The Whole Circle Of Life Thing Just Became Serious

There is no delicate way to put this:  We have a bit of a rodent problem in our apartment.

I actually think mice are moderately cute, at least in certain contexts.  And our problem with them hasn't been terrible.  We've been seeing the scuttle across the floor occasionally, which is startling, but not life-altering.  I hadn't found mouse droppings or any evidence that they had been getting into our food, but I was concerned that we were on the clock for those sorts of problems to start.  Not to mention the problem of mouse reproduction.  I was imagining an army of baby mice chewing holes in cracker boxes and bags of grains from the supermarket bulk bins.  Ugh.

We had been thinking about getting a cat as a pet for a long time for the companionship and entertainment they bring, but it occurred to us that a side benefit might be some natural rodent control.  When we brought Laila home, I wondered what would happen.  On the one hand, she had spent some time as a stray, and had presumably caught rodents and/or small birds to eat.  On the other hand, she is so small and wobbly.  Once she started regaining her strength and playing more, though, I became optimistic.  Seeing her brutalize her toys made me think she still had that feline drive to hunt and kill things.

Well, it turns out that killing her toy spider repeatedly was just practice for the real thing.  When I came home from work on Friday, something looked different in the living room.  I realized that she either somehow acquired a new toy mouse, or....there was a dead mouse elegantly juxtaposed with the small Persian rug I brought back from Syria.

Laila getting pets for a job well done.

She's a very tidy killer, it turns out.  There was no blood in sight.  While I bear mice no ill will, I don't care to sustain a colony of them in my home.  Nor do I care to set lots of traps or try to poison them.  I'm very proud of our furry natural exterminator.

Laila staying in fighting form by attacking her streamer toy.

Circle Of Life, From The Perspective Of A House Cat

When your human drags a toy spider along the floor for you to chase, it is very important to make sure it is truly dead after you catch it.  The whole apartment would be infested with toy spiders if not for my vigilance and hunting prowess.  You're meowcome.

Making Vintage Jewelry More Wearable

I haven't posted in a while about anything I've made.  I was dragging my feet on photographing pieces, but I finally went ahead and photographed several today.

I inherited some of my paternal grandmother's jewelry when she died several years ago.  Today's piece of jewelry began with a fabulous fly pin that belonged to her.

There is wonderful detailing on the fly's wings, which, frustratingly enough, the picture doesn't show very well.  It also has a purple body.  Purple is my favorite color, and it was my grandmother's favorite, too.  I thought it was an extremely cool pin.

The only problem is that I'm not really a pin person.  I think it may be a generational thing--I've seen lots of older women wear pins with a great deal of flair, but when I try it, it just doesn't feel like me.  Truthfully, I can only think of one woman around my age who I ever saw wearing pins on a regular basis.

So the pin sat unworn for a number of years.  I finally decided it was time to remedy that and make a necklace from it, since I wear necklaces very regularly.  I started by buying a bail to convert the pin into a pendant.  The bail is simply a piece of tube that goes over the pin back with a large loop on top.  You can get these bails with either a vertical or a horizontal tube, depending on the direction of your pin back.  My pin was thus turned into a pendant.

I thought just putting it on a plain chain would neither do the pin justice nor having pleasing proportions.  So the next question was how to design a necklace that would complement the pendant without overwhelming it.  Inspiration came in the form of a package of seed beads that came as a free gift with some other beads I had ordered.  The seed beads were a mix of soft purples and whites with a matte finish.  I thought the soft, matte beads would allow the pendant to really shine.  I also thought that using matte beads would bring the overall shine of the piece down a bit, and make it easier to wear for everyday occasions.

I also wanted to incorporate metal into the necklace, so I bought gold-filled chain, wire, cones and a clasp.  Gold-filled is a good affordable alternative to gold.  I shudder to think how much solid gold would have cost.  I made four strands of wire-wrapped seed bead links, and used cones to link them to the chain.  I then connected the clasp to the ends and slid the pendant on.

Since the loop on the pendant bail is so large, I can easily remove the pendant if I want to wear the necklace without it.

And, since I left the pin back intact, I could remove the pendant bail and wear it as a pin again if I ever wanted to.  I'm glad that in one form or another, the fly pin will get worn again.

Our New Furry Friend

Meet our new kitty, Laila.

We brought her home from our county's animal shelter on Saturday.  Shelter staff had named her Oreo, but we knew we wanted to rename her.  For one thing, it seems silly to name such a skinny cat after a type of junk food.  A cat-loving colleague suggested that we name her Laila, which means night in Arabic.  We decided that she was indeed a Laila, and the name stuck.

I hadn't visited an animal shelter in many years, and Scott had never visited one at all.  Even though we knew in general terms what kind of cat we wanted (friendly, older, short-haired), there were still many to choose from.  It was quite overwhelming.  One of the staff told me they had even more cats elsewhere in the building who were not being displayed for prospective pet adopters.

In spite of a large selection, we narrowed our choices down to two, Laila and one other kitty.  We met with each separately in a sort of meet-and-greet room.  The other kitty was primarily interested in exploring the room, but Laila came right over to be petted.

She was silent on the car ride home.  I had her in her carrier on my lap, and she just kept turning around and looking out all the different mesh windows.  When we got her home and I opened the carrier, I expected her to run under a piece of furniture and hide.  But she was interested in exploring right away.

The shelter staff think Laila is 10 years old.  She's had a rough life, at least in parts.  She was found and brought in as a stray with a puncture wound that suggested she had been bitten.  Because of the probable animal bite, she had to go into quarantine at a cat foster home for 4 months.  She's very skinny and has a slightly wobbly walk.

She warmed up to us very quickly.  Generally speaking, when we're home and she isn't eating, she wants to be where we are.  Her preference is that we drop everything and pet her, but barring that, she's happy to hang out and watch us.  She wasn't eating much when we first brought her home, but is starting to eat more.  She also seemed to have trouble jumping very high, but she seems to improving and/or becoming more confident.  After I cruelly pushed the chairs under our kitchen table--to deprive her of a midway point to jumping on said table--I watched her defiantly jump to the table from the floor.

Laila has brought a lot of joy to our home, and we hope we can give her good golden years.

Monster Mochi Mess

I've loved mochi since the first time I tried it, which was in high school.  I used to buy mochi filled with sweet bean paste at Asian grocery stores, and I enjoyed getting it for dessert at Japanese restaurants.  It's pretty mainstream now, and I can get it at Trader Joe's, filled with ice cream.

It never occurred to me that I could make mochi at home, though, so I was intrigued when the New York Times published a recipe for it.  It looked simple enough, and there weren't too many ingredients, although the key ingredients I wanted--glutinous rice flour and adzuki beans--were unlikely to be found in our local Safeway.  Essentially, I would need to combine the glutinous rice flour with water and sugar and then cook it fairly briefly on the stove.  If I wanted to fill the mochi with bean paste, I would need to make that separately.  Oh, and the process of forming the bean paste-filled cakes looked like it might be a little sticky, but surely nothing I couldn't keep at bay with a dusting of corn starch.

I gathered my courage and my ingredients.  I found adzuki beans at a local Thai market.  I looked for the glutinous rice flour, and ultimately ordered it from Amazon.

One weekend, I decided to give it a try.  I started by making the bean paste.  So far, so good.  I tasted a little of it, and it tasted as I had expected.

Then I started cooking the mochi itself.  I was supposed to stir and watch for it to become shiny and hold its shape.  That happened pretty quickly, and I poured the resulting product onto a cornstarch-dusted piece of parchment paper.  So far, so good....except that the mochi was too hot and too sticky to handle.  I decided to leave it for a while so it could cool down, and, with luck, become less sticky.

A while later, it had cooled down considerably, but had not gotten much less sticky.  I decided to try my luck anyway.  I sprinkled some more corn starch on the parchment paper, and put some on my hands.  I grabbed a piece of the mochi dough and tried to form it.  It stubbornly refused to be formed into anything.  I put it down and washed a thick layer of sticky residue from my hands.

Several attempts later, I was no closer to forming cute little mochi balls.  I suddenly got the idea that instead of making lots of little mochi balls, I could make one large mochi cake that I could cut into pieces.  I put half the mochi dough in a round cake pan, spread a layer of bean paste over it, and then spread the rest of the mochi dough on top.  I ended up with this,

which is a far cry from this:

I hoped it would be one of those things that looks gross, but tastes delicious.  No such luck.  The bean paste tasted fine, but the mochi never developed a chewy texture, and remained way too soft and sticky.  I'm not sure where this experiment failed, but failed it did.  I had to admit defeat and throw it away.

On top of the disappointment of a failed dessert, I had a truly impressive mess to clean up.  It seemed like everything that was uncontaminated with sticky residue had a fine coating of corn starch on it.  Aargh!

There is at least a partially happy ending, however.  Since I had leftover glutinous rice flour that I felt motivated to use, I looked for other mochi recipes.  I found one in which the mochi was baked in the oven for a longish time at a low temperature.  As a bonus, the recipe incorporated coconut milk, which I like.  I was too afraid of another messy failure to try to create mochi balls with my leftover bean paste, but the plain mochi from the second recipe I tried was delicious, with a delightful chewy texture.  Even though I didn't make exactly what I set out to make--and my first mochi attempt bore no resemblance to anything I wanted to eat--I ultimately learned how to make something new that I would probably make again.  I think I'll count it as a win.

Catoctin Mountain And Bring On The Fall

Last weekend, we went hiking at Catoctin Mountain with some friends.  It was in part a celebration of weather cool enough to allow us to even think of hiking.  This summer, with its record string of above 90 degree days, has hung on a little too long, if you ask me.

It was a great day!  The good weather really did hold up, we had a good time hanging out with our friends, the views were beautiful, and we all felt well-exercised in the end.  Unbeknownst to us, the park had started a new program in which each hiker was issued a gnat to fly back and forth in front of his or her eyes during challenging portions of the hike.  Fortunately, that was the only fly in the ointment (ha, ha).

In addition to the pleasant weather, we had some evidence of fall's impending arrival in the few red leaves on the trees.  Bring it on, I say!

We had some sections of rock scrambling.  I made extensive use of hopping off rocks from a sitting position and crab walking.  Since I didn't fall down the entire hike, I consider my strategies a success.

A crevasse to fall in!

After hiking, we ate dinner in Frederick's old town.  I had seen signs for Frederick's old town from the highway before, but had never been.  It was a fun place to walk around with a good variety of restaurants (we decided upon Cuban).  Even after living in Maryland for almost six years previously, we are still finding new places to go.

Having Allstate Insurance Is Like Writing A Best-Selling Novel Or Winning A Nobel Prize

Ever since we moved to the DC area in February, we have gotten by without a personal vehicle.  We are lucky to live near a Metro station, and I am also lucky to work near a Metro station.  We live within walking distance of three supermarkets.  We have used Zipcar when it has made sense to do so, but for the most part, we have walked or taken Metro to get around.  As someone who has never been comfortable driving, I have found living a mostly car-free existence to be tremendously satisfying.  I felt like I was sticking it to the man when I reflected on how much additional exercise I was getting walking everywhere and how much money I wasn't spending on parking, insurance, and gas.

However, thanks to Scott getting a new job (yay!) in a location not Metro-accessible (shouldn't everything be clustered around Metro stations??), we are now getting a car.  We picked one out on Saturday and plan to bring it home on Thursday.

A vehicle necessitates auto insurance, of course.  We thought it would be a fairly straightforward process.  We last had auto insurance through Allstate before we moved to Kazakhstan, and we currently have renter's insurance through them, so we figured we would just go back to them.

It was not to be.

Scott first tried getting a quote just by filling out one of their forms online.  The system was unable to give him a quote, so he emailed the local agent.  The local agent said he couldn't give us a quote either, and that Allstate couldn't insure us until we had a year of insurance coverage elsewhere.  The reason?  Because we had a gap in auto insurance coverage.  Why would we be so irresponsible as to have a gap in our auto insurance coverage, you may ask?  Because we sold our car before we moved to Kazakhstan.  Even if we had wanted to throw our money away on coverage we couldn't possibly use, we actually had nothing to insure, since we no longer had a car.

Clearly, having Allstate insurance had become an oddly exclusive club, so Scott consulted Consumer Reports and decided to call Amica, which was highly rated.  Amica at least was willing to provide us a quote....to the tune of $4,000 a year.  Um, no. I will say that trying to gouge us at least seems like a plausible business strategy, as opposed to Allstate's deciding not to cover us at any price.  The reason was the same, however:  our gap in coverage due to our period of time not owning a car.

In the end, we went with Esurance.  We're still paying more than we ever have for auto insurance, but at least it's less than $4,000.  I guess this is another one of those hidden costs of working abroad, or at least returning to the US after working abroad.  Come to think of it, this could also be a hidden cost to anyone who sells their car and uses mass transit in order to save money, and then decides to have a car again at some point.  I will be very happy if the US can ever move past the narrative of continuous car ownership being an integral part of adult life, but we are obviously not there yet.