How to do laundry with cats

Today’s lesson – How to do the laundry with cat assistance.

First – NEVER wash the cats in the washing machine. No matter how hard they try to convince you otherwise, even if they separate the red cats from the tan cats. It will never work well…

 

Remove cats, then wash and dry laundry as normal.

Carefully spread laundry to fold on the bed in neat organized piles.

Find cat cutely asleep

When you rub the belly and try to gently convince cat to relocate, receive this look…

Last step. Give up on laundry and go do something else.

Done, and you’re welcome!

Coconut Chocolate Chip Cookies

I’ve been meaning to post this recipe for awhile. It’s a good one and I don’t want to lose it! Thanks to some new friends, who I promised the recipes to, I finally typed it up. I do not remember where I got the recipe, so can’t give proper credit, but below is the original with my changes. Enjoy!

 

Coconut Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 cup butter, softened

1 cup white sugar

1 cup brown sugar

2 eggs

2 tsp vanilla

3 cups flour

1 tsp baking soda

2 tsp hot water

1/2 tsp salt

2 cup chocolate chips

1 cup nuts

The above are the original ingredients. I usually do not add the nuts, and for the flour, instead of 3 cups flour, I substitute a mix 3-4 cups of almost half and half flour and coconut. This works well with the coconut we get here. It's drier. I haven't tried it with very fresh coconut.

Preheat oven to 350F

Cream together the butter and sugars. Add vanilla (powder or extract)

Beat in the eggs. (local eggs can be smaller than US eggs, adding a third is ok)

Dissolve baking powder in the water and add to the batter with the salt.

Stir in the flour mix.

Add chocolate chips.

Drop by the spoonful on ungreased cookie sheets.

Bake about 10 minutes.

Artistic Homework

Brian’s class has been studying Renaissance Art and each student had to pick one piece to do a project on. Brian picked “The Ambassadors” by Hans Holbein the Younger. It’s a fascinating piece, with a lot of great detail. Wiki has an interesting page about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ambassadors_(Holbein)

Brian has had to study the painting and write up a paper on various aspects. This weekend, he had to re-create the painting itself.

I think his version turned out quite well. It was something of a scavenger hunt, trying to find objects to stand in for all the various bits and bobs in the original!

Our first version… a little less accurate…

What a fun way to study art! 

***UPDATE**
Brian photoshopped the elongated skull into his version: