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..and there's no one around to hear it, do i still have to pay to get it removed?
this morning the tree has leaned appreciably by another few feet.
yellow = vertical
red = saturday am
green = saturday pm
orange = sunday am
the bakery is closed.
the cookie baking and packing is entirely finished. because i found two kinds of cookies i'd baked earlier in the year socked away in the bowels of the freezer, i was able to send off a dozen different kinds. (click the tiny tupperware to admire my assembly line.)
here's the tray i took to the vet when we dropped off a yowling thermos this afternon. the platter itself is hideous — a jolly, bloated-looking snowman — but i am hoping everyone will be so gobsmacked by the beauty of the cookies that they will welcome a little ugliness when they get to the bottom of the pile.
i am now out of:
__
* actually, i think we have another fifty pounds in the basement, but my upstairs container is down to dust and weevils.
we've had a couple of very heavy snowfalls in the last couple of weeks. many of the trees on our property are bowed down with the weight of the snow. some of our neighbors' trees have fallen over. and now, now one of our venerable evergreens looks like it's on the verge of pushing up daisies, if daisies could indeed be pushed through three feet of snow.
yesterday as i was talking on the phone, i stood at the dining room window and looked out. what i saw made me hang up the phone and yodel, "paul! you gotta come see this."
one of the large pine trees on the far side of the driveway appeared to be leaning way over. here is what it looked like this morning from the front steps:
here is what it looked like three hours later from the same spot:
if you'd like to gain a true appreciation of how far it's fallen in a few short hours, check out this composite. the yellow line is perfectly vertical. the green line shows the angle of the trunk this morning, while the red one shows where the trunk is now. i made one of the photos transparent so that you can see the tree's former position as well as its current one.
not good.
i called the tree man this morning and asked him to come look at it (read: get rid of it) any day this week. in a rare display of good planning, i parked the car way up the driveway this afternoon — in case the tree falls during the night, i want to be able to get to the airport on time tomorrow morning.
lunch is currently enjoying a retreat at the cat hospital, where he is, i am told, resting comfortably after being shot chock full of radioactive goo. (why does this make me think of butterball turkeys?)
"our nuclear medicine ward is furnished with large, comfortable condos with continuous music and videos for enrichment," promises the hospital's web site. his own condo. music. videos.
"unfortunately, no visitors are allowed," the text continues. but that's okay. lunch will be too busy catching up with the latest hollywood blockbusters and, you know, rocking out with eminem to miss me.
these are sort of linzer cookies. "sort of" because linzers are traditionally made with hazelnuts and filled with raspberry jam. mine are made with pecans and filled with apple and plum jelly.
what can i say? i don't like raspberry and i had no hazelnuts.
last year when i made these i tinted the apple jelly green. big mistake — according to mom, she didn't even try those because she was sure they were filled with mint jelly.
these were supposed to be pressed cookies. i printed out martha stewart's recipe, which has served me well in the past, assembled my pampered chef cookie press, and...nothing.
the dough was soft enough to be pushed through the die with no problem, but it wasn't detaching from the press worth a damn. i didn't struggle with it for long at all. instead, i took terry's suggestion and made plain old cookies instead, rolled in colored sugar and mashed into discs.
simple, sparkly, and done.
inspired by terry's enumeration, i'll make a little list of my accomplishments and obligations.
accomplishments:
now the daunting part.
obligations:
i am tired just thinking about it.
today is paul's birthday!
Happy birthday, Paul!
(also emily's. a big day!)
modifications on last year's cranberry pecan tassies. this year i used walnuts and candied orange peel instead. because the tops were not so attractive (no red cranberry peeking out), i drizzled them with white chocolate. thanks for the idea, t., gleefully stolen.
the dough for these is a bitch to work with. it's a whole lot of cream cheese, a whole lot of butter, and just enough flour to hold it together. it's very sticky and melts instantly when i try to jam it into the mini-muffin tins. worth it, though, i think.
number seven is a chocolate mint bar cookie. basic toll house dough converted to chocolate and spiked with andes mint chips — a tip of the hat to terry, who alerted me to their existence.
however, a whack on the head to terry, who also suggested their diamond shape. they look great, but there was a lot of waste incurred in cutting the diamonds. i will gain at least five pounds from eating the scraps, and it's all terry's fault.
the friends who came to dinner last night have been following the atkins diet. when i heard this, as we were putting dinner on the table, i said, "oh, well, the beef and the sauce are low-carb, and perhaps a bit of the asparagus...and i can leave the cheese plate on the table if you want..."
"no, no," one of them assured me, "we're doing modified atkins," and happily accepted potatoes and pie.
later, after they'd left, as he surveyed the carnage in the kitchen, paul said, "'yeah, we're doing modified atkins. we've modified it...by adding starch.'"
after a brief hiatus to, you know, have a life, i'm back, hunching over the mixer to produce another holiday cookie. this time it's cranberry/white chocolate chip.
these are very good — a tablespoon of brandy sees to that — but they're just a little sweeter than i'd like. i may be the only person in america who likes her cookies not-so-sweet. the dried cranberries add a welcome tartness, though, and you can chew them for days.
basic toll house dough, really. next time i'll add nuts, because i like to live dangerously.
today i bought lunch a round little bed. i wasn't sure he'd sleep in it, but not eight hours after the purchase he seems to have made it his own. when he lies on his side and puts his head down he fills it entirely, neatly curled into a furry donut.
what's really going to be great is when thermos decides he should try to wangle his way in alongside lunch.
the bed is made of that orthopedic egg carton foam ("orthopedic kitty nest," reads the tag), and its cover, which can be removed for washing, is berber fleece.
the bed was on sale at petstuffcoland, but it still cost $18. clearly my joy at lunch's good prognosis pushed me right over the edge into insanity.
today we took lunch to the cat specialist in burlington, the closest person the state has to a veterinary neurologist.
she put lunch through his paces. here are some highlights.
the upshot of all these exercises? the vet said very definitely that she doesn't believe he has a brain tumor — she said that even if the steroids had reduced the swelling of a tumor, he would still have some residual neurological effects. but lunch has none. he is "perfect" neurologically.
i mean, he's not smart, but that's different.
the vet seemed entirely confident that the whole espisode was the result of a bad reaction on the part of his immune system to the thyroid drugs. not common, she said, but she's seen a couple of similar cases before. her advice was to cease the thyroid drugs immediately and to get him zapped full of radiation as soon as possible.
so the upshot is that the cat is entirely pissed at us for letting this stranger do the wheelbarrow with him and laughing about it — but we are immensely relieved and appreciative.
lemon poppyseed slices, a light, simple, crisp little cookie.
the recipe comes courtesy of the nice ladies on the recipe boards at work. every year they do a virtual cookie exchange — each member posts her favorite cookie recipe. this one's a winner, though if i made it again i'd add a hint less sugar and a hint more lemon.