The Omnivore's Hundred

Here is a meme from Very Good Taste, called the Omnivore's Hundred.

Here’s what I want you to do:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

Bold I've had, Italics I would not consider.

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper (I am smarter than this)
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear (there are actually some growing not too far from the house, I should go pick some today)
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal (I do not like burgers)
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant. (like I have that kind of money!)
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Update on Maggie & Heed

I thought I'd post this right quick, since I was looking over the archives and realized that I hadn't said anything about Maggie since that last post about her growling at Heed. Since that post sounded dour, and things in fact are awesome, I thought a little update was in order.

Maggie is doing great. We still make her work for her rewards, and she is listening to us and learning words and signals very well (like walk, wait, and come). We are learning what her different moods mean, what different sounds in the house mean when we are not in the room with her (for example, the sound of paws on the kitchen table is now clearly identifiable), and we're getting the hang of how much exercise she needs to have to keep from going stir-crazy. She has lost weight, maybe as much as 3 lbs, which doesn't sound like much until you see the before and after photos. It's about half of what the vet recommended she lose, so that's pretty awesome.

She is much more affectionate towards us now, and shows a lot of personality. She's lost pretty much all her food aggression so far as I can tell - her and Heed drink water out of the same bowl, and once she figured out that Heed has no interest in her food aside from smelling it, she stopped growling at him about it. They not only tolerate each others' presence, they interact, curling up on the same couch cushion for a nap, touching noses, and when Heed has his fugnuts-o-clock race around the house, Maggie is right behind him, trying to initiate a game of will-you-freaking-chase-me-already. She still doesn't have a big interest in toys, but will occasionally romp around with her squeaky hedgehog or the mysterious lime green mittens that turned up in the living room and no one remembers where they came from. They are ugly and fit for dog chewings.

She still sleeps in her crate at night, so Hastur and the Library Overlord totally lost a bet there, though they were right that I do feed her more people-scraps than I probably should. She doesn't get them every day, or every week, and she has to lay on the floor and wait for me to bring the food down to her nose and THEN wait for me to say 'Okay', but she does get them. We've even given her treats around other dogs and had her do tricks and not show any aggression, so that's awesome. We need to get ahold of her foster-mom, though, because I lost my phone at a wedding like a month ago (seriously, so many weddings) and we still need to get the paperwork all done up in our names. I wonder if it's rude to just drop by?

Heed is still Heed. He sleeps on you, or near you, or if he picks a really uncomfortable spot instead of you, and he's gained back some of his weight again - I'm eyeballing him at around 18 lbs, so he's gained about what Maggie's lost. People always tell me that he must be a really fat cat to weight so much, and you know, he IS fat, but we compared him and the dog, and from shoulder to butt they're just about the same length. Heed is shorter by a small bit, and he's about half as wide, but he's still essentially a beagle-sized cat. Living with him, it's odd for me to see normal cats, because they always look so small. He still won't go to bed until I do, so I think I'll let him get on that.

Truly Reversible Entrelac Scarf!

So, I started spinning my Mediterranean batts from Loop! on Etsy, and fell in love hard. Like, really really hard. I sampled like 25 grams of 3-ply light fingering weight yarn from it (navajo plied, of course), and have since been alternating between spinning up more singles, and furiously swatching with my sampled yarn, trying to get a fabric that didn't look like ass.

First I tried lace. 3 ply, too round, poor pattern definition. Then I tried the start of the Clapotis - which worked, but I got bored like 20 rows in, so not so much. I pondered tiny cables, but then I've already got my Irish Miss scarf going on zeroes, and there's only so much patience I have for tiny cabled scarves. Plus, with the color pooling, it would look like ass. I pondered some more.

Today I tried some entrelac, on a whim. I like entrelac, it's surprisingly amusing to work and the front side looks very impressive. The back side, though, looks like ass. Not only like ass, but like crazy asymmetrical ass, which instantly withers the impressed stares of passers-by (and you know I loves me some impressed stares of passers-by).

So I got thinking. Entrelac. Reversible. Entrelac. Reversible. Ribbing? Would ribbing work? I did a quick search on Ravelry, and yes, someone has done an entrelac scarf in ribbing, and it is reversible... but it kinda looks like ass. Each of the squares draws in towards the middle (like ribbing does), but the ends flare because of the picked up stitches. In short, the squares are, well, NOT.

So, I got fiddling. In the end, I worked up a pretty simple solution for the whole pulling problem - don't pick up so many damned stitches. If you have a square of 16 stitches, pick up eight, then increase in each stitch as you knit them (you should also twist the picked up stitches, to prevent holes, but that's what I always do when picking up stitches so I don't know if that's like special instructions or not). If you do that, you're picking up about the same width of fabric as you'll get with your ribbing, which is pretty damn awesome in my opinion. So, yeah, I'll be finishing my little 25 gram reversible entrelac swatch, and hope to post pictures. I may even write this up as a PDF and post it as a free Ravelry download.

I Fail Hard at Tour de Fleece

Yeah. That's what I did there. I spun the Sedona merino all to singles, then navajo-plied about half of it (and immediately started playing with it to the exclusion of all else), and I spun one of my eight ounces of the Plum Possum. One. And that's it. So I fail hard at Tour de Fleece.

I did, however, order some Tagua nut slices, and some whole ones as well. Tagua is also called "vegetable ivory", because while when fresh it is edible and has the consistancy of jello, when it dries it is very, VERY similar to ivory. It has a grain to it, it cuts easily if you know how to cut things, and it's really, really pretty. So I got those in today, dug the dremel out of some boxes, and went to town.

I ended up making two tatting shuttles out of two of the four slices I had ordered. They're both teardrop shaped, though one has channels reaching towards the tip of the shuttle, and one has channels going straight out to the sides, and the one with the channels going up keeps catching on the ring thread, like every stitch, so I'm scrapping that plan and chalking it up to a learning experience. Since that one's "spare" now anyway, I doodled a little bit with some henna on it, so we'll see if that takes at all. If this is something that works out, I may start making them fairly regularly, and putting them on etsy. If there's even a market for this kind of thing. Do people still buy tatting shuttles, even? I know I hadn't hardly touched mine since I started knitting.

Anyways, that's all the news for now. The Sedona yarn is destined to become a few of Hansi Singh's patterns (octopus, squid, garden snail, maybe Nessie), and if all turns out well, I should grab a few pics of a hand-carved, hand-hennaed tatting shuttle!

I Love Navajo Plying

It is so true. So, today I was on Ravelry, reading the forums, and someone linked to a YouTube video about how to do Navajo plying - which, if you're not familiar with it, is a way of making a 3-ply yarn out of ONE bobbin of singles at a time. I had always heard it described as "making a long crochet chain, and adding twist". Now, I ask you - if that's all you know of Navajo plying, doesn't it seem like doing just that - crocheting a chain, then going back and adding twist - should work? And yet it does not. I could not figure it out.

Well, as the video clearly shows, there's one bit of information missing in that sentance. What you do, is you make a long loop and grab the free end of the yarn, like you're going to do a crochet chain, only instead of tightening it down into a chain, you slowly allow twist to go into that loop-and-end piece that you're holding. Having a loop means you're working with three strands at a time, then when you reach the end of your loop, well, you just pull that free end through some, to make another big loop! I tell you, a lightbulb went off in my head when I saw it. Ihad to do it. As soon as I got home.

And so I did, with one of the 2oz bobbins I've spun up of the Sedona roving. It does mean that I'm working with mostly one color at a time, now, instead of plying them together than I had planned, but I don't care. It's beautiful. It's the most even, lovely yarn that I have created. It ended up a light fingering weight yarn, and reminds me of nothing so much as the base yarn for Lorna's Laces. It's still definately thicker in some spots more than others, but overall I'm very pleased. I think I'm'a make me some socks.

Tour de Fleece!

Today was the first day of Tour de Fleece, and I for one find that exciting as all get-out. I've fired up the Babe, and spun maybe a half-ounce of merino hand-dyed in the Sedona colorway by Freckle Face Fibers (she's on etsy, check her out), and then in the mail today came the merino-bamboo roving I ordered from Fat Cat Knits (colorway Plum Possum, also on etsy - I loves me some etsy). I'm almost insanely excited about the Plum Possum. There's a half-pound of it, so I'm going to try and spin it up a little thicker than I normally do, and hopefully 3 or 4 ply will make a DK to worsted weight, because I saw this awesome sweater on Ravelry that I really want to make with it:

*NOTE: THIS IS NOT MY PICTURE, CLICK TO GO TO POCKET FARMER'S FLICKR PAGE*

*NOTE: THIS IS NOT MY PICTURE, CLICK TO GO TO POCKET FARMER'S FLICKR PAGE*
Words. They fail me. Her sweater is based off of the Cobblestone sweater from IK, but in my opinion is much nicer - from what I can tell, those wonky garter ridges down the sides are gone, the yoke ends at a much nicer place for people with boobs, and the use of color is just fabulous. So, of course, I'm going to shamelessly steal her idea :) This will be my first sweater since the Stupid Bobble Top (was that two years ago? holy crap!), and I think I've learned a thing or two since then. I'm hopeful

So, let's formalize this, shall we? My Tour de Fleece Goals:

1. Spin ALL of the Plum Possum roving (8 oz)
2. Finish spinning the Sedona roving (~2.3 oz?)
3. Finish spinning the Sandstone roving for the Irish Miss scarf (~1.7 oz?)

And since I'm a firm believer in extra credit, these goals would be nice to reach, but I won't be as sad if they have to happen later:

4. Ply and set the Sandstone yarn, same as the first two batches.
5. Ply the Sedona yarn, 3 ply
6. Ply the Plum Possom yarn, sample 3 ply and 4.

Et Tu, Obama?

So I saw on Bitch Ph.D today that Barack Obama doesn't think mental distress is a good reason for an abortion, and I have to say, I'm pissed. It's a slightly-documented fact around here that I vote my Uterus - basically, for whoever I feel is most likely to leave it the hell alone and protect the rights of others to have theirs left alone as well, so that the women attached to said uteri, knowing their individual lives as I never will or can, can make their own damn decisions about their own damn plumbing. Obama had a pretty good record so far of being pro-choice and protecting women's rights, and I really really liked him for that. So this? It makes me want to bang my head against a wall.

Interestingly enough, reproductive rights is something that Mr. Sweetie and I were talking about earlier today (happy July 4th, right?). He was pissed because of an interview he'd heard on overpopulation, and how the arguments being used were entirely too focused on how the poor/brown people/3rd world countries should stop having so many babies already! He was especially ticked at how people who ARE poor/brown/not from around here get so much crap whenever they do have children, as if just because the current mismanagement of resources is mismanaged, they are horrible people for becoming parents - specifically, he was mad at how it's not the people having kids that is the problem with world hunger et all, but the sharing of resources into the hands of the few. When folks start saying that poor people shouldn't have so many children, they should be saying, 'what can we do to alleviate poverty?' When folks start talking about how people in 3rd world countries should stop having babies, they're often afraid that these people, often giving US vast amounts of their labor and resources, might actually start using those resources for themselves, which of course Would Be A Bad Thing For America. And when folks say that brown people shouldn't be having babies, well, then they're being racist fucks and should shut the hell up for a whole horde of reasons.

So this got us talking about how the Right to Choose is the Right to CHOOSE FER CHRISSAKES, and how that does include the right to become a parent, if *you* think that *you* are able to bring up a child to *your own* standards. We talked about the single-child policies of China, the male hormonal birth control pill that is going through the FDA right now (he would be fine to take it, he says, but I would rather he not be in that first wave - new drugs often have bugs to work out that the smaller sample sizes just don't catch), we talked about surgical sterilization (we agreed that if one of us were to do it, it should be him, since it's less expensive, less invasive, and he's not the one terrified of surgery), and then we talked about things that are a little more difficult.

I have depression. This is something I choose to be open about, even though I'm able to hide it fairly well when I want to (for example, while at work yesterday, when I had a really bad episode that had me on the verge of tears for like 6 hours and only Mr. Sweetie and the Library Overlord knew what was going on), because I think that it's important that people be able to talk about these things. When it comes up in conversation, I fucking converse.

I have depression. Mr. Sweetie knows this, better than anyone other than me, and especially he's aware of how, were I to become pregnant, my depression could become a serious problem. I would *like* to raise children, one day. I am OK with adopting them, because there are tons of kids who need homes, and I would especially like to adopt twins (open adoption, get to know the mother, if she's young help her out as much as we can, always be upfront with the kids). If Mr. Sweetie and I concieved unintentionally, I would probably prefer to keep it, but I would want to start going to psych evals like right away please.

If I was pregnant, I would try to bear the kid to term. I would try really, really hard, to manage my depression, to overcome my insanely strong childbirth phobia, and to generally do right by the parasitic lump of cells filtering my blood for nourishment because I chose to turn to my husband rather than my vibrator at a given instance. I would try.

But you know what? I could still fail. I could succumb to depression, to my fears, to my mental discomfort, and it would be within my rights to take the bus to Planned Parenthood and un-have me one child. Mr. Sweetie acknowledges this, because he knows me, and he loves me. And because I know him, and I love him, I understand that were that to happen, it would be well within his rights to be hurt by this. It's no small thing, to be planning for a child, and then not. It's the kind of thing that can strain, or break, a marriage, and we both acknowledged that today, driving to Houston to go hang out with some friends. My mental discomfort with pregnancy could potentially end our relationship.

So it's no small thing, Mr. Obama. Not to the people involved.

Yowee

Well, I did it again. Tendonitis. This time, my right hand is cold and tingly, especially around the fingertips. There's cramps up to the elbow, and occasionally beyond. Heat helps, as does medicine, but damn it's inconvenient. I suspect it's a combination of working on the computer 8 hours a day, then coming home and playing WoW for a few hours, before finishing with a night of spinning. Yeah. That's probably it.

Mostly I'm blaming World of Warcraft. I mean, if those folks at Blizzard hadn't put their danged Fire Festival at the same time as I got interested in spinning again, we wouldn't be having this sort of trouble, now would we?

I've been thinking of doing something different with the blog these past few days. I know this is a knitting blog, but to be honest when you're working on only one or two projects that are on tiny yarn and tiny needles (hello, Irish Miss scarf!) and your camera doesn't work for shit (still can't find that damn connecter cord), words are all you got. So I got thinking, around the time that I did the zombie post - writing fiction is fun! So maybe I should post some of my fiction here? All I've really got on me right now is my NaNo Novel from last year - would folks be interested in seeing that up here? I warn you, it's not edited AT ALL, and in my opinion it should get off to a much quicker start than it does, but I like it. It's 50,000 words, but that doesn't include all of the story. When I got to certain parts, I'd have to actually WORK on it, to make it go. It might be good practice, it might just be fun to do. Anyone interested?

As a teaser, here is the excerpt I posted last year:

Spookworld
an excerpt

TUESDAY

Dr. Phillip Jennings scratched a flea in his beard. The sweet smoky smell of beans cooking over an open fire comforted him, and he leaned back against the concrete and lumber contraption he called home. It was nice living here, under the Bryan River bridge, not a care in the world. Once or two hours a week he’d go into town and help the poor little engineering majors with their homework in exchange for canned food, soap, bottled water, and a few packs of cigarettes. He didn’t smoke, and he told them so, but still they gave him the cigarettes. Once he tried to explain the difference in being homeless and being in prison, but the boys eyes (it was only boys he helped to study, the girls were too cautious of his dirty, smelly self) would glaze over, so he stopped. He shared the cigarettes with the other street people, and built up good will. The shelter let him shower there so long as he brought his own soap and wasn’t drunk, which he never was. He enjoyed life too much to drink; his was an existence free from care, and idyllic eden where he could sleep, read or think as much as he wanted, every day of his life.

So when he saw the stranger shambling up from the other side of the river, he felt no fear. He waved, and gestured to his beans. “Howdy, brother. You look hungry, want to share some beans? Maybe a smoke?” The stranger said nothing, just continued his clumsy, slow advance. Dr. Jennings scratched idly at his beard flea (he was considering naming it Irving, but thought that might make it harder on himself when the flea drowned in tomorrow’s shower) and waited. Maybe the stranger was a crazy – god knew there were enough of them in the general homeless population, and he knew quite a few of them himself. Most were harmless, but a few were unstable enough to merit avoidance. Dr. Jennings wondering if this man was one of those. “Hey now, brother,” he spoke softly, like to an unfamiliar animal, “There’s no trouble here. I got food to spare and a nice warm fire. Won’t you share it with me?”

The stranger crawled hands and knees slowly up the side of the embankment, putting a cold and dirty hand on Dr. Jennings’ shoulder to steady himself. He started to raise his face.

The eyes were empty, not filled with madness, but cold and glassy as a taxidermied bear’s. The mouth was bloodied and raw, flesh falling in strips from he perfect, white teeth. Those teeth terrified the good doctor more than anything, shining white and clean in that dirty, dead man’s face, the metal gleam of braces undiminished by the meat and gristle of Dr. Jennings’ shoulder and neck as it bowled him slowly over onto the concrete floor, a wailing moan starting somewhere in his belly and escaping through his mouth like steam from a kettle, rising to match that rumbling howling screech from the stranger’s own filthy, dead lips.

Roux the Day

So, Mr Sweetie has a new student worker who's vegetarian, and I wanted to cook something all vegetarian-y and impress her (because, you know, I'm a praise-based organism). She *does* eat milk and eggs, which gives me a little more wiggle room, though this recipe I made today doesn't use any milk.

I have said before, publicly, that I don't know how to cook. See the green onion incident.

I've been wanting to make pasta from scratch for a while - ever since the Library Overlord mentioned that yeah, it's just flour and eggs and a little bit of salt. Like, seriously. That's it.

So I gave basic pasta a go last weekend, and then I felt I was Truly! Ready! to cook something ovo-vegetarian.

Here is the basic recipe I use for pasta:

2 cups flour (more if you think you need it)
4 eggs (room temperature)
Pinch of salt

Mix dry ingredients in a bowl. In a seperate bowl, whisk the eggs up good. Mix that shit together, until it sticks to itself enough that your hands are, you know, fairly clean. Like, you can move them independantly, bend them, see where the skin is, that kind of thing. Make it into a ball, then put that ball in the bowl, put some foil or damp cheesecloth or saran wrap on the top, then leave that shit alone for at least half an hour. It's done when it has a kind of glossy dampness all over. And is vaguely plump-looking, not that you really expect it to rise.

Flour the surface you're going to be rolling on really well, then roll it out (or, you know, buy a pasta machine). If you have limited space and/or are me, you can flour the top of the dough VERY well, the fold it, and the flour will keep it from becoming a big mass of dough again. You can make layers this way. Layers are nice. Roll it nice and thin, then cut it into strips, and cook them in boiling water with some salt. Use a LOT of water - and also? They cook FAST. Like, 2 minuntes fast. Don't leave thinking you have time to do other things. Drain the water out when they're done, and you have pasta. If you are me, you have ugly, uneven strips, but it's pasta and it's tasty.

The first time I made this, I forgot that I had thrown out the pesto I planned to have it with. They were good all by themselves. The second time, I had them with canned pasta sauce (spinach cheesy goodness). Even better.



So tonight, I Had A Plan, you see? I was going to make a meaty-tasting meat-free pasta sauce. It was going to rock. Here was The Plan:

1. Roux is thick. Make some roux. Medium to dark, but not too dark.
2. Walnuts are mellow. Toast some walnuts. Add them to the roux.
3. Portabella mushrooms are delicious and meaty. Sautee them bitches in butter.
4. Everyone loves green onions.
5. And salt.
6. And pepper.
7. Maybe you should add some water, so it actually forms some kind of sauce.

Somehow, I thought that roux was one of those things you could have a lot of, so I made a LOT of roux. I'm proud of myself that I didn't burn it, and I got it down to a nice dark peanut butter color (I have never made roux in my life), so I just dumped the entire goddamn cup of roux in with the walnuts, thinking thick = sauce.

So, at that point I had a giant pile of roux, and my precious walnuts. I tried adding water in a frantic attempt to less-roux-ify it. I actually ended up straining the walnuts out, so I had a pot of roux and a pot of walnuts. I added the mushrooms, onions, salt, and pepper to the walnuts pot, and it was good, but it sure was.... thin. Maybe I should add back a little of that roux.

So I didn't want to add too much, but I did want a creamy consistancy, so I busted out the coconut milk. As it turns out, coconut milk is actually pretty good in savory dishes! I was starting to have a passably okay mushroomy-walnutty-vaguely-creamy-sauce-thing. But it was still a little thin.

Instead of doing the sane thing and quitting while I was ahead, I added more roux. After pouring the thin stuff off the top, which was mostly water. So I was adding almost pure roux again. Then I went and cooked the pasta, and by the time the pasta was done, you know what I found out?

I had somehow invented the vegetarian recipe for brown gravy. And not the good stuff, either - the instant kind like you get a Luby's, three hours after the lunch rush. Oh yeah.

At that point I did what anyone would do in my situation. I fed the dog what she would eat and put the rest down the garbage disposal, then sat down with a bowl of ice cream for dinner.

Zombies!

So I get up this morning at 4 a.m., because the cat would like to be in the window now. The cat is not allowed in the window, neither at 4 a.m. nor at any other time, because he is 15 lbs of fat-ass, who wants to sqeeeeze his way through the blinds (and crush them, and break them, and ruin our deposits) to sit on the windowsill... for maybe ten minutes top, then squeeeeze back through to the bed.

Have I mentioned that the window is right above my head? As in, the cat must walk on my face with his 15 lb self to get to and from said window? So yeah, I'm against the whole process. Why he only wants to do this first thing in the morning is beyond me, but I suspect it's an elaborate plan to wake me up, so that maybe I'll feed him early. Not that I ever feed him early, but hope springs eternal.

So today, I am awake at 4 a.m., because the cat has tried to walk on my face, and there really is a limited amount of cat-flinging you can do while prone and groggy and cranky as all get-out, but somehow it sinks into my lizard-brain that Heed is crouching down next to my face, hair puffed out all crazy, growling at something in the backyard.

He is not a growly cat, so this scares the shit out of me.

I woke up Mr. Sweetie before I looked out the window, and I thought I saw a dude wandering around the yard behind ours (see, this shit is why we need a privacy fence, I don't need to know what is going on in your yard, neighbor people!), stumbling around like he was drunk or stoned or something. Well, scratch that, you see a lot of drunks in a college town, and he didn't seem drunk, so probably on something. The dog started barking, Mr. Sweetie got out the handgun case from the closet but didn't open it - you know, because you never know, but you want to be safe. I guess I don't really regret him getting the gun now, hey?

So the dude wandered around for a while, then turned like he heard something (which he didn't do for the dog - weird, right?) then wandered off towards the highway. We were pretty goddamn awake at that point, so we started getting ready to go to work.

We had some extra time (like two hours extra time), so I figured hey - I'll make breakfast. Haven't done that in a while (try ever, but I was still freaked out and needed something to do), and we had some pamcake mix and chocolate chips, how hard could it be?

So I'm mixing up the batter, and Mr. Sweetie's on the computer in the living room, and next thing I know he's spouting crazy-talk about zombies and uprisings and oh god oh god we're all gonna die.

Honestly, it's like we don't plan for these things.

So, of course, I finished the pamcakes (they were delicious), turned off the stove, and grabbed the bug-out bags a friend had prepared for us last year. Supplemented with the 50 lb bag of cat food we'd picked up from the store the other day, the rain barrel from the yard and our brita pitcher, and we were good to go. It wasn't easy getting the Maggie and Heed into the attic, and let me tell you, getting Maggie's crate through that creepy little door did not help my mood one bit, but once we pulled ourselves up and busted a small hole through the roof, it was cosy enough. Mr. Sweetie made an amicable truce with Falafel Jones, the previous resident, regarding which sides of the roof were off limits, and we were able to last out the uprising without too much trouble.