It Started with a Journal

I love Tippr/Groupon. Today I bought a voucher for an hour-long massage for $35. I haven't had a proper Swedish massage in like 7 months. Plus because it reached its maximum value we all get a free neck pillow.

===

It turns out that I'm likely not going on the Portland trip over July 4 after all. K. isn't sure she wants to go anymore, and to be honest I wasn't super keen on it either. Maybe that's why I was so blase about booking Talis into his usual kennel, which apparently has a one-week cancelation policy during peak periods (May-Sept). It's actually probably a good thing that I didn't, given the uncertainty K.'s experienced now, otherwise I'd be out a deposit. I could still try to get him in, if they decide they want to go at the last minute, but there's no guarantee. I also wasn't looking forward to leaving Jaime home alone for ~4 days. I was going to travel by train, though, which would have been fun. Anyway, it's looking unlikely at this point, which I think is all for the best. I think I'm still going to take tomorrow off, because, why not? I have like 8 weeks' worth of vacation to use this year. O.o

===

More Jaime weirdness. Actually, I don't know if it's really weirdness, as I've never had a cat before. But it's weird to me because of things I've read and been told about cats!

( A litterbox story. )

===

My dad's not a foodie like me. Mostly he just likes certain things and a certain way of preparing those things. While he was here we went to a number of places, but only two really stood out: Fatburger and Chandler's Crabhouse.

( On burgers and overpriced seafood. )

===

TV Show Meme: Day 07 - Least favorite episode of your favorite TV show

Since I used Glee as my favorite TV show for the last question, I'll stick with it for the sake of consistency. My least favorite episode by FAR was the finale. It sucked. It was rushed and incohesive, and a glaring wart on an otherwise blemish-free season (mostly). It was not worthy of such a brilliant and fun show.

===

Next Friday is K.'s eldest's 5th birthday party, and they're celebrating by renting Molly Moon's ice cream truck to serve ice cream to all of C.'s little friends. Now, this may sound like she's super spoiled, but that's not the case. K. and D. just seem to be able to find fun and original activities to make things special, rather than just going with the tried and true like everyone else in their parenting group does. The cost of the ice cream truck isn't actually that much, and they're not serving anything else at the party or renting bouncy houses, and they've asked that no gifts be brought. The kids are just going to play at the park and have ice cream. But not a lot of people would have investigated the option to do anything but the usual -- the parties all seem alike, with hot dogs/burgers, kids' fruit juice, and the ubiquitous mountain of Safeway cupcakes that is supposed to resemble one big cake, but is easier because you don't have to slice it, you can just pull cupcakes out (and they taste like crap, btw).

Strawberries! So many strawberries are suddenly developing nice color in my tiny little patch, it's awesome. And today I saw, for the first time, A TINY LITTLE TOMATO!!!! Eee! Here's hoping this decent weather holds out. It's not super warm today but at least the sun is out. I haven't been able to take pictures recently but I'm going to soon. Right now I'm still trying to decide if I should just cut my garlic scapes now or not. Most of them have one loop, and I wanted to wait for them to develop two loops, but it's slow going.

Got my car back from the body shop today with its repainted door. Looks good. But then, it looked good the first time too, and the darkening of the color didn't happen until after a few months. Hopefully I'll get a good deal on another car this weekend and then I can just turn this one in.

On the pet front, things are going better. They're definitely at least tolerating each other at this point, even if they don't play or anything. I am getting a bit stressed about Jaime's eating habits, however. In that, HE WON'T STOP EATING. He constantly wants food. He's a cat food fiend. I really wanted to free feed him, but I can't because he just eats everything I give him in a short amount of time. At first I was feeding him 1/2 cup dry cat food (with 1-2 tbsps of wet cat food) twice a day. The vet thought that 1 cup of food was a lot for him (he's 10 lb, 10 oz, which she says I want to keep him at). I was just going off of what it says on the package, which is 1/2-1 cup of food for cats between 10-14 lbs. But the package also recommends free feeding, to put that much food in the dish once a day. If I did that, Jamie would be done with it in a few hours and then be starving the rest of the time! I've cut his food down to 1/3 cup, twice a day (for a total of 2/3 cup per day), but he polishes it off very quickly, even when I don't put any wet food in the dish. So I don't know what to do. I don't want to put him on a path to become obese, which leads to other health problems, but neither do I want him to go hungry (he's always meowing for food). The other stressful thing is that if he eats like this, I don't know if I can go out of town for a couple of days and just leave him a pile of food. He'll probably just eat it all on the first day and then starve the rest of the time! Have any of you cat owners ever experienced this with your kitties? What did you do?

Since my dad arrived the day before, we have so far had Chinese food and Fatburger, lol. Their cajun chicken sandwich is actually quite delicious, and my dad really enjoyed his mushroom swiss burger.

TV Meme, Day 03 - Your favorite new show (aired this TV season)

I think it's pretty obvious that I'm going to say Glee. I just love it. Okay, the season finale was bad, but in general, this show makes me Smile with a capital S. The storylines are pretty trite and many of the characters are annoying, but for all that, it's almost always fun and frequently brilliant. I generally like the music they feature and I love that they're getting super talented guest stars. My favorite character is, of course, Sue Sylvester, because no one can touch Jane Lynch. I'm glad the show's already been picked up for two more seasons; it's so rare that a show I like doesn't need mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to get it renewed that I am a little afraid Glee is going to start becoming a show I won't like (aka, if they do more episodes like the season finale).

So... things have deteriorated on the doggie/kitty front. ( The neverending Talis/Jaime saga. )

I totally ordered a webcam yesterday so that I can install it and spy on Talis and Jaime while I'm away.

I guess tonight is supposed to be the Glee finale? Seems odd. It seems like barely any build up for what is supposed to be a big showdown. I mean, VA was shown as 'the impossible team to beat' from the very first episode.

Has anyone else heard of the Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson? The first book is called The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I'm thinking about buying the trilogy because I'm like #489 on the holds list at the library, and something equally ridiculous on Paperback Swap.

OMG and I have overdue books at the library. This is the first time it's happened and I don't even know HOW. I'm usually very good about that kind of thing. I feel like such a bad member of society.

( TONIGHT'S GLEE OMG (THEATRICALITY) )

Also, did you know that Heather Morris, aka Brittany, is a professional dancer, and went on tour with Beyonce as one of her two backup dancers? She was originally hired for Glee to teach the Single Ladies dance to the actors (for the episode Preggers). They just so happened to need a 3rd cheerleader, and that's how she got the role even though she'd never acted professionally before. It does explain why she's in like every dance number (same with Harry Shum Jr., aka Mike Chang, who was in those iPod commercials with the dancing silhouettes). ( Check out 'Brittany' dancing with Beyonce! )

This weekend I Gleeked out and rewatched the first 13 episodes, plus the newest 6 that I hadn't seen. It's like the best show ever. ( Spoilers. )

So I saw Robin Hood. I can't in good conscience recommend it. It was just too all over the place and nonsensical. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is still all the Robin Hood I need, though if I could I would totally switch the actors playing Robin and Marian. Morgan Freeman and Alan Rickman made PoT great.

For K.'s birthday dinner D. made linguine with clams. It was so good and so easy I made it again, with a few tweaks. Posted about it on my food blog.

I'm halfway through Black Powder War and started Jinx by Meg Cabot. It's one of the 527901354102 books she's written in the last few years that I haven't yet read. She's too prolific; I can't keep up with her. She writes as many books as I read. It's kind of ridiculous.

The handyman came on Saturday and fixed the toilet and two tubs, installed a peep hole (though unfortunately he went a bit higher than we agreed and it's a bit too high for me), and sprinkled moss killer over the roof. He got everything done in under 2 hours. I'm pretty pleased. That was really a $45 well spent (plus $15 for materials) -- not only did I get all that stuff I've been wanting fixed, fixed, but now I know a decent go-to handyman!

It's gotten so cold here that it's almost like we've been in fall and now it's approaching winter. People on gardening are showing pictures of their first tomato HARVESTS and here in the Pacific NW most people don't even have their tomato plants in the ground yet. It's pathetic.

Making little improvements every day. Still have the sniffles and a cough, but I have to do less of each now. Yay. My sense of smell/taste is mostly all back though, so big cheer for that.

I think today I am going to attempt to make cream of broccoli soup for the first time (that wasn't from a can). When done well it's one of my all-time favorite soups, so I hope the recipe I'm planning to use is a winner. The best broccoli soup I've ever had was one they served at Kerckhoff Hall in the coffee shop while I was at UCLA. It came in a bread bowl, which is always a plus, but the soup itself was so. freaking. good. I don't know what supplier they bought it from or what was in it, but I've never had broccoli soup that good before or since.

I have some obvious TV show recommendations to make. Sorry they're so obvious but it's all I've got.

1) Mad Men - Mentioned this in my last post but now I've watched all 3 available seasons and I've solidified my opinion that it's a must-watch show. It's authentic, it's interesting, the characters are rich, etc. The bulk of S3 wasn't as good as the first two seasons, but by the end I was sold and am excited for what's coming next.

2) Glee - I've always had a soft spot for amateur singing groups/show choir type things, possibly because I can't carry a tune and have forever wished that if I could have any talent, it would be to sing. The show is so super fun, even if I find a lot of the characters annoying and/or useless (with the exception of Jane Lynch, who is a comedic goddess). I know that sounds weird. As a whole though, it just works. I've watched all 13 available eps now and miss being able to watch it; I looked forward to every episode.

I also just finished S5 of Lost, which... I enjoyed, but thought was the weakest season. I don't care what they say, some of the stuff that's happened in the past was so not part of some overarching plan. When you have characters going, "Oh yeah, I did that but it was fake/I lied," it's like, okay, yeah, that's them going, we didn't know what we were doing then and this is how we're going to retrofix it. I've also started, at long last, Battlestar Galactica. I'm totally years behind the bandwagon on this one. I avoided it at first because I've just never been into Star Wars/Star Trek-type things, and BSG seemed to be of that ilk. I'm enjoying it so far, so either I've grown more tolerant or it's different somehow. It helps that it's more science fiction than fantasy (more robots, less creatures with prosthetics and purple skin).