Stuff you should have

These are my favourite things, and you should have them, too!

Monday, November 20, 2006 , terribly early in the morning

Random holiday gift ideas

About once a week I try to clean out my email inbox, but I get so many cool emails that I hate to delete them without sharing them.  So, here are a few of the most interesting online things that you might not be aware of:

For really nice and reasonably priced tie-dyed clothing, visit Dyed in Vermont.  I bought Flippy a t-shirt from this company a couple of years ago and it looks great, has never faded, and it’s just a really beautiful piece of wearable artwork.  The only thing they don’t carry that I’d like to see are zippered hoodies, but otherwise they have a great selection.  How about a tie-dyed lab coat as a gift for your favourite veterinarian?!  You know, I just thought of one other thing the store doesn’t sell - pet clothing.  If you ever read this, Mr. Tie-Dyed, you should make some doggie t-shirts!

Maybe I’m the only person fascinated by this concept, but I wish I had a need for the new My-Cast Mobile Weather service.  I don’t have need for it—I rarely ever leave the house—but it seems nifty.  It might be a good idea for pet owners who have storm-phobic pets, as you could use it to alert you of impending bad weather while you’re stuck at the office.  You’d get notified of a storm and you’d have to leave early to go home.  Oh well.

I think this gift idea is both tacky and touching: name a star after a loved one.  There’s something kind of cheesy about it if it’s used as a grand romantic gesture, yet I feel like it would be a fun thing to do for a pet.  One thing’s for sure, whoever came up with the “star registry” idea in the first place was a marketing genius and I’d like them to send me lots of money.

This ”receive a real letter from Santa” program is supposed to be for kids, but I’m going to have Santa write to Flippy.  Flippy’s been working very hard lately and deserves to find something nice in her stocking, like a dreidel and some latkes.

Last but definitely not least, for the grown-ups, is a link to that Gevalia coffee offer you see all over the place.  I’m linking to it because if you’re into having your coffee delivered, Gevalia actually makes good coffee.  I used to swear by their decaf Stockholm blend, but I finally reached a point where I just couldn’t drink as much coffee as was being delivered, and I cancelled my “subscription”.  It really is good coffee though, and there are tons of decaf and whole bean options, so it may interest someone.  I was just looking at it myself and I notice that don’t have anything called “Stockholm blend” anymore, but I’d imagine that’s now their “Signature Blend”.  Maybe we should order some… hmm…

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 11/20 at 03:02 AM
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Thursday, November 16, 2006 , the wee hours

Kashi TLC cookies

I wanted to write about how much I love, love, love Kashi’s new TLC (Tasty Little Cookies) Oatmeal Dark Chocolate cookies.  I can still do that, but I can’t give you a link to them, because they aren’t even listed on the Kashi website.  How odd.  We bought them at Target about a week ago, so they’re out there, somewhere, but perhaps they haven’t been distributed nationally yet.  In any case, I think they’re fabulous.  They taste “good for you” because they’re full of chewy grainy bits, but that also helps them taste homemade.  They aren’t overly sweet but do contain real chocolate and not that fake carob stuff, and they’re a large, hefty cookie.  Flippy and I were eating them as “breakfast on the run” for a couple of days, and I think we could make a fair argument that it was a healthy decision.  I like them more than Flippy does, but we have different taste in cookies—for example, she loves the “soft-batch” type of cookie, and I think they taste nasty.  So, these Kashi cookies might also be something you either love or you leave.

In the ingredient department, they’re full of good things.  Each cookie contains seven whole grains (oats, rye, barley, sesame seeds, and a few others) and three grams of fiber.  They only have 130 calories each (which is pretty good considering that they’re large), but they contain a fair amount of fat (5g per cookie).  There’s no trans fat, which is good for your heart, but will still go straight to your thighs.

If these sound like your sort of thing, do give them a try if you can find them.  I wanted to to try the oatmeal raisin flavour, but we can’t find them at the grocery store and we haven’t been back to Target.  Target is an evil place where they force you to spend at least $100 before they let you leave, so we can’t go there very often.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 11/16 at 02:22 AM
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Saturday, November 04, 2006 , early evening

Mark Bittner, artist

Our friend Mark Bittner, author of The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, is now a successful visual artist as well.  Some of his wonderful digital photographs are now for sale at the The Linda Fairchild Gallery in San Francisco.  My personal favourite will always be “Mingus and Coit Tower”—I made a Photoshopped version of that image using some filters a few years ago, and got many online inquiries from people who wanted to buy copies of it.  I never thought it was my place to be selling my versions of Mark’s work, but maybe I should have taken them up on their offers!

If you’d like to see a small selection of Mark’s photos, visit The Linda Fairchild Gallery website.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 11/04 at 06:38 PM
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Thursday, November 02, 2006 , evening

Something for the old folks

I’d just written a very nice blog entry, but IE 7 crashed and I lost it.  I’m not sure how I feel about IE 7—I’m getting used to the features, but it’s so “locked down” it’s sort of a pain to use.  I’ll need to find the security settings and loosen things a bit, and it had better stop crashing or I’ll go back to IE 6.  So there.  And yes, I’ve tried Netscape and Firefox and Opera, and I just can’t seem to adapt to them.

You’ll now get an abbreviated version of my original post, as it bores me to write it again :p I was posting about this very cool thing I saw in the Hammacher catalog, an LP-to-CD converter:

LP-to-CD Recorder Stereo System

When I was growing up all we had were vinyl LPs and cassette tapes (8 track had already perished), so I’ve still got literally hundreds of LPs stored (safely?) in our garage.  I worry about the heat getting to them every year, but they’re stacked properly and tightly, and they always seem to weather the temperatures well.  If I had this sort of converter gadget I could copy my rare LPs (the ones which were never re-released on CD), and then sell the originals on eBay.  And then we could retire!  Or at least, we could probably go out for sushi.

I’d never want to go back in time to before the days of CDs, because CDs are so tidy and durable.  Still, I miss owning a turntable and listening to my old “classics’ (taste is subjective), and it would be nice to hear them again.  Hammacher also sells an LP-to-MP3 converter, but MP3 files are just too technical for me.  Now hand me my Geritol.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 11/02 at 09:51 PM
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Tuesday, October 24, 2006 , late evening

Zoltar!

Frighten your children on Halloween and every day in-between when you buy your very own creepy, life-sized Zoltar fortune-telling machine!  It’s guaranteed to provide nightmares for the entire family—for the kids when Zoltar spontaneously speaks to them when they approach the cabinet, and for the parents when they receive the $9000 credit card bill!

image

If you’re too much of a wimp for Zoltar, you can treat the family to something a little more delicate, like a 7 foot tall, fully-animatronic version of Robby the Robot.  He’s only $49.999.95 (I’m surprised they worry about that five cents).

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Seriously, can you even begin to imagine having that kind of money to waste?  I thought I was being extravagant a few days ago when I put a $60 wall clock on my holiday wishlist.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 10/24 at 10:19 PM
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Wednesday, August 30, 2006 , early evening

Magazines on sale

I received notice in my email today that Amazon.com is having a “sale” on two popular pet magazines, The Bark, and I Love Cats.  You’ll still pay the regular subscription price ($15 for “The Bark” and $26 for “I Love Cats"), but then Amazon will send you a $5 gift certificate good on a future purchase.  I’ll admit I’m not familiar with “I Love Cats”, but I’m always buying “The Bark” at the bookstore, and I’m paying about $20 a year for it.  With the gift certificate, it lowers the subscription price to $10 for the year.  I think I’ll be taking advantage of this (not that we need more magazine subscriptions, but whatever).

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 08/30 at 06:52 PM
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Tuesday, August 29, 2006 , late morning

More about green tripe

It’s been a couple of weeks since I received my first order of “innards” from GreenTripe.com, and the dogs have had a chance to sample all the different goodies.  They just love, love, love the Tripe Stuffed Raw Cow Hooves, and at just $1.25 each, they’re a great bargain.  I offer them frozen, straight from the freezer, so it makes them long-lasting and gives the dogs a good dental workout.  They stink ever so slightly ("essence of barnyard"), but no more so than the dried cow hooves you find at pet stores.  The dogs will lick out the stuffing and then chew on the hoof, but I end up tossing out the thickest part of the hoof at the end of the day.  You can also buy unstuffed raw hooves, for 33 cents each, but I don’t know if they have much nutritional value.  If you’re going to pay for the special shipping and styrofoam crate and dry ice, you’d might as well spend a little extra and get the stuffed hooves.

Unfortunately, the dogs are pretty ambivalent about the tracheas and gullets ("unfortunate" because I have so many of them, now I have to figure out how to use them up!).  The tracheas are kind of slimy and tough to grip, and the dogs seem confused by them.  They’ll eat them if I chop the tracheas into smaller pieces (which I’m doing), but I don’t relish the idea of doing that all the time.  The gullets seem better for chewing, but they’re so large that they have to be cut into smaller pieces or they just get wasted.  I can thaw and chop one gullet into four pieces, which means two days worth of snacks, but it’s a lot of work and has to be done carefully, with a big cleaver.

I found another website, A Place for Paws, which sells green tripe, chicken necks and backs, and a selection of other raw items, but they only ship their perishable products to the midwest.  Still, it might be a good source for people living in that area (check the delivery map on their website).  Their prices seem to be excellent.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 08/29 at 11:15 AM
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Sunday, July 30, 2006 , evening

One more for the coffee fans

We bought a Nespresso Aeroccino a couple of weeks ago, and as I know there are quite a few coffee fans here, I wanted to write a bit about it.  The Aeroccino is a “small kitchen gadget”, about the size of a large coffee mug.  You fill it with your desired milk or milk-like substance, plug it in and push a button, and it automatically makes either steamed milk or foamed milk.  It does this absolutely silently, in about 60 seconds, and then you just pour the prepared milk into a cup, add a shot of espresso (or whatever you’re drinking), and you’ve got an instant latte or cappuccino.  Clean up is a breeze—just rinse it under water and wipe out the inside with a paper towel and you’re finished.

We’ve tried a few different drinks with it and have been impressed with what a good job it does, and it has saved us from a couple of trips to Starbucks.  It hasn’t paid for itself yet, but in time, I’m sure it will.  What prompted me to write about it today was that we were out of milk, so I made us some small (6 oz.) cappuccinos from some half-and-half we had in the fridge, and they were heavenly.  The foam was so light and creamy that it was like eating a cloud, but it was solid enough to hold its shape and stay foamy until the drink was finished.  I ate the residual foam out of the cup with a spoon.  I know brevé cappuccinos aren’t healthy, but wow, it was tasty, and it will definitely be on my list of of “things I love to consume which are bad for me”.

So, I had to share my adoration of the Aeroccino with you all.  Maybe you’re just plain coffee drinkers, which is fine, but if you go to Starbucks to get lattes and cappuccinos, you might be interested in this fun little gadget.  We also own a Nespresso espresso machine (we’ve had it for a couple of years), but I’m sure you could still make a great drink with strong coffee.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 07/30 at 09:17 PM
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Friday, July 28, 2006 , evening

It must be bunnies

The cats just love any toy made from real fur.  It turns them into little savages, and they run and growl and toss the toy around as if it were real.  We found some cheap little fur toys at PetSmart, but the cats eventually “lost” them all, or Eli ate them, so I searched online for some toys which were reasonably priced and not made from synthetics.  I found what I was looking for at Sign of the Cat, a gift shop in Maryland with an online store.  They stock a number of real fur toys, at very reasonable prices.  Here’s what I bought for $10.50 (being inspected by Scampi):

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Shipping was very slow (my order took two and half weeks to arrive from the time I ordered it, via Priority Mail), but the toys are a good price so I can’t really complain.  The most expensive one in the photo is the “fur with feathers”, which cost $3.50.  I’ll definitely order again, although our local Tandy Leather store is having a big sale next week, so I might also see if Flippy wants to go hunting at Tandy for wabbits.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 07/28 at 09:59 PM
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Wednesday, July 26, 2006 , late morning

Hair Raiser Coffee

I wanted to do a little shout out to the nice people at Hair Raiser Coffee.  We discovered their dark roast coffee at CoffeeFest, and have since been enjoying it immensely.  You may know we’re “all decaf, all the time” people, and it’s tough to find decent decaf coffee blends, so we were thrilled that a premium coffee like Hair Raiser was available in a decaf roast.  Hair Raiser is a dark roast coffee, a French roast—the beans have that wonderful dark roast oil on them, and they’ve managed to roast the beans as darkly as possible without hitting the point of burning them.  I sometimes roast my own coffee beans and know how fine the line is between “dark” and “burnt” (it’s about 10 seconds, frankly).  Anyway, if you’re into dark roast coffee and are tired of what you find at Starbucks or the grocery store, treat yourself to a bag of Hair Raiser (you can order via their website).  They have quite a few full-caf blends to choose from, as well as their decaf, and you can even buy Hair Raiser undies.  Nothing says good times like drinking coffee in your underwear.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 07/26 at 11:42 AM
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