I made homemade ice cream yesterday for our big Three Birthday's & a Graduation Bash. Actually, there weren't tons of people - just the right amount - but the puppies made up for it... When you start adding fur to our three pups (Lambert almost qualifies as five just by himself), what you get is a pack.

Man, oh and loving the puppies... if anyone finds a Newfie-Mix puppy that doesn't cost too much, well, I want him/her. I can't yet afford him/her, but I can start daydreaming about him/her. Just figure: if I manage to get a job that pays back my school loans so I don't have to go live in South Korea and live even more nunnish for two years in order to be financially viable, then maybe I can get a dog! In the meantime, I very much enjoyed the dog pack that accumulated last night.

And it was so friggin' hot (it went from hovering in the 50s to slinking in the low-90s in one day, causing my mother's artichoke plant to have a heat stroke & my sweat glands to sprout overnight) that one Margarita turned me into a blithering idiot in ten minutes, and so I figured I might as well continue in that vein, and so did... ah, the beauty of summer!

Anyhow, back to the ice cream, which was made to accompany db's chocolate-strawberry cake, which she was going to title the "Sweet Maria Cake," until I vetoed it (with bias) in favor of "Jackass Maria Cake." So, the Jackass Maria Cake was wonderful and very pretty as well, and so was the ice cream I made, which I have decided to call: "Harmony of Bitter & Sweet Chocolate Ice Cream."

In case you like making ice cream (like me), I used this basic recipe, but to make it uniquely my own Harmony of Bitter & Sweet, I added the following three steps:

(1) Zest the rinds off two oranges plus a touch of thumb knuckle. Add the results to the custard base simultaneous to the chocolate bits.

(2) Wear a bikini and sweat as you are making the first part, but don't, and I repeat don't, sweat into the custard base.

(3) Add, um, well, a bit (a bit? no, maybe more, maybe a fair amount? like a shot, or possibly two or three shots, but it depends on whether you have just had a bit of margarita with 90-degree weather how much you add, but yeah, a 'bit') of Cointreau Orange Liquor to the whipping cream. Hell, it's just like vanilla (!) so add as much as you like, as long as you know it makes it slushier and harder to freeze.

Yep, so that's that, but I would like to add that ice cream is best made when you have at least three grunt laborers to help you churn the hand-churner, and for this, we all had to thank kt, la, and my sis. Good job, ya'll.

Yeaaaaaaaaah, I love love love summer. Oh, and I finished Lolita, and it was indeed a twisted tale:

The Squirl and his Squirrel, the Rabs and their Rabbits
Have certain obscure and peculiar habits.
Male hummingbirds make the most exquisite rockets.
The snake when he walks holds his hand in his pockets...

She was so kind, was Rita, such a good sport, that I daresay she would have given herself to any pathetic creature or fallacy, any old broken tree or a bereaved porcupine, out of sheer chumminess and compassion.

oh, hysterical lovely bizarre... still laughing, ten minutes later

p.s. I had a strike in bowling! (still haven't ever broke the 100mark). and Happy Birthday to everyone.

p.p.s. love can be so very selfish, no?, and yet when it settles like a pup on the mat, the most loyal.

p.p.p.s. More from the Monster:

- and a last-minute kiss was to enforce the play's profound message, namely, that mirage and reality merge in love. // Lo 213

[...] I felt instinctively that toilets - as also telephones - happened to be, for reasons unfathomable, the points where my destiny was liable to catch. We all have such fateful objects - it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another - carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of special significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break. // Dolly 224

This Saturday, I had pretty close to a perfect day - add a couple hours of writing and the calm serenity that comes from job security, and well, it would have been absolutely too edgy to exist. As it was, I just about glowed all day long, feeling my kudos and the splendid possibility that soon I will have rock-solid abs of steel ball-bearings upon which I can roll myself along every tough-girl possibility out there (I've been highly irritated to find myself 15lbs overweight for the first time in four years, really, and I'm damn sick of trying to squeeze, at best, into pants that were loose last summer; so while trying to remain patient with myself, I'm also setting up a daily regime of exercise, so's to become a Superhero again).

Anyhow, back to the perfect day. Well, I had finally gotten over my bitchiness, which was really actually quite bitchy. It was a combo of That Time of Month, and getting upset with a good friend for the first time ever (with her). It's hard to know what to do when you experience emotions for the first time and they're not so clearcut that you can simply state them and get over it, but instead need to think about whether you're being a jerk for feeling upset in the first place.

How was that for vague?

Well, the gist, why not, is that my first week here, my friend called to say she had canceled her July trip to WA, and well, this visit (and a promised kayaking trip along with it) was something I had been looking forward to and holding up in my mind as indication that I wouldn't eternally be solitudinous in the PacNorthwest wilderness, and also, I've been missing this friend & was excited to catch up in person. But alas, my friend had canceled this trip for something she's more excited about, and that smarted, really... part of my bitchiness was related to the apparent discrepancy between anticipations, i.e. it made me feel unloved and unworthy, which is harsh business coming from a best friend. Anyhow, Saturday started being a good day because I had called her, told her I was upset and then made up with her and felt a better about things, and far less inclined to sulk.

So, after morning coffees on the front porch (morning sun, hummingbird feeder, four flowering pots and a succulent pot), I got going and went down the Saturday market in B'ham, which has become an intensely happening and busy event since I've moved away... it's very much like the street festivals I got excited about as a kid, and the stuff for sale at this mart - food and pottery and plants and outdoor items and woolie t-shirts with cute sayings - is good stuff, nothing to snuff my nose at (as some people have seemed to think I might do now that I've become an amazingly erudite urbanite).

I was fairly overwhelmed by the number of people and would have preferred a quiet place to enjoy people-watching, but even the stairs I used to sit on for gawking purposes have become little hubs of ice-cream and shaved-ice eating, with four ballerina-clad blond children drooling colored items down their pink fru-tus. And so, I was rather quick, wandering for a bit, eating two samosas (not the same as mimosas, by the way), and buying myself the most adorable patio-tomato plant ever (for my back patio: red-bricked, table-clad with umbrella, afternoon sun, three plant-boxes awaiting the kitchen baby sunflowers, sweet peas, and wallflowers). It's the cutest tomato plant ever, let me repeat, and I have named him Siegfried.

Then I left, came back home, settled Siegfried, and picked up my number one recent treat, which I bought myself to make everything seem okay while I look for a job and get really really super-buff and sultry tangy waterbabish:


Lo and behold, my water-puppy, which was very cheapy and not the best in the world, a little tippy (must practice rolls when my back is slightly better) and such, but something I can easily lift myself and toss on the top of my car and shuttle out in, by myself and solita without having to desperately try to rope a friend into going with me.


And so, on nearly-perfect Saturday I fed this heron. That's right, I fed it (not, as my father heard me, "shot it" but gavith of the food). Picked up a couple of floater fish that had been tossed back by some nice fisherman, and paddled gently into the lily pads, tossing the fish about five feet away from my boat and watching the heron swoop down and scoop them up with one slurp of his slurper. He then eyed me as if to indicate by the broad cleft in his eyebrow-tufts that I had not, in fact, provided him with sufficient food-substances for him to consider following me home and letting me name him something literary. Next time.

I then paddled for a couple of hours, raced home, and went to see the Roller Betties, some of whom were very hot, and all of whom where entertaining and ferociously athletic. Since then, I've been trying to come up with great Roller Betty names to name my plants. So far, the best is Broadknee Dangerfield (alt. BangHerField). I then went out pool-playing, had a hotdog, then went dancing, more pool-playing (I'm due to go to work soon, so am speeding through this), more dancing, meeting of new people (didn't make too much of an ass of myself although a little bit of an ass), back to dancing and then home. Nearly perfect day.

By the way, I'm also reading Lolita and I think it's pretty twisted. Am I alone in thinking it's twisted?

I don't know why I'm feeling so damn secretive these days, but I am.

However, let it be known that I'm safely back in WA, trying to find jobs, trying not to contemplate my Future too much, feeling bitchy about one thing but trying to feel less bitchy about it because "it's not nice to be mean [or bitchy]," feeling spoiled about new additions to my house (will mention later when less secretive), playing with the puppies, and growing kitchen babies for my back patio:

*Chicago, as Viewed from the River*

*Just Entering Washington, First Rain*

*Birth Outside My New Bay Window*