Baby squirrel in our garage

Posted via Pixelpipe.

Happy Easter

Content-Aware Image Sizing

The narrator’s voice may put you to sleep, but hang in there for a minute. They’ve opened up a whole new level of photo editing capabilities.

So many times I’ve wished I had more image to work with, or a better crop.

A Photoshop plug-in should be coming soon from onOne Software.

The dog ate my chocolate – A learning opportunity.

Growing up I’ve always been taught that if a dog eats chocolate, he’ll die. That’s the extent of my veterinary knowledge.
So…what do you do when you come home late at night and find that your dog’s eaten 3 chocolate Santa Snickers bars and a plastic candy-cane tube filled with M&M’s while your wife and kids are out of town?

1. Freak out
2. Try desperately to come up with an excuse that absolves you of any blame for the family pet dying
3. Call every vet in town to find out what you already knew, they’re all closed
4. Freak out
5. Hatch a plan to find a duplicate 2 year old boxer/lab mix at 12:30 on a Friday night
6. Freak out

After you get those first six steps out of the way, settle down and call the emergency 24-hour vet hotline. Here in Grand Rapids you’ll be calling the Emergency Animal Clinic (Map and contact info here).

The nice lady will tell you that no, your dog won’t die from eating a chocolate chip that fell on the floor. In fact, your dog will need to eat a 1/2 oz. of chocolate for every pound of body weight for it to have a severe toxic reaction and a 1/4 oz. per pound for a mild toxic reaction.

From what I could scrape together from the mangled wrappers it turned out that our dog had only eaten about 4-5 oz. Not enough to kill her, not enough to freak out about, but enough that the vet had me feed her 4 teaspoons of hydrogen peroxide to make her yack out everything she ate. “Just pour it down her throat” she said. And 10 minutes later, out came the chocolate.

In the end, the dog lives, I spend the night cleaning up dog puke. Good times.

More info on dogs and chocolate here.

Improvisational Chicken Breast recipe

3 frozen chicken breasts defrosting in the fridge. No recipe, no plan, no ingredients and no time.

And there is no way I’m eating plain old chicken. Time to MacGyver something together.

Found: Lemon juice, butter, honey, white pepper, garlic powder, tarragon and oregano.

Do these things got together? They do now. And…it came out damn good, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing it down.

Do this:

1. Thaw your chicken ( I had 3 medium size breasts)
2. In a large skillet, add a tablespoon or two of butter, about a 1/4 cup of lemon juice, about an 1/8 cup of honey, a large pinch of pepper (I used white just because it sounded fancier, but I’m sure regular black will do just fine), a couple teaspoons each of tarragon leaves and oregano and a sprinkling of garlic powder
3. Heat slowly until butter is melted, honey thins out and everything is stirred around evenly in the pan
4. Add your chicken breasts and cook over med-hi heat till they’re done, about 15 min. each side
5. Bonus accident: after sitting for a couple of minutes, the lemon/honey/butter thickened to make a nice sauce to pour over the chicken after you serve it up. If this doesn’t happen for you, you can always drizzle a little honey on top.

The flavor had a little bit of zing from the lemon, some sweetness from the honey, and a little spice from the pepper. And, it was a million times better than plain old chicken. I also made up some steamed zucchini and rice pilaf to go along with it. Tasty.

You should probably know, that I didn’t actually measure anything, so everything you read above is just really bad estimating. Don’t worry though, it’ll work out fine.