Rebekah brought a cake into work for my birthday today!



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Thanks, Rebekah!

Question that popped into my head as I watched the FINA World Championships in Rome this week: solo synchronized swimming?





Image copyright Getty Images.

Two baby doves, five days old. Mom is off taking a break somewhere, probably tired of trying to sit on top of a pair of baby birds who are maybe one-third her size already. I keep forgetting to bring a real camera, so this is taken with my stupid Moto Q work phone, whose only redeeming quality is that the camera is slightly better than my LG Rumor personal phone.

I completely forgot to mention the other day in my praise of great actors the amazing performance by Stephen Root as the pathetic gay vampire on True Blood in a role completely unlike his usual great comedic work, but awe-inspiring nonetheless. (I hear he's in No Country for Old Men as well, but I haven't had a chance to watch that yet since I only recently found the USB drive where that's stored).

A lot of big expenses hit all at once this month, so I'm keeping to a very tight budget until the next paycheck and challenging myself to eat out of the pantry again. So far it's working pretty well, though I learned last night that if you make a baked penne dish to extend two servings of dry pasta and some leftover sauce into maybe three or four servings, you have to add something besides cheese and breadcrumbs to bulk it up. Otherwise it's just the same two servings of cooked pasta, only with stickier, cheesier sauce.

The baby doves hatched on Monday morning. We were starting to get worried about her because the gestation period for dove eggs is about 18 days and it was getting pretty close. This is a photo of mom sitting on the nest on Friday afternoon taken from the top of the stairs. Now we're worried about the babies falling off that beam.

Still no barn swallow nest on my patio. My neighbor's raucous party the other night shook loose most of the mud that was there. Maybe they gave it up as a bad location.

Today I awoke to temperatures that could almost be considered chilly. Supposedly it will stay reasonable for a couple more days before the flames of hell crank up again. I made nimbu pani, an Indian version of limeade this weekend. They drank it by the gallon in Midnight's Children, so I had to go look it up. The main difference comes from adding a pinch of salt that smooths out the sugar and tartness. Isis really likes it. I used about half as many limes as the recipe calls for to get 1 1/2 C, and the concentrate makes about 8 glasses.

So tired of eating cold dinners. If I'd wanted to live with day-in, day-out temps hovering around 100°, I'd have moved to Phoenix. Tonight I made a chilled cucumber soup from USA Weekend magazine that tasted good though the consistency was weird and I was starving about an hour afterward.

Went to see the new Harry Potter movie today. Though I liked the Cuarón vision over Chris Columbus' by far, it was nice to see all the cool little magical touches again that make the wizarding world so enchanting. I don't remember as many of these in Order of the Phoenix, but I only saw the movie once. David Yates, writer Steve Kloves and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel (Amélie) make a good team.

I'm watching the latest episode of The Next Food Network Star as I write this, and this one convinces me that Susie, Bob and Bobby are really the sadistic bullies I've always suspected they were. If the host of some podunk morning show randomly decided to slop hot sauce all over something Bobby Flay made he would have murdered the guy right there on the spot with a paring knife. And there is no way in hell they would have walked onto Paula Deen's set in the middle of a shoot and swapped out her butter for tofu, or suddenly stopped Boobs De Laurentiis mid pasta and told her she had to make something Cuban. They had the nerve to chastise Jamika for showing she was mad??? Because Bobby's never, ever been visibly enraged on camera. Nor Alton Brown. What pisses me off about this show is that they consistently subject these people to standards that not a single one of the current stars had to deal with, and what has it gotten them? In five seasons, they found one legitimate breakout in Guy Fieri. Maybe it's time to rethink the show?

Count fennel in amongst the thing you don't want to revisit in the middle of the night at the toilet bowl--you know, that list of things like tomato sauce and hot peppers that make an extremely unpleasant experience even more awful. Fennel is very, very bitter.

It has been ungodly hot here again this week so the other night I made a raw lemon and fennel soup from Veggie Times (the recipe is not online yet and don't bother anyway). The soup itself was extremely bland but didn't taste especially off or anything. Nonetheless, I felt green around the gills right after eating it and then woke up in the middle of the night already halfway down the hall to the bathroom. Not sure if one of the ingredients was bad or whether I was predestined to get sick. Next day I was mostly fine, just tired and not particularly hungry. There's a weird stomach bug going around that makes you queasy/barfy and headachy/feverish for a couple of days, so it may have just been that. I made broiled tofu with mango sauce and mustard greens last night (also Veggie Times), and was for the most part just fine. The recipe itself was ok, basically tofu cooked in your favorite chutney and served over bitter greens that seemed like an afterthought.

That's the second time I've cooked fennel and the second time I was less than impressed, so it's off the list.

I've jumped on the True Blood bandwagon this season and am so impressed by some of the cast who tend to make the rounds of good shows. As I mentioned in a post about Lost recently, the same names seem to pop up again and again. William Sanderson plays the Sheriff, and Chris Bauer, who played the tragic union boss on the second season of The Wire, is the doomed Detective Bellefleur. Michelle Forbes, who has Bellefleur wrapped around her talon, was recently on Battlestar Galactica (a show that every geek on the planet but me watched), and was also Ensign Ro on Star Trek TNG way back when.

In other news: Cathy's mom passed away nine weeks after her initial diagnosis and the memorial was last weekend. I did one of the readings (2 Cor 4:14-5:1) without falling on my face on my way to or from the lectern and without either giggling or sobbing uncontrollably in the middle. It helped that the baptismal font blocked my view of Cathy and Tim in the front pew. The service was beautiful, and all of those who bitched and moaned about having to put on a dress and sit in church for an hour can just go stuff it because that's what Shirley wanted and if you're not the one who died then you don't get a say. Tomorrow Cathy flies to Pittsburgh to do the whole thing all over again and bury her mom's ashes in the family plot. I'm tired of people dying.