How To Make Thai Green Curry

Start off with a trip to the garden...

First, some Thai lemongrass, doing quite well in the herb spiral:

 Now add some basil (which is trying to go to seed, but still has plenty of leaves):

 Next add some Kaffir lime leaves, purchased off the internet. For all I know they might be random leaves off some guy's neighbor's mulberry tree, but hopefully not -- they do match the "double leaf" pattern shown by wikipedia and the internet is never wrong:

Then put everything in the blender along with a few other ingredients (onion, chilies,  ginger, etc.). If you can't get everything to blend nicely, shove it down with a wooden spoon.

Sure, the manufacturer strongly advises that you turn the blender off before putting implements in, but what do they know?

(Everyone needs a little extra fiber anyhow...)

Finally, you cook it all up and voilà:

(If you really want to know how to make it, you might want to check here: http://thaifood.about.com/od/vegetarianthairecipes/r/greencurry.htm)

And the Award for Best Water-Saving Landscaping Goes To...

When you want to really spruce up the place, clear out all vegetation and put a bunch of random stones up.

Is it just me or does this look a bit like a cemetery? To make it worse, it's right across the street from a funeral parlor.


And now for some more pictures of barns in downtown Woodland:

And some cool-looking bark, just to keep up the randomness:

Barns of Downtown Woodland

Here's a random sampling from the walk this evening. Just because.

It doesn't get much more random than that...

Blast from the Past

I was sending a message to a friend today and looking over an old conversation.

Here is something I wrote during the last few weeks of my residency. [Melanie was the Moluccan Cockatoo that lived at the hospital.]

I put Melanie's perch outside last week so she could get some fresh air and scream at the people on the breezeway, and the wind was up and her perch rolled off the loading dock. Oops. Really, I wasn't trying to kill her.

We have one reasonably good student this week, one student who is the most scatterbrained student I have ever seen, and one underclass student who is just awful. I can't even just have her see wildlife since she never wants to euthanize anything. (Wildlife cases in the past two days: electrocuted hawk, open necrotic fracture kite, open necrotic fracture peacock, barn owl missing the distal wing, egret with a leg hanging sideways, multiple scrub jays and crows that are fledglings and have been stuck in the heat and the smoke and die about an hour after they get here.) And I'm on this weekend. But it's the last weekend ever, yay!

Oh yeah, it was time to go...

In sadder news, I put Molly to sleep this week. She was possibly the stupidest dog I've ever met, but she was very sweet and a great companion just the same.

I'll miss her.