Here She Is!

Lula

Lula was photographed in the morning sunlight before an extremely realistic "living room" background. She selected this photo because she thought it captured not only her external beauty, but also her reflective inner self. Here, Lula ponders life's most profound questions: Is it strange that I like to lick window screens? Are my claws sharp enough? How much wet food is too much? Will my owners ever tire of cleaning the litterbox? Lula knows, as well as we do, that these questions must inevitably remain unanswered...

Lula's new trick

Well, if anyone is still even checking this blog . . . I promise we will write more when we figure out how to get a website so we can include photos (digital camera still pending). In the meantime we're just doing the school-thing. Last night Ken re-read Oedipus Rex... it's wildly inappropriate! But a high school standard, it is. And people are getting worried about Sponge Bob? Yeeeeeesh! Try a play featuring father-murder and MUCH more shocking family dysfunctions. Not to mention the eye-gouging stuff. Not that I think high-schooler should not read Oedipus Rex, it's just that they should also be required to watch Sponge Bob.

Jonathan and Kristen Gourley had dinner at our place Friday night. In our overwhleming excitement about the upcoming holiday, we made Corned Beef and Cabbage. We experiment with new meals for our guests all the time. It keeps dinner invitations coming, for they fear returning for another round of the pressure cooker. Kristen is due on May 2, and seems to be doing really well.

For a V-day gift Ken printed out the first 2.5 months of our e-mail correspondence and made a book for me... it is about 100 pages long! Mind you, we lived in the same town. It has been fun to read.

No real progress on finding a playmate for Lula. Now we'll wait until after our trip to DC/North Carolina to resume the search. We don't want to adopt a kitten only to leave him to fend for himself with Lula around. She's a crazy lady. To help our energy bill, we have a comforter nailed up in front of our front door (on the INSIDE, we're only sort of as hickey as you think). Lula's new game is to book it down the stairs and then run straight up the comforter. Then as she hangs there, she'll turn to look at us and jump down. Hopefully by next winter, we'll be motivated enough to put up weather-stripping. Though she looks so cute hanging there . . .

wonderbread and skippy

I thought my most recent bread-baking adventure would end in utter disaster. But, unlike so many other bread adventures, this one was not a huge time investment, so I didn't really care. On the back of the 5lb bag of King Arthur's Stone Ground Whole Wheat flour there is a recipe for 100% whole wheat bread. I've been having good luck with the honey-whole wheat loaf in Betty Crocker, but it's only half "whole wheat." So this new recipe seemed like a crock, because when you "dissolve" the yeast, you do so in 2 Tbs of water--not "warm" water or "very warm" water (aren't those awfully ambiguous designations anyway?)--just water. Another advantage of this recipe is that you don't have to roll the dough into a 18" by 9" rectangle, and then meticulously roll it up so as to prevent air bubbles. You just dump the sticky ol' stuff into a pan and let it rise. I mean, it really didn't seem like it would work. However, it did! The loaf is substantial, but not dense; flavorful, but not overpowering. But the simplicity! Short of having a bread machine, it's the easiest way to get homebaked whole wheat!

For the first year of marriage we are trying our hardest to be domestic gods and goddesses. August 15th 2005, it's back to Wonderbread and Skippy.

My presentation on "219" and The Armory Show went really well, kudos to Banta for giving me a very impressive "in." There is a book by Marius de Zayas entitled something like How, When, and Why Modern Art Came to NY... in which there is a lovely story about Banta and Arthur Stieglitz. Although in one copy "Frueh" is misspelled as "Fruch."

Still no playmate for Lula, we're going to meet a kitty on Friday though!