Stella One Week On.

Stella seems to have recovered nicely. She has been off the painkillers for some time now and is walking and begging for food very nicely. It's not all together clear what went wrong with her, hopefully it was just a stomache ache. We will be watching her carefully, but for now the good news is, she is looking reasonably chipper.

Sunday Night At The Vet

Its clearly been along time since I contributed to the college fund for the vets kid. We have just spent an hour or two and 100 bucks at the Vet.

One of our dogs "stella" is feeling quite poorly, she's walking gingerly and breathing heavily. Unfortunately for the 100 bucks the vet was unable to tell us what the problem is -- we have been given some pain killers and instructions to check back if things don't improve. We are hoping that it is some kind of muscle strain ( we went to the dog park this morning ) or allergic reaction which will pass in a few days. We shall see and fingers crossed...

The First "Onesie".

We bought our first onesie ... even I got a little cuted out by it, as it has "I'm new here" written on it. It just had to be bought.

Fortunately for the pocketbook alot of the other ones had christmas messages written on them which wouldn't quite be appropriate for our little one.. he's gonna be a little late for that..

Moving My Study.

I've nearly finished moving my study. I've setup the laptop and moved almost everything. I've just got to clear out one more closet and then setup the server. I guess things are humming along nicely.

25 Weeks On.

I heard the heartbeat!

I went along to one of the scheduled examinations and they checked the heartbeat -- sounded good to me -- it was appearently normal at 160 odd beats a minute.

It was quite amazing to hear. I've seen the beat before on the sonogram but never heard the real thing, it sounded very alive! Fortunatly hearing the beat hasn't broken my state of denial yet -- which means I'm not freaking out .... but it is certainly one step closer.

A new father and Caffeine.

Disturbingly a recent dad told me that I may have picked the wrong time to make the move to a "sans caffeine" lifestyle. Appearently a young baby doesn't encourage sleeping.... hopefully I'll manage to stay away from the evil molecule. But if I don't manage it, at least it will give me an amazing buzz with only a small amount.

I shall cross my fingers and see what happens.

Tasting Menu From Abacus

On friday night we attended a tasting menu at the central market cooking school. The tasting menu was prepared by Chef Tre Wilcox of Abacus in Dallas. Who was recently featured on the reality TV series Top Chef Miami. If you want to know more about the show heres a link to Ted Allen's blog. Chef Wilcox is pictured left.

The Food : It was great, the highlight would have to be the crispy pork belly. It appearently took them two days to prepare and it was definitely a privaledge to eat it! The smoked chedder and jalapeno bread pudding, and seared sea scallops were also incredible.

The experience : It was very interesting to hear a chef talk about ingedients. Choosing the right ones at the right time of year, as well as the right ones for the dish. An example would be the difference between sea scallops that are shucked underwater against scallops that are shucked in air.... who knew it would matter...It was also fun to see chef wilcox prepare some of the dishes in situ as it were.

Overall : Highly recommend this class if you can get to it.

Pregnancy Amnesia

Well I've noticed something interesting. I think my lady is getting a bit more absent minded. She forgets her keys, and phone and stuff. A few days ago she left the keys in the car and today she almost reversed the car into the garage door before it had finished opening.... incredibly this seems to be a symptom of pregnancy... can you believe it!

some text about this can be found here. It amazes me that this would be true -- but I can attest that it seriously seems to be happening....

Knife Skills 101

This weekend we attended a class at the central market cooking school, called Knife Skills 101. I have to say it was great fun and very informative. The class was perhaps a little over subscribed for my tastes. But the chef tried hard to include everyone. More information about the cooking school can be found here. The class covers a lot of ground, including how to sharpen knives, hold them, and of course how to slice, and dice.

I have to admit that probably the most amazing thing was slicing a tomato into seedless sections, it was pretty impressive and really hard!

anyway I highly recommend the hands on class if you can make it.