Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

The house still smells like curry. Yum. Why does it smell like curry? Because last night I made tasty little turkey mini-burgers (not mini-turkey burgers) with curry, ginger, garlic and cumin happiness. I used slightly sweet Hawaiian rolls instead of dinner rolls since a) I couldn’t for the life of me find pre-baked dinner rolls in the grocery store and b) I thought the sweetness might compliment the curry nicely. I was right about the latter too. I tweaked the recipe (ripped, literally, from Bon Appetit) by cutting it in half and dropping the cilantro. I think I will tweak it further by adding a bit of garlic to the ground meat instead of just to the curry mayo.

Saturday was fun and productive on several levels. I did a large grocery shopping trip. I may shop on Saturday morning more often. The customers are nicer. I chatted over rump roast with a lovely little couple. We were trying to find smaller roasts for our small households. Then another older gentleman asked me about cooking pork chops. This is so much better than the usual grocery store experience I have. No one even tried to walk off with my cart! At the checkout, I was reminded why I prefer to bag my own groceries but even that wasn’t so bad. When I got home, the Fop (who woke up feeling not quite well) was off to an event.

For some reason I decided it was time to clean out, purge and organize the major cupboard of food stuffs in the kitchen. I hauled the step stool up from the basement and dove in. An unknown amount of time later, the cupboard of doom was under control. I have a little pile of old crackers to put out for the birds and squirrels (well, mostly the squirrels).

In the grinder this morning is Kenya AA from Armeno. It came out of my French press this morning positively perfect. Some people have good hair days, I have good coffee days. This morning I am sipping divine coffee: rich enough that I know I’m drinking coffee but gentle enough for a Monday morning. There’s not even a hint of bitterness or acidity. I love my coffee and my French press.

To our left, we have the elusive Giant River Otter. Actually, they’re not elusive at all! They just move too fast for me to catch uber-cute pictures of them. They also do cute little human things with their hands. The zoo announced that they have more Baby Giant River Otters (say that 3 times fast! it’s fun!) this spring so I’ll be going back to try to catch photos of more than just their backs.

In other weekend news, I got a small snow flurry yesterday much to my great glee. It’s going to warm up later this week so some of the snow we have now might melt. Then again, the snow is packed so solid right now that it might as well be ice. I had a great time (really!) Saturday morning when I finally decided to get the snow and ice off my car. It was actually much easier Saturday than it would have been mid-week. The bottom had iced up so that it all came off my car in big chunks. For my next trick I drove out of the driveway I hadn’t bothered to shovel. I was hoping for some dramatic crunchy of crusty snow or something. Nope, the trusty Subaru drove right on top of the 3-4 inches of packed snow and ice. There are barely tire prints. I’m not sure why this inspires such glee.

Alright, now time for another round of random links. From the open tabs section of my bookmarks:

• Snow crystal photo gallery - high-res pictures of actual snowflakes. This photographer’s work was featured on the snowflake postage stamps many of us used over the holidays.
• Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique - (Snagged from Bruni) Science communicators unite! Their merit badges rock. Jon, this one’s for you.
• The Physics of Bras - A fascinating read. “Making a bra is like building a bridge…”
• The Neil Gaiman Magic 8Ball - “Do not get into an argument with the mystical and oracular ball of enlightenment. It will win.”
  

And last week’s best comic award goes to Chickweed Lane:

Scary how apt it is, no?

And now my coffee is gone, many work e-mails written, some status reports reviewed, and other miscellaneous things have been addressed. Oh, and a couple of out of date applications are now updated. Did you know that Fetch (beloved FTP client of Dartmouth alums of a certain era) now has an OSX widget as well as its standard interface? There are lots of other cool features available, but the widget is shaped like a dog bone. Jim Matthews (the mastermind behind the cute little dog) purchased the source code from Dartmouth after being on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” and started his own company. How exciting can an FTP client really be? For those of you not yet in the know, Fetch turns your cursor into a running dog while it’s uploading files. Beat that, Unix command-line ftp-ers!

tags: coffee, cooking, fetch, food, ftp, ftp clients, giant river otters, links, philadelphia zoo, political cartoons, random, snow, technology, weather, weekend, widgets, zoo