The cat (who isn't sick anymore. I hope) Here is the story of the sick cat. At some point on Saturday, Tangerine got outside. We do not know when; all we know is that we didn't even notice it until Sunday (for an extra heaping of bad cat parent guilt!) and then we could not find her anywhere at all, and we only found her after Richard put up posters on Monday morning and a neighbor called to say she'd been found. We can only assume that the whole thing was a huge trauma for her because when she came back she was nervous and lethargic and by the time we took her to the vet on Tuesday she was dehydrated and not eating, and basically we ended up force feeding her baby food and giving her fluids until Thursday afternoon when she finally decided that eating might be a good idea. Since then she has been doing her best to make up for lost time by sucking down food at every opportunity, and enjoying all the extra attention her very relieved humans have been giving her.

Jelly Two friends and I got together this morning and we made three batches of pomegranate jelly and 5 batches of jalepeno pepper jelly. The pomegranate jelly is very time consuming and also very tempermental and I have only ever had about a 50% rate of success in my years of making it for getting it to set into jelly and not just remain pomegranate syrup. The jalepeno pepper jelly is disgustingly easy and quick and very, very pretty, and the best part is that even if it does not set much, it doesn't matter. We use the recipe from the Chevy's Fresh Mex cookbook, and it is amazing.

For the pomegranate jelly, I shucked a bit more than half the pomegrantes from our tree to get enough seeds for one batch. My skin is so dry that it just sucks up any bit of dye, and the nifty thing about pomegranates is that while the seeds stain everything purple, the skin can stain everything an amazingly sickly yellow with just the faintest hint of green. If I had timed this better I could have simply said that the horrid coloration on my fingers was just part of some strange Halloween costume.

The niece Have I mentioned lately how much fun my niece is for the rest of us to watch (maybe not so much fun to her parents, from time to time)? The latest story, as related by my mom, is that my niece, who is six and a half, got so annoyed at the fact that her mom yelled at her (the fact that she deserved the yelling is, of course, irrelevant in the mind of a determined six year old) that she stormed off to her room and wrote her mom a letter, telling her that if she didn't promise to never yell at her again, she was going to run away. I admit to wondering just how hard it was for my little sister to not burst into hysterical laughter and instead keep her calm about it. But anyway, the delicious irony of this is that it's my little sister who was the one who tended to do exactly the same thing when she was young too.