The Digital Age
So I made my first attempt at digital art today. Behold: Pepper in neon!
(Yes, I know it sucks.)
Drawing in Procreate is very different than drawing by hand. I’m sure I could adjust the brush settings to be much more like drawing with a real pencil, but I didn’t want to mess around too much this first time.
Whatcha think?
An Eventful Day
Today involved:
- A migraine upon waking up (always fun!!!!)
- A TON of smoke in the air and, along with it, a very smoky run this morning. I tried wearing a mask for part of it but running in a mask is freaking hard, yo
- The first day of classes which, for me, just involved ASHA (or standing around while Rob introduced ASHA, as I’m teaching next semester and he’s taking charge of this semester)
- An at-home vet check-up for Pepper (just because taking her to the vet seemed to really stress her out)
I hope this isn’t indicative of how the rest of the semester will go.
Edit from mid-October: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Fish
Got a little fisheye lens for my phone. So of course I had to test it with Pepper.
She’s a cutie.
That is all.
Longest run + Pepper Adventures
You guys, I am SO CLOSE to marathon distance. SO CLOSE!
Also, look at this adorable girl:
We’re trying to get her used to the harness so that we can take her outside on the weekends. She seems to be enjoying the whole process.
Look at this destructive baby
She loves to murder rolls of paper towels.
(Don’t worry, we don’t let the towels go to waste; we save them and use them to clean up her pukes and other gross things.)
Pepp to Vet
We took Pepper to her first vet visit (well, first one she’s had with us) today, and the poor girl was SO scared. Like, Jazzy got scared too, but she would just kind of freeze up, turn into a brick, and let the vet do whatever they needed to her.
Pepper was mashed as small as she could get into the corner of her carrier and was just terrified. She kept emitting this very low growl and would occasionally his VERY softly. These growls and hisses were very different than the “play growls” and “play hisses” she uses with me when we’re fighting (big loud growls, big intimidating hisses).
Poor sweetie! Hopefully she’s just scared because this is the first time we’ve taken her anywhere; we’ll see how she does next year.
Pepper!
We’ve had our sweet Pepper cat for a year now!
She’s calmed down a little bit, haha, but she’s still a wild child most of the time. She’s so smart. She’s probably the smartest cat I’ve ever seen. I hope she is able to stay curious and playful and healthy for a long, long time!
Pepper Play
As you’ve seen from many of my pictures and videos, Pepper is a very active, playful cat. One of her more recent favorite things to do is to take one of her favorite toys (either her new froggy or a particular mouse she loves), tuck it between her front paws, and then get wild when I try to take it from her.
I walk up behind her and start tip-toeing really loudly as I get closer and she starts flipping her tail and putting her ears back and getting that wild, playful look in her eyes. I reach down around her neck from the back to try and get the toy and she tries to shove it further beneath her as she growls (playfully) and hisses (also playfully…trust me, she could demolish me if she didn’t like what I was doing).
One of her favorite toys is a frog that ribbits. She destroys one of these per three/four weeks on average, so we’d just given her a new one. Here’s a video of her being super protective of it while we play. I love that dirty look she gives me at the end, haha.
So tough!
Pepper Pictures: March Edition!
Here’s another set of bi-monthly (-ish) pictures of Pepper, because she’s always posing and I’ve always got my phone ready to take her picture.
Big yawn!
She’s so beautiful.
Sink time!
Hahahaha.
HAHAHAHA.
Beauty queen.
She can basically flatten her hips completely down, haha.
Floor time!
Bi-Monthly Pepper Pictures
Because you know you want them.
Watching me opening packs in OOTP.
She is Pepper Towel.
Lounging.
More lounging.
Tub time (please ignore how gross our bathtub is).
YAY!
Puff Daddy
Pepper very readily puffs her tail if she’s startled, more so than any other cat I’ve seen. Sometimes she puffs at us when she’s in play mode and sometimes she puffs at us if we’re down the hall and she doesn’t know who we are.
Example: here she is after seeing Nate at the end of the hallway and not knowing who he was immediately.
Look at how fat that tail is! She’s such a sweetie.
Some Pepp
Have some more pictures of Pepper, because she’s always either a) in a gorgeous pose or b) in a weird pose and both are equally great.
That thing on the left is her tail, not her other leg.
Where’s Pepper??
Aww.
She’s so pretty.
She’s so weird.
Up on the fridge.
More posing.
Is it time for more Pepper pictures?
Yes.
Yes it is.
Enjoy.
Big yawn!
Snooze time.
Sneaking in my laundry pile, haha.
Hiding.
Pretty girl!
More Pepper
So Pepper is an exceptionally pretty cat. Jazzy was gorgeous too, but I think because her coloring was so dark it didn’t show up very well in photos. Pepper, on the other hand, basically glows because she’s so white (and also sits still for pictures, unlike Jazzy), so her prettiness shows up very nicely. Observe!
She looks deflated in that last one, haha.
Bright lights / big city / we have / a kitty
Sooooooooooo we didn’t get Waffle. The Humane Society doesn’t let people “reserve” animals (first come first serve), and when I checked their adoptions page right before we headed down there, Waffle’s picture was gone.
Meaning she had been adopted by someone who had an earlier appointment that morning.
I’d already bonded with her so much just by looking at her picture that it was almost like another loss. I ugly cried about it while Nate was in the shower.
But we decided to go anyway; perhaps another cat needed us.
And one did – we ended up with this pretty girl right here:
We don’t have a name for her yet, but she was very calm on the car ride home and seemed to not be afraid at all as she explored the house. It was hard to get a non-blurry picture of her.
It’s going to be interesting to see how different she is from Jazzy.
Edit: we named her Pepper!
Uh, McCormick?
HOKAY.
So.
I love black pepper. It’s basically crack to me because I need it on foods in order to live.
Anyway.
I put a metric ton of it on my scrambled eggs tonight and then, while waiting for them to cool down, decided to read the back of the pepper container.
Do…do you put ground black pepper in cake? Is this a real thing? Or has McCormick been smoking too much of its own crack pepper?
Like, I initially thought this might just be a “generic back of package” blurb, but the wrapping says black pepper on it.
Dafuq.
OCTO-LIZARD HATH SPOKEN!!!!!!!!
Hi.
So I measured it out today: I put 6 grams of black pepper on my pasta/broccoli. That’s 113 shakes of the pepper shaker.
Am…am I a monster?
Stir fry—Claudia style!
HI PEOPLE!
So I have recently acquired a wok and have decided to try out stir fry. My first attempt was pretty damn good, and even though I’m probably doing it all wrong, I decided to share it (mainly ‘cause I took a pretty picture, haha).
You will need:
- Some sort of uncooked egg noodle – 100 grams or a bowl filled with uncooked noodles. The noodles will compress once they’re cooked, so don’t worry about fitting them plus the veggies in a bowl once you’re done.
- Broccoli – 35 grams of small stalks with florets or a about half a cupful
- Carrots – 2 ounces julienned or about a half a cupful
- Red pepper – 1 ounce cut into cubes or however you prefer (about a loose handful)
- White or yellow onion – 20 grams sliced or cubed (enough to fill your palm)
- Mushrooms – 15 grams sliced, or about a small handful
- Canola oil (or some sort of equivalent—whatever oil you like that’s good for high heat) – 2 teaspoons
- Stir fry sauce (again, your choice) – about 3 tablespoons
It’s best to get all your slicing/combining/other cooking done before you actually start the stir fry, so do all this before you even turn on the heat beneath your wok.
Combine broccoli, carrots, pepper, onion, and mushrooms into a microwave-safe container, add about three tablespoons of water, and microwave on high for about 1:45 or 2:00, depending on how thick you’ve kept your broccoli stalks. While this is microwaving, put a pot of water on the stove and get the water boiling. Also, go ahead and put a tablespoon of stir fry sauce and the two teaspoons of canola oil into the frying pan/wok and mix it up for later.
Drain the water from the veggie mix and set aside. Once your water starts boiling, cook your noodles to the package instructions (the variety I use cook very quick and are done in less than a minute—don’t overcook or you’ll end up with squishy and that’s not very appealing). Once they’re done, drain the water and set aside. Start heating up your frying pan/wok. I get mine up to about a 5 or 6 on the oven knob, just until the sauce starts to bubble.
I know I’m going to get chastised for this, but I add all my veggies at once. Everything seems to be pretty uniformly cooked once I take them out of the microwave and they’re not going to be on the heat very long, so I don’t worry too much about different cooking times like I know you’re supposed to do. It all tastes fine in the end, in my opinion. If they’re sizzling like hell, though, you’re doing this part right. Stir them up with the sauce so that they’re all coated—this’ll take about a minute.
Make a well in the veggies and dump in your noodles. Add the remaining 2 tablespoons of stir fry sauce atop the noodles and mix well with the veggies. I usually cook for another minute and a half to two minutes, just until things start sticking to the frying pan/wok. Turn off the heat and transfer everything to a bowl.
Yay! I think I’m getting better at this cheffing stuff.
Today’s song: Dog Days Are Over by Florence + The Machine
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