time for a pizza party

That right there is a Cruzer pizza that was consumed in the back seat of my car. If I would have waited a minute longer to take the photo, there would be no more pizza left. Cruzer is using the Daiya cheese on it's vegan pizzas and it's the best vegan cheese I've tried. Maybe "the best" isn't quite the right descriptor, as I'll continue to use Follow Your Heart and Playfood (if it's ever available again) in certain recipes. Perhaps "most like the gooey, salty, and greasy ass glue found on the kind of low-rent pizzas advertised by people waving signs on street corners during rush hour" is more accurate.

This is the vegan version of the cheese I consumed on pizzas and quesdillas and nachos and carne asada fries and all other sorts of foods I ate in my young pre-vegan life. In other words, the stuff that made me fat. I must tread lightly around this Daiya cheese. It's not health food by any stretch but still better than dairy. I want to have a pizza party with a stack of Cruzer pizzas with extra Daiya cheese and vegan pepperoni, a bunch of 2-liter bottles of root beer, paper cups and paper plates. I never thought I could have a vegan grade-school style pizza party till now.

Figures that the moment I decide to resurrect this blog, I get caught up in other stuff and then don't update. My lack of focus is only partly to blame though as we did get hit with some dog drama that needed some attention.


Got to protect my nose from foxtails

First up, the evil unholy bullshit of foxtails. These insidious, wheat wannabes are the plague of the Western states and in particular my long neglected landscape. I have tried to eradicate these things from my yard with no such luck. My dogs don't spend a whole lot of time outside and the time they do spend is supervised and usually filled with playing ball and visiting through the fence so I never worried too much about it. Then one evening my precious Lilou is sniffing around the apricot tree and the next minute sneezing violently. A trip to the emergency vet, $300, and one groggy dog later it was all over. Seeing the bloody foxtail that was pulled out of my baby's nose sent me on a mission though and I have spent just about every free hour of daylight I have getting rid of foxtails.


I'm going to be up all night

Not long after the foxtail incident, Boots decides he doesn't want to sleep at night. Or be quiet or calm or anything like that. He bounces off the walls, destroys everything in sight, and generally just acts like that naked dude on PCP that was on that COPS episode (it was an early one, had a lady cop, probably in Iowa or somewhere midwest...it's a classic). This batshit behavior occurred right around an earthquake time so that might explain it. So I had two sleepless nights on Boots Watch. We took lots of late night walks and I watched him destroy a few bones and every time I would drift off he would pounce on me and lick my face till I woke up. He's a brilliant dog with tons of drive and an insane pain tolerance, so my watch was as much to protect him from himself as it was to protect the house from him. It was over as soon as it began though and he's back to his gentlemanly, creature of habit self who goes to his crate and arranges his blankets when he's ready to go to sleep.

We also had some good drama, some major progress for our family regarding Buster and Boots but I'll save that for another day.