Lazy Day Lunch

Today we just hung out at the house. Planned to go skiing but Ron had a conference call - working from home.

I had to put the bird in her cage during the call; this is Bruno.

She was my bird until I met Ron then she shifted her affection to him and openly and unashamedly prefers his company to mine, but when he gets on the phone, she seems to know his attention is elsewhere and today made so much racket his coworkers asked him if he had a bird at work. So she got a time-out. She was also a he, hence the name, until she decided she wanted to be Ron's mate and started laying eggs. When she does, she turns into a hostile, shrieking termagant we call Birdzilla. The advice we gleaned from the web when she first started laying was to let her keep them until they would have hatched - they're not fertilized - then she'd lose interest. Boy is that #&!@# crap . She kept laying eggs and we started taking them away. I don't know about everyone else, but I like to walk into my bedroom and not have the nasty bird run across the floor of her cage, hissing and flapping her wings. So we don't let her keep her pretend eggs.

I love salads and bought some green leaf lettuce this week, made this just pulling stuff out of the refrigerator; lettuce, spinach leaves, snap peas, celery, green onion, green pepper, boiled egg (recently bought one of those wire egg slicers), feta cheese and tuna. Lighthouse blue cheese dressing. yum.

We do plan to ski tomorrow, then we pack a lunch, laskluster as it may sound, just turkey and cheese sandwiches, some fruit, maybe some mixed nuts. We're too cheap to buy food at the lodge. Booze, but not food!

Maybe post some pics from the ski slopes soon.

To shovel or not...

We finally got snow this week. Snow and snow and more snow. That’s good because where we ski (http://www.skiwhitepass.com/) got enough snow to open before Thanksgiving, then it didn’t snow in any appreciable amount again, so skiers were sliding around on nearly two-month-old chewed up and re-groomed crud. Until the last week and a half. The bad thing about snow, in more ways than one is, out of job necessity, my hubby and I live about 150 miles apart with a mountain range between, and last weekend he couldn’t drive over because the weather in the mountains was so savage. Pooh :( That and shoveling snow:

Where I live, if you don’t shovel the driveway, the snow gets driven over repeatedly and packed into a treacherous two-wheel-path glacier that no amount of scraping, bashing, scooping, and salting can budge until the spring melt (it’s also a really good idea to have the leaves raked before it snows so spring doesn’t hand you a flat vegetative slick that has smothered your lawn). So when it snows, I’m out before much accumulates, removing it from the driveway.

That’s where I developed the theory that the next time you’re house-hunting, stand at the end of the driveway and imagine it’s winter. It could influence your choice. I didn't do this. I have a lonnggg driveway to shovel.

When my kids were younger, it used to annoy them spitless to have to go out and shovel while it was still snowing, but I insisted, with the premise that it’s easier to move lesser amounts more often than wait until a foot or more has accumulated to shovel just once. This week’s accretion was very light powder that was (almost) fun to shovel and not so cumbersome as the wet concrete that usually collects here. 

While shoveling for probably the sixth time Tuesday evening, a man walked up and introduced himself as the son-in-law of my next door neighbor. He had a tool for removing snow buildup from her awning and offered, for a price, to do mine done, too, mentioning that it was supposed to snow more that night; my awning might collapse.
“How much?, I asked”.
"I’m charging her $60 dollars”.
I explained that there is another awning on the other side of the house.
“$70 dollars, then”.
“For each, or both?”
“For both”.

Hmmm. “I’ll think about it”. What I was thinking was, $60 dollars? That’s f*cking ludicrous for a 5 minute task – this is fine, powdery fairy dust, remember? 
And, “What kind of a jerk charges his mother-in-law $60 bucks for a 5 minute task when he should just help her out because he’s married to her daughter.” If I was married to him, and my hubby will attest, I would harangue his ass for even considering charging my mother for snow removal services.

I turned the offer down and continued shoveling.

I said all that to say this: It warmed up then cooled down, melted the snow on the awnings and resulted in these colossal icicles forming from the awning on my front porch. They’re beautiful, but I’m afraid if one falls, it will kill a passing neighborhood pet, or worse, a passing neighbor. Maybe I should have had the damn awning cleared…

Pasta with Gorgonzola and Italian Sausage

Sorry for the unimpressive cell-phone photo, but damn! This tasted really good and I was just using us ingredients I had in the fridge:

8 oz. cooked pasta
8 oz. Italian sausage, browned
2 cloves minced garlic
1 cup chopped fresh spinach
3/4 cup milk
4 oz. crumbled gorgonzola cheese
1 tsp. red pepper flakes
Italian seasoning, to taste
Fresh ground pepper, to taste

Brown the sausage, add garlic, brown a bit, add spinach, milk, cheese, and red pepper flakes, reduce until thickened, add to drained pasta.

Top with grated parmesan.

One of the Joys of Reading...

I subscribe to Outside Magazine (website: www.outsideonline.com) not because I’m the most robust, outdoorsy person or that all the articles appeal to me-some don’t, in fact, but I usually read them anyway-for the writing. All of the writing is outstanding, so even if the subject doesn’t interest me I can ride a wave of better than exceptional prose and far-over-the-top vocabulary and learn about some subjects I wouldn’t have otherwise if I didn't bother to read them. Some articles are about extreme activities, some human interest stories, and some are funnier than hell.

Normally I do need to look up a word or two I find in each issue, so to my delight, in the November issue article On the Origin of Species, written by Michael Roberts uses the word “sastrugi”. The article explains why Steve Martin’s new movie The Big Year, in Martin’s irreverent style perhaps -I haven’t seen it-may garner some long-overdue respect for bird watchers. But Roberts uses the word describing a skier. What the hell? I’m a skier and have certainly never heard that word. But the beauty of learning it that way, as a delightful surprise, is that I’ll never forget it. Go ahead-look it up!

Sort This!

While in a long meeting this afternoon, I mused over an item I recently saw perusing Skymall Magazine during a recent flight, amid the countless yard ornaments and luxury items for your pets:

A plastic cup that you presumably allow your adorable offspring to use to separate the cereal from the marshmallow goodness in Lucky Charms?

These is so much wrong with this; that we need another useless plastic implement (it's a long list, but I include in it those plastic devices with different sized holes that help you measure the correct amount of spaghetti like you can actually screw up and cook too much, and these charming plastic containers I saw at the store shaped and colored like either lemons, onions or tomatoes to store either lemons, onions or tomatoes in that probably don't "keep" them any better, if even as well, as the plastic bag you brought them home in) on the planet whose oceans and landscape are choking in it. Is there truly a need for these?

Back to the cereal, if you want your child to eat marshmallows for breakfast, buy 'em a bag of Jet-Puffed or even better - a jar of marshmallow creme. Instead of letting them sit and sift out the toasted oat cereal (Lucky Charms via Wikipedia - If Wikipedia can be trusted, this cereal is the original Cheerios with sugar and marshmallows added, and I never realized there were so many iterations of the marshmallow shapes), probably leaving them for you to eat, buy some Cheerios for yourself in the first place. Do parents actually let their children sort the cereal?? I remember getting seriously chewed out for trying to dig the prizes from the bottom of the box before we ate all the cereal, but then, we didn't have a handy tool to dig it out with.

Leaving Ocean Shores

We tourists probably think this is adorable-I  know I do, I turned around to take this photo, but if it was my yard-probably not.

We had a mom and child deer visit us at the condo about dinner time Saturday night. We tossed out sliced veggies and apples. The little one just sniffed at them, but mom deer chowed down. We're probably not supposed to feed the deer, but it was obvious from their expectant looks up at us that, if not us, someone will...

Long Weekend at the Beach

We took a walk on the beach today. Normally the first thing I do when I get to the beach is shed my footwear and wade in the surf, but this trip, the water is a dark chocolate color and leaves a mucky residue on the beach. I have no idea what's caused it, but it's nothing I want my feet in, although we did see some people surfing this morning. Blech.

This was the sunset Friday night:

This morning I was looking at the tracks of someone who walked the beach in wedge heels, apparently. I find just walking in the sand my Keens fairly challenging and sure wouldn't try it in a heel. If it's all I had to walk in (and that would never happen - I subscribe to a one pair per day + another pair just in case strategy), probably I'd just take them off and brave the chocolaty muck.

My love of the ocean grew from horrible yearly family trips to the ocean when I was a kid. We'd start out in darkness, my parents would overdose me with dramamine because my Dad refused to stop the car if I got carsick and was outraged if I rolled down the window and puked down the side of the car. People who can't tolerate the unexpected probably shouldn't have children, but this is not a rant about my Dad.

Once at the ocean, we'd get up pre-dawn every day to go dig razor clams. I hated it, a squeamish young kid shouldn't have to kill things; once we got our limit, Dad would hasten off to a bar and the rest of us were free to nap, read, or explore. I spent a lot of time propped up against some driftwood with a book in my lap, watching the breakers and listening to the surf. I love it to this day, and nobody makes me go dig clams these days.