Time to catch up a little….
KITTY PASSPORT UPDATE # 1 This week I took my cat Penny for her first trip to the vet! Yes…I’ve had her for three years now. Call me a bad catmom if you’d like, but she’s always seemed so healthy I’ve never seen a reason to put her through that traumatic vet experience…that is until it dawned on me that kittymight be relocating to Europe in a few months. So we’ve now officially begun the process of applying for a pet passport (yes, she gets her own passport) . Luckily a few years back they discontinued the required quarantine (I don’t know what I would do if we had to quarantine her for 6 months). In order get her through customs, Penny needs a host of vaccinations, blood testing, a microchip inserted into her back, and precautionary deworming. She’ll also need two more vet visits before Mats takes her to Sweden the first week in June as well as a trip to the USDA building for the archbishop of vets to quadruple-authorize the paperwork. That’s all in kitty passport news.
FALL SEMESTER REFLECTION As of yesterday, I am officially done with first semester of my senior year at UF! This semester I took some awesome classes, played some fun concerts, and had a film I made screened at at two film festivals downtown. Next semester, I will be taking it easy with only 10 credits. This is not my choice, but rather the fact that I have taken so many classes the last 3 1/2 years that my bright futures scholarship will cut me off if I exceed 10 more. I think when I graduate I will feel most proud of the fact that I have milked the state of Florida’s college scholarship fund for every penny that I possibly could. Free education? Yes, please! 3 of next semester’s 10 credits won’t be a class but independent study. I’ll be writing an ethnography about Lovewell’s cultural exchanges for my honors anthropology thesis.
MY HAIR I cut my hair. It’s short to me, but you can be the judge.
MY INTERVIEW AT THE SWEDISH CONSULATE Mats and I had our interview at the Swedish Consulate. As luck would have it, the woman interviewing us had been at a SWEA meeting which Mats and I attended to speak about Lovewell a year ago. She remembered us and was very interested in Lovewell. At the end of the interview she had even invited Mats and I to a Swedish Christmas event in ft. lauderdale. Needless to say, I think we got this one in the bag.
CARRIE UNDERWOOD CONCERT I’m a little soar from building the stage for Gainesville’s Carrie Underwood concert. She performed her last show of her tour at the O’Dome on Sunday. Mats worked the event too. He said she was much tinier than he thought she would be. The concert was awesome. She seems really funny too. After singing her last song, she came back stage and started doing the chicken dance.
CHRISTMAS HOMECOMING Cassie, Mats, and I are heading to Ft. Lauderdale on Friday and Mats is leaving for Sweden on Tuesday to spend Christmas with his family. We had a blast shopping for Christmas gifts for Mats’s niece and nephew, Emil and baby Elvira. I wish I could be at two Christmases at once!!!
FRIENDSHIP DOUGH I went to a Christmas cookie party. We were all super girlie… baking cookies, chatting, decorating cookies, exchanging cookies… I was even given something called “friendship dough”. I had never heard of this before, and to be honest, it seemed a little weird at first. You’re given a ziplock bag of watery dough. The yeast causes the stuff inside the bag to grow bigger and bigger. You have to mush and burp the bag once a day (not kidding), and as it grows, you can put more of it into other bags and give them to your friends. It shouldn’t be refrigerated because of the yeast. Then, when you decide to make it into bread you mix it with pudding, flour, and whatever else you want in the bread, and you bake it. After I received my bag of friendship dough and was told how to take care of it, I asked doughmaster/party host Robyn who had initialy created the dough. She said she had no idea, she only knew that it had been shared by many friends for a long, long time. That is when it got weird to me. I now have this dough that could be like.. a decade old… that I’m not supposed to refrigerate but rather mush, burb, grow, and pass on to my friends? Sounds like something my mom may have heard of so I’m going to check it out with her before I take this any further. Until then I’ll keep mushing and burping my dough bag.
