Sunny afternoon with the cats
Saturday, May 13th, 2006
Archive for May, 2006
Pretty cool
Sunday, May 14th, 2006
The weekend was pretty cool.
Ez and I went to dinner with the whole family to celebrate our second anniversary (which is next Sunday) – meaning I survived 2 years of marriage – pretty cool.
I didn’t get discount tickets to go see Sting, so I guess we won’t be going, but I decided to use the same amount of money that I would have spent on the tickets to go do something fun instead – pretty cool.
I got paid for a site I made today – getting paid on time is always cool.
I managed to do ALL the erands I had for today and then some, and it’s not even 16:00 yet – also cool.
And while I was out on my errands I stopped at the optician to get my glasses fixed, and asked about clip-on sunglasses. I decided that if they cost 300 shekels or less, I will buy me a pair – turns out they cost 295 
. I ordered a pair with cool gray-blue lens. Then, with less then an hour to spare, I stopped at the hairdresser who broke a world record in quick hairdressing and cut my hair in a very flattering and cool looking style in 7 minutes (that’s SEVEN. MINUTES.), and he didn’t even charge a lot because, well, it only took SEVEN MINUTES. I was there at 15:05 and out the door by 15:12.
The sunglasses should arrive by the weekend, and combined with the new hair I might be able to fool people into thinking I’m either artistic and bohemian (if I wear my hair down and put on the sunglasses) or a professional bounty hunter (hair up, sunglasses).
Pretty cool.
A friday of 5 senses
Friday, May 12th, 2006
Sight
– Ikea, again.
– Little birds’ beautiful tissue holders. When I first saw them I thought they were lavender sachets, and now I’m getting ideas.
– Warm, sunny and great days, which I decided to enjoy so I spend a lot of the day outside, and work at night instead
Smell
– The dead body of some animal, which stinked up the whole camp that we set up for Sarai’s bachelorette party. We still had a great view, though
– Polly’s perfume on Ez’s sweater (I’d be a lot less forgiving if I hadn’t seen her wear the sweater 😀 ), Her perfume, called "Happy", is quite excellent!
Taste
– Rice with coconut milk and peas sauce at Reut’s house
– My first attempt at cooking turkey breast – diced and stir-fired with vegetables. Not bad.
– Coffee at the new branch of Arcaffe which opened in Haifa a few weeks ago. They are SUCH snobs, but the coffee is good.
Touch
– Dirt under my fingernails. I spent 10 minutes outside in the sun on Tuesday, digging in the dirt, planting Aloe Vera and re-potting Geranium. It was the most refreshing 10 minute break I had in months, I felt like I rested for an hour.
– Slimy raw chicken, which I had to pick up from the living room carpet and toss outside so many times this week that I hardly find it disgusting anymore.
– Natural alpaca yarn, being knit into the Coronet hat, frogged and re-knit for the 3rd time. I figured that something knit
from Alpaca yarn should be as perfect as possible, or at least perfect
to the level that I would wear it.
Hear
– New wind-chimes that a friend brought us this morning
Sophie, shake hands!
Thursday, May 11th, 2006
Ez managed to teach Sophie how to shake hands. Now every time she wants us to pet her on the head, she gives us her paw. It’s the cutest thing.
Click Sophie for live video action
Totally random phone pics
Thursday, May 11th, 2006
I downloaded all the photos from my phone today.. a lot of randomness has gathered there over the last couple of months!
Siamese twins at the window of the studio I used to work at
The cutest chair in the world
Neo and Sophie watch a movie
A creepy doghouse
The russian church in Jerusalem
The moon over the red sea in Eilat
A tree in Haifa at night
The neighbour’s cat checks out the camera
And a picture from today, visiting Baby L and her mom!
(a quick knitting note – I am doing quite well with knitting Coronet. In fact, I am doing so well that I have already frogged the top part twice because I made some mistakes and I want this to be a nice hat that I can wear. I intend to knit it again this evening, hopefully mistake-free this time)
Naturally
Tuesday, May 9th, 2006
Warning – readers who are squeamish about the sight of raw meat (specifically raw chicken) might want to turn back now and head over to a different site, maybe something that features cute things.
Last warning – more pictures like this are coming up.
I mentioned in a few posts this week that I’ve been switching the cats to a raw diet. This is sometimes reffered to as natural nutrition (although many people who heard I was switching my cats to natural nutrition assumed I was going to give them tofu and gave me hell about it), but is more commonly known as raw feeding.
The idea behind raw feeding is that the commercial food that we give our pets these days is basically junk food. There are many descriptions on the web of what wet and dry commercial food is made of (some more gruesome then others) but all these sites (and quite frankly, common sense) agree that commercial food is junk food. It’s like giving a person nothing but hamburgers to eat every day, and we all know what happened to the guy in "Supersize me".
Since commercial pet food is a relatively new thing, there are few tests that checked the long term results of this kind of diet – and those that did had alarming results (see the Pottenger’s Cats study as an example).
What Raw feeding basically means is that instead of the commercial diet, you give your cats raw meat (this of course works for dogs too, but I will only refer to cats here..). In order to ensure that your cat gets all the nutrients it needs, you only feed the cats certain parts of a chicken (those with good meat-to-bone ratio) and supplement it ocassionaly with internal organs and vegetables.
So much for the scientific part. In real life, it turns out that cats who got used to eating easy to chew, commerical diets their entire lives are quite surprised when suddenly forced to chew their food.
Which results in some pretty funny situations, where the cat decides that the food has something personal against said cat and tries to re-kill it.
Sophie and Neo are, in fact, so surprised by this sudden culinary change that they refuse to touch the food. You’d never think a cat would refuse raw chicken, would you? But they hardly touch it, and stick to the dry food (I’m making a slow transition, so they still have dry food available).
Laura got the hang of things faster then the others and it’s quite facinating to watch her learn to chew her food again instead of just lick it up. For the first 2 days she only licked the chicken and therefore remained quite hungry.
However, things have certainly improved since then.
I just opened a new category on the blog called "Raw Feeding", and I want to try to document the cats’ transition to raw food here.
Raw feeding – drawbacks and advantages so far:
At least in Israel, raw feeding for cats is much cheaper then commercial feeding. Feeding 3 cats raw chicken for a whole month will cost between 30-60 shekels. Feeding my cats commercial food (they eat a combination of wet and dry food) has cost me about 250 shekels a month.
It does seem healthier, too. I still hesitate to recommend it (because I haven’t tried yet), but it feels better to give the cats real meat then it was to give them that processed, smelly stuff. Additionaly, the cats learn to use their teeth and mouth again and CHEW. They say that with time, this will also solve common dental problems like plaque.
However, it’s definitly less convenient then feeding commercial food. Instead of just tossing some dry cereal in the cat’s bowl, you need to handle raw meat (which is quite yucky), give more accurate amounts, make sure that the food is balanced (and supplement it with vegetables and internal organs when it is not), and smile supportively when the cat decides that the best place to eat is the living room carpet. Because the benefits of commercial food were not even questioned until recently, there is also that terrible nagging voice in the back of my head telling me that what I’m doing is bad for the cats. The many resources on the web are useful, but also confusing, because it’s hard to tell who’s right. For now, I’m relying mainly on the information given in the Israeli natural nutrition forum in Tapuz.
Next week I plan to consult with the vet – and I hope he will be supportive.
And if not, we can always switch to more "natural" natural nutrition. Neo seems prepared.
Illusration Friday – fat
Monday, May 8th, 2006
Just a little illustration I did for a client for Easter.
Check out Illustration Friday’s new site! It’s been redesigned and looks great.
Terrible horrible no good very bad day
Sunday, May 7th, 2006
From "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day" by Judith Viorst, Illustration by Ray Cruz.
zucchini muffins
Friday, May 5th, 2006
In about an hour, I will be on my way to Sarai’s bachelorette party. Her friends have decided that what she needs right now is a trip to the north, to sleep in sleeping bags by the Kinneret (a lake) and then hike around on the following day. I found this somewhat surprising since the bride is 7 months pregnant, but decided to play along.
Now, I’m a city person. I do not like the wilderness, even if the wilderness is a small lake about an hour’s drive from my home. I like having a bed to sleep in and my own toilet.
Sarai’s friends like the wilderness. They are nature girls. They like going on hikes and seeing flowers in places other then a Powerpoint presentation. They also assume that all girls can cook.
And so, I found myself this morning making Zucchini muffins.
This followed 2 days of mild hysteria because I really hate baking. I considered buying a pie but that didn’t quite fit in with my grand "play along with the nature people" plan. I ended up in the supermarket, buying zucchinis, little paper oven-proof cups to bake the muffins in, and stuff I have never seen before like Baking soda.
How to make Zucchini muffins in 10 easy steps:
1. Wake up early enough to still be able to go buy pie if the whole thing fails.
2. Get your recipe. Roni sent me an email with her fool-proof Zucchini muffin recipe. I needed to make a double batch.
3. First step of the recipe – grate and squeeze 1.5 zucchinis. For some reason I assumed that this means 1.5 kilos of zucchini.
4. Grate and squeeze the zucchinis until herding goats in Romania starts to sound infinitly better then doing what you’re doing right now.
5. Mix dry ingredients in a separate bowl. My lack of baking confidence kicks in and I SMS Roni, just to make sure that she really meant 1.5 kilos of zucchini before I add the flour. "NO! ONE AND A HALF ZUCCHINIS!!!" I can just imagine Roni laughing as she sends me the hurried answer. 1.5 Kilos. Ha ha.
6. Mix wet ingredients in another bowl. Will someone once and for all explain to me what is the deal with everything in a separate bowl?!! it’s just all going to be mixed together eventually!! But Roni said not to play around with baking recipes, so I follow the instructions word for word. Exact measurements? no problem! Separate bowls? sure!!
7. My kitchen table now looks like this. Yes, that’s beer in the corner. It’s 11:30am.
8. Mix mix and mix. Curse baking’s harsh and unforgiving nature. Curse sleeping husband’s inability to cook. Curse own inability to cook. Curse the drain, which is now plugged with grated zucchini. Curse more.
9. Run outside to sounds of angry meowing. We’re switching the cats to "natural nutrition" (which is a nice way to say raw chicken) and I have placed some pieces of chicken outside in the balcony for them this morning. Find out that the smell of raw chicken has attracted every friggin’ cat in the neighbourhood, who are now sitting outside your balcony looking hungry. Chase cats away.
10 Go back in. Check oven for heat (if it burns your finger, that means it’s ready). Place mixture in lovely paper over-proof cups and place in oven. Wait 30 minutes or so.
Perfection.
Now I have no idea how to know if they taste good. Keep your fingers crossed.
My first cable
Thursday, May 4th, 2006
This is a braided cable. Even better, it is the band for the Coronet hat. Made of 2 strands of 100% Alpaca yarn held together. Also, it is the right size. I find it important to stress this fact because this is the first thing that I knit in MONTHS which is the right size, after 2 Debbie "I estimated the size of a 3-6 month old based on antique charts from Guliver’s travels" Bliss baby sweaters and the uCan2 Potato Sack.
Cabling is a pretty neat trick. It’s very easy and quick to learn (Dan, here’s your next project!) and the results look like you managed to teach your yarn to do tricks and jump around itself. I don’t have an official cable needle so I just used one of my DPNs, which as far as I can tell is exactly the same.
Drawback – my DPN also looks a lot like my WACOM digital pen, so I almost started to knit with the pen during the more distracted moments.
I found that the Coronet pattern called for thicker yarn then the one I was planning to use, but holding 2 strands of it together made it just thick enough. How do you hold 2 strands when you only have 1 ball of yarn? just wind it into a center-pull ball (instructions can be found in SnB) and knit both ends at the same time..
During the time it took me to knit 13 inches of cable, Dan has already finished 2 umbilical cord baby hats (well ok, maybe it took him a bit longer. But he did 2 hats in 4 days!!). I’m not sure if I’m still just impressed or if I’m already jealous.
