My cat Boo, who's made a home of my shoe box.

Today’s lesson: cats don’t like leashes.  Or at least that’s what I’ve found trying to leash-train mine.  When we moved to a new house, I was a little worried about Boo (an occasionally outdoor cat) wandering off and getting lost in the new neighborhood.  So I decided to leash train him.  Unfortunately, Boo didn’t take too well to my idea.

For starters, you can’t walk a cat with a leash on a collar, since they don’t have necks like dogs.  So, I got a cat harness to put on him.  Amazingly enough, with a little bit of coaxing with treats, he let me put on the harness.  I even got the leash on, no problem at all, and managed to lead him around with treats.  Encouraging, right?

Deceptively so.  Yes, he’ll wear the harness, and yes, he’ll walk around a little, but without treats there is no movement.  Even without the leash, Boo acts as if the harness (which, I assure you, weighs no more than an ounce or two) puts some unbearable weight on his back, and slinks low to the ground.  Evidently, he’s not a fan.  Moreover, whole ordeal seems to have put him at odds with me for a while, but I’ve given up on the leash training, and he’s starting to warm up to me again.  Especially since he’s learned what a wonderful bed my old shoe box makes.  The moral of the story?  You can’t walk a cat, but it can still be fun to try.

In fact, this morning I woke up to find him missing, and assuming my dad had let him out, went into a little bit of a panic searching about the new neighborhood for him.  In the end, it turned out he’d just gone back to his old hiding place, the cloth on the underside of our couch.  Now he’s taken to his old habit of sitting in front of my monitors atop my desk with a vengeance.  So far he’s nearly shoved just about everything on my desk off of it, and taken up my mouse wrist rest with his own rest.  Now he’s finally settled down in front of one of the screens, with my keyboard, thankfully, only hanging a little bit off of the desk.

A mostly eaten vegan pizza

So I’ve been home for Christmas the last couple weeks, but the most urgent news, methinks, is the pizza my girlfriend and I just devoured.  I’ve been vegan about a month and a half now, and cheese pizza remains pretty much the only thing I’ve missed.  So, of course, I’ve been anxious to get going on a pizza since my block of vegan Mozzarella from Follow Your Heart arrived.  Today we tossed some ingredients in a bread maker, kneaded them up into dough, and made a pizza.

The pizza, as it turned out, was really good.  The Vegan Gourmet cheese is a little trickier to melt than dairy cheese, but that was no problem: I just set the oven to broil for a couple minutes at the end and it melted just fine.  It wasn’t quite like normal Mozzarella, but good nonetheless.  That, and putting full-out slices of pineapple on top turned out wonderfully, much better than the little pieces most places put on pizza.

Aside from that, I’ve gotten plenty used to eating vegan over the last month.  I’ve got a pretty decent repertoire of things I can make, including lots of baked goods now.  Between Christmas, New Years, and my birthday I’ve got fudge, cupcakes, and cake all piling up, and now I can make pizza with cheese: hurray.

Anyways, moving on, the holidays were great as well.  I got to see all my friends who scattered off to different universities after high school, not to mention my cat, who’s apparently taken over my chair now.  Seriously, I can be sitting in the chair, stand up to get something off the back of my desk, and he’ll be there when I sit back down.  I don’t even know where he comes from.  Christmas and so on themselves were nice as well, as they gave me excuses to make delicious baked goods, give them to people, and gather with family and friends for fun stuff.

Now it’s almost over, though, with just two more days left in Bradenton.  I’ll have to go back to another semester at school, but at least I can get my freshman year finished up, take the Computer Science Foundation Exam (and hopefully ace it), and move on with the rest of my degree.  For now, I’ve got enough time for another trip to Busch Gardens and enough dough for one more pizza before I leave, and I intend to enjoy both of them.