H - this is for you.

Look closely at the photo below (taken in September 2000) - "Quinn's Pet Hamsters" are awesome. This was hanging in the basement of the church where Sandy's sister got married.


I am a real sunshine (ha).

Good day!

Guess who cooked!

I did! I made two new recipes this weekend, which is two more recipes than I made this whole month! Don't quite know what motivated me.

I made Ginger-Lemon Pinwheel Cookies which are a serious pain in the ass to make. You're really making two different cookie recipes at the same time and then combining. Something went awry with the molasses dough. They look interesting (I would have loved looking at them in my high school years) but are a bit hard. I don't recommend the recipe unless you have a lot of time on your hands and enjoy frustration.



The second recipe was a Breakfast Tortilla, which, surprisingly, is a Cooking Light recipe. I say it's surprising because of the amount of fat and cholesterol in it but I guess you're supposed to eat it in moderation...This is a hard task because it was tasty. The end product is here:


I made if for a knitting get together and it looked much nicer on the table with the other treats:


This is the real money shot though - a yuppie's dream :) - some Darjeeling tea, quiche, fresh strawberries and breakfast tortilla. It was so tasty and satisfying.


I think I probably gained weight today.

utube

More evidence of my exciting life: I found some funny shit on youtube. Yeah, I know I'm not alone but I mean LOL kind of funny, which is rare for me. Sure, I chuckle quite a bit and think to myself "that's funny" often but don't regularly laugh out loud at things. That said, I laughed at this:




This guy has several other short films of equally funny stuff but the astronaut one is my favorite. A runner up is the snail:



Stay tuned - more useless stuff coming your way soon! right here!

Blah

Dang - October 2009 may be an all time low for blog posts...all the action happens on the other blog. Here I'm meant to have more G's blah life moments. So, let's recap the blah life today:

• Wake up
  
• Eat cereal while perusing the interwebs - thankfully other bloggers updated their sites and I had something to read!
• Change the cat litter - hopefully this cheered up the kitty
• Put away laundry
  
• Go to grocery - passed the same group of homeless alcoholics twice in the alley - saw an interesting bit of graffiti
• Work on travel research for a possible holiday road trip
• Eat cold, left over pizza for lunch
  
• Make spicy pumpkin bread
  
• Pay bills and reconcile bank statement
• Make black bean soup - this took forever. I have gotten out of cooking and I didn't time things very well but the soup turned out to be tasty.
• Skim through the latest issue of Cooking Light while listening to weekend All Things Considered
• Work on knitting a blanket while listening to podcasts of Real Time with Bill Maher and Slate's Political Gabfest and drinking Lefthand Warrior IPA.

This day was about twice as productive as usual. All right so you're definitely full of blah now.

I do want to officially make an endorsement. In a previous post (actually in two previous posts) I included a picture from a web site I've frequented lately but didn't actually put in a web site link. The Darth Bunny below is from the web site Animals with Lightsabers and I can't get enough.

Anyway, this post has really tasked my atrophying blogger muscle. I'm going to watch Jon Stewart now.

the end of the world is coming...

Actually this isn't another blog post about cute animals, it's about dystopia in the arts.

Today I went to the book signing for Margaret Atwood's new novel - The Year of the Flood, which I highly recommend. But before you read that, you'll have to read Oryx and Crake, which is something of a precursor to The Year of the Flood.

As the book review in the first link indicates, both books are about a possible future in which climate change has had some of the more obvious outcomes (you know, the ones we hear most often - sea levels rising, droughts and desertification, etc.). Also the gaps between the social and economic classes have grown wider. The military has been privatized and permeated everyday life. The media is controlled by this military - but in a subtle way so that not everyone knows. Oh and there are the "secret burger" franchises in the future. These secret burgers are called that because the meat from which they are made is secret (meaning it could be any part of any animal - including human). Interestingly, there was an article in the NY Times today about hamburgers.

Some call this science fiction but Atwood calls it "speculative fiction." If you ask me, some of these things don't sound that out there. Anyway, I'm not doing the book justice because there a lot more themes than I'm recognizing here.

My point of this blog is that I'm fascinated by stories of these possible futures. I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy last year and that really started it. I couldn't put that book down! Well, except for one time when I was so scared I had to put it down for a minute. I won't tell any more about that book.

I've read all of Kurt Vonnegut's books, many of which are "speculative fiction." One of my favorites is Galapagos. In this tale the human race is wiped out by, what else, a disease that makes humans infertile and things are going to poop anyway with, you guessed it, food in short supply and the gap between the rich and the poor growing.

Recently I (finally) read Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 - also about a possible future. I have the Ender's Game and a zombie book on my list next. Zombies are not really a possible future (I hope) but I find the various manifestations of zombies in books and movies fascinating. Not sure why...

And one other thing:

hamstah this!

It's a bit late for me but I'm surfing my cute animal sites in search of uplift and found this awesome bit of genius, which is the perfect response to the original hamstah.

Oktoberfest dogs

I recently attended a fairly lame Oktoberfest in Vail, Colorado. I say lame because it was very small and had no real German flare. I mean the beer offerings were bud, bud light and Beck's. So while Sandy and David, our guest from Texas for the weekend, drank a beer and tried out a variety of meats, I tried to get pictures of small dogs. But first I got this picture of a shop dog hanging in and out of a store:

This one had a wee fountain of hair on its head due to its person putting a rubberband in it.
This one was fairly agreeable but had its tongue sticking out all the time.

This one has a great little doggy fro.This floppy hound was hard to resist.
I got all of these photos while the owners were looking the other way. I didn't want to get into any long conversations about their dogs or the breeds or whatever. I just wanted to pet the dog and get a photo. Success!

Tube postcards

My friends Nadine and Ted recently traveled to London. Not only did Nadine bring me a cool bike postcard but she also brought the postcards below back for me! These hilarious postcards are referring to how one should behave on the Tube.

Colorado State Fair and Camping

This past weekend our niece and nephew, Morgan and Jake, were out to visit (with their parents) from the east coast. So, of course, we all went to the Colorado State Fair to get some real western culture.

The animal stuff was the strangest. I mean the fair with the rides and the greasy food and the people, some of large size, was no surprise. Here is a sheep being prepared for show and judgment:
We came across a sheep contest and I swear as we passed by the only words I heard were "...and the body cavity..." I have no idea what this has to do with judging the sheep and I don't want to know.

We also saw swine in repose:

This one is called "Sandy with Swine":

The cows were also present - here is a choice image of the view:

I found this odd but it was very popular, one of the "interactive" things kids could do was milk a cow. Now, I'm sure this is a great experience, perhaps once in a lifetime, and educational for the children but it sure seemed...I don't know just odd to watch. What also caught my attention was the look on the cow's face as she was handled by one child after another:

Unfortunately we missed the "mutton busting" which was on Friday night. This is basically small children competing with other small children - who can stay on the running sheep the longest...



Other than animals there were marching band complete with color guards competing for some trophy or other. Here is a view of the tortured kids in their marching band outfits in the heat of Pueblo, Colorado.

Then there were the rides...this is the "Wacky Worm." Sandy got to ride it with Jake.


As you can see it was a pretty scary ride:

After the day at the state fair we took Jake to Jellystone campgound just south of Castle Rock, Colorado. The main event was a campfire and roasting marshmallows. Jake didn't like his very toasty so he held it pretty high over the fire:


Sandy on the other hand likes his burnt. Not really but I think Jake found it amusing to see three marshmallows on fire.


Jake wanted to stay up late but it was a chilly night. Sandy put him in his rented REI kids sleeping back and put him on the picnic table.


It was a pretty tiring weekend for kid-less folks like ourselves.

Bento

I got my bento box in the mail today! According to the interwebs a bento box is a single-portion takeout or home-packed meal common in Japanese cuisine. I can buy that (literally) but it also happens to be a cool snack container for American goods. As some of you probably realize, a bento box owned by me will not be used to carry Japanese food.

But anyway, my bento box is decorated with birds and leafy twigs but it is also two tiered. Yes folks that is two containers stacked and clipped together. Check it out:



For all of you who can't wait to get one of your own you can go to Iloveobento.com. Other than Japanese food, I am open to food suggestions to carry in my bento box.