Bowl

So I pulled out my crock pot this week and made the potato soup from one of my crock pot experiments.  Best potato soup ever!  

And what could be make my potato soup even better?  My potato soup in a bread bowl! 

However…  I am too lazy to make my own bread bowls. 

I had a couple of Kaiser rolls leftover from the bag I got off the day-old rack at Tops and had an idea:  What if I made a mini bread bowl from one of those?

 

 

It worked!  But it was really small and didn’t hold much soup.  I thought I would be OK with it because I don’t eat a lot to begin with, but this wasn’t enough of a meal even for me   

But… it was really good!

This would be a really nice idea for an appetizer, and I think I would serve it as such the next time I have company over for dinner.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained!

Smart Dog

This is good!

 

Nerf

So the other day a friend of mine needed to kill some time and stopped in a Target store.  Wandering around he found himself in the toy department and happened to see a Nerf gun.  He decided to get one for a bit of fun.

 

 

The one he picked out was just like this, only in orange (they also come in red and green!).

Imagine his surprise when he reached the checkout counter and found out that he needed to show his driver’s license to buy the toy.

Ummm… who made up that law?  Do they think that anyone would try to rob a bank with an orange, plastic toy that looks like the one pictured????  One that shoots Nerf (foam!) darts?

I would totally understand if the gun even slightly resembled anything real… I could see someone painting a plastic toy black and it might pass as real – but this?  Even it was painted gun-metal black it stil wouldn’t even look close to real.

Yikes.  What’s next?

Not-So-Wordless Wednesday

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

On this day in history in 1945, The Russians liberated Auschwitz concentration camp, where the Nazis had killed over 1.5 million people, including over 1 million Jews.

I had always thought that the Holocaust was a horrible time in history. After visiting Auschwitz on a trip to Poland, it is even more horrible to me. I cannot put into words how thoughts of the Holocaust make me feel.

I posted this cartoon last year, but it’s worth posting again…  (click on it for a bigger/readable version)

Cats

I’m not a huge cat person.  Cats are nice when they are someone else’s – I just wouldn’t want to own one myself.  I don’t like that they walk around on tables and counters and I have this thing about litter boxes in the house.  I know it’s weird – I have no problem cleaning up dog poop and chicken poop outside (and hopefully someday llama poop!), but when an animal does it’s business in the house… I don’t know – it’s just, ewwww 

Anyway, the past couple of months I’ve noticed a couple of cats hanging around property.  It looks like it might be a mother and her baby – one is about half the size of the other.  I haven’t seen a collar on either one, but I haven’t been able to get very close either - they both run when they see me.

I have a few thoughts about the situation:

First and foremost, I worry about them getting pregnant and having more kittens (assuming that they are both female).  There are enough stray animals in the world – I don’t need /want a bazillion stray cats all over the neighborhood.

I do however, have a mouse (or mole or vole – whatever) problem.  Oddly enough, not around the chicken coop – which is where I would have expected it – but in the front of my house and out on the back forty of the property.  After the snow fell this year, it was really evident by the number of trails all over the place.  I have seen both cats hunting and catching the mice (or moles or voles or whatever they are).  I do like that.

But then again, at my last house, my next door neighbor had cats that she let run outside.  They used to poop in my garden beds all the time and that was just the grossest thing ever.  Nothing like going to pull weeds around the flowers and sticking your hand in a big piece of poop.  Disgusting.  At least dogs don’t hide their droppings.  Anyway, now I’m worried that if these cats stick around, I’m going to have the same problem in my garden around here.  Although I am planning on fencing it in this year because of the Stupid-Evil-Garden-Eating Rabbits, what if they decide that it’s worth the climb over the fence to use my garden beds as litter boxes?  I don’t want to go through that again.

Because they seem to be feral cats, I don’t think that they could ever be adopted by anyone as a house cat.  If they were taken to the SPCA, I’m sure that they would be euthanized.  I’m thinking that the best case scenario would be if I could catch them, get them fixed and then let them go about their business.  But I don’t think that I would ever be able to catch them – unless I tried using a trap.  But I only have one live animal trap and I don’t have the $$$ to buy another.  I would want to get them both at the same time – you know, just get everything done at once…   How much does it cost to get a cat fixed, anyway?  That would be another problem…

What to do?  What to do?