I have a strange pussy

Our cat, Dinah, does not like her arthritis medicine. This has long been a truism in my household, and when we started her on it a year ago it was mostly true. She wouldn't eat the wet food with the medicine mixed into it. As an experiment, I changed brands of wet food, and last night when I did it I forgot to mix the medicine in, but instead just put it in to the bottom of the bowl. Dinah started by nosing aside the wet food, licking up the medicine, then proceeding into the wet stuff.

She's just weird.

Omaha is sick. Sicker than I like. It's just a cold, and I wish she'd take it easy, but no, she's immediately into the thick of things. I respect that she has knowledge I don't and can't, like about her radio show projects, but it's the weekend and she's diseased. Still, I'm glad she's home. She's wandering about the house in her pyjamas, blowing her nose every few minutes, looking a bit ragged and undead.

Oh, good news: I found a brand of DVD-R that works in the JVC player. It's the Sony brand (which is the same brand as the burner), and it seems to be quite reliable. So I'm happy; I have a way to make video DVDs that don't require the Lasonic player, although I'm keeping it because I have no desire to re-burn the TDK-branded DVDs.

The weekend comes

I gave the kids leftovers last night, and of course they both went for the macaroni and cheese. I had some leftover thai shrimp and rice. I gave them both a bath and washed their hair, and Yamaarash-chan and I spent some time working on her final assignment homework. She had brought it over two weeks ago and we'd started it; when she came over last night she was mostly where she'd left off. It's a "What is in South Africa" for 2nd graders: what do they eat, what games do they play, and so forth. Two weeks ago I'd shown her the CIA World Factbook and the World Almanac and the Time Atlas of the World and we'd done the flag and a couple of other things together. Her mother's girlfriend had helped her fill in the name of the capital city. But everything else was undone. We did the foods last night, and in fact I may make one of them for dinner this night (A kind of shepherd's pie with ground lamb and minced fruit.)

I read to them a couple of books. There was one we'd gotten from the library, Carousel by Liz Rosenberg, that just blew me away. There are moments when you realize you're in the presence of someone whose writing you will never match, and Ms. Rosenberg did that to me. There is not a line wasted, not a misplaced adjective or verb, not a false note, not a maudlin moment to this hurtling, beautiful, incredible story of two girls, a cold rainy night in the park, and a broken down carousel. She writes only teen fiction (including, apparently, a Lambda-award winner) but wow, her command of the language is so powerful I was just in awe.

I just had to praise her. Everyone seems to rant about the art, which is quite good, but it was the writing that stuck with me.

Today, Omaha is still sick. I've become quite the connoisseur of cold medicines, picking and choosing among psuedoephedrine, dextromothorphan, gaufenesin, various antihistamines and pain releievers, looking for just the right combination for what I or Omaha or the kids have.

I made the kids pancakes which turned out pretty good. They're playing now, quietly, and Omaha is resting once more. I have to go and do laundry soon, now that the dishes are all away.

Oh, and I figured out what's different about my computer. I put the DVD burner on the same IDE channel and the CD burner, rather than share the DVD channel with a hard drive. Since the IDE channel is only doing one thing at a time, there are no interrupts screwing up the performance. That and the 2.6.9 kernel, which has some bugfixes in the IDE handler, have really fixed things. Now if only I can get the damned scanner working...

The scanner lives!

I got the scanner to work. Apparently, SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy) uses the old /proc filesystem for finding devices, rather than the newfangled (and human readable) /sys filesystem. I had to recompile USB support with "support for the /proc filesystem" enabled, and everything just worked. Yay.

Bobotie

So, this evening, I promised Yamaarashi-chan that we would do something interesting together: we would eat an authentic South African recipe, since that's what she's studying. Tomorrow, we're going to have to do a lot more homework. I have already scheduled us to be at the library tomorrow.

Tonight, though, we put together something called bobotie,

Yamaarashi-chan cooks dinner for the family.

which is basically leftovers cooked into a pie held together with eggs rather than potatoes as one would think for Shepherd's Pie. Other than chopping the onions and handling the oven, I let her do all the work: browning the onions, mixing the meat in, letting it brown too. The recipe we had was "authentic," and that means that we didn't drain the meat afterwards: bad mistake. It was too greasy for an American diet. Next time we'll know better.

She stirred in the currants and a medly of chopped dried blueberries, blackberries, and cherries-- I'm not a fruit-at-dinner person, but those worked-- and then some bread soaked in milk, and then topped it with an egg-and-milk scramble. I put it in the oven for her, and then we made rice together. That was undramatic, since the rice-cooker takes care of everything except measuring the amount of rice you need.

We ate it. It was good, but it would have been better without all the grease. The girls liked it, but not enough to ask for it again. Still, it means that when Yamaarashi-chan gets to make her presentation on "her" country for her class, she can say that she made and ate something they (supposedly) eat there.

Afterwards, I let them play a bit. They played Hullabaloo while Omaha and I relaxed with a game or two of backgammon, and then I put the kids to bed. Those kids grow like weeds. I'm about ready to put away the stepping stool in the bathroom and Kouryou-chan's booster seat has lain in a corner, unloved, since I can't remember when. While they were brushing their teeth I saw that Yamaarashi-chan's nightgown, which used to cover her down below her knees, now barely fits her. I cleaned up the kitchen and went out to the pharmacy to grab Omaha some guafenesin for her nighttime dosing. And then I put her to bed.