Random food

We had friends (probably soon to be flatmates) around for dinner last night. Among other things, we made paneer, which turned out to be stupidly easy.

Not so long ago, Mort also played with making spring rolls, extremely delicious and vegan to that Lindsey can eat them. My favourite thing, however, is the apron.

For me, there was a box of fun that's rapidly becoming other things:

My lobster-claws

In return for taking care of Johanna's cat, Minnie (and not taking her to "work" with me), Johanna bought me some awesome lobster-claw cycling gloves. They've got padding on the palm, reflective stripes on the back, and dozens of tiny bicycles to make sure everyone knows they're for people who want mittens but also want to be able to change gears, rather than for people who want to dress like a cow and freak out oncoming traffic. The gloves I had with separate fingers weren't stopping my hands swelling up and turning purple with the wind-chill I get cycling down the hill when it's below freezing.

Minnie, despite going into acute (and briefly anuric) renal failure right before Xmas, is now off fluids, off meds, concentrating urine and has a normal level of blood urea nitrogen = rock on, kitty!

In a completely unrelated area, I may just have figured out the fastest and laziest way of ripping out wool for recycling. Grandmum would have approved.

I finally finished the socks for Mort with a DNA-cable up the front - I'm pretty pleased with them.

And sometimes Mort has to disassemble the oven door. The upside is that the handle no longer wobbles.

Three carboys full

Real Christmas trees are the done thing here, which makes sense since we're in one of the states that grows them for everyone else. On the first of January, however, they're hurled out onto the street to await pickup by the Christmas-tree Man:

We briefly extracted Steve from his exciting world trip for a hiatus in our little slice of Palmy, and forced him to make beer in the garage:

And now, smugly, we have three carboys full of beer that has pretty good prospects. Left to right, it's a Brown Ale (Steve's one), Dry Stout (like Guinness), and Brown Porter (yesterday's effort). No, not all of our finished homebrew is in shot.

I have kickass slippers

It's like I stood still too long and warm fuzzy moss grew over my feet:

A geeky spreadsheet for the pattern can be found here - Slipper pattern (it displays as gibberish, but if you right-click on the page and "Save page as..." you can download the file... I hope...)

White elephants & tofu

We were invited to Weihnachtsfest 2009 at Christiane & Bill's place, where we learned about the White Elephant Gift Exchange. Being deliberately obtuse, I made a white elephant for our contribution (it went down rather well with Elena).

One of the best moments, however, was when someone loudly referred to the pavlova Mort made as, "that famous Kiwi pie".... In front of an Australian. The room became perceptably warmer, I can tell you.

We spent the week leading up to Xmas cat-sitting/nursing Minnie, Johanna's cat in acute renal failure. She's the sweetest thing, and extremely forgiving of all the poking & prodding. It was really nice to have a cat around.

Because we're living with a vegan, I've been keen to try making tofu. This was our first try - first we made soy milk, then coagulated it with gypsum:

The finished product - 500g of soy beans (about $US 0.80) made 700g of soft tofu. A bit firmer next time, I think - I want to be able to fry it.

Yay for new glasses

I finally got around to going to the optometrist and now have new glasses and fewer headaches - all good! They're pretty similar to my previous glasses, but a little pointier.

The weather is finally warming up after a cold, dry week. The downside of this is the pipes thawing and bursting a hole throughout the garage wall. Another downside is an interesting phenomenon called "freezing rain", where the rain falls as liquid but freezes as soon as it hits anything. The ground just looks wet, but it's actually covered with an extremely slippery layer of ice. Here's what it looks like on rhododendrons:

Thanksgiving

Lindsey and her parents were kind enough to invite us to spend thanksgiving with them and their excellent cooking, at her parent's place in Black Butte Ranch, East of the Cascades.


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It's extremely pretty out there, all conifers and snow and mule deer eating the community golf course:

There was also plenty of other wildlife to keep our noses pressed against the windows - I think this is a Hairy Woodpecker (or possibly a Downy Woodpecker, but it's probably too big):

We had a little tour around the town of Sisters - a cute little tourist-trap, with bylaws stating shops have to look "Old-Westy". No such requirement for the cars passing through, though.

Unfortunately, this picture is a little blurry, but you can get the general idea of the awesome hideousness of some of the articles in the second-hand bookshop there:

On the upside, one of the shops there had RJ's liquorice from Levin *nompf*