This and That (again)

So I've really been pretty busy, but not with things that make very interesting posting. So, you know, feel free to skip over this.

I've been doing quite a bit of cooking of late in an attempt to eat both healthier and cheaper food. I need to save some money. In the last couple weeks I've made:

• Carrot and Potato Stew with Quinoa: Tasty but too spicy. I think next time I'll cut the spices in half. The quinoa was excellent though.
  
• Potato Bread: Yummy! Very fluffy and light.
  
• Cranberry Sorbet: Didn't quite freeze right and kind of tastes like canned cranberry sauce in sorbet form.
• Mashed Potatoes: Kind of tough to mess up.
• Finnish Rye Bread: Has a nice taste to it but a little denser then I'd like.
  

Shooting all that money-saving in the foot this week was the escapades in cat ownership. Wendy and I found out that clay kitty litter is strip mined and have been experimenting for the last month and a half with more environmentally-friendly options. We started out with a corn-based litter which was highly disgusting. Then we tried Yesterday's News which was too difficult to clean. I think think we've settled on a yellow pine litter that smells a bit gerbil-y but controls the cat odors well. In between the newspaper and the pine though, I bought this crazy expensive litter (I misread the price) that promised to turn pink if your cat had a urinary tract infection, among other things. So of course it turns pink and we drag both miserable cats to the vet for urine samples. While we were there the vet weighed them and noted that Pyramus had lost a pound. Since he hasn't seemed to be feeling great we got him the full check-up and blood test workup our vet does on FELV+ cats. $550-odd later they're both totally fine and Pyramus has seemed much perkier the last couple days. So much for saving money this month.

I watched The Rocket over the weekend. I thought it was well filmed and well acted--although Roy Dupuis is way too old to play a 21-year-old rookie--but not nearly as captivating as it could have been. I felt like the filmmakers were more worried about stuffing as much as possible about his career than about creating a really solid dramatic structure or a full picture of his life. It's creates a bit of an unbalanced feeling film to me. As a side note, I watched the movie using the subtitles but I did see a bit of the dubbed version and oh my lord is it horrible.

I think that's about all I have to say. This has not been my best post ever here.