Fondue party

Love to eat them mousies
Mousie's what I love to eat.
Bite they little heads off
Nibble on they tiny feet.

-- B. Kliban

 

Malcolm the cat asked me to start this blog entry off with some cat poetry. He has been known to sing this verse in the middle of the night. He gives it a bit of a blues feeling, probably due to lack of mice. .

 

It's getting quite spring-y here now. I think it would be a good day to find a scenic body of water and listen to the wonderful water sounds. First stop, Spain.

 

 

I love to watch ducks on the water, especially when they go underwater with their heinies up in the air.

 

Now to Essen, Belgium, home of the celebrated Christmas Beer Festival, held each year in July. Everyone is so busy around the holidays that the Belgians decided to move the festival to a more convenient date. Besides, after several of those good Belgian beers and ales, no one cares what month it is.

 

If you are able, after attending the Beer Festival, stagger to this beautiful spot for a nature break.  Occasionally duck heinies can be seen here too, in fact sometimes you will see three duck heinies when in fact there is only one.

 

 

You may also see a boatload of beautiful (and cold) maidens, on a tour with some old man playing Scrabble. Be sure to wave back when waven to, at, or whatever.

 

 

Next stop, beautiful Ontario, Canada, where you could travel from lake to lake for your entire life and never see all of them. Eh?  It's too late to start now - you should have begun when you were three to have any hope of making a good dent in them.

 

 

So why is this post titled "Fondue Party"? Because I'm going to show you my new fondue maker.  

 

 

Cool, huh? You just build a big fire in the middle and you can cook five different fondues at once. This is handy when you have a lot of guests, such as a boatload of naked maidens.

It can also be used as an incense burner, but that gives the chocolate fondue a bit of a tang that you might not care for.

 

Having begun this post with a cat topic, I will finish with one as well. This link will take you to a Swedish site where someone has gathered together a large selection of cat photos and videos. If you like cats and spend any time on the Internet, you will have seen some of these before but there are a lot that were new to me.

A Bold Fold (or so I'm told)

I've discovered something about myself. I have these artistic urges, but I'm not really an artistic person. However, I AM very good at following patterns or designs that someone else has already figured out. I may have found the perfect hobby for myself: Iris Folding. Ever heard of it? I think it's actually considered a type of origami but the results can be used in some pretty snazzy ways, such as in the greeting card below.
 

Image by campbelj45ca via Flickr

Of course if you actually WANT to have paper cranes, swans and ducks all over your house, you should stick to origami.

Image via Wikipedia

I don't need this, do you?

For a good overview of Iris Folding, check out this page on Squidoo. 

I did my first small project this weekend after finding a little kit for this balloon at Stamping Cat Studio here in Salem.

It isn't perfect - I made all the usual beginner's mistakes, like accidentally gluing my fingers together - but I learned a lot and next time I'll know what I'm doing. 

Iris Folding has a lot going for it, for example:

1. It isn't nearly as hard as it looks, so you can impress people. ("WOW" is a common response. That either means they really like your creation or they can't believe you spend your time folding paper.)
2. It gives you an excuse to look for interesting pieces of colored paper (otherwise known as "trash")  everywhere you go. Experience the joy of discovery, like a magpie finding some dryer lint for his nest.
3. You cannot eat while doing this. Anything that keeps me from eating is a good thing. 
4. REAL greeting cards are very expensive nowadays. Make your own and save thousands. The more you make, the more you save, or something.
5. When a friend asks "What have you been doing lately?" you will actually have an answer other than "oh, nothing much", making you instantly less boring.

In my next post we will once again travel to far distant lands, but I did want to spend this artistic moment with you. They happen so seldom.