The cats went to see the vet last week for their annual shots and exam, and also because Isis has been barfing a lot, usually around 5am. The vet said she seems to be fine, it may just be a hairball that got down into her stomach. She's only barfed once since then, so hopefully it's not chronic kidney failure.

I found out today that someone I worked with for several years died yesterday at age 33 of a rare form of cancer, a tumor in her pituitary gland. I first met Rannie at E3 when our PR agency had just hired her, a completely green kid who had been putting together comic book cons. After helping me stuff many, many folders with press releases and fact sheets (the days before electronic press kits and ftp sites), we had a nice dinner on 3DO's tab. She was such a sweet person, always ready with a big hug and a smile, even if we hadn't seen each other in ages, and she always said she never forgot that dinner at E3. No one deserves to die of cancer, but this one seems especially unfair.

This evening I made a vegetable soup completely from scratch (no, I didn't grow the vegetables). Using guidelines from Alice Waters, I threw together some chopped onions, carrots, turnip, leek and some of the veggie broth I made last weekend and it magically turned into soup! A good soup, even! It's finally cooling off again after another few warmish days, so that coupled with a not-great day, made a hot, comforting meal pretty essential tonight.

Trying to get back on track after E3 but there's just too much to do. Work is insanely busy and about as ridiculously drama-ridden as All My Children. Koosh has adjusted to her collar and leash--for the most part--and loves going out on the patio for short periods of time. She usually just lies in whichever chair has the most sun while I putter around spraying aphids and sweeping up leaves. Isis doesn't always come out with us, but when she does she likes to look out through the broken fence board. The only problem with Koosh so far is that if she gets scared, she tries to dart back in the house faster than I can free her leash from the chair leg which causes some distress, but at least it all ends in Greenies once we're back in the house and settled.

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.

The other day I was reminded of a lunch my mom and I went to at her friend's house in Jakarta where the woman served us tuna curry and we listened to a Naked Vicar comedy album, and she told us a story about getting locked out of her house and heaving a transformer through the window to break in. (Transformers back then were not cool alien robot toys, but freaking heavy green bricks that allowed us to use some of our Western electrical appliances in our Jakarta homes.) Looking back now it's kinda weird that she had to break a window to get in, because most houses in Jakarta were astoundingly easy to break into, especially as most had those glass louvers that you just slide out. I also wonder where her servants were.

Anyway, the point of this is that we had tuna curry for lunch, a dish that is super easy to make with pantry staples and really cheap. A lot of my little Australian friends ate it because it's very mild and only a curry in the sense that you dump in a tiny amount of curry powder. I used this recipe as the base with a few changes: swapping about a 1/2 cup of frozen peas for the bell pepper, and using greek yogurt for the sour cream. I found out too late that there was a lot less yogurt in the container than I thought but it came out fine. In the future I will also use canned tuna instead of packets because the packet tuna is a little too dry. I ate it over rice but it's also good over noodles or wrapped in naan. The cats were, needless to say, fascinated by this dinner.

This weekend I also made bread from scratch using an extremely basic recipe, which turned out pretty well. It came out of the oven at about 5pm and I ate three slices and then did not want the lentil soup I'd planned to make for dinner.

I picked up some Pepsi Natural at Target on Friday. It's "natural" because it's made with cane and beet sugar instead of HFCS. Pretty good. I thought it had a kind of coffee-ish flavor, though the ingredients don't indicate anything that would explain that. Apparently the Pepsi Raw they introduced last year in the UK has coffee leaf in it.

And suddenly I have three Crissy dolls. The one on the far left is my original Growing Hair Crissy, the one I've had since age 3 or 4. Don't ask me why I still have her. Usually she lives under my bed and when Amanda came to sleep over a few weeks ago, I pulled her out and Amanda was smitten, hinting several times that she'd just looooove it if Crissy could come live at her house. Since I hadn't come up with a good birthday gift yet, I went on eBay and eventually found a still-working Crissy for under $15 (the one in the middle). When she arrived she smelled strongly of cigarette smoke so I put her out in the patio storage closet in a bag with baking soda for several days and managed to get most of the smell out. But after washing and brushing her hair it became apparent that some kid (or maybe a weird adult) cut off far too much of it, and then the growing hair mechanism stopped working. Back to eBay, where I found another working Crissy for about $10. She arrived two days ago and thankfully is in fabulous condition.

My Crissy is wearing pants she's had had since 1973 and a top graciously donated by Amanda from one of the dolls she brought with her to the sleepover. Middle Crissy arrived in a baggy dress that I suspect was made to fit an American Girl doll (same height, thicker 'round the torso) that I washed and plan to fix so it will fit better. In the meantime she is wrapped in a little crocheted jacket that I think Grandma Hedstrom made for a baby doll. Last Crissy arrived naked and is now wearing an aftermarket outfit I also got from eBay after unsuccessfully bidding on a few lots of original clothing. It's very cute and very Amanda-ish.

This photo also shows the strips of clear packing tape on the edges of my living room chair which have been applied in a futile effort to keep Koosh from ripping up my furniture. Oh, well. The two chairs cost me $50 each so it could be a lot worse.

Food this weekend was all about using up leftover ingredients in the fridge without leaving the house. When you cook for yourself, you end up tossing a lot more stuff than you'd like, especially produce. The amazing Debbie Meyer GreenBags and BreadBags have helped alleviate a lot of that, but I still want to eliminate as much waste as possible. Plus, it was raining really hard and I was in no mood to go out.

Some of it was easy: to use up the rest of the roasted red peppers I needed for the yellow rice & chicken dish I threw them in with a new batch of the yogurt & lemon hummus and it turned out fantastic.

To use up the half head of cabbage leftover from the soup last week using what was on hand, I poked around the 'net until I found a few recipes for cabbage stroganoff. I went with this one (halved) since it did not call for beef bullion cubes, which I do not have. Yes, it's true. It came out as a kind of sweet and sour cabbage casserole, not stroganoff-y at all but quite yummy. I actually didn't have any paprika on hand either, so I tossed in some cumin, turmeric, cayenne and a tiny pinch of cinnamon to get a kind of Middle Eastern flavor to go with the last of the plain hummus served on cracker bread. I think you can pretty much use any spices you want and it'll come out ok. I used greek yogurt in place of the sour cream, so between this and the red pepper hummus that was pretty well taken care of, too.

The cabbage casserole made enough for 2-3 large side servings, so last night I broiled up a yellowfin tuna steak I found in the freezer (olive oil, cracked black pepper and chopped dill from the ill-fated tofu stroganoff experiment). Yes, I ate a large piece of fish and it wasn't at all bad. Thank goodness the weather was fairly warm last night so I could keep the windows open and get rid of the smell.

When I was buying the pico de gallo for the rice & chicken, the checker mentioned how much she liked that particular brand and often used it to perk up her homemade linguine with clam sauce. Tonight I mixed up a batch of my mom's clam sauce and tossed in some pico de gallo at the end (I have a lot left since I didn't think it worked with the chicken) and it adds a whole new dimension to white clam sauce. Try it sometime.

Mom's White Clam Sauce

4 servings

1 stick of butter
3 cloves of garlic, minced
2 cans minced clams & juice (which happen to be on sale for $0.99 this week at Rite Aid)
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1 tsp Italian seasoning
salt & pepper to taste
1/2 cup white wine
juice from 1 lemon

Melt butter, add garlic and saute for a few minutes. Add the other ingredients except for lemon juice and simmer for about 15 minutes. Remove from heat and add lemon juice. Serve over linguine.

Next time I will probably add the pico de gallo a few minutes before taking off the heat to soften the onions a bit but not make the tomatoes too mushy.

I also discovered that Isis loves clams. Really loves clams. Koosh is not interested in the least, but Isis keeps banging on the pantry door because she thinks I'm hiding them in there.

My mom really enjoys The Last Restaurant Standing on BBCA, and I've seen it promo'ed endlessly during The F Word, so last night when there was nothing else on I decided to give it a try. By the end I think my blood pressure had spiked into the red zone. The level of tension and grim desperation on the show is truly unbearable.

And did that couple actually try to serve up Welsh-Chinese food? What is that, exactly?

I went to a dinner party a couple of weeks ago thrown by a friend from library school, and one of the other guests was a psychology professor who wrote a diet book a few years back called The Shangri-La Diet. The basic premise that you can fool your brain into lowering your body's set point by slurping down a couple tablespoons of unflavored oil each day. Rita has been doing it since she had her baby and has lost 60 lbs total--down 20 lbs from before she got pregnant--and hasn't even been working out. She says she's only really hungry about once a day. I got the book and it's pretty interesting. Cathy and I are going to give it a try. He recommends flaxseed oil, which is quite good for you anyway. Seth is a pretty funny guy and currently teaches in Beijing.

I finished Sonny Barger's book earlier this week. Even though he has very different philosophies about life than I do, it's hard not to kinda like the guy.

After letting it languish untouched for months, I've been trying to make as much progress as possible on my Cozy shawl and have almost hit the halfway point. Because I was in a hurry when I bought the yarn and didn't have the nice people wind the skeins into balls at the store, I have to do it myself at the end of each ball. This time around I managed to make an unholy mess (while trying to keep Isis from "helping") which took a good four hours to untangle and rewind. I watched all of The Last Templar, an atrocious miniseries starring Mira Sorvino as the world's most incompetent archaeologist, while I worked on it, which is how I knew it took four hours.

This recent post on one of my favorite blogs made me laugh because we used to get raccoons in the backyard in Danville all the time and it was a constant effort to keep the cats out of their way, especially Koosh. I vividly recall one morning trying to shove Isis and Sparkle out the back door, surprised that they were resisting so much when usually they were frantic to get out. It suddenly dawned on my sleep-addled brain that something odd was taking place on the deck: two gigantic raccoons were going at it. Ours weren't quite as noisy as Laurie's pair apparently was, but a disquieting experience nonetheless.

Random (mostly foodie tv) notes:

Royally pissed about the latest Top Chef; Leah totally should have packed her knives on this one. Carla is turning out to be absolutely hilarious.

Slowly warming up to Ted Allen's new show Chopped, which is like Top Chef meets Iron Chef in a dark room. Who was that contestant in this week's episode who was unclear on the concept and kept whining about the time constraints? Did he wander into the studio by mistake?

If you're on a diet, watch Man vs. Food on Travel Channel. Food has never looked more unappetizing. I DVR'ed the episode on Portland where he visited the Stepping Stone Cafe, Voodoo Donuts (of course) and Salvador Molly's. For those of you who live in Portland or thereabouts (and have cable), the episode repeats on Saturday at 8am. Salvador Molly's supposedly serves Indonesian food so we might have to check that out at some point.

Need to catch up on Lost and Gossip Girl. Not sure about whether I'm on board with Hell's Kitchen just yet.

In home cooking, I think I've moved from the garbanzo phase into a mushroom phase via that spicy cabbage soup. Most of the recipes I've pulled to try involve mushrooms in some major way. Will be trying a tofu mushroom stroganoff this weekend.

Two new things I've discovered Isis is afraid of:
1. the drawer under the oven where I keep the baking sheets
2. the plastic bag the paper comes in when it's raining

This weekend's assignment is to read Sonny Barger's biography to get in the right frame of mind for a client's game about biker gangs in the 60's. It's interesting though because a lot of the action took place very near to here in Oakland and Modesto and points in between. Also a good thing I just finished a potboiler about Tibetan monk horror on the plane back from Minneapolis because their other big triple-A title centers on that subject. We spent all day yesterday in LA mapping out plans for their 2009-10 lineup which grew quite suddenly by about 40 percent over what they'd been planning just a couple weeks ago.

One of our other clients who is currently on hiatus with us for unrelated reasons has been battling a boatload of lunatics over a sound file in a game that shipped over a year ago. We've been getting a lot of phone calls about this, and it has made for a very busy couple of weeks.

Isis loves hummus. She knows this pizza has hummus on it and will not back off. This is a small pizza I threw together out of what I found in the fridge: my favorite Mediterranean style flatbread spread with a hummus base, crumbled feta, slivered sun dried tomatoes and shredded romano.

As I've been doing almost every week for the past few months, I tried out a couple of new recipes last week in order to build a set of relatively easy, healthy things to make at home. The home run was a spicy mushroom, cabbage and rice soup from Apartment Therapy. This can be easily tweaked with different ingredients, like adding chicken or turkey or substituting different grains. It actually got less spicy over the three days I ate it.

The big miss for the week was a roasted broccoli "pesto" from Vegetarian Times mag. The recipe said that roasting broccoli would bring out richer flavor... well, not exactly. Roasting broccoli brought out the burnt flavor. And it took me forever to get the odor out of the house (in freezing weather, I might add). I like Veggie Times and will probably renew my sub, but their recipes are very hit-or-miss.

I don't get as many cute photos of Koosh because she moves too fast, espcially with the slight delay on digital cameras, but sometimes she falls asleep and holds still for as long as 3-4 minutes.

While I'm really tempted to add a lolcats caption to this and submit it, I'm just not feeling the lolspeak today.

Isis enjoys looking out the bedroom window.

Isis got her stitches out yesterday so she looks less like I made her myself.

Saw the new Philip Glass/Christopher Hampton opera Appomattox last night but still not entirely sure what I thought of it. Overall it was very good, with some excellent moments, and the staging and direction were stunning (though the rotting horse carcasses really didn't need to spin at the finale). I liked the way they juxtaposed the gentlemanly demeanor of Grant and Lee at Appomattox with the desperation and squalidness of the common people and soldiers, and how the harrowing scenes flashing forward into the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960's underscored the deep divisions Grant and Lee's agreement could never hope to fix.

However, I don't think Glass' music lends itself well to the operatic form. In the first act the music seemed more like a film score, providing a background for the dialog, which came off as ad-libbed lines sung randomly, like when people joke around pretending to sing their normal speech. In the second act, the music took over for the libretto in getting its message across, often drowning out the voices entirely. Some great stuff there, but not entirely successful.

Last week I went to the first opera in my mini-sub, Tannhäuser, another Bugs Bunny opera. The overture is a significant section of What's Opera, Doc?, the part where Elmer sings, "Oh Bwunhilde, you're so wuvwey," and Bugs replies, "Yes I know it... I can't help it." Everyone thinks that music is from the Ring Cycle, but no, it's from Tannhäuser. Learn something new everyday. Tannhäuser has fantastic music and nice singing, but the story is hogwash. Next up is the new Philip Glass opera Appomattox in a couple weeks.

I spent most of this weekend trying to get pills down Isis' throat or sitting in my car driving back and forth to Pacifica. Good times.

Current reading: Hide and Seek by Ian Rankin and reviewing GTD. More on that later.

We got some Cars branded Pop Tarts at Big Lots, and far from being delightful breakfast treats based on the charming animated tale featuring anthropomorphic motor vehicles, they look more like the scene of some horrific traffic accident. Yum yum.

Isis' surgery went very well. They removed the entire mass which hadn't yet attached itself to any muscle tissue, and the lab should have the analysis of what it actually is back by Monday. The vet thinks it was a reaction to one of her shots, and if it hadn't come out, could have eventually become a sarcoma. Isis was pretty much back to her normal annoying self by this morning, trying to get me out of bed at 5 to fill up her food bowl. She wasn't too thrilled about having to take an antibiotic pill, however, nor having to wear the cone while I'm at work so she can't lick the incision. Watching her try to get through the cat door with the cone on was kind of sad but also highly amusing.

The Kittywalk "cat containment system" is set up and connected--sort of--to the pet door so there aren't any huge gaps for the cats to wiggle through. This config consists of two T-connects, a deck-and-patio section, a clubhouse and a cabana.

So far Isis likes it more than Koosh does (she still runs to the front door whenever I say, "Do you want to go outside?"), but I think that once I spend more time
actually sitting on the patio myself, instead of just shoving junk around, that they'll spend more time hanging out in it. Here is Isis grazing on cat grass like a cow.

I made a lot of progress on my patio and living room this weekend, filling up a few bins' worth of trash and a couple of bags for Goodwill. This morning I went to pick up the bins and cart them out to the car when I noticed a couple of brown things on the floor by the door that I assumed were leaves or bits of cardboard until it dawned on me that they were frog shaped. Apparently they crawled in under the front door. As I was trying to rescue them with a tupperware container and a piece of junk mail, Koosh decided to make a break for it out the front door, but she only went about 10 steps before realizing this Outside is quite different from the Outside she expected and she turned tail and shot back inside.

What happened to Top Chef? I tuned in last night for the latest episode and all they showed was some kind of weird extended infomercial for Bertolli frozen dinners featuring Rocco DiSpirito 2.0. So the Big Bertolli Secret is that they--get this--freeze the individual ingredients separately. Wait, I'm not entirely sure I got that. Could you repeat it one more time? And then once more with feeling? As much as they'd like you to think this is groundbreaking stuff, normal people have been doing it for years.

It also appears the denoument where Joey stumbles tearily into the kitchen to say goodbye was recreated because surely that's Howie sitting in the folding chair by the door? Wasn't he just standing there at Judges' Table when Joey was told to pack his knives? Are there TWO Howies? God help us.

I managed to empty two boxes last night and can now actually walk right up to my kitchen sink. The pile of boxes in the corner of the dining area resembles the Matterhorn. Koosh likes to climb up and sit on the top, but I can't get her to wear little kneesocks and lederhosen.

Isis, always the problem solver, is adjusting to not having a shower door track from which to drink in the morning. By the way, my shower curtain is not studded with rhinestones; those are water droplets.

Koosh update: She's back. Still sulking, but I got her to eat some tuna before she scurried away under the deck.

Last night's Hell's Kitchen was f-----' awesome. Bawling Bonnie needs to go pronto, followed closely by that one with all the hair all over the place like Cousin Itt. It's highly amusing that these two, who spent so much time putting down the Waffle House chef for her alleged lack of skills, are now getting to enjoy the full force of Ramsay wrath for their lack of skills. The way they keep flirting with GR is really nauseating, too. They seem fairly unclear on the concept of a restaurant; doesn't matter how cute you are if the food never gets to the customers. The entire competition seems to have come down to two people at this point: Julia and Rock, the only ones there who appear capable of running anything.

In other news, I can't find Koosh. When I got home last night she came out from under my bed where she'd apparently been sleeping all day after her ordeal at the vet. I tried to give her some tuna, which she refused(!) and she headed out into the backyard. That was the last I saw of her. Hopefully she's just freaked out and hiding under a bush somewhere. Complicating matters is this event in New York plus the ceiling scraping/painting project in the house. I'm supposed to take both Isis and Koosh to the boarding place tonight because I have to leave tomorrow morning. Life just doesn't get much more fun than this.

Donny Deutsch is a jackass. Just had to get that off my chest.

This morning I put two cats in crates and took them to the vet for their shots and checkups, sustaining only minor injuries.

I'm really bummed that Michael got the axe on The Next Food Network Star. It doesn't make sense; Adrian is cute and all, but he just doesn't seem to have the cooking chops to carry a whole show. Michael's failings are easier to remedy with a little coaching. We didn't get nearly enough of Paula Deen during the episode, but Sandra Lee would've been a better fit for MRE challenge anyway since it's right up her gussied-up-premade-food alley.

And, wow, Giardia can certainly be a bitch, can't she? She also appears to have stolen my mom's lemon pasta recipe, except that my mom uses gobs of butter instead of olive oil, and wouldn't use basil leaves if you held a gun to her head.