Rock! Death! America!
Littering our noise on the Earth
May 18, 2012 at 12:59 pm · Filed under Pets
Ziggy had a joyous, treat-filled time at the vet on Tuesday. Then we drove home, and I slammed the tip of his tail in the car door. Ouch. He got his revenge by vigorously wagging his long, whip-like, bleeding tail all over the house. It was like cleaning up a crime scene. Numerous attempts to bandage his tail were futile, as he would happily bang it against the walls or stove or dryer and re-open the wound. I ended up at 4:45 pm taking him back to the vet. They gave him the snazzy blue bandage you see in the picture. It fell off (read: was wagged off) less than 24 hours later.
He went back today for a check up, and it is healing nicely. They don’t want him banging it open again, so the vet tech came up with this fancy plastic tube with bandage combo. He finds it a little embarrassing.
Note all the dog hair on the couch he isn’t supposed to sit on.
Here’s hoping for a blood free weekend!
May 10, 2012 at 12:16 pm · Filed under Home
I love our garden. My mother-in-law does most of the actual labor of weeding and trimming and stuff, but we both have an addiction to plant shopping. This year I noticed the garden is really maturing, and everything looks really pretty right now. Which I see you can’t quite tell from all my extreme close-ups!
Tulip.
Sweet woodruff.
XM’s watering can.
Colorful.
Columbine.
White dogwood.
Tiny gnomes.
May 8, 2012 at 12:36 pm · Filed under Beer, Board Games
D’s birthday was last weekend. To celebrate that and the completion of his brewery, we got him a custom wood tap handle made by Jerry’s Wood Works on Etsy. It is so pretty!
May 3, 2012 at 12:35 pm · Filed under Board Games
We have a really fun game called Igloo Pop. Each igloo has a certain number of beads in it. Your job is to shake them and try to guess how many beads are inside (there is a sticker on the bottom with the number). There is a ring of nine cards with numbers on them that you set around the igloos.
If you guess that the igloo you are shaking has 10 beads in it, then you put your token in the igloo and set it on the card with a 10. Some cards have two or three numbers, so you can hedge your bets a bit.
It is a free for all of igloo shaking! Once everyone has placed tokens and igloos, you go around the ring and check to see if anyone has guessed correctly. Losers lose their token, winners get their token back and the card, and there are some rules for multiple people on a card. At the end of the game, you count up the number of people on your cards and how many tokens you have left. Highest number wins!
Shaking is serious business. This review brought to you by Pepsi.
This game is really different and a lot of fun. It even has a cute story to go along with the theme.
April 27, 2012 at 9:45 am · Filed under Beer, Board Games
D made his first beer from the new electric brewery system! He made a hoppy brown ale that is pretty delicious. I’m sure I could find out all the brew specifics, but I’m feeling lazy so I’ll give you the layman’s rundown. He brewed 10 gallons and pitched one kind of yeast for one 5 gallon batch, and another for the other 5 gallons. On a side by side tasting they are pretty similar, but there are some subtle differences.
The brew day was really successful until the last step - D started to run water through a hose and hadn’t opened the valve quite yet to let the water flow. The water backed up in the hose and the hose expanded like a balloon until it loudly exploded and threw water everywhere. This little incident inspired the name of the beer, Le Boomb Brown.
See, we’ve been naming our beers (okay, his beers) with a board game twist, as the brewery name is Victory Point Brewing. Previous beers have had such names as Coco Rally Toasted Coconut Porter (game inspiration: Robo Rally), AppAles to AppAles (Apples to Apples), and Ticket to Rye IPA (Ticket to Ride).
Le Boomb is a silly little dice game that has you roll to see if you do nothing, if you pick up the bomb, or if the bomb explodes. If you are in possession of the bomb when it explodes, you are out. Last one in is the winner! It seemed a fitting name for the exploding brew session.
Pretty beer! We also made a Victory Point Brewing logo and made a tag for the electrical panel.
Exciting stuff!
April 23, 2012 at 4:45 pm · Filed under Board Games, Family, Home, Kids
We managed to squeeze in a lot of board games over Spring Break. I took (mostly terrible) pictures of them with the Hipstamatic app on my phone.
Climb! A finger dexterity game.
Dominion: Seaside Expansion.
Cars 2 Sorry Sliders.
Flash Point Fire Rescue. Got this one off of Kickstarter. Great co-op game!
Frog Jam. A matching and memory game with a chance to mess up other people. I used to play this with O when he was really little, and I just found it in the basement.
A La Carte. A cooking game!
Mystery Garden. 20 questions with a theme.
Patrician: Towering Glory.
And finally, Tribune. We would have probably played more, but D had the flu!
April 19, 2012 at 10:26 am · Filed under Beer
D and I took a tour on the Brewvana bus a couple weeks ago. This was a special tour put on by the New School Beer Blog. We went out to the Hood River area and visited five breweries. It was a nice trip! The Brewvana bus is really fun, and it is nice to go visit a the gorge without having to drive ourselves.
First stop: Everybody’s Brewing in White Salmon, Washington. We’ve been here a couple times, and always enjoy the beer and the lovely space.
Then we were off to Pfriem Family Brewers, a new place in Hood River still under construction! Fortunately they had some bottled beer that we got to try. Yum!
We then went up the hill to Logsdon Farmhouse Ales, which are literally brewed in a farmhouse.
Then we were off to Parkdale to visit the almost open Solera Brewing. Solera is in the old Elliot Glacier Public House spot. They had some of our favorite beers of the day! Can’t wait to go back.
Finally we had dinner at Double Mountain in downtown Hood River.
We had loads of fun! I highly recommend the Brewvana bus.
April 11, 2012 at 12:11 pm · Filed under Books, Food, Kids, School, Vegan
The 4th and 5th graders at Woodstock get to participate in ORCA - the Oregon Reader’s Choice Awards.
The Oregon Reader’s Choice Award was started in 2010 as a way for Oregon children and young adults to read high quality, popular books and select the best of the best.
Today the school librarian is throwing a pizza and voting party after school. In order to be able to vote you had to read at least three of the nominees. O read them all, because that is how he rolls.
I was going to read them all too, but didn’t get around to 11 Birthdays, N.E.R.D.S., or Heart of a Shepherd. This is a pretty cool way to get kids to read books and genres they otherwise wouldn’t pick up. O and I had already read Odd and the Frost Giants because I’m a huge Neil Gaiman fan. I wasn’t excited to read The Day-Glo Brothers, but was pleasantly surprised to find it a short, super interesting and entertaining read. The Storm in the Barn is a graphic novel that relies on beautiful, sparse drawings to set the mood. I’m a fan of graphic novels, so I hope this showed comic book naysayers that stories told as graphic novels can be just as powerful as a text only book. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon started out slow for me, but as it went along I got into the story.
My favorite was The Magician’s Elephant. It hurt my heart in a wonderful way.
“Could it be?” said Leo.
“Yes,” said Peter. He did not look up at the ceiling. He kept his eyes on Leo Matienne.
“What if?” he said to the policeman.
“Why not?” said Leo back to him. He smiled.
“Enough,” said Gloria.
“No,” said Leo Matienne, “not enough. Never enough. We must ask ourselves these questions as often as we dare. How will the world change if we do not question it?”
The kids are having a pizza voting party, which means I need to provide O with a vegan slice ‘o pie. I was going to use my Chinook Book coupon and get a free slice at Whole Foods, but they don’t have pizza ready at 8am. I decided to make it myself. It isn’t hard - we have pizza often - but my mother-in-law usually makes it.
I followed Robbie’s thin crust recipe, which is stupid easy to make. We had leftover pasta sauce, some Daiya cheese, Tofurkey sausage, and Smart Bacon. Yum!
ETA: The pizza was a hit! And N.E.R.D.S. was the winner, with Where the Mountain Meets the Moon a close second, and 11 Birthdays in third.
April 9, 2012 at 10:19 am · Filed under Holiday, Kids, Vegan
I saw Eggnots mentioned on the Vegansaurus blog, and my mother-in-law convinced me to buy them (it really didn’t take much to persuade me!). Eggnots are a “realistic, inedible, non-perishable egg alternative” made of ceramic that were initially created for kids with egg allergies.
My kids haven’t colored eggs since we went vegan a couple of years ago, and I missed sharing this activity with them. It seemed kind of spendy for a one time activity, but we decided it was worth it to try once.
These look and feel like real eggs. Amazing.
I forgot to buy an egg dying kit, so we followed the directions they provided and used food coloring, vinegar, and boiling water. It worked great, especially the neon blue and purple food coloring.
O made a Minecraft inspired egg.
The eggnots turned out really beautiful! I think it will be nice to be able to pull them out next year and have them out as decorations for Easter and not have to worry about them going bad. I always hated that we dyed eggs and then stuck them in the fridge where nobody could enjoy them.
April 2, 2012 at 11:16 am · Filed under Food, Vegan
My Mother-in-law got the cookbook Babycakes Covers the Classics for her birthday. Babycakes is a gluten free and vegan bakery with stores in NYC, LA, and at Downtown Disney in Walt Disney World.
We went to the WDW location last July on our Disney vacation.
I don’t remember what we got. I do remember that we got our treats in a to go box to bring back to the hotel room, and that the heavens opened up shortly after we walked out of the bakery. We crammed inside a huge Disney store with everyone else and waited with two crabby and overstimulated children (surrounded by every Disney toy imaginable) for the rain to pass. It didn’t.
We ran to the boat launch to take a boat back to our resort (it was kind of a special thing, the boat only goes to a few places), only to discover that the boats are really open with a slight covering that does nothing to stop sideways torrential rain.
We decided to risk it, despite the chance of being struck by lightning. We kept the box of goodies protected, but the rain and humidity did a number on our treats. They were still tasty, but probably not the texture and consistency that Babycakes intended!
The Babycakes cookbook looks really yummy, and has things like hamentaschen and donuts and whoopie pies and mounds. Yes, mounds. Mounds!
The kids and I made Black and White Cookies. We didn’t follow the gluten-free recipe, opting to just use the alternately recommended spelt flour because it was easier and cheaper. I think the recipe makes cookies in giant bakery sizes, because these things are huge!
Each kid made an icing and applied it to half the cookie.
They were super tasty!
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