It's Tax Time

As tax time rears its ugly head, there are a whole lot of things to think about, probably how much money you're getting back and when. You should probably be thinking about who's doing your taxes and what their qualifications are. Thankfully I've wrote a vaguely informative article about how to select a great CPA. Check out the links here to make yourself a smarter little panda:

How to Find a Good CPA

Five Things Your Tax Accountant Won't Tell You

Good luck during this tax season in getting all the dollars you deserve to migrate back into your pocket.

Rain

What a fantastic week in San Diego, almost two inches of rain fell from Thursday to Sunday, putting the region ahead for its annual rainfall total. We're also expecting some more towards the end of the next week. Unfortunately there are some extremely unwise folks in town who aren't smart enough to temporarily turn off their automatic sprinklers, so even as the rain pours down, sprinklers still sprinkle, wasting water. These are the folks who are last in line for conservation and environmental issues.

Water is one of the extremely limited resources here in Southern California and every gallon counts, so when we're out on our morning dog walks and there's more annoying than seeing a sprinklers on as the streets remain wet from recent rains. The word on the street is that come July 1, Southern California will have mandatory water rationing, thus the opportunity to rat out those water wasting folks may soon be at hand.

In previous years of water rationing I recall unpleasantness between friends and neighbors as people confronted one another about water abuses. Many of this future unpleasantness could be avoided if people could conserve water now, but there are too many ignorant "I have my sprinklers on ever though it's raining" folks around town.

Mozarella Cheese

You can make your own cheese, and it’ll be good. Yes, right in the comfort of your own kitchen, probably with cooking equipment you already have. If you have an hour of time and an adventurous spirit, you can easily make your own mozzarella cheese. After one failed attempt I made mozzarella cheese in about an hour, though with some practice, it could probably be done in half that time. Mozzarella cheese is one of the easiest cheeses to make and since it can be used in a variety of dishes, sandwiches, pizzas, pasta, etc. it will disappear quickly.

Instead of going into the gory, step by step details of the process, Amazon has cheesemaking kits. It’s also a great resource for other free cheese recipes and cheese making supplies. The only two ingredients you’ll need that you may not be able to find in your local supermarket are rennet and citric acid, both of which you can purchase cheaply online. If you’re lucky enough to have an extensive local grocery store or cheesemaking shop in your town, you might be able to find them locally. Besides rennet and citric acid, the only other ingredient that you’ll need is whole milk. You’ll need to read the label carefully and make sure that the milk is NOT labeled “ultra pasteurized”. Ultra pasteurized milk has been heated to a high temperature that kills the bacteria and cultures needed to make cheese. Raw milk or pasteurized milk is OK.

One best facets of making mozzarella cheese is its simplicity, simplicity of ingredients and necessary equipment. All you will need is a pot large enough to hold a gallon of milk, a slotted spoon, some clean rubber gloves, and a kitchen thermometer. A candy thermometer is preferable to other types as you’ll want a large enough readout in the 80 to 110 degree range. This is the sweet spot for cheese, where you’ll want to hold the temperature of your mixture so the curds can set, so a thermometer that’s easy to read in this range is optimal.

Once you’ve tasted the cheese you can make in your own kitchen, you may be hooked. I’ve added cheese making to my weekly kitchen tasks and enjoy watching the curds set, then massaging the curds into small mozzarella mounds. Sure I still get my other, more complicated cheeses from my local grocer or farmers market, but soon enough I may experiment with another type of cheese with a higher degree of difficulty. Once you’ve made your own cheese, you’re part of an ancient tradition of turning milk into cheese, and you’re part of a select group of people who’ve made homemade cheese.

Rain and some New Trees

As we finally got some much needed rain today, it's a good opportunity to stay inside and watch the raindrops fall. After a month or more of a rainless rainy season, the drops started falling yesterday afternoon and continued through the night, a slow pleasant soaking rain, just what the garden needs. Though most of the garden is covered with a many inch layer of mulch, underneath the thick clay soil still remains, and a slow soaking rain is just what's needed to fully saturate the soil.

About a month ago I put in four new bareroot fruit trees, spaced evenly along the southwest fence. They were ordered online and delivered the first week of January.

The trees were a Royal Rainier cherry and and Lapins cherry. Rainier cherries are delicious, but always expensive and they tend to have a short season, one week they're here, the next they're gone. Plus the fact that they're grown in the Pacific Northwest means that they have a significant carbon trail if they're shipped to Southern California. I never thought that cherries, let alone Rainier cherries would grow in Southern California, but these are a low chill hour cherry that should produce here in Southern California. The Lapins cherry is known as a good pollenizer and also has a low chill hour requirement.

The other two trees were both pears, a Flordahome and Hood variety. These are both low chill hour requirement varities that should produce in Southern California.

All four of the planted trees were out in the ground about a month ago and all have taken well to their new surroundings. They have all started leafing out and the two pears have flowered as well. Pictures to follow....

No Winter in San Diego

It's been yet another odd winter here in San Diego. Typically winter is barely a season in San Diego, though noticeably colder and damper than the other nine months of the year (aka summer), it's still punctuated by warm spells, Santa Ana winds from the North and East, and general mild, warm days. This winter started out promising with an almost record rainfall in December, 3 inches, but since the rains of December, it has been bone dry. January should have been the wettest month of the year, but we received barely a trace of rainfall and since the beginning of the year we've had multiple stretches of days over 80 degrees. The cold unsettled weather pattern that ushers in storms has abandoned the area for high pressure and unseasonable warmth.

"Uh so what?" you may be thinking, "I'm freezing my (inset body part here) off". Well aside from the aesthetic implications that I like winter, being chilly, having to wear the occasional jacket. Our heat waves last year during February, March, and April, affected the yields of some of my blueberry bushes and citrus trees. Both of these were fooled by the early heat and flowered and budded only to be smacked back down with a cold frost. It looks like the same thing is gonna happen again this year.

Already my early peach and pear trees, and blueberries are leafing out and flowering. This may prove to be a non-event if the remainder of the winter is mild, but on average, we're still due for several nights of frost before our official "Spring" season arrives. Hopefully it'll turn out OK, but the risk of losing another years worth of fruit and berry crops has me fretting.....

Being warm during winter may sound like an ungrateful thought, bordering on treasonous to folks who may be cold and snowbound, but I feel that people need cold and rain as much as a garden does. It's part of the seasonal rhythm of life. It's an odd "out of body" feeling to walk outside and be greeted with 85 degrees in February. It leaves you with the seasonal equivalent of taking an afternoon weekend nap, sleeping too long and momentarily feeling disoriented as you wake up and struggle to place what time of day it is.

13th Place!!!

In the Glamor Shots post I detailed the trials and tribulations of photographing Shaak Ti in all her glory. Well all the time, effort, and nose lickings (from being down at her level) finally paid off.

She finished in 13th place in the Doctors Foster and Smith catalog monthly contest for the month of May. Here's the link to the Doctors Foster and Smith website and you can see 13th place belongs to our wonderful dog!!!!

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So maybe 13th place isn't the greatest, but heck it's a start, possibly to an international modeling career that can bring us in some big big money! Please stay tuned for further developments on our now famous dog.

Family Unit Day

As a people prone to celebrations, the Gluten Free Girlfriend and I have carved out another day to celebrate from whence before there was none. Shaak Ti joined our family a year ago on this day, and given her bouncing around the doggie foster care system (people have so many misconceptions about deaf dogs), we weren't entirely sure when her birthday occurred. Since we weren't sure of the exact date of her birthday, we knew she'd be sad if we didn't somehow have a day of celebration for her. So we created "Family Unit Day", the day we got Shaak Ti and our family unit - yours truly, Gluten Free Girlfriend, Tito the Bad Dog, and Jedi Master Shaak Ti, became a happy family.

Family Unit Day started with an early trip to dog beach on Coronado so the dogs could scamper around, chase birds, and pee on anything and everything. Being that it was still 7:00am, there wasn't much activity on the beach save the lone lifeguard truck that made an appearance and caused us to have to sprint and grab Shaak Ti, and hold her until it left. She enjoys chasing cars/trucks and running in circles around them. Sadly this will probably shorten her life expectancy, but I've accepted this. After an hour of having the beach to ourselves for quiet people and doggie introspection time, we moseyed back home, breakfasted on kibble and eggs & toast respectively.

After breakfast we all had a nice, long family nap and then set about our errands. Our errands really only consisted of taking Gluten Free Girlfriends vehicle into the shop for a new set of tires, lunching, then going to PetSmart for some Family Unit Day presents. Shaak Ti got a new rope toy that's three feet long and essentially too big for her to chew on (she loves a challenge) and Tito got a tiny stuffed frog (he like to exert his dominion over smaller toys). The toys were presented upon our return to the house, and the critters happily flounced around with their new treasures.

OK so Family Unit Day wasn't much more than an excuse to skip work, go to the beach, have lunch out, run some errands, buy a new toy for the dogs, and play with the dogs, but heck, isn't that what life is all about? We're hoping a national public awareness campaign about Family Unit Day will start catching on, starting with the blog and then circling the globe. Though Canada does already have "Family Day" as a national holiday, hmmm..... Now, my next holiday to create will likely involve golf or In N Out burger, but either way will consist of not going to work and being a slacker.

Skunkles the Dog

Just when we had fallen into a nice rhythm of calling Shaak Ti "Lumpy" (she had a weird growth on her neck and is on antibiotics to get rid of it) she had to go and undergo another traumatic event that has caused her to get a new nickname. Now when I say traumatic, I don't mean traumatic for her since every experience so far, even the ones that leave her exhausted and bloody are fun. Even a trip to the vet is fun. When taken to the vet last week to have the lump examined she was so nervous and scared that she was playing and wrestling with another doggy patient in the waiting room. So when I say there was a traumatic event in the household, I usually mean one that caused me and the Gluten Free Girlfriend to jump out of bed at some Gawdawful hour and lose significant amounts of sleep. Yes, sleep loss is traumatic indeed.

Around 4:45 in the morning she gets up and charges, charges out of the bedroom, out the doggie door and goes crashing through some bushes in the yard, barking at full volume. I'm only slightly conscious of the barking as I'm still in the throes of warm sleepy time. It's only when I hear her come back in the doggie door and begin rolling/clunking around on the living room carpet that I become fully awake. And upon hearing the commotion, my first conscious thought is "crap!!!". Now after a late night mouse chasing episode of a few weeks ago, I make the assumption that she's actually somehow managed to catch a mouse, and is now in the living room, playing with the mouse, throwing it back and forth and generally spraying mouse parts all over the living room. In retrospect, that would have been a pretty good alternative.

I spring out of bed and into action, running to the living room hoping to get there before the Gluten Free Girlfriend awakens and finds her precious pooch mangling a mouse carcass in the house. As I get to the hallway and turn into the living room, Shaak Ti is bounding happily towards me, and that's when the smell hits me. Fully hits me. Nutty, a bit garlicy, overwhelming, in your face, in your nostrils skunky goodness. I grab Shaak Ti (now I've got skunky goodness all over me) who thinks this is some sort of cool new game, haul her into the bathroom, and put her in the bath tub. By now Gluten Free Girlfriend is also awake and realizes the situation, though she wasn't fully awake enough to curse about it. Strangely she's surprisingly coherent and effective during these early morning dramas.

The Gluten Free Girlfriend starts bathing Shaak Ti, I grab some tomato soup from the kitchen and bring it to her so she can start bathing her in tomoatoey goodness and hop on the computer to research skunk smell removal. After a bit of looking I find the following formula
- 1 quart hydrogen peroxide
- 1/4 cup baking soda
- 1 tablespoon of dish soap
which ended up working very well. You just have to make sure not to get it in the dogs eyes, which was difficult considering she got sprayed right on the head. I scaled down the formula a bit as this would have made a lot of stuff, and brought it in to the bathroom to help in the bathing process.

As Gluten Free Girlfriend repeatedly bathed Shaak Ti, I set to fixing the house, lighting every scented candle we had, setting out bowls of baking soda, opening all the windows, washing the rugs she had rolled on, and putting down carpet cleaner powder. After an hour or so, the house smells terrible (really really terrible), Shaak Ti has had multiple consecutive baths, and it's almost 6:00, time for us to get up anyways. Except for the fact that she's had to be bathed for the last hour, Shaak Ti is almost completely oblivious, and would probably chase that same skunk this minute if she had the opportunity.

My internet research also turned up the following statement from a veterinary website: "In regard to skunk and porcupine encounters, there are two types of dogs. Those who learn the first time, and those who never learn". Sigh. Guess which type of dog I have?