Crap crap crap! Crap on a crap cracker!
My house REEKS of garlic. I mean offensively so. I’m so a-tarded. I went to go make a loaf of bread in the machine, I was thinking something savory to counterpoint the molasses oat bread of yesterday, so I settled on an olive oil, rosemary, garlic bread. I only had 2 cups of flour left (must go to store and buy bread flour, wheat flour, sugar, beer, ice cream, apples) so I had to make a smaller loaf.
David likes garlic. He loves garlic. I am firmly on the fence (ha!) with garlic. I do enjoy a bit of garlic now and then, a touch of garlic flavor is nice. I do not like things that taste strongly of garlic and I am super paranoid about smelling of garlic. I wanted to make a good bread that David would like so I just kept crushing cloves of garlic and throwing them in.
It’s the halfway point on the kneading cycle, we’re not even to baking and I think I made a terrible mistake. The warmth of the machine has drawn out the scent of the garlic and it permeates everthing. If it weren’t so damned cold out, I’d go site in the car.
Monthly Archives: January 2006
Another dog story
Yeah, it’s another dog story…
Last night we go on our walk, something that is generally a quiet affair. 2 dogs, a girl, some poop, excessive sniffing. Easy.
Maddie has an arch nemesis. I’m not sure what brought on the nemesisitude with this particular dog. Surely, we pass a number of houses on our walk that have dogs, but this dog she hates. My first indication was only an indication of extreme interest on her part. This dog was never actually outside when we walked by but she always managed to save some tiny amount of pee to release on his fence.
I know dogs have some sort of fucked communication through their pee. I figure dog pee is the equivilent of an internet forum but more interesting and the dogs tend to stay on topic. I do wonder about urine based flame wars among the dogs, “u p like a n00b!”
If I was particularly lucky, she’d manage to save a crap and drop it by the fence. This was a particular pain since there’s a nice incline up from the alley to get to this fence and I have to go up there, secure the dogs and pick up crap. On days when karma punishes me, they both crap up there, but 4 feet apart so I can’t just grab them both.
Last night, things were going my way, Maddie evacuated herself early and seemed in a good mood. We rounded the corner and I stopped and made Ghengis go. In a few feet we’d be in the alley and with the exception of the yard of Maddie’s pee buddy, there aren’t so many options to poop. Let’s be clear, he’s had pleanty of opportunity, he just hasn’t taken it. He does his business and I am glad.
The easiest way to deal with 2 dogs while picking up dog crap is to put their leashes on the ground and step on the at the handles. I have the plastic handled retractable leashes. This allows me to keep the dogs with me but also allows me the freedom to pick up the poop in the bag without being jerked around because Ghengis has decided to play jackass rodeo on Maddie.
As I started to put the leashes down Maddie caught me by surprise and took off, pulling the leash from my hand. This is odd because when I walk her she rarely takes off after anything and if I do accidentally drop her leash, she immediately stops because the scraping of the leash handle freaks her out. Of course none of this mattered because pee buddy was out and I was to learn immediately that the exchange of effluvia between them had been done with enmity.
“MY NAME IS MADDIE!!! MY NAME IS MADDIE!!!”
“YOU! You pee on my fence and I have to go pee on it! Get off my yard! I am the boss of this yard! ME!”
“MY NAME IS MADDIE!!!!!!!”
“GET OFF MY YARD!!!!!! I hate you! I am the boss of my yard!!!”
“MY NAME IS MADDIE!!!! ME! MADDIE!!!”
This is what I imagine their barks translated into. At some point, Scooter’s owner (scooter is a dumb name for a dog so big, but whatever) stepped out on the deck to tell Scooter to shut up. He had no idea what was going on. Maddie let him know her name.
Now I have to abandon the poop and go get Maddie and shut her up. She’s announcing her name left and right which excites Ghengis and things devolve.
“MY NAME IS MADDIE!!!!!!!”
“OOOH hey! Maddie! Tell him my name too! Tell him my name is Ghengis!! Tell him my name! Tell him! Tell him I like rawhides and squeaky toys and my names is Ghengis”
“MY NAME IS MADDIE!!! MADDIE!!! MADDIE!”
“Tell him my name too!”
“GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY YARD YOU FREAK!! Stop peeing on my fence! I hate you! I don’t care if your name is Maddie or Fart Fume!!
What makes all of this more difficult, besides the fact that I am truly imagining that my dog is yelling and announcing her name over and over like the idiot that she is, is that she doesn’t run up to the fence on the normal, easy to access side. No, that would have been easy on her and me. She decides she needs to take the straight line through the terraced landscaping on the side yard. Yes, terraced landscaping filled with frozen, pokey, icy, sharp little evergreen shrubs. She’s so engrossed in saying her name and having him understand that SHE IS MADDIE that she won’t listen to me. I have to haul my fat ass up the terraced side yard trying not to ruin anything in the process so I can get her down.
And drag her back down the block so I can finish picking up the poop. Then I have to prepare them for walking by the house again as that is the way home.
We get home, I go to the bathroom and it is then, at the far end of the house from the front door, that I realize she has cut her foot. I learn this only because there is blood all over the goddammed floor.
David came up and he got her in the tub and we cleaned and assessed the damage, she probably cut herself on a shrub. We bandaged it up and she looked pretty miserable.
But she is confident that her name is Maddie.
tchoochoopoulis
Molasses oat bread is good bread. Hearty, chewy, lots of flavor. Goes great with muscadine jam. Yum.
Nothing of note to report, really. It was a nice long weekend for me. I took friday off and I had today off and it was a nice rest for my addled brain.
My brain has just been obsessed with the crocheting. It’s all I think about. I’m constantly on the lookout for new patterns and designs, and I can tell you without a doubt that there are a lot of crappy designs and patterns out there.
I have about 8 million different projects I want to do. i want to make scarves based on lace and edging designs, I want to make lace edging for pillow cases, i want to learn filet crochet and make gifts for people, I want to join forces with someone who can make purses and crochet flowers to be attached to the purses…and on and on and on.
I ended up not going to the crochet class as I came down with a rather uncomfortable bladder infection that day, but the next wave starts up soon enough.
I also found the pattern for my next scarf and I just hope i have enough yarn on hand for it. Anyone wanna be my yarn patron? I’m particularly fond of the Noro brand Lily cotton/silk blend in solid colors (not a fan of variegated yarn for intricate work). It’s what i am using on the scarf project right now and that stuff is a dream. Completely smooth, a nice sheen, braided instead of twisted. I’ve been searching eBay for deals on it, but it seems the best deals are either on ugly colors or variegated colors. Sigh.
On the other hand, cotton thread for lace is super cheap on eBay. I’m a little obsessed.
Dammit. I wish I had more interesting things to talk about, but it’s winter and I’m chill and I get all nesty in the winter. It’s the quiet life, and I am happy.
maybe I was wrong???
I always tell people I’m not creative. I usually think it’s true. And yet…
I realized that I regularly take crochet patterns and modify them to suit my needs. I can mix and match different patterns to make new ones whenever I need to. I made a bunch of scarves based on patterns I got from my baby blanket books. Right now I am converting a pattern for lace edging into a scarf (yeah, I’m ripping out yesterday’s attempt, it’s not bad, it’s just not what I was going for).
I can actually be creative. Most of the food I make for parties are recipes invented by or modified by me, including my rack of lamb dinner, the stuff I made for my housewarming party and most of my curries. A lot of the things I make are not big stretches, it’s not exactly difficult to make a veggie curry, it’s really one step up from the bachelor stir-fry, but it is rare that I use recipes and when I do, I usually modify them.
So yeah, this is my “go me!” post. I can actually do creative things!
The other cool thing is that in doing this lace edging scarf, I ABSOLUTELY want to make this same pattern as actual lace edging and sew it on to pillow cases as gifts. And you know what? That is SO OLD LADY!
another one of THOSE days
Brunch at 2pm at the Egg and I. A metric buttload of food between the two of us, he had one of those skillet scramble things with the veggies and the cheese and the eggs, I had eggs commodore (eggs benedict but with sausage) and we shared a kamikaze pancake (a multi-grain pancake with walnuts, bananas and blueberries, I wish they put the fruit in the pancake instead of on top). I doused everything in Chilula hot sauce. My problem with Chilula is that I want to call it Cthulhu and I am afraid that one day I will accidentally ask for it and they’ll bring me a bottle stuffed with the tentacled lord of evil.
And that would totally suck.
After brunch we met up with David’s friend, Kasey, and I learned to play canasta and I won! I only won because I have beginners luck, I always do well the first time I try something and then get worse at it. It was fun to learn, though.
Took the dogs to the dog park, but the ground has turned into one unending sheet of ice. There is no where you can walk there that is not completely slick and dangerous. We only stayed about 20 minutes, but it was enough to knock Ghengis out. We kept Maddie on the leash this time so we could keep her out of trouble. This worked out fine until I was too far away from her and David so she pulled her head out of her collar so she could run to me and be at my side. There was also a huskie there, not the same one involved in the previous fracas, but Ghengis seemed to remember it was a huskie and decided he was gonna bark and show him how tough he was. Try keeping dogs apart and behaved on a sheet of ice! Luckily, Ghengis just wanted to bark and not fight.
I started the scarf, the big scarf project. I really want this to turn out well, I got nice yarn in a great color but now I don’t think I like the pattern so much. I’m about 10 inches into it and it’s just not as nice as i would have liked. I’m going to grab another ball of yarn and start on another pattern and see if I like that better. I’m going to have to pull out this one I’ve already done anyway, I made a big mistake at the beginning and the farther along I get the more glaringly obvious it is. I mean I always make a mistake in my work and usually I don’t mind, they add character, but this one is actually affecting the way it lays down. Crap.
Aw well, such is the life of a crocheter. or something.
I’m gonna go make some molasses oat bread so we can eat muscadine jelly with it. Yum.