Yesterday it occurred, rather belatedly, to me that today was Saint Patrick’s Day and then it occurred to me that I have not ever actually cooked corned beef and then I suddenly started craving corned beef with cabbage and potatos, and so I started searching online for recipes, since I figured this is the sort of thing one can do in a crockpot. And then I suggested to Richard that we should see if anyone was interested in coming over for dinner, even though it was last minute.

Last night was choir practice, and we knew that if we were going to get it set up for this morning we would have to go get all the ingredients after choir, since there wasn’t much time before choir to do anything but eat dinner and find our music. So we headed over to the store and I am not sure why it did not occur to either of us that waiting until the last minute to get corned beef for a holiday where everyone and their grandmother eats corned beef (even though yes, I am quite aware of the fact that corned beef is not, in fact, a traditional Irish meal at all). But when we wandered through the meat section of the store, we couldn’t find it anywhere (we didn’t really know quite what we were looking for, to be honest), but we did find a big empty chiller with a sign that said ‘corned beef’, and a shrinkwrap package of potatoes, carrots, onions, and cabbage, cleverly labeled ‘Irish Vegetables’, already pre-cut into the appropriately sized chunks.

Luckily I tracked down a random employee, who noted that there was more corned beef over in the vegetable section, by the cabbage, because naturally the produce department is right where any sane person would go looking for big hunks of dead cow, but he was right, it was there. However, what was not there was cabbage – they’d been completely wiped out (see above reference to ‘leaving the shopping to the last minute’). So even though we had mocked the package of ‘Irish Vegetables’ moments before, we had no choice but to grab it, since it appeared to be our only source of cabbage for the evening.

This morning we stuffed all the ingredients into the crockpot except the cabbage, and set it on high and let it do its thing while we were at work, so that by the time we got home the house smelled divine. I found a recipe for Sticky Toffee Pudding Cake online, which sounded really good, so I made that (with a few modifications, due to the lack of any pureed dates to be found in our area, as well as the problem of not having a pan larger than my springform pan for the steaming process). My parents brought over some green Irish Soda Bread (as an aside, my dad makes great pizza, and when we were kids he used to occasionally put food coloring in the crust, and while a green crust is not too scary to look at just try to imagine eating a crust that someone tried, not quite successfully, to dye purple, because it looks wrong on too many levels to count), so we were all set.

The corned beef and root vegetables were delicious. The cake, although a bit on the fussy side, was wonderful – not too sweet, even with the homemade caramel sauce cooked into it. I suspect Richard and I will be eating it for breakfast for the next day or two. We’d ended up buying two packages of the corned beef because we weren’t sure how much we’d need (although it wouldn’t have all fit into the crockpot anyway), so we thinking that we’ll cook up the second batch on Sunday, since there isn’t much left over from this evening.

I forget, sometimes, how fun it is to slam together a dinner at the last minute and have people over. I think that sometimes we get so busy doing other things, and it doesn’t help that our friends have been slowly scattering further and further away, and they’ve got their own lives and making dinner plans at the drop of a hat isn’t really very easy for most anyone any more.

For those of you who don’t know yet, hold on to your seats. Because Sacramento has hit the big time. Yes, folks, we finally have our own Ikea. Be still all of our beating hearts.

I’ve been passing it on the way to work for months now, watching as the big blue and yellow box was put together and the signs hung and the parking lots striped. I remember when they built the one near Berkeley and how everyone was just so excited because oh boy, there was going to be an Ikea within driving distance, and I vaguely recall that they had to either put in a new off-ramp, or reroute traffic off the existing off-ramps so as to avoid any Ikea-related snarls on the nearby freeways because the masses would flock. And when the Sacramento one opened at the beginning of this month there were signs on the freeway, warning that traffic might be slow as you approached the exit for Ikea, because the masses, they would be a’flocking to this one too.

I’ve seen their stuff on their website and since I am not so much a fan of the minimilst holdover-from-the 70’s style of furniture, I never bothered to go to the one in the Bay Area. It never seemed worth a special trip just to go to a furniture store. But now, we have one in Sacramento, and it is conveniently located right off the freeway, one exit before I turn to go to my office, and so tonight, on the way home from work, I was bored and pondering the lack of dinner choices and figuring that I really ought to go see what all the fuss was about, and feeling as if maybe it would be fun, just this once, to be part of the flocking masses, and I called Richard and instead of going directly home we instead met at Ikea and prepared ourselves for the Ikea experience.

It’s a very large store, for those of you who’ve never been in one, and they start you off upstairs, and they give you maps, which is good because if you were looking for anything in particular instead of just aimlessly meandering, like we were, you would very quickly go ever so slightly insane if you did not have a map to direct you where to go. They’ve got tiny little ‘rooms’ set up here and there in each section of the store, showing how to incorporate their furniture and accessories into even the tiniest of apartment spaces, and that in itself was rather clever and useful. But the furniture itself? Eh. I was not impressed.

Or rather, maybe I am about 15 years too old to be impressed by Ikea. It is inexpensive, yes, and the sort of furniture one would expect to find in a college student’s apartment, and if I was just starting out and desperately in need of some stuff that matched and didn’t come from a relative’s hand-me-downs or a garage sale, I could see the appeal. But I am not a college student and I am still not a fan of minimilist 70’s style furniture, and so it just didn’t do much for me.

We ate dinner there, because one doesn’t get the chance to eat Swedish meatballs in a furniture store every day, and we found some plain glass drinking glasses down in the kitchen supplies section of the store, which I’ve been looking for for a while now. But then we went home and that was it, and I suspect that unless we suddenly find ourselves in the need for some cheap, boring bookshelves, we will not be going back any time soon.

I woke up early thismorning because the cats thought they really ought to have their breakfast RIGHT NOW. And when I got up, because I was still sort of half asleep and fully intending to crawl back into bed when I was done appeasing the starving hordes, I decided that even though my sinuses never get better on their own without benefit of the miracles of modern chemistry, that the best way to make the intense and painful pressure in my sinuses go away was to just ignore them and go back to sleep and hope it would disappear on its own.

Ha ha ha. By the time I finally crawled out of bed, several hours later, to either take some decongestants or else stab something sharp through my cheekbones to relieve the pressure, I was dizzy, naseous, and feeling like crap. So I took a pill (becuse luckily we still had some) and I crawled back into bed and willed the pill to stay in my stomach and not leave the same way it had entered, like my stomach really thought it should do, and curled up and waited for the medication to kick in. Because the bestest part about sinuses and the meds we all love is that they can take HOURS to work.

So most of the day today was pretty much shot, since getting out of bed wasn’t exactly an option when I was feeling woozy and queasy and getting the distinct impression that my sinuses had now decided the best way to kill me is to make my head implode. But I cannot really complain too much because bad things come in threes, and in my family, I got the better end of the bargain. Because yesterday, instead of going with me to craft night, my mom stayed home to try to put the house back together because they were burgled yesterday afternoon. And the jerks who broke in not only smashed a window and spread glass as far around the house as they could, they also went through and methodically dumped every single drawer and cabinet all over the floor. Bizarrely, it appears that the only things they actually took were some Sacajawea dollar coins from my dad’s dresser and both my parents’ digital cameras. For a brief moment there we thought they’d also taken my grandma’s pearls, which was actually worse than the digital cameras because those can be replaced but heirlooms cannot, but the pearls turned up amid a pile of debris later that night.

And when my dad called to tell me that they’d found the pearls, he told me about the third bad thing for my family, which was that my older sister was in a traffic accident Friday morning and totalled the car. Luckily the boys weren’t in the car with her and aside from some nasty bruises, both drivers are fine. But still, it has not been a good few days for my family, and my little attack of the killer sinuses kind of pales in comparison. Not that that made it any less fun at the time.

After I upgraded to the newest version of MoveableType a month or two ago (thanks to the talents of my very patient husband) I noticed that I was getting quite a bit of comment spam. A LOT of comment spam, actually. And the new version doesn’t synch with the Blacklist plug-in I’d had for the old version, so even though with the new version I’ve set all comments to require approval before they’re posted, it was still a lot of comments to wade through, trying to pick out the real ones from all the riff raff.

And then it occurred to me that I haven’t shut off comments on older entries in quite a while, and in fact, all those comments were coming on only older entries, so I went through a very tedious process of shutting off comments on every single entry for the past six months (which is how long it’s been since I did this last), and have come to the realization that I am just going to have to do this once a month, and that only a month’s worth of entries can ever be active for comments from now on.

It is worth noting that I have not received a single piece of comment spam since I did this.

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The other night I was standing at the kitchen sink, rinsing dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. We’ve got a garden window right over the kitchen sink, which looks out over a patch of the back yard we’ve not really touched – mainly it’s served as a place to stack random bricks and stones left over from our previous landscaping endeavors, and it’s also where the trash cans live. So I wasn’t exactly expecting to see anything moving out there, which is why it startled me enough that I apparently gave a little yell.

Somewhere out there, some kid is really upset that their mylar birthday balloon escaped. It had obviously been floating around a while, since it was hovering just at window height. It only hovered there a few seconds before it spiraled out of sight. I have no idea where it eventually ended up – it’s been awfully windy lately, so by the time either of us could have stuffed our feet into shoes and gone to fetch it, it was long gone.

I think I’m just glad that it wasn’t one of those bright yellow smiley face balloons. It was bad enough I was confronted with a shiny birthday cake; it would have been worse to have suddenly seen a face peering in.

This past weekend Richard and I decided to be proactive on dinner food, since we were eying the calendar and realizing that one or both of us has something planned every single night this week. So Sunday afternoon we did a massive grocery shopping spree and then spent about two hours in the kitchen this afternoon cooking.

I started with a Garden Vegetable lasagna from the latest issue of Cooking Light, which looked delicious in the magazine and ended up tasting even better than expected (we actually ended up having that for dinner Sunday and Monday nights). The only downside is that it took a lot of time and counter space and dishes to prepare, but then this is not an uncommon side effect of many of the recipes in Cooking Light, so I suppose I will not hold it against them.

While I was working on that, Richard put together Chicken with Vegetables and Rice, for which we used brown rice instead of the white rice the recipe usually calls for because we are all about the brown rice in this house. Then, since I was *still* working on the time-suck that was the lasagna, he made a Mexican Bean and Rice Casserole, which is one of those disgustingly easy recipes that mostly involves opening a lot of cans and stirring things together into a big bowl and then pouring it all into a pan to bake. And finally, because at this point I’d finished the lasagna that made time stand still, I started making Bumpy Meatballs. These are something that emerged in my family years and years ago. I am sure it’s a recipe we likely picked up through Girl Scouts, because it is the sort of comfort food that is perfect for kids. Basically you just make meatballs with rice and then you smother them with a mixture of cream of cheddar soup and milk and then you toss it into the oven to bake and the rice soaks up the liquid and they turn out marvelous. Because we’re pretty much back on the Weight Watchers Points plan, we used the faux ground beef instead of meat, but the recipe is such that you would likely never even notice the substitution because when it comes to Bumpy Meatballs, cheese sauce trumps all.

In the course of making this last dish, I discovered that Richard is the Meatball Master. I have never managed to make pretty meatballs, no matter how many times I try, because the gunk sticks to my hands and they always end up sort of lopsided and misshapen and tend to fall apart. But give Richard a bowl of mangled (faux) meat goo and he will produce perfectly round meatballs without any apparent effort at all. I know who will be in charge of forming meatballs in our house from now on (hint, it isn’t going to be me)!.

The end result of all this furious cooking was that we now have home cooked meals available to last us for the next few weeks. Richard performed a feat of physics in rearranging the contents of the freezer so that they somehow fit inside, and so far this week we’ve been pretty good about snagging two random boxes each day to thaw in the fridge for dinner that night.

I finished my project for the Knitting Olympics yesterday morning – actually got up early so I could finish it because the choir was supposed to sing at a funeral that afternoon, and it was actually a warm, sunny day, and I knew that if I was going to get it outside to block, yesterday was my one chance. In between choir practice and the actual funeral I dashed home – the excuse was so we could change and Richard could use his nebulizer, but I will admit here that I deliberately went to practice in jeans so that we would *have* to go home and then I could get the shawl pinned and outside to block.

Anyway, here it is in all it’s glory. I sent the picture to my sisters and my little sister wrote back a note that my niece said I look like a butterfly.

So now the Olympics are finally over (well, mostly they are, we started watching the closing ceremonies but then gave up because neither of us could work up the enthusiasm to care). We didn’t really watch much of it this past week, with the exception of the women’s ice skating, and of course Ice Dancing, which sort of blew us both away because the things those couples do on the ice is amazing. I vaguely recall watching Ice Dancing before and being a bit bored by it, but that must have been a few Olympics ago, because it is seriously fun to watch. We both agreed that in a way we like it better than pairs’ skating, because the guy gets to do more of the artistic stuff in ice dancing, and the way they do the lifts looks actually far more difficult, and also scary. The women’s skating was nice to watch, but it didn’t have that heart-pounding excitement of past Olympics, what with not having any back-stabbing rivalries going on. And I have to admit that I was actually rather pleased to see the Japanese skater win the gold because she was lovely to watch.

I would like to make a request of the networks for the next Olympics. For the love of all that is holy, do not let that idiot Dick Button anywhere near a microphone ever again. Please, please, please. I do not think he even once contributed anything remotely interesting or informative (unless you count his continual whining about sit-spins and ugly death spirals interesting or informative) and really, I have yet to meet anyone who didn’t spend the entire time watching the skating compeititions wanting to reach in and either slap some industrial strength duct tape over his mouth, or else just strangle him and put us all out of his misery.

Saturday morning I got up bright and early and picked up my knitting mom and we headed off to catch the train (the knitting train, no less – seriously, they had a special car just for the yarn-addicted) and head down to the Santa Clara Convention Center for Stitches West 2006. More on that is posted here. I bought yarn (big surprise), I did a lot of knitting on the train (again, big surprise), we got a little lost on the way home from the train station (the navigator got her directions backwards), and it was a very long day, but we had a marvelous time.

Yesterday morning, despite having gotten home quite late and being very tired and really wishing I could have just stayed home to sleep instead, we went to church because the recorder group was playing and as leader I sort of had to be there. Due to various scheduling conflicts all my alto players couldn’t come, and that left me with only sopranos and tenors, and since we were playing a song in the round, and we could scrounge up enough soprano instruments for everyone but not enough tenors, everyone ended up on the same instrument and it all worked out quite lovely. Also we had to go to church despite preferring to stay home and sleep because Richard’s still teaching the Sunday School class on the Da Vinci Code. I finished the book, by the way, and my impression of it did not improve by the time I was done. Maybe it would be better if I was a repressed fundamentalist who was raised to never question what my preacher done taught me, so the ‘revalation’ at the end of the book would have been so shocking I could have overlooked the hackneyed plot, the gaping loopholes, the overuse of cliches, and the random piles of ‘look what we dredged up from Conspiracy-Theories-Are-Us’, but alas, that was not the case.

Richard headed off to DundraCon for the rest of the day so that left me with time to work on my Knitting Olympics project, and then to go to my third-Sunday-of-the-month knitting group (look, we have a website now). Those of us who went to Stitches West babbled excitedly about our trip and did our best to make the rest of them wish they’d gone too, and there was a little bit of show and tell of our various purchases, and there was drinking of coffee and eating of pastries – two things which I have decided should always accompany large groups of women who have come together for the sole purpose of knitting, but I digress. Afterwards I came back home and kept on working on the Olympics project and then finally when I was starting to fall asleep over my needles, I went to bed.

Today I tried very hard to sleep in a little bit but the cats weren’t the slightest bit interested in cooperating, and it was just as well, because we had to get up and head off to Napa for my older’s sister’s birthday. We wrapped up the really cool pop-up books about silly dinosaurs and silly sharks for my youngest nephew, whose birthday was last weekend, and the present for my sister, and then we headed off to my sister’s house, where we arrived just as they were finishing up the latest dog training session. They adoped a dog a few weeks ago and because she tends to be a little tense around other dogs, they’ve got a trainer who comes to their house and works with all of them there. It seems to be working out quite well, and the dog is just an absolutely sweetheart and so very happy to have a family of her own. The boys, naturally, adore her, especially the youngest, since unlike the cats, the dog actually doesn’t mind when he wants to give her a great big hug.

Mom and Dad had to leave shortly after lunch because my dad had to catch a plane, but Richard and I stayed a little bit longer, to eat birthday cake and chat. And then we came home and we both took naps because it has been a very long weekend, and now I am back to my knitting and I have passed the halfway point on this shawl with just one week to go and as much as I know how much I will like this thing when it is done, I have reached the point where I wouldn’t mind if it would just hurry up and finish itself instead.

Ever since Allegra died there has been a huge void in our house. Rebecca’s death started it, but Allegra’s death made it real. With both of them gone there have been no more snippy, opinionated little cats in the house, and it is amazing how very much you can miss that when it’s no longer around. So we started to toy with the idea of looking for another cat, at some point – maybe even a little tortie – but we decided we would take our time and think about it, because it is the way with cats that something will always show up eventually that is just what you were looking for, even if you hadn’t known you were looking to begin with.

A few months ago I saw a picture on a random feed from Petfinders and the face was pretty cute, and when I clicked on it, the story intrigued me even more. It was a tiny little tortie who was a feral kitten and who was pretty nervous and shy and had a hard time getting to know people and who needed a home with people who would be willing to be patient and understanding. And her story stuck with me because after all, we already have a cat who is nervous and *very* shy and who we refer to as the invisible cat and who only decided that to be brave enough to sit near me on the couch after he turned 12.

Every month or so I would click the link and see if the little nervous tortie had been adopted, but of course she hadn’t because that is just the way of things, and every once in a while Richard and I would talk about the idea of getting a new cat and the idea of getting a very specific cat, and then finally we realized…well, you all knew this was inevitable, right?

This is Checkers (the picture is from the Petfinder’s site because right now the only picture we would have any chance of taking ourselves would be of two little eyes peering suspiciously out of the dark).

We picked her up this evening from her foster home in Folsom and she did not make a sound the entire drive home. We’ve closed the doors to the library and the jack-and-jill bathroom and set her up with some food and water and a litter box. We’ve rigged a towel over the portion of the bookshelves she immediately bolted toward so she can have a little cave to hide in and I made sure that the door to the linen closet is slightly ajar because our other nervous cat really likes hanging out in there. She’s a tiny little thing and she’s just under three years old, and she has the biggest yellow eyes and I do not think I even need to tell you that we were smitten the instant we met her, or that maybe, just maybe, some of us were smitten months ago, having stumbled onto a little thumbnail picture of a tiny tortie with a checkerboard chin who was meant for us all along.

I love the Olympics. I really do. I might get annoyed by the prima donna attitude of some of the contestants and I might want to reach through the television screen and smack a few of the announcers upside the head with large, heavy objects from time to time, but overall, the whole thing is just lots of fun. This is likely due in large part to the fact that the Olympics is the only time when I get to see my favorite sports on prime time television, but also because it is two weeks, every two years, of pretty, pretty people doing amazing things that normal human beings can only dream of doing.

I have to admit that I can only watch one or two runs of luge or bobsled or downhill skiing before I start nodding off, because once you have seen one person go down a hill or slide around a ring very fast, you have seen them all. But there are other things to watch, like the snowboarding, where they strap themselves to boards and zip around in a half open tube and jump really high into the air and try to kill themselves, and the mogul thing where they do big jumps in the air and try to kill themselves, and the pairs skating, where they fly around the ice and occasionally the guy picks up the girl and throws her into the air and they try to kill themselves. You know, I think I see a pattern here….but anyway. We have been watching them on and off the past few nights and this year it feels as if there have been some really amazing highlights so far. First of all, kudos to Michelle Kwan for being so gracious and classy and knowing when to walk away, even though it must be killing her inside. She shows a level of maturity that is sorely lacking in most of our major league sports associations these days. There have been the women skiers who crashed so horrifically that if the announcer had not preceded the clips of their spectacular wipe-outs with a reassurance that they were all okay, I would have been convinced at least one if not more of them had done serious damage. And then there were the medal winners in pairs skating – all three teams recovering from something dramatic and powerful and showing the courage and determination to get over the fear and the pain and all the obstacles, physical and emotional, and keep on going right into performances that had every right to deserve to win.

It seems so strange to not be writing here. I feel like I hit this dry spell where nothing seemed worth writing about. I guess I can see why people go on hiatus. I’ve been doing this for six years; it’s only natural to occasionally hit a wall, right? Doing Holidailies this past December was harder than I expected, only because I felt as if it was a struggle to get the words out. It’s only in the last week that things seem to have shifted. I’m not sure what changed; just that they did, and I suppose I ought not to question it.

So. Life. I am taking part in the Knitting Olympics, because it is just the sort of crazy thing that appeals to me. Plus, I’ve wanted to make the thing I’m making ever since I saw the book, so this was as good an excuse as any. I’m actually making pretty good progress, considering I only started on Friday. I’m going to three knitting groups each month, and I am taking part in my third hand-knit sock exchange.

This knitting thing that has pretty much taken over my life, by the way, feels good. I’ve even written up my very first pattern – something that brings in my old nerd tendencies, since it relies heavily on a number of calculations, including the use of the Pythagorean Theorem. And I’ve got two more patterns – both of which are going to involve a fair bit of math, at least for me to map them out, brewing around in my head that I will eventually bring out in yarn, both of which I think could turn out really amazing, if I can just get through the next two weeks of knitting insanity.

In non-knitting news, life is going along as usual. After 8 months of leaving messages and trying to contact our gardener through phone (before the number was disconnected) and then through his staff, we finally gave up. I still feel a little guilty because he used to be really good and I’ve been using his services for a very long time, but there is only so far you can go when you are paying someone to do things that they are not doing. We found someone else, and I have had a number of ‘wow’ moments since the switch. They actually trim the shrubs we asked them to trim. They actually unearthed the stone toad and the gnome from the front yard (shut up, it’s a family thing and it has to stay outside if only because we are the only ones of all of Richard’s family who have the *guts* to stick the darn thing in the yard for all the world to see, and if we have a stone goose with interchangeable outfits for the seasons for my family, we can also have a silly little gnome for his). They trimmed the flowers in the raised flower bed in the back yard, just like they are supposed to be trimmed, even though I didn’t ask them to and was starting to feel guilty that I couldn’t even muster the enthusiasm to go out and trim the damn things myself (I really do hate yard work). Every week, when I see everything they have done and how nice our yard looks I am reminded of how bad things had gotten with the other gardener, and how we really did let things go far too long.

Richard picked up every book by Christopher Moore available in the library and we’ve been working our way through all of them. He also picked up a copy of the Da Vinci Code, since he’s currently teaching a Sunday School class on it. I have had no desire to read it, even before the class, but his obvious distaste with the book made me even less willing to devote any time at all to the darn thing. However, the class is half over now and I still haven’t read it, so I decided to make it my breakfast reading for the week – something I can pick up, plow through 50 or so pages in the 10 or 15 minutes of breakfast time each morning. And it is good that I am doing this only in short bursts because I think if I had to sit and read this non-stop my eyes would just roll right out of my head from the sheer badness of it all. The clichés, the useless, irrelevant, boring detail, the random ‘facts’ that are thrown in to bury the entire stupid story in a mountain of…well, lets just say if I’d really wanted to wade in such a huge pile of sh…uh…cat poop, I could just not scoop the litter boxes for a few days and get the same result. But I am determined to finish the damn book, even though I think it is possibly one of the worst accumulations of drivel ever published, just because I cannot let a book this stupid beat me.