Giraffe Chat

Today, I woke up thinking about Chorkies, a breed Neil claims is a mix of bok choy and turkeys, but is actually a cross between Yorkies and Chihuahuas.

And now, let's eavesdrop on giraffes. 


Gigi: Mon Dieu. Girard, you've grown up.  We'll have to find you a tall girl, and soon.

Girard: I can see you're having some trouble reaching that leaf.  Let me get it for you, Gigi. [pulls a branch down and passes it to her] A pleasure to see you again. 

Gigi: [chewing] Very kind, Girard.

Girard:  May I say, your tongue is a lovely shade of black today?

Gigi:[stops chewing] Girard? [starts chewing again] Good heavens. I was a calf with your mother. 

Girard: [stretching his neck to reach the highest leaf] Just an observation. You know I've always remembered the way you looked that day you killed the lion, that power hoof to his chest. Fierce. 

Gigi: [ ... ]

Girard: Do you know that some humans thought we were a cross between camels and leopards?

Gigi: Ha! As if my spots were that tiny! Sasha would love that.  You should tell her that.

Girard: [chewing, looking away over the savanna] I'd rather tell you. 

Gigi: Oh Girard. You and your prehensile tongue. 

Three Signs and a Woodchuck

Biting commentary on the side of a Ditch Witch in Silver Spring.
It's not often enough that signs talk about lethal digging teeth. I'm not
going to explain what a Ditch Witch is. Just think big, scary teeth,
like the monsters that live under your bed

.  

Taken at the Rock Creek Planetarium for my friend Neil
because he likes to talk about Jupiter.

I'm glad they warned me before I climbed
up to walk across the flower bed. 

Taken because he reminds me of my fat, orange cat
even though his teeth aren't as prominent.

Feline Fashion Dos and Don'ts

For the last several days, my sister Susan Daffron, The Book Consultant, and I have been attending BlogPaws, a conference dedicated to pet bloggers. Susie was a speaker at the conference as well.

We met many smart and kind people and heard them talk on topics ranging from making effective movies to social media to book publishing. I learned a great deal, none of which I'm going to share today, as a much more important issue is on my mind. 

I'm talking, of course, about Cat Fashion. 

As the Sheraton had relaxed its pet policy, we got to meet all kinds of furry critters out with their humans. Many happy dogs, a couple of ferrets, and at least one guinea pig attended the event, as did several cats. One of them impressed me with his easy charm amidst all the hubbub. 

Meet Marcel, the Fashion DO:

Stripes add a bit of fun.

Marcel is, bar none, the most fashionable cat I've met.  Although the photo makes him look ceramic, he is a real live kitty, and he pulled off a beret without so much as an irritable flick of the ear. Paired with the traditional striped top, he was a joy to behold.  As a representative of a hairless breed (great for people with allergies) he advocated well for his feline brethren. 

Inspired by Marcel's fabulousness, when we got home, we discovered that PetSmart had given us samples from their Martha Stewart collection. Long suffering Leo (who you may remember from the Cats in Antlers post) was nominated as model.

Leo, Feline Fashion DON'T:

Leo: "I'm too sexy for my shirt."

A few notes for the older feline fashionista:
-- You're no longer a kitten; the size you wore in high school will no longer cover your gut.  If you try to wear that size, you will look like a sausage exploding from its casing.
-- Sequins are a difficult look for most men over the age of one to carry off.
-- If you are not, perhaps, blessed with perfect proportions, do not emphasize your imbalances by visually chopping them up.
-- Minnie Pearl is gone; remember to remove your tags
-- Much as we love the Jolly Roger, the pirate look has come and gone.  Stay abreast of change. 

Martha has a paw in everything

Culinary Arts #1: How Not to Bake a Cake

1. Turn on oven to preheat.
2. Open cake mix portion of Boston Creme Pie Mom sent you for your birthday and toss it in bowl.
3. Add butter that you actually remembered to take out of the fridge yesterday to soften. 
4. Carefully measure amount of milk into 2/3 cup scoop. Review instructions, realize it should be 3/4 cup. Guestimate and throw in more milk.
5. Crack eggs and add to mix. Extract shell pieces from bowl. 
6. Get mixer, attach beaters, and place them in bowl. Watch one beater immediately fall off into bowl. Swear. Extract beater, rinse it off, and thoroughly affix it to mixer. 
7. Test mixer for beater security while by turning it on over the sink. Forget that other beater still has cake mix on it, so cake mix goes all over shirt and window over sink. Shriek. Turn off mixer. Swear. Giggle. Mix ingredients. 
8. Grease 8 inch pan with butter. Realize you don't have flour to cover butter. Decide this doesn't matter.
9.  Add batter. Throw cake in oven and set timer.
10. Custard filling: Over a new bowl, crack an egg and toss yolk back and forth between shell halves letting white fall into bowl. Feel like real cook separating eggs until you realize recipe calls for yolks, not whites. Throw whites from bowl into sink and put yolk into bowl. Successfully manage to put right part of 2nd egg into the bowl. Add milk.
11. Add whisk attachment to mixer being sure to affix beater securely. Mix contents.
12. In small saucepan, add custard filling mix and egg/milk mix. Stir over medium heat. Mop up liquid that sloshes out. Stir more slowly. 
13. When custard starts to gel, stir for one minute, remove from heat and let cool. Do happy dance that it tastes and looks right.
14. Wander around and wait for cake to cook.
15. Smell burning cake.
16. Check timer (ten minutes early!). Peek in oven, watch smoke pour out and and see that cake is now overflowing out of 8 inch pan. Refer to directions and note that it calls for a 9-inch pan.
17. Close oven door. Swear.
18. Open oven door, fan smoke away and delicately scrape overflowing edges of cake so they fall on the oven floor. Note increase in smoke. Get spatula and scrape cake scraps off oven floor onto kitchen floor. Sweep kitchen floor.
18. Pray smoke alarm does not go off.  Rejoice that windows are already open.  Open them wider.
19. Catch one piece of oozing cake before it falls off pan and taste. Tastes like cake! Frivolously choose to believe cake is still salvageable. Close oven door and let it keep cooking.
20. Be pleased that smoke seems to have dissipated.
21. When timer goes off, check cake. Note that it is still gelatinous in the center. Reset timer for another 5 minutes.
22. Check cake after 5 minutes and see it is still not done. Consider that oven was probably not preheated when cake was put in.
23. After another ten minutes, cake bounces back from light finger touch. It's done! Remove from oven and let cool for 10 minutes as instructed.

Scary cake fail.

24. Attempt to remove cake from pan. Realize flour probably was important, as much of cake is still stuck in pan. 
24. Scrape out cake crumbs. Consider making them a layer. Decide that, no, anemic, squishy little cake still needs to be sliced in two for two layers. Slice cake so bottom crumbles but top stays somewhat intact. Add crumbled layer to crumbs scraped from pan.
25. Add custard layer on top of crumble layer.
26. Try to add cake top without breaking it. Fail. Try to arrange crumbles artfully. Fail. 
27. Open chocolate icing package and note the contents is totally insufficient to cover a pristine cake top, much less serious cake sins with which you are currently faced. Hope anyway.

Yummy tart

28. Use knife to spread icing. Tear up cake even more. 
29. Stare at cake and think, well? Maybe? Put it under Saran wrap and put it in the fridge and hope it looks better. 
30. Take it out of fridge and note it does not look better. Consider that it may still be undercooked. Think about salmonella poisoning.  Put it back in fridge. Refuse to throw it out because the filling tastes good. 
30. Go to store. 
31. Buy gorgeous summery fruit tart. 
32. Take pretty, store-bought food to bbq.  Eat well sans salmonella. 

Why I Like to Drive

If you fly, you don't get to see all the roadside randomness which is America.

For instance, from 10,000 feet, you wouldn't get to see the Suwanee Belle, a riverboat decaying off Interstate 78, far from any water.

Suwanee Belle, resting on the lawn near the
Riverboat Saloon

Large water wheel; no water.

Slow decay

Where exactly in Pennsylvania, you ask?  Here, this landmark will help you find it:

Large advertisement for Roadside America (the largest known miniature village)

Maybe this is what the sign refers to when you stop at the Pennsylvania Visitor's Center and they provide this helpful advice:

Billboards Seen Driving to Bread Loaf

Floyd the Dashboard Frog
playing with Almost Dorothy
Photo credit: Neil de la Flor

The Poem:

Billboards Seen Driving to Bread Loaf

We’re almost out of the South.
Triangle Waffle House specializes in

ham & eggs.
Lens cap cover on.
Thousands of Wigs! Hairpieces, Wigs!
Trailer hitched to pickup tilted off the highway.

Welcome to Johnston County. Olde South billboard, decaying.
It’s metaphor, you said, and, I want to see a civil war battlefield.
Ava Gardner Museum.

How’s your coffee? It’s tea.
Vermont will have windy roads. With cliffs.
Enough that you could kill yourself,

but most people don’t
worry about their fear of bridges.
We switch drivers.
Drink tea.
Read poetry: Maureen’s, Dean's, Mr. Breadloaf.
A Sign reads, "Elephants."

We’re near the home of Smithfield Hams.
A poem with repetition: where are my wigs?
An overheight detector.
A Bible factory outlet.
Bentonsville Civil War battleground .
Want to go?

No!

-- Neil de la Flor & Cyn

The Process:
The summer after our first year of graduate school, Neil and I journeyed up from Florida to Vermont so he could attend Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and I could help my mother move in Maine. Digging through old files last week, I found a random list of one-line typo-ridden notes. I dimly recall typing them one day while riding shotgun with my laptop as we headed north. The goofy tidbits brought back travel memories -- Neil is great fun on the road, just remember to feed him every three hours -- and so I emailed the mess to Neil to begin refashioning: time for a poem. We trimmed words down and rearranged and added a smidge, and voila!, a conversational vignette on travel and friendship and how very weird the South can be (wigs!). 

Neil wanted to make a sonnet, but I apparently can't count syllables or delete (hey, my degree is in fiction for a reason), so perhaps we'll try that next, chug along with something else. 

My point is not to say, Woohoo! High Art right here! More that, unlike the Important Poems you may have had to memorize so you could recite them too quickly with no feeling and sweaty palms in 8th grade English class, formal is just one approach to wordsmithing. Another is collaborating with a friend to create an oddball trip souvenir.

Sale!

I thought it was only legal to sell your Hoohah in Las Vegas. 

Perhaps the Purple Haze in the Hookah Cafe limited their proofreading skill.

Fast, Fresh, Cheap

Fast, Fresh, Cheap = Smoking Bulldog. Sure, that makes sense, at least it does in the airport in Charlotte, North Carolina. Oddly, this isn't the first time I've taken a picture of a smoking dog. There's a cafe in Paris called Au Chien Qui Fume. 

I missed a couple of great signs here today in Florida, in the interest of actually getting where I was supposed to be.  I hope to catch them tomorrow though, assuming I can get lost in the same general vicinity. Quirky tends to flourish in sunshine under palm trees.