Fri 30 Sep 2005
Friday Cat Blogging
If you believe what some people write about Lizzie, you’d think she was a perpetual motion machine. Not quite…
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Wed 28 Sep 2005
Free, Free…
After several years of taking college courses at night, I’ve finished my degree requirements. I’ve been getting tuition reimbursement from my employer to help. Now that I’m done with school. my boss declared this a day of celebration and asked people to bring in cakes, cookies and other snacks. No problems with that reason for a party.
I’m celebrating too. For a few years, it was just work, school, necessary life things, and then shoehorn in the things I wanted to do — the writing and cartooning of “What a Good Cat!”, for one.
For another, I wanted to brush up on my French language skills which had gone rusty since graduation from college the first time around. For my birthday in 2002, Pat got me a subscription to Champs-Elysees and we got broadband at home about the same time, so I could improve language skills by listening to RFI and France Info.
Besides those newscasts, there is the streaming on-demand journal télévisé from French networks. I’ve watched TF1 and France 3 as well as i-tele and TV5, but most often it’s France 2 for its weekend anchor Béatrice Schönberg. Using Microsoft Media Player allows me to rewind and replay and slow down the streaming until I understand or give up trying.
(En tout cas, si vous, chér lecteur et visiteur, si vous êtes français/francophone et vous vous demandez pourquoi ce bloggeur anglo-saxon écrit de la belle Béatrice Borloo… eh bien, parce que j’aime la France. Je peux lire, je peux comprendre ce qu’on dit pour la plupart. Mais écrire et parler? Pas bien, pas encore… je fais de mon mieux… en tout cas.)
Indeed, elle est belle, and I appreciated that she spoke clearly when my listening skills were redeveloping. She’s a professional broadcaster, too, but human, evidenced last weekend when (my guess is) the teleprompter quit as she was wrapping up the newscast. She knew to mention that the weather was next. “And then…” she said, and when she slowed down while saying “et puis…” her cheeks puffed out for an instant as if to say “and I don’t know what comes next.” But it was only a split second stumble; she came back to say “…probably an afternoon full of surprises.” And finishing with her usual “As for me, I will have the pleasure of returning tonight at 8 p.m….” and on to the end.
Up ‘n At ‘Em
We have cats, and since they are all Good Cats, we’re used to them waking us up early for food. This morning, for the first time, though, I awoke with Caitie’s paws planted firmly on my throat. It’s a good thing she only weighs 11 pounds. I just wonder what kind of message she was trying to send with that behavior — it’s not as if I didn’t know that she’s the boss.
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Tue 27 Sep 2005
What Did She Learn?
I had a dentist appointment at noon today, so I didn’t come home for lunch. With Pat’s attention taken up with watching granddaughter Diana, the cats didn’t go outside today.
Almost all of them, anyway.
After supper, Caitie stood by the back door and MEOWED and MEOWED and MEOWED. I tried to tell her it was raining, then opened the back door and let her sniff through the screen. Not that I really believed it would make a difference.
Eventually, I grabbed an umbrella and opened the screen. For maybe a half-minute, it looked like she was enjoying herself, running across the yard to the landscaped area we call the Island.
Then she crouched under a butterfly bush for a few seconds, looking more dissatisfied every moment, before springing up again and running back to the house — to the locked front door, where we waited until Pat let us back in.
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More F.C.B.
Calico Amy and tuxedo cat Datsa are featured at Pen-Elayne on the Web.
Melissa is permitted up to 15 minutes of fame, but from the looks of things, she wants none of it.
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Bringing Up Sunday Dinner on Monday Night
Lemon Oregano Chicken Scaloppine: Excellent.
This is “healthy”? This is good. The sauce was helped by fresh Rutgers tomatoes from Pat’s vegetable garden and fresh oregano from her herb garden. Only thing we’d have changed was to make it thicker.
Pat takes care with her tomatoes. Besides the usual feeding and weeding, we can recommend underwatering during a dry summer like this one. Resulted in stronger flavor.
Triple-chocolate Cranberry-Oatmeal cookies: a past favorite, back for an Excellent encore. Differences this time — we used frozen cranberries from Wegman’s in the dough and baked them on silicone cookie sheets, which were a birthday gift for me this year.
Wine: Omaka Springs Sauvignon Blanc 2004. Wine Spectator gave this a 90? We would do the same if it was on a scale of 1000. I don’t speak wine-ish, so plain English will have to do: Yech. Disagreeable flavor and scent. Hated it. Did we get a bad bottle?
Sun 25 Sep 2005
Sunday Dinner
After last Sunday’s efforts, I’ve been given another assignment for today’s supper: first, Lemon Oregano Chicken Scaloppine from Foodfit.com, and for dessert, Triple-chocolate Cranberry-Oatmeal cookies from Epicurious.com.
The chicken dish looks pretty simple (he wrote confidently) and tasty enough, while the cookies may not have sufficient chocolate chips. Let’s see, a half-cup semi-sweet chips, a half-cup milk chocolate chips, and a half-cup of white chocolate chips. (None of them Ghirardelli, either. That’ll teach them to reformulate my favorite chips. Oh yeah, that’ll show them…)
Oh yeah, and some flour, oatmeal and egg to hold the chips together. Mmmm-boy (I’m thinking a Jackie Gleason impersonation here) is this gonna be goooood…that is, if Gleason ever got that worked up over chocolate.
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