Sooki Sue 1994?- September 25, 2008

Yesterday afternoon we said goodbye to Sooki . I have no words to match my sadness.

The Smoothie King Incident

Aw smoothies. One of my favorite treats and probably the healthiest of them all. So when I passed along the rot of 1999 to Chuck, I thought I would be nice and bring him a big fat smoothie from Smoothie King. Tropical somethingerother with strawberries, nanners and various other good things. "Various other good things" must be smoothie crack because I have never been able to make them quite as good as the king. I walk in his door and I am not even off the entry way tile and it slips from my mittened hands and lands right on his white carpet. (who the heck puts white carpet in an apartment?) Yay me! Chuck spent the next day at home sick with his best friend mr rental rug doctor.

I have not been allowed to forget but I do sometimes make up for it by offering my version of a Smoothie King smoothie.

1 banana
1 handful of frozen strawberries
1/4-1/2c OJ
blend like a fewl and serve

My family sways from total banana frenzies to casting off bananas til they are nothing but fruit fly fodder. We are not a family that loves the spotty nanners. My solution is to toss the bananas into the deep freeze with their skins on and bring them out as needed. Simply snip the ends off with kitchen shears and squeeze them into your blender.

One smoothie that we tried recently was a take on Jo's smoothie. I am by no means as big of a peanut butter lover as Jo but I still do like my peanutty fix.

1 frozen banana (helps to lop them into 2-3 pieces before you blend but not required)
1 blob of vanilla yogurt
1/4-1/2c milk
big ol blob of peanut butter. Seriously, don't waste your time with measuring. I use about 2-4T if you had to pin me down for an answer but scoop and dump and it is all good.

I also like to thaw the bananas out over night and squash them up for pancakes, oatmeal, banana bread and rice crispies.

mmmmmm yum

Caroline

Kaileigh loves Old Crow Medicine Show. The first song she really loved, outside of singing E-L-M-O over and over, was Wagon Wheel . I love OCMS myself so I am perfectly happy to have someone else sing along with me as we roll on down the road.

This year my brother and his wife had their first baby, Caroline. Caroline and Kaileigh share the exact same birthday. How cool is that? Even cooler is that OCMS has a song entitled Caroline. Click and listen if you wish. Kaileigh sings it like it is a love song because she misses Caroline.
Luck would have it that they will be visiting soon. Not soon enough or long enough I am sure but either way Kaileigh is super excited.

See you soon Caroline.... oh Jeff and Fiona too of course. ahem :)

Sicker Than a Dog

Poor Jessie. She has been pretty darn sickly lately. So we carted her off to the vet. Not our normal vet that we know, trust and love. They were booked so I figured we would just pop into the office of one of the vets we use to take our herd to when I was a kid. Somewhere along the line, this country vet turned into a fancy pants vet that no longer believes in using his degree to flipping figure anything out. Oh no. They must use tests and more tests to say to you, "Yep, we aren't sure what it is without more tests so here's some antibiotics. Take two and call me in two days. Oh and here is some fancy pants food made by a crap company but we like to charge $3 a can." Which btw I hear most dogs won't touch with a ten foot pole. That says alot to me. If you can spend a good five minutes licking your nethers then you really should have no issues with crap food.


Way too much spent for no real diagnosis and we have a dog that is back to her usual self (give or take half her body weight). Laying on her back in whatever patch of sun shines in. We have switched her diet to a modified BARF diet (yep, I'm a wimp and can't hand her a hunk of raw meat yet) so she is transitioning to a homemade diet which is basically what I feed the other dogs but chopped up more cause she is without toofers.

How to Catch Flies the Green(tea) Way

With two punks in the house and all of their friends, we really should have considered putting in a revolving door. I am constantly saying "shut the door, shut the door, shut the door". Flies around here must be drugged with all the skeeter spray the city uses so they see my door open and they fly right on in. Sooki is great at handling flies but as she gets older she really does not stalk them like she use to.

I have a remedy. A natural remedy that is super easy. First you brew up your fav green tea or whatever tea you really enjoy. I am pretty sure it has to be tea that you like too. Sugar the tea to your liking and set off to do whatever tasks in the house you have. Make sure that you come back and drink your tea often. At some point, the flies will see that you like your tea. They will smarten up and do a couple fly bys and then dive head flipping first into your tea when you are not looking . Now you have caught your fly. Hooray!

Just remember to look into your glass before each sip. Nothing like live fly+tea in your mouth to ruin your glass of tea.

Gotta go scrub my mouth free of fly germs again.

Pesky Skeeters!

*This is your friendly tmi alert. If you have issues with that then move along people. You have been warned.*

We just returned from our first big vacation in our new popup camper. I have to say that I love that darned thing. The memories are still fresh in my head (yes, I will blog about the trip soon, Tabitha. I know what a popup lover you are.) as are the the bug bites. I really do not understand why in the world the little blood suckers like me so much. All I know is that those South Carolina skeeters are pervs. They did not aim for the easy parts like oh say an exposed leg or something. Nope, they wanted flesh that no skeeter has ever chomped on before. They headed straight for the hills and valleys the little bastards that they are.

They were sadly not frightened off by my hippy bug spray either. Heck they didn't even care when I threw caution to the wind and deeted up. I apparetly am like sweet feed for skeeters. Have you ever seen a horse that knows you keep the sweet feed in the Rubbermaid bucket and the plain ol feed in the metal bucket? I am pretty sure that is how the skeeters react when when I open our camper door. Only they do not make that beautiful sound of hooves running in a pasture. Do they even make a sound at all? Only sound a skeeter makes that I enjoy is the sound of my hand smacking them silly. Which is followed by Kaileigh running to see if there was any blood involved. Yelling "did you kill the blood suckers!!??"

Thank you Benedryl gel for keeping me from scratching like a flea bitten hound in public.