Katy on the Move!



I went to Columbus this past weekend to see the kids and to spend some time with Katy. All my pictures turned out blurry for some reason, and Katy was very interested in the camera . . . and the computer and anything else that was within two feet of the floor. She is crawling all over the place and standing up to everything that has a hand hold in sight.

There are still more sounds that start to approximate language. Bye-bye is now starting to have a little bit of an 'i' sound to it and is accompanied by a sort of claw-like motion of the hand. This usually takes place a minute or two AFTER the person making the exit has given up and left the house. But, hey! Timing will come!

Oma's love of music is always a part of my play time with Katy, and this time we sang through the first CD of her two-CD set of Bible songs for kids at least twice. The piano in the picture only has four keys which play a major triad and an octave. I am appalled that so many of the children's musical toys LOOK like one instrument but sound like something else. How terrible to have something that looks like a saxophone sound like a harmonica! The piano is the worst instrument of all. Many of them only have three or four keys and no half tones so you couldn't even play Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star on them. What a waste. But I digress. Katy seems to love various songs and sounds and definitely knows how to bounce along with the beat. We had a wonderful time.

On Saturday evening, Brian and JT stayed home with Katy and watched basketball while Emily and Melanie and I went to dinner at Outback Steakhouse and made a trip out to Easton to go shopping. We had fun at New York & Co., Williams Sonoma and eventually Starbucks before heading back to the house. All in all, it was great to see the kids and then head back to Pittsburgh on a dry and sunny Sunday afternoon. The time change and the milder temperatures made for a truly lovely weekend.

One Dead Chicken, Etc.

Well, folks, there won't be any pictures with THIS post! It is tough to take a picture of a smell, and that's what this is all about.

It all started yesterday afternoon when I pulled some chicken out of the freezer to make for dinner. I did a little defrosting in the microwave to get things started, and then I put 3 chicken breasts in my beautiful Princess House baking dish and covered them with salsa and corn. I covered this and left for church (I was playing in the orchestra) leaving Greg with instructions to put the chicken in the oven about 6:30 so we could have dinner when I got home.

I arrived home about 7 p.m. to the smell of the chicken and the gurgle of the rice cooker. Greg and I set the table and chatted until about 7:30, then we sat down to eat. The chicken was okay, but it was a little pink in the middle at the thickest part of the breast. We cut the ends off where it was cooked through and put the rest back in the oven while we watched a movie. It would make a nice meal or lunch for today or tomorrow.

You guessed it! We both forgot about the chicken and went to bed. About 2:30 this morning, I woke us to that pungent burning smell that a chicken covered in salsa makes after it has been cooking for 7 or 8 hours. It was nauseating. I stumbled downstairs and turned off the oven thinking I would clean it up in the morning. But the smell was pretty awful. After another 30 minutes, I got up again and came down to find three pitiful chunks of charred "meat" lying in the black ashes of stuff that was totally unrecognizable. I took the meat and wrapped it in foil and took it to the trash container in the garage. Then I put the black stuff in the garbage disposal and put some hot sudsy water in my pan . . . wondering if it would ever be used again. Then I lit a candle and sat down at the table to watch the neighbors street lamps glowing in the dark and wish for the smell to subside. I eventually blew out the candle and went to bed.

The house still smells today, but it is getting better. We ate out at lunch today. My confidence is a little shaken, and maybe I'll stick with spaghetti and stir fry for a while. However, I must say that I think my dish is going to survive. That Princess House is good stuff.

Never to be daunted by my culinary disasters, Greg stopped at Costco on the way home from church today. I said we needed some salad stuff, and he brought home 2.5 POUNDS of fresh spinach. Do you have any idea how big this bag is? The closest thing I can think of this size is one of those 5 gallon buckets of paint my dad used to buy from Lowe's when he was priming the inside of our house. That, my friends, is a lot of spinach. So maybe we are vegetarians for the next week or so. Sure hope the e coli thing is past . . . .