The mysterious case of the disappearing fish

Another gruesome little tale from the Aquarium of Death.

I turned on the aquarium light early one morning last week and noticed there was a dead one floating at the top. These things happen. It must have died sometime in the night because it had already been about half eaten by its tank mates. So I yelled for Dave to come look (as you do) and then I hopped in the car to drop Dave off at the T station (ten minute round trip in the car, but a 15 minute walk, and at temperatures below freezing like they have been all week, it's just not that big a deal to take ten minutes out of my morning at 7 am to drop him off.) Lengthy backstory aside, what I'm trying to get across to you is that ten minutes elapsed, tops, between when I first noticed the deader and when I got back from dropping Dave off.

The fish had disappeared. I don't know if the other fish in the tank had a feeding frenzy or if they are always such efficient little cannibals (maybe it only died ten minutes before I noticed the body) or if they stashed the body somewhere in the fake plants to eat later like a lion with a gazelle carcass, but maybe I'm just not meant to be privy to all the secrets of the Tank of Doom.

Needless to say, they didn't get fed that day.

domestic goddess

So sometimes I get a wild hair up my ass and turn into what I think is some kind of superwoman. Today was one of those days. I worked from 9 until 5:45 (technically leaving early, but whatever), went to the chiropractor, cooked dinner (teriyaki turkey tips with a big salad with homegrown tomatoes. I love having a gas grill and the tomatoes were totally worth the trouble. I put them in giant containers, the biggest I could find, and next year I'll stake them better but it just worked perfectly.



I also got a loaf of cornmeal bread underway (I love having a Kitchen Aid), made the bed, put away some dishes (I love having a dishwasher) and cleaned up the kitchen.



And before I got to bed I'll have folded a load of laundry, taken the bread out of the oven and cleaned the litterboxes. I wish I had time to get some embroidery done, but unless I want to stay up until midnight there's not time for that. I am also not going to get around to my mail pile tonight, which I totally don't mind missing.

But for right now, I'm totally going to take an ice cream break and watch A&E's Hoarders. Fascinating! Mental illness! Makes me feel better about my life!

Also I was a little overconfident in trying to get everything done and left the bread on top of the stove, which got super hot from the oven preheating beneath it and kind of cooked a little. I pulled off the weird crusty edges and punched it down and am letting it rise as usual; I think it'll be okay, just slightly smaller loaves than usual. So as a superwoman, I still need some work.

typical blogger cat pictures

Sorry about the unscheduled blogging hiatus. I had a cold and then we threw that whiskey party, so that stuff kept me away from the computer. Here's what's been happening, in my absence.

I gave Pip some catnip again.


Lucky has discovered that laptops are made of warm.


Simone is as plump and as bursting with sweetness as always. (Yes, I stole that from the copy on the raisin box. Me and my copy-thieving ways.)


Inty is costing a million dollars, as usual.


Her IBD started flaring up again - puking at least once a day - so I took her to the vet. This time we didn't wait until she got so skinny she almost died. $250 worth of testing later, we can rule out thyroid and diabetes and be pretty sure that the increased levels of cat barf in our house are because of Inty's IBD - which, you know, is what we figured was happening before we took her to the vet.

Anyway, now she has a new steroid ($35) and $60 worth of a new prescription food. We've changed from low ingredient - i.e. proteins she probably hasn't encountered and thus isn't allergic to - to a hypoallergenic food. Basically to make the hypoallergenic they denature the protein molecule and chop it up all small in the hopes that the immune system won't respond to a smaller molecule the way that it does to normal big protein molecules. If she keeps barfing and doesn't respond to the steroid, we'll put her back on an anti-nausea drug. And maybe re-start a regime of giving her B-12 shots periodically. That's all if, though, and I'd kind of like it not to progress further because: expensive. Also, the strain of keeping all that chemistry in my head just reminds me of why I never did pursue my childhood dream of becoming a vet: not good enough at chemistry. Or math in general. As an adult, knowing a little bit more about how much vets get to deal with poop and barf and what their earning potential is, I'm kind of glad that I was a quitter when it came to chemistry.

No comment.


No photos in this post were staged, though some were retouched afer they came out of the camera.

Lasted: one day

I couldn't take the guilt. I moved the roses to the dining room where I wouldn't be the only one enjoying them. I suck.




And as long as I'm confessing things, I'll admit that every picture I post taken inside my house is kinda staged.


the dark blobs under the table are Pip and Simone grooming each other. Not staged

I mean, it mostly looks like this but I'd say that there's about 20% more clutter. (Hmmm, maybe 20% is giving us too much credit. Kay? Can you weigh in on this?) But the booze is only temporary. We're having a whisky party next weekend so we're all stocked up on single malts and bourbon and whiskey. And also wine and beer and rum and vodka in case you want to come to the party but don't like whisky, whiskey or bourbon. (I got kind of carried away at the liquor store.) Also if you're reading this and you're local, I probably know you personally so consider yourself invited and that I am just dumb and forgot to email or facebook you.

So, party, yay. We haven't had a party since my birthday last year, which makes it over a year, which is too long. I have been fussing with my hanging baskets for weeks so they will be party-ready.


this picture was not staged. I don't count "choosing a good angle" as staging.

Okay, that's a lie, I have been fussing with the hanging baskets since I got them and that's because it's the first time I have ever grown flowers and not killed them right away. But this year something has clicked in my brain (regular watering ?) and I'm nuts about gardening.


This picture was not staged. Fuck, now I am obsessed about staging versus not.

When I say the gardening bug has taken hold, I will tell you that I have begun saving the water from when I clean the fishtank and use it to water the plants. Fish poop is rich in nitrogen, apparently. I also made an all-natural aphid repellent from dish soap, wesson and water. So far it doesn't seem to have done much to deter the aphids. It's a bummer since it's cheap and I felt like a virtuous hippie when I was making it, but I think I will go back to the all-natural shit they sell at the garden center, which at least seems to kill the fuckers. I question their claims of "able to use on day of harvest" but it says it's for organic gardeners, so it can't be too bad. Right?

Anyway, I should shut up now. I have dishes to do, laundry to fold, litterboxes to scoop. Miles to go before I sleep.

Great Expectations

I wish my desk looked this clean all the time. This picture is totally staged though. The roses (from my little pots) smell like summer. I feel a little guilty that I'm the only one who will get to enjoy them, since I am the only one who sits here. Not guilty enough to move the vase, though.



Anyway, so fake cleanliness. Recently I bit the bullet and bought a new vacuum. I actually forked out five hundred bucks for a Dyson Animal. It was the reviews on Amazon that did it to me. They were like, insanely positive. There were reviews titled, "This Vacuum Changed My Life." I am not even making this up.

So when it I arrived I got all excited and insisted on vacuuming at 10 pm and testing each attachment in turn. This made Dave very angry. I think he wanted to sleep or watch TV or relax or something. I don't know the specifics because I wasn't really paying attention. I decided a long time ago that he's lucky to have a wife who gets so pumped up about vacuums and keeping the house clean.

I am kind of disappointed in the vacuum though. I think maybe my expectations got over-inflated by all those long, lovingly detailed reviews by people who now referred to their Dysons as "Jesus". So I was pretty much thinking that the second I plugged it in, all the dust in the house would race into the vacuum's gaping maw of its own accord while the vacuum gave me head.

It didn't work out quite like that, though. I mean, it worked fine and smelled better than the 15 year old Kenmore we have been using, which emits a steady stream of something that smells like a dog fart from its nether regions, but it definitely didn't make the earth move. I dunno. I think I was kind of stupid to buy into the hype in the first place. So I guess the moral of this story is, even a $500 vacuum won't go down on you.

gardening etc

We spent most of this sunny weekend outside. Well, got a good chunk of time outside, anyway. We ran a bunch of errands yesterday, including a trip to the the hardware store for a serious pair of pruning scissors, the kind that can take down live wood with a two inch diameter. These things could take your hand off at the wrist.

I was trying to think of a non-boring way to describe how much crap we took down, but I'll just tell you that the resulting brush pile is about the size and shape of a sedan. Something like a Ford Taurus. I think we're going to have to rent a woodchipper to get rid of it. (Speaking of woodchippers, the closest I have ever been to one is the movie Fargo, which we watched last week. It's held up well.)

When I got one particularly big branch, the old guys sitting on the porch across the street clapped for me. Then one yelled, "Don't hurt yourself!" which was a little late since I'd already been hit in the head several times with falling branches. Eventually I learned to get out of the way.

Then today was more errands and yoga, and then we both fell asleep in the afternoon. I took the extended version of the nap while he got up and went for a bike ride. Then I played with the flowers - we have hanging baskets with scarlet verbena and pink petunias and I spent a while deadheading those and the baskets of impatiens.

I also went after the aphids that infest my tomatoes and roses with a "natural" organic pesticide. In a couple of weeks, I think I'll have roses and tomatoes should start being ready a few weeks after that. When the current batch of insecticide runs out, I think I'm going to make my own from dishwashing liquid, mineral oil and water.

I'm really excited about the gardening stuff this year for some reason. I've made various attempts before at container gardening, but I've always proven to have a black thumb. Hopefully this year will be better, because I really like flowers and homegrown tomatoes.

For dinner tonight we grilled some steak tips (just the Whole Foods "santa fe" marinated steak tips) and some veggies (videlia onion, summer squash and zucchini tossed in a mixture of olive oil, fresh thyme, rosemary, salt and pepper.) I love my new gas grill - means the grill is ready to go in ten minutes - and the nonstick grill pan I used for the vegetables. We had sweetcorn, too. I love early summer corn.

All in all it was a pretty restful weekend. A good break from the work week (although actually I should be catching up on some work stuff rather than sitting on the couch blogging and catching up on other blogs. Oh well. I so need to make this rhubarb-berry jam soon. Although I originally went to David Lebovitz's site because summer has got me wanting to start making ice cream again. I'm dying to make this Salted Butter Caramel icecream, which I think will be delicious but looks like a pain in the ass since you make 2 kinds of caramel as well as the custard for the base. Bet it will be worth it, though.)

Um, ew. And etc.

After I finished listening to Jane Eyre I started listening to Sense and Sensibility. Marianne comes down with a "putrid fever", which sounds gross, and almost dies. I've read Sense and Sensibility quite a few times, but I don't think I've read it since before Google. I always wondered what exactly a "putrid fever" was, but until now I didn't have the internet to help me find out.

Turns out putrid fevers are also known as typhus. Jane Austen and one of her sisters nearly died of it, which is how she was so familiar with the disease. 'Hey,' I thought, 'typhus is what the pupils at Jane Eyre's school get. What is typhus though? Is it like typhoid?'. Nope. It's an infection (treated nowadays with antibiotics) that's spread by body lice. EW EW EW EW EW. That totally clashes with my image of that era in history as being full of well-clothed, well spoken ladies and gents - basically as I listened to the book I was picturing the Ang Lee movie with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet, so finding out that the characters and their author were all crawling with lice was kind of a shock. It makes sense, of course, given the lack of running water and central heating at the time, but still. EW.

Next I am going to listen to Dombey and Son. At least Dickens was upfront about the effects of poor sanitation (the graveyard description in Bleak House, for example.)

But back to Austen. Listening to Sense and Sensibility I realized that not only are admirable male characters rare in Austen (most of the good men are kind of waxwork models of piety and virtue, Mr. Darcy and Mr. Knightly being the exceptions), but that it's all about the inner lives and landscape of women. I guess I knew that already, but I was finally like, 'Oh! That's why lots of men don't enjoy reading her - she's not writing for them.' Well, duh, right? Except that as a woman, of course I grew up reading all kinds of books which focus on the male experience (David Copperfield, Treasure Island, Tom Jones, Boswell's Life of Johnson - the list is endless) - because those books are so much more common than the female-centered ones - so it never occurred to me to be bored by reading about the experiences of men. I'd have run out of books pretty quickly.

Moving on. I've been reading (really reading, I mean, not listening) Hilary Mantel. She is wonderful - very dark and very funny. I'm on my third of her books and I admire her writing tremendously.

In other news, all five cats are still around and I'm/we're still agonizing over Zoe. I posted a question about euthanasia to the blog of a vet that I really like. Here's his answer. Definitely not easy. I do think Zoe's in pain, though our vet didn't agree the last time we saw him, and will try the painkiller test on her.

Somehow it's 8:30 already and I still need to vacuum (we are drowning in a sea of litter), clean the catboxes, and do my taxes (argh). And get to bed early, 'cause I need to be in the office by 8 tomorrow.

in like a lion, indeed

I dyed my hair purple.




Me and my new hair with Zoe.


curly hair in the dining room.


Lucky. He is a pushy old customer from Brookline.

He's our FIFTH cat. Pip was number 4, which was already too many, and then we acquired a fifth. So the deal with Lucky is that he belonged to a blind friend of Dave's. Lucky was diagnosed with diabetes (he's 12 and overweight), so obviously his blind owner couldn't see to give him his shots. So Dave's blind friend found a home for Lucky with another friend of hers ... except that lady was diagnosed with alzheimer's and couldn't remember the shots. So Lucky ended up back at the shelter and since he's 12 and diabetic and overweight, he was probably going to spend the rest of his life at the shelter, except we are suckers and adopted him. Two days after we brought him home, he had a hypoglycemic episode and almost died. After a mere thirteen hundred dollars, though, he was saved, and now he's not diabetic. (For now. Cats are really hard to keep stable. Zoe's back on insulin, for example, but only a small dose once a day. And we've invested in a blood glucometer and checked her blood sugar this afternoon; we'll probably start monitoring them both regularly. If I can avoid any more $1300 emergencies, I definitely want to.)

So five cats is way too many, and it's also an expensive hobby, but Lucky is super sweet. I had food poisoning last week and was running a high fever and generally felt awful, and Lucky was super happy just to lie in bed with me. He totally spooned me. Lucky (totally misnamed, in case you hadn't guessed, but Dave's blind friend's cleaning lady found him in a dumpster when he was 3), anyway, Lucky is really easygoing and gets along with the other cats, apart from Zoe, who hates everyone. He and Pip wrestle - he's the only cat strong enough to kick Pip's ass. Pip is a big boy these days - he was 9.5 pounds at the vet last month and I bet he's up to ten now. We call him "muscle boy" because he's a brick shithouse.


Look how much bigger he's gotten since August.


Pip likes cat TV.


Dave took this photo of Simone. She is his favorite. Technically Simone is still bigger than Pip, but she's a lover, not a fighter, and Pip wales on her ass all the time. (Whales? Wails? I think it's a regional phrase and I've only heard it spoken, not seen it written. Google was no help.) The brown rug with circles is in the second bedroom, which is now "the dude room", god help us. So naturally a brown rug was an appropriately masculine choice.



Sometimes Pip can be sweet.


I like how they both have their tongues out.

We are going to see Trail of Dead tonight at the Middle East Downstairs, which should be a good show. The only problem is that their set doesn’t start until 11 (which ought to make work tomorrow sleepy. My plan is to shower before the show and do a roll and stroll tomorrow morning; I figure if we get in at 1, I can go right to bed and sleep until 7:30 tomorrow morning and leave the house by 8, which will make me feel wretched, but I will be functional tomorrow for work, at least. I grow old, I grow old, and will probably regret seeing the show tomorrow.) Oh, and we’re getting 6 inches of snow today and supposed to have another 12 tomorrow. Yay New England. In the meantime we are listening to Yo La Tengo - transferring vinyl to MP3s, puttering and doing housework, and we need to hit the grocery store if we want to eat next week. A nap before the show is also very likely. Life is busy.

and just for kicks, a couple of pictures from when we were out in New Mexico over Christmas to see my parents.


The sky is so blue out there.




Some kind of cactus flower.

One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish

So I keep tropical fish, and it's not something I write about that often because really, how much is there to say? They swim around, sometimes Pip makes a grab for sushi, whatever. Also I am not very good at taking care of them - I'm kind of slack about water changes and definitely not good about changing the carbon filter regularly and the tank gets a lot of sunlight from our windows where it's situated so usually the water is a little cloudy and maybe a little greenish. Just like tornado weather!

And also I do dumb shit like putting fish together which then eat each other. I've got some serpae tetras and they eat the fins of the little neons that are also in there. Every time I tell someone who knows about fish what's going on, they say, "serpaes aren't supposed to nip neons!" No shit, that's why I thought it would be okay to put the two together, but apparently not. The neons are practically finless by this point. Poor guys just roll all over the tank without their stabilizing fins. I should really flush them and but them out of their misery, but I'm not even a good enough fish owner to do that.

And I realize the above makes me sound like a pretty bad pet owner, but I have actually improved. When I first got the fishtank, I was obsessed with the water and everything being sparkling clean, so I would do 100% water changes regularly and would boil the rocks to get the algae and germs off of them. Mysteriously, the fish kept dying, no matter how clean I kept the tank. then I realized that part of the problem was that I was uncontrolled when I added water back to the tank - I used to just dump a bucket's worth in and it would create a little tsunami in the tank and the fish would be dashed against the glass sides of the tank and die of their injuries. Doh. Also a fish-keeping friend came over and was like, whooooaaaa, you have the cleanest tank I've ever seen, I don't think it's healthy for the fish, I think they need more algae and stuff to be able to maintain bacterial life which will in turn keep the pH balance in check.

So now the tank is kind of dirty and I clean it less often. It's grosser to look at but the fish do seem to be lasting longer.

Which brings me to my current topic. If you weren't already disgusted by my tales from the piscine crypt, here comes some more. In order to combat the algae problem, I bought some little algae eaters. I know I brought three of them home but a couple of weeks ago I looked and looked and could only find two. They hide so I kept looking over the next couple of days but could only ever find two. So today I changed the water and even changed the carbon filter, expecting to find a fish skeleton somewhere, but no. I don't know where the hell that third guy went. I guess the tank ate him. Maybe he's under the gravel somewhere and of his bones are coral made. Who the hell knows?

And now that I have metaphorically aired my dirty laundry, it's time to get the clean load out of the dryer and get on with the next load.

Monday looms

But not yet! I still have a few hours. We spent most of this weekend completely unplugged and it was glorious. I love the internet, but it's also my job, so it was good to have some time offline.

I got some reading done.

See if you can spot all four cats!

Note also that the living room is trashed. I cleaned it yesterday but it's pretty much ruined again by now. We didn't really go out much, although we did have Thanksgiving at my sister's house, with my nephews and my other sister in attendance. My sister can really put down a thanksgiving spread. I was grateful not to have to cook the whole meal, although I made rolls and a fresh cranberry bread and that was our contribution to the feast.

Besides the normal weekend housework projects, I had time to do some mending which I'd been meaning to get to for roughly six months.


You can see I'm a lousy seamstress. I was originally working with white on white - at least then I don't have to look at my mistakes - but it was really fucking hard to see. So I switched to blue, which is fine since the stitching is on the inside of a pillowcase and won't be seen. I am a slacker. The only reason I mend sheets instead of throwing them out and buying new is that they're really heavy cotton and high thread count, plus since they're old they're really soft and silky. And also new sheets are expensive.


I also got the cats all fucked up on catnip and took pictures.

See if you can spot Pip's need to be neutered! He has no idea.

And now, back to the weekday grind again. Le sigh. I do feel better after the slow, four day weekend, though. Plus I made lasagna tonight (used the recipe from Cover and Bake, with a few modifications. Cover and Bake is done by the obsessive Cook's Illustrated people, so you know that the recipes will always work and be delicious, just as you know the recipe will take forever. And it did take forever, and it was delicious. And I made flavored basil oil, and also some chutney. So at least I have good leftovers to nosh on during the week.

blah blah blah about nothing in general

Oh man. I have been on fire this weekend, let me tell you. I did a pile of ironing yesterday and made black bread with wacky ingredients like instant coffee and cocoa powder. The bread was kind of fucked up, like tiny little doorstopping loaves of great density. I think I allowed the yeast to over proof, if that can happen. Oh well, shit happens. Then we went out for drinks and then bowling and then burgers and fries for dinner around midnight. It was pretty fun.

We overslept this morning (no surprise there) and skipped the early a.m. run to HellBasket, choosing instead to pay the Stop & Shop convenience tax, where you get the same amount of food but it costs 20% more to buy it in a store with wide, spacious aisles and ample parking. So after yoga and Stop & Shop I started cooking, namely a pot roast with root vegetables, a gingerly-star-anise-y plum chutney and a sauce made from the cooking liquid. Dave just needs to get home now so I can eat it already. I even got wine and lit candles and put a tablecloth on the table, it's all fancy-like. Oh yeah - while I was in the kitchen I also made tomato sauce for a lasagne planned for later this week. And I did the usual boring weekend things like laundry and dishes and catboxes, and now that I'm sitting down I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to get up again. Oof. Plus Zoe is sitting on my lap.

Among other things I didn't mean to do this weekend was misplace my phone. So if anyone is expecting a call from me, sorry and I will catch up with you next week. (Squinting santa fe-wards.)

wine o' clock

Braless at last, I'm relaxing on the couch with a glass (not my first) of Chardonnay and Zoe on my lap, Inty on the armrest and Simone over at the end of the couch. Pip is digging himself smallish ass groove in the arm rest pillow. For a while I didn't know where Pip was - he turned my screen sideways and then took himself off. (Ctl + alt + up arrow, in case it happens to you and you need to turn it back.)

Lisa noted recently that taking your bra off is the best part of the day, and she's right. It's not like I find bras uncomfortable - I am way more uncomfortable going around outside braless - but there's something deeply satisfying about finally getting free of the tight elastic
band around your chest and feeling your breasts sink down to lie down, tiredly, on top of your ribcage.

The cats and I are all watching Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which I've never seen before but rented on Netflix on the strength of having a white nightgown in my little wedding trousseau that looks a bit like the one Elizabeth Taylor wears in the movie. I can't fit into it at the moment - my boobs, along with the rest of me, put on the annual summertime ten pounds as usual this year - but I should be able to wear it again come january, when it's totally not seasonal. Plus Dave is at band practice tonight, and since classic movies are not his bag, I've got the place, and the cats, to myself. The movie is a little tough to watch - I'd burned through my first marriage by the time I was 26, so it's hard to watch a movie about such a riotously unhappy marriage, but it's completely riveting, I'll give it that. Elizabeth Taylor has some awesome outfits, though, and she does not have at all what we would consider a movie star body, so that's kind of cheering too. Her figure looks a lot like mine. Especially as I slurp up more fattening wine. Om nom nom. Plus Paul Newman just died, so it's good to be watching him in his prime.

I thig I'b gettig a code

So I skipped yoga today, in favor of a nap, hoping that if I baby myself I can prevent the cold from becoming full blown. Although what I ended up doing was a ton of housework in the morning - litterbox, vacuuming, cleaning someone's shitty paw prints off the couch, starting laundry, changing the sheets, yadda yadda. And I drank like a gallon of orange juice, for the vitamin C. Now I'm all full of juice and sloshing around.

Then after the chores in the morning I napped, and if there's anything nicer than snuggling under a quilt for a nap on a Sunday afternoon with a clean conscience, clean sheets, sunlight streaming in through the windows and a purring cat, I don't know what it is. Dave was at band practice so I had total peace and quiet. Woke up around 5:30, showered and started some bread. Man, I love that KitchenAid so much. Thank you again, Mr. and Mrs. Lynch. The dough came together in about 5 minutes.

I adapted a James Beard recipe (which is itself an adaptation of a Jane Grigson recipe) to suit the ingredients I had on hand. In a funny coincidence, I own the Jane Grigson book that Beard talks about, too. There were so many good people writing cookbooks in the 50s and 60s - James Beard, Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson - that that's what my cookbook collection is based on. I have Julia Child but I confess I've never cooked out of her. The modern writers I turn to most are Mark Bittman, Nigel Slater and Nigella Lawson. Oh, and my friend Anne Bramley's Eat Feed Autumn Winter arrived from Amazon yesterday and I've already read most of it (I inhaled it like a novel) and given my mother a recipe from it (for roasted vegetables.) It has actually made me excited about the squash and root vegetables that I know we'll soon be inundated with from Boston Organics, our CSA.

Anyway, the bread is in the oven now so I can't report yet on whether it's good or not, but so far it seems to be acting normally. I've never made so many drastic alterations to a recipe so I'm a little nervous about the outcome. I will update this post if it turns out gross, otherwise you can assume it was delicious.

Here's Beard's original recipe:

5 cups of all-purpose flour (preferably unbleached)
1 tbl salt
2 tbl sugar
2 pkgs active dry yeast
2 c. warm milk
1/2 c. walnut oil or 8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, melted and cooled
1/2 c walnuts, roughly chopped
3/4 c. onions, finely chopped

Sift flour, salt and sugar into a warm bowl. Dissolve the yeast in 1/2 c. warm milk and pour into the middle of the flour, together with the walnut oil (or butter) and the rest of the milk. Knead well until the dough is firm and blended into a smooth, springy ball (about 10 minutes.) Leave in a warm place to rise for two hours (or in a cool place overnight.) Punch down the dough, mix in the walnuts and onion, shape into 4 rounds and leave on a greased baking tray to rise for 45 minutes. Bake at 400F for 45 minutes, or until the loaves sound hollow when tapped underneath.

Here's what I made:

Pesto Bread

5 cups of all-purpose flour
1 tbl salt
2 tbl sugar
4 1/2 tsp. bread machine yeast (bought the wrong yeast by mistake)
2 c. warm milk, between 120F and 130F
about 1/4 c. pesto topped off with 1/4 c. olive oil (to keep the right proportion of fat.)

I put all the dry ingredients together in the bowl of the kitchen aid and gave it a few stirs. Then I added the milk (apparently bread machine yeast requires a higher temperature than regular yeast, or so the sides of the jar say. Anyway the higher temp thing was handy since I accidentally let the milk get a little hotter than I planned and I didn't have to wait too long for it to cool enough.) Once the milk was in, I dumped in the pesto and olive oil and let the whole thing come together. I stuck a towel over the bread dough just as it was, in the kitchen aid bowl, and let it rise on the stove top (where it got a bunch of residual heat from the pre-heating oven.) Technically I should have washed and greased another bowl and turned the bread to oil it all over and let the bread rise in that, since mine stuck a little. But who cares when you're skipping a whole pain-in-the-ass step? The sides of the bread machine yeast jar said to let the dough rise for 10 minutes, but I waited until it doubled in size and that took about 30 minutes, which is still faster than the two hours in the original recipe.

Then I peeled it off the sides of the bowl - like I said, it stuck a bit but not terribly - and punched it down and shaped it into two loaves on a non-stick cookie sheet (instead of 4 loaves like in the original recipe. That would have made four elf-sized loaves.) I've made this bread before and not only were the walnuts and onions a pain in the ass to incorporate at that stage, I didn't think they added that much to the bread - not like essential moisture or anything - so I didn't even add pine nuts (though that would probably have been pretty good.) I did brush it with olive oil to prevent it from cracking as it rose, which I guess worked since it didn't crack. I nearly sprinkled it with coarse salt at that point, thinking of foccacia, but decided that salty bread might be strange in sandwiches, which is probably the fate of this bread. My hope was for it to be tasty enough that just smearing cream cheese in between slices would make a good, and easy, lunch.


Once it was shaped into loaves, I let it rise again until it was doubled in size, which seemed to take about half an hour - the kitchen was pretty warm by this time, which I think helped the bread's rise along - and then stuck it in the oven. I set the timer for 45 minutes, figuring that if anything, it would take longer than the original recipe but either my oven timer is messed up (possible) or the bread machine yeast does something crazy, because it was only in there 25 minutes (according to the oven timer) before it was all brown and hollow-sounding when rapped on the bottom. I dunno. I think it's the oven timer, because bread usually takes more than 25 minutes to bake. I didn't look at my watch, either, which means we'll have to wait until it's cool to cut in and see if it's raw in the middle or anything horrible like that. Oh, the suspense! I really know how to live, huh? Probably no pictures even if I do update this post because I still don't have the right memory for the new camera and I don't really want another dachshund fetus incident.

update three seconds later: it is delicious. Om nom nom. The milk made it super fluffy and light, and you get just the right amount of pesto taste, distinct but not overwhelming

listy list list

So my shrink and my best friend have both frequently expressed astonishment at how much time I spent doing housework. That's what I spent my evening on tonight, so here's a little run-down, transcribed from my to-do for tonight. (Note, I am blogging at 11:50 pm and I didn't even cook dinner, I just reheated leftovers.)

I got home at about 7:30 - which is not unusually late for me - and sat down and wrote the following list, in all its tedious, tiny-itemed glory:

THURS PM

go for walk

blog

make lemon pepper cashews

laundry (W)

use up basil to make pesto or tomato sauce (I heart my cuisinart mini-prep, it's so much easier to clean than the big guy and perfect for a small job like pesto)

eat dinner

clean catboxes

vacuum

read

go to bed early

clean fish tank (W)

prep Inty's meds for tomorrow morning

wash and refill cat food bowls

remove evidence of ravages caused by dinner, cashews and pesto from kitchen

email

refill brita


The ones with lines through them got done tonight; the (W) items are reserved for the weekend.

So I don't know - is this excessive? Because it all seems very normal to me to want to do this kind of stuff on a regular basis - this is totally regular maintenance stuff, nothing too ambitious - yet I probably won't get to sleep until well after midnight, and I need to be into work at 8 so that means getting up at 6:30 for realsies instead of hitting snooze until 7:15.

Whatever, if I'm normal or not doesn't matter, I am in serious need of the long weekend coming up. I plan to hang with our colony of cats, actually get some reading done instead of reading three pages in bed before I fall asleep ... oh, and I totally have a list of bigger projects to get done around the house this weekend, of course. Because long weekends are made for domestic puttering and naps and drinking beers with lunch. I hope the weather is nice.

So it's come to this:

Apparently I have become someone who vacuums every day.

I also clean the litterboxes daily. (I have to; otherwise the whole house smells like a big cat turd.)

I am no longer able to ignore messes around the house.

Given $600, I would probably spend the money on a vacuum and not a Nikon D60.

I think that's kind of a female thing, actually. Spending the money on something household related for a shared good rather than a toy for myself. I'm kind of bummed out by realizing this, actually. I'm also completely disconcerted to realize I have become something my ex-husband reserved a special sneer for: I am house proud.

And I can't tell if that's bad because it's embracing traditional female value assigned by a patriarchal culture or if it's okay to groove on a clean house, the way it's okay to wear lipstick and heels and feel like you look awesome.

Help me, Internet-Wan, you're my only hope!

This showed up in our CSA box this week.




What the hell is it? I am unable to deduce this vegetable's identity from the list for this week's box

File Under: Be Careful What You Wish For

Dammit! I had a whole post nearly all written and then Inty walked across the keyboard and erased the whole thing. Fucker. Good thing she is cute or we'd be eating cat steaks for dinner.

So anyway, what I was writing about was how recently we found a cleaner* (via the friend of a friend) and how now I feel really unmoored without my long list of tasks to do at home and constant pressure. I spent last weekend reading and feeling lazy and guilty about it. I could easily generate another list of tasks, of course, but the point of hiring a cleaner was to get away from that. And I've been telling myself for months now that when Dave is busy doing band stuff, since that's basically him off with a hobby (it's not really, but you know what I mean?) I should spend the time that he's away doing something I really like to do, not cleaning ... but I always ended up spending the time cleaning because if I didn't do it then, it wouldn't get done, and then I'd have to listen to Dave freak out about how the house was dirty and cop to it being partly his fault for not being around, which just made me feel worse about everything, which is why it was easier to just keep the place clean.

But now that I don't have to do that, I don't quite know how to use my new spare time, and I don't know how to stop feeling guilty about not being busy every second of the day - equally as busy as Dave, who works full time, goes to school 1/2 time and is in a band - unless I create more stuff for myself to do. So ... I find myself in the familiar position of having what I wanted but being too neurotic to enjoy it. I'm sure this is something that I'll be discussing with my shrink, but in the meantime I'll be taking deep breaths and telling myself that it's OKAY to take some time for myself. Really. It is.




* it took a long time to find someone partly because I wasn't that aggressive about searching and partly because I wanted someone independent, not like Merry Maids, where you pay the service a decent hourly rate but the people doing the actual work get minimum wage - but then I was also a little skeeved by the idea of just grabbing a flyer off a lamppost and inviting a stranger into my hours for a few hours while I wasn't around. I read Nickel and Dimed like a good liberal. I heart Ehrenreich anyway. So I pay our cleaner about twice what my own hourly rate, which seems fair to me - she's got to pay for her own health insurance and plus cleaning toilets and vacuuming is hard, gross work.

Mr. Squirrel

This little guy's acorn can actually hold a votive candle, and he was a wedding present from a dear friend. At present, as you can see, he's acting as a door stopper to hold the door leading to the back stair and porch open. He fulfills this role admirably. Much more interesting than a regular rubber wedge.

I am contemplating putting cat treats in there at random times, mostly because I think it would be cute to see the cats check the votive all the time to see if a treat has shown up. Like checking the change slot on a vending machine - it's pretty rare that someone forgets to take their change, but it's still worth checking!

Also, I need a new camera, or at least a tripod, because this one takes really really blurry pictures without the flash, and it sucks to download a bunch of pictures you thought would be awesome only to find that they look like they were taken through a thick veil of Vaseline. Obviously a tripod would be cheaper but - also obviously - I would really like a new camera... one that I could upgrade with wide angle and macro lenses. The current one is a hand-me-down from Mom and it was state of the art in 2003, but it's starting to show its age. I would also like five hundred dollars to purchase said camera, but none of this is very likely to occur.

notes from underground

On the phone with the nice customer service lady from Macy's, about a part of a wedding present (the icecream maker attachment for a KitchenAid) which had gone astray in the post ...



CS lady: It'll take a few days to get that out to you.

Me: That's fine.

CS lady: So, You understand it will take 5 - 7 days, right?

Me: That's fine.

CS Lady: That's 5 - 7 business days. And that's just to process the return. It will probably take 7 - 10 days to arrive.

Me: I'm getting married in two weeks. I'm not making icecream any time soon. Really. It'll be fine.

The internet makes me happy and not happy at the same time

good news first:

Google released a calendar sync for Outlook. This is wicked good news for me since when I got a new phone a few weeks ago, I basically said, 'I text a lot and I want something that can sync with my calendar at work because OMG! TOO MANY APPOINTMENTZ! I LOSEZ TRAX!' (I didn't really fall into lolspeak but the sales guy understood me.) I ended up with a windows smartphone, a dash, which has a qwerty keyboard and is a microsoft platform. I know, I know, Bill Gates is not teh coolest, but I do know the msn OS pretty well and wasn't up for learning another platform. So my phone syncs with my work computer (where most of my appointments are; I kept making doctors appointments that coincided with meetings. Oops. Guess which got cancelled? Hint: not the meetings.) And now I've got a cloud version of this data too, so I can access a larger version from my home computer (because I still don't completely know how to use all the functions on my phone. I know, I know - lame.)

Also, this article by Gord Hotchkiss is kind of interesting, about the way human memory works and how that informs the way we use search engines ...

Satisficing behavior also extends to the actual interaction with the search page in a number of ways. First of all, we have capacity limits to the number of results we can put into our working memory for consideration at any one time. We don’t scan the page, load up all 18 or 20 results in working memory, and then make our optimal choice. Here too, the capacity of our working memory and satisficing play a part. In this case, the heuristic cut off is simply the fact that results show at the top of the upper left. This is where we expect to find the best results, so it makes sense that we take the top 3 or 4 results (this seems to be the typical channel capacity for most people with search results) and load these up for further consideration. A quick 4 or 5 second scan, looking for which of these is the best match to our query, and we either click or select the next group of 4 or 5. But everyone, yes, everyone, scans the same way at the beginning. We all start in the upper left corner and scan the first “chunk” of results. We’ve done hundreds (actually, thousands at this point) of eye tracking sessions, so take my word for it. This is typical behavior.

I know that Enquiro has done a lot of research on how Chinese users scan a page and I know Chinese (Cantonese) is read differently than English, so I'm assuming he's including Chinese users in this. Cooooooool.


Although I'll quibble with Hotchkiss's citation that "It depends on the type of information, but generally speaking, our limits, as discovered by George Miller in the mid 50’s, seems to be 7 “chunks”, plus or minus two." He does say plus or minus two but Chinese speakers typically can juggle 9 - 10 numbers in their active memory at any time. (Thanks, New Yorker, for that similar article.)

I also think this is a little dubious, mostly because any time cavemen get dragged into social sciences my radar starts to twitch:

Consider that our social circle in the past, a concept known as Dunbar's number, generally was about 150 people. These are not mere acquaintances, but people we know something about. To use the definition provided by Dunbar himself, these are people who, if you saw them sitting by themselves in a bar or coffee shop, you would have no hesitation going over and joining them. Just like our working memory, our ability to maintain social relationships has finite limits. And, once again, there are evolutionary reasons for this. The average size of the human tribe 40,000 years ago on the African savannah? You guessed it, about 150 people.

but still, it's a good read.

Also, if you're wondering how I got to that article and topic, that's what I do all day at work, search engine stuff. It pays the bills.



Bad news:

Want to have a baby? Now's the time. The Boston Globe wrote a scaremongering piece of offensive claptrap that completely made me want to barf. My local rag! But how can I not be outraged by statements like this:

No generation of women has had more trouble with fertility than this generation, who received the terrible baby boomer advice, "Wait. You have time. Focus on your career first."

Yeah, because it's fucking terrible advice to want to be financially stable before you have a kid. Is the writer of this article unaware of divorce statistics? And how well single mothers typically fare, financially, after a divorce?

Compare this statement:

If you are past your early twenties, and you're single and want to have children, you need to find a partner now.

to this:

There is plenty of evidence to show that the quality of your eggs takes a nose dive at age 35.

Um ... correct me if I'm wrong, but there are about TEN YEARS in between ages 25 and 35 in which you can simultaneously pursue a career and look around for a mate. (The heteronormal assumptions in this article are also beyond breathtaking. Since when is it neccesary to settle down with a mate before you have kids? yeah, it makes sense for a lot of people, but everyone doesn't have to follow that path to have a kid.)

The good news is that psychology research shows you will gain more happiness anyway by finding a partner than by having a good job.

Leaving aside the weakness of using "the good news is" as a bridge in a formal piece of writing, what "psychology research" is this? Because from what I've seen, being broke and financially dependent on your partner (I presume; or maybe the author is suggesting women who want to have babies become so-called welfare queens?) ... anyway, having no job and no control over how money is allocated in your household isn't really conducive to gaining happiness, in my opinion.

The whole article is bullshitty linkbait, of course, but it made me really mad anyway.

thanks to feministing for the link.

.....

Other stuff:

we moved, it was very painful, and I didn't kill Dave, and since I'm typing, obviously he didn't kill me. I would like to write a blog post enumerating all the things I did wrong and right for next time we move, but this is all I've got time for now. (No time for spellcheck or proffing! sorry.) I'm running late picking him up, actually.