Crafty little devil

Sometimes I do very smart things.

I got a new couch. Of course it quickly became The Little Bastard's favorite thing to scratch.

I also have a spiral staircase in my kitchen. So. What's that got to do with anything? Well. I did some research and found cat scratch rope is called sisal (and it's made from cactus!). So, I found a spool of sisal at the hardware store. And I wrapped the spindle of the spiral staircase with the sisal. Making it into a cat scratching post!

The Little Bastard loves it!
And he's clearly accepted it belongs to him.

Now this is seriously cute. Cute counts for a lot.
Oh he still claws the new couch too but nowhere near like he used to.

Chicken soup!

Well. Chicken noodle soup.

I make soup all the time. Soup is the one and only good thing about wintertime. But...hard as it is to believe..I've never made chicken soup! I'd had chicken quarters for dinner ending up with a leftover quarter. The light clicked on! I decided I'd make chicken with that leftover quarter.

I picked the chicken from the leftover quarter, boiled all the bones for an hour and a half. I had roasted the quarters in garlic and parsley so there was enough seasoning there.

I sweated some onion, coarsely chopped celery and carrot in some olive oil, added some garlic, the broth and some Hodgson Mill whole wheat egg noodles. Product review! I don't know how they did that but those are really delicious egg noodles! Then I added the chicken I'd picked off the leftover quarter. Oh, and I splashed in the juice from half a lemon. It still needed a couple pinches of salt for it to really come to life. Managed to prepare two servings.

I don't have much room in my freezer so I freeze my soups in quart sized zip lock freezer bags. It's easy when you put the bag in a measuring cup and then just dump it in.

What on earth?!

Normally I avoid politics and controversy on my blog. I blog purely as a recreational thing to indulge my idiosyncrasies. But. I read in the paper today. The President of the United States. Yesterday. The *President* of the United States. Held a press conference. From Camp David. On a Saturday afternoon.

To tell us all. He's been to the best schools. And he's very smart. And. This is quite rich. To reassure us he "do proper".

I was out enjoying my morning walk. In the freezing cold. When the full ...gravity..of it hit and I literally laughed out loud. It would be quite hilarious if it wasn't so sad.

Seriously. WTF was that?!

I'm really embarrassed.

Snow Day!

Blizzard Day is more descriptive.

The snow died down a little bit...I live in this building..
Today we're enjoying what's called a Bomb Cyclone. This sucker came roaring up the coast (Noreaster) this morning after having dropped snow in Florida yesterday! I haven't watched the news yet but it sure looks like an official blizzard. Visibility has surely been less than a thousand feet all day and mostly barely a few hundred feet. Cold wind blown snow all day long.

The only good(?) thing is it's colder than was forecast so rather than all heavy wet snow it's been more dry powder.

The horses are all tucked in with plenty of hay and water. Just going to have to catch up on barn work tomorrow and over the weekend.

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Edited to add:

The news says the official report isn't in yet but everyone has to agree it was a full blown blizzard. If you've never been through a real honest to God blizzard they are pretty bad.

And now the west side of the storm is going to bring in below zero Arctic air for the next couple of days. Wind chills -18 to -30° F.