Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Pix
Cuteness overload, NC-17
My sis sent me a bunch of awwwww-how-CUUUUUUTE photos today — yeah, another viral email, and doubtless many of you have seen this one, too.
But I doubt your mind occupies the same gutter as mine, so perhaps these captions hadn’t occurred to you.
But all the other girls at Zeta Beta Theta practice with carrots!
Before and after
Have I pissed and moaned about our remodel? I must have at one time or another, so I’ll keep it brief here. We had a big remodel done a few years ago. We ran out of money (oh, something about our contractor going about 100% over-budget). As a result, for the last few years we’ve had plywood floors, plywood counter tops, mix-and-match exterior siding, and a variety of other weird problems — like the LEAKS. Leaks and leaks and more leaks, the main reason we remodeled when we did, rather than wait until we had enough money to do it all at once. And did the first contractor fix the leaks? Noooo.
In the last several weeks, we’ve taken a few giant steps forward. Our new contractor has replaced all of our leaky doors and caulked here and there, and the leaks are far better than they were. We won’t know until the next big storm whether all of the leaks are better, but based on the last storm, more than half of them are gone.
But the big deal, from my point of view: NEW COUNTER TOPS! WOOT! No more plywood. We’ve gone granite.
Pix below the cut.
The Filial Thirteen
My son is twelve. TWELVE! ALMOST A TEENAGER! And so I got this brilliant idea to do a Thirteen all for him. Trouble is, I did it last year, too. So much for originality. Can I come up with thirteen more memories about my son?
You betcha.
Ferrets ‘n cookies
We bought a new ferret today. Bought him used*, so he wasn’t quite as expensive as Zappa. Zappa is the darker one in the background; the new boy is in the foreground. He’s creamy white with faint dark markings down his back and tail — an inverse skunk.
Any suggestions for names? I like “Ghost,” but I’m in the minority here. Can’t think of what might work well with “Zappa.” “Hendrix,” perhaps? How about a name-that-ferret contest?
Oh, and I made chocolate chip cookies today!
I wanted to use the Tollhouse recipe, but in searching for it, I found this site, which claims to improve on Tollhouse. Suggestions I followed: I used melted butter instead of softened butter, 1 tablespoon of vanilla instead of 1 teaspoon, and 1/2 cup of oats instead of 1 cup of nuts. The melted butter made for an easier cookie dough (no sore arm from stirring), the vanilla improved the flavor slightly, and the oats were a BIG improvement over the generic Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Cookie. I like the flavor of oatmeal cookies, though, and Jake objects to nuts in his cookies, so the success of the oatmeal addition doesn’t surprise me.
Hmm. Maybe I need to run a “fatten up my family” contest — we can get readers to post their favorite fattening recipes. God knows I need to fatten up my family.
Don’t forget — live blogging tonight. Soon. My pork roast has to get up to temperature.
D.
*His previous owner took him back to the store; she was allergic to him. He’s six months old and as sweet as can be. I thought Zappa was good-natured, but this fellow is even better.
PS: Here’s something different. Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy . . . backwards.
This cracks me the hell up. And where is everyone tonight? You have to save me from myself.
Challah baloo: a contest
I wish I could show this to you in Smell-O-Vision.
Nothing smells as wholesome and welcoming as freshly baked egg bread. I use the recipe from Julia Child’s Baking With Julia, which is about as idiot-proof a bread recipe as there is. Julia’s bagel recipe also provides reliably delicious bagels. I keep kicking myself that these are the only two recipes I’ve tried from Baking With Julia; no doubt many of the others excel. I’d like to make the pumpernickel loaf, for example, except I don’t know where to find prune butter.
So here’s the contest:
1. Between now and next Sunday (September 30, at midnight), blog about baked goods and include at least one recipe.
2. In your blog, pimp this contest with a link-back.
3. Let me know in the comments to this post when you have posted. I’ll provide a link-back to your post, too, much as we do for the Thirteens.
4. If you don’t have a blog, write up a post anyway and send it to me. I’ll post it to Balls and Walnuts — and give you credit, of course. This will count as your entry.
5. The prize: need you ask? On Monday, October 1st, I will randomly choose one lucky winner to receive a copy of Baking With Julia. (If you already own it, let me know, and I’ll send you another cookbook of similar value.) You’ll need to provide me with your snail mail address when the time comes.
Per Lyvvie’s question:
6. Yes, multiple recipes/pimpages (on separate days) = multiple entries.
Any questions?
Lyvvie’s Upside Down Apple Pie Cake
microsoar: How Not to Bake Bread
sxKitten’s twofer: Toffee, Pecan, and Mango Crisp; Gingerbread
Tam makes Whatever Crisp
Jess’s Chocolate Cake
D.
Pity me.
I spent the day immersed in scenery like this.
We’re looking out across the Smith River Valley at the Siskiyou Mountains in the distance. Looking down from our trail, we can see the South Fork of the Smith River:
This looks out of focus to me, confirming I am Teh Suxx0r at photography. Must. Take. Class. (On the other hand, some photos can be blurry as hell and they still rawk.) Trust me, the Smith is so clear, you can count the stones.
Two miles hike in, two miles out, with nothing to do at our destination but soak our tootsies in one of the nation’s few unspoiled rivers . . .
GallimauFriday
Check out The Hermit’s new political vid. Davis Fleetwood hooks into an emotion I tried to explain here, but y’all thought I was talking about music or something. And I was thinking about it again this morning on the drive to work. On NPR, they were yapping about the housing crash, about how devastating an experience it is to have your house on the market right now. “I’m so exhausted,” the woman said. “I never know when the real estate agent is going to show up, so every morning, I have to Windex the windows before I go to work.”
I thought about Davis’s video, and everything snapped into perspective.
Join me below the fold for
FROGS!
ZAFTIG WOMEN!
A FRIDAY SNIPPET!
and more, because there’s always me, too.
Of Billy Goats and Heart Attacks,
Of cabbages and kings.
Good thing Jake and I went to the beach yesterday, because today, it looks like this:
It rained last night. Rained! If we’d gone out today rather than yesterday, I wouldn’t have this farmer tan, and undoubtedly Jake would have had any number of streams to dam up. Still, I can’t complain about yesterday’s weather — a true summer’s day, without the heat the rest of y’all have had to endure.
Pix below the cut . . .
Klondike
Yesterday, Dean wrote about his dad splitting wood, and I was sorely tempted to hijack his comment thread. Because it’s a funny thing, the actions we associate with our parents. Memory’s a fickle beast.
Right now, my dad is likely doing the same thing he’s doing in this photo from forty years ago: playing Klondike. I can hear him shuffle, spread, and turn cards as clearly as I can hear myself tapping the keyboard keys. When I think of my dad, he’s shuffling, spreading, turning cards. Dean thinks of his dad chopping wood; I think of mine playing solitaire.
Back then, my father could have chopped wood. He’s short, like me (though not as short as me), and used to be muscular, powerfully built. I don’t know how he kept in shape — he shunned exercise. But when I was a kid, those biceps scared the crap out of me.
I’d rather remember him chopping wood, but there he is, shuffling again. “You pay fifty-two dollars for the deck,” he says. “Aces go up, and you build upward in suit. For every card up here, you get five dollars back.” He keeps score on the back of an envelope, and he never finishes in the red.
If you asked me to give you a second memory, a second common association, it would be of the man sitting in his chair, reading a paperback or working a crossword puzzle. Yup, real dynamic. He taught high school math for many years, and by all accounts was a superb teacher. I’m sure he’d prefer to be thought of that way, but I never saw him teach. He came home tired, like all us fathers do, and to unwind, he read books, worked a crossword puzzle, or played Klondike.
I wonder what memory Jake will associate with me? I’d prefer if he remembered me scrambling around in the kitchen, fixing dinner, but he doesn’t often watch me. Maybe he’ll remember me climbing rocks with him at the beach — that would be nice, maybe even as nice as splitting wood. You know, I might even like being remembered as a doctor.
But I have a bad feeling he’ll remember me as I am right now, sitting in this chair, my legs tucked under me, futzing at my blog.
D.