Wednesday Hodgepodge: Jumping cats and homemade noodles

1. What pets did you have while growing up? Tell us a little something about them.

The usual mix of dogs, cats, gerbils, goldfish, guinea pigs...not all at once.

We had bad luck with cats. The first one disappeared (that was in the days when it was more common to let cats wander at night). The next one had been abused and never got over his earlier rough treatment. The third was a Siamese given to my sister, who, we then discovered, was allergic to animals. We kept her anyway (I meant the cat, not my sister) and she lived with my parents for years. The cat was allowed in the living room, but our large dog wasn't; we had trained her not to go in there. The dog, maybe to make up for her imprisonment in the kitchen, liked to nap in the living room doorway. The cat would take a running leap over the dog, land in the living room, and stand there snickering.

2. What is one thing you absolutely must accomplish today?

Anything requiring warm weather. Our hot spell is supposed to disappear by the end of today.

We have to go to the Euro-grocery to replenish our meat and perogy supply. The freezer in the apartment, besides being smaller than we're used to, doesn't keep things well for very long; they get freezer-burned much faster than they did even in the freezer compartment of our old fridge. So we don't buy too much at a time.

3. Where were you ten years ago? What were you doing there?

The end of September 2007: our oldest daughter had moved on to classes at high school, except for Canadian history, but I was still busy homeschooling a ten-year-old and a six-year-old. From the blog that month:

Crayons has been reading books to herself at an awesome speed; I'm glad we can go a little slower with her school time books. We're enjoying the Just So Stories and the rest of Year One; we've also been going through the Little House books at bedtime.
We've done less on crafts than I wanted to this month, but that's partly because the weather's been so good; in all the school days that Crayons circled the weather symbols in her planner, there was only about one day she didn't circle the sun. But there's no big hurry...Christmas is only THREE MONTHS AWAY...
We're taking a bit longer than I expected to work through two books that we're all reading together: Organized KIDZ and Ben Franklin. We're also reading Five Little Peppers together. So it's just as well that I decided to hold off on starting Astronomy and French until later this fall--we're busy enough for now.
And if you want to know how The Apprentice is doing...she's solving equations for x and y using elimination and substitution; exploring problems of ecosystems; watching videos about the early 20th century (with me); teaching the younger Squirrelings how to play chess (okay, she's just learning herself); and her second-year hairstyling class finally gets to Use Scissors. Kind of like student nurses passing their probation in all those old nurse novels...I think she's also reading Emma.

4. September 26th is National Dumpling Day. Did you celebrate? Apple dumpling, xiao long bao (steamed Chinese dumpling), chicken and dumplings, pirogi, matzoh balls, or gnocchi...which dumpling on this list would be your dumpling of choice? Have you ever made homemade dumplings of any kind?

No, we did not have dumplings yesterday, but I will probably buy frozen perogies today.

My grandmother was of Pennsylvania-Dutch heritage (well, partly; almost none of my relatives were just one thing). She learned to make these noodles from her grandmother, and then taught me. One of our extended-family traditions was making a giant kettle of "pot pie," and it didn't happen very often because making the noodles was a lot of trouble (a good reason for training the grandchildren to help). 


5. 'There are two kinds of adventurers: those who go truly hoping to find an adventure and those who go secretly hoping they don't.' William Trogdon

So which kind are you?

Depends on what the adventure turns out to be! I would say I have both some Took and some Baggins.

6. Insert your own random thought here.

This Friday morning I will be starting something sort of new, sort of old. Hint: it has to do with books, but it's not writing. Guesses?

Linked from the Wednesday Hodgepodge at From This Side of the Pond.