Pesto Stuffed Pork Chops

Time for another recipe that looks and tastes like you're some sort of master chef, but is really ridiculously easy. It's almost a tragedy that I'm writing this for stay at home dads because I could have totally used a meal like this to impress chicks in college. I suppose you could just impress your wife with it but that's not quite the same, you know she's spending the night even if your food sucks. I suppose it's just as well that I didn't possess this sort of culinary power in my misspent youth...... on to the recipe!

Pesto Stuffed Pork Chops
4 thick cut boneless pork chops.
1/4 cup prepared pesto sauce
1/4 cup plain bread crumbs
1/4 cup parmesan cheese (cheap is ok, fresh shredded is better)
1 tbs olive oil
salt and pepper

Mix the pesto, breadcrumbs and cheese in a bowl and set aside. Your pork chops probably have one side with fat on it, you want to cut a pocket on the other side. Use a sharp pointed knife and just work your way around in there. You're trying to make a little meat purse for the pesto mixture. The smaller the opening the better the filling stays in and the bigger the pocket the more you can fit in. Like many things in life, you're looking for balance here. After you cut them, stuff them with the pesto mixture. Work it back into the pockets as well as you can. Better distributed filling means better distributed flavor. Now put the olive oil in a frying pan and brown the chops for 3-6 minutes on a side. Whatever it takes to get them brown. Salt and pepper them and place them in a baking pan, uncovered, and bake at 350 degrees for one hour.
That's it. Cut, stuff, fry, bake, done.
The only downside to this recipe is that your wife is likely to think you should be cooking this well all of the time. Enjoy.

Vengeful God of Ants

I am the Vengeful God of Ants.

What a great new home. Lets swarm and bite a child!

Some kind being has delivered great pieces of food!

Oh my God! Why? Why have you brought them to us!

Ordinarily I really like ants, they're fascinating. Individually they're useless but together they form an amazing super organism. Think of a food source and it's likely there's some sort of ant that eats it. Sugar ants eat sweet things, carpenter ants eat wood, I even know where there's a colony of leaf cutter ants that I'm trying to get some good pictures of, they don't actually eat leaves but eat the mold that grows on the leaves that they harvest and stuff underground. Ants are everywhere, ants are cool. Except fire ants. I hate fire ants. They invade the yard and bite the kids and I. Most ants are chill if you step on their nest. Sure they run around in a panic and one or two might bite you to get your attention. They're just sort of saying "excuse me giant person, you're on my house." Not fire ants, those bastards are evil. Make one mistake, step in the wrong spot, and hundreds of them pour out of the nest seeking a victim, they swarm you. They bite you over and over and the bites are horrible. They swell up and all of the tissue at the center dies and it leaves this big itchy hole in you and it takes forever to heal and it leaves a scar. All of my children have ant scars on their feet and legs. Pretty much all you can do with fire ants is poison them, and I hate using poison anywhere near the kids. Fire ants and their associated poisoning was one of the primary drivers for me getting guineas. They might scratch my truck and poop on the front porch, but they are my avenging angels when it comes to fire ants. They can't seem to find the ant hills themselves, stupid birds, but put a little food on the ant hill and they go to town. I can't tell if they actually like to eat the ants or if it's just instinct to eat everything that's small and mobile. They do go back to the same spot for a few days until they've consumed everything that moves so there might be some tiny spark of intelligence going on there.
I doubt it.
They guineas are my tools of death. I direct them and unleash them on my enemies the fire ants. I use them to protect my land, my children.
I am the vengeful god of ants.

Honest Days Work

I just realized that I didn't make my usual Saturday post yet. I spent most of the day doing actual work. I replaced the shocks and upper A-arms on my truck. Good honest physical work. It mostly went well, only required a little cursing to make it all go together. I saved between $200 and $250 in labor over paying someone to install the parts. Feeling pretty good about it. Feeling manly. I'll get back to talking about babies and cooking and laundry next week.
Have a wonderful weekend.

Odd Requests

Most of the things I do as a stay at home dad are pretty routine. Making food, cleaning up, diapers in the old days, nothing out of the ordinary. I also get requests that are way beyond what I can do, "build me a spaceship daddy, no, a real one", but for the most part I can handle what comes my way. Every now and again I get a request that sounds silly at first, but after a moments contemplation I think to myself, "yea, I can do that".

My daughter bought this ceramic fox on vacation two summers ago. I'm not sure why she thought she wanted it but she did. It was her money that she'd saved so whatever, knock your socks off kid. The fox lives on her dresser and occasionally makes leaps to the floor in some zany attempt to escape. It hasn't gotten away yet, but it has broken off both of it's front legs. My daughter brought it to me and asked if I could fix them. Well, the legs are long gone so my first thought was no, no I can't. But wait, maybe, just maybe, I can. A few minutes with a twig and a pocket knife. A little adjustment. Some hot glue. There you are, tiny wooden prosthetic fox legs. It's things like this that keep my job interesting.

Books I finished this week:
A Thread Across the Ocean - John Steele Gordon
The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg
A Thread Across the Ocean is the story of the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable. The cable was laid in 1866, it took five attempts and millions of dollars. I'm not talking millions of today's dollars, millions of dollars in the mid 1800's. It was a big deal, it used a boat that was five times bigger than any other boat afloat at the time. The cable was produced in England because they had a monopoly on the special tree sap that was needed to coat it. The whole story is crazy. It's also instructive to read history like this and realize that presidents and generals were directing troops by telegraph during the civil war. We could send messages 1000's of miles before we knew that it was a good idea to wash hands before surgery. Advancement of knowledge isn't the even flow that we think it is. Great read.
The Dirt of Clean is an entertaining book. You learn about why and how we in the west have gotten to our level of cleanliness. It starts with the relatively clean Greeks, moves on to the rather dirty Europeans of the late Middle Ages and then onto modern cleanliness. It's an entertaining read and I enjoyed it. The only thing I disliked was the authors tendency to hop around in time to justify linear thoughts about progress or lack there of. It reads like what it is, entertainment, more than history. You do get to learn a lot about why Europeans were clean when the Romans lived there but descended into dirtiness for quite a while. Also the unbreakable link between the simultaneous rise of soap and advertising. If it interests you, you'll like it.

French Bread

I'm a sourdough man. I like raising my little bowl of yeast and bacteria. I like feeding them and mixing them up with different flours to make breads and pizza crusts. I like their wild and slightly unpredictable behavior contrasted with the nurturing and care that they require. Sourdough is some seriously manly stuff.
My wife on the other hand, when she bakes, is a bit more refined. She likes to follow the recipe as written. If it says use 1/2 cup, you use 1/2 cup, not pretty close to 1/2 cup more or less whatever it'll work out. If it says knead for 5 minutes, she's setting the timer and she'll knead until that sucker beeps. She also likes the predictability of domestic yeast. Add this much, rise for this long, get regular, predictable, and I grudgingly admit, yummy, bread.
To go with the shrimp bisque she made last weekend, she made french bread. It didn't have the flavor of my bread, but it was light and tasty and perfect for dipping in soup. It also make a fine sub bun the next day. She's good at this baking thing.

French Bread: from Betty Crocker's New Cookbook.
3-3 1/2 cups flour
1 tbs sugar
1 tsp salt
1 package dry yeast
1 cup very warm water (120-130 degrees)
2 tbs vegetable oil
Cornmeal
1 large egg white
1 tbs cold water
Poppy or sesame seeds if you want

Mix 2 cups flour with sugar, salt and yeast in a large bowl. Add warm water and oil. Mix at low speed (mixer) for 1 minute. Stir in remaining flour 1/2 cup at a time until dough is easy to handle. Turn it out on a lightly floured surface and knead for 5 minutes. Place in a greased bowl and turn it so all sides are greased. Cover and let rise somewhere warm for 1 1/2 to 2 hours until double.
When it's risen, divide dough in half and roll each half out to a rectangle 15x8 inches (my wife gets out the tape measure for this, really) Roll up the long way pinching the edges and end to seal. Place both loaves on cookie sheet lightly covered in corn meal. Cut 1/4 inch deep slashes across the top at 2 inch intervals with a very sharp knife. Brush tops with cold water and let rise uncovered for 1 hour or until doubled.
Heat oven to 375. Mix egg while and 1 tbs cold water and brush over loaves, sprinkle with seeds if you want to. Bake 20-30 minutes until golden and hollow sounding when you tap them. Enjoy. I did.

Migo

Patty is actually our second dog. Our first dog was Migo. His story is a little hard for me to tell so just bear with me.
Back in the day, when I only had one baby, I used to load her up in the backpack and take a morning walk. We'd walk around the neighborhood nearly every morning and stretch my legs and let her see the world. There were always loose dogs in the neighborhood and we got to know which ones were nice and which ones weren't. One day we met a new one, and he was really nice. He loved us. He followed us home and sat by the front door waiting for us to come out again. He looked hungry so I gave him some cat food. He loved us more. He decided to live with us. Just like that, he decided that our house was a good one and he'd live here now. Even though our yard wasn't fenced in at the time he stayed by the house. He came inside and laid around and just made himself at home. We had a dog.
We found his real home a few days later while walking around the neighborhood again. A nice guy came out on his porch and yelled that we had his dog. We chatted for a bit and told him the story of his dog deciding to live with us for a few days. He confided that he couldn't really afford to feed a dog this big and we could keep him if we wanted. We weren't sure if we should just take his dog, but he insisted. To show us how much he appreciated it, he invited us in to smoke a joint with him. We declined but were happy he no longer had to spend his weed money on dog food. Priorities man.
The dog was so friendly that were just calling him The Friendly Dog. His old owner told us his real name was Lug Nuts. It was clearly time for a new name to go with his new life. We settled on Amigo, Spanish for friend. That name very quickly mutated to just Migo and it stuck through his whole time with us. There were variations of course, such as Meegs, Eeegs, Eeger, and so on, but he was Migo. He stayed fantastically friendly for his whole stay with us. He was happy to see you every day when you came home. He was thrilled to just lay inside on the floor. He was great with the kids and the cat, letting either of them pet him or lay on him or generally harass him with no repercussions. He was as nice a dog as you could hope to have, especially with small children.
He wasn't perfect, he had a bit of a larceny problem. Anything left unattended in the yard he'd steal and bury. Work gloves, shoes, toys, tools, if he could grab it without you seeing he'd be off to put it in a shallow grave. One time he stole our daughters favorite stuffed duck and we had to kick at every fresh looking patch of soil in the yard until we found where it was. He stole a pair of gloves from my father in law and one of my wife's shoes that we never did find. It was kind of maddening, and we never could figure out why he did it. I think he was just born a thief. He was also had some sort of herding dog in his genetics somewhere and compulsively herded people. You could't run down the driveway without getting bumped off course.
He was a good dog, he was healthy (after we killed the heart worms that he came with) and happy and just good. He might still be with us, but I made a mistake. A horrible mistake. It's hot in Texas and Migo used to sleep under the car in the shade. I knew this. He'd be under the car and would climb out while I buckled the children in. It got so I didn't think about it. If he was there, he got out, if I didn't see him climb out it was because he was somewhere else. Except one time he didn't. I don't know why. I don't even know if I saw him under there and ignored it, I might have. I was heading off to pick up kids from preschool and I immediately knew what happened. I didn't run him over with a tire, I pinned him between the car and the ground. I raced to the garage and got a jack and lifted the car until there was enough room to get him out. The damage was done. We brought him to the vet and an x-ray showed that his hips, which were  horrible due to genetics anyway, had been smushed around and displaced. He was hurt badly. He couldn't stand. In the vet's opinion, he didn't have the natural structure in his hips to be able to fix things. Had we brought him in healthy we would have been having a discussion about how long he was going to be able to stand on his own. Like this, the choice was clear.
My parents are vets and I spent my childhood helping to hold old sick dogs and cats as their owners spent their last moments with them. I did that for Migo too. He was a very big dog, so I carried him back behind the house and dug a very big hole and said goodbye.
That moment of inattention is something that I can't really forgive myself for. I am consoled by the fact that for the years he lived with us, he had a good life. We cured his heart worms that would have killed him slowly years before. He always had food and people that cared about him. He had kids around him, and he truly loved kids. He was a good boy.

My Wife Cooks Too

Take out the edible parts and cook the shells.

I look at cooking as part of my job as a stay at home dad. I shop, I plan the menu, I cook. When my wife asks how she can help I usually tell her to go play with the kids so they stay out of the kitchen. She can cook though, she does quite a good job of it, she even enjoys it. When she hasn't cooked in a while things sort of build up in her and she puts her foot down and demands to cook a fantastic meal for us. It feels really weird to just sit around and wait for dinner to get done, but a man has to do what a man has to do.

Add some of these and cook more.

End up with this for dinner. So good.

Finish with these for dessert.

This weekend my wife cooked, shrimp bisque, french bread and asparagus for dinner and big New York black and white cookies for desert. Normally when I write about food a recipe follows, but not today. I usually pull my recipes from older cook books or public sources online or from my own experimenting. The shrimp bisque and and the black and white cookies are recipes that are in the current Feb/March issue of Cook's Country. As the recipes are still on the news stands I feel a bit weird about just passing them on, so I'll just give you some pictures of the meal and let you know that I will be giving out the french bread recipe later in the week. If the food looks good (and it tasted amazing) then you can pick up the recipes at the store. Cook's Country is one of the few things we have a subscription to and it's worth every penny. This isn't exactly quick cooking, my wife did spend pretty much all day in the kitchen on Saturday, but sometimes that's just what you need.

Camera Toys

Ridiculous. Ridiculously awesome that is!

I mentioned in my Art Student post that I bought a manual lens for my big fancy camera. I had so much fun with it that I decided to find out what other lenses I could use. It turns out that with a simple adapter I can use a ton of old manual lenses that hardly anybody wants any more. These are lenses from the 60's and 70's before auto focus became the norm on cameras. The quality of manufacture and the quality of the glass is great and the pictures they are capable of is pretty fantastic. I looked around and did a bit of reading and decided that lenses made for Minolta cameras had the quality that I wanted and a lack of name brand recognition that has kept them fairly cheap. I spent $100 and bought a Minolta MD to micro 4/3 adapter and two lenses, a 50mm f1.7 and a 200mm f4.5.  Translated to English, I bought two lenses that zoom things in more than before, the 50mm is a bit closer, the 200mm is trying to be a telescope. 

Let me out!

I've been taking a lot of pictures. A lot a lot. I took over 150 pictures yesterday while the kids were swinging. I justify it by saying that I'm learning how to shoot pictures with the manual lens, but the truth is that taking pictures with the manual lens is just fun. It's as much fun to get them wrong and figure out why as to get them right. I think, I'm not sure of course, but I think that when taking pictures is more fun, I'll take a lot more of them. It provides an artistic outlet for me and provides my wife and all the grandparents with the pictures they demand. I don't really need pictures of my kids, I'm around them all the time. Everyone else seems to like them though and I'll probably be posting more of them on the blog as I get better at it. What does any of this have to do with being a stay at home dad? Probably nothing really, except that taking good pictures of my children might help justify my not working. Imagine that I'm scrapbooking, except I'm afraid of scissors so I have to do it on the computer.
I'm also trying something new with this post, I'm trying to add a jump. There should be a "click for more" or something after these words. The idea is that I can give you a synopsis of the story or just a picture or two and if you want to read the rest you can click through and get the whole thing. Anyway, there are more pictures after the jump, if it works.

Crash - The Other Kind

Last week I wrote about kids just running out of energy and falling asleep where they sit. Crashing. There is another kind of crashing of course, crashing into things. A lone child can crash into everything in the house. Doors, couches, chairs, the floor, anything. When you get two or more they can then also crash into each other in very creative ways. They can also get into wrestling matches and crash with a force that's beyond what one child could do alone. That's the situation that resulted in our first spectacular crash.
Right before my oldest daughters third birthday she and her brother were playing. They were running around and getting rough and I was trying to accomplish something in the kitchen and referee at the same time. Finally they were both on this little blue chair, standing and wrestling and it was clear that if I let this go it could end with bumps and crying. "Hey you two, get dow.." CRASH!
Over they went. Over I raced. My son popped up screaming. My daughter was on the floor. As I picked her up I saw that her lip was bleeding. I put out my hand to catch the blood and she spit a tooth into my hand. One of her front teeth. That used to be in her head. But was now in my hand. Silent scream.. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!
Stay cool.
Calm her down. Get an ice pack. Wrap the tooth in a wet paper towel with ice. Call my wife to find a pediatric dentist NOW. Get the kids ready to go. Get a call back from my wife with directions. Head to the dentist. By the time we get there my daughter is completely over it and wants to play in the playhouse in the waiting room. Everyone in the waiting room wonders why I look really freaked out and my kids look fine. Maybe I have a problem with dentists? Maybe I kidnapped these two beautiful children and need to get their teeth checked before I can set a price on them? Whatever my issue is, everyone sits at the other end of the waiting room from me.
There's not much they can do with the tooth that is out. The other front tooth is knocked pretty far back into her head so they adjust it and explain that it may or may not fall out. They talk about bridges and false teeth and what we can do if the other tooth does fall out. Luckily, it stays right where it should be. For almost 4 years it stands there alone, next to the hole. For that whole time people see her and say that her teeth are falling out early. Well yes, sort of.
This was the other type of crash, the loud one, the one that needs medical attention.
I like the quiet sleepy one better.

Finding Books

I had someone ask me recently how I found time to read as many books as I do. I didn't really have an answer, I just find the time. Ten minutes in the car rider line waiting to pick up the kids from school. Thirty minutes in the kitchen while cooking dinner (get up, stir, sit down, read, get up, chop, sit down, read). Forty five minutes after the kids go to bed instead of TV. The time is there as long as you don't mind reading whole chapters one paragraph at a time. Back in the day I was even very good at reading one armed while holding a sleeping baby in the other. No big deal you say, everyone can do that, but I did it holding them walking around at night. In the dark. I'd read just a bit every time I'd walk past the windows where enough light came in go get in a sentence.

Finding time to read is easy, finding books is hard. You can always find time to read, but focusing on stacks of books while keeping your kids from going crazy is impossible. Neither the book store or the library is a place where you can just browse for reading material when you have little kids. The easiest solution for this is to just buy books online and have them shipped to you. You can do this, and I always did some, but it's expensive. The library is much more cost effective, but I could never figure out a way to make it work until the last few years, so I thought I'd pass my system on to you. Many, if not most, libraries have a presence online now. You can look at what books the library has, whether they are checked in or not, and renew your books. If you live near an area with any sort of college, your library is also probably part of a system of libraries which greatly expands the books available to you. You can request a book from any library in the system and they'll arrange for the book to be shipped to your library so you can read it. If you're really pressed for time, you can even have them grab a book off of their own shelves and reserve it for you. Now you don't even have to go look for it!
Great, so now you know you have access to a LOT of books but you still don't have time to go search the stacks. If your library is like most of them, their website is functional, but not useful for finding books unless you know the exact book you want. What to do if you need to find something new? There are plenty of sites on the internet that you could use for book suggestions, but when you do that, you're always going off someone else's opinion. What I prefer is to use Amazon.com. They have to be the best book searching resource on the planet. Whether you buy books from them or not, they can help you find them. The easiest thing to do is start with a book you like. Find it on amazon and then scroll down to the part where it says 'customers who bought this also bought' and see what's there. Amazon has some fantastic programing that does a pretty good job figuring out things that are related to what you're looking at. Sometimes there's something weird thrown in there, but it's a great start. Click on another book down there that looks good and see if you think you might like it. Now scroll down again and repeat the process. Doing this you can get get a list of titles that sound interesting. You don't even have to start with a book title if you don't want, just start with something like 'history of cows' and see what comes up in books. That's how I found the Angus book I read this week.
Now you take that list of titles and go back to your library web page and see what you can get. Since you have the exact title and author it's easy to find them. There are always books that you can get on amazon that you can't get through your library no matter how good it is, but many of them you can. Now you can check if the book is in, write down it's call number and just go to the shelf and pick it up. If it needs to be ordered then you can do that and be notified when it gets there to be picked up.
This might all sound complicated but it becomes very very quick. You hear about a book, you search amazon for it or books like it, you check for those books at the library. In about 10 minutes you have a list of books that you can pick up at the library that will last you for a month.

Books I finished this week:
A Cow's Life, The Surprising History of Cattle and How the Black Angus came to Be Home on the Range - M. R. Montgomery
100 Great Poems for Boys - Edited by Leslie Pockell
A Cow's Life is a better book than you might think. To give it full credit you really need to skip the middle 1/3 of the book that goes specifically over the Angus and it's breeders in Scotland in the 1800's. If that's your thing and you're really interested in specific blood lines, then read on, otherwise the meat of the book for the general reader is much like a cow, on both ends. The beginning that covers the history of domestication and the end that covers modern ranching are both very interesting and well written for the general reader. It was worth picking up and I'm unaware of any other book that covers ranching in a way that is informative rather than political.
100 Great Poems is more of a book to sit down and skim over. I'm not much of a poetry reader but it was fun to just flip through and sample some great poems. My favorite was the first two verses of Block City by Robert Louis Stevenson

What are you able to build with your blocks?
Castles and palaces, temples and docks,
Rain may keep raining, and others go roam,
But I can be happy and building at home.

Let the sofa be mountains, the carpet be sea,
There I'll establish a city for me:
A kirk and a mill and a palace beside,
And a harbor as well where my vessels may ride.

The poem was written in 1883.
Sometimes the world changes a lot, sometimes it stays the same.

Better Brownies

Treats for daddy.

Simple trick to make any brownies better. Right when you pull them out of the oven, when they're still hot and squishy, smash some mini Reese's peanut butter cups in them. Just smoosh those suckers in until they are flush with the top and let the heat of the brownies melt them. The technique is most artfully applied if you bake brownies in a mini muffin tin. Then you get small, almost bite sized brownies with a yummy treat in them. In a full sized muffin tin you can fit three. Do it with a full pan of brownies and you can fit a lot. More than seems reasonable in fact.
The next time you bake brownies give it a go. People will probably ask you how you managed to bake them in there. You could tell them the truth, or you could just use my stock answer, magic. It's good to keep a little mystery in the world.

The Aquarium

I can't figure out exactly why we have an aquarium. Not just a little aquarium, but a big 55 gallon aquarium with mollies and guppies and a few bottom feeders and a beta and some snails and actual growing plants. Aquariums are always interesting for about the first two days, then they become part of the background and you just don't notice them. They're like really high maintenance art. Art that you have to feed daily and change filters and water and scrub every couple of weeks. Art that might break or leak and flood your living room. Art that sucks electricity to keep warm when the house is cold. Art that occasionally dies and floats to the surface.

Fish are hard to photograph.

We got this aquarium as a family Christmas present last year. We had a small aquarium for a while when we had babies and it just didn't work out. If I didn't pay attention to the filter (and I didn't) then a design flaw would end up spilling gallons of water on the floor. That was bad. Then about two years ago my oldest daughter got really interested in fish and asked for an aquarium for her birthday. I'll write more about her fish later, but it's enough to say that once she had an aquarium, everyone wanted an aquarium. I think that might be why we ended up with the big aquarium in the living room. It seemed easier than trying to maintain four aquariums throughout the house. And don't ever let your kids fool you, if they want an aquarium, you'll end up being the maintenance man for it. Even if you have very responsible kids that can remember to take care of their pets, an aquarium has some heavy lifting that's going to require dad. Water is heavy, and moving water in any way that doesn't end up with a LOT of spills takes more muscle control than most kids seem to have. My kids anyway. So in order to prevent small scale floods the heavy work of cleaning and moving water is always done by me.
I do like the fish though. They're pretty. The mollies recently surprised us by producing a school of babies. This caught us off guard as we didn't know that we had a female mixed in. It's cool to one day notice the almost invisible fry swimming in the tank and watch them grow without getting eaten by their tank mates. Luckily we had enough room in the tank to absorb the new fish without overcrowding. If they manage to do it again they'll just be making snacks for the goldfish.

Wisconsin Nachos

My wife wanted chips. We don't normally have chips around, but she wanted them, so she got them. In my years of marriage I've learned to just roll with this sort of thing. She got the kind of chips she liked which are unsalted restaurant style tortilla chips. Unsalted tortilla chips aren't very good unless you have something to dip them in. She also got a jar of dippy cheese so it worked out. Until we ran out of dippy cheese.
What to do with 1/3 a bag of unsalted chips? Well, if the Green Bay Packers are playing, you might do as we did and get inspiration. Up in the midwest when I was a kid we didn't really understand Mexican food. Nachos for us was shredded cheddar cheese sprinkled on tortilla chips and microwaved until the cheese was somewhere between melted and a solid rubbery sheet. This is not acceptable in Texas. However, as we watched the Packers lose their game we became nostalgic. We also remembered that we had left over bratwurst from the night before. Wisconsin nachos were born. Just take a leftover brat, slice it thin and quarter it. Spread it over a plate of chips, put some shredded cheese on top and microwave it until the cheese fuses itself together. This is a long long way away from what nachos should ever be, but it's delicious all the same. We managed to finish that bag of chips, mission accomplished.

Truck Parts

I was washing my truck the other day and trying to figure out what I was going to do about fixing it. As I mentioned in my tire rotation post, I have a bad upper ball joint. I won't go into detail about what an upper ball joint is, but it's enough to say that because of how this truck is designed, I have to replace the whole upper suspension arm instead of just the one piece. Because of a deep psychological flaw (shared by many engineers) I don't want to just fix it, I want to make it better. I want to replace it with a part that is stronger and higher performance with longer life. This is the first part to need replacing on my truck and I want to use this opportunity to make it better.
It has snowballed though, gotten way out of control. The arms I found (which are MUCH better than stock) cost $700 instead of the $200 that two replacement arms would cost. Then I need new shocks to take advantage of the increased travel that the new arms provide. Never mind that most of my driving is driving the kids to school. This is some serious off road grade stuff and I'm an off road kind of guy. At least in my mind. So I'm spending too much on parts that are certainly worth what they cost, but probably not to me. Why? Why am I doing this? Because it's interesting. It makes my truck more interesting to me. The process of taking the vechicle that I drive every day and making it better is very engagning to me. The actual mechanical work of replacing the parts uses parts of my brain that don't get used folding laundry and making dinner. Having a truck that I still truly like after 4 years and 85K miles is cheaper than becoming bored with it and thinking that I need a new one.
In the end, this might be more about justifying spending money on my truck than anything else. I first had to come at it from a variety of angles to convince myself. Then I had to figure out how to justify it to my wife. All of you ladies reading this who think it would be great to have a stay at home husband need to remember that, at times, we can be an expensive luxury.

Crash

Nap time is super important, both for daddy and for the kids. I've always tried to keep a strict nap schedule. I think this does two things. First, it conditions their little bodies to sleep at the same time every day, which is an actual thing that works. Second, they never get to question whether there is nap or not. There is. There always is. My son used to tell me that he didn't want to take a nap. I'd always let him know that was fine, he didn't have to want to take a nap, but he had to take one anyway. I'd probably make a great prison warden.
Sometimes you have a very busy morning and the napper wanders off and puts themselves to sleep. This would happen every now and again when I was washing dishes after lunch. I'd get things washed and turn off the water only to be greeted by a ominous silence. Time to find the baby. Sometimes they'd be into something and would be trying to be sneaky, but just as often they would have wandered off and found someplace soft and warm. They just crashed.

Book finished this week:
Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel - Julia Keller
Richard Gatling's terrible marvel is of course the Gatling gun. Not the world's first machine gun, but the first that actually worked. It worked so well that we're still using the same basic weapon today in cases where you need to fire thousands of rounds a minute. It's as terrible and terrifying as it ever was, but what about the man who invented it? What kind of man lent his name to such a gun? An inventor, a business man, someone who watched the civil war unfold and thought that a functioning repeating gun could actually shorten the war. If two or three men could man a weapon so terrible that it would force the other side to view the outcome only one way, then he would save lives. The book covers more than that though, it covers the change in the United States from the agrarian pre-civil war to the eve of the first world war. The changes and motivations of the people and that time are as interesting as the gun itself. In fact, the book covers very very little of the gun other than the fact that it was invented, marketed, and how it was used. The technical details of the weapon are much less important than the fact that it worked, and it worked to shape the world. Interesting book.

103 Years

103 Rings

Beetle tracks in the bark.

Some of you might have heard that we had a bit of a drought this summer in Texas. It was more than a bit of a drought actually, it was quite a serious drought. A lot of cattle were sold off because there was simply no food. No grass was growing and there was no hay to be bought. Wildlife suffered a similar fate with regards to food, and a worse one in regards to water as pretty much all of the natural surface water dried up in many area. What got hit the hardest were the trees. I read some estimates that Texas lost 10% of its standing timber. All of those dead trees led to some pretty horrific fires earlier in the year and I can imagine that the dead trees that are still standing are going to contribute to a lot of downed power lines over the next few years as they succumb to rot and gravity.

Portable TV?

Where I take my son to preschool and walk around they have been doing quite a good job identifying and removing the dead standing trees. Many of these trees line the public walking paths directly adjacent to some really nice homes and back yards and if they just let nature take it's course there would be too many smushed fences and cars and houses. There's scarcely a house in the whole town that isn't in the fall line for at least one tree. Lots of trees down, lots of work for tree cutters, lots of stumps. The stumps show the growth rings from the trees that recently stood there and the tree rings are interesting. In them you can see a pattern of good and bad years for growing. You can see scars from injuries that occurred and then grew over. You can see some clear evidence of droughts. Counting them is fun. Most of the really big trees are 80-90 years old. This coincides with the last big lumber boom in the area. The oldest tree I found was 103 years old. It was big, it got thirsty, now it's gone. 

Skittish Coots.

I get really wrapped up in wandering around in the woods counting tree rings and taking pictures. I look at interesting trees and old junk I find in the woods and try to sneak up on ducks. I just wander around. It's a lot like being 10 and not having a care in the world as long as you get home by the time you're supposed to get home. I get to worrying though. Worrying that perhaps this whole stay at home dad thing is making me lose touch with the real world. My wife is off making a living and discussing the football game with co-workers and dealing with grumpy business partners and I'm discovering interesting beetle tracks on tree bark. She swears it's ok though, that in fact my continued trivial observations and ramblings about the world remind her that there is a real world right outside of hers that isn't all seriousness and business. Instead of resenting my goofy little explorations she's interested in them. She listens to my duck chasing exploits with the same rapture that I listen to her problems of a stuck well. Between the two of us we capture more of the seriousness and the simple joy of life than any one person could experience alone. Things are working well.

Smokey Maple Mustard Pizza Sauce

Usually I'm a lazy pizza maker. Sure, I make the crust from scratch, but I buy my cheese shredded and my sauce in a jar. If we have any other toppings it's because they're left over from something cooked earlier in the week. My pizza is awesome, but that has more to do with the fundamental nature of pizza than my cooking. I'm branching out though, stepping out of my comfort zone. My wife made a honey mustard dipping sauce for chicken nuggets a while back and it was fantastic. It wasn't right for a pizza, but the flavor stayed on my mind. What I needed was something closer to a mustard based barbecue sauce. I did some searching to find out the basic elements of such a sauce, and tweaked things a bit. I've finally got something nailed down.

Smokey Maple Mustard Pizza Sauce
1 tbs yellow mustard
1 tbs maple syrup
1 tsp white vinegar
1/4 tsp black pepper
1 small shake liquid smoke

Mix it all together and spread it on your pizza. Easy peasy. You'll notice that this is a very small recipe, just enough for one 10-14" pizza. This works in your favor if you're just making one pizza for the evening or if you just want to make one pizza that is different without forcing something new on the whole family. If you want to make a bunch of pizzas with this sauce then you just need to apply some basic math. I had some leftover roast chicken and bacon and those two were the perfect toppings to go with this sauce. Quite frankly, the pizza was spectacular.
Give it a try, it's good.

Bugs

Investigating a centipede.

Are bugs pets? Not really, but sort of. I refer to them as short term guests. Caught in the wild and nutured and observed. Ideally freed before death results. Bugs are great.

Big caterpillar.

The kids love to catch bugs and store them in jars. They're always more interested in what's outside than what's inside. I'm not sure why spiders and cockroaches and yucky but cicadas and grasshoppers and centipedes are cool, but they are. So I catch bugs inside and throw them out and the kids catch bugs outside and bring them in. We always try to identify them either with our handy dandy book on Texas insects or by searching on the internet. Once you start picking stuff up and trying to identify it, it's pretty amazing how many different things you can find on a pretty small piece of property. This small piece of the world is literally teeming with life. 

Friendly dragonfly.

We have a collection of bug nets and empty peanut butter jars. There's little that flies or crawls that can escape when the kids are in the mood to hunt. I think it's good for them. They learn to look at the world on a different scale. Most people don't notice the insects around them unless they are being bothered by them. We move too fast and the bugs hold still. When you stop moving and watch, just for a minute, it's amazing what you see. The world is full of life and beauty.
When I was writing this post I was assuming that I'd be able to find a bunch of pictures of the summer grasshopper season. Every summer my kids and their cousins collect grasshoppers from around the cottage. We have a silly number of grasshopper houses that they store them in and feed them cabbage and keep them for a few days. When they're in full swing they will have over 30 captured grasshoppers scattered around, it's quite a production. Somehow I've missed taking pictures of this. I can't figure out how that happened. I'll fix it next summer. I will take my camera in hand and hunt the hunters. I promise.

Pork Pot Pie

Pork pot pie is awesome. For some reason I've made chicken pot pie, turkey pot pie, and duck pot pie, but never pork pot pie. Well, that's changed. As part of the new year I'm trying to use up cooking supplies that have been sitting around for way too long. I had 1/3 of a bone in pork roast that was sitting in my freezer with a 2010 date on it. I think the original roast was too long to fit in the pan so I lopped it off and froze the rest. After that much time in the freezer it wasn't looking like I really wanted to give it a roast, but it was still plenty good for an experiment. Instead of roasting it and then boiling the bones and drippings to get stock for pot pie, I just decided to boil the whole thing. This got me my stock and the cooked meat for my pie all in one go. I don't usually boil meat because it washes out the flavor but I figured that since I was going to keep the stock for use in the pot pie anyway, I'd get the flavor back in the end. I was right.

Pork Pot Pie, Biscuit Topping - adapted from a variety of sources.
2 lbs or so bone in pork roast
1/4 cup flour
1/4 cup butter
1 cup milk
1 1/2 cups frozen mixed veggies
salt
pepper

The night before, put the pork in a pot with water and boil until the meat is falling off the bone. Two hours or so. Remove the meat and bone and put it in the fridge. Reduce the liquid until you have about two cups left. Put that in the fridge too.
The next day, an hour before dinner, get the pork out of the fridge. Throw away the bone and all the jiggly bits that you don't want to eat. Chop the remaining meat and set aside. Now you need to make a roux, so melt the butter in a pot over med/low heat, when the butter is bubbling add the flour and cook together for two minutes. While you're doing this, heat up the reduced liquid. After the two minutes, add the liquid to the roux. Bring to a boil, it will thicken. Add the milk and the veggies and the pork. Heat again just to boiling. Remove from heat. Add salt and pepper to taste. Set aside while you make the biscuit topping.

Biscuit Topping -
2 cups flour
1/2 cup butter
1 tbs sugar
1 tbs baking powder
1 tsp salt
3/4 cup milk
Mix all the dry ingredients in a bowl. Cut the butter in with a pastry cutter or a pastry fork or knives or your fingers or whatever. Just get it mixed up in little chunks in there. Add the milk and mix as gently as you can until it all sticks together. Let it rest while you put a piece of waxed or parchment paper on the table and trace the top of your pie plate on it. Put down a little flour and roll the biscuit dough out so you have one great big biscuit the same size as your pie plate.

Pie assembly -
Preheat your oven to 375
Fill your pie plate with filling, about 3/4 full. You'll have extra. You can thank me later.
Now the tricky part. You need to gently flop that giant biscuit on top of the pie filling. You can do it. Worse case scenario you make a mess but put it all in the oven any way and it all turns out great. You just have to give it a go.
Bake until the biscuit top is done, about 30-40 minutes.

This is good food. The porkiness is spectacular. The biscuit topping is spectacular. You get done eating and you just want to sit down and talk about how great dinner was and how sleepy you are. You might want to wait for a cold day when you've been out hauling firewood or hunting or raising a barn or something to make this. Don't wait that long, this is too good to save for special occasions.

Tire Rotation

I remember being very confused as a kid when I heard adults mention getting their tired rotated. It seemed to me that the very act of driving to the place to get them rotated would rotate them plenty. You could drive down the driveway and back and rotate them. I'm not entirely sure when I figured out that rotating your tires refers to switching around their position on the car to even out tire wear. I know I didn't ask any one, I was way too awkward for that. I just bumbled along in my confusion wondering if I was really confused or all adults were idiots. I was a weird kid. Or maybe all kids are weird which makes me normal, I'm still too awkward to ask.
As I talked about in my tire pressure post, you should be checking your tire pressures. When you're doing that, you should be checking your tire wear as well. You're checking to make sure that your tires are wearing evenly across the tread, as well as from tire to tire. One tire wearing weird can be a sign of a problem, that's something you should look into. What happens more often is that your front tires will wear differently than your rears. On my wife's old Audi, the rear tires would always wear before the fronts due to suspension design. On my old Ford Focus the outside of the fronts would wear first because my wife too corners quite quickly. On my truck the front inside edge wears first, again, just because of suspension design. Ideally you should replace all four tires on your vechicle at once. This way you have identical tread design and stickiness at all four corners so all four wheels behave the same when traction gets low. It really is a safety issue. You'd naturally do this if all four tires wore at the same rate, but since then almost never do, you'd always be replacing two tires that wore out on the heavy wear end of the vechicle, and the other two that were just fine. Nobody does that, they usually just replace the two worn ones, leave the other ones and have mismatched tires.
You can prevent that though by rotating your tires and evening out wear so that the set wears evenly. There are two strategies to timing your rotation. You can either pick a mileage (like 10,000 or every other oil change) and rotate them then, or you can just watch them and when you notice that things are different, then rotate. You generally rotate both fronts straight to both backs or front to back crossing. That is you swap the front left tire with the right rear and the right front tire with the left rear. If you alternate rotation methods, every tire will end up riding on every corner of the car. The rotating itself is very easy, it's just like changing a flat tire four times. In fact, it's one of the great automotive tasks that require no special tools. You can use the jack, the lug wrench, and the spare that come with your car. Pick a front corner, swap the tire for the spare, move to the back, swap the tire you just took off for the one that's on there. Move back to the front and replace the spare with the tire you just took off of the back. Now that I count that out, that's three tire changes for one side, so three for the other, it's actually like changing six flat tires. Well, the good news is that by the time you're done you're really good at changing tires with the factory tools that come with your car. This brings up the point that while you don't need any special tools, if you have a better lug wrench, a floor jack and a couple of jack stands, you can do things a lot faster. Now all you have to do is break the lug nuts free, jack up one corner, put it on a jack stand, remove the wheel, move to the other end of the car, use the jack to swap wheels, put the rear wheel back on the front and lower the whole thing down. It's actually a lot easier and it's what I do when I'm near my tools. I did rotate them the old fashioned way a few summers ago when I was away for the summer and my truck needed it, so I've been there too. In fact, when my kids start driving I think I'm going to make them do it with the tools in the car, maybe a couple of times, just so that I know they really know how to use the tools in their car to change a tire. Nothing like doing it six times in a row to really ensure they know the task.
When you have the wheels off, check your brake pads (if you have disk brakes) to see how they're doing. When the car is off the ground and the wheel is tight, wiggle everything to make sure that you don't have any suspension components that are wearing out. I found a bad upper ball joint on my truck yesterday that I wouldn't have known about until it got much much worse. Just poke around under there and give things a good look see. Familiarize yourself with the shocks and the a-arms and all of the bits and pieces that make up the car that gets you around every day. When you need to get something fixed you'll be familiar with it which is useful whether you fix it yourself or have someone do it for you. Knowledge is power. 
Rotating your tires is one of those manly tasks that you should be doing just because you should be doing it. It's good for your car and it costs you nothing but time. If  you don't know when you had them rotated last, go give them a look see. When you rotate them, write it down, keep track of it so you know when to do it next. Go spend some time with tools and cars, it's a good break from sippy cups and diapers.

Time Bomb

One of the moms at preschool is right at her due date. Every time I go to pick up or drop off my son I check to see if she's still there or not. It's so exciting! I always loved that last week before a new baby came. Everything was ready. You knew (or believed you did) that the baby was healthy and everything was going to be fine. It was going to be better than fine. It was going to be AWESOME! I loved it so so much.

I LOVE PRESENTS!

That last week of pregnancy is like some sort of mutant reverse Christmas. On Christmas eve you get all excited knowing that you only have a few more hours left until you get to unwrap presents. You don't know what you're getting, but you know that in the morning it's happening. With a baby it's the opposite. You know what you're getting, you just don't know when it's coming. Not knowing whether it's a boy or a girl makes it even more exciting. Every day, every hour could be it. When you go to bed you wonder if your wife is going to wake you in the night. When she heads off to work you wonder if she's going to call you during the day to come get her. It could literally be any time. ANY TIME! Instead of a few hours of excitement on Christmas eve, you get a whole damn week of that sort of intense excitement. It's enough to wear you adrenal glands right out. Quite frankly, it's exausting.
I always had such a hard time hiding my excitement that it seemed like I wasn't even trying. I'd be bouncing around the house asking if I could get her anything and taking care of any kids that were around and not being able to sleep. This sort of drove my wife nuts. The last week was much less fun for her. She was always somewhere between "this is really uncomfortable" and "sweet Jesus why did I think this was a good idea let it be over already oh my god".

I had fun though, so much fun.

Books this week that I forgot to write about on Friday
Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond
Nine Tomorrows - Isaac Asimov
Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Cabin Fever - Jeff Kinney
Guns, Germs and Steel attempts to answer a very basic question. How did the world end up like it did? Why did Europe come to conquer the Americas, and not the other way round. It's easy to notice that Europe had the guns, germs, and steel weapons that made conquest possible, but why did they have them, and not the Americas. We know that there is no difference in intelligence or inventiveness between races, so why was there such a disparity between technology? Diamond lays out the role that agriculture and it's rapid spread throughout some parts of the world, but not others, played in this. If you've ever thought that you're pretty darn lucky to have been born where you were instead of somewhere else in the world, and wondered why that was, this book is for you. Great read.
Nine Tomorrows is nine short stories by Asimov from the late 50's. It's just all around great reading. I'm not a huge sci-fi fan, but these stories were brilliant. I'm not sure this book is in print any more, I picked it up at a used book store, but if you can find a collection of Asimov's short works, you'll be entertained.
Cabin Fever is the 6th in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. Kinney is just awesome. He's incredibly funny without ever being inappropriate. His drawings have a subtle emotion that adds so much feeling to the text. I can't read his books without laughing out loud. If you have kids and they read these books, you need to steal them. Very quick reads, very very funny.

Brace Yourself

The first of my kids now has braces. I'm sure there will be more, but he's the first. He's only 8 so he's not only the first one in the family, but also the first one in his grade. He can't tell if that's bad or not yet. We warned him about the potential teasing but that hasn't materialized, mostly the other kids just think they're cool. Novelty and all.
He's one of those kids that really does need braces. He has significant structural issues in his tiny mouth which I believe are a direct result of his mother. She's beautiful, but she does have a tiny mouth. There are probably lots of other genetic defects (I like to call them features) that I have to take credit for, but not the tiny mouth. My mouth is normal. So normal in fact that I still resent the fact that I had to have braces at all. I distinctly remember the orthodontist telling my mom that my teeth didn't have any problems, bu they could be straightened out a little. I was sitting right there! I could hear everything he said! He said that I didn't really need them! I had a brief moment of joy but was immediately crushed when my mom started discussing how much it would cost to just straighten them out. Damn near jumped out of the chair and ran away.

By the time I got my braces on in 7th grade, so many people had them that it wasn't a big deal. Nobody cared except me and I didn't care what they looked like. I was the most awkward 7th grader you could possibly imagine and I was pretty aware of the fact that braces weren't going to be the deciding factor about whether I was going to get kissed by a girl. I had way bigger problems than that. No, I didn't like them for two different reasons. The first was taking care of them. Suddenly about half of the food I liked was on the don't eat list. Not that I really stopped eating much of it, but if I didn't sneak it then I got yelled at for it. The reason most of it was on the no eat list was that it got stuck in my braces and then I had all kinds of trouble getting it out. Brushing my teeth was never one of my favorite things, but with braces it became horrible. I actually developed worse brushing habits when I had braces. If I couldn't get something out, I just left it in under the assumption that if I gave it enough time it would soften and be easier to get out. As long as it wasn't visible in my front four teeth, I didn't work too hard at it. Now that might have affected getting kissed now that I look back on it. Last night while trying to help my son floss between his braces my wife mentioned that I must know how to do it since I had braces. Sorry honey, I never, not once, flossed when I had braces.
The second reason I disliked my braces was the implication that my smile, which I'd had my whole life and was quite fond of, wasn't quite good enough for the world. I needed improving. I had pretty high minded ideals for a 7th grader and resented this terribly. This was vanity, but not my vanity. This was vanity being forced upon me by others. Injustice! I was wrong though. Not wrong that it was vanity being forced upon me, but that it was injustice that only I was facing. Being exceptionally akward it never occured to me that at some point a straight smile would matter. I couldn't grasp that slight adjustments in my teeth might actually make a difference in how people see me. A crooked smile wouldn't matter if I was a ditch digger or a lawn mower (or a stay at home dad in fact) but it could make my entry into some jobs harder. Sales, politics, acting, even being a lawyer in front of a jury, are all things where people's performance can be affected by their looks. We might not like this, but do some extent, it's true. No parent wants to purposely shut doors in their kids' lives. They want to believe, and make as possible as they can, that everything is open to them. It took me a long time to understand that my parents may or may not have been doing something to improve my life, they couldn't possibly know the outcome then, but they were trying. That trying, that actively giving a damn, makes a difference.
So my son has braces. His teeth would grow in without them, he'd still be able to chew and smile. But in his tiny mouth he'd end up with a wild snarl of teeth. I'm not sure what effect this would have on him as an adult. I really don't know, and I don't get a do-over on it. I've just got to do what my parents did, do what I think is best, and assure him that he'll thank me for it someday. Maybe he actually will, maybe he'll carry just a hint of adolescent bitterness way too far into adulthood. Could go either way.

Lasagna

You always need to make dinner before dinner, if you made it after dinner that wouldn't make sense. But what if you have something going on before dinner? What if you have an afternoon dentist appointment that will get you home right about the time you'd like to be getting dinner on the table? What's a stay at home dad to do? Ideally, you make your wife cook. Ha! You next choice would be leftovers, and that works well, if you've planned for it and actually have leftovers. Really though, this is one of those times that you need at least one meal that you can make in the middle of the day that you can serve later. I think the ideal meal for this is lasagna. This is a really really simple recipe and there are probably much better ones out there. This isn't gourmet food, it's hot, it's tasty, and it'll get you fed when you need food. It's a good simple meal for any time, but it really shines as a make ahead meal for those odd times when you really need one.

Tastes better than it looks, honest.

Lasagna - recipe from god knows where.
13x9 baking pan
9 real lasagna noodles (the ones you cook in a pot before you make the lasagna, not bake along with it)
1 jar spaghetti sauce
1 container cottage cheese
1 pound ground beef
shredded mozarella cheese

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. At the same time, heat a big pot of water to a boil while browning the ground beef. When the water is boiling, boil the noodles for 10-12 minutes. You want them cooked, but still firm enough to pick up without tearing. Pour 1/4 to 1/2 cup of the sauce in the bottom of the 13x9 pan so the noodles don't stick. Combine the rest of the sauce, the browned beef, and the cottage cheese in a bowl. Put down your first layer of noodles, cover with about 1/3 of the meat/sauce mixture, sprinkle some mozarella on top. Repeat with the next two layers of noodles sauce and cheese. Make your top layer of cheese thicker. Place uncovered in the oven for 40-50 minutes until cheese on top is melted and starting to brown on the edges. Pull it out and let it cool until you're ready to eat it.

Yesterday I made this at lunch time while I was making lunch for my pre-schooler and me. It was in the oven before nap time and out before we had to leave to pick up the older kids from school and drag them to the dentist. When we got home all I had to do was cut it up, zap it in the microwave for a smidge to warm it up a bit and I was golden. A successful home made meal without being home to make it. Awesome.

Baby Deer

I was on my first week of summer vacation with the kids when my wife called me.
"There's a fawn in the yard."
"Cool"
"No, it's all by itself."
"It's mother will show up, give it time."
The next morning I get another call.
"It's still there."
"Ok, well, I still think it's mother will show up."
"What if she doesn't?"
"Uhhh.... what do you mean?"
"What do I do if she doesn't?"
"It's a fawn, there's not much you can do. It's not like you can invite it in for a meal."
"Yea, I guess so"
The next afternoon, the calls continue......
"The fawn is still here, it's walking around by the guineas."
"Ok, maybe it's mom won't show up. No mother would let her child associate with guineas."
"I told you"
"Yes you did."
"Now what do I do."
"Nothing, there's nothing you can do. It can drink from the guinea waterer and if you don't mow the lawn it will have plenty to eat. The rest is up to the deer."
"Should I buy it food?"
"If it will make you feel better, but it probably won't eat it."
"Does it still need milk?"
"Probably not or it would already be dead."
"What!"
That's how we ended up with Baby Deer living in our yard. He wasn't really a pet, he was just an animal that happened to live in our yard for a while. We never did find out how he ended up there. We suspect that he was born there and though his mother could easily hop the neighborhood fences, he was too little. They would have hidden in back and since we didn't have a dog at the time and we don't really ever go out to the back 1/3 acre of our property (which is quite jungley) we would never have seen them. As he got older his mother would have started to leave him occasionally to go do something else, go eat somewhere else, go talk to other deer, whatever it is that deer do. Whether she was chased away by loose dogs or hit by a car or just got lost, we'll never know, but she disappeared. With his mother gone he started to wander about. Deer are really quite social and I'm sure he was lonely. He latched on to the guineas as his herd. He'd follow them around as they looked for bugs and he'd lay down near them during the day. At night he headed out back when they went to roost in the trees. It wasn't long before he was even eating guinea food out of their food bowl in the coop. He'd come too when I whistled for the birds.
He was always just a bit wary of people. We could get pretty close to him but never really tried to tame him. We might have been able to with patience but it seemed like a bad idea to me. A basic fear of humans would be useful to him if he ever jumped the fence and headed off on his own. When we found our dog Patty that fall and brought her home we were worried about how they'd get along. They did have a few interactions that worried us, but the stern talks that we gave Patty and the fact that neither of them had a friend seemed to sort it out. They didn't exactly become cuddly, but they would play with each other in the yard. Some observing out the window showed that Baby Deer was the one instigating the playing as often as not. He really did need more friendship than that stupid flock of birds could supply.
As fall drew on he grew bigger and grew out of his spots. He also grew a cute little set of buttons on his head confirming that he was in fact a he. This made me feel pretty good about not trying to tame him. There was no way he would stay around any longer than next fall, he'd be too interested in girls by then and he'd be off. He wasn't a pet, and I knew that, but I did check on him every morning. Every now and again he'd manage to get over the fence into the neighbor's yard. I'd open the gate and sort of herd him back in. I knew he wasn't ours but I still felt like we could provide the safest place until he was ready to leave. One day in January, he just wasn't there anymore. We looked for him. We really hoped he'd come back, mostly so we knew he was safe, but he didn't. Lots of things could have happened to him, most of them bad, but I like to think that he finally saw another deer in the vacant lot of woods behind us. He found a friend, not a make do friend like the dog or the guineas, but a real deer friend. When that happened he was ready to leave. We'd kept him safe as long as he needed that and now he went off into the world to be a real deer. I was happy for him, but it was still hard not to be sad about it.
Baby Deer was never a pet in the strictest sense, he just happened to live the same place that we did for a while. He was still a very interesting part of our lives and of our children's childhood.

Checkerboard Cake

Checkerboard cake is more of a cake baking technique than a recipe. The magic is in the alternating bands of light and dark that make up the checkerboard when stacked and sliced. You can buy checkerboard pans but you don't need to. In fact, I think it takes a bit of the sport out of it and it's pretty clear that somebody must have been making checkerboard cakes before there was a demand for the pans. So how?
Two Layer Checkerboard Cake - technique by Nana
You need two half recipes of light and dark cake. Yellow and chocolate, strawberry and vanilla, it's up to you.
Two 9 inch round cake pans.
A bunch of tin foil.
The trick here is to be able to pour two different kinds of cake batter into the same pan in an organized way. You do this with tin foil dams. Take an 18 inch piece of tinfoil and fold it over on itself until you have a strip about two inches wide and 18 inches long. Then form this into a circle that divides the pan into an inner circle and an outer circle. Now make another one and do the same for the second pan. Now for the tricky part. You need to pour one color into the inside circle of one pan, and the outside circle of another. Now do the same for the second color. When your oven in preheated gently pull the foil circles out of the pan and bake. The colors will remain separate and when you stack the cakes and cut you get the effect seen in the picture. You can go as crazy as you want with this technique, you can make two loops or three loops or hearts or cows or whatever you want. The checkerboard cake kits just supply you with pre-made plastic loops that do a more precise job of what you do with the tinfoil, no mystery.
Go ahead and make a checkerboard cake and show it off. When people ask you how you did it, just tell them it's magic. It sort of is.

On The Road Again

19 hours, 45 minutes, 6 seconds, door to door. It might have been our fastest time yet. A logical person would wonder how many miles we covered in that time. I say that it doesn't matter. The distance is always the same, only our efficiency in travel is variable.

Shhhhh.......

We used to fly from Texas to Michigan for Christmas. Then we went and had too many kids. If we were to fly now it might just be cheaper to buy the whole plane. Six plane tickets is a LOT. Then you have car rental, and since we can't fit in a normal car we have to rent a van which costs about 10 times more than a car. Again, for the two weeks we're up there, we might as well just pop by the dealer and buy something. I think I know why big families never go anywhere farther than they can stand to drive.
We've settled into a pretty efficient driving routine. We leave after lunch on day one. We stop for dinner and the kids go to sleep near their normal bed time of 8:00. We drive through the night alternating between driving and sleeping for my wife. I can stay up late into the night pretty well as long as I'm fueled with gummi bears and caffeine. My wife can sleep at the drop of a hat. She's also still functions well on just 3 or 4 hours of sleep from her breast feeding days so when I get tired she pops right up and is ready to go. The kids wake up between 5:00 and 6:00 and soon after we give them breakfast in the car. We make it to our destination before lunch. This schedule maximizes the time that people are sleeping in the car and minimizes the time needed for meal and bathroom stops. Sleeping children neither eat or pee which is a real advantage.
Our kids really are great car riders. They read a lot and color and just seem to be able to take being strapped in place for that long. I suspect that if anyone is ever looking for astronauts to Mars my kids will put our car trips down on their applications. There's a lot of 'are we there yet' from the little ones who seem to have a bit of trouble wrapping their heads around the idea that we won't be there until tomorrow. Even the dog seems to have made peace with the idea that we occasionally live in a car instead of a house.
Being a stay at home dad gives me a little more say in the whole road trip experience. Not only do I get to use my real life Tetris skills to pack the truck, I also get to interpret my kids demands. Are they hungry? Nope, they're just fine. Do they really need to pee or can they make it to the next rest stop in 22 miles? They can make it. I'm home with them all the time, I just know these things, I'm finely in tune to my children. Except when I'm not. Last year our youngest was only potty trained by a few months and that had me a little nervous. He was great at making it to the toilet, but he wasn't so good at knowing when that would happen. When he said he had to go poop 10 minutes after a rest stop when we had asked him if he needed to poop, I confidently declared that he really didn't have to go. He was just thinking about the last rest stop and it was all in his head. He did this in the grocery store all the time when we walked by the bathroom. He'd be fine when he forgot about it. Except at it turns out he couldn't forget about it. In fact, 5 minutes later nobody could forget about it, ever. We had planned for accidents with a change of clothes right next to the door so we were sort of prepared. I took him waddling awkwardly into the next truck stop bathroom. I got him up on the changing table and it was clear that his underwear was a complete loss. I was like an insurance adjuster looking over a terrible wreck, clearly they were totaled, no one could dispute this claim. I still fee bad for all of the people that used that restroom until the trash was changed. You can't just flush underwear, and garbage cans just don't have lids tight enough to contain the fact that something terribly wrong has happened. Truck stop bathrooms are sometimes pretty horrible places, but that bathroom, on that day, was it's own special kind of horrible for all that visited after us.
Thankfully this year was uneventful, some scars heal slowly.