Unexplained phenomena

There was a photo from before I left for my vacation at the bottom of a post that I didn't describe and some of you astute readers might have finished reading that particularly scintillating (it wasn't) entry and gotten to the end and been like, "WTF?" This is the photo in question:

This was a gift to the Big Yam from his Great Nany. It's an obviously handmade, quite tall figure made out of the itchiest, most unsoft, most toxic-seeming foam this side of a Chinese infant formula manufacturing facility. She said she saw it in a store and wanted to get it for the Big Yam. We suspect it was an item used for display purposes, as it's not even finished. The top of his head is open so that you can see into it and there's a cheap ribbon looped through to hang him from something. It is simultaneously creepy, unsafe, and odd and we don't know what the crap to do with it in our house. I don't really want the Big Yam playing with it - it's really shoddily put together with like, wood glue. When I called Great Nany about another unrelated matter, she wondered if it was "Bud Lightyear" - oy. Right now he's been relegated to a dark corner of the basement. Any ideas?

Real life has been pretty good to us so far. I've been taking over mornings so that the Dotytron can do lesson planning and all the other borz0rz stuff that teachers have to do during their time off so that their lives aren't hell. LAME!

But we've been having fun hanging with the roomie and Montréal I, going to parks and for walks and just chilling.

Yesterday I attempted to get our lives back on track and made us whole wheat blueberry pancakes for breakfast. The key to a good pancake (IMO) is making sure you have enough fat in the pan so that you get that crispy ring around the outside (see above). That crispy ring MAKES a pancake, IMO.

Last night Montréal I made us a fish soup for dinner. I was admittedly skeptical. When we lived with her in university I wasn't prepared for her Russian peasant eating habits and would look askance at her dinners of smoked oysters on buttered crackers. Really, it was I who had the growing up to do, as I'm now the person happily scarfing pickled herring on buttered rye bread like I grew up on a gulag in the the Siberian Steppes. The fish soup was very simple - water, carrots, celery, potatoes, dill, salmon, and scallops, shrimp, and squid poached in a lemony marinade tossed in at the last second. I made us a salad of broiled figs stuffed with gorgonzola and wrapped in pancetta on arugala dressed with olive oil and balsamic.

I also made us Mona's Mother's Mother's favorite cookie recipe, which got bumped to the top of the baking queue when our friend N won a family oatmeal cookie baking contest with the recipe. As you well know, I loooooooove winning cooking/baking contests!

Finally, here is a photo of a giant slug that appeared on our back deck, with the Dotytron's hand for reference. HOW CRAZY IS THAT?!??? Giant slugs are GIANT!!! We saw oodles of nature while at the cottage(s) which I get big thrills from. We saw: a muskrat, baby loons, regular sized loons, a doe, a buck (I've never seen a male deer in the wild and this one was super up close), and wild turkeys. That's a pretty impressive tally.

Tonight I'm being reunited with my dove, Dr. Rei and we're going to dinner and seeing Crazy, Stupid, Love with Montréal I and the roomie.

Fin.