More Dental Woes

I am predisposed to hate dentists, but for a long time I gave my current dentist the benefit of the doubt and assumed that he was actually a decent dentist even thought I don’t like him.  After yesterday, I’m pretty sure the he (Dr. Marc Purdy) is a bad dentist.

It was the fourth appointment of a root canal that was initially supposed to take one appointment, and he decided he hadn’t properly filled the root at the previous appointment, so he dug it all out and refilled it.  He did this without any anesthetic, and it hurt.  A LOT.  He and his evil assistant didn’t seem to care that I was crying out in pain.  Rather, he seemed pleased when he caused me pain.  If you haven’t ever had a root canal before, here is a little bit of what it entails: they remove the root of your tooth, fill it with a material and then melt it to fill up the canal.  This is all painless as long as you’re numbed up, but without novacaine, it feels like someone is trying to melt your brain.

 

Upgrade Your Insults

I have a horrible case of road-rage. Even though it’s a small town, Ithaca has awful traffic. Our dog trainer told us he wants to write a book called “Going 15 in a 30: The Ithaca Story.” That’s is a pretty accurate description of how all the old hippies getting high in their Subaru station wagons drive around here. And it drives me up the wall. I tend to overuse the term “Fucking Asshole” when dealing with them, which is why it so great that I Stumbled Upon this webpage with some great insults, attributed to Shakespeare. I’ve vowed to add these to my vocabulary:

• Weather-bitten Pig-Nut
• Beef-witted Barnacle
• Fat-Kidneyed Footlicker
• Common-Kissing Clotpole

I particularly like the ones that are composed of seemingly innocuous words that somehow add up to something bad like “Frothy Onion-Eyed Clack-dish” or “Saucy Elf-Skinned Wagtail”

I also wish I was one of those Southerners who could rattle off bizarre Southern expressions. So I googled up some southern insults and came up with these:

• “You look about as happy as a dead pig in sunshine”
• “You’re more slippery than snot on a glass door knob”
• “If your brains were dynamite, you couldn’t blow your nose”
• “You’re tighter than a flea’s ass over a rain barrel”
• “If I had a dog as ugly as you, I’d shave his butt and make him walk backwards”

They are all a little long winded for shouting at a hippie in a Subaru, but I sure hope I can find a use for them sometime.

 

Indiscriminate Eating

The male members of my household should really display better judgement about what is and is not food, in my opinion.

Howard:

has been known to eat noodles with ketchup and cottage cheese. Julius:

will eat any random trash he finds, and is particularly fond of licking the bags that toilet paper comes in. The worst offender of all is Oliver:

Having nearly starved to death at one point in life, Oliver is willing to try to eat basically anything. Pens, electronics, thermometers, whatever. Yesterday he knocked over a sack of garden fertilizer while I was at work. When he woke up this morning acting very lethargic, I was very concerned that he had eaten some of the fertilizer. We called the vet, who suggested feeding him lots of liquids, but who didn’t seem very concerned. He was definitely under the weather most of the day, but he is back to his usual exuberant self now, and I am very relieved.

 

Pasta with Creamy Tomato Sauce

My favorite food is Penne Al Arrabiata. A restaurant I used to go to in England had something they called Penne Al Arrabiata on its menu, but the dish wasn’t like it usually is — it had a creamy tomato sauce and was really delicious. I’ve tried to recreate it, but almost all the creamy tomato sauce recipes I’ve seen involve heavy cream. Mixing heavy cream with tomatoes doesn’t really result in a creamy sauce… more grainy really. I recently read a recipe somewhere that involved marscapone cheese, so tonight I decided to try it.

Oliver and I went to the dog park and stopped on the way home at the natural food store down the street from our house. Since this involved leaving an extremely hungry dog alone in the car, I tried to make the trip quick. They didn’t seem to have any Marscapone, but I found some creme fraiche, another ingredient I’ve never cooked with before. The package (made by Vermont Butter and Cheese Company) said “Creme Fraiche enriches sauces, soups and adds a pure cream taste to all recipes without curdling over high heat.” That was exactly what I was looking for, so I bought it. The resulting pasta was just what I wanted:

Pasta with Creamy Tomato Sauce

• 8 ounces Penne Pasta
• 2 Tbsp Olive Oil
• 5 Cloves Garlic, Crushed
• Pinch Red Pepper Flakes
• 1 Tbsp Tomato Paste
• 15 ounce Can Whole Tomatoes + Juice
• 1/4 cup White Wine
• Salt to Taste
• 2 ounces Creme Fraiche

Boil pasta in salted water as directed. Meanwhile, heat oil in a skillet and add garlic, red pepper and tomato paste. Pulse the tomatoes in a blender or food processor until pureed. When the garlic sizzles, add tomatoes and white wine and cook over high heat. Add salt to taste. Cook 5 - 10 minutes, adding water from the pasta if it gets dry. When the pasta is done, add the creme fraiche to the tomato sauce and stir, then stir in the pasta.

 

Fun with GIMP

I find GIMP (open-source Photoshop-esqe software) pretty confusing in general, but I followed a nice tutorial to convert the photo in my previous post to this:

It was kind of fun, and definitely a lot cheaper than buying a new couch that is not Lucy-colored.

 

A Pile of Orange Fluff

I’m working from home today, and so far it’s going very slowly. Shockingly, other people who work at my lab also wish to use the computers, and won’t let me fill them all up with my jobs. While I am waiting, this is occurring on the couch next to me:

To add to the cuteness of the situation, they are snoring.

In other, less cute, news of the week, the assistant district attorney was very unhelpful in my quest to contest the seatbelt violation I got WHILE WEARING A SEATBELT. I get extremely angry just thinking about the whole affair, so that is all I’m going to say about that. Also, his bump on the head finally spurred Howard to go to the doctor and get an MRI of his head because two people in his family have died of brain aneurysms. He hasn’t had it yet, but is worried about it. It is unlikely that there is anything wrong, and if there is, the doctors can fix it, but it’s still not a fun prospect.

I will try to dwell on the happier things in life:

• It is Friday
• I have been for a run everyday for the past 10 days
• I canceled the health benefits of running by eating a lot of really yummy ice cream sandwiches
• Oliver is getting a hair-cut this afternoon. He’s gonna be so cute!
• Lucy woke up and gave Julius a bath, but now they are back to snoring.

 

Homemade Ice Cream Sandwiches

Last week when I was slaving away on my annoying and never-ending pi0 study, I wanted to make some homemade oreo cookies. I finally have a little bit of time to breath this week, so this evening I made a variation on the theme: ice cream sandwiches (because really, why would you eat shortening mixed with powdered sugar when you can eat premium ice cream instead?). I used a chocolate cookie recipe from the Smitten Kitchen. They are really really good:

 

Deserters

This is the approximate series of events each morning at our house:

• Howard gets up
• Howard closes the bedroom door so I will not be attacked by hungry animals
• Howard feeds and attends to the various animals
• Howard opens the bedroom door, gives me a kiss, and goes to work
• The cats come into the bedroom
• I wake up and pet them lots

This morning I woke up and there were no little orange furballs there to greet me.  I am apparently nothing compared to a little patch of sunshine in the living room:

 

My First Flower Bed

I’m not very good at making things look pretty, but this weekend I tried.  We used to have a disgusting rotting woodpile next to our backporch.  It had rusty nails and trash in it, and the cats and dogs had to walk over it to get to the yard, so something had to be done.  I hauled the wood off and attempted to make a flower bed out of the remaining space:

So far, it only looks marginally better than the wood/trash pile, but I’m going to work on it.  The dog has already smooshed two of the flowers, so it might be a lost cause.  This can be my test flower bed, so one day when I have a house of my own, I can make one that does not look quite so pathetic.  One problem is that I can’t move the decaying railroad ties behind it, because then the gravel that is supporting the porch would flow out.  This doesn’t seem like the best porch design, but the people who lived in the house before us did all sorts of wierd crap like that.

 

The Outward Hound

Here is a picture of Oliver in his backpack, which is seriously called “Outward Hound.”  Today we went for a run to the farmer’s market.  It was Oliver’s first trip there, and he was a little freaked out by all the people, but he warmed up to the place after I shared some of my huevos rancheros flatbread with him.

The backpack is kind of ridiculously huge.  I don’t want to weight him down too much.  Just the backpack itself with a few treats and a plastic bag inside seem to be enough of a workout for him.  I like the handle on top — it makes it look like we could pick Oliver up as if he were a sack of rice.