Butt in the Mail

 Butt in the Mail 

I received butt in the mail.

....

It wasn’t just a butt, it was cat butt. I don’t know if a friend mailed it to me or if I kickstarted it and forgot about it.  I do know that this might be the strangest unexpected item I have ever received in the mail.  I feel like if a friend did send it, I need to bump of my mail game. 

Of course my brain goes not overdrive with this mystery. Is this cat butt a coded message?  Is really saying “my  dear, you’re a rear” or  “enjoy this piece of tail in the mail?” I can name at least half a dozen people that could be the culprit.  Some of them being family and coworkers. For all I know this could be an invite to bake cookies.

 I don’t know the cat butt origin and maybe it is best that way. No culprits for the kitty cutter have been forthcoming, but I know that if I was to send one in the future I would be cackling to myself the entire time it was in the mail. So, if you are the person that is responsible, I salute you.  You have literally made my day and confused my husband.  Thank you! 

Cat Hobby

 It is nice when you can share a hobby with someone. It gives you something to bond over and a feeling of companionship.  Dib and I share the same hobby of sewing. He is might not get all the technical aspects down, but he is excellent at holding the fabric down and inspecting the work.  (And if you want me to be completely honest, he can be a complete menace.)

Here are a couple of sewing projects that have the special Dib touch to them. 

Ice Cream Failure

 

This is a little bit of a convoluted story about ice cream and failure.

This story starts with my mother in law giving me a recipe. She had acquired this recipe from a friend and is raved as a no fail bread recipe with only two ingredients. I thought it would be a great recipe to try and a wonderful excuse to buy a half gallon of ice cream. My thought process would be that I would make the ice cream bread and tell my dad about the wonderful uses for ice cream other than just eating it.  That was my plan.  Eat ice cream, try a new recipe for bread and pick on my father and report back to my mother in law on my success.

I really want to say that I executed the plan flawlessly. If I bragged on this as a success and smirked over my kitchen prowess, then know that I was utterly lying. I totally bombed on this.  I think  the fault lie with the ice cream. I thought it would sounded wonderful to have chocolate peanut butter bread. That it would be great to make into French Toast.  There is one thing that I failed to consider with Chocolate Peanut Butter Ripple, is that there is literally ribbons of peanut butter in the ice cream.  Cold peanut butter is stubborn. It does not like to mix and will not unclench its might grip in even melted ice cream.  Trying to get the chilled peanut butter to relax and mix with flour is a  nightmare that I would not wish on my worse enemy.  Once I had everything incorporated I popped it in the oven in a loaf like shape.

In all honesty it looked like I giant brown turd.  It did not look appealing and sadly it did not change into any sort of shape while it baked. It wen tin the oven looking like a turd, and it came out of the oven looking like turd. This was not the easy kitchen victory that I had anticipated. It was the anthesis of that.  My husband, the supportive champ that he is, shave me is best Paul Hollywood impression and let me know it was under proved. 

I had thoughts that perhaps I could salvage this experiment and then write I heart warming tale about over coming adversity and try to tie it into a moral or child hood lesson I learned from my father.

My glorious idea to salvage it, was to first slice it up, so it no longer looked like a turd. The second part was to bake/toast it to be like a biscotti and maybe put a little bit of fudge icing on it. Everything is better with fudge icing on it. Except it isn’t. It still tasted like stale ice cream, except now it was dry and the fudge icing made it really obvious that the bread was lackluster.  It was not what I was trying to accomplish and was a rather embarrassing kitchen failure. 

Sometimes things just suck. There is no way to make it not suck. Sometimes you just have to accept that and keep moving. On the bright side, I had still had ice cream. 

Random Thoughts

 It has been a while since I last wrote anything.  Most of the time the words won’t come out of my head or I am distracted by random thoughts.  

One of the most soothing things that I do is sew. My fabric addiction is becoming well known and my Pinterest board of inspiration is a little out of control. Sewing lets me think and not think at the same time. 

Here are some of the random thoughts that have come to pass:

• The Room of Requirement in Harry Potter is the wizard equivalent of the Holodeck in Star Trek.
• There should be a pizza donut for people that want something savory as an option in the donut box. 
• My cats stripper name would be Eviscerator
• Why don’t more people use the metric system
• In zombie movies they use wooden planks and plywood boards to block the windows and doors. Is part of being and adult mean keeping extra wood and plywood in the event of a zombie outbreak?

What are some of the random thoughts that you have?

May Movie List

I keep thinking that I will discover a theme an underlying theme when reviewing the list of the previous movie viewing pleasure; however a theme seems to escape me.  The genre is all over the place. There isn’t an particular decade we stuck to, and certainly not an actor or actress.  I suppose a  loose theme would be  Repeats. Not necessarily a repeat on the list, but more of movies I have seen at least once prior to this year.

May Movie List

• Capitan Kronos Vampire Hunter
• Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance
•  The Protector
•  Cast a Deadly Spell
•  The Abominable Dr. Phibes
•  Mr. Sardonicus
•  Lethal Weapon 3
• RoboVampire 
• Aliens
•  Straitjacket
•  Dogora The Space Monster
•  I Was a Teenage Wereskunk

 How many of theses movies have you seen?

 

Calico Ghost Town

Sit right back and you will hear a tale. A tale of a fateful trip. It started...  Okay, that may be the beginning of Gilligan’s Island and my trip wasn’t fateful, but like most of the episodes of Gilligan’s Island it was at the very least interesting.  

In fact the adventure that I am thinking about is no where near boating or water and take place in Calico Ghost Town.  When I was a young lass, my mother took me camping at Calico Ghost Town and I distinctly remember the Camp Ground Keeper warning us to never wander into any of the mines, because our bodies might not be found and to always dump your shoes before putting them on, because scorpions liked to hide in them.  Needless to say, we only camped there once and the place left a lasting impression on me, because anytime I am in the desert, I constantly think about scorpions and death by scorpions sting.

 

Now, lets fast forward at least a decade and the urge to go back to Calico Ghost Town strikes me.  I have a love for caves, and what is a mine but a man made cave?  Or at least that is the thought running through my head when I cajole my dear father into a drive to the desert.  When we get there, the town is nothing like I remembered.  Which was wonderful. It was one of my favorite things ever, a roadside attraction with a historical flair. Yes, there were mines, but there was so much more.  The town catered to tourists of a family nature, and there were enough activities to keep young children entertained while receiving a brief history of mining and life on a new frontier.  Pretty much everything my dad could roll his eyes at and humor me on was there, whether that was to dress up in old times clothes for pictures or to ride a train that pointed out the history of mining and the area or walk through the Mystery Shack.  

While most would say that it doesn’t do any good to go down memory lane, sometimes it is just what is needed.  I appreciate the time I went as a small child and the fear of scorpions it provided, but I also appreciate go back and seeing how things can change in a positive way an created new memories.

Opossum Lake

It is Mother’s Day, so it would only make sense to talk about a time my mother may have tried to murder me. Or this is a story about me exaggerating the events of a Sunday morning. 

My mother loves to read murder mystery and detective novels.  When I was a surely teenager I remember us both burning through Sue Grafton  and Mary Higgins Clark novels. After reading so many novels there becomes a check list of things that look suspicious when they happen in real life.

It was a beautiful Sunday morning. The birds were chirping and there a was that relaxed feeling in the air. This in itself should be suspicious, because only cliched mysteries start with, “It was a dark and stormy night...”.  On that beautiful Sunday morn, my mother drove me out to a remote spot in the woods by a lake.  Yes, this is where all the warning bells should be going off. There is a reason why there are so many horror movies with grisly murders that happen near lakes and in the woods.  It is really easy to “lose” a body in the woods and is not exactly easy to comb a lake.  Check off another box on the murder list.

Arriving at the destination my mother casually mentioned that the lake was recently refilled and stocked with fish.  Is there a more menacing name for a lake than Opossum Lake?  Literally, opossums play dead.  If we were in a murder mystery, the killer would play dead and then strike.  The refilled lake in some of the off shoots there are at least a dozen or more feet deep there are trees that have poke out of the water like grave markers.  It isn’t a stretch of the imagination to picture a body tied to at the base of the tree.  I am sure this is at least three more check boxes on the murder list. 

Mentioning of the concern for bodies under the water and I am reminded that fish have just been stocked.  Fish eat everything.  Any evidence of my presence would be quickly remove by nature if worse came to worse.  More items for the murder list.  How does our hero escape this dastardly plot of  mayhem?  Easy I talk my way out of it. With careful consideration and the knowledge that I was in charge of putting her in a home when she becomes old and infirm, she let me live another day.  It was a close call, or at lease it was by this account of the story.

By now, my mother is reading this and rolling her eyes.  The non murder themed sequence of events, is that it was a beautiful day and we went kayaking in the newly refilled lake, where I spent half the time worrying about tipping the kayak and drowning by being tree that was poking out of the water and her laughing at me for being ridiculous.   So, it wouldn’t have been a murder, but more of an accidental death that didn’t happen.  I am sure my mother is now wondering if she dropped me too many times as a child if a simple day of kayaking turned into an attempted murder.  

Happy Mother’s Day!