17 party recipes for days when you need to feed a crowd on a budget
Feeding a crowd can get expensive fast, especially when you are trying to make sure there is enough food for everyone. The good news is you can keep costs down without serving skimpy portions or relying on snacks that disappear in five m…
#dining #cooking #diet #food #RecipeTopics #CreamCheese #MarshmallowFluff #Recipes
https://www.diningandcooking.com/2481067/17-party-recipes-for-days-when-you-need-to-feed-a-crowd-on-a-budget/
October ’25 personal update roundup
Vacationed with family for my birthday! In San Francisco, where I checked out the Cartoon Art Museum, rode the streetcars, saw some sea lions, bought imported snacks in Chinatown, had dinner in the Castro, and walked up too many hills.
Not sure I got a single Art Thing done all week. Just a lot of Tourist Things, and a lot of extra sleep in between walking around all the Tourist Things.
The Leif & Thorn 10th Anniversary update went live somewhere in the middle of that. Along with an announcement that I’m officially dropping from a 7-days-a-week schedule to a MWF schedule. I hadn’t come to terms with “yeah, this is a commitment I need to change” when I originally queued that update, so I had to edit it in later…which I ended up doing from my phone in the middle of the Bhangra & Beats Night Market.
All of this is the longest I’ve ever been away from the cats. A local friend checked in on them a couple times. (Got investigated by Fiddlesticks. Never saw the Fluff.)
I always wonder how they perceive changes in their routine like this. Fiddles was certainly ready to get back on her “wait next to my bed in the morning until she gets her wet food” schedule. Thought Fluff might be suspicious, but he emerged from hiding within 15 minutes of me getting home, and has been his normal cuddly self ever since.
(“excuse me sir, I was trying to write”)
Got a couple of Art Things done yesterday. Will I do more over the weekend? Or will I distract myself with doomscrolling and cat-spoiling? TBD.
One bright note for the future: I spent the back half of October low-key stressing about a flood of spam traffic on my comic sites. Even after I figured out how to cut it off (longer post about this later, probably), it had already blown through so much of my hosting-plan resource quota, my legitimate traffic for the rest of the month would’ve easily filled the rest.
Since I had a lengthy conversation with SiteGround tech support to get the problem fixed, I was hoping some admin put a note on my account that says “disregard the limit this month, it was messed up by a wave of spambots which the customer has dealt with.” But nobody outright told me if that could/would happen. I was just quietly crossing my fingers.
Well, October is over! The sites never went down. The quotas have reset. And my account stats show actual-human-reader traffic holding steady at a rate that isn’t going to break them in November.
Sigh of relief. Knock wood that this keeps up.
catposting for August (Fluff and the kicker toy, Fiddles and the baby food)
Fluff having a snooze:
Fluff having a sit:
Got him a new kicker toy a few months ago, it’s a hit:
Fiddlesticks busy shedding on a pile of just-washed-and-folded laundry:
Fiddlesticks plopping down in a corner of the vet’s office like she owns the place:
I asked last year for wet food recs that don’t generate such a mountain of trash. (Fiddlesticks expects some every morning, but she only finishes the gravy/puree stuff, which only seems to come in plastic sachets.) (Fluff isn’t interested at all. At first I gave him some wet food daily, but I’m guessing he didn’t like it much and only ate it out of food-insecurity, because at some point he just flat-out stopped.)
“Chicken puree baby food that comes in glass jars” came up. And it’s been a hit! For the sake of variety, I still give Fiddlesticks the cat puree about half the time, and baby food the other half.
…Then, at this vet visit, they said “She’s lost more weight than we’re happy with, possibly because she has this bad tooth, which likely makes it hurt to eat dry food. Also, please give her this course of antibiotics, which can be put in her food, as long as she takes it twice a day.”
So I started giving her twice as much wet food. Same serving size, but morning and evening. At this point, the antibiotics are long finished and she’s had the tooth out, but I assume it’s still good to keep her weight up. Plus, it would feel pretty rude to stop.
Soooo in spite of everyone’s best efforts, we’re back up to generating the same amount of plastic trash I started with!
Could be worse, could’ve been twice as much trash. But still. The irony.
Marshmallow Fluff’s vet visit back in May found that his teeth were in pretty bad shape, so he got scheduled for a follow-up dental visit. For some reason, even though the actual dentistry was scheduled for the afternoon, I was supposed to drop him off between 7 and 8 AM. This blatant bias in favor of morning people, I swear…
What I ended up doing was, went to bed around 2 AM as usual, set my phone alarm to go off in an hour. Woke up with the alarm, checked my current Stupid Phone Game (this was a perfect time interval for it, all my trains would be back in the station and ready to send out on new jobs), started the timer again, went back to sleep. Rinse and repeat.
The fluff was hanging out on the bed with me this whole time, until (of course) between 6:30 and 7 he decided he had important cat business elsewhere. Fortunately, a little before 7:30 I lured him back up, dumped him in his carrier, and we did make it to the vet by 8.
(He was so grumpy. So betrayed. It’s a hard life.)
Turns out he needed a tooth extracted, and had an infection in the gums underneath that got cleaned out, and came home with some pain medication that I’m supposed to squirt into his mouth every 8 hours for the next week. (I’ve managed it once. If he tolerates it every 12 hours, I’ll call that a success.)
On the plus side, they were concerned he’d have a hard time chewing at first, so I put out some wet food for him…but within an hour of getting home he was sneaking off to steal Fiddlesticks’s (dry) food. I restored his normal menu, and he’s been chowing down like nothing changed at all.
Got that poodle foot where they shaved his leg to put the anesthesia in:
Kinda regretting that I didn’t ask them to give his whole body a therapeutic shave. It would make him more comfortable in however many more heat waves we get this summer, and I would get to do less vacuuming for a while. But eh, too late now, he’s home again, and I’m not dragging him back to the Evil Place for another year!
https://erinptah.wordpress.com/2024/07/04/somebody-was-cruelly-forced-to-the-vet-yesterday/
Hardcore booping action spotted in the wild
(feat. my halfhearted efforts to brighten up the Void Tortie so she’s visible next to the Fluff)
Exhausted from a long day of boop
https://erinptah.wordpress.com/2024/04/02/we-found-him-the-booper/
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