mistressofmuses

A few people said they'd be interested in the recipe my vet had for an at-home kidney diet for dogs.

Here's what she gave me!


It's an older recipe (from the 80s), but she says it's still solid in terms of the proportions of protein/fat/carbs that do best for kidney issues. The source is Hills.

What makes this kidney-friendly is that it's a restricted protein diet.

Ingredients:
1/4 lb ground beef (do not use lean/chuck)*
2 cups cooked white rice, no salt**
1 hard-cooked egg, finely chopped
3 slices of white bread, crumbled
1t (5g) calcium carbonate***
Add a dietary supplement for vitamins and minerals

Cook the beef, stirring lightly until browned. Stir in the rest of the ingredients until mixed well. Add water (not milk) if the mixture is too dry. Yields about 1 1/4 lb of food.

* It seems like it's hard to find anything OTHER than lean ground beef, and chuck (80%) I don't think is considered "lean." I think you can generally find 73%, which is what I think we'll try. I'm guessing this recommendation is because you want the higher fat content.

** Specifying both white rice and white bread does not surprise me. That was one of the things that did surprise a lot of the family when my grandmother had to be on a renal diet, that you want white rice and bread, not brown or whole grain.

*** The bottom of the page helpfully suggests going to a grocer to purchase eggshells for the calcium carbonate. My vet has helpfully written in "Tums" as an alternative, haha. This works out to five tablets, at least of the type we have, since they are 1000mg each.
I wasn't sure why this quantity of calcium was recommended, but a quick search says that it's a common use in dogs and cats with kidney disease, because it helps to bind to the extra phosphates in their blood. (Creatinine being the one that she said was most elevated for Cy.)

Analysis of the recipe:
Protein 6.9%
Fat 5.5%
Carbohydrate 21.1%
Moisture 65.5%
750 kcalories/lb of food

Now, for Cy's weight, he'd need to eat a bit more than the recipe yields per day (though it could scale up fairly easily, and we would probably be cooking it in bulk anyway.)

Unfortunately, rice was already a significant part of the diet we were giving the dogs (since Bella is allergic to wheat), but Cy has decided to go on a rice strike, and now refuses to eat it. We'd actually just started replacing it with bread, which he loves! So maybe we'll try substituting in more bread and less rice.

We are giving him the kidney foods we got samples of (she gave us three cans and three ziplocs of different dry foods.) We had him try a few of each of the kibbles, all of which he liked, and he got to try some of the Royal Canin wet food, I think with some of the same brand's kibble mixed in as well for dinner tonight, and he *cleaned* that bowl. So he likes the food.

But as everyone else pointed out, and I already knew, it is *expensive*. $120 for a case of 24 cans, with feeding guidelines to feed *three cans per day* for a dog of his weight? That's about $15/day, and unfortunately... I don't think we can afford that.

Now, beef and eggs are also pretty expensive! But it's going to be a lot less than $15 a day.

I'm also thinking about maybe combining the two. We typically feed twice a day, so maybe the home diet once per day, and the commercial food once per day? Primarily the home recipe, but with a half a can/a small serving of the kibble per day added in? That would maybe let him reap some of the benefits of the commercial diet (additional supplements that they include, etc.) while not being AS big a budget blow for us, while still making sure that everything he's getting falls within the guidelines for a better diet for him.

For all my earlier enthusiasm for the holidays, today really didn't feel like Christmas. It just felt like a Wednesday, lol.

Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, I hope it was a good Wednesday!

I did do my usual baking:


Yule log cookies. (A sort of spiced shortbread-ish cookie with a sweet icing and nutmeg on top.)

I made these on Sunday night, and they turned out pretty well.

On Monday, I got up at a fairly reasonable time to get started on baking. Then the day was a bit derailed by errands that were in turn derailed by Alex having more dizziness issues, but eventually I managed to do it!

Unfortunately, it took a lot longer than hoped, so by the time I was done, I completely forgot to take nice pictures. I was in a hurry to get packed and head over to my mom and Taylor's, so I didn't have time to stage nicer ones, ha.


Kolaches! Blackberry and peach this year, again. They turned out quite good.


The cranberry bar things that I'd made. I forgot to grab a picture before I'd packed a few up. They were really labor-intensive, compared to things I usually make. (Just a lot more ingredients than I usually mess with at once. And I had to zest an orange! Lol.)

Unfortunately, they were underdone. :( I'd given them some extra time, and the edges were very much done... but the middle was still very soft. (It seemed okay when I did a knife test in the middle, but after giving it some extra time, I was afraid I'd overdone them, when I actually should have gone for longer.) Because the recipe calls for cooling completely and then frosting them before you cut them, by the time I discovered the underdone middle, it was way too late to do much for them. The edges were quite edible and very tasty, though.

Mom's surgery on Monday went really well! She didn't see the surgical site before they'd bandaged it, but sounds like they took a pretty big chunk out, which is standard for a melanoma excision. They weren't able to fully close the wound. But she's walking around, and all the news from the surgeon and from the genetic testing they did on the biopsy was really good! She's at the lowest end of the lowest risk on basically all the factors that they were looking at. The pain was pretty bad on Tuesday, but by today had improved.

I stayed over at mom and Taylor's Monday night through this afternoon. Taylor and I played quite a bit of Final Fantasy XIV, and reached the end of part two of Shadowbringers. (Lots of fun bits. The fantasy ghost DMV. "Our story," said by the up-until-now-silent-protagonist! OF COURSE HE'S HADES. Our catboy boyfriend's most unconvincing, immediately-failed heel turn right after his identity reveal, I love him. Ardbert, my friend Ardbert, canon enemy-to-soulmate [not AU].)

We did not do any of our traditional baking at my mom's, because she really didn't want to be on her feet for that long, and just no one seemed to have the energy. We're hoping to do some New Year's baking for the favorites, instead.

This morning we did our gift exchange - I got pajama pants and books, which was exactly what I wanted, ha.

Alex came by in the early afternoon, we hung out for a while, and then did our gift exchange with each other when we got home.


My favorite stuff from Alex. :) I'd asked for the little mothman plush in the front, but then Alex also got the other mothman plush and the shirt. And a set of pens, and a cool Over the Garden Wall tote bag, plus a notebook.

Then we settled in for our usual tradition: making a pizza and watching...


Christams [sic] Twister!

(but now Alex has fallen asleep, so I don't know if we'll make it through any of the other usual holiday movies.)

It feels very unfair that I have to go to work tomorrow.

I simultaneously feel more prepared for the holidays than usual and yet like I have way too much left to do.

Mom has surgery (outpatient) on Monday. They're excising the melanoma they just found. It's not a *pleasant* surgery, but it shouldn't be overly prone to any complications. I sort of expect she's not going to want to be on her feet much around the holiday, though. (I talked to a coworker today who has had several melanomas, and he sort of helped me feel less worried about the surgery itself. I knew it was minor, but still helped to hear from someone who has dealt with it.) There is, of course, always the serious worry of metastasizing, which is what we want to make sure DOESN'T happen. So risk not completely mitigated, but hopefully this will be it.

My grandmother has covid. We aren't sure how/where she got it, since almost the only thing she does is go to medical appointments. She recently had throat surgery (widening the lower portion of her esophagus, which had narrowed and was making it hard for her to swallow), and so was in the hospital for that, plus several pre- and post-operative appointments. She also has dialysis three times a week. She and my aunt do occasionally go out to lunch, which could be the culprit. She seems to be okay, she was mostly fatigued and just feeling "under the weather" when they gave her the test. But she'll be 97 in January, plus she *is* recovering from fairly recent surgery, she's a dialysis patient, she's had congestive heart failure... so she's not a *low risk* patient. She is fully vaccinated, so I'm extremely hopeful that it protects her well from any complications.

-

It feels weird to be worried about both of the above, and then also be thinking about holiday stuff. I also know that it's not like I can just worry about them enough to change the outcome, it just doesn't work that way. But it makes it feel weird and petty to still be trying to gear up to celebrate things, or trying to figure out how to fit in all the things I still need to do.

My holiday hype (which was already a bit unexpected for me) has definitely died down a bit, mostly due to stuff like the above. Plus our truck needing a lot of sudden, expensive work. Plus our heat is still out and we haven't gotten a response from maintenance at all. I'm striving mightily to maintain some enthusiasm, but it's wearing on me a bit. (Though not as much as it's, say, wearing on my mom, I know.)

I realized somewhat belatedly that oh shit I need to get holiday cards out. I completely spaced needing to do it, which has been my problem most of my life, I'm pretty sure. I got them all addressed and written last night, but couldn't find any stamps, and the post office was closed by the time I was off of work. I did get my dad's gift shipped tonight via the machine at the post office, but didn't want to send the letters with the ugly barcode postage instead of stamps. :(
Alex helped unearth some stamps, though they're plain flag stamps, which is barely better than the barcodes, haha. But oh well, I think that's what's going to have to happen in order to get them into the mail.
I'd meant to ask if anyone else wanted holiday cards this year... but again, utterly spaced it. Maybe next year I can be on top of it enough!

I need to get my mom and sibling's gifts wrapped, but I think I'm pretty well done with gift acquiring, which is nice. A lot of years I've been having to panic-shop in the couple of days right before. There was one gift for Taylor that I was afraid wasn't going to arrive, since it was just sitting with "label created" for almost two weeks, but it finally moved today! It's supposed to arrive on Saturday! (Which makes me feel better; Taylor didn't want much, but I felt bad having little to actually give.)

The biggest thing I have to still do is baking. This year should be better set up for that than some, since Xmas is on a Wednesday, which gives me two days off before it. I obviously don't want to start baking anything too soon, but I also can only do so much at a time. I'll probably try to make one thing Sunday night, and the other two things on Monday. Then I can go over to my mom and Taylor's on Monday night after my mom's surgery, and spend Christmas Eve over there. We can do whatever baking things they want to do then.

I'm planning on the usual yule log cookies, plus kolaches, and then this year I was going to attempt a copycat of the "cranberry bliss bars" that Starbucks sells. They're a white chocolate, cranberry, orange thing, and they're very good... so hoping I can make a credible knock-off. At mom's we'll probably do the molasses and butter cookies, which are my two favorites, ha.

Alex took this picture, but it was the best of the day imo.

I'm not terribly patriotic, particularly after All That from the Supreme Court, but it is also Alex's and my anniversary. 15 years together!

We went out for fireworks, and brought the dogs with. We'd brought that umbrella in the background of the above pic to make shade, especially for Cy, but he absolutely wanted to be in the sun the whole time.

( More, including six more pictures, below the cut: )

Had a pretty good day today. <3

Got up mildly late. Gave Alex his gifts: a couple small plastic horses. He's also getting a tattoo later this week (the artist he wants to go to didn't have openings today.)

We did have some "responsible adult" errands to run, which feels like a bummer on a birthday, but it was fine. We dropped off our ballots. After that we ran to the grocery store for a handful of things, then to get our rent check, then to Target to get a couple more storage bins to wrangle more of the horse collection.

After that, we dropped the dogs back home, and then went out to late lunch/early dinner, which was very nice. (We haven't eaten out in a pretty long while, preferring to get carryout... but it was good timing, so there were only a couple other tables seated in the area.)

I took a nap when we got home, and we ate cake late, haha.


Civic duty accomplished!

Saturday was the second (and main) day of the holiday trip. We had the morning and early afternoon to ourselves, though we didn't do much. I guess the hotel is well-known for having a water park, but we... never made it there, ha. I don't currently own a swimsuit, and half of the pools were outside. While they were heated, it was still far enough below freezing that swimming outside didn't sound great, alleged hot tub or not. Sorry to have missed out on like, the resort's Thing, but oh well.

We had a fairly lazy morning. We got coffee from the cafe downstairs, and I bought a quiche from there for breakfast. It seemed like the most financially responsible choice. The resort is pretty big on its restaurants, but uh... on the pricey side. Probably very good! But a bottle of water from room service was $4.50, which shows the general pricing of everything, haha. Apparently the Italian restaurant had a brunch buffet, but I was afraid to even ask how much it was.

The quiche was tasty, and minus a minor annoyance where apparently the entire hotel's key cards were wiped because they were surprise! switching to a new system, which caught the staff off-guard too, it was a mellow few hours. I was very tired, because I did not sleep well, though didn't want to nap and miss the stuff we were supposed to do. Taylor read a bit of Mort by Terry Pratchett out loud, and that was most of the morning.

There were two activities for the afternoon: a beer tasting at a brewery in town, or a paint-and-sip event in the hotel. All three of us chose the paint and sip, because I don't care for enough beer to make a tasting very fun, and painting sounded like a better time.


I did An Art!

The way the "paint and sip" thing works is that in addition to the boozy beverage, there's an artist who sort of guides you, Bob Ross-style, through the steps to paint your version of the example picture. She led us through what colors to mix, some of the techniques for how to do the different parts, plus some help if anyone was very dissatisfied with their results.

( Nine more pictures below the cut - painting + dinner: )

Sunday morning, the three of us split a very tasty chocolate-raspberry croissant from the cafe bakery. Should have taken a picture of it, because it was also a very attractive pastry.

After checkout, we met up at the Stanley Marketplace for brunch at the Denver Biscuit Company. The Stanley Marketplace is a pretty cool place. It's sort of an indoor mall, but it's in an old manufacturing building, and is a pretty great example of repurposing a cool old building into something new, rather than tearing it down. I've only been there once before, and that was with my driver friend for the Van Gogh exhibit we went to before she moved.

The restaurant doesn't take reservations, so our party of 14 or so (as we kept losing people, lol) had to wait a while for enough seating to open up for us, and we wound up being very glad we'd eaten something beforehand. Mom, Taylor, and I all got basic biscuits and gravy, which seemed like a safe bet for a biscuit place. It was delicious, but SO MUCH FOOD.

It was a very fun weekend, and I'm appreciative that A) Taylor and my mom's company does this sort of thing for them each year, and B) that they brought me along. :) It was a fun time, if way bougie-er than anything I ever do otherwise. I had a great time, but I was also glad to get home and take a nap, haha.

My work day on Christmas Eve was just as slow as expected. I finished up with my actual work within about an hour and a half, and then spent the rest of the day just watching through training videos. Those aren't due until the end of next month, but now I've only got one more to do.

After the half day, my mom came to pick me up. We headed back to her house to hang out.

We made some of our family's traditional holiday cookies: molasses cookies and butter cookies.

( Pics of both: )

We did get a bit of a white Christmas - it snowed a fairly good amount on Christmas Eve. Not as badly around us as it did out on the plains to the east, but still enough to stick. Fortunately the roads around us didn't get too bad.

Taylor and I finished up the Final Fantasy XIV raid we'd started last time ("The Binding Coils of Bahamut.") I definitely see what they meant about this being kind of a weird one to have be optional... because it really does feel extremely plot-relevant, despite a sort of "and now we must never speak of this to anyone" conclusion.

Then we watched the last three episodes of The Fall of the House of Usher. Not quite a typical holiday vibe, but I guess it falls under the "stories of ghosts terrorizing rich people" heading, lol.

Christmas Day was also nice. I was gifted a ton of books (as I'd asked for, haha.) My TBR list is definitely crying, and I have GOT to figure out how to make more time and space for reading. They also got a bunch of books from me. I'm pretty sure that's about 90% of what all our gift-giving is: just... swapping books around, lol.

Alex slept in, but came over to join us around 1:00 or so.


Cy was criminally cozy on my mom's loveseat. (He wrapped himself in the blanket, by nosing under where it was draped over the back of the seat.) The cushion cover is on there solely to protect my mom's furniture from our dogs' stomping on it.


And here's Bella standing on the loveseat. (The books on the table there are all the ones Taylor got, ha.) Ignore Bella's butt glowing in the sun.

We hung around for a couple hours, and then headed home. There Alex and I exchanged our gifts. I got a couple more books, a very large set of lots of colors of gel pen, and like... a thousand cute animal stickers, haha. Also a very cute "fruit bat" squish plush (it's a bat... that looks like an orange. I love it!) Also some candy and very cozy looking socks. I got him model stuff, some brushes for pastelling, a kitchen gadget with some various blades for chopping and slicing, and a new wallet. Also candy and some silly tiny plastic crabs.

After that, he was ambushed by a nap, so we delayed our Christmas movie watching. After he woke up, we made a pizza and then watched Christmas Vacation and our always holiday classic: Christams [sic] Twister.


Amazing as always.

I was dozing off after that one, so we put our other holiday movies on hold. (I'm mildly surprised - Alex doesn't usually want to stretch it into more than one day, ha.)

Today we watched A Christmas Story and Muppet Christmas Carol. Tomorrow will be It's a Wonderful Life. That covers most of our personal holiday classics, ha.

Very glad today was a normal day off for me, but then that I also took tomorrow off. I feel like I *should* have the week between Christmas and New Years off to just do... nothing. Or nothing beyond recovering from a big holiday and doing whatever I want to in order to prep for the new year. But alas, it's hard to take that string of time off from work, since there are a LOT of people who want it off, and a lot that's hard to get coverage for. Oh well - a three and a half day weekend is still nice.

We don't have a lot of space to devote to decor (and Alex isn't thrilled about the season as it is), but we DO have a small tree!

It's just a little silver thing we've had for a few years now, since we got the apartment, which allowed us any possibility to set something up for the holidays.


Here it is!


And here it is in the dark to show off the lights!

And what is our Christmas tree topper?


The traditional Christmas Tapirs, obviously!

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I definitely have more to do than I wish I did! I tried to get ahead of baking stuff, but only met with some success. I'm hoping to bake three things: yule log cookies, kolaches, and a new-to-me recipe for orange-cranberry shortbread cookies. I made the yule log cookie dough on Wednesday, hoping to bake them and then make the kolache dough on Thursday, leaving baking the kolaches and making the shortbread dough tonight, so all I'd have left tomorrow would be baking the shortbread.

I succeeded at making the yule log dough on Wednesday... then yesterday was just a disaster from front to back, lol.
The kolache dough did NOT work out the way I wanted - it was just impossibly sticky. I wound up adding more flour just to get it to a point where I could even get it into a ball, and something resembling the texture it's supposed to be. There is a non-zero chance I fucked up in the first place and miscounted the amount of flour I'd added, and that's why it needed more, in which case it'll hopefully be okay now (if still slightly short on flour.) If not, then it's got too much flour, and either way, I'm worried it's been overworked. We'll see! I don't know why it didn't work the way it should have.
Then when I tried to bake the yule log cookies and make the frosting for them, I discovered that while Alex and I had both been sure we had plenty of powdered sugar, we in fact had about three tablespoons of it, lol. Since they should be frosted while warm, that meant I had to put them on hold until today. But the kolache dough had to chill in the fridge for at least two hours, which meant I couldn't do it last night either!

So tonight, gotta try and bake two things and make a new-to-me dough (which I'll have to partially wing it on, because I do not have the food processor, zester, or pastry cutter that it expects I have in my well-stocked kitchen. So... knife, small grater, and forks it is!

I'm hoping things go a bit more the way I'm hoping, and that I don't hate my life by the time I'm done.

-

Today at work was hideous, and tomorrow may be the same, lol.

The more nights I don't post because I'm tired, the more posts I fall behind. Sobcry

July 3

Yesterday morning I went to breakfast with my dad. Didn't realize he was in town until he texted to ask if I wanted to meet up for breakfast, ha. Went to the usual place we go, and it was nice to hang out for a bit.

He's doing well, stepmom is doing well, gardens are doing well despite Arizona heat, current record recording is nearing completion but having a hard time crossing the finish line.

I'd hoped to spend a good part of the 3rd on doing like... personal life admin stuff. (Catching up on posts here, working on getting fic stuff uploaded elsewhere, catch up on habit tracking, some other little stuff.) Alas. We had errands to run - the big grocery trip for the month, getting rent, etc.

Once we were back, I was just dead on my feet and had to take a nap. Napped for about an hour and a half, and then it was time for... early fireworks!

We picked one of the not-too-far-away fireworks celebrations that was on the 3rd to do a test run of how Bella would react. She's gotten very non-reactive toward sounds (amazing, considering how easily she freaked out about sounds [and everything else] when we got her.) But... we wanted to do something on the 4th, so wanted to do a sort of test-run. [Also seemed like a good idea because the weather was predicted to be pretty bad for the 4th, and it would let us get some fireworks if the 4th got rained out.] The event in question does not allow dogs within the park, but there were areas nearby that fireworks were viewable, and we could be within easy return-to-the-car distance just in case she did get anxious or panicky.

She...

Did not care in the slightest. :)

The fireworks were supposed to start at 9:30, but a pretty heavy rainstorm started up at about 8:45. Deciding that they'd better just go for it, they started the show early at 9:00, and almost simultaneously the show ended at 9:15 and the rain stopped, lol. Bella was FAR more upset by the rain than the fireworks, ha.

(Cy has always been mellow about fireworks.)


Bella, backlit by a streetlight.

July 4th

The weather was predicted to include some severe storms, and the event we'd planned to go to did cancel their fireworks display. I was a bit relieved, because I did NOT want to risk going and getting caught in bad hail or the like, so not having to weigh that against missing them was nice.

Count me in the "not really interested in celebrating America's birthday" camp, but July 4th is also Alex's and my anniversary. 14 years!

Despite not having plans to go anywhere, I still made our traditional-to-us fruit salad. [Made of only the fruits we really like, so no bland underripe melon or mediocre grapes.] This year was peach, nectarine, mango, banana, strawberry, blueberry, raspberry, blackberry, cherry, mandarin orange.

The peach and mango would each have been helped by an extra day or two, and the cherries weren't the best I've ever had, but it was still damn good.

The weather was still very warm and nice early in the day, so we went to one of the local parks for the dogs to run around for a bit. (Less running on Cy's part, but he gets to roll in the grass.)


It's Cy!


And Bella with the best, silliest grin while panting.

We came back, Alex wondered if we should go to the other fireworks event we'd gone to last year since the weather wasn't really doing anything bad. I dragged my feet a bit because I was worried that it still WOULD do something bad, and we sort of went back and forth for a while... and then it pretty suddenly got very bad.

We went outside to watch the very weird motion in the clouds, got unpleasantly wet in the rain, and came back in.

Then some people literally right across the street from our window set off professional-grade illegal fireworks for almost four hours (with one break for another rainstorm), so. [I am SO glad that both dogs don't care at all, because these fireworks were basically eye-level with the apartment windows, very close.]

We also ate our other-traditional-for-the-date-for-us ice cream cones.

( Six more pictures, including one spider: )

Went out to lunch with my dad.

He's doing well - he's in town for about 9 days to work on recording. (Not a full record this time; planning to release things as singles, which makes it a bit easier on the production end. Some of the stuff can be done remotely, but sometimes everyone needs to be in the same place, and that requires quite a bit of coordinating, taking time off, and traveling. Only needing to do a few songs at a time is a bit easier than trying to get a whole album together at once.)

He took me to lunch for my birthday. :) We went to Little India, and IT WAS SO GOOD.


SO. GOOD.

This was their lunch special: vegetable pakora, butter chicken (the red bowl), saag chole (the green bowl), chicken curry, and naan. Not pictured: basmati rice, and kheer for desert.

I hadn't had butter chicken before, despite having heard of it several times. That was probably my favorite! The saag chole was delicious, too. The chicken curry was fantastic, though I wish it hadn't had coriander in it! (I am tragically one of the people for whom coriander/cilantro tastes soapy, but there wasn't so much that it was overpowering. The other flavors more than made up for it!) The kheer was also amazingly delicious. And freshly-baked naan!

It was also a ton of food - I think I only managed to eat about a third of everything, as amazing as it was.

It's been a long time since I had really good Indian food! Before we were together, Alex had a near-fatal allergic reaction to some - he was told there were no tree nuts, turned out there were cashews - so even though he loves Indian food, he's been afraid to risk something similar happening! We get frozen stuff that we can cook sometimes, but that's not quite the same.

I knew the kheer possibly had nuts in it (almond and pistachio), but I asked the waiter about the rest. He told me that the rest of the stuff we'd had did not have any nuts (there definitely weren't pieces, but sometimes paste or oils aren't as obvious.)

Alex tentatively tried the leftovers I brought home, and did not have a reaction! (Though we'll see if the coriander bothers him later.) So we shared the rest of it for dinner. So good.