So I bought deli sliced ham instead because prosciutto is ham. Probably. I see that the recipe calls for sage leaves. I'm 99% certain I don't have whole sage leaves but I'm certain I have sage of some sort or other. Coz sage is a pretty typical spice to have, right? And if you're doing lots of fancy cooking, you're going to have lots of spices, right?


No, no sage at all. I have three bottles of cumin and two bottles of allspice, two different types of ginger, minced and powdered versions of both garlic and onion. But no sage.

Of course.

Assembling the food, I'm supposed to wrap two slices of prosciutto/ham around each 4-oz chicken cutlet. I'm supposed to have four cutlets but instead have two approximately 8-oz boneless chicken breasts. I find that wrapping the ham around the breasts is not working so well because the ham slices are too small to wrap around each breast.

So I attempt to pull off the ham I've wrapped around each chicken breast so I can cut the breasts in half, intending to re-wrap them with the ham.

Only, the ham is deli sliced.

Which means they're really thin.

Which means that as I pull the ham off the chicken, the ham falls apart.


This is really not going well, I think. I look over at my 4-legged tub of lard, affectionately known as Logan, lying on the floor by the end of the counter. He's just waiting for a scrap of something to fall to the floor so he can snarf it up. So I decide to oblige him by flinging a shredded piece of deli ham at him.

He's normally very good at catching food in the air. For a walking ottoman, he's got lightning quick reflexes when it comes to food.

But the ham sticks to my fingers as I fling it at him and it lands on the top of his head. He lifts his head but hasn't realized he has ham on his noggin. I stare at him, wondering when he's going to notice the ham on his head.


I reach out to pull it off his head and in one swift movement, he's off the ground, leaping up to snap at my fingers like he's a dolphin going for fish in a show at Sea World.

The ham topples off his head and lands on his back.

He remains painfully unaware that he has ham on his back. I'm not sure if that's because he's so fat, he can't feel it, or if it's because he has fur like velcro and he's used to having all kinds of stuff stuck to his fur.

(It's not unusual for him to have small branches or multiple leaves stuck to various parts of his body. In the fall, I find branches all over the house and I'm never quite sure if they're there due to him carrying them in his mouth or if they hitched a ride on his back and only fall off when they get tired.)

While I'm debating how to get the ham off his back without him biting my hand off, our other dog, Sunny, comes running into the kitchen. Ah ha! Sunny will see that ham on his back and eat it and then I won't have to worry about losing a finger or two.

And she sits there next to him, looking all freaking adorable, completely oblivious to the ham on Logan's back.


Sighing, I toss a couple more shredded pieces of ham at the two nincompoops and turn my back on them to finish dinner. I glance out of the corner of my eye a few minutes later and see that Sunny has finally discovered the ham on Logan's back and is eating it.

In the end, the dinner turned out well, despite the lack of sage and prosciutto. And Logan remained ham-free for the rest of the night.

No, really. They do, no matter what they say.

But it's okay because he's still young enough that he will cuddle with his mom on the couch.

I dread the day Frank starts having the social life that Dweezil is starting to have. I never expected that there would come a time, at least before adulthood, that I would go a month or longer without seeing them. And while it seems like they've been little forever, I never expected them to grow up so fast.

So now, I'm asking them, stop growing up. Stay young, stay small. I'm not ready for you to grow up just yet. I need more time with you before you go off into the world and do your own thing.

I'm not ready yet.

When you can find the nice scenery.

(I think scrub oak happens when the land has gotten too lazy to make anything nice but feels like it has to look like it's trying.)

We found stuff to look over, all right, but wasn't quite what either of us had in mind.

And I was all disgusted and stuff.

But as Brad and I were looking at the garbage, I was reminded of a blog post by one of my favorite bloggers, Jamie the Very Worst Missionary, where she mentions Glass Beach in California.

Last year, there was a single hollyhock bush growing that I was sure was a weed at first, particularly with the way it grew. I pulled it out because it didn't fit with anything else I was planting.