimate the songbird population or get carried away by owls or hawks or eaten by a badger or coyote. In Sonoma County feral (and outdoor) cats have had a horrific impact on ground nesting songbirds. We here at Jewel central believe our cats belong indoors. Sigh. Abu, alas, being the cat he is, not only has escaped outside but while outside has caught birds, mice and small rodents. He is now highly motivated to get outside, particularly because he is aware we keep him inside.
Today, I went into the garage for some reason or other. I very carefully closed the sliding wooden door behind me. When I returned, I stopped to think before I opened the garage door and then, rather than open it with confidence in him having been asleep on the couch when I headed for the garage AND having closed the sliding door, I opened it about an inch. And there he was. Staring at me through that inch of space. I then closed the garage door and walked all the way around the house to the front door.
The question now is, what do I do when he figures that out? No one will be able to get inside the house.
Updated: Video. This was after our washing machine overflowed, so pardon the blanket etc we used to mop up a lot of water prior to this exclusive video. I am standing with my back to the garage door.
When my son was little I finally bought a car. We lived in San Francisco, at Franklin and Clay, which is one of the hillier sections of the city. Parking, even with a parking control sticker, was pretty tough to come by. One day I came home after an afternoon doing whatever it was, my 2 year old in the back seat, and there was a PRIMO parking place right by my building. If angles had been singing, that parking place couldn’t have been more miraculous because it was also big enough that even I could parallel park in it. Which I did. As I was getting my son out of his car seat and gathering up our stuff, I noticed an elderly woman walking slowly s l o w l y up Clay Street. Which was steep right there. Very steep. And it was a warm afternoon.
She reached my car about the time I had my son in my arms. And she stopped and I said hello. And then she asked me for a ride. She had a doctor’s appointment on the other side of two hills and she was walking up those steep, steep hills. My first thought was, but don’t you see this parking place I got? RIGHT BY MY BUILDING? But I said yes, of course, because no one should make a 70 or 80 year old woman walk up two more steep hills to her doctor’s appointment.
I like to attribute all my subsequent experiences with parking mojo to giving an old woman a ride to her doctor’s appointment.
Some years later, when we’d moved north and my son was about ten, I think, we were driving from wherever to home. And I notice, as I am driving, that there is a woman who — well, if you’ve seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding, imagine the 50 or 60 year old Greek matriarchs in that movie, plump and dark and a bit, well, blowsy, and that’s what this woman looked like. She was wearing business appropriate clothes, though. She was obviously in a hurry. She was practically running along the sidewalk.
We stopped at a light and the woman reached the corner and then ran across two lanes of traffic to my car and bent down to the front passenger window. She looked harried and flustered and I opened the window and she asked me, begged really, for a ride to the bus stop. My first thought was, Hell no! You look like a crazy lady with your hair flying all around and you are accosting complete strangers. But of course her ink black hair was flying all around, she was not dressed for running yet had been running because she was going to miss her bus and she was pretty far from the stop, to be honest.
So I gave her a ride and made her wear her seatbelt even though she didn’t want to. I dropped her at the bus stop and my son and I went home.
The reason I gave two complete strangers rides was for more than just the obvious. I did it because when I was a teenager, my mother was a volunteer who drove cancer patients to their chemo treatments. And one lovely lady, who was dying of cancer, came to live with us for four months because none of her children would take her in.
And I have never, ever forgotten that.
Again by Twitter request:
Devonshire Cream is not readily available in the US, though you can certainly buy it. This yummy spread is especially good on freshly baked scones. It’s supposed to be easy to make so I went in search of recipes. My first attempt was an utter failure. All subsequent attempts have been a resounding success.
There are two methods, the oven method and the frying-pan method. The oven method is probably the least work, but technology may conspire against your success. Basically, what you do is heat the whipping cream in a covered oven-proof bowl at a very very low temperature for a long time. For the oven, you need 180 F, and some ovens, it seems, turn off after several hours of being on. You’re supposed to leave the oven on for 8-12 hours and then come along and scrape all the delicious Devonshire cream from the top.
In my case, I didn’t get the opportunity to find out if our oven would shut off because someone came along, ignored my note to leave the oven alone, and turned it off. Damn. But my whipped cream in that attempt was also only 18% fat. Total fail.
The frying pan method takes more attention, but it is less vulnerable to someone turning off the oven because the frying pan method looks like something is going on. Which it is. If you’re home for several hours anyway, this method works great.
Pour 1-2 pints of whipping cream in the frying pan. Put it on low over heat diffuser. Cover. Every hour or so scrape off the top layer with slotted spoon. The recipe I looked at said not to use a slotted spoon but that was a frustrating failure. Slotted spoon. Put the stuff into a container. Repeat until the cream is gone or you’re tired of it. Cover the stuff in the container and let rest in the fridge.
You’re done.
The subject came up on twitter and since the process for making candied ginger, and obtaining the amazing left-overs, isn’t amenable to 140 characters, I thought I’d quickly share it here.
Peel the ginger.
Chop it thinly and into pieces not too much bigger than your thumbnail or, say, smaller than a quarter.
Put the ginger in a sauce pan and just cover with water.
Bring to a boil then lower the heat to medium-ish and let it cook a while, stirring frequently. The original recipe I followed said to cook until it was transparent, but as it turns out, that takes forever unless you are a master chopper and able to chop really thin. I don’t think it’s necessary. Besides, the transparent part happens at a different stage. Basically you want to keep it at a low boil (more than a simmer) for at least 45+ min. I set my timer and come out and stir every 10 minutes.
In order to get a good amount of ginger water you can use for tea (see below), once or twice pour the water off into a suitable container. Add fresh water and continue slow boiling your ginger. Not too often though or your ginger and ginger water will be wimpy.
When it’s transparent or the finest slices are looking transparent, remove the ginger from the heat, save off the remaining water and weigh the ginger. If you don’t have a tare scale, then eyeball it.
Put the ginger back in the saucepan and measure out an amount of sugar equal to the weight of the ginger. (If the total weight of your ginger is 10 ounces, then measure out 10 ounces of sugar.) Or eyeball it. The margin of error appears to be pretty big, but err on the side of more sugar, not less.
Add 3 tablespoons (or so) of water to the ginger. (I know that doesn’t seem like much, but it is.) Pour in your sugar and return the ginger to high heat. Throw in more sugar if you’re worried or anxious for some reason.
Using a LONG wooden handled spoon, constantly stir the ginger. (Why? Because the mixture is HOT, that’s why. The longer handled the spoon, the further your hand is away from the heat.) The sugar and water will boil rapidly and look foamy. Keep stirring until the pan is dry. DO NOT STOP STIRRING OR WALK AWAY at any time while you’re doing this. It’s at this stage that the ginger becomes transparent.
Remove the ginger from the heat and pour the contents onto a fine wire rack with wax paper underneath, or just onto the waxed paper if you don’t have a finely wired rack (otherwise, all those small bits of ginger fall onto the waxed paper anyway.) Let it cool a bit. You can use the spoon to spread it out.
Put the ginger into a bowl with more sugar and toss to coat. When the ginger is completely dry, put the ginger in an air tight container (see below).
You will have left over sugar, some of it fine, some of it lumpy with tiny bits of ginger, all of it gingery.
Get another bowl or container. Pour your ginger into a sieve and shake. (See above, transfer the big pieces to your container.) You will have a bunch of fine ginger infused sugar which you can save and use.
Sieve the sugar from the waxed paper. You’ll have the clumpier sugar left, which you can store separately from the finer sugar.
Use FRESH ginger.
Get a big glass of ice water. Put in fresh lemon juice to taste. Add some ginger sugar to taste (doesn’t take much!). Enjoy.
Put some of the ginger water, how much depends on how hot and gingery you like your tea. Fill the rest of the cup with boiling water. Enjoy.
Use the ginger sugar to flavor stuff. Like other tea. Or in your coffee.
