Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Tragedy in Dublin! For the past few weeks we've had a pair of doves bobbing around the open-air office building walkways. At one point they decided to build a nest on a 3" wide wood beam supporting the stairway roof (though I strongly advised against it on several occasions). You could tell it wasn't going well because twigs littered the stairway and nothing stayed put on the beam, and as of Friday they seemed to have wisely abandoned the idea and moved on. But this morning we got to work and found a huge mess of scattered twigs all over the stairs, along with a tiny broken egg. Doves are the stupidest birds on the face of the earth. It's a wonder they've managed to keep the species going this long.

In other nesting news: despite a lot of frantic swallow activity and the barest beginnings of a mud nest on a ceiling beam, a nest has yet to materialize on my patio this year. I have no idea what happened to the swallows who started the work, but we also have had a lot of hawks hanging around, so maybe they feel it's safer elsewhere.

The first two roses of the year bloomed late last week and unfortunately hit their peak this weekend when I was down in LA. I've already had a helluva time keeping the aphids at bay. Yes, mom, I will prune those dead leaves as soon as I can.

Observation of the week: Kerrygold Blarney Stone cheese + Saltine crackers = Cheetos (Puff style).

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Sunday, May 17, 2009

It's bloody hot this weekend, so of course I made salt and vinegar roasted potatoes yesterday for breakfast. (As previously mentioned my appetite has been weird lately, and I had to use up my potatoes which were rapidly going bad.) They were probably some of the best potatoes I've ever had. Dinner was gazpacho.

It's also really dry; the relative humidity dropped yesterday morning from 40% to 32% within about two hours. I have the vaporizer running as well, which helps keep the interior temp down by a degree or so.

The cats and I are sitting in the dark today trying to stay cool. Koosh loves going out on the patio on the leash now, but she always wants to go out at the hottest part of the day. I really want to finish the first sock of a pair for Cathy's mom since they have to be done before Friday, but it's hard to knit socks in the dark. We're currently watching In Cold Blood on TCM: it has "cold" in the title, the soundtrack is cool jazz, and it was shot in icy black and white.

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Thursday, May 14, 2009

Watching the season finale of Lost last night, it was making me nuts trying to figure out where I'd seen the actor sitting on the beach with Jacob. After a lot of digging today (that scene appears to be one of the items of least interest among Lost analysts), I figured out that he was also Silas on Deadwood. I also learned that another familiar actor on a recent episode turns out to have played Joanie. Apparently, at least four actors from Deadwood have now appeared on Lost, including Calamity Jane as Juliet's sister (not hard to miss since Jane was usually covered in dirt and wore a hat all the time), and William Sanderson, though I still think of him as Larry from Newhart more than E.B., and he's been on a ton of shows.

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Wednesday, May 13, 2009

On Monday I achieved a complete sock. Please hold your applause until completion of the companion. This one used a little bit more yarn than the last one that sprung a hole, so I finished the toe with some of the undyed Shelburne Farms yarn and it worked out splendidly. Last summer I compulsively knit dishcloths to keep from losing my mind and killing all our clients; this summer I think I will be compulsively knitting socks.

Late last week I received an "abnormal" medical test result and freaked out all weekend before I was able to get in to see the doctor first thing Monday and find out that it's not panic-worthy. For three days there I pretty much lost my appetite, and even though I now know that there's no reason for concern, there are only a few things that sound tasty. Last night I decided to make lemon rice pudding from Laurie Colwin's book More Home Cooking. She warns against using arborio rice, but it's all I had and sure enough, it was too thick (it's so dense I could cut it into squares). Unfortunately I didn't think of making the pudding until just after 8 pm, so it didn't get done until nearly 11 and still needed to chill. I ate a huge helping for breakfast this morning and it's really, really good. The entire time it was cooking, all I could think of was A.A. Milne's poem "Rice Pudding."

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