Summer is cooking

I've spent a lot of time in the kitchen over the past week. 

I tried to make my mom a birthday cake early last week, but I think the frosting I made was too heavy for the very light, springy cake, and it fell in on itself. We still ate it, though; it was tasty and extremely sweet.

Later, I made steamed buns for the first time. It was a Hawaiian take on them, filled with ground beef that had been sautéed with onions and seasoned with five-spice, hoisin, and soy sauce. They were ugly, due to my inability to shape the dough properly, but they were stinking delicious. We still have a bunch because I made a double recipe. I think steamed buns are something I could eat almost every day and not get tired of it.

We recently re-subscribed to Imperfect Foods, taking a break from eMeals for a bit. I am liking it because instead of picking the same types of meals (vegetarian, heavy on the Asian and Latin influences), I'm getting ingredients that I then figure out what to do with. 

Later in the week, I cooked the pork chops they sent, and made a big batch of purple mashed potatoes. We also had some mushroom ravioli with a lovely spinach Alfredo sauce.

This has nothing to do with our grocery delivery, but the past couple of days, I've made yak chews. I've been looking at them ever since we decided to get a dog, but they're so expensive. I found a recipe online, made them. Twice. The first time, I guess I didn't use enough acid so I was able to run the milk through a second time and did a second batch! Now we have whey left over that I'm trying to give to my neighbors who have chickens, if I can catch them at home.

If I ever do decide to purchase yak chews at the store, I'm going to buy these from Yak-9. They're local!

We finished paying for our dog yesterday, and within a couple of hours, got a notice to set an appointment for pick-up. We're scheduled for Sunday, August 8! 

They're getting so big! This is actually two litters together. Ours start coming home next weekend, then the others a week later. (Luke is the mostly-white dog with some brindle spots and a blue collar, sitting right by the big old bucket, watching his bro (or sis) try to chew the dog fence.)

This week, Mal and I finally made it to a different homeschool meetup than the one we usually attend. He met a couple of kids who played the same way he does, and as we left, he told me, "I had the time of my life!"

We met at Casa Costa in Old Leander, where James and I went a couple of years ago (the pandemic makes the passage of time so weird), and it was really good. This time, I got Portuguese fries, which I highly recommend, if they're the special when you visit.

The next day, we went swimming with the group we frequent, and Mal loved the pool so much that he just went back with James. I still have a bit of a sunburn so didn't want to re-expose myself yet.

Mal slept with James two nights this week. The first night, he kept having to use the restroom (his doctor says this is normal, just an immature bladder) and decided he'd rather be in a bedroom where the bathroom is in the same space, because he was scared of running five feet through the living room to get to the well-lit bathroom in the front of the house. The next time, he just decided he wanted to sleep in there. I slept GREAT both nights! 

It's about three years late, but Mal might finally be transitioning to his dad as the "favorite" parent. I don't mind that at all. It's been a good run, and I'm more than willing to share the title with someone else for a few years.

Closing in on puppy homecoming

 Little Luke and his littermates are 6 weeks old! They've been merged with a litter that is one week younger, so there are 15 puppies running around like crazy together.

And also sleeping a lot.

As I've read dog-training books, listened to dog-training podcasts, and watched dog-training videos online over the past 4 months or so, it has made me judge my past self very harshly, as I've dealt disastrously with previous dogs. I like dogs, but each one I've gotten, I've been grossly unprepared. Even with Kaley, when I researched greyhounds extensively, I didn't eve really consider proper training; instead, we just got lucky that she was a "good" dog, who had been taught general human-pleasing manners in her brief stint as a racing greyhound.

The first dog "I" ever owned was a baby sheltie pup. I was living with a man who selected the dog, but the first time I saw her, I was hooked. She was a sweetie. However, I just thought you do the same thing I'd done with cats: get them, they live with you, everyone is happy. We made the huge mistake of letting the dog roam freely in the house, even though both of us worked from 5 AM until 10 AM or 1 PM. Usually, the guy got home before I did, but he said that cleaning up the poop would have made him sick. In fact, even seeing it grossed him out, so he helpfully put paper towels over the piles for me to clean when I got home. (Yes, I realize this was a red flag regarding the suitability of said roommate, but that would be a whole other blog post.) We should have crated that dog.

Furthermore, because I had no knowledge of typical puppy behavior, I just did not understand what was wrong with that dog, who wouldn't leave me alone when I tried to work out. I'd get on the floor to do sit-ups or push-ups, and she would jump onto my head, nip at my hair and hands, etc. If you're saying, "Duh" right now, yeah, so is present-day me. I had no idea how to stop her, because my constant, "Okay, stop" and moving her didn't work. I know now that interacting with her was reinforcing her behavior. And, again, this would have been an appropriate time to crate a dog. After having played/trained with her.

When I moved out, I left the dog because I was moving back with my parents, and knew it was pushing it for them to take my cat.

The next dog I got was Kaley, and she was a dreamboat. I can see now that she had some separation anxiety with me, specifically. She didn't do anything destructive, but she'd FREAK OUT when I got home. We always thought it was funny, and I actually encouraged her to run around and jump up and down because it was so stinking cute. I didn't realize I was accidentally playing into her fear by reinforcing that she was right to party when I got home because it was such a relief. Sigh.

In Las Vegas, we adopted a Husky to be a companion for Kaley when it looked like I was going to be gone a lot for a new job I was considering. I'd take that dog running with me (running was part of the job, or else I never would have done it), and he loved it. He had a lot of energy, but a good run a day would make him manageable. Still, beyond that, I don't think I ever really thought about the different needs a Husky has than a greyhound. He was also boisterous in a way Kaley wasn't, and my ex-husband, who loved Kaley even more than I did, probably, and was very protective of her, felt the Husky was "mean" to her. I saw it as his trying to engage Kale in a way she wasn't used to, and felt like they'd eventually have found a middle ground in which to play. But we ended up rehoming the Husky because of it.

In Sherman, we stupidly tried to adopt a deaf terrier. It was so SO playful, and had really no training before at all. I certainly didn't know how to train a dog, period, much less one who couldn't respond to sound cues. Looking back, I should have established early on a foot stomp to mean "look at me." I could have worked on that several times a day for a week and the dog probably would have understood it. Most dogs respond just as well to hand signals as vocal commands, so it would have been simple enough to move forward with signs, once the dog knew to check in with me in any situation. And, again, we didn't utilize a crate. I don't know why that never occurred to me.

The dog was so small and so full of energy that by the second day we had it, D (who was maybe 3 at the time) was scratched up from the dog giving chase down the hall and jumping up to try to get D to play. We tried telling D to be "boring" when the dog wanted to play, but it's hard to keep a 3-year-old from running away when they want out of a situation. After a week and many bruises and scrapes on D, and D having to keep the bedroom door closed so the dog wouldn't chew all of the Polly Pockets, we returned the pup to where we had adopted her. I'm hugely embarrassed about this one, because it was a small organization run out of someone's home, and I was so out of my mind with stress that I returned the dog on Easter Day.

It was all my fault. I was unprepared and did not think to try to get assistance from a trainer. I felt like it was obvious that the dog wouldn't fit in with our family. Baby gates never occurred to me. Using treats to train wasn't something that was on my radar at all. I just kept treating these dogs like cats. And it was irresponsible.

The last dog we tried to adopt was Shelby, the super-sweet Catahoula leopard dog. She was about 3 years old, and super easy-going. She was huge but not interested in bugging the cats. Aish ended up being the most comfortable with her. We only had 2 problems with her: 1) she barked like crazy every time anyone walked past our house (and since our house is a main arterial to the lake, that happens 10 times a day, minimum); and 2) she made snoring noises every minute of every day. The second issue is what conflicted with D's misophonia, and is likely not something we could have fixed. But the barking. Oh my gosh, I was so bad at it. I just let her outside every time she started going nuts. I'd try to say, "Shelby. Thank you!" and hope she'd get the message that I had heard her alarm and that was enough. But I never showed her what I wanted to do instead. I never incentivized her stopping the barking after that initial alert. I guess that until recently, maybe I thought training was something that pros did, except for things like "sit" and "stay," and even then, you just had to hope for the best and if you had a good/smart dog, they might do it if you were lucky.

As for Shelby, a neighborhood family with three little girls took Shelby, and they LOVE her. I'm so happy about that.

But I was incredibly irresponsible for so many years. I hope to do much better by Luke. I'm not going to lie that the thought that he might whine/bark when we leave him in the crate alone if we have to go somewhere stresses me out a little. As long as D is here, we have to manage noise so carefully to keep D from hating the source of the noise (I think D likes Mal better now than as a baby, because even though he's boisterous today, it's not constant crying). But I'm very hopeful that I have a lot more of a knowledge base to pull from, and support from being on the same page with James on all of this.

GI Stuff, youth vs. age

When I was still in high school, I had some pretty severe "issues" with my digestive system. Sometimes, I'd get weak and chilled, and I was not at all tolerant to lights, bright colors (or visual chaos of any kind), odors, and sounds. It was kind of like hypoglycemia and a panic attack at once. I fainted at school one time, and at home once.

It got debilitating enough that my mom took me to the doctor she trusted most: an elder from our church (he was actually a medical doctor; this wasn't religious treatment). He thought that putting me on the birth control pill might alleviate these symptoms, as he believed it to be tied to hormones. At that age, my periods are randomly-occurring, and I had intense pain before and during that part of my cycle.

Humiliation at having a parent and church elder put me on The Pill aside, that actually did help quite a bit. For the first time since menarche, I had a regular cycle, and though I still had severe cramps, the anemia and fainting and sensitivity to any stimuli was all but gone.

Over the years, things have kind of settled down. Periods did still kick my butt before I had D. I had a female boss tell me, "Everyone who works here is a woman. If everyone needed a day off of work per month, we'd never get anything done." As I've aged, it's gotten better. I still have to take an Aleve every once in a while, but it could be worse. (Could also be better. I'm looking at you, menopause. Plz come for me.)

Sunday night (two days ago), my lower abdomen started hurting. It felt like bloating, so I went to bed expecting to wake up Monday with it having resolved itself.

It did not. I walked as usual, and it didn't work itself out then, either. I'd ordered some Gas-X but that didn't seem to make a difference, either. The pain started to be sharper, especially on the left side. But it kind of ran across the top of my FUPA. At first, I thought it might be appendicitis, but that's on the right side. I wondered about something to do with ovaries, but found out today that if a cyst ruptures, it's going to hurt mid-cycle, not right now.

Today, I went to the walk-in clinic and, after ruling out at UTI, the doctor sent me for a CT scan. Apparently two quadrants in my colon are "inflamed." I'm supposed to go see a gastroenterologist ASAP, but they're all booked out through September, so the triage nurse scheduler is trying to get me in within the next week.

The doctor gave me some medicine for the pain, and told me to eat a bland diet until we can figure out what's going on. I think maybe the medicine has kicked in a bit, or I'm experiencing the placebo effect. I sincerely do not care which is the case. It's still sore, but not stabby at the moment.

**Now it's the following day.

I walked my normal walk this morning; things I've read about colitis say it's good to get some brisk but not too impactful exercise, and it seems like walking is the perfect thing to do.

Orange sunrise on my walk.

I didn't hear back from a GI yesterday; we'll see what happens today.

It's interesting... when I was 16 years old and doubled over with abdominal pain, my only thought was, "Make this stop."

Now that I'm 48 (for another month and some change), my thoughts are, "Make this stop, and I don't have time for protracted medical procedures, so just give me a pill, please." And also, "My kid is too young for me to die, so we can't have that." 

I'm not actually too worried about a morbid outcome, but I do know that if it turns out I have Crohn's disease (and I don't think I have enough symptoms for that to be the case, but I'm not a doctor), in a decade or so I'd have to start being carefully screened for cancer. So I did the head math really quickly and decided that if this ends up being serious, 8-10 years from now is a more convenient time to keel over than right now.

We're about to get a puppy, for goodness sakes! Covid took our big vacation last year; my stupid colon can't mess this up, all right? Can we just agree on that?

The Joys of Home Ownership, and other adventures

This week, we're having the big old Chinaberry in our front yard cut down because it mostly died during the freeze in February, and it had already dropped multiple limbs in the yard and onto our roof and the open patio, shearing off a corner of a support post.

I hate to see any tree go, even an invasive one, but especially one that was so big and lovely. But we did see this coming and planted a pear tree about 15 feet further away from the house last spring. We've been fortunate enough to have a bunch of rain, so the tree "took" very well, and has some new green growth since we first planted it. It even had a few wimpy flowers earlier.

Speaking of rain... take a look at this extended forecast for the rest of July:

This is MUCH lower than Austin's "average" high of 95.2 (which usually involves a few days of these temps, and equal days of high-90s/100+). On the one hand, the cooler temperatures should keep us from running the air conditioner as much. On the other, the cloud cover means we won't generate much solar so our actual bill might be higher. Still... I'm never going to complain about milder temperatures. It's been practically lovely so far this month. A few super humid, sweltering days. But not many. It's weird. 

We have a plumber coming on Thursday, and this will allegedly complete the master bathtub repairs that we've needed for more than two months. I don't know if this is common practice or a new thing, but one reason it's taken so long for us to have the repairs completed (aside from one of the issues NOT being plumbing, but being a roof leak) is that we are having to get our own parts, and we are lay people who do not speak "plumber."

Like, when they told us we needed to acquire a shower valve, that's what I did. When they showed up to install it, they asked if I got a trim kit. I said no, and asked if we needed one. They said we did. Since this was the second time it had been suggested that we might want to replace our "trim" and I had no idea what they were talking about, I just said, "Can you point at what I need to get?" Well, now I know that a "trim kit" is the shower head, handle, and tub spout. When the first plumber suggested that to take care of a leak, we might want to replace our trim, what WE thought he meant was the really crappy wooden tack-up job that handyman did for us at the beginning of the pandemic. We know it's not perfect, but it IS actually better than what was there before, and I was pretty sure it wasn't allowing water to leak anywhere.

New information in hand, I ran to Lowe's, bought the only non-chrome trim kit that they had, and got back in time for the plumbers to install it. Except that it wasn't Moen. THEY DIDN'T TELL ME THAT THE BRAND WAS IMPORTANT. Sigh. So they left, and I shopped for a Moen handle kit. At that time, I realized that we could have bought an inclusive trim kit with valve for much less than we piecemealed it. Double sigh.

We decided that we could install this ourselves, and would reuse the spout we already had. I gave it a good CLR bath, and that helped a lot.

Nice, huh? Can you tell that we have VERY hard water?

Unfortunately, once we tried to put the spout back on, we couldn't get the base of it flush with the tile. It was about 1/4 inch away from the wall. I looked on YouTube at ways to fix this, and it involved cutting into the stud, which I'm not comfortable doing, especially that close to plumbing infrastructure. So we're going to pay the plumbers to install it (we bought a new spout which is Danco brand, but it's the same size and apparently the off-brand universal replacement for Moen) so we don't end up with leaks in the wall.

Then Saturday, the man who's going to fix our guest bath ceiling is supposed to start on that. While he's here, we'll have him give us an estimate to repair the drywall in the bathroom (which we've kept open until the whole master bath tub is dealt with), and HOPEFULLY that will be it for a while.

So, is it new that homeowners have to provide what I consider plumbing supplies on their own? When I was a property manager, our plumbing contractors had warehouses where they got stuff. If we needed something they didn't have, we paid them to find and procure it. Is it normal that they don't do that now? Or is it because of the pandemic supply chain? 

And if this is normal now, I'm going to need plumbers to leave me a detailed list of what I need, including brand, size, etc. Because I have no idea and it all looks pretty similar to me. I'm so tired of the whole thing; I need it to be over.

Honestly, we do have leaks in both our back (since we've lived here) and front (since the freeze) porches, and I don't know how much there is to do about those. It doesn't get into the house, so it's not a priority. 

This stuff all coming up right after we got an AMAZING offer on our house and just weren't able to move on it makes it even more maddening, honestly. Like, we could be in a different house RIGHT NOW and not dealing with this. Although I have no doubt that other places would have issues, too. This is just one more incentive to rent. I know you're not building up equity, but we've spent LOADS on repairs and upgrades since we moved in here.

Anyhoo, this week is a busy one. Mal went to Urban Air today and a friend of his ended up showing up unexpectedly. Tomorrow, we're going up to Temple to see Nana and Pappy, and to swim with Hannah and Chance. The Brownies are coming up in the evening, because it's Tian's birthday. We plan to hang out to see them for at least a few. Wednesday, we have the tree people coming. Thursday, I'm meeting a friend at a coffee place (no coffee for me, thanks). Friday, we might be going back to Urban Air or Indigo Play with two of Mal's neighborhood (kind of) friends. Saturday is one of Mal's homeschool friend's birthday party. 

I'm going to end with a few pictures from our trip last week, because I totally forgot even to mention it. We drove to Dallas on Sunday, July 4, and came back on Tuesday, July 6. But we had a fun time, and wanted Mal to get to visit Peppa Pig's World of Play before we have to hunker down with the puppy pretty seriously for a few months. It was good times with the fam (except for D, who thoroughly enjoyed having the house empty, and who took great care of everything while we were gone!).

Lunch at Joe's Crab Shack on the way out of town.

Bass Pro Shop!

This is the prettiest I've ever seen the Grapevine Mills parking lot.

Waiting for "rope drop."

First ones inside!

Eventful lunch at Rainforest Cafe.

Short stop at the Dallas Zoo... because it was HOT!

Dude, Sweet Chocolate! A family tradition.

Yes, that is a cheese cave. 

Here's a bonus: It's both of my kiddos taking a rest at the Dallas Zoo. Adorable.