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Treetopia.com is having a sale! But only until December 4.

More General Interest Than The Last Post

Is that the most festive cable box you've ever seen or what?!

I did a little Christmas decorating in the Cambridge apartment yesterday. Don't worry Pete - it's all cheap-o from Target and T.J. Maxx and not too much. Just a little something jolly, small and easy to store. I'm pretty proud of the "snow." It's marabou ribbon for gift wrapping.

We're not in one place for long around the holidays (or at any other time) but I had to do something.

Last year I began my Christmas tree collection, never imagining that weeks later we'd decide to sell the house. There's not much room for a tree in this tiny apartment. Of course as I'm writing that I'm spotting a space just to my right that might work... Hmmm...

This place needs some serious personalization. It's kind of getting me down. I'm going to try to do something less seasonal about that this week.

I'm Secretly Really Into Makeup

November thirtieth, here you are again. It's the final day of NaBloPoMo and my final post for the month - unless I think of something better to say before midnight.

Looking back it doesn't seem as though I've had a single interesting thought all month. So in that vein I shall come clean about the latest Kool-Aid I've imbibed.

Yes, I love Bare Minerals foundation. I never thought it would happen to me. I've always been a "please God no foundation" type but everybody was making such a stink about the stuff I decided to try it. If you hit the link above you will go to the page on Sephora.com where they are selling the starter kit (while you're there you might want to pick up this, or this, or one of these as well - all bear the Mel stamp of approval - except the first one which I haven't tried and hope to get for Christmas because I'm a big dork and I believe everything I read in a product's advertising copy) This is also bound to be good. When I say "good" I mean "fun."

Okay, back to the topic at hand. This Bare Minerals stuff is great! First of all putting it on is a very calming ritual. It's powder - but not super-drying - so it isn't cold and gloopy and you don't have to worry that you're not spreading it evenly. You just dust it loosely all over your face with a big, fat, soft brush. If you want more coverage you do it again. If you have spots to cover you hit those with a dab of the touch-up brush. You can't apply it badly (though you might want some help choosing the color to use) First you do the base, then you do the blush (I often skip the blush as I tend to be ruddy in the first place), then you do the translucent top coat. It takes no time and you don't even have to look while you're doing it.

You can't feel it on and, by some miracle, it really stays on. One thing I always felt was humiliating about foundation was the way it could end up on a person's shirt collar - UGLY. This doesn't do that - though I can't say I've rubbed my face in my shirt to force it.

Not only that but it's got SPF 15 and it's completely unscented. Since all the ingredients are inert they won't give you a rash either. High frigging five!

At first I thought, "well this stuff's fine I guess" but I kept doing it because I liked the ritual and because it has sunblock. More recently though I've grown accustomed to having really good-looking skin. Maybe that's a bad thing. Maybe that makes me product dependent. Nah - I can live without the stuff. I am chocolate dependent though.

There are plenty of brands of mineral makeup out there. Some are super-hippie-crunchy-pure and some are fake. I haven't tried any of those. I just know Bare Escentuals. Typical. The department store brand. I'm so bourgeois.

Thus ends my third NaBloPoMo. Now I shall go celebrate my success with a martini with blue cheese stuffed olives. Unless I go pomegranate - in which case, really no olives.

Thanksgiving '09 Rundown

Spencer looking like a homicidal elf.

Fay's not vomiting (fingers crossed), the laundry is in the washing machine, Pete's gone up to Vermont, there are still some Thanksgiving left overs in the fridge. Things are winding down. Probably. So I have a little time to list the things I/we made for Thanksgiving.

In the photo above you can see the turkey breast and stuffing, the brussels sprouts (chopped and pan fried in butter and garlic), the maple-tangerine cranberry sauce and cauliflower with brown butter, pears, sage and nuts (almonds and pecans). Not yet at the table are the sweet potatoes (just roasted and mashed with butter), the pan-fried crushed potatoes, the gravy, Pete, Lisa and I.

The turkey was brined then had ginger herb butter stuffed under its skin and was roasted. The recipe called for juniper berries which I couldn't find so I just left them out. It was fine. The stuffing contained cranberries, nuts and oyster mushrooms. It (and any other of the above courses which contained nuts) was supposed to have hazelnuts in it but I didn't want to spend all day shelling them so I substituted a mixture of toasted almonds and pecans. Also fine.

I bought a pecan pie and a pumpkin pie.

The only preparation I did ahead was brine the turkey (which I highly recommend) make the herb butter and stuff the butter under the turkey skin. Everything else was done on the day. It was a full day of cooking but at a leisurely pace. The only snafu was that the turkey finished maybe half an hour before we thought it would.

Except for the brussels sprouts and sweet potatoes which we wung (wow, that looks funny written out) and crushed potatoes (Martha Stewart) all the recipes were from the 2008 November issue of Fine Cooking magazine.

Thinking about it all is making me hungry. Since there were only four of us I halved the amounts in the recipes. Now I kinda wish I had more left overs. Oh well. Maybe I'll remember that for next year.

Better

We cut short our Thanksgiving holiday trip to take Fay to her regular vet and as Pete predicted, Fay started feeling better on the way home.

Pete was nice enough to bring me a (delicious) hot dog when we were on the ferry and Fay showed some interest in it. Once we arrived on shore I got some boiled chicken and rice out of the cooler to see if she'd go for it and, heck yeah, she did and she wanted more.

So at this point she's pretty much back to normal (here comes the family in-joke:) after ruining Thanksgiving for everyone.

Sick Fay

Stinkin' Post

Fay is feeling lousy. She hasn't eaten any thing since yesterday at 6:30 AM. Yeah and okay, then she barfed before lunch and hasn't wanted to eat a damned thing since. She's also been lying around not moving much.

I took her to a well intentioned but not very thorough vet here. He gave her subcutaneous fluids and some stomach settling medicine. So far it hasn't helped that I can tell.

The folks at her regular vet said she'd need more thorough testing. So I think we'll be cutting this trip short.

Shoes

It's another cheap-o post with a photo! Only it actually took a bit of time to compile and make this image. It's a whole lot of shoes that I'm unfortunately not going to buy for myself even though I like them.

The top row is from endless.com. The shoes with the grey backgrounds are from either neimanmarcus.com or Shopbop.com .

These, below, come from shopbop.com. The ones pictured with sock-like thingies come with the sock-like thingies. That's good (if you're into sock-like thingies) because they look like they'd be hard to find otherwise. Personally I don't know if I'd go for the s.l.t.'s. The grey suede ones don't have them but they still have the cool sculpted heel with metal accent.

And these are just silly.

There Will Be Rude Language Herein

I am attempting to make chocolate chip cookies and I'm in something of a rage.

I had forgotten that the beach house kitchen is not set up for baking in any way. Well, okay, there's a hand mixer and a couple of spatulas but that's it.

First of all the mixing bowls SUCK. Some girlfriend-beating asshole chef* advised my parents on the mixing bowls. He probably had some chef thing about how baking is for wussies so the mixing bowls are great if you need to marinate a salmon or make a giant manly caesar salad but they're too shallow for mixing batters. I was creaming the butter and sugar together and butter and sugar were flying all over the kitchen.

I changed to a large-ish salad bowl to incorporate the eggs and dry ingredients. That was an improvement but still not ideal. However, I've mixed up the batter and cooked the first batch of cookies only to remember that we don't have any cooling racks.

Fortunately the top oven is broken so I can cool the cookies on the racks in there.

Did I mention that there's an incomplete set of dry measuring cups? I'm lucky that there are any dry measuring cups. I'm sure I bought them myself at one time.

Oh, and because I was thrown by the lack of a quarter-cup measuring cup I left out one cup of flour so the cookies are a bit on the flat side. That's okay, there's plenty of sugar (!) butter and chocolate in them so they still taste good.

Oh, and another thing. Our friend Spencer has arrived and he's trying to take a nap. I'm not sure he's been able to sleep at all given, for one thing, the incessant large-scale leaf blowing operation that was going on across the street. If it wasn't that it would probably be mowing or hedge trimming.

People here are NUTS about their landscaping. It's got to be Martha Stewart perfect at all times. Of course they don't do it themselves. They hire crews of men with power tools to do it. It is impossible to have any quiet at all during a weekday over the summer. This being a holiday the crews are in overdrive to get the yards ultraperfecto before tomorrow. Laser-sight those hedges guys! At least lasers are quiet.

Once the leaf blowing stopped some crazy bird started kicking up a ruckus in our rhododendron out front. It sounds odd but this bird was really pissed off and letting the whole neighborhood know. I went out to take a look and it settled down.

Then I started mixing the dough with the electric mixer. Fay took noisy offense. I had to put her in the car.

Mixing done, Fay back in the house, cookies dolloped on cookie sheets. Now the part I expected to be difficult. Fay hates the oven. Any oven. Time to put the cookies in the oven and it will take more minutes than I want to leave her in the car outside. Pete and I worked out an emergency system. He holds her and her ears while I open the oven door and move the cookies in and out. It kind of works but now she's riled and barking at any unusual sound.

We suck as hosts if you're trying to sleep but we do provide flawed cookies.

*My brother was friends with the girlfriend of the girlfriend-beating asshole chef back when my parents first bought this place. My brother didn't know about the girlfriend-beating until later, after the couple broke up.

Bohemian Rhapsody

Practically everyone I know on Facebook posted this so chances are you've seen it too but

it is really good.

Mild Griping

Yep, sorry, I've been getting away with posting photos for more of November than I'd like to acknowledge.

Not today though. Nope, today I'm going to ramble about something or other until I feel like I've fulfilled my posting commitment.

Pete, Fay and I are at my parents' beach house for Thanksgiving. The weather is okay. In the morning the ocean looks so beautiful. The skies are grey so the ocean is a range of shades of glittering graphite and steel. When the sun pokes through the clouds in some places the sea turns silver. It's a dazzling feast for the eyes.

I did most of the Thanksgiving marketing at the local fancy-pants market. I was pleased to be able to find a turkey breast at this late date. I plan to brine it tomorrow. I've brined chickens before and they really come out well.

Today I was going to make chocolate chip cookies. I even put two sticks of butter in my jacket pockets (wrapped) to help them soften more quickly. It kind of worked, I guess. They got a little softer on the outside. You just can't really rush butter.

Anyway, since this is the beach house and you never know who was here last or where they put anything after the last time they used it, it took me about twenty minutes to find the cookie sheets. Then I started going through the cabinets looking for things like flour and baking soda and vanilla. I found all those things but what we don't have here is sugar. Who ever heard of a house with no sugar in it? No White sugar, no brown sugar. There is some ancient Sweet and Low which there's no way in hell I'll ever use.

I guess it's good that I found out today. I still have a few things to pick up at the market, like celery and onions. I would have been pretty pissed to be in the thick of cooking and not have any sugar on hand.

I wonder what other rude awakenings I'm due for in the next couple of days?

"Honey And Clover"

I neglected to mention that the title sequence below goes to the anime/Japanese cartoon, "Honey and Clover" which you can watch on Hulu.

It tells the story of the lives and loves of a group of art students who all live in the same apartment building.

I Am Obsessed With This

Other countries do T.V. So much better than we do. This thing's nuts.

The music and the visuals are out of control. <3

Fay's In The Bag!

She looks kinda like my grandfather here. She loves to travel.

@#$@%&

It's not even lunch time yet.

Motifs So Far 2

The spirals were popular last time so I made some more.

Happy Dogs

I missed Zoey last night.

It was stressful having her around because I knew her owners must have been really worried about her and because Fay was always trying to pick fights with her. I was pretty much carrying Fay with me everywhere to keep the peace.

But there were some really great things about Zoey. For example she was affectionate. She'd sidle up to me and demand patting. When I stopped she'd beat her tail on the floor and shove her head into me so I'd pat her again. Fay, although she's a pug, is not affectionate. She wants food, not patting. Ear rubs are okay but only to a certain point. Then it's "hand over the grub."

I took Zoey out for a walk yesterday. She tore gleefully through the woods. It was a beautiful thing to see. Because of her illness Fay can't do that anymore. She doesn't do gleeful displays anymore. She enjoys barking at and chasing cars but that produces satisfaction for her, not glee. Maybe it's that Fay can't caper anymore. Maybe she does feel glee (like when she's eating) but she just doesn't prance like she used to. Maybe it's age. I don't know.

Watching a happy dog lifts your heart. Fay is happy but in a more complex way. That's part of her charm. Simple dog glee is just so accessible though.

Zoey was also accommodating. She realized that Fay was not going to let her sleep in our room so she padded off to the guest room where I'd laid out a bed for her. When I got up in the middle of the night to dispose of a Fay turd Zoey looked up at me from her bed, wagged her tail then put her head contentedly back down.

There's no way I'm saying that I like Zoey better than Fay.

Fay is my girl. She's the one I spend most of my time with. She's got a huge personality and is very interactive. When she wants something (which is usually) she'll let you know. She's bossy and demanding and hilarious. I guess I don't really think of her as a dog most of the time. I don't know what that would make her. She's Fay - her own thing.

Zoey was just easy and pleasant to have around so I missed her.

The Visitor, Epilogue

Here she is, Zoey. She just left in a truck with her owner's son-in-law, Peter Prescott (not that Peter Prescott)

Last night I posted a found animal report on the local humane society Lost & Found blog. This morning I sent in a photo for them to post with my listing. A few minutes ago I checked the page to see if the photo had posted yet. It had, but to a lost animal report. The lost animal report that her owners had phoned in.

Technology proved helpful in this instance but not as quickly and easily as it did in that commercial for some smart phone or other.

So Zoey has gone home (she now lives not far from here on what we in these parts call the Lower Road. Pete, Fay and I live on the Upper Road)

I have to say that she is so much more polite and better behaved than a certain blob named Fay, who made my life more difficult by trying to get herself beaten up with her surliness and inhospitality.

What a load off! I'm gonna go eat something really good now. NACHOS!!!!

Who Are These People?

For God's sake we don't all live in California! What the hell is wrong with you people?!!!

Here's what my lawn looks like right now:

Real frost goes great with silvery sandals. Awesome.

And no, I am not wearing a wispy tank top with lace trim as a dress. It's 28 degrees!

The Visitor

Today I have a visitor. Her name is Zoe and she's a dog. A dog from Oregon. Loose in my yard in Vermont.

I called the phone number on her tags and got the vet who spayed her and gave her her rabies shot. They told me her name and the name of her owner. They also called the number they have for the owner.

I googled the owner and I may have found something on Facebook, of all things. I sent someone with the same name as the owner a message on friggin' Facebook.

I still haven't heard anything but it's early yet I guess.

Back when it was daylight I was kind of hoping Zoe'd take off and head home on her own. Then it got dark and I heard a lot of howling coming from lots of different places. We do have coyotes out here. I looked to see if she'd gone. Nope. So I let her in.

She's is in great shape, nicely fed, pretty teeth and she's very nice. She's been brought up right: I'm eating my dinner right now and she's not paying any attention to me. No mooching from her, unlike some people we know. She's lying peacefully near my feet underneath the table.

Fay is sequestered upstairs. You know how she is around food. There'd be blood if she had her way.

I guess I'll watch Zoe tonight if I don't hear from the owner. I've got a call in to the animal control officer too. I guess we'll just have to wait and see now. Kind of not psyched.

Payback Time

My physical knocked the wind right out of my sails - and I'm really healthy! What the hell is my problem? I'm even excited that I'm up to date on my tetanus shot.

Fortunately my wonderful husband took care of me tonight. He let me take a nap then he made me a manhattan, a cheese plate, a fresh salad and reheated some left-overs for dinner (I LOVE left-overs) He also set a fire in the fireplace.

He's so dreamy!