Did I Just Say What I Thought I Said?

Often I catch my self saying things that I never would have guessed,

A) needed to be said in the first place,

B) that I would need to be the one to say them and

C) that I wouldn’t just be saying them, I’d be yelling them.

In my first edition of “Did I just say what I thought I said?” I give you:

“Don’t dry your hotdog off on a towel!”

Note: As there is no hot dog or bath towel in this photo it has very little relevance to the above quote other than that the happily jumping girl is also the wanna be hot dog dryer.


Note: This picture has nothing to do with anything so far mentioned, I just like it.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Distorted

Weekly Photo Challenge: Distorted

On Friday Ivy didn’t want John to put her to bed, she wanted me to do it. John gave Ivy a very polite explanation of why he would be taking over the bedtime routine for the weekend.  They counted the days of the week that John worked as he pointed out that I get to put the girls to bed four nights a week while John only gets three. They talked about the days of the week some more and concluded with the fact that John would be putting them to bed Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

On Saturday night John made the get ready for bed announcement and Ivy said “But I want Mom to put me to bed.” and John patiently talked through the whole thing with her again.

On Sunday night it happened again.

On Monday afternoon John said goodbye to the girls on the way out the door and Ivy burst out with, “BUT DAD, I want YOU to put me to bed tonight!”

John laughed.

I laughed harder.

Ivy wanted to know why.

Life through the eyes of a five year old- it’s distorted.

Girl Hunter by Georgia Pellegrini (and Chukar Hunting)

This book was fine.

Woman chef becomes hunter in order to truly participate in her omnivorous life.

Pretty good stories, good looking recipes but one thing really bothered me.

The chukar.

Georgia shoots her chukar at a Texas game ranch where “…an olive brown figure rises from the left, only 10 yards in front and, crosses my path in a diagonal leap skyward.”

She who has never tasted a chukar gets her bird, and life is good. I bet she even remembers how it tastes.

I have also been chukar hunting.

It was a bit different than that.

My Dad, brother and cousin Johnny all went chukar hunting in Nevada a few years ago. After lots and lots of driving we arrived and it was beautiful.

We parked the truck down along the river.

Until I realized that I had to hike up all that beauty.

See here is the thing, the locals don’t call them “Dirty Rotten Bastards” without due cause. Chukars hang out on the side of the mountain until they see you coming, then they run – straight – up – the – mountain. When they reach the top they no doubt do a few chukar high fives before the Dirty Rotten Bastards laugh and fly down the other side of the mountain. 

I don’t run up mountains as fast as a chukar, my game vest stayed empty.

After a few days of hunting we got smarter and learned what the birds ( I mean Dirty Rotten Bastards) were flying to and we were able to set up hunts so that they flew down our side of the mountain. That sounds like it should be much better, and it was. All you had to do was stop upward movement on a 45 degree, rocky, snow covered slope, pivot outward to be facing the flying birds and then attempt to stop gasping for oxygen in the thin mountain air so as to steady your gun and get a shot off.

My game vest still stayed empty.

Then I’d watch and watch as the unscathed bastards would fly off, mark where they went down, hike back down my mountain and get ready to chase them up the next one. It was fantastic in a masochistic sort of way.

Fortunately not everyone was as bad a shot as I was and we were able to eat chukar for dinner at night.

Unlike Georgia I do not remember how it tastes.

I was so tired by the end of the day it’s possible I would have thought cardboard a delicious dinner.

Tyler (who can kill a chuckar) and dogs along ridge.

As the local mountain lion hunter told us, you go Dirty Rotten Bastard hunting the first time for fun, the next times are all revenge.

And now that I have my own bird dog and know that I have to pretend I’m training for a marathon before I leave, I can’t wait until I have an opportunity to get my revenge.

Hopefully I’ll even remember how it tastes.

Would I recommend the book? I go bird hunting because I like the hunting. Figuring out what the birds are eating, where they will be and when, watching the dogs work the field (or mountain) and maybe if I’m lucky being able to fill my game vest with something tasty for dinner. I’d rather hike up and down mountains while puzzling out how it all works with friends or family than be certain of finding game on a managed property with a guide.

The author is a hunter to find out where her food came from, participate in the harvest and cook great food. I think what she does is admirable, I think her stories are good and I’m glad she wrote a book about it, I just can’t broadly recommend it as a hunting book. It’s not my kind of hunting.

Searching for Recipes

Eating on a diet without wheat, corn, rice, oats, lamb, green beans, chicken…. it gets boring.

Really boring.

Fortunately we are starting to successfully add foods back into Clara’s diet (Hooray for tomatoes and cane sugar!) but it’s a slow process.

As exciting as tomatoes are the food we are eating is still pretty boring. Venison roast with vegetables sounds great, unless you eat it at least once a week. Poor Ivy has been begging, for pizza, noodles and dessert and so I’ve been looking and sleuthing online trying to come up with something different. Trying to do a regular Google search for recipes was frustrating. Even using different cooking websites and their recipe sorters was hard, lists of recipe names that I then had to open and double check ingredients seemed like a great idea but was tedious to carry out. Then I found Pinterest. While I’m still a little sketchy on the point of the whole thing and have no plans of creating my own Pinterest account (because what would I do with it?) I discovered you can look at things just from the Food and Drink category. There you can see pages and pages of good looking pictures of food. The brilliant part?  I can glance at a picture and make a much better quick guess if it will work than looking at a recipe name. So as long as I can avoid drooling over the oodles of lovely looking food we can’t have I have been able to sort through and find some new ideas.

We’ve tried Honey Chipotle Turkey Meatballs, which were excellent though next time we’ll be making the sauce separate on more of them, it was “too spicy” according to Ivy. Then I found Chocolate-Covered Katie and Clara friendly dessert made a more regular appearance and life was good.

Previously making dessert was more of an ordeal, we had found a good chocolate cake recipe and a few good cookie recipes, but very few quick desserts or easy snacks. Last week we made Chocolate-Covered Katie’s Cookie Dough Dip with just a few differences to make it Clara friendly.  Clara and Ivy helped me dump the ingredients into the food processor and blend it up. I opened the top, told Clara that yes she could taste it and turned to get a bowl. When I turned back she had two handfuls of it.

Needless to say the Cookie Dough Dip was a hit!

I feel I should also mention that this dip has a base of chickpeas.

I have never willingly ate more than a single bite of a chickpea containing food before.

Of course I also never had them with chocolate chips.

Chocolate, it makes everything better!

This Moment: Smile!

A Friday ritual . A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week.

A simple, special, extraordinary moment.

A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.

Pocketful of Posies, A Treasury of Nursery Rhymes by Sally Mavor

I love nursery rhymes.

Once, just after starting my blog I wrote about some of my thoughts on children’s books. You can take a quick peek here: Pick a Good One, O Best Beloved, I’ll wait while you do…

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After reading that I’m sure you know exactly why I love reading nursery rhymes to the girls but just in case you didn’t go read it I’ll elaborate.

Even the most well known of the nursery rhymes have uncommon words, (dame, contrary, posies) and once you venture into some of the other less well known rhymes you get even more, horrid, doth, stile, delve, caper, sup and comely just to name a few. We certainly don’t stop and identify each unknown word, that would be boring but Ivy will often ask if she doesn’t understand a word even if it’s in a rhyme that she’s heard many times before. I like to think I’ve got a decent vocabulary but I’m not throwing around comely and caper very often! I can’t think of a better way to sneakily expand vocabulary than through a bunch of short fun rhymes.

Since the rhymes are so fun and short both girls are starting to memorize a few (beyond Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star)  so we can now “read” together trading lines back and forth. Good for the memory and just plan fun!

Nursery rhymes, gotta love ’em!

Recently one of my librarian cousins told me about this book:

As you now know from reading my old post I say gorgeous illustrations trump even crappy writing when we pick out a book.

This book has nursery rhymes and fantastic pictures -what can I say librarian cousins are great!

The illustrations are photos of artwork made out of everything from acorn caps to beads, sewn together on felt backgrounds and populated with little handmade people. Ivy and Clara have both poured over the pictures and so have I, they are fascinating!

Would I recommend it? Yes!

Kudos to anyone who can name all ten nursery rhymes my uncommon words came from!

The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins

Sometimes when everyone raves over a new book, my stubbornness emerges and I avoid reading it.

I have no good reason for this, I’m just contrary.

After approximately 45,879 people told me to read these books I was still ignoring them.

Then it was picked as our book club book last month so I gave in.

How did I like it? I’m not sure.

On the one hand:

I was completely sucked in, couldn’t put it down, dreamed about it (mostly nightmares), lost sleep over it and got the next books as soon as I could.

On the other hand:

The main character drove me nuts in the second book and was annoying in the third.  It’s got a pretty good ick factor, nightmare inducing even. By the third book I felt as though the author was sticking with her gimmick that worked instead of branching out leaving me a bit so-so on some of the plotting. And, even though this should be superfluous, the name Peeta was fine with me until I tried to say it out loud and then every time I saw it I thought of PETA and that’s just never good.

But even with all that I couldn’t put it down.

Would I recommend it? ??????

I know that since 87,902 people told me to read this some of you must be out there.  Help me out here, would you give it a broad recommendation, or do you all just like to get me to read things that are nightmare inducing??