Majzy pictures!

After posting the History of Majzy, I figure I should post some pictures.  I mean, that's what everybody wants to see, right? These are all from the day we brought her home.

We set Majzy up a little spot for her food right below our food in the pantry.

Here you see Majzy in one of her favorite sleeping positions: all joints locked directly out.

And in the exact same pose, except she is sleeping under a chair. It looks way less comfortable. But, she had had a long day.

I'll post some more pictures soon.  They're super cute.

Majzy

For those who don't know, Kate and I recently got a dog.  Here's the executive summary: she is pretty darn cute and we are very excited.

The more detailed version follows.

Kate gets really bad panic attacks (I've asked permission to share that with you, dear reader, so don't feel awkward about knowing something you shouldn't).  We've done a lot of reading, and we have found that dogs can be trained to help cope with panic attacks.  But to make this a useful thing, we would need to be able to take the dog anywhere (because the panic attacks aren't kind enough to only strike at home).  So, we did lots of research into service animals. 

We decided after all that research that we should get a dog that we could train to be of service to Kate.  On the blog, I don't plan on dwelling overly much on the fact that she will be a service dog, but I figured it would come up at some point, and I wanted to mention it from the start. 

In looking for a dog, we looked at lots of different makes and models.  We looked at grown dogs and puppies.  We looked at rescue dogs, rescue-rescue dogs (a term I just made up for dogs from places like Last Day Dog Rescue,which saves dogs from shelters on the last day before the shelters put them down, giving them another chance to get adopted), and dogs from breeders.  Janine even tried to get us to adopt a Potcake, which I would have really enjoyed (partially because the adoption process involved spending a week in the Bahamas...)  In the end we went through a breeder instead of rescuing a dog, which I feel kind of bad about.  I would really have liked to save a dog from a bad situation, but that just wouldn't fit our needs. 

We started looking at different breeds.  We made a spreadsheet of about 200 breeds (all those recognized by the Ann Arbor Kennel Club).  It seemed like as good a place to start as any.  One by one we started removing them.  Some were really easy- we got rid of about half just based on size.  We ended up with half a dozen or so breeds that were worth looking at.  So, we called breeders and did in depth research on those breeds.

We found a breeder about an hour and a half away from Ann Arbor who breeds Labradors and Flat Coated Retrievers.  She just had a fresh litter of Flat Coats, and one of them seemed perfect to us.  When we went out to meet Kim and the pups, we found that she had put little colored collars on each of them as soon as they were born so that she could tell them apart.  We wanted the girl with the Yellow collar, which we just called "Yellow," for lack of a better name.  We brought her home the next week.

As for the name, Kate wanted to keep the Yellow theme, so we thought of different things that are yellow.  Banana is a terrible name.  So is Sun, or Daisy, or Corn.  Really anything sounds either like a person's name (like Daisy) or like a hippy's name (like Corn).  So we went another step.  We started looking at other languages just for fun.  We put all those words into Google Translate and listened to them in other languages.  Kate really likes scandy-land, so she fell on the idea of "Majs", Swedish for Corn.  It's pronounced with a soft "J", like Maize.  And since I am at the University of Michigan, with Maize and Blue as our colors, it seemed like a good fit.  So we landed on Majzy (MAY-zee, rhymes with Daisy). 

Majzy is a great pup, and she is being a lot of fun so far. 

I was planning on having this post be mostly pictures with just a little explanatory text, but I think I will do that in a separate post.  For anyone who just wants to see a cute puppy without going through all the boring explaining.

Happy New Year from Teddy!

Celebrating New Years the only way I know how.  By watching internet videos of cute animals

Christmas dinner: The Eatening

I just posted about making Christmas dinner, but I thought that the Christmas dinner itself deserved a separate post.  Kate and I got out our wedding china for the first time (is that right, Kate?) and set everything up to look really pretty.

(Kate went kind of nuts with the "background defocus" feature on our new camera)

And we set all our food out to enjoy.

 For those of you not familiar with the Haglund Swedish feast (or at least, our modified version without pickled herring), you see from left to right, crackers, mashed potatoes, limpa (heavy rye bread), roast and sausage, and fancy cheeses (also bought on sale at Kroger.  We can't afford to be too fancy).  You might also notice some mis-matched china.  I meant to blog about that a long time ago, and maybe still will one of these days, but that was bought at an estate sale here in Ann Arbor and we just wanted to get it out and use it too.  It's kind of a peachy-pink color, and Kate really fell in love with it. 

Anyway, Merry Christmas to all!

Christmas dinner!

I'm only posting this 5 days late.  That's pretty good for me.

So, the date is December 24th.  It's Kate's last day at Barnes and Noble.  I'm home all alone, so I decided to make Christmas Dinner.  And in the finest of family traditions, I made a Swedish feast.  The recipe was documented by Sara in her recipe book.  It has come in quite handy over the years.

To start, I chopped up an onion (sliced half and diced half) and sauteed it in a little bit of oil in our dutch oven (Thanks John and Dan!)

Then, I browned a beef roast.  I found this particular roast on sale at Kroger.  Thank goodness for sales.  It's about a pound and a half, which is a lot for two people, but it is just right for two people who want leftovers for several days.  You just want to sear the sides, not actually cook the roast just yet.  A couple minutes on each side is perfect.

Then I put the lid on and let it cook over low heat for a few hours.  I deviated from the recipe a bit by adding a healthy (huge) spoonful of minced garlic.  Because I love garlic more than I love recipes, which is saying a lot.

After cooking for a few hours, I added another onion.  Not just any onion, mind you, but an onion with 4 cloves stuck into it.

I'm not sure why we stick the cloves into the onion like this.  All I know is that it seems to please the Swedish dinner gods, so I do it.

Next I added a single bay leaf.

Yum.  Partially cooked roast and raw onion and bay leaf.  After this, I put the lid back on and put it in the oven (I could have left it on the stove, but the oven was already warm from baking Limpa bread, and I needed the stovetop space)

While the roast cooked in the oven, I cooked up some sausages. 

And, of course, threw them in with the roast about an hour before I took the roast out.  And that's how you make a delicious Swedish dinner roast.

Merry Christmas!

Hail the heav'n born Prince of Peace! 
Hail the Son of Righteousness!
Light and life to all he brings,
Ris'n with healing in his wings.

Mild he lays his glory by,
born that man no more may die;
Born to raise the sons of earth,
born to give them second birth.

Hark!  The herald angels sing Glory to the new-born king!

The problem with special effects

A few years ago, a young director named George made some awesome movies with revolutionary special effects.  But the movies were awesome because of the characters and story, not the special effects themselves.  A few years after that, George decided to try it again.  He made more movies, but these leaned more on the special effects and less on the characters and story. 

What's wrong with that?  Special effects are cool, and they can make a movie cool.  True, but the problem with special effects is that they are getting easier and easier to make.  So, anybody can make a movie with great special effects.  Even people who don't make movies for a living.  If you want to be better than them, you have to give us more than shiny computer effects.

In other words, once amateurs can do stuff like this, the pros really need to step up their game.