Ms Piggy makes my day

On a whim, I decided to download some pictures of Ms Piggy from Google Images and Yahoo. Well, what a delightful surprise I had. There were dozens of pictures (even a few risque ones) and all of them darling.

Some neighbors are coming for supper tonight so we're busy cooking--corn on the cob (a must this time of year), mashed potatoes and gravy, caprese salad (since we have fresh basil) and smothered pork chops. Warm brownies with ice cream for dessert. I think I'll just have ice cream because I don't much like brownies.

But I love, love, love ice cream! A friend and I went to one of those little ice cream shops down in the trendy area of St Paul yesterday. She ordered Norwegian Chai ice cream and I asked for Salty Caramel which I've heard is a popular flavor locally. They were out of that, so I settled for good old Maple Nut. (It was wonderful!) This particular shop, called Izzy's, gives you a little extra treat and adds a tiny scoop of another flavor on top of your cone. My Maple Nut was topped with a dollop of smooth and creamy dark chocolate. Ummmm.

OK, I'm done gloating about my excellent ice cream cone. It will probably be another year before I get to try the Salty Caramel.

I'll let you know how it is.

How much do we need cats?

There are two drawbacks to having four cats:

1) Litter boxes (enough said)

2) Shedding all over the house.

The cats all have different coats--Snuffy (shown above) is an American Longhair and sheds like a son-of-a-gun. He develops small mats in his fur and pulls them out with his teeth discarding them willy-nilly all over the carpet. It's truly amazing that he remains fully furred when he loses so much of his fur on a daily basis.

Tweedy is a tortie American Shorthair who sheds very little, but Sunny is a Norwegian Forest Cat with a dense double coat that develops big mats. We have to shave him several times a year because we can't even get a brush through his fur. The "prodigal" Gracie is a Ragdoll cat and she doesn't shed much, thankfully.

We dearly love our cats and happily share our home with them in spite of the drawbacks. I've never calculated what the cats cost per year and I guess I really don't need to know. Buying cat food and litter, plus occasional toys and vet bills is just part of the cost-of-living at our house.

The one thing I value most about the cats is this--they make me laugh. That is such a precious commodity you can never place a value on it. Add to that the snuggles and purrs and you have a winning combination of life enhancers.

"I love cats because I love my home and after a while they become its visible soul."
Jean Cocteau

"Time spent with cats in never wasted." May Sarton

"If purring could be encapsulated, it would be the most powerful antidepressant on the pharmaceutical market." Alexis Hope

Extreme Ironing

When I got married in 1958, among my wedding gifts was an iron and an ironing board. It was a useful gift because "back in those days", nearly everything had to be ironed. When my girls started school, all their little dresses had to be ironed. I had a full-time job so I had a perpetually full laundry basket of clothes needing to be ironed.

Then came the life-altering invention of permanent press clothes and tumble-dry clothes dryers and we have never looked back. I don't use the iron more than a couple times a year. And, when I do, it's most likely to shorten some pants with Stitch Witchery (great stuff!).

How then, did it come to pass that grown men--seemingly sane and healthy--took up ironing as a sport?! Take a look at these (ahem) athletic fellows.

Gracie graces us with her return

You may remember that we adopted a stray cat on wintry day back in February. But then, in July, much as she loved being well-fed and pampered, she got outside and disappeared.

Last night, the other three cats began reacting to something outside. When they started running back and forth from the patio door to the bedroom window around the side of the house, we knew they had seen an animal. Sue switched on the light out on the patio and got a glimpse of Gracie. Sue was so speechless it was funny--she stammered and gestured that I had to come and see. I went to look and there, off to the side of the patio was Gracie, peering at us fearfully around the side of a potted tomato plant. (Our tiny patio is a regular jungle of tomato plants.)

Sue went to the kitchen to get some food to entice Gracie while I quietly went outside and sat down in a patio chair. (Thankfully there were no mosquitoes.) The three cats were lined up inside the patio door watching the drama. As I sweet-talked Gracie, calling her by name, she would sneak forward and then dash away only to reappear on the other side of the patio.

Sue handed a bowl of cat food out to me and waited inside with the three cats to watch. After several false starts, Gracie finally advanced to the dish and gobbled some chunks of dry food down whole. Then she attacked the rest of the food and ate it up. I leaned forward to stroke her cheeks (her favorite spot) and she began purring. It only took a few minutes before she was in my lap.

I brought her inside--which did not go over well with Sunny, Tweedy and Snuffy. They really had their noses out of joint. They kept giving her hate stares and avoiding her. She was very restless all night but I suppose the sudden transition was quite disorienting. Today she's just like she never left.

We can only guess what happened to Gracie while she was gone but she didn't look nearly as bad as when she came in February. She's thin but her coat is still in good shape. We'll have to watch for fleas and worms for a while. I really can't tell if she remembers her name, but to me, she's forever Gracie (whether she wants to be or not)!

Retro desserts

Speaking of foods no longer on the market, remember Jello's wonderful Whip and Chill? I used to make that for the family back in the 70's. It was like a mousse and it looked really fancy with a dollop of Dream Whip on top. There was another product called "1-2-3" that was Jello that separated into three layers as it set. It was really pretty in a tall glass.

There have been different flavors of Jello that have come and gone over the years. (There are flavors in stores right now that will probably disappear one day as well.) I remember Spiced Tomato flavored Jello was available at one time--probably for aspic. Not a big hit. I looked online for some of the other failed flavors, and there were quite a few:

1. Mixed vegetable
2. Celery
3. Blackberry
4. Mango
5. Sparkling berry (you added 7up)
6. Mixed fruit
7. Apple
8. Apricot
9. Sparkling white grape
10. Concord grape

I'm sure you can remember others that came and went. Much as I love Jello, I never tried most of the discontinued flavors. It might be that some of them were just being test-marketed.

A Rainbow Foods store near me is selling three "dessert toppers" called Orange Crush Orange and Vanilla Cream, Dr. Pepper Cherry and A&W Rootbeer Float. I bought a bottle of the orange stuff. (Ingredients: Corn syrup, High fructose corn syrup, Water, artificial flavors, etc) It is dreadful! Gross! Horrible! I have not seen it any other grocery stores so I'm thinking that this is a failed product in the making. Nobody would buy it a second time.

I looked it up online and found it's manufactured by Vita Food Products. I sent them a customer message giving them my opinion, but I doubt that I'll hear back from them... The product they have listed right below the three dessert toppers is Scorned Woman Hot Sauce!

Reader's Digest files bankruptcy

Well, the chickens have come home to roost! Who would have thought that the most-read magazine in the country would be going down the tubes?

I can't say that I'm sorry, however. For many years Reader's Digest made a practice of mailing out huge volumes of mail to older people promoting contests and books of all kinds. After my mom died twelve years ago, we cleaned out her house and found piles of Reader's Digest mailings stuffed in drawers and unopened boxes of books stacked in a back room.

Now Mom didn't have much income, and I'm sure that she entered those contests in hopes of winning something to leave to her family. It makes me both sad and angry that she was taken advantage of that way.

When you multiply that by the thousands of other elders that were bamboozled, you can understand the scope of Reader's Digest's scam. As for all those Reader's Digest condensed books that they promoted so heavily? They are now so undesirable that you can't even give them away! Thrift stores refuse to take them. They wind up as landfill or being recyled.

So, it seems to me that advertisers and subscribers gradually lost respect for Reader's Digest and it finally caught up to them.

Would you read Shakespeare's blog?

What would Shakespeare blog about? Probably international gossip about the royals and world politics. He might well become a TV pundit--riling up the populace with heavy-handed conspiracies, dramatic revelations and dark dealings in government. He would be wildly popular.

I, on the other hand am a lightweight (metaphorically speaking), and deal in recipes, family stuff and things that bug me. Fortunately, there is room online for everybody.

I have a dirty little secret--I've never been a fan of Shakespeare. Even though I was an English major and studied the Bard, I never found that unique passion for his works that many others do. I don't get what the fuss is about. I sometimes wonder if it might be that he wrote in the same Elizabethan English that the King James version of the Bible was written in. That would certainly lend a lot of weight to the words.

Believe me, I'm not in competition with the great Shakes. I just have a real blind spot when it comes to having insight into what other people see in his writings. I guess I'm to be pitied.