What's goin' on over in this pen?

Over the past two weekends, we’ve seen a lot of animals. Two weeks ago, we went to the Royal Highland Show, where there were a lot of large, happy cows, curious goats, fluffy sheep, and gigantic Clydesdales, one of which tried to read Scott’s map, and another of which was hoping a lick of the grass design on my shirt would produce the taste of the real thing. Poor guy. I did give him a pat on the nose, but I don’t think it was any consolation.

Do you have an apple?

I also got to make a fool of myself as a volunteer in a demonstration called Quack Commandos, in which the awesomeness of sheepdogs is displayed by getting one of them to herd some Indian Running Ducks in all sorts of directions and then getting 6 humans to try and do the same job. Needless to say, the dog kind of kicked our asses. But how many people can say they’ve herded Indian Running Ducks? I bet you can’t.

Sheepdog: takin' care of bidness.

Humans: not so much.

In addition to the animals, there was a crapload of free food sampling going on, some scrumptious strawberries and cream, and various other snacking. I also saw a guy scale a 40 foot pole in 17 seconds. And Scott drooled over big boy toys like combine harvesters and tractors, forgetting completely that we don’t have any fields to mow and a combine harvester is about one and a half times the size of our flat.

Regardless of this, walking around looking at animals all day just makes me want a farm full of them even more. I could make a lot of cheese and ice cream.

We can't carry that home.

Ok, I realise this is actually quite important stuff in animal husbandry and all, but it's still funny.

Puffin proof.

More recently, this weekend, we headed out to South Queensferry far too early in the morning for a Sunday to catch an RSPB seabird cruise. There were seals! And puffins! And cormorants! And about ten billion different kinds of gulls! It was pretty good, and it only rained for about 15 minutes of the 3 hours. My camera was no match for some of the telephoto lenses on that boat, but I got a few decent pictures of the seals, and I managed to get some pictures that at least prove we saw puffins. They’re really small!

Seals!

After the boat trip was over, naturally, the sun came out in full and we walked around South Queensferry for a bit, had a mediocre sunday roast in one pub and a pint in another before heading home. Lovely way to spend a day.

Sunny South Queensferry.

Somewhere in between these animal excursions, I went shopping for clothes, which I desperately need. Unfortunately, after failing to find anything I liked or deemed appropriate, I gave up and instead came home with three new CDs (M.I.A., Rodrigo y Gabriela, and Coldplay. Hooray new music!), a bottle of Cava (It was hot and I wanted something cold and fizzy.), and a new Tefal Jamie Oliver Professional Series stainless steel 30cm nonstick omlette pan. YES.

Retired (but still pretty hot).

Sex-ehhhhh.

To put this in perspective, I used this pan’s predecessor, a similar one, hard anodized instead of stainless steel,  just about every day for two and a half years. I don’t drive anymore because I live in a city, but I do cook all the time. So this is kind of like the equivalent of buying a new car. It will be used and used well. And DAMN it is nice. I like when cookware goes on sale.

Unfortunately, I still need clothes. This ‘no clothes, so let’s buy food/something for the kitchen’ thing is all too common of an occurance. I blame the fashion industry. But that’s another post.

Tasty, tasty kiwi with a spife.

When we were in Australia and New Zealand, we renewed our love for kiwifruit (green AND gold, yum). Before we left Christchurch, we picked up a few kiwi spoons, or as I’ve discovered they’re called, spifes. Yes, spifes! Spoon+knife, obviously.

They’re nifty little tools for kiwi lovers, and we now use them all the time. Until Scott broke his (while eating a kiwi, no less). This was a sad, sad day, as we’re the sort of people to get very excited over something such as a spife. (When we discovered what I like to call the spforkn… well, we still haven’t shut up about it.)

As the spife is kind of a promotional thing for kiwis, you can’t easily buy them unless you want something unnecessarily fancy from some crazy kitchen gadget store. But we just wanted the green plastic happiness that helps us eat a kiwi. So I emailed Zespri (the kiwi people) and asked them how I could go about acquiring more of these tools.

It turns out the people at Zespri are awesome. They emailed me back almost immediately, asked me for my address, and said they’d send a few our way. I LOVE when companies have kickass customer service like that. I didn’t even buy anything from them and they were all over it (I mean, we buy kiwis all the time, but I didn’t buy anything directly from them). Plus it pretty much guarantees that I’ll talk them up for a lifetime.

So, bravo, Zespri! And thank you for the spifes. Ask and ye shall recieve indeed. They will be put to good use. Go eat some kiwifruit, everyone!