We watched the IAMS Eukanuba Tournament of Champions this evening on Animal Planet. I'm a bit of a closet dog-show nerd. I really love to watch all of the pretty dogs prancing around. The dogs on there are absolutely gorgeous (not that I don't have a special place in my heart for mutts). The working group are my favorites… the Samoyed, Akita, Malamute, Huskie, Newfie, and Kuvasz are all in that group. They're excellent doggies. Miss May belongs to the Sporting group. I like loads of them as well. A very cute little dog called Coco who is a Norfolk Terrier won Best in Show. I will admit that he was a fine dog, but I really feel like dogs should be a good deal bigger than cats … 
Telemarketers
Tammy: Good morning is Matthew there?
Me: No. And he's never here during week days, he works. And you keep calling, sometimes 3 times a day. So can you PLEASE stop calling? Please take him off your list.
Tammy (sounding a bit taken aback): Yes, sure. We can umm take you off the list for a period of umm twelve months. Is there umm anything else I can do for you?
Me: Can you make it any longer?
Tammy: Umm yes. We will put you on our no call list. This may take 30 days to process.
Me: Can you make it shorter?
Tammy: ……
A Real Bed
Our current bed is great. The only problem, we don’t really have one. What we have is very nice mattress and box spring sitting on the floor. Since the mattress is a huge pillow top, it sits pretty far off the ground, its actually higher off than our old dorm beds were. Also, because of the way we had our mattress positioned, it didn’t look odd either. We were in no hurry to find a new bed. Well, we finally found one we liked. Its made Bill Bale and hopefully will be finished by some time in March. If you want to talk a look at this stuff, you can look at http://www.sandhilldesigns.com/
Sitcom Television Charchters, Dictators, and May
As a (what I thought would be) 5 minute diversion, I started playing Guess the Dictator or Television Sitcom Character. I'm trying to make it guess DJ Conner from Roseanne. It's about 40 questions into it … It seems to be quite lost, making very pointed qustions, most of which are way off. I should never have headed down this road. OK good, it FINALLY guessed who I was. Kinda fun, really.
I found a really excellent price on a memory card for my digi-camera this morning, so I bought it. Quite excellent. Oh, speaking of the digital camera, I took a really cute clip of the puppy having a nervy spaz in the snow and it's up. Beware … it's 5 MB. It won't be up forever either since it sucks bandwith.
I Worked So Hard!
I worked like crazy yesterday on Jesser (read: 1 hour) but somehow I didn't manage to write anything down. Well I'm changing that today … obviously. I've been a bit low on energy, so I had a nice lie-in this morning. I was still up by 8:30 but it sure beats the icky 6:30 Matt was wanting me to get up at. I felt a wee bit guilty/sad about not having brekkie with him. But I got over it!
So by now, I'm up and fed and feelin pretty darn good. I've got soooo much to do it's almost overwhelming, but I like to be busy. It really motivates me. Perhaps if I have a bit of extra time, I'll upload a few new pictures to the site. That'd be good.
Off to work … out.
Rum Cake
from: Paula Kafer
Ingredients
1 cup pecans, chopped
1 yellow cake mix with pudding
3 eggs
1/3 cup oil
1/3 cup cold water
½ cup dark rum
1 stick butter
¼ cup water (for stronger rum taste reduce or omit)
1 cup sugar
½ cup dark rum
Directions
Grease a Bundt or tube pan (tube pan gives you a better surface for the glazing). Place chopped nuts on bottom of pan. Combine cake mix with eggs, oil, water and rum. Pour batter over nuts and bake at 325° for 1 hour. Cool. While it cools, prepare the glaze. Melt butter in a sauce pan. Stir in water and sugar and boil five minutes. Stir in rum. Loosen cake from pan and invert on large plate. Pierce top of cake with a utility fork and drizzle glaze over, letting it soak in. Continue poking and soaking till all glaze is used.
It's Cracktastic!
I just watched an episode of Trading Spaces: Boys Vs. Girls. It's like it's grown-up counterpart, except that kids participate and there's an extra carpenter to lend a hand. There also seems to be a much larger budget. And if you thought some of the rooms on Trading Spaces were cracktastic, you ain't seen nothin' yet. They do these incredibly elaborate theme rooms for these kids. That in and of itself wouldn't be so bad if they didn't remove almost all functionality from them. The one last night for example had a little boys room turned into a stadium. Fine. But to do this, they made him a “Sky Box” bed (read: loft) in the corner of his 8' ceilinged room. It looed like even if I sat up, I'd smack my head, let alone a kid who will probably grow to be at least 6″ taller than me. They also turned the girl's room into a candy factory, with how-the-hell-can-I-sleep-in-here-it's-so-bright color scheme, conveyor belt, and a whole wall full of shelves with candy jars (bubye books!). Here's a pic:
They do seem to have a very cute pink chair at her desk though, which looks an awful lot like my green chairs … where did they get pink? Spray paint?? Maybe that paint that “bonds to plastic at the molecular level.” Did I just miss them at IKEA? Hmmm…
Back to Zzzzz …
I'm tired! I went to bed at a sort of reasonable hour and then I very unreasonably couldn't sleep. I don't know why. I don't make up the rules. It's a nice morning though. Well if you don't have to get up and take the puppy out. As it's freezing cold and snowing again. But it's not grey and icky.
We had a lovely weekend. Nothing major happened. We did quite a bit of cooking. I'll link to a couple recipes down below. I also made Matt a nifty Scrabble tack board for his office. I'd post instructions in my craft section, but it's so easy, there's really no point. Basically, you mount an old scrabble board on a piece of foam core (or whatever) and then you glue tacks to the back of the tiles and figure out some way to hang the thing up. It turned out pretty cute. Thanks Readymade #4!
We also played a lot of DDRMax2 as well. It's a very nifty playstation dance game. We really got quite a bit better in the 3 days we've owned it. It's so much fun.
Ack! I just accidently pushed the back button and I wasn't focused on this form thingy, and it went back a page and I thought I'd lost all this! I think it's a sign that I'm done. 
Corn Pancake
from: 99
Ingredients
2 tablespoons butter
3/4 cup corn kernels
3/4 cup skim milk
2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 cup flour
1 large egg
cinnamon
powdered sugar
applesauce and sour cream for serving
Directions
Heat oven to 450. Place a 10″ skillet in the oven for 10 minutes. Place butter in the skillet and tilt in all directions to cover the pan. Place the flour, corn kernels, sugar, and milk in a blender or food processor. Process until smooth. Add the egg and blend until combined. Pour the mixture into the prepared pan and bake for 15 minutes. The pancake should be set and lightly brown. Top with a sprinkling of cinnamon and powdered sugar.
Cut the pancake into four wedges and serve with applesauce and sour cream.
Garlic Chicken Pizza
from: cookinglight.com
Ingredients
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 1/2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 (16-ounce) Italian cheese-flavored pizza crust (such as Boboli)
1 1/2 cups shredded cooked chicken breast (about 8 ounces)
1 cup chopped plum tomato
1 cup chopped mushrooms
3/4 cup (3 ounces) shredded part-skim mozzarella cheese
1/4 cup (1 ounce) crumbled feta cheese
1/4 cup (1 ounce) finely shredded fresh Parmesan cheese
1/4 cup chopped green onions
Directions
Preheat oven to 400°.
Combine first 3 ingredients, stirring well with a whisk. Place crust on a baking sheet; brush vinegar mixture over crust. Top with chicken, tomato, and mushrooms; sprinkle with cheeses and green onions.
Bake at 400° for 15 minutes or until cheeses melt.
Nutritional Info (1 of 8 slices)
CALORIES 263 (27% from fat); FAT 7.8g (sat 3.6g, mono 2.8g, poly 0.9g); PROTEIN 19.9g; CARB 27.1g; FIBER 0.5g; CHOL 36mg; IRON 2.1mg; SODIUM 563mg; CALC 296mg;