Fiona & Przemek (and Fergus) Part 3

I've seen Przemek emerge from within the Fergus/Fiona pile but never caught a picture of it until last week.  Finally!  I've missed so many shots that would have been infinitely cuter than the ones I managed to capture, but I'm glad I got something. They are not easy to photograph. Przemek is so shy and so indescribably fast.  He's so fast, I can't even keep him in frame in a video.  Seriously--he's like the RoadRunner--he looks like a blur when he's on the move and even skids to a stop like RR.

I had a kitchen assistant this week.  I drafted L to help make another big batch of the black bean-quinoa burgers that she liked so much.  It's good for her to start to learn to prepare good, nutritious meals, and it's also good for her to learn how much work goes into food.  That may help curtail the "eating to alleviate boredom" habit she's acquired. She didn't love the process, but she did a good job, and learned quite a bit.  I'm going to try to get her involved at least once a month or so, as the help is nice, and I want to continue to teach her cooking skills. I got less done overall than I normally do when working on my own, but as she learns more and requires less assistance, I think it will be more helpful.

It's a good thing we made the burgers, as both my plan A and plan B for Wednesday night's meal fell through (didn't have necessary ingredients and can't go out once I get everything started), so I pulled six of the burgers (the remainder go in the freezer for emergency meals), and we'll have those with sweet potato puffs and apple nachos.  I got some (vegan) sriracha mayo that I'm anxious to try on these!

We ended up with:

• 6 bean burgers for a meal; 12 for the freezer
• 2 heads of garlic (cleaned/peeled and ready to use)
• Roasted red pepper hummus
• Spice Market Sweet Potato Lentil Packets - but I make a huge batch and just throw it all into a 9x13 Pyrex and cover with foil; The foil packets are a messy pain in the ass.
• Seasoned barley (to serve with dish above)
• Pizza
• Chocolate mousse
• It was a really long day, and that list seems fairly short. :(

Last week we lost one of our sweet rats.  Frances was an old girl, and she developed an eye infection a few weeks ago. She was on antibiotics and eye drops but the infection got the better of her and spread rapidly through her face and head. Things like that can progress so quickly with small animals. Given her age, the extent of the infection (indications that it had started to spread to the brain), and her pain, we had to make a late-night run to euthanize our poor girl. That is never easy.  We're down to three rats now.  I'm really glad we have the emergency vet clinic in town and available, but holy shit!! they are SO expensive!  I'm still fairly horrified by what they charged for a 2 minute (LITERALLY) euth.  It was triple what I would normally pay for a small animal euth., and given the minimal effort and time required, and the fact that we brought her home with us, it really was appalling.

Teaching C++ and Java in the same semester is proving to be absolutely brutal already.  Nothing takes longer to grade than code.  There is no way to do it quickly (and right).  Worse than that, though, is going back and forth between two similar but different IDEs and syntax that's also similar but different.  This might actually break my brain.  It's challenging and definitely not boring, though, so at least it's fun but tough, rather than a horrible experience.  I am having to use ever increasing levels of caffeine to keep my brain operating on high gear with minimal sleep (not doing to well on sleep quality or quantity again), which means I will need to undergo painful caffeine detox at the end of the semester.