Have I mentioned lately just how much I worship Joss Whedon and his family? Unfortunately, being in the UK, we cannot legally obtain Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, but as soon as I am able to get it from iTunes UK, I won’t hesitate to pay for it. (The people who make and sell stuff like that do get SOMETHING in the way of cash if I buy it from iTunes, right?) Don’t get me wrong, Doogie and Captain Tightpants were great! I just have great admiration for the brains behind it. (The brains also consisting of two of his brothers and one of the brothers’ fiancée.) It’s not JUST that the end product was wonderful, but also the idea behind it is really cool. Yeah, I know it has been out for a while – I have just been ultra slow in blogging about it.

So, tomorrow we are taking Ed back in for surgery tomorrow. They wanted to wait until the infection was under control, but the holes in his backside just keep getting bigger and bigger, even as they heal. Poor fellow. Oh, well – he will feel better after it’s done.

Anyway – That’s all for now.

The London Lite has a section where people text in their messages and they may or may not get printed. Anyway, for some reason, I couldn't stop laughing over commentary about pidgins getting on the tube. One earlier in the week said "Got on the tube. Pigeon on seat. No one blinked an eye." For a while, there were texts from a bunch of folks about this pigeon that would get on the tube every day at around the same time, then get off at the next stop. People never think twice about these vermin. I wonder how they would react to the very large rat I saw the other day? It seems to be normal to see rodents at rail stations, and this one was as big as Ed! (Ok – That's an exaggeration… But, it WAS as big as squirrel, though the tail was longer, proportionately than a squirrel's tail. It was longer than the rat itself, and massively thick. If I ignore the face, it made me think more of a possum with black fur than a rat. Could you imagine getting on the tube and finding one of those sitting on the seats?

So, for my fellow Americans: There are 3 big free papers in London, and while I am including the links for the online version, they don't match the printed version. They are the Metro in the morning, and the London Paper and London Lite in the evening. (There is also one called City AM, but as it is financial and business news, no one seems to read it.) The Metro is the least reliable. About once a week they print something that is such utter bullshit, you will not find it anywhere else, even their website. For example, one of my more naïve and less intelligent co-workers saw a story about Americans buying Vietnamese babies. (Huh?) So I asked him to explain – he of course couldn't, so he starts looking for the story. Eventually, he goes, "But I read it in the Metro last week! They printed it, so there had to be something to it!!" I have concerns that this person may be an accurate representative of his country. If so… This is a sad, sad country. (Ray says I am being an intellectual elitist, though.)

There's a lot of things that I don't quite understand about what is socially acceptable here. If someone is squatting or trespassing, why can you not just haul them off to jail? Well, apparently, "squatting is not illegal"?!?!?!?! I mean, if I just walk into a house that is for rent, and say "Hey, I am living here and not paying you rent", I would expect someone to come arrest me. I am trespassing. Is it any different from getting into a random car that is left unlocked in a parking lot and taking a nap in the backseat? What right do these people have?

Ok – That was my rant for the day. I am just plain confused now.

So the good news is that Ed is doing better now. He has two good sized open incisions on his butt now, with all the pus and stuff oozing out. (They were abscesses – you can't stitch up abscesses after lancing them or they will just become re-infected.) We've got him isolated in his own room with no dogs and he seems ok. We are taking him to our own vet today at 1530 to have them check over him and see if they want to give him a different antibiotic or if they want to do anything else with him.

Also – tomorrow is Ray's birthday. So, I tried to make him a birthday cake. I am again glad I never took Ray's last name when we got married because I really wouldn't want people to mistake the name as a statement of ability… This is the gorgeous cake I tried to make:

And this is what I managed to do:

It actually collapsed while I was trying to take pictures of it, I managed to catch some of it on a plate.

You might have noticed that there is a slight difference in how mine looks vs the one from Smitten Kitchen. This is, I think, because I didn't have parchment paper, and Ray insisted that the cake wouldn't stick to brand new Teflon coated pans… (His rebuttal for my statement that its all his fault was that he's a Cook not a Baker.) The result was that a chunk got ripped out of the middle layer. It would not, under any circumstances go back together in a happy fashion. Also - the Smitten Kitchen lady says to stick the cakes in the freezer for 30 minutes. DO THIS! It would have helped immensely, as well as ignoring Ray's insistence that the cakes were cool enough to frost when they obviously weren't. The top layer is perfect because it stayed in the freezer long enough to actually freeze while I was trying to fix the other two layers. But, regardless of the mess that is "the cake" – it tastes AMAZING!!! It is just… omigod. The cake recipe itself, without the frosting, is just godlike, moist and wonderful. Then, the peanut butter frosting is really good. The peanut butter chocolate drizzle stuff… Well – I think I would put more peanut butter into it. It really just tasted of the chocolate instead of a chocolate-peanut butter mixture. But – overall, it still tastes damned good. I am really happy with it. And in the future, I know what I could do to make it look better.

- Use parchment paper.

- Leave the cakes in the freezer for a FULL hour, at least in my pitiful UK freezer.

- So that the cakes are a bit thinner, I should use 8in pans instead of these 7.7 in Woolworth pans.

Other lessons learned:

- They don't have half and half readily available in the UK, so I used Elmlea Single Cream since its supposed to be lighter than regular single cream and you can supposedly use it in coffee. I think it may have been better if I'd mixed it with some milk so that it was closer to half and half, but it wasn't bad.

- PLAIN or BAKING or COOKING chocolate in the UK isn't what we Americans would think. In the UK, it's semisweet or bittersweet chocolate. In the US, it's, well, unsweetened, nothing but chocolate. So, if you need semisweet chocolate chips or chunks or whatever, you have to get plain chocolate. If you want unsweetened chocolate, you get drinking chocolate. I don't understand it, but that's how it is…

- As far as Dutch Processed cocoa… I understand that it is cocoa that has been treated with an alkali to reduce it's acidity, but there is nothing in UK stores that claims to be Dutch Processed. So I used Cadbury's Bournville Cocoa because that is what I could find. It works quite well, though I suspect that it may not be dutch processed because the cake is really fluffy.

- You expect since the English have moved away from imperial measurements, that it would be more difficult to find 8 in pans (which would be 20.3 cm). But why 19.8 cm? Who the hell needs pans to be 19.8? It made the layers a bit thicker than I wanted. (I think I am going to pickup silicon pans when I am back home in Oct.)

- The Smitten Kitchen lady mentioned using a commercial peanut butter so that you don't get the oil separation. Except that all the peanut butter here tastes terrible. The ones with no sugar added have palm oil added. And I can't explain why, but it's just not as good as Jif or even Skippy. So, we've found a NYC brand of peanut butter that is pretty good and I used this. I think the rougher texture of this peanut butter is better in this recipe than the Skippy smooth. (We can get Skippy here, but not Jif and not Smucker's Natural.) By the time it's mixed in, there isn't really any concern with it separating back out or anything. It works pretty well, even though it's a pain to mix up initially.

- I couldn't find corn syrup, so I used Golden Syrup. It really wasn't bad at all, but have JUST NOW found a better solution. I will try the melted sugar next time and see how that goes.

Wow! This has been a long post. Oh, well. I hope someone else tries this cake and has better luck making it pretty. It is really really tasty.

So, I am waiting to hear from the vet... Poor Ed. We have no idea what happened, but somehow, he ended up with an abscess on his rump. At first, I thought he jumped out another window. He was outside Saturday, and I didn’t know that Ray had let him out. (Ray still can’t remember if he actually let him out or not.) He seemed to be walking funny, so, I thought he’d jumped, but he seemed to be intact other than his tail being a little sore. Nothing was broken – we didn’t worry about it. Then I realized Sunday that he was walking funnier than the day before – his butt stuck way out. Well, maybe his anal glands need to be expressed or something – it’s not that uncommon of a thing for Ed. I told Ray, and by the time Ray took a look at him 20-30 minutes later, Ed seemed to be in even more pain. So, I found a vet on a Sunday (today is a Bank Holiday and we didn’t think he could wait until Tuesday because he was in so much pain) in Caterham and took him in. They were a bit hesitant as it isn’t something that folks would usually want emergency service for, but Ed was in far too much pain for us not to take the poor fellow in. Well, we brought him in and it turns out, as I’d said, that it’s an abscess. The vet said that it’s commonly from another cat attacking, being the aggressor, and the cat being attacked (Ed in this case) turning tail and running – the aggressor would have clawed at Ed’s tail. Well – Ed is only allowed in the back yard, which is fenced off and he cannot escape. However, we know that the Persian behind us (Justin) can jump up onto the brick wall... Maybe he got into our yard and fought with Ed and ran off? Or, if Justin can get in there, then any of the other dozen cats that roam the streets could have as well, I would guess... That is the only explanation we can think of... Ed isn’t allowed to roam, so...? Poor guy. I hope everything is ok. But, it still doesn’t mean I like him. Really. I hate cats. They are all vile and evil. Eeeeevilllllllle. I only give him special tuna treats or ham and pet him and stuff so he doesn’t try to kill me in my sleep. I don’t actually like him at all. (And does anyone actually believe that?)

So, other stuff… I think Ray is exceedingly excited about going back home for a week in October! He keeps talking about going to the Mexican restaurant. :-) We figure with Mike, Norma and the kids, there won’t really be room for us, so, right now we are trying to figure out what hotel to stay in. I want to stay at one off I-95 because it offers a “southern style breakfast buffet”. Yum! Dunno yet, though. The bad thing is, though, because of Ed’s vet costs, there goes a lot of the money we’d put aside for this. Oh, well. It’s not as if our financial situation is THAT dire. And Mom and Dad are going to let us borrow a car, too, so we don’t have to rent one, which will be good.

Anyway, rather than more complaints or contemplation… Just going to grab some lunch and do nothing for a while.

It's been a VERY long time since I posted anything…. Sorry. I've been sick and busy, and I've been gone, etc… I will post pictures of Paris one day. When I get to it. Really! I promise!!

So, I am finally getting to it because I am watching a show called "BNP Wives". For Americans who aren't familiar the British National Party – imagine the KKK with actual real political power and people with these beliefs actually holding office. As in – these are Aryans. These are Blood and Honour (yes, with an extra "u" because it is the British arm of the same racist group). These are people that think the holocaust was a lie. Ummm… WTF? I mean, sure, it's sensationalist media, and sure they are probably taking the very worst sound bytes, but that doesn't change the fact that the women they are following ARE racists. I guess I just have this image in my head of the majority of the outspoken racists in the US as being on the lower rung of society. I mean - if you can't work well with others, and ignore all those things like race and sex and religion and sexual orientation and blah blah blah, then you will never be able to succeed because prejudices will keep you from recognizing potential. It's an obvious statement. But here, these people are winning elections and stuff.

I guess this really grates on me, too, because the other day, Ray walked down to the station to meet me, as he always does, and he brought Dingo with him. By his account: A fat lady with her fat kid and an old guy were standing on the platform waiting for the train. Dingo sniffed the kid, the lady yelled at Ray to keep Dingo on a shorter leash. He started to be apologetic, then she kept on. So he was Ray-like to her, ending with telling her off. The old guy had to point out that he was American and that started yet another argument. "Why don’t you go back and stop taking our jobs?" Well – to be fair – Ray does NOT have a UK job. He pays UK taxes, but doesn't actually take a job from the UK. He still has his US job, gets paid in US dollars, etc. He contributes more to the economy than the fat housewife and more than what the pensioner currently contributes. (Whether that was an assumption on his part that she was a house wife, or whether she said something, I can't tell you.) Then, of course, he goes into the "If there were enough qualified and motivated people in this almost third world country, it wouldn't be an issue, but here I am stuck in this place…" (If you've talked to Ray in the last couple of years, you've heard this rant enough times that you probably know it quite well.) Anyway – the point of the Ray-rant story is that while some of these folks will yell about immigrants to the UK and how they are losing jobs because of the European Union, they don't have the qualified workers in this country to sustain their economy. They don't seem to be aware of this, though. I could go on here about the current state of their economy - their overwhelming dependency on the world (read US) economy, but....

Oh, well. Once again, I say – not my country!

Oh – Good news – Ray and I will get to come back to the US in October to see my folks, because my brother is coming up from Huntsville… Airfare was $1060!! (If I'd gone with the UK sites, it would have been £670 for the two of us…)

That's it for now. I am going to bed, though I am still not quite over the shock of seeing the Blood and Honour tattoo on that guy.