Dogs and Cats Living Together

We have two dogs and three cats. When Jason was born five years ago-ish we had four dogs and two cats. I used to call us the Sad Couple Who Replaced Children With Animals to the people who asked why we had so many pets.  It generally stymied any further conversation which was the idea.
And then God laughed and got us knocked up. The dogs assumed the naked, squalling thing was just another addition and with a little finessing he was assimilated into the pack with no trouble.

Sammy Dog passed on and then Lucy Dog but we gained CiCi the Fat Cat from my mom after she was bittten once too often. I originally found her in a dumpster when we lived downtown and mom fell in love-temporarily. CiCi sleeps with us, Zeke the ancient dog, sleeps with us, and more often than not Jason comes in during the night so we're a big puppy, kitty, people pile until morning. I'm allowed about ten inches on the edge of the bed so I've become really good at sleeping on my side. Ethan the dog comes in and finds space on the floor, Rio the cat wanders in and out and Fearless the last cat will snuggle with Zeke as long as we pretend we don't see her. Kenny is occasionally banished to another room if his snoring becomes unbearable so there is more room for the rest of us from time to time.

Some people might think this a bit much, some may say it's ridiculous but my life is generally ruled by the ridiculous so I stopped fighting long ago. We've never gotten a dog or cat from an animal shelter. They've always just wandered up, found a good fit, and stayed on for the continental breakfast and belly rubs.  As the pet population at our house wanes I don't think we'll replace as many but it's not always up to us. We swore Ethan was only a temporary dog until we could find a home for him but he's not the most attractive dog and no one wanted him. Oh, and my friend who said Ethan was too ugly for him to adopt-ever wonder why I don't call you anymore? So Ethan stayed and we love him. You can't always pick who you love, right? Which explains that asshole in 1990.

Thank Goodness it's Spring-Oh Sh%t.

It's looking like I may have spent most of my time since Thanksgiving eating my way through winter. Eating five Christmas cookies while drinking coffee with half and half results in Lisa getting larger. But since everyone looks like a bear during Jan/Feb with the fleece and the Kevlar or whatever they make those puffy coats out of I really hadn't noticed that my "fat jeans" felt like the skinny jeans and the skinny jeans felt like what those divers wear to go underwater for whatever reason.
And now it's spring here in KC. Spring with stupid 85 degree weather so we rejoice and put on...shorts?? Tank tops? Filmy blouses with little cap sleeves?
Well, dammit. No more indulging in cookies, french fries, cheese on everything including cheese, pasta servings like Marines might eat or pizza for breakfast.
Now before you call for the Lifetime intervention I do eat sensibly, I can still touch my toes and make minimal noise when I get up from the sofa. But I do love me some scones and butter.
So I'm back to not eating everything that walks by, portion control helps a ton, and I'm excited to go back to eating what I manage to grow in my garden (pots this year, read the earlier post on my 2010 garden disaster) or buy at the farmer's markets. And I've decided to include the odd recipe here and there that I like so here's the couscous salad I make about every week in the summer:

Couscous Salad-so nice they named it twice.

Instant plain couscous-about a cup. Follow box directions but add a few shakes curry powder and cumin to the water before it boils.
Chopped parsley-roughly a half cup.
Feta cheese-again just eyeball it, maybe another half cup
Kalamata olives chopped-you guessed it-half cup
One chopped red, yellow or orange pepper (make sure your credit is good they cost about $1000 these days)
Another half cup or so of toasted pine nuts or toasted walnuts.
Fresh lemon juice from 1/4 lemon

After couscous has cooked fluff with a fork and put in a bowl to chill in the fridge for a couple of hours.
Add remaining ingredients after it cools. Salt/pepper to taste-I use the grinders for both, can't beat the taste. Might need a bit more curry/cumin. I just keep adding stuff until I like it.

As my herb garden progresses I might add mint or basil in lieu of parsley or garbanzo beans or once in a while some red onion. Just go with what moves you. I had some saffron this time and threw that in for a little sparkle.

Hope you like it.

Kicking the Unemployed

People are quick to judge, quick to condemn, quick to write off. I read (and teach) about looking for work in the age of the myth of privacy, warn of the dangers of expressing yourself in social media and how people (read employers) will move on with little provocation. And now I'm hearing that some employers and recruiters won't consider candidates who are unemployed, which is bullshit, believing that they are somehow tainted or use quill pens and churn their own butter.

And yes, I take this a bit personally as a victim (along with 40 others) of a lay-off myself in 2009. I knew the quality of the people who were sacked along with me and there wasn't one that would have been let go if the greed of corporate America hadn't forced it. I decided to start my own business and hopefully have a bit more control (insert laughter here) but I know that many of my friends had difficulty finding new work, several were even forced to leave advertising. And my group was just the beginning. At the end my former employer laid off more than a hundred others. 

Not considering a candidate simply because they fell victim to an almost unprecedented economic crisis is short-sighted and really just idiotic. I must confess to a bit of schadenfreude (look it up) when an HR manager, who once told me she had to "strip the deadwood" from a large workforce because they cost too much, was laid off from a very large corporation last year. I don't wish that on anyone but my hope is that she finds a new job and becomes a lot more empathetic.

The EEOC is looking into the legality of this practice and while I don't know if the policy is illegal I hope the threat of investigation will cause employers to think twice about ignoring the out of work. And then I'm disgusted because threat of a lawsuit will have to do this instead of simply being a little bit human.

Watching Japan

I continue to watch coverage of the earthquake in Japan and the nicely paired nuclear crisis that has come with it. Insult to injury just doesn't cover it. I have no concept of what these people are experiencing. To have nothing, to have nowhere to go, to lose family and friends and even my entire city, it's unfathomable to me. The Japanese are an interesting people. I was lucky enough to go there in the 90s for work and we were given a handbook on behavior, customs, food etc. It was like getting a manual for a trip to another planet. Even hand gestures were detailed due to the vast difference in cultures.

The country was beautiful, organized, dignified with a touch of whimsy here and there and I loved it. Our driver (we called him the Penguin because he resembled an Asian Burgess Meredith) wore white gloves and whenever we stopped he whipped out a long fuzzy dusting rod and went over the car front to rear in case we had picked up a speck of dirt since the last stop.

The attention to detail was wonderful. From the handrails in the public spaces to the painstakingly wrought plastic models of the food offered in the little noodle shops (which thankfully kept me from ordering eel eyebrows or something). The client treated us to a magnificent and mysterious dinner one evening and although I didn't recognize the majority of the food it was lovely in its presentation and endless in its delivery. And because of the custom of filling drinks as soon as they became even the slightest bit low we were pleasantly hammered about halfway through the meal. Our hosts were unfailingly pleasant, accommodating and pretty amused by us and our game attempts to try everything and by the end of the evening we were all laughing and pretty darned drunk.

We took a detour to the old capital, Kyoto, before we came home and wandered from temple to garden to little alleyway and it was so intriguing to see monks walking side by side with kids in Power Puff Girls backpacks. I stayed in a traditionally tatami hotel room with a giant cedar bathtub where I floated for about an hour before turning on the TV to see the Chiefs/Broncos game and, I kid you not, a Godzilla movie.

I've read that the vending machines in Sendai are still intact even though the people there have little food or water but to crack into the machines is such a foreign concept that they remain unmolested. We've all seen American behavior when there is the slightest disruption, and we all run to steal TVs. The people I've seen so far are stoic, calm, polite and getting to work to restore their homes. I heard a word, gaman, which means perseverance, determination and patience. It describes what I've seen perfectly. It's what I remember from my trip so long ago.

We may see a nuclear disaster that changes the world forever or we may not but the Japanese people will deal with it and move on.

After all, they've done it before.

Compost Happens

Thank God spring is finally threatening to appear. I'm so sick of snow and cold weather I could scream. I'm tired of space heaters, thick socks over thick socks, mysterious breezes in the office and if I see another fleece pullover I'm setting fire to it. Today was in the 50s, with that sort of cloudy sunny sky that happens in spring and the wind actually had some warmth to it.

Time to go outside.

My vegetable garden was basically a total disaster last year. My promising zucchini was completely obliterated by stink bugs. Those little bastards killed my beautiful plants literally overnight and then moved on to the cucumbers and murdered them as well. So after tempering my anger and the urge to napalm the whole area I filled a bucket with water, pulled the limp and bleeding plants from the bed and tried to kill the bugs without resorting to pesticides. I scooped the shield shaped villains and dumped them in the bucket and then stomped on what I could find. Sometimes my commitment to organic gardening can be a real pain in the ass. Time will tell if I they're gone or not.

The beans were listless and unhappy and the peppers were stunted. My tomatoes were victim to an early spring deluge followed by a beastly hot and dry summer so they responded by not producing a single fruit until fricking August. So while I berated and begged them I bought tomatoes from a delightful and flirty Italian man in the parking lot of the discount bread store. He was about 80, thought he was 30, and I was only too glad to exchange some sexual harassment for his lovely yellow and glowing red tomatoes. I'll pretty much do anything for a good caprese salad. Ask anyone.

About the only thing that thrived was the damn mint which took over the herb garden, the rose bed, crept through the fence and I'm sure was under the couch at some point. I probably used it twice over the summer.

So after my garden was victim to weather and homicide I promised myself that I would take this season off, let the ground rest and plant a few things in pots hoping for a little bit of summer produce.

And then I broke ground, spread compost and planted spinach and lettuce this afternoon. Jason helped me by pouring a handful of seed into the same spot and then stomping on the ground. I laid a piece of old metal fence over the top to keep the neighborhood feral cats from using my garden as a toilet and felt like I had accomplished something today. Surely I can eke out one little round of greens to celebrate making it through another Missouri winter.

I swear its the only thing going into the area this year. Although I do need somewhere to put the elephant ears and I really want to grow some cannas.

But that's it.

Probably.

Cravings

I just finished Anthony Bourdain's biography Kitchen Confidential which I highly recommend. He writes in a great conversational manner that's both intimate and hysterical. If you worked in a restaurant or some crap job in your late teens or early twenties, with a gang of similarly aged co-workers, drank too much, perhaps smoked questionable plants, probably bedded down on, um, impulse, and drove some kind of shit-mobile this book is for you. It's a great food book,visceral, gamy, sexy, and evocative in its descriptions of various meals without the sort of food writing that makes you feel that unless you can buy Egyptian cumin or some such rabble, you'll never really know what good food is.

I also really dug the memories of his being a dickhead, hanging out with other idiots and folk that really only lived for that day, for the fun, the food, the drink, the questionable behavior and I love that he totally owns up to it. He even admits to still being bit of one which in this age of I'm OK But I Pity You is quite refreshing.

I still have friends from those days, we don't see each other much but we know the part we played in each others lives, we would be there in a second at 2AM if they needed us and can tell each other the truth. We don't get to tell the truth much anymore. If you're lucky you get to have someone you can talk to about what a miserable human being you are. Someone who will tell you that what you did was dumb but what you're feeling is genuine and justified.

So I realized this is a book about friendship as much as about food, about how commitment to a single thing (feeding people) can forge an unbreakable bond, explode on contact, expose the uncommitted and, if done right, can make someone happy you don't know and never will.

Pocket of Happiness

I found myself in one of those little bits of time I sometimes call pockets of happiness. Of course when I call them that I want to throw up and yet that's the little phrase that's in my head. It's one of those small stretches of time when things are perfect. In this case I was on the front porch, about 6:30 in the evening, the temperature was at the place where you don't feel hot or cold, just a slight breeze. The light is perfect, if you know me you know how much I love the perfect evening light, no matter the time of year, and I'm surrounded by green from my front garden which is very happy right now and not completely dessicated by that cruel bitch of a Missouri summer. I'm watching my son and his friend running amok with water pistols, chasing each other in and around the car in the driveway, using it as cover. The trilling of a delighted kid's voice is pretty special, a half a tone from being irritating but full of completely unconscious happiness. I think we tone ourselves down as we get older, afraid to immerse, afraid to totally commit to a moment. But then as I'm gazing at the loveliness of the sky, the little stuff that floats around in the golden light, listening to them argue over who is dead and who needs water I'm ambushed, soaked and I let out a squeal that was just half a tone from irritating. I grab a water pistol and totally nail the neighbor's kid while my son in his Wolverine mask manages to get us both. The dogs are barking and I can hear a lawn mower and wow, even a frickin' ice cream truck. And even though I'm sure it's being driven by a sex offender I'll buy if he comes around.
Sure I need to feed the kid and do the laundry and figure out how we're going to keep going and get my mom moved and all that other stuff but for about ten minutes every single thing in the world was as it should be. I'm grateful for those little pockets of happiness even though I really should find something else to call them.