Happy Cinco de Mayo!
We’re celebrating by eating Chicken Enchiladas tonight. YUM.
I think I’ve mentioned before that when I make dog treats for George and Gracie, I cook them for however long the recipe requires, and then I turn off the oven, but leave the dog treats in the oven so that they can dry and harden (since soft, moist treats would start to mold pretty quickly). More often than not, I leave the treats in the oven overnight. Invariably, the next day I forget the treats are there and turn the oven on to preheat for whatever I’m making, and five minutes later I’m saying “What’s that smell… Oh, shit!” I’ve never actually burned the treats, luckily.
You’d think, after doing that ten or fifteen times, it would start to occur to me to check the oven before I turn it on, but so far that hasn’t happened.
So Sunday afternoon I turned the oven on to make my lunch, and then I wandered off to fold clothes and put them away, and when I came back seven minutes later, I was like “What’s that smell…” and then I remembered that that morning I’d put the egg shells on a cookie sheet, put them in the oven for twenty minutes, then turned the oven off. And forgot they were there.
(We collect our egg shells in a bowl until the bowl is full, then I dry them in the oven, crush them up, and feed them back to the chickens. Theoretically, the calcium helps make the eggs they lay stronger.)
Dog treats might not burn when they’re in the oven, with the oven turned to the “broil” setting, but egg shells burn like a motherfucker. And they smell really, really bad. I took the sheet of egg shells out and set them on the stovetop, and they sat there and smoldered and the longer they smoldered, the worse they smelled. I finally had to put the sheet on the back step and asked Fred to take the egg shells over to the compost heap the next time he went outside.
(He thought I should just crush them up and give them to the chickens anyway, but I was all “They won’t eat burned egg shells! They won’t like the taste!” In retrospect, I could have given them the choice, I suppose.)
The house reeked of burnt egg shells for the rest of the day, not just in the kitchen. One of the things about having an old house is that it holds smells in an odd way. There’s a spot in the hallway approaching the front room that always smells like whatever was cooked most recently in the kitchen. It’s not the whole hallway, just this one spot. So every time I’d walk through the Spot o’ Stank, I’d think “What the fuck is that – oh, right.”
Other oddities in the way our house presents smells – if someone pees in the front room (a cat, usually. I’ve mostly broken Fred of that habit. Har!), you might not necessarily smell it in the front room, but you will smell it in the doorway of the guest bedroom. Also, Fred’s bedroom generally smells of whatever was last cooked in the kitchen – though I guess that’s not necessarily an oddity, since there’s a vent in the floor of his room that’s in the ceiling of the dining room, which is right next to the kitchen.
And speaking of our house and smells, whoever thought it would be a good idea to put the air intake vent for the downstairs air/ heating system directly across the hall from the bathroom? Well, let’s just say that they probably should have thought a little harder about that.
Fred sent me the link to this picture yesterday, and it made me laugh out loud.
Beulah and Bessie are making themselves QUITE at home, thank you very much. Sunday night after I put them up for the night, Bessie howled and howled until Fred got up and let them out. They stayed out until about 10:30, when they wouldn’t stop moving around and kept waking me up, so I got up and put them back in their room ’til the next morning. Last night, same thing. I’m sure the time’s coming soon when they won’t be quite so squirmy when I’m trying to sleep, and I suspect that they’ll be out and about, 24 hours a day.
They seem more willing to not be right on top of each other all the time. I mean, they’re usually in the same room, or fairly close to each other most of the time, but yesterday they spent all afternoon in separate cat beds – Bessie was in one of the beds on my desk, and Beulah was in the much cozier bed next to my desk. They snoozed there all afternoon, I guess to store up energy for their wild running-around time in the evening.
(The last of the pictures I took before I took the boys to the pet store on Friday.)
“You. Look at me. You tell me RIGHT NOW who left this branch here. Who would do such a thing? Tell me now, and I will kick their motherfucking ASS.” Sheriff Mama ain’t kiddin’ around.
Previously
2008: If that man cripples me with the sledgehammer, y’all make sure he gets me the LUXURY wheelchair.
2007: No entry.
2006: “Motherfucker say WHAT? You wanna prance?”
2005: Did you know you could use it to relieve muscle soreness, as a plant fertilizer, and as a laxative?
2004: Okay, girlfriend? Just how fucking stupid ARE you?
2003: No entry.
2002: No entry.
2001: No entry.
2000: God, please tell me when I was 19 I didn’t sound that much like an airhead…