Return to the Jewels

Does anyone even remember that I was working on a quilt?  It's been sitting in the corner since Thanksgiving.  I finally picked it up again in the last week.  And the amazing thing?  I have finished the piecing!  Really!  I am so excited.  Rob chuckled as I did a happy dance.

I still have so much to do.  I need to add borders.  I need to figure out what I'm doing for the back.  And then... I need to quilt the darned thing.

But for now, I'm going to bask in the beauty of what's done.  Just look at that!

Fractious Finches

I got a thistle feeder for Christmas.  It has been an entertaining gift.  I never knew we had so many goldfinches in the area.  There's quite a flock of house finches that live here, but I'd never seen more than a couple goldfinches at once.  Now?  I can see we have bunches of them!  And they are quite a fractious crowd!  This feeder is often packed to capacity with goldfinches shelling seeds as fast as they can and warning off other birds attempting to land.  I am amazing how much seed they go through in a day.  Goldfinches are noisy, too!   They are constantly warbling at each other; it's a pretty sound.

We're snowed in today.  Even with the snow and the wind, all of our feeders are packed. The birds all stand out against the snow, especially the cardinals.  It's too bad my camera refused to take a clear photo of them.  There must be more than fifty birds out there of at least a dozen different species.  There are several birds nestled next to the sliding doors to get out of the wind.

Home Base

 Athena and Vicky's home base, with hay and water
Willow and Pippin's home base; the current home base setup

Many people ask - can you litter train your guinea pigs?  I usually answer:  they'll train themselves if they want to.  At least that's been my experience in dealing with my guinea pigs.  I haven't made any attempt of training them in their cage, but for floor time I try to encourage my pigs to limit the peeing and the pooping to one spot.  I call this place Home Base.

The original home base came about as a shallow cardboard box, a well worn towel and was situated under an old hot-water radiator.  It was a perfect place to hide out, and the young pigs I had loved to spend their time under there while they weren't off exploring the kitchen, the laundry room and the family room.  There were accidents if they managed to get under the couch and hide there for any length of time, but otherwise, I let them roam a large portion of the house without worries.  Even after we moved to a new house, and home base wasn't nearly as warm and cozy, Eclair and Teddi still knew to stick with that.

Peanut Butter

I was noisy the other night.  Or at least that's what I was told.  I had read an article on Lifehacker a couple of months ago about DIY peanut butter and decided to give it a try.  It really was as easy as they described: dump peanuts into a food processor and run it for five minutes or so.  I probably could have processed it a bit longer - it wasn't super creamy smooth.  That works out fine, though, since I like my peanut butter with texture.

My food processor is one of those little hand-held things, so I'll be sticking with small batches.  But that's probably a good thing.  I will have to start experimenting with flavors or maybe different nuts.  Hmmm.... cashew butter or almond butter may be next on my list.

Limbo

Pinni does her eggplant impression

We're all still adjusting to Bertie's absence.  Pinniped had been moved to the living room for a few weeks to make sure she wasn't lonely.  As a byproduct, she was getting a lot of lap time.  I'm not sure how fond she was of all of the attention.  Pinni's a very wriggly pig.  She also tends to be rather leaky - she can make it barely 10 minutes before she needs to pee.

Pinni was moved back to the pig room last week.  Happy pig.  She popcorned around the clean cage and seemed much more relaxed than she did in the living room.  She's still getting daily snuggles, which she is learning to tolerate.  I think she's decided that the reward of tomato and melon makes the kisses and squeezes worthwhile.

Bunch of Baking

Oatmeal bread with Pumpkin Butter.  Yum!

I've tried out several new recipes lately, that have required me to fire up the oven.  It's prefect with the colder weather we've been having.  Initially, I was aiming to replenish my goodies supply (there should always be cookies in the freezer).  I made a variation of my Snickerdoodles recipe (with chai spice) and then tried a new cookie (its name is too dang long - I'm now calling them Confetti Cookies).

Where the Egg Ends Up

I've been putting the egg-cersizer in the cage a few times a week and it gets batted around like a soccer ball.  Bertie and Pinniped would immediately face off like opposing teams.  Even now, Pinni comes running over and noses it over as soon as I place it on the floor.

What I find entertaining is where the egg-cersizer winds up at the end of the day.  After it's emptied, I find it stuffed in a corner or wedged behind the brick under the water bottle.  My favorite is the one time it was slam-dunked into the nearly-empty food dish.  How did they manage that? 

Once the girls wedge it into these spots could they ever get the egg out again?  The spot behind the water bottle isn't very accessible.  The egg-cersizer is usually empty when I find it in jammed in a corner, so there's not a whole lot of motivation to dig it out.  Was it tucked out of the way on purpose?  Perhaps they were putting their toy away, the game having ended when it ran out of cranberries.  I suspect it's sheer luck that it gets wedged in these spots after it's empty.  On the other hand, knowing guinea pigs, it's more likely a message for me to refill it.

Cranberry-Pistachio-Chocolate Cookies

I was digging through my cookbook shelf a couple of weeks ago and found a few untried recipes on scraps of paper jammed between the books.  I'm pretty sure a friend gave me this recipe.  These are festive looking cookies with confetti bits of green and red and brown.  I'm sure with those colors they'd be great for Christmas.

I'm not fond of making slice cookies because they never come out as round as they should (although no one complains of my oval date-filled cookies).  These held their shape pretty well when cut, but all of the nuts and chips caused some of the cookies to split.  Um... not that I'm complaining:  I love lots of junk in my cookies.  The baked cookies were very pale; they did not brown as I expected.  However, they have good texture and are tasty, which is probably why I saved the recipe in the first place!  I'll be adding this to my cookie cookbook.