(Not our cat. We are too fond of our lives.)

We’re having a lazy day, since we did our big dinner yesterday. I have washed the two pairs of footie fleecy jammies that were my Christmas present — one red, for everyday use, and one navy blue for more formal occasions. I’ll probably don one set and head to bed with some new books shortly after dinner, since we’re up before dawn to catch the train for our Second Annual Niagara Waterpark Extravaganza.

Hope everyone is having a similarly relaxed and pleasant holiday!

And from last year, but still apropos:

Tomorrow when we wake up, the sun will rise a bit earlier and set a bit later. Hurray! Light!

Happy solstice. To celebrate I made cookies with a very large quantity of instant espresso,* figuring a bit of extra perkiness was seasonally appropriate, however substance-induced it may be.

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* which is not ever to be used as an actual drink, blech! — but is a decent baking ingredient

12 things to throw at Bush

Best line:

12. Reality
…

He will merely blink a few times and get that look on his face like he almost had a thought, then it passed, like a bit of gas.

Heh.

From the Star:

Doctors may have resolved the perennial up-or-down-toilet-seat debate for families with small boys in the house.

Leave it up, experts say.

Falling toilet seats are injuring an alarming number of recently potty-trained toddlers, a British study reports. The medical term for the damage – penis crush.

No, no, no.

The sensible thing to do is to teach them to sit down when they pee, like civilized people. NOT to leave the seat up so everyone has to look at the horrible gaping maw of the toilet and the ick that accumulates on the bottom of the toilet seat when uncivilized people insist on standing to pee and the unappetizing sight of the cat(s) drinking from and/or bathing in the thing. No. Sit the heck down, already. And close the lid when you’re done.

Tree!

Originally uploaded by morecoffeeplease.

The extremely, enthusiastically, hyper-helpful-even-if-you’re-just-looking-fine-thank-you local Scouts sold us a perfect tree this year — the right height and shape, the right smell, nice and fresh. And lots of space underneath for a big box that I’m sure will contain the footie jammies that are the sole (NPI) item on my Christmas list.

M and I went to Supper Solved a week or so ago to make dinner entrees. It’s one of those newish places that’s designed to send you home in a relatively short time with a whole pile of dinners ready for the freezer.

It’s set up in stations, one station per recipe, and each station has the recipe posted and everything you need to make that recipe. If it says “add one cup chopped beets” there’s a bin of chopped beets in front of you with a clever 1-cup scoop/measuring spoon in it, and so on. When you’re done making the recipe you put it in aluminum freezer-to-oven containers, stick a pre-printed label on top so you’ll know later what it is and how to cook it, and then just walk away and leave the mess behind for staff to clean up. They change the recipes monthly.

It’s not really set up for kids, but it worked OK — M read the recipes and did the majority of the prep work, except if it required touching raw meat (“ew! slimy!”) or if the bins were out of her reach. If we go again I’ll take a little step-stool for her.

The quality of the ingredients was very good and I was happy with the quantity for the price. Chicken entrees had 6 boneless skinless chicken breasts, salmon had 6 good-size salmon fillets, pork tenderloin had 2 large tenderloins, etc. While it’s still a relatively expensive way to do dinners, it’s certainly not usurious and it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than going out or ordering in. And boy, is it ever nice to have all the prep work and cleanup done by someone else.

We split most of the entrees in half (they provide smaller packages for that purpose) since we don’t have all that many occasions on which we need to feed six people at once. A bunch of them have now gone to some friends who have a very new baby so they don’t have to eat lasagne constantly*.

We were in & out in ninety minutes, but that’s with a six-year-old reading the recipes, doing most of the work and slooowwwly making sure the label stickers were JUST SO. With two adults doing different recipes at different stations at a reasonably brisk pace you could probably finish six entrees in half an hour or forty minutes.

I took our wire-frame granny cart to schlep everything home, which worked very well. It was light enough to lift up our stairs at home so I imagine it would be fine to lift onto a bus too.

We’ve now eaten three of the entrees and they’ve all been excellent. So, two thumbs up!

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* not that there’s anything wrong with lasagne, but after a week or two one does crave a bit of diversity in one’s dinners…

Quotation of the Day for August 8, 2008

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.”

- Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago.