The Goathouse Refuge has received a very generous offer for a matching grant if they can raise $10,000 by the end of March.
Please donate if you can, and spread the word. Facebook, email, tweet, or even phone — however you can get the word out!
I spent this past weekend in a flurry of cooking. We should now be all set for dinners for at least the next month, if not longer. The freezer is packed with dishes that Fred only has to let thaw and then bake for a specified amount of time, since I won’t be able to lift anything for a while.
(Funny enough, my entry from a year ago talks about how I spent the previous weekend cooking meals to freeze so Fred wouldn’t have to cook while I recovered from my hysterectomy! My hysterectomy was on 2/10/10. My surgery this year is on 2/11/11. I wonder what’s in store for 2/12/12??)
The house will be cleaned from top to bottom on Thursday, including litter boxes, and what laundry there is will be done. I’m going to move my couch to the other end of the room, and Fred will bring the recliner down from upstairs for me. I suspect (if past surgical recoveries are anything to judge by) that in the recliner is where I’ll be sleeping for at least the first week.
Now if Friday would just GET HERE already, I’d be happy!
We went up into town Saturday afternoon to visit the liquor store. I ordered some fancypants vanilla beans from Penzey’s a few weeks ago, because I wanted to make my own vanilla extract. I’ve done it in small bottles in the past and loved the result, but I bake a lot and go through vanilla pretty quickly, so I wanted to do the big-bottle version of it.
I don’t drink, I’m sure I’ve mentioned. I haven’t had any alcohol since before my weight loss surgery in 2006, and it was probably at least a couple of years before that that I’d had any. In theory I like the occasional strawberry daiquiri, but after I had weight loss surgery, I was at first worried what the effect would be on my system, and these days I’m not interested enough in it to give it a try.
That said, I have to say that when we walked into the ABC store to buy a bottle of vodka, everything in there looked like it would be VERY tasty. I was walking around thinking “We should get some of that! And that! And that!” before Fred dragged me over to the wall o’ vodka. I have zilch experience with buying liquor, so we had to have a long discussion about which liquor was better and which was the rotgut stuff. We ended up getting a bottle that wasn’t quite top end stuff, but close to it.
(I’d tell you the name brand, but I don’t remember and I don’t want to get up and look.)
I’m suddenly reminded that once upon a time – I must have been… maybe 26? – I decided that I needed to have a signature drink. And I’m a badass, right? So one evening when my sister and I went out for dinner, I ordered scotch on the rocks.
Ugh. Gad. NAS-TAY.
I think I’ll stick with Diet Coke, thanks.
ANYway, I got my big bottle of vanilla extract made, and now it’s steeping in the cabinet for about three months, needing to be shaken every so often. I put reminders in my Google Calendar so I’ll remember to shake it at least once a week.
Speaking of, I had forgotten what kind of alcohol I needed in order to make the extract, and so I did a Google search, and someone had instructions on how to make extract to give for gifts. The last step in the process, after letting it steep for a few months, was to pour the liquid through a filter to remove the specks of vanilla from the extract.
Really? REALLY? There are people who’d take the vanilla specks OUT of the extract? So if I make extract to give as gifts, should I filter the vanilla specks out? Because that seems odd to me. My favorite part of home-made extract are those tasty little flecks!
What say you guys? If someone gave you a bottle of homemade vanilla extract and there were specks of vanilla floating around, would you be all “Ewwww, vanilla specks!” or “Vanilla specks! Awesome!”
We are working our way through Sons of Anarchy, currently about halfway through the second season. Last night we were watching the one where
SPOILERS IN THIS NEXT LITTLE SECTION
the guys are in jail, and Clay and Jax are fighting, and what the hell was that dance Jax was doing? He’d punch Clay and then go reeling away from Clay and stumble around and then go back at Clay. I called it his “Gumby dance”, and Fred and I guffawed through the rest of the scene.
SPOILERS OVER
So Tara was angry or upset about something – which is not uncommon for Tara, amiright? – and I’ve been thinking all along that she really reminds me of someone, and finally last night it hit me just who she looks like.
Resemblance is uncanny, no?
(Note: I did not like Tara at ALL during the first season, but she’s really growing on me during season 2.)
Okay, most of you guessed the exciting news!
Last week, I talked to the shelter manager about Alice. We had put her on Prednisone to see if that would help the wheeziness. It didn’t, and the vet said that likely the scar tissue that was spotted at the top of Alice’s trachea was responsible for the occasional congested-sounding noises Alice was making. Since it didn’t bother Alice and the Prednisone wasn’t helping, there was probably nothing to be done.
I told her that Alice had had all her vaccinations and we decided that Alice was ready to go to Petsmart. But I knew that Fred had gotten attached to her, so I said that I’d double-check with him, and let her know what the deal was with Alice.
Long story short, I talked to Fred and we dithered back and forth over whether to add Alice to the permanent residents. I wasn’t resistant to the idea, honestly, but I wanted to know, one way or the other. He wouldn’t commit – wouldn’t actually say “I want to keep her”, and in fact said that if she were being adopted directly from our house and was going to someone else’s house without having to spend time at Petsmart, he’d be okay with that – and so I emailed and said “Alice is ready when there’s room.”
Well. There was room for Alice on Friday! So I packed her up and brought her bed and her stuffed Tigger, and took her to Petsmart. She was glad to see Rhyme, and she ran and hid when I first let her out of the carrier, but after a few minutes she was walking around exploring, her tail straight up in the air.
When Fred got home from work that afternoon, he immediately began saying I should go get Alice back and bring her home. WELL. I figured if he was THAT desperate to get her home again, he could very well go into Huntsville and get her himself! We talked, we dithered, we went back and forth, and then we went to bed without having made a decision.
The next morning, we dithered some more. And then finally Fred said “I think we should go get her.”
And so we did. Alice Nelson – just “Alice” for now – is the latest permanent resident to join the Anderson household. She loves Fred with a passion (but if he’s not around, she’s friendly enough to me, too) and he loves her back.
This is the EXACT same way we ended up with Stinkerbelle, by the way. As several people have pointed out to me, apparently the way to stay around for good is to suck up to Fred!
(Those of you who weren’t able to figure it out, you’ll note that Alice’s picture was moved out of the “fosters” list, and in fact if you went to the foster page about her, it says at the bottom that we’d adopted her on the 5th. She has her very own Permanent Residents page, too.)
Yes, I did say last week that we needed to reduce the number of cats in this house. HOWEVER, if you consider that at one point last Fall I was 99% sure we were going to end up keeping all four Bookworms, this means we’re actually DOWN from where we were.
(Fred calls that “Robyn math”!)
(Also, we didn’t have a calitabby yet. We needed one for the collection!)
So. Aaaaaactually, there wasn’t just one thing that was AMAZING news this weekend. There were TWO things.
You know the first one, that we decided to keep Alice.
The second? Reacher will be going to his forever home later this week. I’m not going to give you the details yet, because I don’t want to jinx it. You know how I am. Suffice it to say that he’s going to a great home and I know he’s going to be spoiled rotten. I’ll give you more details once he’s gone home.
With Buster being adopted last Fall and Rhyme being adopted last weekend, this leaves us with one Bookworm, Corbie.
At the moment, Corbie is still our foster. I don’t think it would surprise any of you if he ended up staying permanently – but for now, he’s still classified as a foster, he’s still available for adoption, and he’s post on Petfinder.
We never expected someone to see Buster’s picture in the book at the adoption center, so it’s possible it could happen with Corbie, too! We’ll see.
Corbie and Reacher, fighting.
Reacher is not a small cat – he’s a big chunk of man. I told the people who were thinking of adopting Rhyme and Corbie last month that I called them Small (Corbie), Medium (Rhyme) and Large (Reacher). Fred says Reacher is shaped like a Who in Whoville (that’s a How the Grinch Stole Christmas reference), which led me to dub him Reachie Lou Who.
Brudders.
::thlurrrp::
Corbie’s face cracks me UP.
She might be little, but it doesn’t stop the princess from getting where she wants to go. She climbed into the utility sink to sniff around.
“What?”
“You’re not my daddy. YOU can’t tell me what to do!” Brat.
You’ve heard of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice?
(Just say “yes”)
Meet…
Corbie & Robyn & Fred & Alice.
(Thanks to Jean, who was inspired and whipped this up over the weekend. It cracks me up every time I look at it, particularly that smug look on Fred’s face!)
Previously
2010: I don’t know how on earth we’re ever going to dig out from under all that.
2009: No entry.
2008: Which of your cats, if they were human, would you actually want to hang around the most?
2007: I judiciously left off the “You fucking motherfucking asshole.” part.
2006: And then the spud said “Is he trying to go to Narnia?”
2005: I’ll take my anonymous life, thank you.
2004: No entry.
2003: No entry.
2002: “What?” he said. “I WASN’T geeky!”
2001: No entry.
2000: Tomorrow, I’m going to go see Dr. Judy for my ear, out of which I still cannot hear anything but constant white noise.