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I used to be good at making muffins. I no longer am, apparently. I haven't cared for either of my last two batches, and it's been ages since I baked. What's your favorite easy, HEALTHY muffin recipe? Please?
Thank you in advance. I just ate two dried up little blueberry muffins I made yesterday, and I really, really thank you.
We discovered the MOST amazing place yesterday on a dog outing. Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve, part of the East Bay Regional Parks, practically just behind where we live (literally on the other side of the hill from the lodge we got married in last year), it's this huge beautiful space for walkin' in.
It's an old volcano, so the geology of the place is fascinating. And were I twelve years old with a fresh, curious mind, I would have been fascinated by the igneous and the whatsamacallneous, but I am old and my brain is full of things like property taxes and flax-seed oil, so I could only walk and marvel at the view and the cute, cute dogs and remark at all these loose rocks that, hey, might be volcanic!
It was all misty and damp, spitting a promise of rain, and the green hills rolled around us. We stood on the county line, looking from Oakland to Orinda. Cows graze up there (and you can still have dogs off-leash! Yay East Bay Regional!), although we didn't see any. Clara was disappointed.
Only one bad thing happened -- we climbed to the highest point to get the best view. We stood next to a barbed wire fence and oohed and ahhed. Then I noticed Clara was on the WRONG SIDE of the barbed wire. She'd gone through a few feet away, where the fence was more open. I called her, thinking she'd come back the same way, but she's a smart border collie, and came back the most direct route, right THROUGH the fence. Her nose got stabbed, and started bleeding, rather alarmingly. We grabbed her (she didn't seem to notice anything amiss) and examined her -- it was only a puncture wound, but ohmygod, did it bleed.
It bled right into her mouth and then dripped out, onto the her white chin and the ground and made her look absolutely vicious. She ran happily ahead and greeted several people while Lala hollered, "Barbed wire! Nose! She's fine!" It stopped bleeding within minutes, and today we can't even find the damage, but it was alarming.
But blood aside, it's as close to Brigadoon as the East Bay gets. The Redwood Regional Park, Leona Canyon, the Chabot area, those areas are wonderful, but they're so full of trees that block the view (I guess some people like that sort of thing) and undergrowth that includes a ton of poison oak. Sibley is open, rolling, green, almost poison-oak free. The views are amazing. It's right behind Montclair. It's just about perfect.
It is a day off for me, and I have SO much to do. I have an acupuncture appointment (hooray!) and a meeting with the new dog walker (who trained with Cesar Millan -- no matter what you think of his methods, that man is so cute), and I'm possibly watching the godkid Dylan, and tonight we're having dinner with an Unraveled friend who is going to Venice soon and wants the scoop. Lala got new 501's that she shrunk to fit, so I sent a hot-lookin' wife off to work and then made muffins, and life is good at the Hehu house.
In my yarn/writing room, my desk sits right in front of the window, which looks out on our street. We live in a culdesac, one street south of MacArthur in East Oakland. MacArthur is a bit rough, but our little street is sweet, with good neighbors and single family houses, and the creek running behind us.
There's an old brown-shingled salmon-colored house across the street, and behind that, on MacArthur, is a church. Over that, I can see the green hill that rises suddenly above our neighborhood. We walk the dogs up there often, and from that hill, you have the BEST view of all of Oakland, Alameda, the bay and across it, from the San Mateo bridge to the Golden Gate, and all of the San Francisco skyline.
Someday I'll write about the racial lines of demarcation that the hill represents. It's mindblowing, really, from where we live in the flats, mostly black and a few hispanic families, to that hill where it goes suddenly and steeply UP for eight or nine blocks. Black families at the bottom, hispanic in the middle, and white at the top. I do not exaggerate. It is freaky and bizarre and scary and sad and astonishing, and is so vastly interesting to me that I'm only touching on it today, and then leaving it behind. Someday I'll do something with the things I think in my head about it, but this blog post isn't the time.
What I AM writing about today is what I see out my window. Arnold, our neighbor across the street, has family over. Arnold is older, and walks slowly, but is more active than I'll ever be. He takes care of the even older couple who live in the shingled house next door to him, and keeps up their lawn. He spends hours every day in his own yard, wearing a blue coverall and a newsboy cap. He has glasses and a small gray beard. He lent us his lawnmower when we moved in when he saw Lala cutting the grass with scissors. Right now he's sweeping the driveway while his nephew, the WORST parallel parker in the history of the universe, washes his car. Two younger kids have run inside -- I've never seen them before but I think they're attached somehow to the nephew.
I've watched my calico cat Adah go in and out of every yard on the block, and she's been trying to get Arnold's attention now for ten minutes, arching her back prettily and turning her paw toward him in the sun. He's busy now with a low camellia bush, sweeping leaves from underneath it and pays her no attention. She'll move on in a moment; she doesn't have time for those who Don't Pet.
Inside, I'm propped in my armchair now, still looking out the window, but now over my shoulder. Harriet is sitting next to me, watching Harriet TV out the window. Miss Idaho is sharing the space with my slippered feet on my footstool and she's wrestling with Clara. There's a lot of growling and not much action. Both appear lazy. I'm drinking green tea after having finished my muffin. This is my day off, and I plan on doing nothing except perhaps some yard work and a run to the beach with the dogs. Oh, maybe a Trader Joe stop.
Arnold just did the smartest thing: he rolled his green waste can out to the sidewalk where he'd swept up all those leaves, then he laid it on its side, opened the top and swept all the stuff in. I always use the rake and try to lift that stuff into the can, which never, ever works. Nice.
Dogs are killing each other! How fun! Harriet's going for Clara's underbelly, since really, that's all she can reach.
I'm going to drink more tea and enjoy my day off. Running every other day lately has given me the unexpected benefit of feeling like a lazy slob on the days that I don't have to, and I love feeling like a lazy slob. Oh, yeah.
I just spent all my blogging time writing over here, but that doesn't mean I don't love you any less.
In fact, it will show you how special you are to me when I admit to you that Cadbury Creme Eggs are back (Dear Reader Cheryl alerted me that they're in the Big Longs in Oakland, on the endcap; bless her heart, she told me last year, too) and that I have consumed almost three boxes so far.
Ahem.
But this: they are SMALLER THIS YEAR. The cheek! The sheer nerve, thinking we won't notice.
That only means I can eat more. Yep. And that's something I won't mention over that other site. Only to you, my ducks.
Okay, I have a knitting question that I bet you’ve NEVER read before. Or maybe you have. But I haven’t, so I need a little help here. (Warning: Poop blog ahead, Rabbitch. Turn away if it makes you weep.)
Harriet, our Queen Bee, master of all she rules, and just
about the cutest dog to roam the world on Very Short Legs, is probably about
fifteen years old. She hasn’t been well for the last year, and we’ve had some
struggles with pancreatitis and a couple of UTIs, but the right meds helped, and right now she seems to feel great.
She is, however, going a bit senile (yes, seeing the vet about that, too). Every once in a while she’ll have an accident where she shouldn’t, where she never would have a year ago. Like the car. When I take them out on walks and to the beach, she’s in the back of the station wagon with Clara, both of them sitting on a sheet I keep back there to catch beach sand, so it’s no big deal.
But the other day we had a very special brunch outing, and Harriet was a guest of honor, so we let her up in the main part of the car. She sat on the back seat and stood up and stuck her head out the window and let her cheeks flap backwards in the wind. Harriet heaven.
And then the smell. Not only had she had she pooped, but she
had walked in it a bit before we figured out the smell (we’re not as bright as
we like to tell you we are).
And she was sitting (and walking) on my sock in progress. My really cute sock, I’ll have you know. I’m fond of that sock. About three-quarters done, all poopy now.
What the HELL do I do?
I cleaned the car, but I was barely able to touch the knitting. I can handle cleaning upholstery, but for some reason, I couldn’t even imagine cleaning the sock.
Today I took out the needle (because I need it to start
another pair) and I washed it. So I have an unfinished sock, with live stitches
hanging ragged, still dirty. How do I salvage this?
I could thread yarn through the live stitches and wash it by hand.
Ew.
I could wash it by hand sans the live-stitch-save and prepare for major damage.
Ew.
Or, I just realized, I could cut my losses and throw the whole thing out (including 100g ball, which also got dirty) . Damn, that’s probably what I should do. Trouble is, I don’t remember where I got the yarn or what kind it is, because I lost the ball band. I have this cavalier attitude about socks. I always finish a pair and put them on, and then people say “Where’d you get that? What’s the brand?” and I can say, “Oh, I dunno,” because I already know I’ll never want to knit the same pair of socks twice anyway.
But I loved this sock!
Help! Poop! Poop!
Mmm. Just finished my lunch, which was an unexpected blue cheese burger. I’m at work (during the DAY!), and while I brought food to eat as I do every day, at 9am six or seven men showed up and started ripping apart the kitchen. Truly. Ripping APART. Walls, cabinets, sink, they moved the fridge into the hall and the microwave is blocking the supervisor’s office (he hasn’t seen that yet, that should be something to watch).
Not sure yet what they’re doing in there yet. We have four cabinets, one for each of our four shifts, filled with dry goods that are now on the floor in the kitchen. And they said they’ll be done by Tuesday. Today is Friday, isn’t it? This, in a 24 hour center, where we can’t leave the room during our 12 hour shifts. We kinda need a working microwave. I went in to look for salt and just gave up.
But the upside was that the cafeteria on the property was open (DAYSHIFT! I’m telling you, it’s good stuff), and we sent a technician to get us each a blue cheese burger. Which, when it came, was a bun, a burger, with some blue cheese on it. That’s it, no dressings, no lettuce/pickles/onions, even on the side. I just mushed it together, and I have to say, it was damn good.
Have you seen the Mr. Bento? I want one, soooo badly. I have $25 gift certificate to Amazon that I haven’t used yet, but I should use it for an electric tea kettle; ours finally gave up the ghost. But that Mr. Bento. Now, that’s a sexy lunchbox. (Search for Mr. Bento p0rn on flickr for some real fun, but not when you’re hungry.)
I'm tired, and happy. Have been up since 430am, and I'm loving being still awake. Really. Because soon, I get to go to bed, and it will be DARK. I love sleeping at night. All day, all twelve hours of my shift, I bounced up and down for joy. Days! Days! I had no idea I would be so happy to rejoin the day-work force.
No time for much, though. Walked the dogs. Must eat something. Perhaps a bath. Tomorrow I will fit in a run, but today, I'm a tired slob, and really, it's quite nice.
Sleep well, won't you?
Normally, I wouldn't do this, cross-pollinate the Yarn and Run of the A-Go-Go, but I have a bra confession, and it's over there.
I am better, thank you. Midnight shifts are OVER. I shall be more human again. I got some sleep. I have learned that there is possibly nothing prettier than a very black, very short dog running through tall shiny green grass on a hill overlooking the San Francisco Bay. That will improve any mood, no? As will a run around Lake Merritt, which I am headed for right now.
(Gratuitous red shot here. It's more cinnamon than red. I like it -- I forgot to keep the box, though!)
I am frustrated. I am a good completer-of-things. I get things done. I follow through. Why, then, why can't I finish a book?
I would like to finish writing a book. There. That's all I'm thinking this morning. The long novel, the 500+ page one, is within fifty pages of being done. Yes, I'm sure of it. The middle book, that's within a hundred pages. The Nanowrimo romance, that's within perhaps twenty or thirty pages of completion.
I know, of course, that these are rough drafts. First drafts. They can be changed, ripped apart entirely. I can get the ending done and redo it later. Why don't I just do it, then? Aargh.
I won Nanowrimo, which means that I wrote 50,000 words in November. See? Completion, of a sort. But the book wants to be about 75,000 words, though, which is why it isn't Done.
And so instead of sitting down daily to finish things up, I start things like Runagogo to distract myself. Wonderful, that thing has turned out to be. Scout was right to encourage the idea to have its own website. Now I'm hooked on watching it, watching people post. I'm spending time running. It's a Project, and I adore projects. I need projects.
I just want my project to be writing, you know? I'm so easily distracted by shiny things or timesaving devices or the internet or knit-design ideas or chocolate, and it's just so hard to sit down and write sometimes.
Also, I'm whiny. ONE MORE NIGHT and I'm done with midnight shift, possibly FOREVER. That is something to celebrate. Instead, I'm unreasonably irritated with my coworkers, with the temperature, with my brainwaves. My face is itchy from dryness. I want to brush my teeth. I would like to eat ice cream but I have none. I had the WORST RUN EVER today.
I have the mean reds. They're not bad, and they'll pass, but I will certainly be glad to get home and go to bed. I don't even dare knit -- I'll screw something up, and how.
Perhaps yogurt with granola will help. I'll give it a shot.
Hooray the sitting on of children! Especially cute godbabies. (Some limited knit-content to follow, but don't get your hopes up too high -- only a small baby-sweater-sighting.)
Dylan reached for Miss Idaho, over and over, and Miss Idaho kept pulling up one eyebrow and leaning backwards, pretending like nothing was happening. This was INSTEAD of just jumping off the couch and Lala's lap, which, of course, she wouldn't do.
DYLAN RIDING CLARA! I love this picture. And how patient lovely Clara is.
Seriously, when you ask your fairy godmothers to watch your son, don't blame them if they think baby-in-sink is a good photo-op. It is.
And he only learned to turn the faucet on in the very last four seconds of this sequence.
If that ain't red, I'll eat my hat. Or yours.
We went to Pt. Isabel to look at the Bay and at all the dogs. Dylan played it cool in his new Christmas sweater from Auntie Rachael and his hat which matches Auntie Lala.
Look at them, would you? I totally, like, needed to use the phone the night before, but Lala was on, like, a two-hour phone call with Dylan, figuring out what they were going to wear. I know, right? Right?
Wave 'em in the air like you just don't care.
I just got back from a run and I had a training class ALL day, and have another one tomorrow, so that is all. Ex and oh.
