Take it from a mean old bat: some of the coolest words in the English language are My sisters have a toy store! Pete loves the Angry Little Girl dolls and adds them to all the displays. We now have an Angry Kim doll in our living room Pete swears he hears running around at night. I sit on the toy store floor and read the books. When I find five or six I love, I pop them into an envelope and mail them to my grandson Panky. He’s a smart boy. He’s gonna read if it’s the last thing I do – unless the last thing I do is push Miss Sasha’s mother-in-law over the Reichenbach Falls and make an accidental swan dive. Our cats love the finger puppets we’ve casually dropped all over the house. Drusy brings tiny Peter Rabbit to us like a gift every morning. At least: we think it’s a present. It could be a warning to Grover and Stuart Little.
Category Archives: our furry overlords
One Step Beyond
These are my friends Smarty and Ben. They’re rescue greyhounds sharing a domecile with my boss Gianna and her husband, the gent at the other end of the leashes. When Gianna’s family goes on vacation, I sometimes see my friends Smarty and Ben out walking with other humans. Usually I recognize the dogs first. Once Smarty walked up to me in town and mentioned he liked my shoes. I thanked him before I realized I was talking to a dog who would never need shoes, and that was some incredible abstract thinking on his part.
Down From These Heights
Beautiful Sweetpea. She would nibble on the squirrels if she could. From here, the neighbors look so tasty.
Collar To the Cold
Here at Poor Impulse Control, we’re all about It, whatever It is, so long as It is funny, and nothing is funnier than talking about food. Why? Because I get stage fright making rice pudding and half my family went to cooking school without so much as sending a postcard. To recap somewhat, then, I have several different projects going and your bag’s packed.
1. Dad died and left cookbooks to study, mysterious gear and problems to solve;
2. Dagnabbit: jarring, canning and preserving;
3. Inspired by Pete’s wonky digestive tract, he and I are exploring better food for better health including organics, reducing meat consumption and expanding our vegetable and grain options;
4. Gardening. It’s better to grow one’s own food than to rely on outside sources wherever possible;
5. Affordable, nutritious eating. If we can get dinner on the table every night for $10, we might have enough money to pay our fucking bills.
These topics overlap somewhat. For instance: remember our friend, Dad’s dehydrator? 
Instructions for the mothership here are hard to come by in book form and online recipes are full of slippery adjustments. Example: every direction I found ended with store in a cool, dry place and last summer, New Jersey did not provide any of those; in time, everything I dehydrated and stored in the basement turned a lovely blue. Pete and I picked up a vacuum sealer, thereafter sealed everything and stored it in the fridge. This degree of caution still did not guarantee success: sometimes dehydrated vegetables are sharp and pierce the plastic and appear sealed anyhow. They are not and will turn a lovely blue in the fridge, which like the rest of New Jersey is slightly damp.
Ta, dahhhhhlink, you’re saying, Can we take a connecting flight to the point? How about you return your tray to the upright and locked position and not be so critical, hmm? As lessons in home economics go, learning dehydrating without a teacher proved tricky, expensive and frustrating. In practice, dehydrating works best for us with fruit like peaches, pears and apples. Reconstituted, these sturdy fruit add nice flavor and the texture is familiar if you, as I did, grew up eating dried apples; I also learned the hard way that peeling apples and pears before drying is worth it. A second preparation has been very successful: combinations of leeks, young carrots and fennel – loosely speaking, a form of mirepois. Rehydrated and minced, one of these packages adds a jolt of kickass richness to soups, stews and sauces.
The next thing I wanted to road test was fingerling potatoes. I know. No, really. I know. You can buy potatoes all year round, there’s no point in drying them, right? There is, actually. I bought these potatoes from local organic farmers with excellent tattoos. When I bought them in September, I parboiled them, sliced them lengthwise and dehydrated them overnight at the highest setting on the dehydrator: 175 degrees. Two nights ago, I opened the package and poured boiling water over the potatoes, and when they cooled, I refrigerated them until this morning, when I drained off the water, mixed in about a cup and a half of homemade yogurt, half a cup of grated cheddar, salt, pepper, cumin, dried sage and minced rosemary. I poured this into two small casseroles, dotted the surfaces with a bit of butter, covered with foil and baked at 425 for an aromatic eternity. For the last fifteen minutes, the potatoes baked with foil off to develop a nice crust. Result: a filling breakfast gratin that tasted like summer.
Pete was hesitant before the first bite but enthusiastic thereafter. He offered that the potato flavor was good but next time, instead of long rehydration, we might try boiling the potatoes. It will save time. We decided that in the future we wouldn’t dehydrate other kinds of potatoes, just fingerlings, and the initial storage failures, while discouraging, had taught us enough to be worth the price.
This is a picture of dinner at our house: Pete makes something almost miraculously delicious, I make a yogurt or a fruit sauce, and Drusy drinks water out of a plastic goblet. We have all accepted that at dinnertime, Drusy will be joining us for drinks. Believe me, this is a civilized alternative to what might have become our routine had the other two cats decided they wanted to fight us for our dinners. Pete and I are okay, though, until one of the cats learns how to operate a spatula.
Out To Capture A Moment Everyone Knows
Lovely Drusy on the mantel, beneath the Picasso print dated 2.14.58.
Two Kinds Of Ice Cream
We were all so cozy. If you can believe it, outside a horn honked twice and Drusy, dressed like Audrey Hepburn, sailed down the stairs and sweetly warned us all not to wait up.
Instead I Pour the Milk
Never in my life have I personally been so frigging happy. Let’s deal with that, shall we? Maybe it’s the man, the food, the cats, the neighborhood, the job, the people – I can’t say because I’m writing for shit and it’s the middle of winter – but I am very happy, generally. Last week, I went to town meeting about sustainable living. One committee member said the schools aren’t going to do something just because it’s the right thing to do and I didn’t punch her in the face because I’ve fucking matured. I take things in stride now. My hip is kicking my ass, making it tough to put on socks. I bought scuffs on sale for more than 50% off, causing me to do a cautious Happy Dance. Drusy got a box just the right size for a 6 lb. cat. Halle-freaking-lujah.
The Path Before Me Lies
Lovely Topaz, her arms around my hand, falls asleep.
The vet diagnosed Topaz’s smelly breath and seeming fever as a painful gum condition that causes inflammation and makes veterinarians weepy. I listened to him talk about treatments, feeling like I’d been punched in the gut. I took the prescription to the drug store near my house, where times have changed. For years, I tricked the departed Larry, the little black cat bent on stealing your soul, into taking stinky medicine because the fish flavorings were ungodly expensive. Now, flavoring is $3 and the medicine is not even all that expensive. For about a week, we’ve mostly tricked Topaz into taking medicine mixed with tuna water – but it has to be fresh. Yesterday’s chilled tuna water will not do. Because Topaz is getting tuna water, Sweetpea must have it, so now it’s a treat and Topaz wants more.
In other news: tuna salad on crackers, tuna sandwiches, tomatoey tuna surprise.
The Shadow Of the Valley Behind Me
Last week, Topaz seemed to be running a fever, so we trundled off to the vet’s office, where the vet was very patient with 6.5 pounds of seething, hissing and shivering pussycat. I don’t want to get into humiliating specifics, but let’s just say that if the six and a half foot vet is intent on taking the temperature of the tiny angry kitty, LET THEM FIGHT IT OUT. Got that mental picture? Got it? Awesome.
In the evenings now, Topaz has taken to curling up on a velveteen pillow while I type a stirring missive or work on the family store’s website. Sometimes she stands on the keyboard and insists I admire her beauty, and how could I not? Though she will on occasion go so far as to nod off on my lap, Topaz is no lap cat. She is in her heart a panther, lounging in a tree, watching, always watching.
How Quiet the Chamber Is
First thing every weekend morning, I feel my way downstairs and refill the cats’ dishes. Because it’s winter, I put on scuffs and feed the outside cats, but that’s not as simple as it sounds because Topaz is always at my heel, trying to get outside. This morning, it was 29 degrees and an icy rain had just begun falling, Topaz wanted out and suddenly the door was locked behind me. Fortunately, Pete was upstairs in the shower and the tenants were all still in bed, so I discovered that I could actually stand up for 45 minutes. Naturally I was thinking about outdoor stuff.
Around the corner from our house, this sign is taped to a dumpster on a street wide enough for parking on one side and anxiety on the other. Certainly homeowners have every right to inconvenience neighbors with mid-winter renovations and unsightly scrap materials, but it seems likely canine enthusiasts have demonstrated their displeasure. Further: protest poop is a not unfamiliar sight upstairs in the attic here at Handmade House: an aggrieved party will leave a deposit located where it cannot be ignored, even if it can be stepped in. So it goes: point-making is a messy business and neither cats nor dog owners care for strategy. They are big thinkers! My advice: wear boots.
Poor Impulse Control 