I have conquered Rice

I did it.  It took 4 tries, but I did it.

Leila has a love beyond measure for the Mexican rice from Baja Fresh.  She'll order the the cheese quesadilla, but what she really wants is the biggest side of orange rice they will sell.  Then she likes to eat it on chips, or with a spoon, or one grain at a time with her fingers, as long as it gets into her mouth.  It finally occurred to me, after having spent probably hundreds of dollars on rice at Baja Fresh, that I could probably recreate this culinary marvel at home.  According to Leila, who has taste-tested every batch, I have done it, and we should never have to buy a side of rice again.

The first batch tasted good, but was too mushy and wet.  The second batch was the right texture and consistency, but did not taste as good as the first batch.  The third batch was 95% there, but I had the sack to put actual onions in it, and even though they were minced to within an inch of their little onion lives, their sliminess made the rice almost inedible.  Jeez, Louise!  We also learned that tomato paste looked incredibly nasty when squeezed from a tube into warm chick stock, so don't do this.

So here, for all eternity, is the final recipe for Leila's Baja Fresh rice, without the pesky quesadilla.

2 tablespoons vegitable oil
1 cup of long grain rice (I tried rinsing it, and not rinsing it, it made no difference)
1 cup of chicken stock
1/2 cup of tomato sauce
1 teaspoon onion powder (or 1/3 of an actual onion, minced fine, if you're feeling sassy)
1/4 teaspoon of cumin
1/4 teaspoon of salt

Preheat oven to 350.  Sauté the rice in the oil in a pot for 6 - 8 minutes over medium heat, stirring often.  Add the onion powder, cumin and salt, and stir for another minute or so.  Add the chicken stock and tomato sauce, bring to a boil.  Put the lid on the pot, and put the whole shebang in the oven.  After 10 minutes, open the pot and stir, then replace the lid and bake for another 10 minutes.  Fluff with a fork, impress your friends and relatives.

I will probably be asked to make this 2 - 3 times a week, and I suppose I could make a double recipe.  Leila will probably get sick of it after about a month, and then she will never want Mexican rice again, but for now, I've nailed it.

Lord of the Dance

So you may have noticed that my posting has been a bit, um, thin lately.  I've had a few people ask me if I've given up writing or have started a different blog, but neither of those things are true.  Nor is it true that I have been undercover with the CIA, or training for the next Iron Man.  Here's the deal:

Remember last year some time I confided in you all that I had been treated for a little nutty? Well, I'm still on my nutty meds.  The greatest side effect of this medication for me has been restlessness.  I haven't read a book in months because I can't concentrate, and I either fall asleep or get up to do something else.  I have crazy dreams about public transportation -taking buses or subways, being in subway or bus stations, looking at bus and train maps - which cause me to be excessively tired during the day.  Last night I had a dream that I was having Christmas Eve with my mother in law in New York at a restaurant table that was entirely too small.  I'm a zombie today.  And as I write this, my knee is bouncing up and down like it has a life of its own and in that life it wants to be Michael Flatly.  I have been watching very good television: Law and Order SVU, Homeland, Sons of Anarchy, Orange is the New Black, but I have to play solitaire on my phone or scroll through Pinterest because I just get too restless.  I'm either doing minimum two things at once, or I'm fast asleep

So its been very hard to sit and write. I glance over at the computer and feel a jolt of inspiration, and then it passes before I sit down.  Even right now, I want to jump up and eat some shrimp salad.  So I'm working on staying seated without falling asleep.  Its a challenge. I'm getting a glimpse into ADD.

There you have it, the big update.  More to come!

Gross

This is gonna be gross, so gird your loins.  More cat drama.

I'm down one cat, but Loathsome Black Cat is still around and is slowly re-establishing her previous post at #1 kitty.  I made the mistake of mixing the late kitty's special kidney kibble with her regular kibble, and now she's got the runs.  She has started sleeping in the house during the day, filling my need to have cat hair on the couch, and two days this week, around 11 a.m. she's shit in the bathtub. 

I appreciate that she does it in the bathtub, and not on my rug or my bed.  It smells so bad.  I want to try to get her to use the litterbox inside again, but not if she's gonna pollute it like that.

The way I found out that she had crapped in the tub was that yesterday I hears strange noises coming from the bathroom and found my dog "cleaning" the tub for me.  God, dogs are so disgusting.  An hour later, he puked on the afore-mentioned rug.  Three times.  Not cool, dog.

At least today when she made her tub visit the dog was asleep and I caught it in time.  So nasty.  Nothing like gross cat poo and even grosser dog vomit to make you get over euthanizing an animal.

The End of the Summer

So, my kitty has died.  We put him to sleep on Saturday.  We are all reacting as I expected we would: initial tears, then moving gently on.  The actual event was traumatic.  I've never had to put a pet to sleep before, and something I didn't know was that they don't always close their eyes.  They just stare, and sometimes wink.  I tried to close his eyes, but they wouldn't close.  The hardest part was walking away from his little body, eyes open, and not taking him home. 

But, this is a place where I'm supposed to be funny, and putting kitties to sleep is not funny, so let's change the subject.

We have had a busy summer.  We meaning Leila.  We went to Boston, she had basketball camp, then sleep-away camp, then two weeks in the mountains, then camping, and in between there was a lot of sleeping in, and playing on her iPod, and watching TV and walking neighborhood dogs for fun and profit, and complaining about being bored.  Just the way summer should be.  We are still on summer vacation for another few days.  Everyone else is back in school, but not us.  Leila has all her school supplies in her backpack, ready to go.  I predict that after, say, four days of school she'll be whining about how tired she is and how she misses summer vacation.  I will not.

This summer, I discovered Law and Order SVU.  I have never watched any Law and Order shows, and generally eschew cop shows and legal shows, but I suddenly got a bee in my bonnet about SVU, and now I binge watch it in reruns.  It really is shameful how much I love watching television.  If I liked exercise as much as I like TV, I could probably compete in triathlons, or swim from Cuba to Florida, or become Ms. Universe.  Instead, I'd rather eat left over cheesecake and watch SVU, and I don't understand people who don't.

So that is one little part of the summer update.  More to come.

Cat, or Demon Seed?

I think my cat is feeling much better.  His fur is soft rather than straw-like, and he's become very demanding.  He's like a cantankerous old man with a deceptive, kitten face.  He follows me around and meows.  He begs while we are having dinner.  He is on my lap the minute I sit down, shedding his soft fur on me (which may sound lovely to a cat lover, but, as it turns out, I prefer my cats sleeping in a corner, leaving me alone.)  He gets very annoyed when the toilet lid is down, and meows at me until I correct the situation.  He meows at me to put fresh water in his many water bowls several times a day, and he prefers to watch me fill them so he knows its fresh, like he doesn't trust me (I wish I were making this up.)  He cannot stand to see the bottom of the food bowl, so every now and then I have to shake it level so the bottom is hidden before I fill it up again.  Now that he is well hydrated and feeling better, he has opinions, man.

We are giving him fluids every night.  It is best to approach him while he is sound asleep, but he generally takes it okay.  I am also giving him lots of extra loves and pets and snuggles and trying not to get too mad when he pukes on my bed.  Which is why the following was so very offensive to me.

I had had a long day of doing laundry and housework and whatever else I was doing, and I had just laid down on the bed for a little quiet time.  It was around four in the afternoon, and that is always the hour that I feel the need to collapse.  Just as I laid down, Kitty starting meowing at me.  I did not want to get up and check the toilet lid, so I ignored him and hoped he would find some other source of water.  He hopped up on the bed, ostensibly for a snuggle, but instead of snuggling me, that rat bastard backed up, lifted his tail and pissed all over me.  And I don't mean a little dribble, or an accidental leak.  It was a deliberate deluge of cat pee.  It kept coming and coming, and no matter how I yelled, he wouldn't stop.  I didn't want him to get it on the bed, so I leaned into the stream of pee to shield the bed.  It didn't work.  I was soaked through, and the bed got wet, too.

Can you believe this shit?  After all we've done for this animal!  After all the vet bills and special foods and fluids, he pisses all over me!! And do you know why?  It was not the toilet lid after all;  There were a few stacks of folded laundry that were making it difficult - though not impossible! - to get to his food.  He just had to eat his six kibbles right at that moment, and didn't want to step around the stacks of laundry, so, naturally, he peed on me. I mean what would you do?

I called the vet, at first thinking it was a sign of deterioration, and she laughed her ass off.  Not a sign of impending death, apparently.

Doesn't he know that I am keeping him alive?  That I hold the key to his comfort and longevity?  That I could just bag this whole business and take him in for The Big Sleep? Ungrateful little shit.

It was a good thing that I left for vacation a few days later, I really needed a break from that guy.  I'm still not quite over it.

Nine Lives?

My Kitty is sick.  I wont bore you with all the details, but suffice it to say that his kidneys are failing and he's not long for this world.  Rob and I are actually giving him sub cutaneous fluids, with a needle and an IV pole and everything, which is something I thought I would never do for one of my animals.  It wont cure him, but it will make him comfortable enough until its his time to go.

Surprisingly, my daughter was completely undone by this news.  She sobbed that she wasn't ready for him to go, which is kind of weird because he hardly lets her touch him.  Neither one of my cats give two shits about my kid, and the most they do is tolerate her, and maybe - MAYBE - sit on her lap while she watches TV, as long as there is a blanket between them. 

I have been as stoic as I expected to be at a time like this.  I'm sure it will get worse, and then he will be gone, and we'll all be sad.  He is a very good boy, very skiddish, but sweet, and not nearly as much trouble as the big, black cat, who, while two years older than Sam, is healthy as a horse. 

So, every other night, I hold him on my lap while Rob slips the needle between his shoulder blades and the fluid drips in.  The hardest part for him seems to be sitting on my lap for five whole minutes.  He'll sit perched on my hip all night long, but being held on my lap is his version of hell.

He's doing okay, and for all I know we could be giving him these fluids for the next year or so.  I'll let you know.  In the meantime, I'll clean up his occasional barf with a little less annoyance than I did before...

Brighter Whites!

If you've been a reader for a while, you might remember when I had all that trouble with my dryer, and it took a month to fix, and only got fixed at all because I cried in front of the Sears repairman.  (Yeah, SEARS, I'm calling you out as a horrible repair service!  Deal with it!) Well I have since found an excellent repair service, named Fred, and I love him and believe everything he says because he is honest and hardworking and once spent two hours with his head in my dryer trying to fix a problem while Sears stayed maybe ten minutes and did nothing at all. 

Two weeks ago today, I was blithely doing laundry, when suddenly the mesmerizing wawawawa of the spin cycle turned in to Ka-CHUNK-a-BlunkCHUNK etc.  I ran from my room to the washer and shut it off, tripping on my rug in the process and possibly breaking my big toe.  Luckily the spin cycle was almost over when the washer crashed and burned, so I put the laundry in the dryer (which works fine, but makes an annoying Wa-shhhhh sound with every turn of the drum) and iced my toe and contemplated going to the ER.

I've heard people can have broken toes for weeks and not know it, and I've also heard there's nothing to be done for a broken toe, so I decided to limp around and ignore it.  (I told you I'm tougher than I used to be.) 

Guess which toe it was?

My darling Fred gave it to me straight: Time for a new washer.  And as long as I'm getting a new washer, they may as well match, so time for a new dryer, too.

I was not super excited to spend this money, but once the machines got here, I washed everything in my house, and used all the different cycles, and marveled at the fact the clothes came out of the dryer warm (guess the heat wasn't working in the old dryer) and cleaner than ever.  I even washed pillows.  It was awesome.  And pretty quiet without the wawawa's and the ka-shhhhhhs.  How sad that discovering that the "whites" cycle included a second rinse was so thrilling to me.  This is what its come to: Suburban appliance ecstasy. 

I was so excited, that I went onto YouTube and learned how to clean my hardwood floors since I can't put them in the washer.  Then I bought a mop.  Things are getting weirder and weirder...

The bruising on my toe is mostly gone now, and it only hurts a little by the toe-knuckle.  Do you think its broken?