Great First Day

Today was an exhausting but wonderful day. It was my first day at my brand new job—a job that, when I read the job posting, seemed to be created specifically for me. I knew it was just the job I’d been hoping for and so I applied, interviewed and was offered the position last week. I immediately accepted. I’ve been daydreaming about working in museum education for quite a while, and this job is the perfect combination of the many things I did and enjoyed in college—informal science teaching, working with the public at museum events, scheduling presentations, training people to do them, etc. So now I get paid to do all these things. There are many, many things I will need to learn about my position, and I’m sure the job will evolve over time since it’s a brand new position that was created to help the person who will be my supervisor since she was completely overloaded. I know that she and I will work very well together, and the rest of the staff that I’ve met also seem very friendly and willing to help out.

I have a great feeling about this job and I’m incredibly excited about it. Oh, and the area where the education staff all have our desks has a fish tank as well as a couple of plastic tubs with aquatic plants and snails! I love it already. And I learned about trichobezoars—basically large hairballs. I got to see some rather huge ones (one was about 2 feet long and egg shaped, another smaller and almost perfectly round) that came from cows, as well as a postcard of one that came from a human girl. I hope I will continue to learn odd but interesting things like this. I’m also hoping that I might be able to claim a cow skull for my desk. It’s just sitting on a cabinet and no one seems to want it, so I’ll see if I can move it over to my area.

And now I really need some sleep so I can run around all day again tomorrow.

Lena’s Trip to the Vet

Today Lena had an appointment with the vet for a regular checkup. Since I couldn’t take her there in the morning and still be on time for work, I made an appointment to drop her off at lunchtime. This meant that Lena came with me to work this morning. She wasn’t too happy and meowed a lot in the car, and then even more in the office. Finally she settled down on my chair (which meant I had to work on the edge of the seat) and calmed down. While she was still squawking a lot I was afraid that someone would call and hear her over the phone, and ask me, “Did you just saw meow??” Toward the end of the morning, she sat on my lap and purred while I worked at the computer—I enjoyed having a work buddy.

As soon as my lunch break started, I packed Lena back in her carrier, dismantled her temporary litter box, put Lena in the car, and drove all the way to the vet. I dropped her off and returned to work after picking up a sandwich along the way. Later in the afternoon, they called me to say Lena was all set. When I came by after work to pick her up, both the receptionist and the vet assistant who brought Lena out to me told me how well-behaved and sweet she was, and remarked how she had let them do their job without any scratching or biting and without much complaining. They also said she was very pretty. I have to agree!

They did find that her teeth need a good cleaning, so I’m going to schedule an appointment for that since I don’t want her to develop gum disease or oral infections. So Lena’s in for another trip to the vet in the near future, but given the staff’s description of her behavior there, she must not hate going to the vet as much as I thought she did.

Tonight Lena’s a bit lethargic, a normal reaction to being vaccinated. Tomorrow she’ll be back to her normal self and if it’s not too hot out when I get back from work I’ll let her out to get some fresh air and maybe chase a lizard or two.

Peaches!

The day started at 6 am when our alarm went off. An hour later we were in the car and by 7:30 we were at Schnepf Farms in Queen Creek. There we met up with Tara and Linda, as well as Linda’s dad, stepmom and nephew. Today was the first day that the u-pick peaches were available and we were among the first people to arrive. We went in and took the hayride over to the peach orchard, where we started to pick our peaches. I have to say that until today I had never been a big fan of peaches. I think it’s because I’d never had really good ones. Some of the peaches we encountered were so ripe that when we pulled them off the branches they tore open. It was when I tried one of these that I realized just how delicious they were. We picked lots of peaches—some ripe for eating and cooking with now, as well as some that would ripen in a few days. Tim and I had a total of about 15 lb, and the others had similar amounts. It’s a good thing we got there as early as we did because not only did we avoid a crowd, we also avoided high temperatures. By the time we left around 9 am, it was already feeling rather warm out there.

Tim and I headed home, where we left the peaches we were planning to consume in the next few days, found some peach recipes, and picked up the ingredients we would need to cook with at Tara’s house. We then drove up to her place to meet her and Linda for our own little version of Iron Chef Scottsdale with the day’s secret ingredient of peaches. Once we got there, the four of us went out to lunch to a wonderful little café called Simple Chef Café, which is well worth going back to. Everything we had there was excellent, the service was great, and the owner came out and talked to us after we were done and told us about some menu items we had questions about. After a trip to Linda’s to pick up her food processor (and pet her cats), we stopped by Basha’s to get a few missing ingredients. Finally we made it back to Tara’s and set to work.

The first task was to wash, peel, and cut the peaches that were soft enough to cook with. Some of those were too soft and went into the mush bowl, and some were firmer and got cut into slices that we placed in another bowl. That was a task that would have been terribly boring had we all been doing this alone in our respective homes, but it became very fun in a group. Though it seemed like an impossibly big project, somehow we made it through all the peaches we needed to cut up and didn’t make as much of a mess as I had expected. It was time to start preparing our food.

Linda had a recipe for peach salsa and so that was the first thing that got made. The recipe involved a combination of ingredients that, to me at least, sounded like they shouldn’t go well together—peaches, orange marmalade, green onions, and grated ginger. There might have been other minor ingredients, but those four were the main ones. The taste was certainly unusual, but very, very good. Next we prepared a peach cobbler. While I haven’t particularly loved peach cobbler in the past, I thought that since these peaches were so much better than any peaches I’d ever had before, and certainly better than the canned stuff, that perhaps this cobbler would take me by surprise. And it did. The cobbler was baked just right, so that the batter was cooked through but the peaches still had a very fresh taste to them even while the whole cobbler had a lovely golden color over it. The third recipe we made was for peach egg rolls with a raspberry sauce. That was the finishing touch—our reward for a long day of working with peaches. The recipe sounded good, but the result was far better than I could have expected. After we had cleaned up a bit and split up the remaining cut and mushy peaches for freezing, we sat down to enjoy our treat. Tim served up an egg roll for each of us over a scoop of vanilla ice cream and then poured some of the raspberry sauce over it and topped it with some powdered sugar. It looked so fancy. And it definitely tasted like something you’d be served at a fancy restaurant. What a delicious end to a fabulous day! And we all still have salsa, cobbler, a few egg rolls, and plenty of fresh peaches to enjoy at home over the next few days. Who knew that peaches could be this good? I certainly didn’t until today.

Lena’s First Kill

Well… almost. We think the lizard ran away, but it did lose its tail. Lena had been outside since shortly after 6 pm, enjoying the outdoors with me and waiting for a lizard to come her way. She did chase one earlier, but it got away before she could even get close. As it got darker, Tim and I decided to have some dinner and a bottle of wine out in the backyard since it had cooled off and it was such a nice evening. Lena stayed outdoors with us, and I forgot about the lizards since Lena seemed happy to sit in the corner of the yard near some plants.

A short while ago I saw her crouching and thought she might be going after a moth since she’d chased one earlier as well. I didn’t do anything about it until I realized that she’d caught something bigger. Tim went after her to release the lizard, but I thought the lizard might be injured enough that it would be better for Lena to finish it off. Tim said the lizard had just lost its tail and got Lena to let go of it. He saw it on the edge of the concrete but I didn’t get to see it. Lena was very interested in the twitching tail and I was inclined to let her eat it, but then Tim pointed out that it might not be very good for her to do so. After all, she’s used to a diet of dry cat food and who knows where this lizard had been.

That’s when we thought we’d move back inside since we were done with our food and drink and we wanted to get Lena away from the lizard tail. She was not happy! She made it known to me that she didn’t want to come inside and made a variety of angry noises at me. When I closed the sliding door leaving her inside, she sat by the door while I gathered the things we had outside. I then had to get Tim to move her aside so I could get back inside with all the stuff without needing to retrieve Lena from the backyard again.

Lena seems to have gotten new energy from her close encounter with the lizard. Just now she ran from the back up to the living room. Probably once I get off the computer she will want to play with her string or her toy mice. Maybe I should get her a toy lizard.