3/23/09

This one made me laugh ’til I cried:

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

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First things first: I made two loaves of bread on Friday using the Amish White Bread recipe that Aimee sent me to (THANK YOU, AIMEE!!!), and I must say that that is some DAMN fine bread! And it couldn’t have possibly been any easier. I used the mixer right up to the point where it was time to put the dough in the bowl to rise, and I ate sandwiches all weekend long using the bread. SO GOOD.

It is a little sweeter than I’d like, though, so next time I’m going to use less sugar.

Which leads me to my question, bread baking gurus – if I reduce the amount of sugar that I use, do I need to adjust anything else in the recipe?

I very well might try making some of Angie’s beer bread next weekend.

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Saturday morning we ran out to do errands – mainly, to visit L0we’s and see if we couldn’t find a door mat to go by the computer room door. The one we had there wasn’t wide enough and I’ve been bitching about it for ages, so off to L0we’s we went. I ended up getting a small beige carpet that I’m already regretting – we track ten tons of shit in on our shoes and boots even after we wipe them on the outside door mat, and the beige shows every bit of the dirt that gets tracked in.

All I frickin’ want is a door mat that measures five feet long by, oh, four feet wide, that is dark and that can be vacuumed. Also, I don’t want to spend $100 for A GODDAMN DOOR MAT. Why is that so difficult to find? WHYYYYYY?

OH. I also got some storage bins – L0we’s sells 18-gallon storage bins made of 99% recycled material for less than $5 each. That’s a freakin’ BARGAIN, if you ask me.

So we came home and Fred went out to mow the lawn, and I came inside and started puttering around the house. I got all the humidifiers from all the parts of the house, cleaned them, then set them on the table on a towel to dry. When they’re dry I’ll pack them up in a storage container and put them upstairs in the garage until the Fall.

(Next Fall when I’m bitching about the lack of humidity, remind me they’re there, would you?)

Then I went into the laundry room, pulled everything down from atop the refrigerator and freezer, wiped them both down (the cat litter-caused dust up there was NASTY), then made a pile of stuff that needed to go into the garage for storage, and put the rest of the stuff back. I cleaned and organized the shelf unit in the laundry room, pulled everything out of the water heater closet, scrubbed the floor, and put everything back.

I was just at that point of my cleaning when the phone rang. It was the shelter manager asking if I wanted some kittens, and I was all “HELL YES!”, and she said she’d arrange it with the woman who had them and would call me back.

While I waited, I cleaned out the guest bedroom closet, carried a bunch of boxes upstairs to store in my closet, cleaned out both the closets in my room, cleaned out Fred’s closet, and was just getting the litter boxes set up in the kitten room (and shooing Newt out of the room – he’s taken to sleeping on the cat bed in there in the afternoons, lately) when the phone rang.

I left the house for the pet store, made it there in record time, and then the woman (another volunteer for the shelter) who’d picked up the kittens walked in a minute later.

You can go over to Love & Hisses to see the first pictures I got of them. They are SERIOUSLY cute – the only problem is that I always forget when they’re so small (they’re really just getting the hang of the litter box), you need to use regular clay litter for them (they tend to eat the litter at first because they are not known for their high intelligence), so I went over to the dollar store to buy litter.

Then I got the litter boxes switched over to smaller ones, and I sat and bonded with the kittens, and the little bitty runt was chewing and chewing and chewing on one piece of food for the longest time, and a lightbulb finally went off, and I realized that she didn’t yet have jaws strong enough to chew that stuff up. Luckily, I had some BabyCat (which is much smaller), and she was able to eat that. Then I gave them all some canned cat food, and they ate the hell out of that too.

Sunday morning I got up and hung out with the kittens for a while, and then made my grocery list and headed for Publix.

Honest to god, I wonder if anyone’s ever died from getting zapped by static electricity. I was in the cat food aisle and I happened to reach out and touch one of the shelves and the fucking zap HURT LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER. I felt my fucking HAIR MOVE from the shock.

IT IS SPRING AND IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE HUMID, AND I STRENUOUSLY OBJECT TO GETTING ZAPPED BY STATIC ELECTRICITY IN MARCH IN ALABAMA.

So Publix annoyed the shit out of me because they had NO canned kitten food. NONE. I wasn’t even looking for the fancy stuff, ANYTHING that was geared toward kittens would have been fine with me, just to get me through a couple of days. But, nay.

I had to go to Wal-Mart to get some canned kitten food, and then I went home.

At some point, I realized that I was pretty much out of BabyCat, and I did some thinking and remembered that a new pet store – P3t Dep0t – just opened near Publix recently. I thought, surely, given that they’re a PET STORE, they’d have either BabyCat or something similar, right? After noon, when I was pretty sure they’d be open, I went up there to check.

I do not know why the fuck it surprises me when I walk into a P3t Dep0t and find that it SUCKS, because I’ve been in two of them before and – surprise! They sucked! So why I was surprised to find that they have one tiny little aisle of cat food which did NOT include BabyCat, I don’t know.

Frankly, I have yet to find any pet store that is as good and carries the range of cat food that P3tSmart does. Why I bother to go anywhere else, I don’t know.

(Well, I do know – it’s a half hour drive to P3tSmart and only a 10 minute drive to P3t Dep0t.)

So I decided I had enough BabyCat to get me through ’til this morning, and I’ll be headed to Huntsville to stock up on it here in a little while.

Also, my new kittens? Cutest things EVER.

(See more kitten pics over at L&H)

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Actually the weekend was kind of babycentric, now that I think about it. I was going out to my car yesterday morning when I saw Newt looking with great interest at something tiny. I went to investigate, and found a wee baby mouse.

It didn’t look injured (and it certainly didn’t look like it was past the point of saving), so I picked it up (yes! Picked it up with my own two bare hands! On purpose!) and brought it inside. Fred found a container to put it in and then I assumed that he put it in a dark place so it could recover.

When I got back from the grocery store, I found that he’d taken the container (a plastic container with the lid set on top so that air could get in and out) and put it on the kitchen counter. You know, the kitchen counter where the cats like to hang out? You know, where all it’d take is a firm smack from a cat paw to send the container tumbling to the floor so the mouse would fall out and the cats could all gather around and take turns eating it?

I’m sure that in a parallel universe, that did happen (or the mouse escaped and is currently living somewhere in the house), but in this universe, THANKFULLY, the cats didn’t even notice that there was living food set out all nice for them, and Fred and I determined that it was time to free the mouse, so Fred went and set it free behind the chicken yard.

(Of course, he accidentally DROPPED it first, but we won’t talk about that.)

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Wanna see what it’s like around here at Snackin’! Time!?

Snackin’ Time March 2009. from Robyn Anderson on Vimeo.

Pardon the camera work. I’m no professional, obviously.

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“Seriously? More kittens? SERIOUSLY? What, am I not enough for you?”

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Previously
2008: No entry.
2007: No offers yet though, damnit.
2006: “Hookers and blow!” he crowed jubilantly.
2005: Also, there’s that whole pesky “dealing with people” thing, and I don’t like that sort of thing at ALL.
2004: The spud passed the test for her learner’s permit, THANKYAJEEZUS.
2003: No entry.
2002: No entry.
2001: Fred and I chose the names of our future child/ren way before we ever met – Seth Forrest and Samantha Jayne.
2000: On the other hand, I was shopping in Wal-Mart, wasn’t I? What’d I expect, diamonds and furs?