Home stretch.

I think I'm in the home stretch with this wretched BK Virus UTI thing - I'm SO MUCH BETTER! Not back to 100% yet, but worlds away from where I was when it first started (back in early August). I've been almost housebound since I got "sick" - I've only just started venturing back out into the real world again. Being tied to the bathroom really sucks - it limits your options. :)

But I had lunch with Julia, Laura, and Elizabeth at ISI on Friday, and we discussed LtN fundraising (among other stuff, of course). I've already emailed the owners of California Tortilla, so hopefully we'll be having a lunch event at the Bethesda Cal Tor. I'm meeting with the manager of Chevy's in Gaithersburg to set up an event there, and more details on that to come. LtN has been giving me something to do these days, which is nice, and hopefully we'll raise even more $$. We've already raised $2,500 - we're halfway to our goal!

In other news, I have a friend going home from the hospital in the next day or so - she had her transplant back in mid August, and she's doing great. When I saw her last week she looked fantastic - I'm so excited for her to be able to go home and sleep in her own bed! It's a good thing - it makes me very happy.

I've posted some pictures on Facebook, but for those of you that aren't FBers, here are some of my latest.

First, some of my hair - it's getting longer every day, it's growing SO fast! I have a crazy cowlick you can see in the 2nd pic. It's even LONGER since those photos were taken a week or so ago - significantly longer. I'll take new pics this week.

We had some old friends (SB grad school peeps) over for dinner a few weeks ago, and Lawrence brought us the most beautiful truffles from Artfully Chocolate Kingsbury Confections in DC. They're crazy flavors - lavender pistachio, whiskey, peanut butter, champagne, etc.

That same night I made shortbread raspberry tartlets for dessert - our other guest Brad brought lasagna and baguette, so all I had to make was a salad and dessert. Talk about a low-maintenance dinner party! The tarts were pretty good - I think the shortbread needs a bit of tweaking, but everyone seemed to enjoy them.

And on Thursday night I made these cute cupcakes for someone's birthday - but they were so disgusting I had to throw them all away. I tried a new recipe - it was a Martha Stewart buttermilk cupcake with dark chocolate ganache frosting. BIG DUD! They were weirdly dense and too bitter. Now I've never been a fan of Martha to begin with *frigid cough cough frigid*, but her horrible cupcake recipe has resulted in an official ban of her recipes from our house. And besides, she makes me nervous - she's so uptight, I feel like she's going to know I made cupcakes, and know they weren't good, and come seek me out and admonish me on TV or something. They were really cute, though.

I've been craving a Belgian waffle for a week or so now, and today we finally went to the local deli and got one. It was SO good.

Okay, these next few are kinda gross and they'll probably turn some people off, but I can't help it, I have to post. Let me preface the pics by saying that yes, I'm aware that I'm crazy and spoil my cats FAR too much, but I kind of love them more than life itself, so everyone's just going to have to live with it. They eat this one canned food called Tiki Cat, and their favorite flavor is wild Alaskan salmon. However, if the salmon isn't readily available or in season, Tiki Cat can't make the product. Yeah yeah, it's human grade food, and it's fancy, but honestly, I can't feed my kids something that looks completely unappetizing, and this just looks like FOOD. So anyway, they were out of wild Salmon, so Gus bought a few others flavors, one of them being mackerel and sardine in calamari consommé. He put their food into their bowl and noticed something funny - there was an entire baby octopus (or squid, I'm not sure) in their food!

Yes it's gross because it's cat food, but really it's nothing more than chopped fish, so it's not that bad. But how weird is that?! Daisy ended up eating it - she does dig calamari. But now, they're back on the salmon, and um, well, I guess Daisy has been hiding something from us for a while - she's Turkish. This is what her bowl looked like after she'd eaten breakfast (and again, it's just flaked salmon, nothing too gross):

And these last two are just cute - one is of me in the morning, asleep with the babies, and the other is of Fitzy in my Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center bag. And yes, that's how I wake up every morning - surrounded by kitten wonderfulness. :)

I think that's it for the moment. We're having a very mellow weekend, just doing laundry and vegging out. I hope everyone else is having a great holiday weekend!