What a week! It has been crazy busy lately – lots of running around, doctors appointments, shuttling Miss Thing and just general busy-busy-busyness. I honestly can’t believe it’s a new week already. It just seems like it went by too fast. Part of that is the whole back-to-school-and-fall-sports thing, and part of it I think is just me. I’m just not sure where all the time went! Seems like one day it’s Tuesday, and then the next we’re back around to Monday again.

So what have I been doing in the kitchen all week? Well – We’ve had several fairly simple meals… and on Saturday Mr. Man did a ginormous grilling session for me – including lamb spareribs, Grilled Corn, eggplant, carrots and beets. Poor guy was out there from like five in the evening until ten at night. But it was sooooo worth it. Everything he grilled turned out excellent. I also made a tomato soup – which while delicious, I unfortunately backslid a little bit and didn’t really take measurements when making – so I can’t post about it.

My plan is to (hopefully) find time to trek out to a farmer’s market this week. I meant to go this weekend, but I did a little sleep-catching-up-on Saturday (I didn’t wake up until like one or two in the afternoon) and then on Sunday instead of going to one of the other local farmer’s markets, I ended up heading over to the Solano Stroll in Berkeley for the street fair. Which was fun, but exhausting and crowded. I’d hoped to try out some fun street food, but unfortunately the best option that I found was a corndog, which was yummy – but not particularly innovative. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough, though.

So what do I want from the farmer’s market with all this produce laying around the house? Well – I know I just did a huge canning session of tomatoes – but I can’t help myself. I’m a tomato fiend. So I wanted to pick up some more tomatoes – and this time roast them with some other veggies, some olive oil, etc… and stick it in the freezer. I know – I know. I don’t have a lot of space in the freezer… but I’m hoping I can find room for a couple ziplocs full of tomatoes…. Wish me luck!

Anyhow – I’m still really enjoying the late season tomatoes – although I’m less than thrilled at the return of Chard… I’m kidding, I actually was happy to see some green leafy veggies – since it gave me the opportunity to make up a batch of Pesto, which I haven’t done in a while. The raspberries unfortunately did not survive the unpacking process, being completely devoured within a few minutes of this picture taking… And the watermelon was taken care of that night as well. Next time we get watermelon I’m going to do what I did this time – which is slice it up and stick it in the fridge. It was much more convenient to have it all sliced up and ready for snacking. The musk melon I gave to our neighbors though, blergh. I hate when they forget to leave our exclusions out.

Now it’s time for a next segment… “This week in Kitteh Mews” Brought to you by Grabby (also known as Miss Thing).

Leeroy and Jenkins have had another busy week. Aside from their near-daily photoshoots, they’ve also been diligently spending much time on their grooming regiment (generally about five minutes a week – hey, their time is valuable!) nap time has been up ten percent this past week, although we’ve also seen an increase in daily Cat-isthenics. Incidents of food-robbing from the counter have taken a decided down-turn, probably helped by the fact that better food control procedures have been implemented.

A new super villain has been making the rounds, the media has been calling him “The Pink Feathery Thingy”. Both Leeroy and Jenkins have made several attempts to capture and/or destroy it – unfortunately, just as they believe they’ve gotten the upper hand, it somehow manages to elude them. More details to follow next time.

In completely unrelated news – there’s evidence that grooming hasn’t taken the complete downturn that we thought – pictures show that there has been some grooming activity this week. Although reporters were able to find pictures of this rare occurence… water baths were dispensed over the weekend to allay citizen concerns that the kittehs were carrying around miniature litter boxes with them – kittehs were shocked and dismayed that the public did not believe they were able to groom themselves without immersion in water.

Okay – I think I’ve tapped out my creativity, so I’ll drop the ‘news caster’ speak and just finish the update. Leeroy and Jenkins have a vet appointment this week, they’re going to get tested for FeLV and get their shots – it took me a little longer to get them an appointment than I thought. My clinic sez that the technician appointments apparently fill up faster than the vet appointments. Not a big deal – they’re going in this week, so it should be all good.

Last little tidbit before I have to run to go get ready for my dentist appointment – and that is, a few people have asked me how I’m able to get such great pictures of Leeroy and Jenkins – so here are the little tidbits of that has worked well for me with regards to pet photography:

• Be patient
• Take pictures during the day, with lots of natural light (when possible)
• Don’t use Flash if you can at all avoid it
• Be Patient
• Try to take pictures shortly after they’ve just eaten (works best with a set feeding schedule, not so much with free-grazing)
• Take lots and lots and lots and lots of pictures – for every 30 pictures or so – I usually get 1-2 good ones. Ish. If I’m lucky.
• Get down on the floor, at their level. Crawl around.
• Be patient
• Do lots of post-picture production work in imaging software of your choice – I like to do a layer with a gaussian blur and blend it with either Soft Light or Overlay at about 50%, depending on the picture
• Use the fastest speed you can for the light level you’re in – cats move quickly – and you’d probably be surprised at how many of my rejects are images with blurry white or black blobs in them.
• Oh – and Be Patient

Well – it’s official. My computer monitor, which has been getting a little flakey latey, has begun to actually DIE. It had developed a red bar on the left side of the screen – which, while annoying, I could live with… but about a week and a half ago or so, the right side of the monitor developed a very annoying and distracting flicker. So I pestered Mr. Man until he did a boat-load of research to help me with getting a new monitor, and it will hopefully be arriving soon.

Fortunately, my backup monitor – I have two on my desk, best upgrade handsdown that you can give yourself is a bigger, or second monitor, is still functioning. And in honor of new-monitor-dom, we purchased a color calibration tool called Eye-One Display 2. We used it to calibrate my backup monitor while waiting for my new monitor, and its hard to believe it’s the same monitor I’ve been using for the last couple of years, because it looks sp much better. It was a good investment for us because in addition to my two monitors, Mr. Man has his two work laptops and monitor, plus Miss Thing’s computer… Well, let’s just say we’ve got a lot of screens… lol But it is a little spendy. But anyways, the new monitor should be arriving tomorrow – yay! Atleast thats what UPS tracking seems to indicate… *crossing fingers*. Which means I should probably clean my desk, huh? blergh

Weekly FFTY box post ran a little late this week because on Saturday, I went to the farmer’s market and purchased 60 pounds (yes, 60 POUNDS) of tomatoes to can – which took me about 16 hours to peel, pack, and boil. Most of them are whole – I ended up with 13 quarts (well, fifteen – if you count the two that failed to seal that I threw in the freezer) and 6 pints of Spicy Salsa. (I’ll try to post about it later…) Then on Sunday, I realized that 13 quarts of tomatoes, six pints of salsa and the extra jars I purchased for said marathon canning spree would not fit in the pantry unless I did some rejiggering – so on Sunday I spent the day cleaning out, organizing, condensing, etc… the Pantry. Plus side, (aside from actually being able to find stuff) is that I was able to get everything off the floor of the pantry and the pantry step ladder so that I can actually – you know – USE the Step Ladder… Shocker, I know.

Miss Thing had a busy weekend, too – she had three friends spend the night – although it was only supposed to be two. She invited a third person because she thought the second person wouldn’t be able to come, but then the second person was able to come, and we ended up with three. I was less than thrilled, but she had a good time. Her and her friends had a great time swimming and listening to music and harassing teh grownups and all that jazz. I even managed to get them to hold still for me to take a couple of pictures for Miss Thing to have, which was nice.

I’m not sure what I’m going to make with all this weeks produce – I used the peaches and nectarines in a bread pudding that I’ll try and post a little later, and I used the sweet peppers in the Spicy Salsa I canned on Saturday. I sliced the fennel up very thinly and used it in a salad – which I really liked, but Miss-I-Hate-Fennel-Thing was less than thrilled… And I have some vague ideas for the beets – but I really need to come up with something good for the figs. The last few weeks we’ve received figs I’ve had a hard time coming up with something interesting to do with them, and searching for recipes almost invariably brings up some sort of fig-and-goat cheese mixture, which I love – but I’d really like to mix it up a bit. I’m sure I’ll figure it out. Knowing my luck, I’ll come up with something amazing… just before figs go out of season. :-/

But anyhow, I’m sure it will be a great week. Moving on to one of my favorite parts of the weekly update… KITTEH MEWS!

Leeroy and Jenkins have had a very busy week – they’ve had several photoshoots, terrorized each other, shredded a scratcher, jumped up on the counters, figured out how to open my clothing closet door, and have in general … been little demons. But they’ve also signed up for a twitter account where they have been unleashed on the vast animal twittering masses. They will post the occassional picture that didn’t quite make the cut for my blog, as well little daily tidbits and whatnots. If you’re interested in seeing more – feel free to follow them here: RoyandJenks.  (LeeroyJenkins was, sadly – taken).

In addition to their many other activities, Leeroy has become a little bit of a bully, and will sometimes take something from Jenkins that he was playing with, or try to steal his food. We’ve been discouraging the latter by keeping the seperate at feeding time – but I admit to being amused by the former, even if it’s not very nice.  We noticed the behaviour to ‘guard’ a toy first with this crinkly ball. When we first brought it home – Leeroy was immediately fascinated and went to great lengths to keep it away from Jenkins and from us. Of course, he didn’t growl at us – but he did at Jenkins. Jenkins is much more retiring of the two, most of the time, so when Leeroy growls at him about something he backs off – whether it’s food or a toy (which is why we’re keeping an eye on them while eating – Jenkins got a couple of pretty light meals there before we realized what was going on).

But Leeroy is so adorable with this crinkly ball – he will chase it for hours, carry it around in his mouth. If he hears you crinkle it, he’ll drop whatever he’s doing and run over to you – he’s gotten it stuck underneath the entertainment center more frequently than I can count and is just ridiculously adorable with it. We did notice Jenkins take one the other night and play a little keep away from Leeroy, so I think they’re working out the toy-playing situation… one way or another. In general, Jenkins tends to favor the fluffy, feathery type of toys anyways.

Leeroy will play with the feather on a string type of toys for a little while – but Jenkins simply goes nuts for them. He will jump all over them and chase them for a while – however, he does get bored. So if you use the same feather on a string too often, he’ll end up getting bored. I’ve found it best to keep several varieties laying around. Switching off toys every couple of days seems to do the trick. Although after examining the toys – I think next time I want to mix things up, I’ll just go to Michaels’ and buy some feathers and make some myself, because after buying (and having Jenkins destroy) several of these whojiggers I’ve realized that they look ridiculously simple to make.

On the health front – the gastro-intestinal difficulties have cleared up, thank goodness – as has the sniffles. I’m a little concerned that Leeroy might have ear mites, but since they both need to go in for a couple of shots and a FeLV and FIV test, it shouldn’t be a big deal, I’ll just ask them to look at his ears then. They had a sibling test negative for FeLV and FIV, but it doesn’t hurt to be sure, so we’re going to go ahead and get the test anyways. They’ve pretty much adjusted to the twice a day feeding schedule – although they are still waking me up earlier than I would really like on the weekends. They’ve also both been sleeping with us lately – Jenkins has decided to take up a sleeping post at the foot of the bed, by my feet – and Leeroy tends to alternate between squarely on my lower back or just above my head, depending on his mood.

What a week – I can’t believe this is the last week of Summer Vacation. I’m so sad. Having Miss Thing around has it’s ups and downs, but atleast there’s the fringe benefit of not having to shuttle her around as much during the summer. I’m kidding – I really like having her home, and I’ll be sad to see her go back to school. Speaking of back to school, guess who put off the remaining back to school shopping until the Friday before back to school? If you guessed me – you’d be correct. I’m not quite sure how it happened – but this entire month seems to have just disapeared, and earlier this week I realized that Miss Thing still didn’t have a backpack. Or shoes. So that’s what we spent Friday fixing.

Some of the items were easy and low-key… Miss Thing’s current clothing tends towards the t-shirt, jeans, and converse shoes mentality… which, while not particularly original is atleast easy… Although we keep having a constant battle of shorts-length. Somehow, I just can’t seem to be convinced that it’s okay for teenagers to wear shorts that are cut about a quarter inch below the crotch. I mean – thats just not okay with me. Call me crazy, but I’d like to see a little more modesty introduced in todays young womens clothes. I mean, I’m not talking Catholic Nun or anything – just jeans that come up a little higher than Showing-off-the-top-of-my-underwear-when-I-bend-over and shorts that come down a little lower than I’ve-Seen-Bathing-suits-that-had-more-fabric. I guess I’m just unreasonable that way.

But we got Miss Thing all taken care of, and mostly ready for school, which is nice. And after I dropped her off at practice I headed out to the DVP Meet & Greet. I used up all the peppers and a few other veggies that I received in this FFTY box making up a lovely veggie dip to take to the M&G that I’ll try to post tomorrow – it turned out really well. This week seemed a little light on veggies, and pretty heavy on fruit, probably because last week they sent me pears and honeydew, both of which are on my exclusion list. :-/

We’ve definitely hit pepper season though – I’ve been watching the amount of peppers given each week get larger and larger recently. lol – I’m going to really have to start getting creative with them at this rate. We aren’t huge sweet peppers fans – not that we dislike them or anything… just not big fans.

So now for the other half of the weekly update – Kitteh Mews!

We’ve had a pretty good week with the little rascals. We put Leeroy and Jenkins on some meds for the sniffles they were having, and they seem to be doing much better. It’s also looking like we managed to clear up Jenkins’ parasite issue, although we are going to have to do another test to be sure. I’ve also been starting to train them to names, and it seems to be working (so far).

Per our vet’s suggestion, we’ve decided to switch them from the Free-Grazing feeding method to a twice-a-day feeding method. The upside to that is – one, it’s made them waaaaaaay more receptive to the whole learning-their-name-for-treats thing, and two, I know that there will always be atleast two times a day when I can find them! lol! They’re adjusting the change fairly stoically, only being fidgety and whiny when it starts getting close to dinner time. It also works out well with them currently being on meds that have to be taken with food. It’s a lot easier to know when their eating if we have a set feeding schedule.

The new feeding schedule has helped with Jenkins, in particular, since strangely enough depriving him of free-range access to food has made him much more affectionate and interested in the peoples. I can’t imagine why that would be. LOL! The biggest downside to the new food schedule is definitely mornings, though. The last few days they’ve been averaging quite an overabundance of affection and energy each and every morning, starting several hours before I’m ready to get up, saying things that roughly translates from Kitteh Speak as “Is it time for food yet? How about now? Now? Maybe Now? How about now?” And because I’m such a kewl, nice person – I’ve been groggily grabbing the kittehs and trying to keep them from waking up Mr. Man (too much atleast), which means I’ve been waking up much earlier than I would probably be inclined towards were it up to me. Stupid Kittehs.

But it’s not all bad – and once they settle down a little bit, I’m sure they’ll figure out a way to train me to their liking. Er… I mean – I’ll train them… Yea! Train THEM. <cough> anyways… It’s also supposed to be healthier – they won’t be able to gorge themselves in to becoming big ol’ fat kittehs, sparking a slew of kitteh health problems… Just you know – cross your fingers for me that they’ll figure out that whole morning thing soon? Please? I miss my sleep.

I can’t believe it’s the third week of August already… :-/ Seems like Summer has just been flying by entirely too fast. Soon Miss Thing will be going back to school, and we’ll be running running running around all the time again. I enjoy having her home, well – atleast most of the time. Some of the time. Okay, whenever she isn’t being a Teen Twit, which isn’t really anywhere near as often as I would like, but what can you do?

This week has had me running around a little more than is my usual during the summer. Mr. Man had several days where he needed to be in the City for work shtuff, including a couple of late evenings, and I had a few appointments and other doodads I needed to take care of. All of which left us with a little bit of surplus from last week’s box from FFTY. I’ve been trying to work through it a little bit, I made some simmered fruit sauce that I’m going to use later this week, and a Cucumber Yogurt dip that I’m going to try and post a little bit later on if I get a chance. So far I’ve been hitting my goal of 2-3 posts a week in spite of all the running around so cross your fingers for me.

Today promises to be pretty busy and disruptive, too – since I forgot to take my Anti-Crazy pills earlier this week and agreed to let Miss Thing have her Team over for a pool party. We’ve got a gaggle of girls in the house (or perhaps that should be giggle of girls, since that seems to be all we really hear from them most of the time).  I don’t imagine it will be too awful, being past the age where I need to entertain them really, thank goodness, but it will still be an adventure.

On the Kitteh side of the weekly update though, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is – we have NAMES! Yay! In spite of Miss Thing’s protests, we’ve officially named the kittehs. We told her that she had until this morning to come up with a name that we liked, and unfortunately that didn’t happen so may I present ….

LEEROY

And JENKINS!

I know, I know – about time, right? After the Giggle of Girls goes home tomorrow, I’m going to try and start training them to their names… We’ll see how that goes. I’ve never actually bothered with training Kittens to come to a name before, but then I’ve never really had two kittehs at the same time before – and it seems to me that with having two, having them know their names might be a little more important than when you just have one. But it’s all official – I even ordered them name tags and the whole dealio.

So what’s the bad news you ask? Well – we found out earlier this week that Jenkins has a parasite, so we’re working on getting that cleared up. I’m glad that we found out what was going on, because quite frankly the gastrointestinal difficulties he’s had have been atleast as bothersome for us as for him. He’s been on the meds for a couple of days now and we’re already starting to see some improvement, so I think he’s on the mend. I made sure to let my Sister, who was fostering them, know so that she can watch out for the other kittehs she takes care of. Fortunately, Leeroy doesn’t appear to have it. As soon as we’re sure they’re all cleared up and healthy, we’ll finish up their vaccinations and what have you. By the way – I know there are many sites and people who extoll the virtues of adopting from Shelters and rescues, and it’s true – they do rock, and I’m not going to repeat all that here. But I found out another fringe benefit earlier this week when setting up their vet appointment. Some veterinarian clinics will give people who adopt from a shelter or rescue the first exam of their new kittens for free. How cool is that?

Anyhow – there is more good news, aside from Jenkins being on the mend and the names, and that is I managed to get exclusive pictures of an EPIC BATTLE fought between  Jenkins the Wise and Leeroy the Swift this morning. Using caution and stealth, I managed to (at no small risk of disrupting the war) snap a great many pictures, to share the story of their unsung heroism. Without further ado, I present the Battle of the Blue Rug (Part the first):

After the dust has settled, the Warriors realized that they were too well matched and that neither could best the other in fair battle, so they call a truce – so that they may live to fight again another day.

Once the truce had been forged, the two warriors realized that their mutual prowess and strength would serve them well as partners, and that together they might take over the world! So they joined forces, and rested together after their mighty battle.

Okay, so yes – that it a LOT of kitteh pics, but this was the short list, I swear! There was just so many good ones.

Weekly update time. It’s been a great week for me – Miss Thing has, for the most part, settled in to her practice routine and has been making strides towards getting along better at home, which is a nice change of pace. It’s a work in progress, but it’s getting there. I also have been busily working on combining all of my email under one umbrella, making the switch to using gmail, which so far is looking to be a vast improvement. Over the next few months I’m planning on deprecating my yahoo email account in favor of gmail, although I imagine it will be a work in progress for some time. I’m a little sad about leaving yahoo email, I’ve used it for ten years, and it’s pretty deeply entrenched, but to be honest, the only reason I’ve used it this long is simply because it was so deeply entrenched, which isn’t really a good enough reason anymore.

I received my most recent FFTY box on Thursday, and probably would have put this post up earlier, except that on Friday Miss Thing and I went out and got our pamper on with new haircuts and facials, and then Mr. Man and I went out to a lovely dinner at Farmer Brown in San Francisco. (My new absolute favorite place to eat at.) Which left the day pretty much booked. On Saturday, I spent most of the day doing my email migration, which took a little longer to set up than I had initially anticipated. Gmail has such a robust system, that I found it was really easy to tweak out trying to get it just so. Sunday, we went over to a friend of ours house and helped them get their audio/video ban-kai on. They just bought a new stereo system and wanted to hook up 14 (yes, 14!) speakers to it throughout their house, so Mr. Man went over and got them all fixed up – or atleast, fixed up “good enough”.

We received a boat load of fruit in this week’s box – which I’ll admit, I’m totally loving. Summer fruit is the best fruit, IMHO, although Miss Thing has been begging for the more ‘usual’ treats that we would have in the pre-box days, such as chocolate chip cookies, brownies, etc… in her words she “doesn’t like desserts with fruit”. Yes, I know – she’s nuts. I do think I need to get a little more creative though – I’ve gotten a little lazy lately and have used my handy Cobbler recipe pretty frequently. Which, don’t get me wrong – is Pretty Durn Delish, but it would be cool to mix it up a little bit. Although I did make a bar-cookie recipe the other day with some peaches that turned out pretty good. Unfortunately, it made so much that we had trouble finishing them all. I think next time that would be a better recipe to take to a potluck or something. At any rate, it’s definitely been a busy and productive week.

Given all the fruit we’ve been receiving, it does make me a little sad that Mr. Man doesn’t like Sweet-Savory dishes. I’ve seen a lot of recipes that call for adding fresh fruit to a salad or making a fruit sauce to serve over meat, but every time I’ve done that in the past I usually get an upturned nose and a ‘could you make this less sweet next time?’ lol. It’s not a big deal, but it definitely forces ya to be a little more creative.

The kittens are doing okay – I’m making an appointment to take them to the vet later this afternoon. They’ve both settled in and are becoming more friendly, which is great. I meant to make the appointment last week, but unfortunately things got too busy for me to fit it in. But I’ve already set aside some time this week to make sure it gets done, as well as taking in our car for some long-overdue maintenence. We still haven’t been able to come up with good names for the kittens yet – Miss Thing’s top contender is Spike & Angel (ala Buffy the Vampire Slayer), but Mr. Man isn’t too keen on that one. We’ve been watching Voyager together lately, so Seven and Nine is also a Miss Thing favorite (she’s quite enamored with the character Seven on Voyager). I’ve more or less given up on getting them to agree to Groucho and Marx, but now I’m thinking Leeroy and Jenkins (reference here) would be perfect.

Anyways, I’m thinking of including kitteh pictures as a sem-regular part of my weekly update, they’re just so durned cute. Pains in the butt to take pictures of, but durned cute. This morning they did not want to hold still or cooperate for pictures – although I managed to nab a couple of good ones. They’re such little boogers. They’ll be doing something adorable, but if I move to get the camera, they’ll stop and give me this look like “What? We weren’t doing anything.” Punks. So anyways, here you go – some only slightly-out-of-focus kitteh pics.

Yesterday, I bought one of those tracks with a ball stuck inside of it – hoping for the best, since our cat Mystery never really cared for the one I bought her ages ago when she was a kitten. Fortunately, they both seem to enjoy playing with it – the white one in particular. I managed to snag an only-slightly-out-of-focus picture of them on it today. I also managed to get the black one to cooperate for a few pictures. The black one has been very skittish since we brought him home, hiding all the time, and just generally not bonding with the peoples, so we’ve started separating them at night. After a couple of days of being in our bedroom at night, away from the his brother, he’s started developing a little more personality and settling in a little better. We’ll probably keep doing it for a couple more weeks. It’s a little unfortunate that the black one has proven to be so shy and skittish though – it means we’re having to focus more attention on just him, leaving the white with less, even though he’s the more well-adjusted of the two.

I was going to include these pictures in my Cherry Peach Crumb Bars Recipe, but when I saw how much my recipe post was being over-run by kittehs, I decided to split them up in to two posts and just link them. So if you want to see the recipe go here.

While I was laying on the floor, getting this picture, the White one decided to come and see what I was up to. I only had a split second to take the next picture, but it came out so adorable. It would probably have been even better if I’d had a fish eye lens, but I don’t have one, even if I’d had time to change lenses…

Overall, they seem to be settling in well, especially now that they’re both getting some time apart – although the first night we seperated them, the white one decided to tear up the carpet next to the bedroom door. It’s in shreds now. Fortunately, we were planning on replacing the carpet anyways – it’s stained pretty badly from the previous owner of the house. I may need to take them to the vet though – the black one has been sneezing and sniffling, and the family that was fostering them mentioned that they’ve had an outbreak of Kitteh Upper Respiratory Infection. They need to get their rabies shots anyways, so I might as well get them looked at.

Miss Thing isn’t really enjoying the daily Litter-Box Duty, but I told her maybe we’d get one of those Automatic Litter Boxes at some point, like this one. It has some great reviews, but I have to admit to choking a little bit on the $300 price tag. Kittens are expensive. lol I enjoy them, don’t get me wrong – but everytime I get a whiff of litterbox, it makes me miss our cat Mystery and how we had her trained to go to the garage door to be let out so we could keep her litterbox in the garage. In a year or so I’m hoping we’ll be able to move their litterbox to the garage, but I don’t want to do it right now – they’re just too young.

So we’ve been back from our Boston trip for a little over a week now. It’s still a process to try and get back in to the rhythym of things – and in case you were wondering, no – I still haven’t unpacked (although it’s on the list for this evening…). Mr. Man has been dropping not-so-subtle hints that he’d like me to get that done, but I’ve just had trouble getting motivated. It doesn’t help that as soon as we got back, Miss Thing started up with a new season of sports – thats for sure. Jiminy, practices every night is gonna kill me. I wish I could find another parent to car pool with, but the girl that she carpooled with last year decided not to come back. Boo.

Pretty thrilled with this weeks FFTY box though – I swear, Summer and Early fall are the absolute best times of year for me. Some of my favorite produce comes this time of year, but anyways – I wasn’t feeling well yesterday when I was unpacking and putting away all my yummy fresh produce, so excuse the less-than-stellar pictures. I just kinda laid them out on the counter and grabbed a quick picture. I didn’t really have the energy for anything else, especially since I still had to make dinner afterwards.

So this week I received:

• 1 Portobello Mushroom
• 5 Pluots
• 3 heads of Romaine Lettuce
• 2 lbs of Yellow Onions
• 1 carton of Blueberries
• 2 lbs of Tomatoes
• 1 carton of baby tomatoes
• 1 carton of Fresh Figs
• 1 lb Red Grapes
• 1 lb Bing Cherries
• 1/2 a lb of Mixed Squash
• 1 bunch of Broccoli
• 1 lb Brussels Sprouts
• 1 bunch of Dino kale
• 1 lb Yellow Beans
• 1 lb Lemon Cucumbers
• 1 lb Spinach Leaves
• 2 bunches Purple Basil
• 1/2 a lb of Sweet Peppers
• 2 lb of Peaches
• 2 lb of Necatarines

I cooked up the beans last night, along with a couple of the tomatoes that were bruised up pretty badly from transit, and it turned out really well – unfortunately, due to the aforementioned unwellness, I didn’t really take pictures or anything. But I’ll probably make it again if we get more, because it was tasty. I’ve been kicking around a few ideas, but haven’t come to any firm conclusions about what I’m going to make just yet, but I’m sure it will be fabulous, and you’ll all hear about it.

There is one other thing thats been going on thats kept me pretty busy, too that I haven’t yet mentioned. While we were in Boston, we left our ten year old cat with our good friends and former neighbors. Unfortunately, a few days before we got home, Mystery went missing. We talked with some of their neighbors, and searched the house, filled out a form at the local animal control, and unfortunately haven’t been able to find her. So after some discussion and soul searching, we decided to adopt two kittens from one of my sister’s, who is a foster mom for H.A.L.O. We’re still hoping to find our cat, and have been checking the shelter frequently, but since we were approaching the end of Kitten Season, it seemed better to go ahead and – if we find Mystery, to reintegrate her with the new kitties, than it would be to wait a whole year before getting kittens. So without further ado, let me introduce the two newest members of our family: (Names have not yet been determined)

They’re littermates, and have complimentary coloring – two adorable little boys. I wanted to name them Groucho and Marx, but Miss Thing is firmly opposed to that plan – in fact, all three of us have yet to really agree on names, and I’m sure it’s getting a little silly now – but trying to get a teenager to agree with anything is a serious pain in the butt. If I say grass is green, she’ll figure out some way to disagree with me about it. Mr. Man and I want to go with complimentary names – Tic and tack, Bob and Weave, Snicker and Doodle, that sort of thing – which Miss Thing isn’t thrilled about for some reason. She’s such a goober.

The white one is much friendlier and people orientated than the black one (so far). I think the black one is more cautious than anything else. They’re both starting to settle in, and I’ve started training them to come when called – which, you know – training cats? Not terribly easy, but they will get it… eventually. (Or I’ll die trying, damn it.) But if anyone out there has a suggestion for a set of complimentary names, I’d love to hear them! Wish us luck on finding Mystery though – even with the distraction of new Kittens, I really miss her and hope that she’s okay… although by this time I’m becoming less and less hopeful.