Still Life, With Cats

This content shows Simple View

Audible

Posted on 2 December, 2017 4:06 pm by Jennifer 2 Comments

Here is the thing pet owners know: pets make noises.

Some are normal noises – in our house, Rupert is a narrator and Azzie and Ingrid are whiners and Ruby beeps, and Nutmeg only squeaks imperiously when I’m not going fast enough to lift her from the floor to the counter so she can drink out of the sink, and all of them chitter at birds.

But there are other cries that a pet makes that are *not* normal. So when I heard one of those sounds this afternoon, I flew downstairs to find Sherman hunched over, and backing into a corner.

At first, after he proceeded to hork all over the floor, I figured it was just a hairball. But then he went into a litter box and started straining and cried again, that horrible sad sound, and he tried another litter box, and when I went to pick him up, the second I touched his side he yelled and hissed and that is so very *not* normal for Sherman.

Richard called our regular vet but they didn’t have any slots available, plus they close early on Saturdays, so I called the local emergency vet, and once I described the situation they said bring him in.

Sherman hollered non-stop the entire drive. In the waiting room he calmed down enough to charm a nearby couple who were there waiting for news on their dog (and were, like me, anxious for anything to take their minds off the reason they were there – this isn’t a clinic you go to for regular care, so if you’re there, it’s for very bad reasons). But eventually that passed and by the time they’d stuck us in an exam room, Sherman was back to yelling that horrible, wrong cry that made it clear he didn’t feel well at *all*.

There is no clear diagnosis as of yet. It could be any one of a whole host of things. Because he was perfectly fine last night it’s not likely to be something chronic, and if he ate something he shouldn’t have (I remind you all that he’s the culprit in this story) there’s no guarantee it’d show up on x-rays.

They gave him some fluids and an antibiotic shot in case it’s an infection, and sent me home with pain killers that are apparently a controlled substance because I had to sign a form and provide my date of birth. He’s now locked up in the library, a little bit stoned from the pain meds, and at some point later today I’ll head off to the grocery store to buy up their available stock of baby food meat since he’s only allowed a bland diet.

And now we just cross our fingers, and wait.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.



It’s the most wonderful time of year

Posted on 1 December, 2017 9:31 pm by Jennifer 1 Comment

Happy Holidailies! Yes, indeedy, it’s that time of year again, where a bunch of us diehard bloggers do our best to blog on a daily basis throughout the month of December. My success on this has been…um…mediocre at best the last few years (which is sad considering that Richard and I *run* the thing) but hope springs ever eternal, so away we go!

To kick off the month of December (and let’s be honest, to provide fodder for a blog entry) we waited until today to pull out the tree. It’s always an ordeal, moving all the stuff in the storage closet out until the tree can be extracted, removing the cats, pulling out the tree box, removing the cats, remembering where we stashed the ornaments, removing the cats, attempting to stuff everything non-holiday related back into the storage closet, removing the cats, shutting the door, hearing a suspicious noise and reopening it to, you guessed it, remove the cats. Fun times.

Nutmeg’s excitement about the whole process was, as usual, palpable.

In years past this has been more exciting, because ever since we got Rupert and Ingrid in 2009, we’ve had cats climbing the tree. However, except for a brief dash by Sherman….

…..while we were assembling the pieces, none of the cats really seemed to care much at all. In fact the box the tree came in was far more interesting.

I suppose we ought to be happy about this, since it means we might finally be able to drag out all the nice, breakable ornaments that have been lurking in boxes in the attic for the past eight years, but in a way, it’s a little bit sad. It feels like the end of an era. We got so used to the amusement of having cats in the Christmas tree – in fact we actually looked *forward* to it each year – that it feels strange to think that we’re going to be back to having a plain, ordinary tree.

Well. Maybe not *completely* ordinary (yes, that is Cthulhu wearing a Santa hat at the top).

Ah well. To everything there is a season and all that. The tree is up and so now it’s starting to feel a little more festive around here. These days (especially with Rupert and Sherman) that’s just about the extent of the decorating we do.

Okay, except for one other thing. But for some reason these don’t stay put very long.

Happy Holidailies!



This time around we came up with a hashtag

Posted on 4 November, 2017 2:00 pm by Jennifer Comment

Because we had so much fun making Stroopwafels, my sister and I started immediately working on what we wanted to bake next. She was in the mood to do something with yeast dough, so a flurry of possible recipes flew back and forth. Since I picked the recipe the last time, I told her she had to pick it this time, so finally she decided on these, which are yeasted buns filled with cinnamon and chocolate, and plaited into a complicated shape. Due to the fact that it’s a yeast dough, we decided we’d both make the dough and set it aside for its first proof, and then join up via Google Hangouts for the next half of the process.

Looking at the recipe, I noted that we were going to be otherwise twiddling our thumbs for an hour during the second rise, which is why we then also decided to make the Cinnamon Star from King Arthur Flour. Conveniently enough, that happens to be the current monthly bake-along from King Arthur Flour (although I hadn’t realized it at the time I suggested it), so that link actually includes lots of details and pictures of the entire process, if anyone else wants to play along.

I made both doughs last night and popped them into the fridge, but the dough for the buns didn’t work out, so this morning I hastily remade it…which is why we ended up swapping the order for what we made, since my dough needed extra time to rise.

Anyway. First up – the cinnamon star. My sister’s made that one before, and she happens to have a lot of apples so she decided to add some chopped apples to her cinnamon mixture, whereas I stuck exactly to the recipe.

Here is my star, prior to baking.

It looks way more impressive than it has any right to be (trust me when I say this was a hot mess prior to the cutting and the twisting step).

So once we had the stars formed and resting under towels, next we tackled the buns.

These were…a pain. The instructions are text only, so both of us were reading them aloud, trying to figure out what, exactly, we were supposed to be doing with the plaiting and the stuffing. At one point I was holding up the laptop, so that the camera was facing down at my worktop, trying to plait the dough one-handed (not very successfully) so she could see what I was doing. Suffice it to say, neither of us has a clue whether we did it correctly or not. But we got them all plaited and stuffed, in one form or another. Here they are, rising.

So once *that* was done, and all the snickering and inevitable comments about ‘playing with our buns’ were out of our system (I kid, those will *never* be out of our system!), it was time to bake the stars.

Here is my cinnamon star, after baking.

It smells as delightful as it looks, and tastes even better!

Here are my sister and I, with our respective stars.

Hers spread out a bit more due to the apples (and took a lot longer to bake because the apples made the dough a lot wetter).

Verdict from both sides of the Google Hangout – yum!

And then about 20 minutes after those came out of the oven, it was time to pop in the buns. Which then proceeded to grow to ginormous size in the oven.

Think I’m kidding about the size? Here we are, both of us posing with buns almost as big as our faces. One of us may or may not have quoted modified lyrics to Baby’s Got Back at this point. Mayyyybe.

Naturally we allowed these to cool completely before we, oh who am I kidding, you all know darn well we cut one of those suckers open and tried it immediately.

The dough itself is quite lovely – it’s a nice light texture and has some good flavor. The filling was…eh. I suspect next time I need to try to get a lot more of the sugar mixture into there (or else don’t use as dark a chocolate as I did). Verdict – tasty, and fun to try, not something either of us will likely do again.

So overall, the second #BakingSisters day was a success.



Is a year enough time to plan?

Posted on 1 November, 2017 6:15 pm by Jennifer 1 Comment

Last night, while lounging on the couch and waiting for trick-or-treaters to climb the stairs and ring the bell (I always feel bad for the littler ones because those front steps are kind of steep), Richard and I listened to a rebroadcast of the original radio program of War of the Worlds. Richard’s heard it before but for some reason, I never had (although I’ve read the book it’s based on, of course).

While the claims that the first airing of the radio drama in 1938 caused wide-spread panic are not true, the myth has continued to persist, and the radio drama itself has become part of west’s cultural heritage. And while we were listening, I noted to Richard that, in an era where social media wasn’t even a gleam in anyone’s eye, and the radio was the most common source of news, it’s easy to see why some listeners might have been understandably concerned.

And that got us to chatting about whether or not something like the radio drama could even *work* today, in the era of instant communication, across a wide variety of media platforms. Richard and I, years ago, took part in Blog Like It’s the End of the World Day a couple times, which was a lot of fun, but we haven’t done that in a very long time (well, except for when we were overrun with Daleks and when the giant mutant spiders attacked, but that was just me doing it by myself, for fun).

So….now I’m wondering. Would anyone else be interested in trying to do an homage to the original radio drama of War of the Worlds, for Halloween, 2018? My thinking is that everyone who participated would have to agree to stick to the plot of the both the book or the radio play, and work within those parameters (not just radio, of course, but any video/images/text done in the original style and theme), but using current media to spread the story over the course of the day. I’m not entirely sure how we’d all pull it off yet – this requires some thought – but it just feels like something that would be fun to try.



Stroopwafel Saturday

Posted on 7 October, 2017 1:04 pm by Jennifer 2 Comments

My younger sister is a baker – not just a baking enthusiast like me, but a ‘went-through-training-and-knows-what-she’s-doing’ baker. So she’s who I contact when I have questions about why my bread is doing things it shouldn’t be doing, or what sort of cookie dough one should use when one is going to do cut-outs with patterns, and that sort of thing. She also, like me, loves to try new recipes, and on a recent trip up to Seattle to visit with her, we took advantage of the fact that we were both in the same place with access to a kitchen, and tried out a couple recipes – chocolate-filled hand pies, and homemade Tagalongs (the chocolate-covered peanut butter-filled cookies one can usually only get from Girl Scouts). It was messy and silly and tasty and a lot of fun and when I got home I got to thinking that if she and I lived closer, we’d likely be getting together on a regular basis to try out recipes and play with butter and sugar and flour.

So a week or so ago I sent my little sister this recipe and said, hey, even though we’re not in the same place, maybe we could try doing these together over Google Hangouts. She was game, so we checked our calendars, and today was the day.

The recipe itself is pretty straightforward – you mix up the dough and let it sit for a bit, and then you make the caramel (both of which smelled absolutely delightful while going together), and then you make the cookies themselves. And then the next step is to split an already-thin cookie into two even thinner pieces, while still hot (possibly there was a tiny bit of swearing and uttering of ‘ow, ow, ow!’ during that process), then dollop a generous amount of caramel in the middle and finally, smoosh the two pieces together, spreading the caramel syrup between them. Then you set those aside to cool and when they are done, you have stroopwafels!

If you happen to have a pizelle maker, which my sister does because she scored it for $10 at a garage sale years ago, then you can smash the dough in there and it will come out nice and thin with gorgeous patterning on both sides. However, if you do not have a pizelle maker (like me), you can jury-rig a dough-smashing system via the clever combination of an electric skillet and a saucepan. Put the dough on the skillet, grease the bottom of the saucepan, and then use that to smash it down into a flat thing. Pro tip – a regular waffle iron doesn’t work (I tried) – the divots are too deep and your dough won’t smash thin enough.

Here are my finished stroopwafels. I know they look a lot like lopsided pancakes (see above re. ‘don’t have a pizelle maker’), but trust me, they’re actual cookies, with delicious brown sugar maple caramel syrup in the middle, and they are quite, quite yummy.

The end result of the whole thing is that we both had a lot of fun, laughing and chatting over the video call, showing each other our dough and our cookies and our caramel, and we have decided we are going to try to do this on regular basis. Because after all, we live in the future now, with webcams and laptops that can be propped up in the kitchen, and living two states away from each other should not be the deterrent to doing something we both love to do, together.



Prototyping

Posted on 20 August, 2017 10:51 pm by Jennifer 2 Comments

I suppose I could have just pulled out one of the self-patterning yarns in my stash and done a stockinette sock, or else dragged out one of the other sock works-in-progress, but instead, flush on the heels of zipping through Mosaic Marbles, I decided I wanted to do a little more colorwork. Also I decided I’d be nice and make a pair for Richard, since the last one didn’t turn out so well.

So over the weekend (when I wasn’t processing a gazillion tomatoes into sauce, because it’s that time of year here in the Central Valley) I started and ripped out the first of a pair of socks, too many times to count. And then eventually I gave up because the yarn I was using was on the thin side and even 80 stitches around was too small and it looked like in order for them to fit, I might even have to go up to 100 stitches. I’m sorry, but life is too short to be knitting socks with that many stitches on the needles, so instead of turning the yarn into socks for Richard I decided that they were destined to be something else, and I cast on for these. The more I knit them the more I loved them and wanted to just keep on knitting them, and before I knew it, they were done.

I have loved this motif since I stumbled across it, many years ago, probably in a stitch pattern book somewhere. I like how it looks if you do it just in one color with knits and purls, but I love it the most when there are two colors in the mix, and suddenly there is this 3-D effect. It’s stranded, which is the perfect way to use thin yarn without ending up with a sock that’s much too thick to be practical (I do live in California, after all, where one doesn’t actually really need warm socks most of the year, unless one happens to work in an office where they routinely set the AC to ‘arctic’). I just did my usual ribbed cuff and heel flap and single-stitch stripes on the bottom of the foot, and I decreased the toe while still keeping the pattern going until almost the very end. I am quite pleased with the result.

However, I don’t think this is the end of it. As much as I like *these* socks, they’re missing something. I feel like there needs to be a better way to have the pattern flow organically, from cuff to heel to toe, without those solid blocks of color. So I’ll definitely be doing more work with this motif in the future.

Summer of Socks Count: 9



Straight

Posted on 17 August, 2017 6:19 pm by Jennifer 1 Comment

The fourth pattern for Tour de Sock was released Monday night. We all knew it would take 2 colors, so there was wild speculation as to what sort of pattern it might be. I was holding out for stripes, stranded, or mosaic – basically anything but brioche because that’s one thing I’ve yet to tackle and I didn’t really want to deal with it during a speed competition. Thankfully, the pattern – Mosaic Marbles – was just mosaic knitting. I’ve done mosaic socks before – I was the test knitter for these socks and I loved the pattern so much that as soon as I’d shipped the sample pair back to Knitpicks, I immediately cast on for my own. So I was actually pretty excited to see pattern #4.

I surreptitiously downloaded the pattern to my phone and then emailed it to Richard while sitting in a meeting, and asked him to print it, figuring that’d give me a head start when I got home later (I’d already wound the yarn). Hah. Turns out the printer was out of black ink, and by the time we figured that out, every place that might sell printer ink was closed. No problem for the evening – I just camped out in my chair in front of the computer and followed along from there – but I was leaving the next morning for a two-day work trip and I really didn’t want to have to deal with reading charts from my phone.

Thankfully Amazon Prime Now managed to get ink to us Tuesday morning. Also thankfully I realized the charts were pretty easy to memorize so I didn’t have to refer much to the print-out anyway.

But on to the knitting. Since Tuesday was only a site visit – which requires tromping around but no sitting in meetings – I got up extra early and plowed through half a sock before we left. The trip down was about four hours straight of driving. I wasn’t the one driving, and half the drive was through twisty, windy roads and up and down hills, but half was pretty straight. So I decided to give knitting in the car a try. I wasn’t honestly sure how it would work out – I am prone to getting queasy when not the one driving, especially on hilly and twisty roads. But on the way down, I managed to finish up the first sock just shortly before the roads started to get a bit bumpy and windy.

I cast on the second sock Tuesday evening once back at the hotel and managed to get in a couple pattern repeats before I was just too tired to keep my eyes open anymore. I turned the heel on the way down to the meeting Wednesday morning, and on the way home, the instant we made it out of the hills and I felt like my stomach could handle it, I dove back into knitting. By the time I got home last night all I had left was the toe. I scurried in the door, dumped my stuff, waved to Richard and the cats, and then sat down and hastily finished it off.

Yarns are Knitpicks Stroll in Dove Heather and Pansy, because I know someone will ask (I adore how the tone-on-tone purple works in this!).

I’m quite pleased with these, and with my placement – 62. Managed to get them done in just a bit over 48 hours, even with working two full days *and* a very long work road trip, all because it turns out I *can* knit (under certain specific circumstances) in the car.

Summer of Socks count: 8



Clear

Posted on 14 August, 2017 7:47 am by Jennifer Comment

Because I finished the last pair of socks so quickly (and after I let my hands recover from that) I realized I had lots of time to do at least one more pair before the next pattern was posted. I thought, briefly, about casting on something new but then I remembered that there were two pairs lurking in bags that needed to be completed, so I sighed and dragged one out and slipped it back onto the needles.

I don’t remember when I first cast on for this pair, and I’d already finished the first one and gotten about halfway through the second leg before setting them aside. But I have been avoiding finishing these socks for a very, very long time. Even now, knowing that if I just sat down and focused it would only take me another couple hours, I still procrastinated, willing to knit just about anything else but these socks. On the plus side, this means I managed to whip out several lace pieces for the upcoming Lacy Knitters Guild newsletter, but on the minus side, it wasn’t until this morning that I sat down and finally finished off the toe, and that was only because the next pattern drops this evening and I need the needles free and I just couldn’t bear the thought of putting these things back onto a holder to lurk in a bag again. Better to just finish them off and get them out of my hair completely.

I am pretty sure the yarn is Knitpicks Felici, but I can’t swear to it because I lost the ball bands a long time ago. The pattern is something a friend was doing for her own pair of socks, and I liked it much more than whatever it was I’d started to do with this yarn, so I copied it (mostly – I reduced the number of stitches per pattern repeat in order to fit my gauge).

The feeling upon completing these socks is mostly relief. Am not sure if it was the pattern, or the colors, or a combination of both, but I’m just glad they’re done and I never have to knit another stitch on them again.

Summer of Socks count: 7



One time shot

Posted on 10 August, 2017 8:47 pm by Jennifer Comment

Pattern 3 of Tour de Sock is Indecisions, because the designer included a number of places where you could make a choice as you knit along. Either a ribbed cuff, or a folded picot cuff. Either a fancy heel or a slightly less fancy eye-of-partridge heel. Either continue the lace and cable motif down the top of the food, or just switch to a corresponding rib.

Of course, this being a competition, we had restrictions on what we could do (no nice simple top-of-foot ribbing for us, in other words). There was a specific cast-on we were required to use if we wanted to do the ribbed cuff. I tried watching the linked YouTube video, but I quickly gave up on that – I had no desire to sit through a lengthy blather about how much the person in the video loves this cast on, blah blah blah, and I don’t mind a picot cuff all *that* much (plus there were bonus points available for the picot cuff). So I gave up on the new cast on, did the picots, and then just kept on going, including the fancy heel because, hey, more points, and why not.

The pattern was released early afternoon on Friday. I ended up finishing the first sock in roughly 8 hours, and as far as I could tell from the chat and help threads, I was definitely at the head of the pack. I did cast on for the second and thought briefly about trying to stay up and finish it, but previous experience has taught me that knitting while one is in danger of actually dozing off while doing stitches only ends in copious amounts of swearing and unknitting later on when one is more awake.

Thanks to insomnia, however, I ended up just waking up a couple hours later and getting back into it…which means I managed to finish this pair of socks in less than 24 hours. Yay. I blearily took pictures, tried to massage the cramps out of my hands (because ow), and sent off the info. Later on, it was confirmed – I came in 9th. I am quite pleased with those results. It’s higher than I ever expected to finish for any of the patterns, considering there’s a couple teams in Finland who have all been routinely finishing theirs in shorter periods of time.

Will I be trying to do any of the remaining Tour de Sock patterns this quickly? Ha, I don’t think so. My hands aren’t happy with me, and I suspect I won’t be quite so ‘lucky’ as to have so much free time around when the patterns are released. Good enough that I did it once. That’s more than enough.

Summer of Socks count: 6



Two little wins

Posted on 6 August, 2017 4:34 pm by Jennifer Comment

Two recent ways in which I am winning at this whole ‘adulting thing’:

1) Yesterday I *really* wanted some sort of baked good, except I didn’t want to actually have to *bake* it (because sometimes I am just not in the mood, yes, I know, I too am shocked by this, and also sometimes all I want is just one little piece of a thing, and not an entire giant batch of thing – see above regarding the ‘adult’ part of this equation). I suppose one of us could have gone out to purchase a thing, but we were both tired and needed showers in order to go out in public, so that was my excuse to lounge, slug-like, on the couch and simply whine about the lack of baked goods without actually doing anything constructive about it.

Today I was feeling the same need for baked goods, and then it came to me – mug cakes! Single serving size, doesn’t require heating up the oven (it’s been roughly 5-bazillion degrees outside for the past several weeks, after all), and once it’s done, there aren’t any other servings lurking in the kitchen to tempt me.

So I made myself a nutmeg spiced mug cake…uh…I mean…’mug breakfast muffin’, thereby satisfying the craving for baked goods while not actually having to go anywhere *or* dirty more than a couple mixing utensils and a bowl, and thus it was a win.

2) This one may only be relevant to some of you – the sort who either currently live with, or have lived with, small creatures prone to making messes. In this scenario, the mess-making creature is, of course, a cat.

I was sitting on the couch, knitting, and I heard the tell-tale sounds of a cat about to hurl. I looked up, to see Sherman perched atop the tiny little end table by the window, head angled so as to achieve maximum mess-making potential once he let loose.

I only had seconds to respond. Leaping to my feet, I grabbed a small box that had been left on the coffee table, and charged over toward the cat. At the last possible moment, I reached out, box in hand, and CAUGHT EVERY SINGLE BIT OF IT. Said box was then closed up and stuffed into the trash, mess free. Definitely a win!

The fact that a different cat managed to hork in exactly the same place several hours later without me being able to make a similar save, thus requiring the exact amount of clean-up I was trying to avoid in the first place, is not relevant here. Shh. Leave me my joy.




top