My Blog is MOVING!

Hi Everybody, sorry it's been so long! This is in part due to setting up my NEW BLOG on wordpress, and in part because of a bunch of things you'll have to go to my NEW BLOG to read about. So update your links and bookmarks people, because from now on I'll be writing from my NEW BLOG!

For those of you who need it spelled out, the new address is: http://meregator.wordpress.com/

Junko

This is a Junko. This particular Junko hit our bedroom window on Saturday. After a little research, I found that the best course of action is to place a stunned bird in a box (with holes, of course) for several hours and then let it go. If it flies away, that's good. If not, well... that's bad. Our Junko flew away after four hours in a box in our garage. We hope he's doing well.

Henna

After about a year of procrastination, I finally managed to try out the henna kit Ewan got for me. Part of the problem was that no one seems to want to give an exact recipe, and there's a lot of winging it involved. That is not one of my strengths, but with a little help from this Mehndi book and a convoluted yet very informative web site, I decided to give it a go. Ewan was my willing (and trusting) guinnea pig for this little experiment, so I let him pick a design. He wanted something Maori-like, but since using moko on a non-Maori is extremely offensive, we went for some kirituhi (non-symbolic "skin art") on his forearm. I looked through some Maori art books, designed a pattern, came up with a henna recipe of my own and went for it. As you can see, I got a little carried away and improvised a bunch of stuff that wasn't on the original design. The first picture is what the henna looks like when it's being applied to the skin. It's kind of like frosting a cake, with ribbons of henna that sit on top of the skin and stain whatever's underneath. I used a jacquard bottle with different sized metal tips to squeeze out the henna, but I think it would have been a lot easier on my thumb if I'd added more lemon juice to my henna paste before filling the bottles. Then I sealed his arm using a comercial henna spray, mostly because it came in the kit, it was getting very late, and I was too lazy to make the traditional lemon sugar sealer. We wrapped his arm in toilet paper and celophane for the night, and in the morning he scraped off the paste with the help of a little oil. I read that it's better not to let the design come in contact with water for a while, so he didn't wash his arm for the rest of that day. The second picture is what the design looked like after a couple of days. Henna stains deepen over a period of about 12 to 48 hrs after the paste is removed. Don't ask me why, it seems a bit crazy but that's definitely what happened with Ewan's design. His design lasted about a week and a half. All in all, it came out fairly well. The stain was deeper near his wrist because the skin gets thicker there and takes up more color. Next time, I'd definitely wait longer before wrapping and sending him to bed, but... as I said earlier it was getting VERY late. We'll start earlier next time. I would also try using heat packs on the design once I've wrapped it to deepen the stain. We did have the heat turned up in the house, but I don't think it was quite enough, especially since it's winter. I'd like to try a traditional Indian pattern on my feet, but I'll have to wait until summer so that I can enjoy it. Who's next?

A brand new bathroom!

After a valiant struggle between Ewan, his dad and the sink, good was triumphant and a new faucet was installed! We decided that we like the green paint we used in the dining room so much that we'd use that color in the bathroom too. A new mirror, towel bar, curtain rod, cabinet handle, towel hooks, lighting fixtures, switches, outlet and frosted glass paper (so we could tear out those awful mini blinds) finished it off. Check out our photo page for the amazing before and after pics! Two big huge thank yous go out to Ewan's Dad for his persistence with the faucet and Ewan's Aunt June for helping make this possible.

The Best Holiday Surprise Ever

My dear sister, who can NEVER keep a secret, managed to keep a really big one for two whole weeks until Christmas. She and her husband surprised us with pictures of their new son! He is about eight months old and is living with his foster family in northern Thailand. I can't wait to spoil him.

Ready for the Snow

Dez finally got outfitted for the snow (which has been falling in buckets for a while now). I broke down and bought him a sweater and boots, because his coat that I'm sewing for him won't be done for at least another week. I'm not crazy about dressing up pets, but as a desert dog he was having a hard time coping with our chilly house. He spent most of the past couple of weeks either snoozing under a pile of blankets on his bed or quivering and looking at me pathetically. I'm sure he'll be gratefull to stay behind today while we tromp around looking for the perfect Christmas tree.

All in a Day's Work

We got our first snowfall just in time for December, and the good stuff fell late last night. That meant a lot of communal shoveling in our neighborhood. It also meant that our neighbor across the street started his traditional building project. From the sound of things, he has been building anything and everything from snow for many years, and his projects are so substantial that they usually last till April. This year he's rebuilding last year's fort, with some improvements. He accomplished most of this amazing castle on his own with just a wheel barrow, a trash can and a milk crate. I did manage to finish our shoveling in time to help out with the last few windows while Ewan and Leanne were studying in the lab. I can't wait to see how it grows over the winter. I'm praying for lots of snow.

Agadez the Canine Typhoon

I tried for days to get a picture of Dez to post here, and instead I got images of what appears to be a ghost dog haunting our house. Just about the only way to tell that he's real is the nose print on the window. He did settle down for about five seconds once - to keep an eye on the neighbors shoveling out from our first snow.

Halloween

Okay, so I'm a day late. And... if you count the days since my last post I'm a bit later. Ah well, I've no defense so we'll just move on shall we? So. Halloween. Definitely one of my very favorite times of year. I love dressing up. I love carving pumpkins. I love watching all the little kids come to the door in their costumes. Sadly there was none of that this year. Ewan and I didn't manage to make it to any parties, we weren't organized enough to carve pumpkins (since Ewan has been working with the cow herd every evening this week), and we only got six trick-or-treaters this year. SIX. I mean, really. Come on. I thought we were scraping the bottom in Montana, but there is just no excuse for this in Madison. That said, we did still have a Halloween of sorts in the Wolff house. Ewan brought me a goodie bag of my favorite treats and cooked me a fabulous pesto dinner, which went very well with our movie choice of "Curse of the Were-Rabbit." That will be my favorite Halloween movie for all time. Thank you, Nick Park.

For my part, I pulled an all-nighter the night before last in order to get a Klausie costume ready for Ewan. They had a contest at the vet school, and a bunch of people went as characters from The Life Aquatic. As some of you may remember, this is not an entirely new idea for Ewan, since he dressed as Steve Zissou two Halloweens ago. Still, we had to start from scratch... his last costume was just his tuxedo and a red cap. To pull of Klaus we needed a new cap, blue shorts, a blue turtleneck, a glock in a holster and of course the signature Team Zissou Adidas shoes. Ewan has been coveting those shoes for years, so I finally broke down and made him some. We found directions online, which I altered a bit, and I hand painted some Sambas to fit the bill. It took 3 coats of paint and 3 coats of varnish. Yeesh. I also had to make a pom pom to attach to the cap, and design an iron-on Team Zissou patch for the shirt. You have no idea how hard it is to find any turtleneck, let alone a men's light blue turtleneck, these days. Then there were the shorts. It's October. Men's blue shorts were no more to be found than the turtleneck. I ended up buying an xl women's turtleneck in white from Walmart (yeah, I know, I'm sorry but we were desperate) and a pair of very light khaki shorts from Goodwill. I then had to bleach and dye these to the appropriate shade of blue and iron on the logo. The Glock was tricky too. One party store actually still had a realistic handgun ripped out of its packaging and hidden on the back of a shelf, and amazingly enough it looked almost identical to a Glock... but the only holster I could find was a shoulder holster for a tiny sissy gun. Scissors and some hand stitching took care of that. Finally, there's the shoelaces. If men's blue shorts and a blue turtleneck were impossible to find, it was nothing to my attempts at locating yellow shoelaces. When I asked the clerk at the party store, she laughed and said, "That color is SO out." Indeed. Apparently everyone else thinks so too, because I think I can definitively say that no store in Madison carries them. Ewan tried to dye the ones that came with the shoes, but since the laces were acrylic it did next to nothing. Enter the yellow sharpie. In the end it all paid off. This costume was definitely my best yet. Plus, Ewan got a new pair of shoes out of it. Just don't tell him that the yellow shoelaces are out.

Oh so much nicer.

As you can probably tell, Dez has calmed down a bit since my last post. He's been so good lately that we've even been letting him sleep on his bed at night! We're up to three nights running with no incidents. Huge progress doesn't even begin to describe it. He even got to meet his cousin Punkin and his uncle Jack this past weekend. All things considered I think he did marvelously. No one got eaten, and my parents' place stayed in one piece. Wow.