Pets of Pets

Soquita Monkita has no face:

To make a short story long........

Soquita is Leny's pet.  Readers might hearken back to last Thanksgiving's trip to CA.  We visited our daughter's family---the two whippets, Mystified and the Lummox.   This is the Mystyfied dog:

The Lummox had a sock monkey.  Leny, being the dominatrix she naturally is, appropriated said toy.  It was an obsession.  Leny took the thing everywhere, even to bed when it was time to retire.  The Lummox could only hope we left soon and he got his monkey back.

Being doting parents, we thought it would be a good idea to get each of the Pirate Dogs their own sock monkey.  We found a website and procured three of the little cuties:

Of course, being independent Pirate Dogs, Captain 'Roid and Crow's-Nest Weetzie wanted absolutely nothing to do with these stuffed atrocities!!  The First-Mate remembered the joy of the monkey from CA and took to hers immediately, christening it Soquita Monkita.  Leny loves Soquita:

Of course doggy love means Soquita has lost much of her stuffing, her voice (squeaker), and, as the opening sentence states, her face.  Since dogs don't have opposable thumbs and therefore must rely on their mouths to carry around things, a little (not to Soquita) damage is inevitable.  Fortunately, perched among the Penguini and with the Dia de los Muertos gent atop the bookcase in the master bedroom reside Soquita's siblings who can replace her if and when that time comes.

As for Soquita, she has reworked the song from an old commercial originally done by Walt Disney:

"I'm Soquita Monkita and I'm here to say

It's hard being the pet of a Pirate Dog all day..."

It's such fun having Pirate Dogs!!!!

 

Partisanship??

So the first vote on the stimulus package passed the House along party lines.  So much for bi-partisanship.  It will be interesting to see if the Senate does the same.

A dear friend lost her job in a layoff last Friday.  All those years at the same place and they count for nothing.  But some people (the Republicans who voted NO) would have you believe all we need are more tax cuts and businesses will do what's right and take care of the working class.  And I've got several bridges and mineral producing acres to sell you, guaranteed to make you a millionaire.....

The Pirate Dogs are rooting for the Somali pirates, even if China is sending a destroyer group.  And they believe that people might be intelligent. I think my perros pirateria are naive.  And the vote today proves it.  Eight years of tax cuts and lack of responsible oversight have eroded our 401-ks and our future and members of the former ruling party endorse more of the same??????  I won't say Karl Marx was right but he was damned closer to the truth than John "the bonehead" Boehner.

A Winter Recipe

It made a lot more sense doing something in the oven for three hours on a cold New England Sunday afternoon.  But when the winds get up to 30 or 40 MPH and it's cloudy here on the High Plains, the feeling in the soul is akin to those Eastern winter blahs.  So.....................

Rice Pudding

4 Cups Milk

3 Tablespoons long-grain rice (Texmati, Carolina, Basmati, or 

    Jasmine all work)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup white sugar

1/2 or 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (depending on your taste-- I use 

a full teaspoon)

Preheat the oven to 300F and butter an 11X7 oven-proof glass baking pan.

Stir together all of the ingredients except the vanilla.  Put in the oven.  Bake for 2 hours, stirring  every half hour to keep the rice distributed.  Add the vanilla to the last stirring.  Total baking time is 3-3 1/2 hours.  

This makes the best rice pudding I've ever had and I've eaten in some diners run by Greeks that made awfully good rice pudding!!!  You can add raisins and vary the amount of rice to get a firmer texture,  I've made this with both whole and skim milk and it's always been good.   This recipe is basically the one appearing in  Atlantic Feb 2007.  Check the link for the original recipe with variations.  With the end of football season, what else is there to do on a Sunday afternoon??  

Quiz

The Pirate Dogs wonder if people are reading their blog so they've decided to post a quiz.  We really hope you'll answer by posting comments to the blog.  Readers should be able to find all the answers in the blog posts, even if it means going way back in the post history.

So here goes:

1) How many Pirate Dogs are there?

2) What are their names and ranks?

3) What's the name of their ship?

4) What did they do to SkippyKee?

5) What's their favorite treat?

6) What are their 3 favorite movies (Hint--Johnny Depp, Keira Knightley, Orlando Bloom 

starred)?

7) What do they call rawhide flips?

8) What Christmas carol did they research and change?

The Pirate Dogs thank you for your participation.  And for a bonus, 

Which JK Rowling character believes in nargles---Luna or Hermione??

You'll need to discuss with the Captain what the bonus is/will be............. 

Dog's Turn

The "we" in some posts is not always the infamous editorial "we"---The Pirate Dogs, singly or as a crew, frequently collaborate on this blog.  Here's proof:

The first mate is actively helping on the computer.  And the result of this canine-human endeavor is the sharing of a recipe for the favorite treat of the Pirate Dogs:  BONE TURKS.

Do your favorite dog a favor and make these for them.  They'll absolutely adore them and you!!!

4 cups of flour, some may be whole wheat
1 tsp. salt
½ cup corn meal
4 eggs
¼ cup molasses
¼ cup olive oil or leftover bacon fat, depending on how your dog feels about cholesterol
Enough milk to make a stiff dough

Optional: ¼ cup peanut butter (The Pirate Dogs love peanut butter from Valencia peanuts.  They haven't convinced us to put rum in this yet.)

Mix all ingredients together.
Knead a bit on a very slightly floured board.
Form into a long roll.
Flatten to about ½ inch thick.
Cut crossways into strips, and then cut each strip into small pieces or large bones or whatever your dog prefers.
Put pieces on an ungreased cookie sheet.
Bake at 375° for 25 minutes.
Turn off oven but leave cookie sheets in until oven cools so that the bone turks will harden.

When times are tough, these might even make a good snack for you according to Capt. 'Roid.

Inauguration Day

Since everyone else in the world is commenting on today's inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama,  we might as well too.  I heard the speech live and no specific phrase really jumped out at me, nothing like "nothing to fear but fear itself" or "ask not what your country can do for you..."

Some sentiments, like toughness presented to those who might wish us harm, working together to solve problems, a commitment to improving the environment and education, but no real blockbusters.  I'm sure after the spinners and talking heads get done, hopefully by Memorial Day, we'll all have some phrase extracted from the speech to anchor their pretensions.

In the meantime, as the man said, time to get to work.  And hope this dream doesn't turn into anything like the nightmare this nation just woke up from.  It really sounded great the first time I heard some commentator on NPR speak the phrase "former President George Bush."  Now the words made famous by those persecuted in Chicago in 1968 will come full circle and rather than being an indictment of an oppressive government, a phrase that reflects the new-found confidence of a country renewed: "The whole world is watching." 

658 Miles and a Red Meat Burrito, Part 2

In 1940, Thomas Wolfe, best known for Look Homeward, Angel,  wrote that "you can never go home again. "  This sentiment is easy to find on any website devoted to American cliches. How must an author feel when his book title and theme are so characterized......Is it a disappointment to be regarded as a cliche, or the ultimate thrill for a writer to have one of their ideas become so entwined in our language and culture?

Those words of Wolfe's ring true, however, cliche or not.  I have that feeling of longing unfulfilled whenever I visit the area I called home when I was growing up.  I find it very stifling and unappealing.  So at the end of a 300-plus mile drive across New Mexico to Las Cruces, I was appalled at the sense of unfamiliarity engendered by the growth of the city over the past ten years.

This was a scouting trip for retirement.  We've been looking at houses online, shopping for potential retirement sites.  Thanksgiving's trip to Northern CA was part of the plan.  Las Cruces and the high desert spoke to my soul when we were there ten years ago.  So as we descended from the 5700-foot St. Augustin Pass and saw the developments spreading into the foothill of the beautiful Organ Mountains, all I felt was a sense of longing for the jeep roads where I used to mountain bike and hike with St. Hannah, the tan dog.  Were they gone, swallowed up by the bulldozers of the developers?

We had found a house online in a new area and decided to trek across the state to scout the area.  Plans were to drive to Las Cruces, gorge ourselves on green-chile cheeseburgers at Guacomole's, tour the historic district, and check out the real estate market.  For a city recently rated one of the top places to retire, prices still seemed fairly reasonable.

Turning off the Bataan Memorial Highway, we entered the subdivision that looked so good on the Web.  We found the house we had devoured online.  It faced the mountains alright. Unfortunately, that view would have to be eliminated if we wanted any privacy in the living area.  Shoehorned onto small lots with minimal height masonry walls, the adobe style houses provided little privacy or feeling of "neighborhood."  We drove around a bit and decided to go have lunch.

The road to the restaurant went right by our old neighborhood so we succumbed to the temptation and drove by our old home.  Nothing had changed, except for an attractive repainting of the house on the corner and the addition of a small satellite dish to the roof of our old place. 

We proceeded to the restaurant only to find it "Temporarily Closed.  Sorry for any Inconvenience."  Well it was damn inconvenient, having traveled over 300 miles to eat there!! But then we remembered Nellie's, the finest Mexican food in the area.  Of course, Nellie's has grown with the city and the line was long just to get into the establishment.  Plan B--Roberto's--famous for its drive thru.  The food was great but dining inside is much less pleasurable an experience than getting the wonderful burritos, pinto beans, rice, and sopas "to go" so as to enjoy them while picnicking by the Rio  Grande with los perros. 

After lunch we proceeded to tour the city.  Auntie Bucksnort insisted it was like CA, even denigrating it by comparing it to the developments of Daly City, with its sloping lots and phalanxes of houses that seem to march up and down the pathetic asphalt covered hills seemingly out to eternity.  Our car conveyed us down the boulevard and turned left at the end, east toward Tortugas Mountain.  The developments faded and soon we were standing on the high desert.  The dogs were relaxed and enjoying their release from the crate and the myriad new odors.  The bustle of the commercial district was just a memory, rapidly retreating into the past and out of our consciousness.  The feeling was akin to rebirth.

We had braved snow in the Sacramento Mountains in the morning.  We had been disappointed by the newer developments.  We hadn't had the time to explore a couple of other areas we knew.  The journey back to the plains was uneventful, other than a stop at the pistachio farm and vineyard for some wine-tasting (we purchased an excellent Cabernet Sauvignon and a chocolate wine).  But while we acknowledge that the Las Cruces we knew has changed, there was a comfortable and restful feeling in the soul that spoke to us and said that maybe, Thomas Wolfe notwithstanding, we can go home again. 

658 Miles and a Red Burrito, Part 1

It's a long way from Clovis to Las Cruces---about 658 miles round trip, diagonally across the 5th largest state.  We did this drive last Saturday, accompanied by Bucksnort, 3 Pirate Dogs, and doggie cousin Esmerelda.  After an hour and a half of the High Plains, the road begins the climb into the Sacramento Mountains.  Small towns with names that elicit fantasies of Billy the Kid and John Wayne--Hondo, Tinnie, Ruidoso.  Then the summit, over 6000 feet.

The clear cold prairie winds became squalls of snow.  The Element hadn't been in this type of climate since leaving New Hampshire in 2007.  Winding down past Ski Apache, the southernmost Alpine ski area in the country, and the casino and sawmill that fuel the  Mescalero Apache economy, our intrepid band reaches the Tularosa basin.  The sky cleared to the warm blue for which New Mexico is famous.

Rest stop in Alamarosa, a small district between the towns of Tularosa and Alamogordo.  We made a great discovery---the McGinn family's Pistachio Tree Ranch and Winery.  Green chile dusted pistachios, Atomic Green Chile Pistachio Brittle, treats for the palate and more than satisfying the urge for hot NM chile.  A superb oasis for this trek.

The next stop was at one of the most beautiful locales on this planet---White Sands National Monument.  The Pirates and Esmerelda made excellent use of the walking area by the parking lot, exploring the totally different sensory experience the High Desert offers as a contrast to the High Plains.  Mescal bushes, Christmas cacti, Yucca.....how the dogs must have appreciated these olfactory differences.

Drive through the missile range and into the Organ Mountain.  San Augustin Pass is about 5700 feet.  Then the Mesilla Valley and Dona Ana County appear before us.  The growth of Las Cruces over the past ten years has manifested itself with the spread of housing developments further along the eastern mesa, almost to the foot of the majestic mountains.  Not much longer to the cool downtown residential area known as the Alameda, some fine dining, and the park along the Rio Grande where the Pirates and cousin could relax, out of the crate and into the warm sunshine.   

Pain and Misery

What a truly gut-wrenching, heart-rending experience.  Windows XP Professional no longer recognizes the boot volume on my PC's c: drive.  That's Personal Computer, nothing to do with politics, in as much as anything has to do with the other in the great cosmic space-time continuum with the dark matter and correlations of incidence......back to the point, or should I say "back-up", which I ruefully admit I wish I had done much more frequently.  The old lap-top is at the local computer shop.  The tech thinks he may be able to get the thing to work or at least recover my data files.  I hope so, our life is on that hard drive.  He promised to get back to me early this coming week to let me know the status.

So how am I posting to this blog, you ask?  Well, living even for one day without access to the 'Net and e-mail was more than we could stand.  And since we've been through several hard drive failures and other aggravations with Windows-based units, we drove over to the nearest Best Buy (about 90 miles away) and bought a new MacBook.  It's wonderful.  Easy to use, packed with applications, a built-in camera, speech technology, just head and shoulders over the Windows-based computer.  

Of course, I do have a stand-alone hard disc with some back-up data that I was able to transfer to the Mac.  And there's a program called Boot-Camp that allows XP to run on the Mac too.  So I figured I'd install XP.  WRONG!!!!  The installation froze my Mac.  I couldn't even get the stupid CD out of the drive.  Fortunately the instruction booklet that came with the Mac had instructions for that particular emergency.  Of course it took several minutes of, and this is an understatement, PANICKED searching for any clue to restore the MacBook to its pristine condition after being despoiled by Windows.  Now I hope the local techies can fix the old lap-top enough that I can load all its data onto my home network and never again besmirch my Mac with XP.

By the way, I haven't gotten a cent from Steve Jobs for this post and I do still admire Bill Gates.  It's just after all those years of Commodore 64, Apple II, and the various Intel-based DOS/Windows machines, the new MacBook is truly a phenomenal experience.