Heather & Chopper's Wonderful World of ...

Dexter has been remodeling again

Heather — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 22:24:38 +0000

Dexter has always been a builder. Last night, he moved the pigloo across his cage and deposited it squarely on top of the ramp entrance from the top level of his cage. You can see the blankets that he’s dragged along with him down the ramp. I’m leaving it alone as I think it may be hilarious to see what he does when he goes back upstairs and finds himself back in the pigloo.

Here comes trouble

Heather — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 01:38:23 +0000

I’ve been asked occasionally where my “scpetrel” handle comes from — no, it’s not “South Carolina Pet Relationships,” although that’s a good guess. No, it’s really not. Sorry. My alma mater’s mascot is a stormy petrel, which is a seafaring bird akin to an albatross. It was the favorite bird of James Edward Oglethorpe, who founded the state of Georgia and gave his name to the university. I wrote a features piece for the college paper back in the day about the origins of said mascot, including some original source citations about the poor petrels (which are oily birds) being set on fire in a storm so that the sailors could follow them to land. I am not making this up, I swear. Anyway, how’s this for a word of the day? I like the second definition.

Here’s a bad idea for you

Heather — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 23:24:00 +0000

I spotted this in the break room at work and couldn’t help but take a photo. Food poisoning, anyone?

Yum.

Heather — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:10:51 +0000

From Chopper:

This is a pretty simple recipe for turkey burgers involving a lot of spice and cheese crackers as binder. Trust me, it works well. I’ve been using Cheez-it brand reduced fat white cheddar crackers, mainly because I thought the white color would work better, and topping them off with a slice of good provolone cheese for the last minute of the grilling time. Also, we’ve been getting ground turkey from Costco in 1.5 pound packages, so the new measurements for 1.5 pounds of turkey are given in parentheses. For anyone who doesn’t know, Mrs. Edna is one of the spice mixers in the market in Charleston. Also, the original recipe dumped everything into the bowl at the same time to mix, but I get better results doing it in two stages.

INGREDIENTS

1 (1.5) pound ground turkey
1 (1.5) tablespoon garlic powder
1 (1.5) tablespoon red pepper flakes or Mrs. Edna’s Cajun Lemon seasoning
1 (1.5) teaspoon dried minced onion (or a nice dried onion mix, if you’re so inclined)
1 (plus one egg white) egg
1/2 (3/4) cup crushed cheese flavored crackers
Worcestershire sauce

DIRECTIONS

Preheat a grill for high heat.
Ground the cheese crackers and, using your hands, mix them with the ground turkey. Pour the spices into the bowl and mix well before adding the egg, dousing to taste with Worcestershire and finishing the mixing process.
Form into four (six) fat patties. Glad Press-and-Seal wrap works perfectly for individually sealing the burgers for refrigerator storage.
Place patties on the grill, and cook for about 5 minutes per side, until well done.

Dexter vs. the Altoid

Heather — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 04:52:41 +0000

He’s now a minty fresh hedgehog after a close inspection (read: violent chomping and annointing) with a crème de menthe Altoid. Hee.

Eleven years

Heather — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 04:06:07 +0000

In honor of our anniversary, I’ve uploaded some wedding photos.

Success

Heather — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 02:15:33 +0000

I’ve gotten most of what I want with the site back up and running — yay, me. Here, have a photo.

Site update

Heather — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 02:49:29 +0000

Since I’m reworking the photo gallery using Flickr, I thought I might as well take the time to update to version 2.6 of WordPress. It went much more smoothly than I feared, although it did eat all of the categories for previous posts … sigh.

I’ll be (inevitably) tweaking the site over the next few days and getting everything settled.

Moving photos to Flickr

Heather — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 01:26:19 +0000

After a lot of consideration, I’ve created a Flickr account and will be adding new photos to my photostream there.

There are a lot of advantages: lovely RSS feeds, social networking, and the need to avoid messing with the Gallery install I have here. For all practical purposes, you won’t see too much happening here. I’m still going to add thumbnails of images and all the items on my photostream will be public (with some rare exceptions, I’d imagine). Anyway, I’m busily uploading and tagging.

Dexter is ready for his close-up

Heather — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 19:00:02 +0000

To our considerable surprise, Dexter allowed us to take some photos last night. He’s not normally a very photogenic hedgehog — not because he isn’t terribly handsome, which he certainly is — but because he is both skittish and extremely fast. I’ve got a lot of very blurry and out of frame photos of him. So, when he started hamming it up for the camera last night, we had to take advantage.