Too Much Pizza

My mom's 19.5-year-old cat Bear, who'd been eating grass and had a blade stuck in her mouth like a hilliblly chewing on hay.

We spent this past Saturday night at my mom's house outside Corvallis; Chris was working at a nearby bike race on Sunday, so we just headed down there midday on Saturday. We got to her place in time to fire up the outdoor earth oven so Chris could make earth oven pizzas.


A view of the inside of the oven, pizza cooking; and Chris rotating a pie to get even heat distribution. Such an attentive chef.

There was only one hitch with the pizza-making... Last time Chris made pizza at my mom's, he made a ton of dough because he wasn't sure how they'd all turn out. He ended up "killing" a couple of them (let's call them sacrifices to the pizza gods) in the process of learning how long to cook them, etc. This time, he also made a ton of dough (he's not made pizzas down there enough to have it down to a science yet), but this time he didn't kill any of them. Between the three of us, by the time he was done, we had seven pizzas.


This isn't even all of them - we'd eaten two by this point, and there were some on another countertop, too. I never thought I'd say there was such a thing as too much pizza, but...

By the end of the cooking process, every time Chris would walk in the back door with another pizza tray, my mom and I would groan and say, "Oh, god, no more, please!" I've heard of death by chocolate cake before, but never death by pizza. We even tried driving one of them over to one of my mom's neighbors, but they weren't home. It would have been especially funny as she lives on a dead-end dirt road miles from the nearest pizza joint... "Pizza delivery!"

We did visit those neighbors the next day to tell them they'd missed out (we ended up bagging and freezing all the uneaten pizza), but it wasn't as funny.


My mom's neighbor's dog, outstanding in his field, waiting for someone to play.


This is an old water collection tank at the back of my mom's property, from the days when some of the previous owners got their water from the springs on the property. It's been unused for years, so my brother cut some holes in it (no, they weren't already there - would've been a very ineffective water container) and he and my mom installed some old, dead electronics out there for my nephew. It's now his rocketship. And it's fabulous.