I'm almost halfway sure my chocolate's paranormal.

October tried to sucker punch me. I took it like a woman, held my ground and then only sobbed when October turned it's back to go on with the busy dealings of Autumn-izing the country.
My Grandmother passed away.
Just one of those things, people were expecting it, and the time came...and then it passed and so did she. Expected or not it still sucked. But I have been reminded of a couple of important things. You gotta live your life, you can't stay in the puddles of sadness, life goes on until it stops and hopefully each person has collected up an awesome cache of memories and experiences when this physical existence ends.
I like calling it physical existence, I really believe there's more to our world than just the physical plane. That the spiritual one, or what ever you want to call it, is the next step after this life. So even though I am sad for my Grandmother passing I'm happy she's moving on to what ever awesome experience is next, no longer burdened by the frailty of a human body.
Which reminds me, I am totally gonna haunt the hell out of people when I pass. I mean, I am going to go poltergeist all over their ass, forewarned is forewarned.
A small side note about me, I've been writing my grandmother letters for years. Just little notes and silly pictures and poems and whatnot. Just things that I felt like might bring a smile if she saw them. Like a closeup of my face sticking my tongue out, or pictures of my husband dancing in the driveway, the sort of foolishness that needs no words or translating and stuff I hoped made her shake her head at the daft grand daughter.
The last one I sent her, we took it to the post office and after coming home saw that my Mom had emailed me to tell me that Grandma wasn't doing good and was going to pass soon. I wondered if my letter would make it to Canada before she did...it didn't. I had done something different with this letter, I wrote on the back that whoever should see it, if they'd please tell my Grandma that Tracey-Anne said "I love you." She was in a Nursing home for 11 years and I'm not sure if she was ever really able to look at the letters I sent by herself.
My Mom said some one gave her the letter at Grandma's funeral, she said someone suggested it be read out loud as part of the services and she laughed and said "God No!" Because I had written stuff like "Well slap my arse and call me Ethel" in it, silly little things like that. Personally I think it would have been a hoot to let the Reverend struggle through my page of nonsense writing in front of a crowd of mourners.
I didn't think much more about that letter after that.
My Mom told me the services were very nice, that a little memorial area was set up with chocolate in honor of Grandma, famous for her sweet tooth. When ever we'd go visit her we'd always bring something sweet. I am not sure I have a photo of her from the last 15 years that doesn't have a box of chocolates or Tim Hortons iced coffee or some other sweet treat in the pic as well. :)
When I was a kid I'd go visit and stay with her for a week or two and we'd eat biscuits and molasses. She said that I was a "good biscuit eater" high praise indeed. I think she liked that I truly appreciated the awesomeness of a homemade biscuit with butter and molasses. :)
So on this one night, not too long after her funeral, we go to a local health food grocery store and I spy, from my position in the check out line a small sign in one of the food aisles that says "Chocolate bars .25"
I think I was moving across the room before I even made the conscious decision to do so, cause come on, chocolate and .25, couldn't have been any more clear to me what I should do if a giant beam of golden light had crashed through the ceiling illuminating the sale with the voice of God or that guy who does the movie trailer voice overs booming
"CHEAP CHOCOLATE!"
So I grabbed a bar, and scurried back into line. The cashier glances at us as he rings it through and goes on to explain that this bar is ridiculously marked down, that's it's retail price is THREE DOLLARS a bar and that the store received a shipment by mistake and so somehow that equates to them selling them for dirt cheap.
We go out to the car, bar in hand, not lost in the bags of groceries, start heading home with hunks of dark chocolate studded with crispy crunchy real cacao nibs through it in our mouths and realize. "Holy crap this is freaking good!" Like I can't believe I walked away with only one bar good. We do some hasty math in the dim interior of the car, add up the savings and figure out that, on sale like this, it's half the price of the bulk dark chocolate we get there.
We did what any normal person would do, circled the block and tried not to run down any pedestrians as we rushed back into the store, hearts thudding because maybe some other lucky smhuck figured out before we did that sales like that don't happen very often.
Success, I won't leave you hanging. We had success, 15 bars of chocolate left! We paid a total of 4.00 for 48.00 worth of chocolate! And once more the cashier, a different one this time, commented on how good a deal this was, how the store got the chocolate by accident and they were just selling it off at 1/12th the price.
Yay for cheap thrills in any form!
When we got home, mouth still savoring marked down chocolate, I checked the mailbox and there was a card inside. We headed up to the house, unloaded groceries onto the kitchen counter as I puzzled over it. Addressed to me from a Reverend in Nova Scotia. I suspected some sort of sympathy card about my Grandmother's recent passing but I didn't expect the envelope for the last letter I'd sent her to come falling out when I opened it up.
See what I mean?
October tried to sucker punch me.
I set the papers down and turned away for a much needed hug from my husband, already sniffling, I decided to just put the card and envelope away until a less emotional time and do something a little less mentally taxing like putting milk in the fridge.
Then...there was a moment.
Not a chorus of angels, light blasting, voices from beyond the grave sort of moment BUT a moment none the less. The card and envelope I'd unknowingly set upon our awesome and unexpected chocolate boon. It suddenly seemed funny, like snort and snicker so hard it blew away the grey fog of grief sort of funny. What were the odds? Getting all that chocolate and then the envelope I'd sent my Grandmother... It felt like she was saying hi.....she got the message...maybe. It felt good.
I don't know for sure if the other side can arrange mega awesome chocolate sales, I don't know if such things as the timing of checking the mail and shopping can be synchronized....but I do know that chocolate tasted ever so much sweeter with a hint of paranormal about it. Just the possibility made me smile and my heart lighter, mind clearer.
And whether she arranged it or not I do know for damn sure Grandma Prest would appreciate my treasure trove of 48.00 worth of fancy chocolate for the low low price of 4.00, almost as much as she'd appreciate the chocolate yumminess itself.


We watch our fair share of paranormal shows, Ghost Hunters and reality shows with psychics and mediums. A common thread that seems to run through is that if there is an "other side" that communication might not always be a direct, clear, scientifically proven event. That usually the communication is very personal and specific to the deceased and person getting it. That it's something meaningful to the recipient, like an amazing deal on chocolate and my Grandmother's envelope I sent making it's way back to me via a third party who I don't even know. :)
What I mean is that maybe the chocolate is only paranormal for me, and that's ok....I'm the one eating it.

How to make September go by so fast........

......your neck will hurt for at least a week from trying to catch a glimpse of the school flavored month as it whizzed by your head.

Calendars are to avoided at all costs, it's the only way to truly make time pass at alarming speeds. It's the same principal as not staring at the clock so that it appears the hand jumped from 10 to 3 and oh boy it's snack time again! Only this is more fun because whole weeks will dissolve in a blur, punctuated by annoying things like dentist appointments and season premieres.

If you can flip your schedule so that you get up at 4 in the afternoon for a few weeks straight, great! You're on the right track. I always say if it's good enough for the Alaskans it's good enough for me. (Days without sunshine..and salmon**.)

It's funny too how much time will pass whilst you're busy elsewhere wrestling with the aforementioned schedule. Nothing spells fun like scheduling a 10 am dentist appointment when you've been currently going to bed around the vicinity of 7 am. We take great satisfaction in doing the math a week ahead of time before an appointment to see how far the schedule needs to move, forwards or backwards, to match up with a hard set time. It's like life becomes a game, one that draws upon all my rusty math skills from high school pre-cal classes from days gone by.

Speaking of which, reminiscing when you should be trying to go to bed so you can make yourself get up and go get your teeth poked is another excellent time passer. Pre-Cal class is forever burned into my brain, and I said as much in my Facebook status, so you just know I'm speaking the truth. To this day if I have a stress dream it's usually about being late for that math class, or worse yet being back at school and not knowing what class I have next but feeling the sinking sensation of teenage dread that it might be Pre-Cal. I'm gonna say it, that teacher was a genius. He never yelled, he was just the master of looking like he might tear your head off if you came to class 20 seconds late. I always secretly imagined that the other teachers were uber jealous of him because of this power he wielded.

After a leisurely stroll down memory lane I tripped on a rock and found out I hadn't remembered the teacher's name correctly which spurred a whole new brain rattling session to see if I could shake loose the cobwebs that were starting to gather and form sticky barriers between present me and past me.

I need a doppelganger. I would even settle for a machine that would let me borrow my past self from my past and bring her to the future. After showing off my ipod touch which is way cooler than the Star Trek Next Generation tricorder she owns (which only flashes lights and makes woowoowoowoo noises and is 10 times the size of an ipod touch) I'd put her to work making some of the things I have ideas for but haven't made yet. I want to say I haven't made them yet because I haven't had time what with all the memory lane walking, teeth poking and schedule flipping but I read once time is an illusion as is the feeling we don't have enough. So I won't say that. I will say though it's funny how it keeps passing, it's not that there's not enough time, there's not enough ME!

My husband once dreamt that there were two of me. Before your minds go all 21st century kinky, he said that the other me was evil. That I smiled freaky and moved like a snake. So maybe that's an omen, no doppelgangers for me, from the past or otherwise because those scenarios never work out good and the last thing I need is to find myself locked in my garage whilst my other self plays it off like she's this self and tries to steal my husband.

Doppelganger are like zombies, it's not enough to recognize the dangers, you've got to have an emergency plan for fending off the living dead right down to tools set aside for the specific purpose of removing the staircases that lead to our second floor patio where we live, should the day arrive the dead rise.

Zombies made September flip by surprisingly fast as well, which is funny you'd think immersing yourself in a Zombie world for a few days would mean that at the most September would shamble by with occasional lurches and free falls. Nope, not the case.

It's not my fault we dedicated 12 plus hours to a Zombies board game. It's the internet's. Internet showed me a photo of a Zombies!!! game in progress and I was immediately struck with 2 parts jealousy and 1 part enlightenment. There are zombie board games? This I did not know, but after several hours of intensive internet research, first narrowing down which zombie board game I wanted and then where to buy it I found myself once again zipping and slipping through time. A few days later my back hurt from hunching over the hoarde of zombies on our kitchen table as my husband and I battled it out to see who would survive the un-dead.
Handling all the itsy bitsy teeny weenie absolutely adorable zombies made me have strong, almost over powering, urges to customize them with paint jobs etc. A crafter/artist/possible doppelganger has to watch out for sudden attacks of insane creativity. I'm not saying that one of these days won't find me hunched over an itsy bitsy teeny weenie absolutely adorable zombie giving it, ironically, more life by adding some blood and stuff to it's undead guts, but now is not the time. Now IS the time for filling our virtual store shelves with all kinds of goodies for lovely customers to purchase. I have had many a chat with myself, my inner brain self not doppelganger self, about the calendar and the proximity of holidays like Halloween and Christmas and that the time to create for those specific dates draws ever nearer.

So September was spent creating things. A lot of things, and dipping my toes into each of the worlds that emerges with a new character. Whether it's a spooky jack-o-lantern or a perky penguin.
I just finally looked at the calendar and lo it was October, and my hair is still settling from the breeze of September swishing by.

October in California is odd. It's hot, like a grumpy summer, but my calendar listens to no arguments about slowing down, or even pausing time until the heat passes and I can play Autumn with crackle logs and Apple crisps. It cares not that September 09 is now forever just a blurry memory. If it were not for the evidence of a fairly productive month I might even wonder if it happened at all....

** I would like to specify that I did not mean days without salmon, but actually that I always imagine Alaskans to have a lot of salmon and I like salmon and so if it's good enough for them to have a lot of it then by golly it's good enough for me.

Melt

(This photo is here solely so you know this blog post has a happy ending. Consider it a spoiler.)

The existence of hot chocolate has always bothered me.
The premise is simple really, drinkable chocolate, and I am all over that like melted candy bar on my face after a gluttonous binge of untold levels of sugary decadence. But hot chocolate is a promise that isn't kept.
Maybe the wrong people are promising me though. Maybe if it was, say, Willy Wonka and not a hometown diner, offering up the promised delights of hot chocolate, it would live up to it's name. But so far it's been nothing. A dark, vaguely chocolate related, steaming hot mug of nothing.
I take my sweet treats seriously. VERY seriously. I have to battle away tears if I ladle hot fudge sauce onto ice cream and there is ANY delay in me enjoying that dessert immediately, before the warm gooey sauce to cold ice cream temperature window of good eatin' opportunity closes. Should anything delay me and the ice cream turns soupy and the fudge sauce is in turn diluted by the ice cream I am in untold agonies. I mean, don't get me wrong I'll still eat it, but mourning the lost perfection of what could have been the most amazing sundae ever the whole time I shovel it into my mouth. Plus every one knows tears and ice cream don't mix, it messes up the salt ratio.
So hot chocolate disappoints me. To the point where I shun it's existence. No longer being duped by decadent descriptions on menus and packages claiming dark, creamy chocolate heaven in a cup. HA! Ha, I say!
When I was a kid and given the choice of a beverage at a restaurant of course I'm going to order hot chocolate. When you're a kid your memory banks work differently. The part of your brain that controls the desire for sweetness overrides any bad experiences one might have had previously with watered down boiling hot brown water passing itself off as hot chocolate. It clobbers the rational side of the brain and grabs the grey lump that is chocolate desire and whispers sweet nothings in it's non-existent brain ear about the promise of how goooood the hot chocolate will be, much better than stinky ol' orange juice. I love a good orange but even as a kid, side by side, orange or chocolate? HA, again HA! Like there's even a choice?
But hot chocolate has broken my heart so many times that even the ever hopeful, puppy-dog-like, resilient, sweet treat lovin' part of my brain has at last learned it's lesson. We turned our backs on it, sneering at it on menus. It was deleted from our top foods menu of the mind and was never heard from again. We shoved hot chocolate so far away in side our brains that we almost forgot about it's pale unflavored existence, accidently making it on occasional hoping....hoping.....*sigh*
Do not weep for me though. I have had a break through.
Hot chocolate.
Hot chocolate and I have been reunited, we have done things to work on our relationship. It's become better quality chocolate now, none of this dried processed powdered stuff, and I have learned to treat it with a delicacy and restraint that can only come from experience and age. It's delivered a velvety rich chocolate experience that enrobes each one of my taste buds individually in warm luscious chocolate and I have come to accept that proper hot chocolate doesn't come in a mug. It comes in a shot glass.
I think that's what was wrong in our relationship all those years. I wanted hot chocolate to physically be more than it could be and fill a whole mug to boot.
How could chocolate have ever hoped to live up to that sort of selfish demand? How could it have turned a mug of warm water or milk into pure warm chocolate? It was spread too thin. Once I realized that the only way to have a decent hot chocolate was to give up my greedy notions of a Willy Wonka-esque type never ending river of decadence, harmony returned. Though in all honesty harmony was actually ACHIEVED as both hot chocolate and I can freely admit now, from the happy comforts of our newly renewed relationship, that what we had in the past was NEVER harmonious.
But, as I said that's in the past.
Because I know there are others out there who may have suffered similar torments as a child, being handed steaming mugs of brown liquid that broke our hearts more then quench our taste buds I shall share the secret to perfect hot chocolate.
It's not a measuring thing but a common sense thing.
Take a hunk of dark, good quality chocolate. The size of which you'd actually sit down and nibble on in one go. Be honest with yourself, it's gonna be a decent sized hunk. Now double it, after all hot chocolate is better if you share it with your sweetie. (see how much I've grown, when I was a kid I'd have been all "sweetie shmeetie, it's all MINE MINE MINE!")
Now break it up on a plate into smaller hunks with a knife.
Transfer these to a pot. Turn the burner on but keep it medium.
Let the chocolate melt slowly, stir it and as it's melting add a small splash of coffee liqueur and a dollop of organic milk. Not enough to dilute the chocolate to the watery stuff of hot chocolate by gone days, but just enough to thin it so that it pours and can be sipped before it re-solidifies into hard chocolate.
Now having stirred it into a gorgeously dark, creamy smooth, mouth wateringly perfect hot chocolate, prepare a plate of necessary side flavor essentials like fresh raspberries, lady fingers, cocoa beans and MORE chocolate if you're feeling ultra decadent.
Pour the liquid glory into the shot glasses and enjoy.
The shot glasses are the perfect size to fool the brain into thinking it's getting a whole glass full, plus they're pretty and the smooth column of warm chocolate between the fingers just adds to the whole experience.
Be prepared to jam your fingers down in the glass to wipe out every last chocolate drip.
I considered serving the chocolate on a plate for better lickability but I do draw the line. I am a lady, I have manners. There'll be no chocolate plate licking here, just finger licking and shot glass slurping, thank-you very much.

Eh!

It had been 8 years since I'd walked through that particular patch of woody area and I was a little annoyed.
The trees had grown while I was gone, the path, worn by my very own feet, had been reclaimed by grass and roots. Branches had the sheer audacity to block the way! Mother nature made no bones about who was in charge. I may have had delightful, unrestricted access, to that area for a large part of my childhood, but it was never really mine. Life's a bitch, eh.
Briefly I contemplated a face off with ol' Mother Nature, just to show her I was no pushover, even after years away from that particular patch of woods.
I was being woodswomanly you see, showing off my Nova Scotia outdoorsy type skills that are put to little use in Southern California. If you get lost down here it's most likely in a parking lot and if you hug a tree the palm police will haul you away for molesting a trunk in public.
On our recent Nova Scotia trip I happily led my husband through the knee high weeds and skeletal branches, still bare of spring's green. Trudging through a path that was now more memory than trail. Pointing out fascinating things like pine cones and thorns and swamp grass and birch bark and keeping a sharp eye peeled for spruce gum because every one should get to chew it at least once in their life. But just traveling along the path unscathed, unscratched was demanding enough, my bout with Mother Nature would have to wait.
Tempting though it was to voice my disapproval to her, I just smiled, politely, and batted branches out of my face, giving up on the idea of arguing this overgrown path nonsense and forged ahead.
Keeping a careful but cautious grip on my burr ball.
When planning our trip home we made lists. Things to do to prepare for the trip, things to take on the trip and things to do ON the trip. The third list was my favorite as it involved mostly Canadian foods. Ah Caramels, Tim Horton's coffee, Coffee Crisps, Wunder Bars, A&W poutine, and pizza donairs...let me just say that last one again. PIZZA DONAIRS.
But smack dab in the middle of the list was make a burr ball from the prickly little clingy balls that grow on the weedy burdocks plants all around the property where my Mom lives.
Let me just say that as far as lists go, you can considered that one dominated. I kicked list ass. I stuffed myself on every thing I had planned to and to top it all off, I made that burdock ball! It was a work of burdock art. My husband gamely trudged along with me as I sussed out dried brown little prickly things from the weeds, calling out "I found some more! And more, ohhhhh MORE over here!!!!"
When we were kids my brothers and I would gather burdocks, sometimes even voluntarily. It was not unusual to come in from the bushes with the little buggers clinging all over our pant legs and socks, making a mess of our shoe laces. Alan said he's had similar but less enjoyable experiences when he was a child with things he almost dare not speak of aloud because they are THAT evil.
Foxtails....ohhhhh.
Apparently as clingy as burdocks but more evil and in absolutely no way fun. But burdocks are cool, the most fun was had gathering them on purpose and sticking them together to make a MEGA BURR BALL.
Why? Well....we were kids, we lived in the country, did we really need a reason why? And if we do then I'll admit we may have thrown them at each other. Burr balls are the warmer weather equivalent of snow balls, plus they stick.
Apparently Fox tails can't be made in to a mega foxtail ball, apparently they just stab your socks and itch your skin and annoy the heck out of you when all you tried to do was take a shortcut home from school across a hill and you end up with stickers in your ankles and a pocketful of regret and a lifelong loathing for a weed you'd as soon obliterate from the planet as ever have to see it again.
Umm, but look husband. BURRS, round, cute, NOT evil!
It was a lovely moment in life for me, introducing my husband to non-evil stickery burrs, dragging him through the wild rose bushes, under the birch trees, through the dense fir tree branches and into the little swampy clearing I remembered so well, burr ball in hand.
I was like a tour guide, the spiel spilling out of me un-bidden.
"And over there is where the pitcher plant is, back there is where mushrooms grew, down there is where the stream is, up there is the tree I climbed, that hill over yonder was a good leaf sliding hill, these denser weed lumps are for standing on, the best moss is over that away, these trees grow berries and did you see the burr ball I made?"
A satisfying, free verse sort of description of my childhood that I was finally able to show my husband in person. I mean one can only describe the apple tree one used to sit in and chuck apples from into a bucket for the pigs for so long. Eventually one needs to drag one's husband through the field and point at it and say "THERE it is!" Then one wonders if said apple tree could still hold one's weight, plus one's husband's weight....
After making it through the overgrown bit of woods that once was a path I was pleased I hadn't picked a fight with Mother Nature after all. She's a strange sort of woman she is. So much had changed and yet so much hadn't. The natural playground beneath the trees where a tiny stream traveled was exactly the same. The trees in the area have always been tall enough to provide a natural sort of branch roof. The ground below a wide open place to play with smooth tree trunks like the pillars of a woodsy palace. 8 years later it looked the same. Now I have to wonder if Mother Nature was really blocking the path or just hugging the little area tight, protecting it with bushy arms and tangled limbs.
I took a few moments to bond with her, flinging myself on to a tree branch, whispered soft apologies to the lichens that clung there.
I think she heard me.
It was a wonderful trip, power packed.

(Tim Hortons is the lifeblood of Pictou County, Nova Scotia!)

A chaotic whirlwind of coffee, friends, coffee, family and more coffee, interspersed with perfect little pockets of nature. Deer sightings, river visits and trips down memory lane. The only down side was I forgot to throw..er...I mean GIVE my MEGA BURR BALL to my brother. The upside is I did remember, just barely, to take it out of my pocket before going through security at the airport.
Though I have to admit I am curious as to what customs would have thought of it. You can just never tell by looking at a person if they are a secret mega burr ball lover or not.

Sandy

(Waaaaay back in the day, like sheesh maybe 12 years ago or more.)

"Don't pet her. She'll bite."
Oh how these words seemed to echo through out my teenage years. When I lived at home they boomeranged about and always came back. Because always there was another person bumbling their way forward, eyes fixated on the "cute little dog."
The outstretched hand and goofy grin gave them away.
The petters.
The ones who stumbled in to nipped fingers before they even knew what bit them...so to speak.
"Don't pet her, she'll bite." I warned in the best no-nonsense tone a teenager can manage.
They never heard, their cooing and awwing and slobbering, over the adorableness of my dog, drowned out my warnings.
It also drowned out the low almost undetectable growl. The one that accompanied the ever so slowly rising hairs along Sandy's back and had her lip just beginning to quiver.
The petter, like some sort of doggy lover zombie, shambled closer, un-heeding my warnings and their own ears with trilling laughter and "pashaws, she won't bite me."
She won't?
Why I had no idea that a person could be absolutely certain. I mean I'm not even absolutely certain that the bag boy at the grocery store isn't going to snap at my hand when I hand him the avocados that rolled away from his reach.
"She won't bite me." They always claimed with pride and that ridiculous note of confidence. Doggy psychic-ism must run rampant in my old neighborhood, as I heard this phrase time and time again.
Most of the time I watched in slow motion horror as the petter, apparently un-concerned if they left our premisses with the same number of fingers as they arrived with, leaned closer and closer to the fairly small, golden haired dog with the floppy ears and lip curling back in a pretty accurate elvis impersonation.
Then, as I saw the fingers dangling like pink sausages, straining ever closer to the eager little jaws of Sandy, saw my dog's control snap like cheap thread, I would break free of my reverie and lunge forward in sync with my pet.
It was a race to see who'd reach their goal first, me to Sandy or her teeth to snapping tight over the petter's fingers.
Luckily I was bigger, and would snatch her up, an armful of angry canine, and spin away from the confused and dazed petter, before Sandy could get her mouthful. A justified bite is no less painful than any other.
The petter would always look on with big sad puppy dog eyes and every one of them, man, woman and child alike, would whisper some version of "She was going to bite me!" The words each petter spoke over the years might have altered slightly but the disbelief was always the same.
Really? REALLY? She was going to bite you? Imagine that.
I'd shake my head in disbelief and bundle my little dog away to our room, sure of the fact she wouldn't bite ME!
Probably not....and if she did at least I'd know enough to realize I probably deserved it.
We were roommates for many years. And like many roommates we became great friends, sisters almost. You have to when sharing a confined space with another living being.
Oh we had our tense moments, I imagine any one would have a fit when discovering their roommate had just birthed a half dozen babies all over your dirty laundry you had left on the floor.
But those puppies were sweet. So sweet. And I touched them when they were just minutes old, even though Sandy's eyes were glazed with a strangely fierce look of concentration reminiscent of how she'd look at the Petters. But I knew. She wouldn't bite ME. And when she did, nipping at my fingers I took the snap for the warning it was and backed off with nothing but bruised fingers and a lesson learned.
Birthing puppies multiple times in my bedroom was a forgivable offense, who among us can not point a finger at any family member guilty of a similar crime. But the time she ate my Halloween candy things got a little tense.
Halloween candy is sacred.
It is NOT to be touched by brothers or Mother's or any one who so much as looks like it has a sweet tooth. I'd give my teddy bear a smack if I thought it's lifeless button eyes had stared a nanosecond too long at my miniature chocolate bars.
So the day I came home from school and flung my school bag on to my bed and met the eager welcome of my dog was almost like any other. Almost. Until I saw the trail of carnage and destruction spewed across my room. As if some devilish monster had snuck in during school hours and found my Halloween candy stash and, evil of all evils, ate half of it and destroyed the rest with sharp toothed drooling bites.
They say small dogs are clever.
But it wasn't words of praise I was thinking when I figured out that my friend, my faithful companion, my roommate, my dog Sandy had hopped on to my bed, from there to my night stand and from there to an even taller dresser and had reached into the open top drawer like it was her own personal candy buffet.
I thought it had been safe. Candy in a top dresser drawer, albeit an open drawer, should have been safe from all manner of candy thieves.
The sticky bits clinging to the carpet and Sandy's wide, dark eyed gaze and wagging tail that swooshed happily back and forth as if nothing was wrong were a defining moment in our friendship. Forgiveness was learned. When someone you love has wronged you in the worst way possible, chewing up your stash of miniature candy bars, you learn to forgive. And hide your candy better next year.
I'm sure I wasn't the best roomate for her either. I tended to hog the bed. I had strange people over and let them in to our room with out asking her permission. I often raided her stash of un-matched socks that she stole from the laundry pile and hid under our bed, returning them to the various owners with out so much as a "May I?"
I threw away the duck foot she found and dragged into our room with the sort of pride that beams like warm sunshine from a little dog, as she pranced through the door, head high and mouth full of duck foot. I snuck it away and hid it outside. I was un-thoughtful like that at times, blind as to the value of of an old leathery duck foot.
Our relationship was not all one of stresses and tense moments. It's funny how those things stand out, when the reality was long stretches of time that blurs together. Cold snow and frosty breath as we huffed and puffed down the drive way to check the mail. Sharp green grass and hot sun on our backs as we wandered through the fields looking for strawberries. Both of us eating as many as we picked.
In the fall we played hide and seek with my brothers and I always lost. Because they'd follow Sandy to what ever bush I was hiding behind. Frantically wagging her tail, eyes full of doggy laughter, obviously not understanding the rules of hide and seek. Or perhaps she knew them very well and was thrilled to always be the first to find me.
Moving out was hard, but Sandy understood, in the way that best friends do. We had a talk, she and I, as I packed my bags to go to California and be with the man I loved. She wouldn't have to travel thousands of miles, she could stay in the country and hang out with my Mom who I knew Sandy loved. And I thanked her for yet another valuable lesson learned because she was my pet. That her needs had to come before mine. And when people asked "Are you taking your dog?" she and I rolled our eyes because of course I wasn't. That would never be fair.
She never did learn the hang of blogging or messaging, and she thought *twittering* was something that birds did. But she posed for endless photos.
I am pretty sure after I moved out she may have been under the impression that she was now a doggy model, as my Mother clicked away with the digital camera and emailed countless photos of her. She no longer sat, she "struck a pose".
I can say with absolutely no bias that she was the most gorgeous, photogenic dog in the entire universe and beyond.
A little golden dog, just the right size to scoop up in your arms if you wanted to carry her, but big enough to snuggle with on a winter's night when the temperatures were below freezing.
She'd have enjoyed biting many more people if given the opportunity.
I'd like to think she's nipping all the ghostly fingers of relatives already passed over. That sounds like doggy heaven.

Semi-Precious Love

Our love is semi precious, diamonds schmimonds, those things are expensive, and hard and what's the point?
Our wedding rings cost 15 dollars each, well, the second ones did. The first ones, the really cool copper bands we bought in Arizona for the grand total of 3 dollars, and I think that was for both of them, the ones we wore even though our fingers turned green and they squished and dented because copper was soft and eventually starting breaking, the ones we wore before we were even married, ohhhhhhh, living in sin people, just had to be replaced.
When they broke, our hearts did a little too because they were our first rings but we traded up, tucking the pretty, tarnished, turning greenish bands of half broken copper away and picked out the ultra cool celtic-esque bands we wear now.
We're doubly married, not because these are our second rings but because we wear one on each hand and it looks really cool. And when we are together, which is always, and people comment on the rings and query as to their significance we smile and say it means we're doubly married and they turn pale and start thinking about polygamy. But then they get brave and ask what doubly married means and we just smile, and gesture elegantly with our hands so that the store's fluorescent lighting glints on them and we try to look mysterious, which is a little hard to do in toe shoes, and we gather our grocery bags in our hands and float out of the store like royalty.
Our wedding cost 250 dollars. And it rocked. 60 dollars for the marriage license stuff, 75 dollars for 3 seafood meals, and 100 dollars fr the dress.
I didn't need a fancy dress but my husband steered me to the poofy section of the Macy's store and I gulped and we had a fine time together as I tried on every dress they had. I am pretty sure it was the prom section. But it was our wedding, and we had fun. Most people say they remember walking down the aisle, I remember the time spent modeling dresses for my husband. He liked the strapless, sizzling black dress with sequins. I liked the penguin colored dress that I figured could double as a vampire costume in the future. I am thrifty that way.
I am pretty sure I saw at least one eyebrow raise because I chose a predominantly black wedding dress.
I am pretty sure that I saw two eyebrows raise because I wore Halloween socks with my sandals. Dirt cheap sandals I bought at a Longs Drug store the year before, big black rubber soles and velcro straps, the perfect place to tuck one teeny tiny Canadian flag pin. They showed off my Halloween socks like nobody's business.
In my wedding photos, that we took ourselves with the camera on self timer, trespassing, literally trespassing, in somebody's Orange Grove show us as a deliriously happy, and damn swanky looking couple. My husband sporting a tie that made his blue eyes pop, me in my penguin coloured ball gown-esque dress...and no body knows but me that under the layers of floor length tulle and faux satin that my feet are adorned with Halloween socks and beach sandals. Well except for the double eye brow raiser, my husband and the world because of course I was so proud of my feet that I took a photo. (Incidentally I am pretty sure I have worn crazy socks to most of the momentous occasions in my life. At least momentous as defined by laws and society, my high school graduation, INS appointments and marriage. Cool.)
We celebrated our 7th wedding anniversary not long ago. And just like when a birthday, his or mine, rolls around we haul out the calculators and do the math. Because we can not remember not being together, and assigning a number makes it seem weird. How can it only be 7 years of marriage????? ONLY 7?
And then we grin because we can remember when we hadn't even met in person yet but were engaged, though I suspect there was more eye rolling by folks unnamed back then, and the moment comes back with a harsh crystal clarity that makes my face flush because it was all such an accidental meeting online. So random, that it scares me. What if I hadn't messaged him? Right out of the blue, a complete stranger, just to chat, like the hundreds of other people I'd messaged and chatted to every day? But he laughs because he doesn't believe we couldn't have met. If it hadn't been that it would have been something else. We're like magnets, though I do not believe we are opposites, only magnetic in that if you shook us up in this giant world full of people the pull would eventually draw us together.
Snap.
We spend more time together than I suspect people married twice, or even 3 times as long as us have. We are together 24 hours a day with the incredibly rare exception when he has a business meeting and for the hell of it I hang out at a store while he business-izes.
We finally bought 2 cell phones, the cheapest ones they had because during the second last business meeting, he couldn't find me at the mall. The cell phone we had which we hadn't used in a year had apparently died and we didn't have 2 because why would we? We're always together. But he was clever and played Rockford and staked out the most likely place I'd eventually show up. The book store. He's ingenious that way, and he showed me the note he left in the Nora Robert's book inside in case I came in the store from a different side and we laughed because I had already bought the book. But not the one with the note, darn.
So we got 2 cell phones.
We celebrated our anniversary with style. One bottle of port, a loaf of crusty homemade kalamta olive sour dough bread, 7 kinds of cheese, smoked salmon and the new Jim Butcher
book. We took turns reading chapters.
We thought about going out but why would we? The best place in the world is at home.
I really do think our love is semi precious, I have always thought it weird that diamonds are associated with love. Because they're *rare*? That's sad. Made under pressure? Weird. Cold, clear and expensive? That is not my love.
Our love is colorful, plentiful and in some ways cheap. Puffed out chest with pride, cheap, because love doesn't cost anything and should be easily available to everyone.

The evolution of me n' beans.

Beans and me go waaaaay back.
Back to childhood when my nose turned up at the idea of any vegetable that wasn't a potato or corn on the cob. What a sophisticated palette I had. Only verrrrrry occasionally stepping boldly beyond my gastronomical comfort zone by eating an iceberg lettuce leaf with bottled, creamy cucumber dressing. This was as gourmet as I got.
I've mentioned being a picky eater before but unless you had witnessed the full scale archeological type dig I could do to a plate of food, mining for hidden vegetables and other nasty bits adults were always gunking up good grub with, you can't fully understand how far I've come.
My first recollection of beans was at my Grandma Prest's house. I'm not sure how she managed to do it, but she could get me to eat food, that if any other parental type unit had stuck it before me I'd have thrown a fit.
Maybe she never tried to MAKE me eat beans, and hence my curiosity. Parents, you're good people. God knows I couldn't handle the job you all take upon yourselves but here's a new flash from a former kid...MAKING some one eat their peas causes a years long rift between said kid and peas.....I'm just sayin'.....Kids are are not just young people, they're mini adults. I remember being told I HAD to eat my peas when I was 7 or 8, I'm 30 years old and it still pisses me off. I understand the logic behind it, health, nutrition, wasting food...blah blah blah....but me and peas had us a real long acrimonious relationship for a damn long time because of that.
Here's where I balance my Karma and say thanks to the universe for parents who provided me with food when lots of kids had none...they could have given my peas to those kids though...I wouldn't have minded.
So a visit with Grandma, meal time rolls around and out of a can comes this brown sludge that was not only beans BUT sweet.....how odd. Baked beans.....beans are a vegetable and I had a war on vegetables, but they had brown sugar or molasses in them lending not only a lovely shade of brown but a definite sweetness that was whole heartily approved by my childish taste buds. It was like some adult some where had screwed up and made a meal that was more like dessert. It was perfect!
I became a fan of baked beans.
Then the universe laughed in my face and caused me great pain one day after I'd become a fan of baked beans. It was when asked, by some distant relative whose house I was having lunch at "What do you want to eat?"
Ahh....the glory of a question like that, no slapping some food down on the table and saying "eat it" I was being given a CHOICE. THE POWER...SUCH DELICIOUS POWER.
"I'll have beans." I say.
*sigh* You can probably guess where this train wreck of a childhood moment is going......I didn't realize I'd have to specify what sort of beans. I didn't realize the bean manufacturer type peoples would waste their time canning anything OTHER than sweet delicious baked beans.
A few moments later a bowl of something horrible, a wet pile of nasty red giant THINGS that were most definitely not flavored with brown sugar, was placed before me.
"What is this?" I asked, hardly daring to breathe, hardly daring to believe that I was expected to EAT this stuff, hardly daring to believe any one would even BUY cans of disgusting red lumps.
"Kidney beans." I was told.
Well hell.
I didn't say that then, I probably didn't even think it, as I was too busy trying not to bawl, such was my disappointment. I could be a brat at times when I was a kid, I can admit it, but I didn't throw a fit THIS time, realizing this was IT, this was lunch. I was stuck. I pushed them around my bowl, as miserable as a kid can be, before heading back to school. Too depressed to be hungry. I can still remember the disappointment, the horror.....I think those kidney beans scarred me for life.
Fast forward a few years. I've learned a valuable lesson, always specify what sort of beans you want, lest some crazy adult thinks a 7 year old kid would enjoy a bowl of kidney beans for lunch. I learned something else.
My mother can MAKE baked beans, the RIGHT kind. The sweet, delicious, smokey from a bit of bacon, and dark from molasses kind. She just whips up a batch one day as if it was the most normal thing in the world.
Didn't I stand there and watch in awe and amazement as she made them? Didn't I taste them myself and realize that HOMEMADE baked beans kicked canned baked bean's tin can ass?
How gourmet I felt. Helping dump the brown sugar in with the beans after they soaked all night. MAKING baked beans. Making them...imagine that.
I always made mine a little MORE gourmet by dumping extra brown sugar on my bowl of beans after they dished up. Hmmmmm......just had an epiphany.....a bittersweet one...childhood sweet tooth equals adult root canals, methinks.
Me and baked beans enjoyed a companionable relationship for many years. They accompanied me through adolescence into adult-hood until I'm all grown up, I meet the love of my life online.
I move to California, and he proudly takes me out for his favorite meal. Something completely foreign to my Maritime taste-buds. The enchilada combo plate from an Alberto's drive through.
I can still remember when I opened my Styrofoam container and beheld the strange mass of brown and bright red that my husband was salivating over.
Refried beans, enchiladas and rice.
I hadn't a clue what an enchilada was, why any one would eat rice without soy sauce and why beans would be RE-fried???? What sort of world had I tumbled in to. And get this...these beans were NOT sweet!
I ate most of the enchilada, discovered the rice wasn't too bad but steered clear of the beans....for a while. Something happened though.
Pop, pop, pop went my taste buds. I think it was new ones growing. They can grow anything down here, it's all the sun.
Pop, pop, pop.
And anyone who has had a take-out combination plate knows there's no force on earth that can keep the refried beans from getting friendly with the enchilada. They softly cuddle up with the red sauce, they ooze under the tortilla, they embrace the cheese and find mysterious refried bean ways of getting on your fork when you only meant to get rice.
My taste buds grew, new refried bean taste buds that were inhabiting my tongue for the sole purpose of tasting salty, creamy, delicious refried beans.
I thought I was pretty hot stuff.
Willingly sucking down tons of refried beans from combo plates from every Mexican food place with in our neighborhood. I was on a stomach and brain awakening journey. The little kid who cowered from peas and onions was willingly buying them to cook up veggie delights of all sorts, most of it inspired by Mexican food.
Mexican food was like nothing I'd had back home in rural Nova Scotia. I bragged about the refried beans to the folks back there. I took pictures and sent them off, pointing out to my Mom how mature I'd become, eating non-sweet beans, willingly, loving every creamy bite.
I found out the stores around here carried cans of these marvelous beans, you could walk right in and have yourself a can of refried beans for a buck.
I cast less and less a wary eye at new foods my husband introduced me to. My palette expanded even more, my world was flavored with cilantro, chipotle and sour cream.
I made my own enchiladas, something that seemed so exotic and foreign 7 years ago became an easy meal to make in a hurry. Burritos a cinch, I started making my own tortillas and chili gravy was it's crown. It seems like the speeding train of expanding taste buds whizzes by faster every day. New food discoveries enlighten my tongue.
AND the bean evolution continues!!!
I went from refried beans to cans of whole beans, that I could flavour and mash myself. My husband's eyes rolled in ecstasy the first time I threw handfuls of spices in with a can of pinto beans and mashed it up. Beans are now a staple of our diet. Where once I raised an eyebrow over a bowl of beans for a meal I now willingly and greedily accept beans for my breakfast, my lunch and my supper. Not a drop of sugar in sight. No desert-like mash masquerading as beans for me...well.....not often anyways....maybe occasionally I doctor up a pot of pinto beans with brown sugar and onion for a little childhood reminiscence.
Then, just when I thought I'd reached the height of bean brilliance, I went higher.
Dried beans, that I slow cooked all day with spices, turned out to be the most brilliant, mouth watering beans you could ever imagine. I'm not just honking my own horn here. (honk honk honk honk honk honk!) In fact maybe you already know this and are scoffing at my innocence, but let me tell you the veil has been lifted.
Beans I cooked myself kick the ass of canned beans. There's a lot of ass-kicking in my kitchen. Including my own because why didn't I have this realization sooner?
All I can do is live in the now, and raise a spoon to the kid I used to be. The one who only ate potatoes and corn on the cob. Wouldn't I freak if I could see me now from the eyes of the me I was then? How far me and my beans have come.

I have been playing with more beans than just pinto, most recently black beans.
My favorite usage of dried beans is as follows:

This is a method not a recipe per se.

POT-O-BEANS

• Rinse a big bunch of beans in water and then put them in a big old pot. Your biggest one so that you can make a vat of beans and eat beans for a week. They get better every day.

• Cover with lots of water, and put on the stove. I start mine on high and then turn it down to simmer once they get boiling.

• I throw in a few tablespoons each of cumin, Mexican oregano and chili powder. Do not be stingy with the chili powder. Lately I've been toasting dried chilies in the oven for a few minutes and grinding them up in the blender to make my own chili powder. I use a lot of spices. I don't actually measure but it's a lot. I also will add about 3 dried peppers in there as well, ones that haven't been toasted. They'll get soft and disintegrate and you can pick the skins out later. Or leave them floating in there and call it a garnish. Don't think I haven't noticed that's how fancy pants cooks operate, anything inedible is labeled a "garnish".....sometimes I garnish my plates with my one and only barbie doll.
  
• She adds a lot of class to a bowl of beans...o.k., I kid. She's not classy at all.

• I let the pot of dried beans, spices and water boil and bubble all day until the beans are soft and tender, adding more water to it when ever it gets low. I like them soupy the first day, it's almost like a bean soup. (As they cool, and days go by they will thicken up, the beans, as well as me, absorbing more of the liquid.)

• When they are cooked enough I put a big dollop of oil in my cast iron frying pan. Maybe as much as half a cup. I chop up half an onion (give or take), two pasilla peppers and about 6 or 8 cloves of garlic and frizzle it all up in the oil with some salt. Softening the peppers and onion, infusing the oil with garlic, yummmmers. This part smells soooooooo good.

• Once the pepper mix has been cooked I dump all of it in to my pot of beans, and hopefully I've left enough room for the oil and peppers. ( Sometimes, an emergency "come help me find a place to put some beans" call is hollared to my husband as I realize physics is causing my addition of peppers/oil/garlic/onions to the beans is making the beans overflow in a very unpleasent, stove messing way. Wouldn't be the first time physics pissed me off.) I stir it all up, add more salt to the whole mix and then...step back.

• They're done. All they need now are a spoon and an appetite. (Though they're mind blowingly good with cheese, sour cream, cilantro, corn chips etc.)

The Beauty of the Big Biscuit...

How delightful are biscuits?
Very, is the answer in case you had a momentary brain lapse and were fumbling through your mind desperately looking for a response that won't enrage this blogger. The answer is very.
A hearty, buttery, flakey bread type product that you can whip up at a moment's notice and be enjoying a bite of, albeit a steaming bite in about 11 minutes.
That's 10 minutes baking time and 1 minute preparation time, I will admit that if you're not a fan of dust clouds of flour, smacking your shins in to cats that get in the way as you dash at reckless speeds across the kitchen gathering ingredients, splattering globs of biscuit dough all over the kitchen, your self and your husband then perhaps a more reasonable (which I'm not, reasonable that is) estimation of total time for everyone else would be around 13 or 14 minutes. Any more than that and I gotta wonder what it is you're doing with your flour that I'm not doing with mine. *insert raised eyebrow look here, the sort Laura Holt is always giving Remington Steele, also guess who has discovered Remington Steele and has been watching back-to-back episodes on Hulu? The answer is meeeee.*
I have very fond memories of biscuits.
They were always the dainty, little, round, perfectly cut sort that made me think of baby showers and women's something or other meetings......sorry the name of that community group escapes me, all I can remember was the table laden with pot luck food, luck indeed, as there were always biscuits, pre buttered with a wee little square of cheddar cheese already adorning the golden beauties like a wee jewel in the crown of...oh God I'm hungry. How many minutes has it been? I've a biscuit in the oven you know.
A biscuit, as in singular.
Because that is my brilliance, my time saving, get a bit of biscuit to my gullet faster than you can say "Beam me up Scotty".
The....BIG...biscuit.
What's with all this rolling the dough out and cutting it in to wee circles anyways? That's like saying you're only going to eat one biscuit and nobody eats just one biscuit. My Grandmother when she lived at home was always in to weight watchers and health and calorie counting and scales and losing weight and this that and the next thing and even she did not sit down to eat ONE biscuit, she ate a whole bunch of biscuits in one go. The tub of Country Crock margarine spread between us, the molasses already loaded into a squeezable tipped bottle so we could ooze out the perfect amount on each beautiful bite of baked biscuit. Perhaps this was why she seemed so aware of her calorie intake every where else I am just now realizing, because when it came to biscuits and molasses we were *good biscuit eaters*. As if consuming a small truck load of biscuits in one sitting was a skill to be proud of.
The Big Biscuit is brilliant.
A batch of biscuit dough pressed out lightly onto a greased cookie sheet (maybe yours doesn't have to be greased but mine does or else there's a kitchen full of broken biscuit dreams, tears and curses when the big biscuit sticks to the sheet and refuses to give you the all important big biscuit bottom layer that's slightly crispy and golden and MINE! NOT the cookie sheet's but MINE. Not that I hold grudges against inanimate objects or anything...for long...it's just I don't like non-sentient things to defy me and my will, is that so wrong?)
Then you pop your big doughy biscuit in the oven for it's allotted time and within 10 or 11 minutes....ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.....a biscuit, warm and steaming and just ready to be plopped on your plate..er.....I mean divided up for you and your husband who is now the one giving you the raised eyebrow look but instead of Laura Holt's eyebrow routine it's Remington Steele's cause he's on to me and my Big Biscuit and wants in on the action.
Sometimes we just have buttered biscuit, some times the all important biscuit and molasses routine, though I warn you this is a routine that is impossible to stop. Butter a bit of big biscuit, drip a drop of molasses, munch away, repeat..and repeat..and repeat..and repeat.
You will hear a distant groan of protest that is your stomach but you will also find your molasses addled brain will ignore it and keep eating bite after perfect bite of BIG biscuit and molasses. It's just the unfortunate reality of something so dang simple and delicious.
Sometimes we dig out our cheeses and sit trading hunks of gruyere and cheddar and fontina back and forth over our plates.
Other times we plop a chunk of Big Biscuit on a salad, like a mega crouton.
Sometimes we have it with marmalade or cinnamon sugar or.....like today....fresh strawberries.
A little trick I do, if you like your biscuits extra golden on top, pop em under the broiler in the oven for a few seconds after they are baked. Another little trick I do, forget it's under the broiler, walk away, distracted by shiny objects and bits of fluff and then wonder why the kitchen smells like smoke.
I can only in good conscience recommend the first trick unless you're into charred biscuit.
A ha, which reminds me. A third trick, take your big biscuit while it's still in it's soft, warm dough form and.....pop it on your Bar-B-Q grill. Holy mama, that's a gooooood biscuit and it can get a wee bit of char but the good kind, not the stomach turning, we can use it as a piece of charcoal to draw a picture of our deceased Big Biscuit, kind. I usually dust my big biscuit with lots of flour so it wont stick to the grill when ever I've done this trick.
By the way for those of you with husbands who look at your biscuits with a dark gleam of greed in their eye I want to set the record straight that biscuits, big or otherwise..do..NOT EVAPORATE. Even a little, so should any biscuit disappear while it's cooling and the BIG Biscuit Baker is outside watering the plants then we'll all know it wasn't a natural phenomenon..... I do give him points for originality, and cuteness....so he can have as much of the dang biscuit as he wants if he continues to be my hand model.

How to Enjoy a Big Biscuit:

1. Break it in to hunks, use your hands just like the caveman biscuit makers did.
2. Prepare a little love for the biscuit with some sliced strawberries, a touch of sugar and a drip of Amaretto, let the mixture combine in an almost carnal like way until it coaxes the blushing strawberries in to releasing it's juices at which point introduce the whole thing to it's betrothed...the BIG BISCUIT!
3. Clean the table like mad in a frenzy of energy because you realize that as the sun sets it's highlighting every bit of dust on the surface and making you look like a bad house keeper, which you might very well be but there's no need to photograph the evidence now is there?
4. Raw...HEAVY....cream......thick and luscious and much more adult than the whipped gelatinous-y type stuff that masquerades as whipped cream in the freezer section of the store. If you have the patience you could whip it up, if you don't..like me, just pour a dollop over the sweetened berries and bit of Big Biscuit and try not to let your hands shake cause it looks too impossibly good to have come together that fast.
5. Lure your husband out on to the patio with promises of telling him where you hid the spoons if he'll hold the plates of strawberry shortcake type cousins in the dying rays of the sun.
6. Eat.

p.s. The recipe I use for my Big Biscuit is adapted from Bob's Red Mill
However I use only 100% whole wheat flour in my recipe, omit the sugar, and replace the shortening with coconut oil. Oh and....um depending on what's closer the fridge or the sink I'll replace the milk with water.

An edible state of intoxication.......

Consolation du chocolat avec crème glacé.

Once upon a time a lonnnnnnnng time ago my father moved us from Nova Scotia to Manitoba, which, if you're not up to date on your Canadian provinces, is from one end of the North American continent to about the middle of fricking nowhere.
I mean I joke about my Mom living in the middle of nowhere but Gillam Manitoba really WAS the middle of fricking no where.
The sort of place that has -40 degree C temps during the winter, the sort of place with enough scary sharp toothed dogs tied in every yard to give any kid nightmares for years to come and the sort of place where big ass brown bears wander past your bedroom window.
As if that's normal, as if glancing outside and a giant hulking beast of an animal that would just as likely eat you for dinner as...well...what ever it is bears eat. Honey I guess...if Disney is to believed. Which is a little weird now that I think about it, a blood spurting human or a pot of honey..? Come on now it can't be both. I hate to be getting off track so soon in to a long winded run on sentences rant but now I can't help but wonder what was really going on between Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh...I think Winnie might have just been waiting for Robin to fatten up and become more of a meal....ewwww.......that's the forbidden story of the hundred acre woods that no one ever talks about, the LAST story actually.....if it were to be told I'm sure Piglet and Roo would be all "He seemed like such a nice guy, real quiet. Cuddly, always on the look out for some honey." Yep, it's always the ones we least suspect.
Well back to childhood memories that forever warped my addled brain into the shape it is today, which is vaguely walnut-y from what I've heard.
Some where between N.S. and the middle of fricking nowhere Dad stopped at a restaurant for some much needed food and we all gathered round the table and chowed down. I'm pretty sure I had a grilled cheese because after all they are the perfect diner food, simple, basic and pretty non-evil. You never have to poke about a grilled cheese when you're a child to see if some one slipped some pickled beef tongue or burnt onions or worse yet CANNED PEAS in to it. (young version of me=picky picky eater)
Anyways Dad must have finished a lot faster than us kids as he was already on to dessert and he ordered something called..BAKED ALASKA.
I in all childish innocence queried "what is baked Alaska?" and was about to have my little grey matter cells blown away.
"baked ice cream"
Huh whahhhhhhhh? Say whaaaaaahhh?
You're joshing me Dad, you're trying pull a fast one over ol' red here. I might have been only 7 but I knew that sounded insane. Ice cream plus heat equals tears from me on a hot summer day when the ice cream melts too fast to keep up. Dad's trying to tell me they deliberately melt ice cream here and he was about to pay for some????????
Dad went on to explain as he placed his order already for a Baked Alaska that I could have one too when I finished my grilled cheese and that the ice cream wouldn't be melted. It would be covered in stuff and baked, yadda yadda. I was 7, my little grilled cheese infused mind could only latch on to the words ice cream. Some sort of magical ice cream that didn't melt and would be baked and would be mine if I could just hurry the hell up and finished this now worthless, annoying stomach filling bit of fried bread and cheese. Like any child the notion of dessert filled me with a shining sparkling hope for the full glory of sticky, ooey, gooey sweet sugar anything and like any child had the immediate and clever rationale that if I eat this grilled cheese I will not have as much room for the afore mentioned dessert of my dreams to fit in my stomach. Parents burn out a little part of their brains when they have kids, it's ok. I can say this cause I don't have any kids and I can see the difference. I'm thinking it's the indignities of giving birth and raising a pooping, peeing, squalling child for the next..ohhh 20 years that deadens a tiny part of their brains, and a good thing too, cause otherwise how can they put up with a whining 7 year old at a diner restaurant with a plate of barely touched grilled cheese that will go to waste if not eaten, still has to be paid for and is now desperately wanting to change her dinner order to just a Baked Alaska.
I say thank God for what ever it is that happens in parent's brains cause if it didn't happen there'd be no worries about over population of the earth ever again if it should suddenly turn off, or on depending on your view point. People would just never have kids again if they didn't experience the mind numbing euphoria that I suppose is creating another human life. Eventually we'd just die out, all of us playing video games and drinking margaritas on Tuesdays and going to incredibly quiet movie theater premieres run by the elderly, starring the elderly and watched by the elderly.
But I was 7, and Dad was a Dad so he didn't explode and cram grilled cheese down my throat like I'd be tempted to do if I could go back in time and meet my childhood self.
I pick at my now cold, non oozing grilled cheese. As miraculous as a hot freshly grilled cheese sandwich is it loses a bit of something as it cools. It;s kind of like the reverse of ice cream. There is a definite window of good eating opportunity for both things. With ice cream it's before it melts, with a grilled cheese it's before the fat it was fried in starts solidifying, the melting processed cheese starts siezing up and the inside of your moth becomes coated with cold nasty grease that clings to gums like a second skin.
Dad has his baked Alaska by now, as I'm now going through the agonies of trying to finish the damn endless grilled cheese sandwich from hell. A grilled cheese sandwich that is clearly out to get me and kep me from getting any dessert. I'm pretty sure the cook at the diner just took a full loaf of bread, sliced it in half and jammed a block of velveeta cheese in the middle and deep fried the whole thing before slapping it on a plate and giving it to me. I'm pretty sure that sandwich was like the world's biggest fricking grilled cheese sandwich ever.
I can't recall what my Dad's Baked Alaska looked like, as I was so distracted by the G.C.S.F.H. (grilled cheese sandwich from hell). I remember it was brown, and unbelievably like it had actually been in an oven just as Dad had said. Turned out a parent wasn't lying in this instance, sure there's no Santa, Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy but that ball of ice cream had CLEARLY BEEN IN AN OVEN!!!!!!!!
Hallelujah
Suddenly a wave of greyness washes over me.....time slowed down in the horrifying about to have a train wreck kind of way it does and Dad's face is anything but blissfully happy as he sets down his spoon.
I feel like I'm speaking in slow motion, under water as I ask "Whhhhhhhhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaattttttttt'sssss wwwwrrrrrrrrrrrrooonnnnnnnggg?"
Dad raises his hand and in a surprisingly authoritative and enviable way snaps his fingers that has a waiter rushing over at break neck speeds. Perhaps he felt the wave of grey awash over him too and knew that hell was pushing against the doors and about to break loose.
I can't remember all that was said, I remember my Dad's dark scowl, the waiter's slightly appalled frightened face, the finger pointing down at his dessert and then......I remember something small and black in the pool of creamy melting ice cream. Something that most definitely should NOT have been there. Some kind of bug, or worm or insect. I can't recall, it was too horrifying to even reconcile in my 7 year old brain.
The waiter apologizes all over the place, I think the manager was called out, I remember they offered to bring out a new Baked Alaska and I remember my Father's look of incredulity of "Yeah right."
I remember the slowly dawning realization that we were now leaving, meals abandoned, and that we were getting in to the van and headed back out on to the road to the middle of fricking no where.
Wait a second......I'm not getting a Baked Alaska? I mean I know that Dad's had some critter crawling around his but my 7 year old mind couldn't quite except the fact I wasn't getting a Baked Alaska. Not today....not ever.
I never saw Baked Alaska on a menu again.
I looked at photos of them in cook books as I grew older, I read about how they were made and always, surprisingly it remains on a gleaming pedestal, untainted and unspoiled in my mind. Despite it's one and only appearance in my life, as an infested dessert the Baked Alaska remains to this day a dessert of indulgence and mystery. Hot and cold at the same time, ice cream from an oven.
I kind of wonder if I have built it up to the level in my head that no actual Baked Alaska could be as good as what I imagine it to be. I almost never want to try one, not for fear of experiencing the gut twisting stomach churning reaction my father had but because worse than that...what if it's....o.k. Just....o.k., not food of the Gods, not ambrosia or sweet fairy like fluffy confections delivered by other worldly chefs in to my eagerly awaiting hands. What if it sucks?
I just don't know.
Do not fret though inner child, for we are off to console ourselves with homemade chocolate pudding, fresh strawberries, salted pecans, chocolate shavings and a dollop of vanilla ice cream. It aint a Baked Alaska but it aint bad.

Stopping Stalling.....

The measure of personal success is how many times you've stalled in life..or just in the car.
In my case I am down to zero stalls a day. Wow, I know, who knew the gear grinding, abrupt bone rattling herky jerky motion of the car seizing up when I release the clutch too fast was actually a working metaphor for life. (as well as an obvious measure of my driving prowess)
To think that I went from an average of 7 stalls a day (ok maybe it was more like 12) to zero in under 2 months is astounding. What's this? Every one and their dog drives, big frigging deal?
Out! Git you outta my blog, it IS a big deal.
The whole fricking world is full of things that *every one* just does, just blusters through as if it's easy squeezy puddin' n' pie while a few of us watch in wide eyed horror as all their teenaged hooligan acquaintances go from zero to 60 miles an hour in the single breath of blowing out their 16 birthday candles.
SOME of us didn't run around charged up on hormones and sugar laden soft drinks and cheesy Dorito chips and hot cinnamon gum with music blasting their own personal anthem through earphones whilst tooling about in their parent's car.
SOME of us some how missed the typical teenage boat that carried all their car driving friends away whilst you stood on the shores of self pity consoling yourself with ice cream that was heavily laden with your own salty tears. Not because you wanted to drive too, but because you just didn't *get* this pulsating desire of every one else to drive, it costs money, you need a vehicle and on top of that one that works for more than 2 weeks at a time. My parents were cool folks but God love em they couldn't keep a car working even if their ability to get to and from town and work depended on it, which it did....
So years can easily past, the kids you baby sat for think it's a riot that you're over 16 and don't drive, they pepper you with incessant questions like "don't you want to drive?" "are you evvvvvvvvvver going to get your license??" "No really, you don't have your license? why? why? why?" "why are you stalling? whyyyyy?"
It's questions like those that put the sit back in baby sitting, nothing like squashing a small child under a mound of pillows, unanswered questions and your own weight. (no children were permanently harmed in the making of my life)
Time marches by in the quirky mind messing way it does where you realize your high school friends are now out of college, the kids you baby sat for are 16 and before you can say vrooom vrooom they're tearing up the roads, brand spankin' new licenses burning holes in their pockets as they too partake in the joys of free-wheelin' freedom and you realize...holy crap. The sweet little youngin's who used to sit on your lap and watch Disney movies are now licensed??
The gap between the mysterious car driving awareness age of 16 and your own oldering years widens. What seemed crazy when you were a kid seems next to impossible when you're pushing 30 and then...sitting smack dab on TOP of thirty, enjoying the view and the super powers every 30 year old acquires.
So I set a goal for myself, I will get my license, but first I had to get my California Beginner's. No more stalling unless it was literally in the car. My first discovery is y'all don't call it a beginner's down here, it's a learner's permit. This newly acquired information sends me into spasms of anxiety for at least a week. The second thing I am informed rather morosely by the DMV worker is that I need a social security number, an American one.
As if I don't have enough *necessary* papers by now.... I'm so glad that I have an entire folder full of papers and documentations and Identifications to prove that I exist. I'd hate to have to rely on my own physical being, my flesh and blood and sweat and tears to prove that I am indeed real, and certainly not a figment of any one's imagination.
Life is strange...
I'm getting it tattooed on my head, swear to Gawwwd, one of these days you're going to see a crazed woman throwing back coffees and muttering to herself about idiot drivers and you'll know it's me. No, not because of the extra glint of insanity that shines with in my eye, not the hair for sure as I might pull it all out by then, no, you'll recognize me by the tattoo in lovely Edwardian Script across my forehead..."Life is Strange" Pretty but practical, having one's personal motto so "in your face" so to speak.
I wonder if when we die and go to heaven God makes you fill out a form in triplicate and give fingerprints...I'd ask a dead relative but none of them ever haunt me.....
But anyways all the teeth clenching, nerve stretching time it took to work myself up to writing the California's driver's test was for naught as I now had to get a SSN card. Oh joy...... but time passes. In the mean time I practice not stalling the car in the drive way...that's right! My husband started teaching me to drive before I even got my license. (cause we're rebels that way...You get the irony here right?....woman waits till she's freakishly afraid to drive and past 30 to start getting her license and considers herself a rebel??? hmm)
I practiced my clutching and non-stalling techniques in the drive way every day. I practiced backing up, turning around and parking. I can do a 3 point turn but my specialty is the 7.5 point turn. I practiced stopping the car on the steep incline and starting it with out rolling backwards (we have a standard transmission in case that isn't obvious by now).
Then I practiced not hyperventilating when the car rolled back the first time I tried stopping on the hill and taking off but ended up rolling backwards and then stalling the car in a shuddering bucking heap of metal that I mimicked by shivering uncontrollably and gasping great car scented breaths. Good times....
Who knew the driveway was so damn exciting. But 2.5 months of checking the mail box every day for my dang SSN number paid off because ...I'm gonna say it...I made that driveway my beeee-otch. That driveway shudders in fear when it sees me coming...ohhh yeaaaaah.
So here I was 2.5 months later, brand new SSN number in hand and I am back to square one, which is in line at the DMV, overworked brain trying desperately to recall the 5 million different speed limits for different roads (65 for the freeway unless otherwise posted, 55 for undivided high ways in case you're curious, 15 miles an hour when approaching a blind intersection, 25 in a residential or school zone and zero if you're parked)
Oh and don't think I didn't notice how the universe threw me that damn SSN card curve ball, nothing like an enforced wait before doing something that makes you disgustingly nervous, as in sitting in a pool of what's hopefully your own sweat and gibbering like a fool next to your beloved sweetums who has more faith in your memory than you do type nervousness.
Of course the wait is fairly long despite the amazingly controlled and professional atmosphere of the DMV. I gotta say, all the crap I have heard about DMVs and this one was like an anti-DMV. I thought I'd be waited on by Satan and poked with a red hot pitchfork or something from the way people go on about the DMV. Not so though, people were polite, it was relatively quiet and the lines moved at a steady pace, lots of television screens so you could see as well as hear your number being called. Why if they'd had a hot pretzel stand I might even consider going back just for the hell of it, a nice Tuesday afternoon date with my husband so we could take in the free show that is the theatre of life!
Finally it's my turn to have my thumb print taken, my photo snapped (great idea by the way, blind the person who is about to take the written test....thanks again universe)
I take the test and my first horror is realizing the test sheet is long and rectangular, I was prepared for a wide rectangular, not skinny rectangular. I resist the urge to erupt into a wailing mass of female hysteria and biting my lip I forge ahead in a truly inspiring display of nerves. (well inspiring for me.)
Waiting inline to have my test corrected takes an eternity, this is no fault of the DMV but my own flustered brain that is trying not to second guess every answer I gave, trying not to wonder if the old man behind me is slowly inching closer so he can perhaps cop a feel or sneak a peek at my answers, both a no no in my book.
The DMV lady takes my test and I proceed to hold my breath so that not a single sound escapes from my body as I strain my ears to hear the words that will mark my fate.....pass or fail? Pass or fail?
FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD AND HOLY LADY DID I PASS OR FAIL? Screamed silently into the darkness inside my brain of course. As if sensing the impending crack in my composure she flicks a glance up at me and casually dishes out my much anticipated grade.
"Pass."
I grin, one of those lip stretching wide faced grins that probably bares too many teeth and looks a tad maniacal but I can't help it. She's drawn a smiley face on my test and all I can say in my coolest voice possible, as if 30 year old women write their driver's permit exam every day is "oh, look a smiley face." BRILLIANT!
I am brilliant, I am conversing, I am awash with joy and finally as she mutters on about needing a licensed driver over 18 in the car with me at all times while driving I look harder at my test and see that my score is........ONE HUNDRED PERCENT.
I am a DMV driver's handbook genius!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I am road ready.
I have a full year before my learner's permit expires in which to practice driving and one day....one fine golden sun filled day I will get that damn piece of plastic that separates me from every one else and I will be..a fully licensed driver....muahh ahhhh ahhhhh.
No longer am I stalling, nope I'm revving my engines and popping it into 1st gear and coasting down the drive way of life at hair raising speeds of over 5 miles an hour.
Sweeeeeeeeeet.

Legless Lizards My Ass....

Occasionally, like any normal 30 year old woman, I surf the net and look at photos of lizards. You know, so I can find out if the blue bellied beasties in my yard are poisonous and going to gather together in a cold blooded strike force against me one day if I keep snapping photos of them. Never once asking their permission, never once asking them to sign a waiver that states I am free to use their likeness in perpetuity, never once considering that my heavy humanoid breath blowing across their scales might be delivering a stagnant breeze of ill will and fear into their poor little lizard hearts.....
Anyways during one such lizard look up on the net I ran across.....legless lizards.
HA!
I wasn't born yesterday, no one dropped me on my head and my leg can't be pulled any harder. I'm dragging out all the colloquialisms in my arse...ok I mean my arsenal but wouldn't arse be a fricking riot instead? Made ya blink didn't it?
The wool has long since been removed from my eyes, I'm no dweeby dunce, I know about legless lizards only where I come from they're called Ssssssssssssssssnakes. Genetics Sche-metics, if it looks like a s-s-s-snake...it's a s-s-s-s-snake.
BLECK!
I know about snakes too, oh I know all about them, snakes ARE EVIL.
I'm not throwing any biblical references around here either, I just know from looking at them and by the very nature of their existence that they ARE EVIL. I mean you don't have to have a degree in slitherin' snake-ology to figure this out, all it takes is one interaction with the belly crawlin' varmints to realize THEY ARE EVIL.
I can not stress this enough, I'd need a helicopter, a bull horn and a big ass stick to make my point as crystal clear as I can, SNAKES ARE EVIL.
Like any gal who's got a pure and unfettered hatred of snakes I have a brother who must have a few screws loose, a few marbles lost and a bat or two in his belfry (see colloquialisms all over the dang place today) because this boy....liked snakes. I mean he deliberately went about the fields LOOKING for them, not realizing looking for a snake is just looking for trouble. It's like walking down a dark alley in the middle of the night with a hundred dollar bill stuck to your forehead and a can of whip cream in your hand...it's just stupid.
Occasionally he'd find one of...them...them wiggling, slithering, squirming, twisting, writhing little demons and brandish it in the air like he'd won a fricking trophy. I developed super vision when he did this, I could be a million yards away and my eyes would zoom in on the thing he held in his hand.
My heart would slam against the inside of my chest, hard enough to jolt me out of my frozen immobility and I'd holler across the slowly decreasing distance between my brother and I as he smiled happily and advanced on me to show off his new..*shudders* friend.
"Michael, don't come near me with that thing!!!"
"Why? It's not slimy, you think it's slimy don't you? It's NOT slimy."
Oh yeah, right like that's gonna make all the difference in the world, the evil spawn of satan isn't SLIMY????? Well bring it on then boy, bring it on. HA!
NO, H, E, double hockey sticks NO!
I'd calmly start backing up in a dignified, lady like retreat and holler to him,
"Michael, if you come near me with it I am going to freak out, I mean seriously freak out, I am GOING TO FREAK OUT!!! DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME???"
And then, I'd hit him with the best piece of logic that cuts through a younger brother's delight at his sister's drooling, backwards scramble away from him, I hit him where it hurt most....I jabbed him right straight through the heart of his deep and loyal love of s-s-s-s-snakes.
"Michael, if you come near me with that snake, I will freak out and I will hurt the snake. Do you understand, I don't want to but I will, by accident.....but I will."
Michael would pause, a frown wrinkling his forehead as he cradled the tiny bit of earthly evil in his hands and now it was he who would back up. A truce realized, at least for the moment.
I have never hurt a snake, let me make that clear.
Unless seeing a grown woman shudder like a Californian earthquake is damaging to the snake's psyche, I have never hurt a snake.
Not even when I lived back home in Canada and would be merrily traipsing down our country drive way, on my way to check the mail. Day dreaming about ice cream, how to get ice cream and wondering when I'd get ice cream again, and then it would happen....
I would freeze midstep and suddenly become aware on some unconscious level that's hammering on the door of my conscious level to start haulin' ass because "look down, look down, there is evil about!"
To this day I remember, finally looking down and a s-s-s-s-snake was curled up in the middle of the drive way and I had already taken a step over and was frozen for an eternity of 2 whole seconds realizing I had yet to complete the step.
I think I levitated, I seriously think I must have spontaneously levitated for a moment, for one gigantic physics defying bound later I was over and past the curled up evil sunning itself evilly in the middle of our now evilly tainted driveway, I leapt forward in giant strides and didn't stop till I was off the gravel driveway and on to the safety of the cement road where I shivered and quivered and broke out in enough goosebumps that I hardly recognized myself....and still I couldn't quell the rising stomach churning nauseated feeling that can only be described as "ughhhhewwwwwwwwwwecccckkk"
I am not sure the logic behind my next actions though it made a hell of a lot of sense at the time but I started freaking out a wee bit more even though the snake was no where near me and beat at my ankles as if it was twining itself around my limbs, I ripped off my sneakers and bounded a good 6 feet away on the cement in case any snakes should be lurking within in them and kept on the move, ya know, dodge and weave, a moving target is a less likely to be snake attacked target.....
My brother Michael thinks that is hilarious, he tries to explain how silly the whole jumping in the air like a mentally un-balanced ballerina doesn't do anything, especially if the snake is practically a mile away by now....uh huh, he thinks I'M CRAZY? He who looks for, touches and...l-l-l-l-likes s-s-s-s-snakes?
To this day ever since the un-expected encounter with a supposedly harmless snake that deliberately chose the middle of our drive way as a lovely place to snooze so he could mess with my mind when I went to check the mail I have been on alert for snakes.
In California there are...r-r-r-rattle snakes and I'm sorry I just can't wrap my head around that, any snake is bad enough and now there are supposedly musical ones that can BITE YOU AND POISON YOU?
When I walk outside I have my very own patented snake expert walk that I do, every step I take I bring my foot down on to the ground like thunder, as a warning to any hidden or invisible snakes in the area to get the hell outta here cause I'm a comin' through. You think I'm exaggerating?
The last earthquake california had I'm pretty sure was just me out back getting some oranges off the tree.
I wish I was joking, but you have no idea how unbelievably tiring it is to stomp my way through 15 feet of rugged terrain (aka grass and dirt) to the orange tree, with my head swiveling about like it's coming unhinged as I'm becoming unhinged trying to grow a third eye so I can keep an extra look out for hissing coils of evil in the grass. Luckily the neighbors don't think too much of me stomping and scowling about with my arms full of oranges and eyes bugging outta my head, they just think "There goes that Canadian again."
Legless lizards my ass. You know who came up with that don't you? S-s-s-s-snake lovers, trying to put a nice spin on the un-spinnable, you can call them marshmallow frosted dimples for all I care, if it's long and squirmy and has no legs....it's A SNAKE.
p.s. May I just say how calm and collected I am being right now, if you fully understand my deep and abiding vault of distaste and...dare I admit it..fear I have of s-s-s-snakes then you'd be clapping your hands at my being able to add the photo of one to my blog. Also that all my typing hasn't been reduced to lkc.nasqw .kvncc,m nm,xhfjkd.
By the way, what cruel joke is it that I should meet and marry the love of my life, a California resident and find out that the s-s-s-s-snakes around here are at least 4 or 5 times as long as the ones we had back home in rural Nova Scotia. I snapped the photo of the s-s-s-s-snake above with our telephoto lens from the safety of our patio and that was a year ago and still I have not calmed down or quit absent mindedly beating my ankles to be sure no s-s-s-s-snakes have snuck up on me and taken up residence there......
The only thing that makes me feel a little tiny itsy bitsy miniscule sized amount better about that s-s-s-s-snake photo is that we identified it as a California King s-s-s-s-snake and supposedly they eat rattle s-s-s-s-snakes.
Oh yeah, I know I feel a hell of a lot better knowing the greenery that looks so pretty at a distance is woven with insanenly long living ropes of evil with bellies full of rattles...ughhhh.
S-s-s-s-snakes...they're just so very wrong.

The rabbit shaped hole in my heart.......

(This rabbit is hollow and empty, just like me on Easter Morning)

We were heathen hillbillies. So forgive me but when I think of Easter my first and only thought is "Why the hell did the Easter bunny stop bringing me chocolate?"
Seriously?
What's up with that? Did I do something to piss the E.B. off? It's not like I was enjoying rabbit stew or pie every other day, its not like I ate his kin or something.
For many a year this freakishly large but painfully shy rabbit hopped his way through our neighborhood leaving treats for all the kids. I never saw him but I'm no idiot, I saw the evidence of his visit. Chocolate rabbits, chocolate eggs and jelly beans don't just manifest themselves you know.
I mean there's a lot of things in this world we're expected to believe based on heresay and faith but the rabbit...he left some evidence. A little "I wuz here" in an edible form, occasionally he'd even display a sense of humour and leave a few non-edible treats. Pink rubber boots one year, a stuffed bunny toy (perhaps in his own likeness???), another year he left me a Star Trek:The Next Generation Collector's plate with Data's face on the front...my God, it's like he was looking right in to my soul. Chocolate AND Star Trek??
Maybe the Easter Bunny was in kahoots with Santa. Maybe he was paying the old guy off with pastel coloured candies in return for the dirt on all us kids. But unlike Santa who's all judgey judgey about whether we've been good or bad the Easter Bunny just wants to know what kind of candy you'd like, what size boots you wear and which Star Trek: The Next Generation character was your favorite.
Until he stops coming.
Parents are pretty sadistic if you think about it. When you're a kid it's all Easter Bunny this, the Tooth Fairy that, Santa Clause every Christmas and then....they wait...until your eyes have reached the soft doe eyed expression of a true believer, your world is full of magic and make-believe and sweet candy and Star Trek: The Next Generation collector plates....they wait until they have you just where they want you. Expecting the Easter Bunny to make his yearly deposit of sugary goodness in a pretty little basket and hop away to the next place and then.......
He doesn't come.
The parents stay in their room snickering at the bewildered howls of the 20 year old in the kitchen who is sweeping her busted illusions off the linoleum floor. There's no taste of cheap rabbit shaped chocolate for her any more, just the salty bitter tears of reality.
Oh yeah.
No one ever explains AWAY the Easter Bunny.
The adults take great pride in their skill of weaving the reality of old dudes in red coats who have magic powers that let him fit down any chimney. They craft incredibly detailed accounts of what the tooth fairy shall do with the tooth she collected under your pillow, and they lure you with sweet promises of a giant rabbit who for no apparent reason at all in the dull tail end of winter, when spring is still a distant promise of green away, will sneak in to the house at night and bring you.......CANDY.
Just like that, free candy and you don't even need to slather an inch of makeup on your face and go begging at the neighbors for it all night like on Halloween. FREE candy from a GIANT Rabbit.
Until......it stops.
There's no funeral to go to, no graduation ceremony, no party wishing a giant, grizzled old hare a happy retirement. Nothing, zip, nada, zilch...no more......the end.
I never give up hope though, perhaps the Easter Bunny lost my address. Maybe he and Santa were using the same database and it crashed, these things happen you know, and would conveniently explain away old Saint Nick's lack of appearance these last few years. And of course I have a moved a few times.....that could have muddied the waters.....
I'm not quite ready to set any snares in my yard just yet. I'd give the hairy old hare a chance to explain he and his lack of chocolate away for a least a full minute before I had me one hell of a pet rabbit chained up in my garage.
So I sit, and I wait, one on eye on the clock and one eye on my growling, barely restrained craving for bunny shaped chocolate, trying to hold my stomach and emotions in check.
Sure I can buy it in a day or two for 90% less than it's price right now but it's not the same.
I don't want store bought chocolate, I want it from HIM...
Every year I wait........fingers drumming on my desk....until sleep knocks me unconscious for refusing to go to bed. And every year I awake to bright morning sunshine, a new day and a decidedly depressing lack of any rabbit deposited chocolate.
Do I cry?
Maybe a little, till I tuck those tears away in to a hard little ball of revenge that resides under my heart. Where I will harbor and nurture and grow my anger like a dark and lovely plant that's riddled with thorns and poisonous berries and one of these years....one of these years...... I won't be waiting by the door for a damn rabbit and his crappy chocolate.
I'll be out there.....he won't need to come find me cause I'll be looking for him.
And in the immortal words of our beloved Elmer Fudd..
"It's Wabbit season, and I'm hunting wabbits, so be vewy, vewy quiet!"

I Scream.....

I like shock value. It's thrilling, we the people, we like thrilling don't we. Who cares about a walk down the street we want diving behind trash cans, rolling away from the wheels of an oncoming semi and hurtling through the air over grey haired grannies and their walkers as you skid to the cross walk and THEN...cross...against the red light.
Excitement we love it.
But I don't get bacon ice cream. Is that wrong of me? I don't get it and I'm a wee bit heart broken to hear of so many people apparently *getting it*. I think what they need is an ounce of reality up side the head. Bacon is meat. Therefore IT NEVER TOUCHES ICE CREAM.
I don't get this sudden rash..make that rasher (ha ha) of bacon ice cream recipes etc. It's every where, I can't turn around the ice creamy goodness parts of the world wide web with out bumping up against bacon ice cream. It's worse then accidentally opening an email that your relative sent out to every one in their address book that was obviously and graphically intended for their significant other only....Worse than innocently clicking on a web link for a site that seems like it's going to be about striped mittens but it turns out it's people who like to wear striped mittens...and that's all. Hey, what ever blows your bubbles, but it don't blow mine and I don't like the idea of bacon in ice cream.
I'm ok with it touching pancakes (bacon that is) as that love union was made ages ago. But it shouldn't even enter in to the thought of ice cream. Some things are scared. You can make all the jokes about God, your Mother and the President/Prime Minister but you sure as hell don't F*#K around with ice cream.
I mean I don't care if it tastes good, it's wrong. And I'm fully admitting that it might taste good, bacon ice cream *shudddddddders* to some people but I'm sorry it's still wrong.
If I want ice cream that means I'm having a dessert, a sweet treat not an astronaut-ish all in one meal kind of thing.
Hey here's an idea if bacon is so damned great why don't y'all slap some in your shampoo, cause mmm bacon smells good and we want it every where we can get it. Do they make bacon scented personal lubricants? Well apparently they ought to. Bacon flavored baby teething rings? Genius!
And ladies, nothing says romance like a triple layer chocolate wedding cake with copious amounts of bacon sprinkled through out. Why even crisp it up? Why not just leave it all fatty and nasty, so you can get a real good bacon experience. Why sugar coat it and pretend it's something it's not. Let it retain a little slime factor if you really want the bacon experience.
Hey, I like bacon. But we have rules in this household, no hitting, no hissing at our cats and NO PUTTING BACON IN THE FRICKING ICE CREAM!
Have they made a bacon flavored vodka? Go ahead ya bunch of sickos go ahead, whip up your bacon flavored vodkas see if I care. It makes more sense than ice cream I can tell ya that. Maybe, just maybe I could sort of come to an understanding with a bacon flavored vodka but my ice cream is precious to me. Ice cream is a treat, if done right it's a bit of a pricey treat. Pricey compared to the artificially flavored, preservative filled .33 cent candy bars I could get instead at a grocery store check out. Why would I need to add bacon to that?
When I have ice cream I'm not just filling a void in my diet I'm having an experience. I don't eat/gulp ice cream. I don't want to be so dazzled by anything while I'm having it that I mindlessly shovel it in and forget to relish every taste. Are you telling me that if you eat bacon ice cream you're not gonna be constantly going,
"wow, bacon ice cream, I'm eating bacon ice cream. Who'd a thunk it? This taste better than I would have expected. It's funny, I don't feel weird at all."
Clank. The spoon hits the bowl, treat is over and you've haven't truly experienced a oneness with the marvel that is ice cream because you were so damn focused on eating bacon in it and not gagging.
There's a good slogan
"Bacon Ice cream : It doesn't make you gag!"
I'm all about experimentation, I too have heard the siren's call of the kitchen muse who whispers sweetly in your ear. Try a little salt on that chocolate, try a little cayenne on that strawberry...what will happen if you switch white flour and use whole wheat instead........ Usually I'll give the kitchen muse a whirl around the dance floor and try the suggestions, as extreme as a little dried pasilla pepper in a mega chocolate cookie even....but the day she comes slithering up to me slyly suggesting I put smoked pig belly in my luscious homemade ice cream is the day I bitch slap her ass back to muse-ville where she can dang well stay until kingdom come and I sit back here savoring REAL un-tainted ice cream.
I don't mean to sound harsh and unforgiving like a total kitchen bitch who thinks every thing should be done her way.........that's what I am, but I'm trying not to come across that way so my point can be sharped to a fine honed bit that will pierce the veil of infatuation with bacon.
In a sandwich...good....in a pie...maybe..IF it's a potato pie, in a sweet pie, helllll no. In a sandwich, yes, in a cookie.....have you learned nothing??????? NO NO NO NO NO!
Maybe it's because I have such special memories of ice cream. Maybe because when I was a kid we were far from rich and ice cream was reserved for special occasions, birthdays and...ummmm...that's about it for the most part. We did have ice cream at other times and it was like a miracle, ice cream and no body got born-ed on that day that we know? Hallelujah. Non-birthday ice cream tasted ever the more sweeter for it's rarity and surprise. You EXPECT to get ice cream on your little brother's birthday, you DON'T expect to get ice cream on a Thursday night in the middle of May.
Oh poor me, only getting ice cream on birthdays, well there were other occasions like I said the rare Thursday plus I aligned myself early on with fellow ice cream addicts who appreciated a non celebratory cone in the summer as much as I did. I thank my lucky stars I had such an addict in my life who made ice cream an event, the way it ought to be. Buying a 2 liter tub of it to eat, scooping it up with cookies, no dishes or utensils of any kind. Sitting on the side of the road over looking a lazy river. Silence but for the occasional crunch of cookie. And every crunch was an accidental bite cause no one in their right mind eats the cookie spoon on purpose, it literally was the transportation unit to allow ice cream to travel to our mouths with out freezing our fingers. We were at once with the ice cream, we savoured every taste, letting it melt in cool, sweet glory on our young tongues.
What sort of ice cream does one bask in on a lovely grey day on the side of the road with a fellow ice cream addict.......Liverwurst and onion.
A HA!
Did you flinch???
Of course you did, that sounds disgusting doesn't it. It was Neapolitan, a simple and humble flavor that satisfied every kid, as there was something there for every one....apparently though there were some kids who were jonesing for a little bacon to be tossed in the mix as they grew up and created just that.
Maybe that's the problem, they grew up.
Maybe they forgot how special ice cream is.
One time, actually one of the last times I visited my Grandma while she stilled lived in her home she had an ice cream cake. One of those super hard, pre-made sorts that has an eerily good layer of chocolate crumble between the top layer of vanilla ice cream and the bottom layer of chocolate. You hear that? Vanilla ice cream, chocolate crumble, chocolate ice cream. There was no layer of BBQ steak anywheres at all in there. If there had been Grandma would have raised an eyebrow and flung the thing out the kitchen window...ok she has more class than that but I don't. I'd have flung it. Then I'd have cried.
Another time when I was a really young kid my Aunt and Uncle took my brother and I to get an ice cream cone at a local joint. I ordered something creamy white with swirls of pink and big gobs of red in it. I ordered based on what I saw in the tub not the label.
"Are you sure that's what you want?" My Uncle wisely asked.
I was undeterred, it looked marvelous, it looked rich and delicious, a little fruity and oh so decadent I was practically drooling like a mad dog on the display case.
The scooper handed me the cone and I took that first lick and my heart literally broke. I can still remember the pain. It actually hurt to have another bite. I was a half decent kid so I didn't sob and whine for another cone. Nobody we knew was rich so there was no "buy me another cone cause I decided this flavor doesn't suit my palette."
I was stuck, trying to eat this weirdly sour...crap.
I couldn't understand it. What in the hell sort of ice cream did I get? Finally I did what I should have done in the beginning and I read the label.
Strawberry yogurt.
For a kid, whose ice cream cones were much too scare for her liking this was literally the most painful ice cream experience of my life. I ordered YOGURT ice cream. (As an adult I acquired a certain taste for it but it's not ice cream. Who are we kidding, it's tasty as all heck if you get a good brand but it's NOT ice cream)
I will never order frozen yogurt if there's the option of ice cream. That's like choosing a tootsie roll over a homemade fudge brownie. Nothing wrong with a tootsie roll...but it aint no fudge brownie.
By the way before I forget, how about a nice batch of bacon yogurt? Maybe it ought to be bacon strawberry yogurt. Breakfast in a tub. Friendly bacteria for your innards with a dollop of fried bacon in every bite. Oh boy.
If there's one thing I've learned in life so far it's that every one is different. Every one has different tastes. And I've learned mine sure as heck doesn't run to bacon flavored ice cream.
Y'all go ahead and enjoy it, if you really, truly are enjoying it more power to you.
I'll save my bacon for a BLT and I'll have a bowl of sweet homemade chocolate fudge ripple ice cream afterwards. Or maybe I'll have a scoop of rum raisin. Of course it's always hard to choose between cookie dough ice cream and Irish cream liqueur ice cream. There was that peach pie ice cream that was pretty tasty, that and an accompanying scoop of raspberry cheesecake ice cream would be soooo satisfying.....oh shoot I forgot about the pecan praline..hmmm...oh man pecan praline and a double scoop of coffee ice cream with a drizzle of hot fudge sauce and a wee scoop of pure vanilla ice cream on top.
Mmmmmm
but y'all go ahead, have your bacon ice cream.
More of every other kind for me!

366 Days of a Publicized Big Mouth

"...its like wow she had a lot to say just about that one lil thing"
Yes, yes I do.
I think my sister said it best. Though more politely than I would have.
I have a lot to say about any little thing, because...I....am a big mouth.
Which is good actually, very convenient for cramming such goodies as cakes, donuts and baked potatoes into, AND for holding the umpteen million words that flow from my brain in a mad rush to get off my tongue and into the free world.
Usually there's a verbal traffic jam around my lateral incisor. Words like "dang it" and "frick" not to mention "rump" tend to get caught on the edge of that tooth, causing a crazy pile up of nouns and adjectives, usually I can sort them out though before spewing unintelligible blather upon the public. Though occasionally a few still lurk in there unbeknownst to me.....I can't tell you how much I hate rinsing my mouth out at the end of a day and spitting a few choice words in to the sink, I'm always like "dang, so that's where all my pleases and thank-yous ended up. Damn you lateral incisor, damn you." It's not ME who's the inconsiderate un-thanker, it's my damn tooth in my big mouth.
Today is the one year anniversary of my revealing my amazing big mouth to the world. One year since I starting adding my own 7 cents (I'm worth a hell of a lot more than 2) to the internet instead of just reading every one else's thoughts and ideas. There's nothing wrong with all those other blogs out there, I enjoy many of them tremendously but none of them are written by me and therein lies the problem.... I want to be a blogger tooooooo, I want to share my amazing meals, crazy random ideas, my rants about things that really tick me off, photos of my wine, lips and hair, memories about my childhood, wild schemes to hide from God, poems about dead monkeys, my occasional threesomes and how to's, like fixing a saggy seat. I wanted a place to showcase the 48 rolls of toilet paper we buy at a time, our forays into rotten cabbage, drunk cookie videos, recipes and lessons I learned from Super Mario. And this, like so many other kazillion people before me, this *blog* thing is the place to do that. (call me crazy but you all better keep an eye on these *blogs* I think it's really going to catch on)
Ya see the thing is you can't walk up to people on the street and launch into a description of what you had for supper, complete with snapshots hauled out of your pocket, slightly wrinkled as you forgot about the bend affect of jamming pics into your jeans pocket and then sitting in a parked car on the side of the road for 2 hours until you see a likely candidate who looks like they could use a freakishly detailed accounting of your meals. I have found, that either people don't care or that wrinkled photos detract from your humorous commentary on apple pie. People are less likely to run screaming if you have nice digital photos on a computer screen then wrinkled ones pulled from your pockets....I guess.....I couldn't say for sure....I don't make people run screaming.......perhaps there's been the odd time or two where COINCIDENTALLY some one ran screaming and I had wrinkled photos of my French fries....but that was NOT my doing. Perhaps they saw a spider and were deathly afraid of spiders...yes that's it....
A blog solves all of that, now I can just roll with style down the street calling out a casual yet elegant "read my blog at www.StuffByTace.com" to persons waiting at the bus stop. There's no screaming, no running, and even if they were doing any of that what do I care? I'm rolling down the street to the next bus stop.....
I love my blog.
Plus I'm sure all my friends and family can't get enough of me and a tiny peek into the inner workings of my mind could be a joy and a cheap thrill not to mention satisfy that little piece deep inside their hearts that wants a voyeuristic peek into our lives with out committing to getting a damn passport and hauling ass down here for a visit.....(this portion of the blog entry is brought to you by relatives who like to guilt other relatives into hauling ass down for a visit while turning a blind eye to their own negligent hauling ass duties)
Remember folks, hauling ass goes both ways.
So here I am, lil ol' me splattered all over the world wide web for all to enjoy and roll their eyes at. Go ahead, eye roll all you want but I'm pleased to be contributing original content to the internet, mind you some of it is hopeless drivel and most of it is examples of the world's most longest run on sentences but it's all original. Call me kooky but I get a peculiar little thrill out of announcing a blog update to people in my address book, I suppose I could just forward the "missing iguana/dog/whatever" emails, the "funniest thing I ever saw" emails or the Viagra spam I keep getting...but...I just can't bring myself to do it. You can be damn sure if I ever send you Viagra spam I'll have written it myself, I don't care if it's long and hard and takes all night, I'll write it myself.
There are a few things I've learned from my year of blogging though. (That's 76 posts in 366 days, that's a NEW blog post every 4.81578947 days. Wow, I was a prolific/blabbermouth wasn't I? I mean sure there's people who blog every day but I also gotta eat, bathe and get a little sun every once in a while so as not to turn in to a bag of dirty bones mole person.) But anyways things I've learned:

• Number one is that I am my biggest fan. I have an unhealthy amusement with my own writing and will snort most un-lady like at my own words until my husband looks up from his work to ask what's so funny.
• Number two is that you have to use your common sense, all uncommon sense should relegated to the back of the closet, buried deep in the sub folders on your computer or to secret blogs that you anonymously write. Common sense is the most essential thing in a blog, no ranting about Aunt Petunia's predilection for sniffing nail polish, no giving away secret Canadian knowledge that we're all sworn to keep when we reach the age of 10, no photos of cleavage, rear ends or middle fingers unless tastefully done. No slacking off from household chores just so that you can write another blog entry about coffee or ice cream, like the world needs another long winded love letter to dairy.
• Number three, and most importantly quadruple check your facts, don't be running your mouth off about how great a dancer you are until you video yourself trying some of the moves from "Dancing With The Stars" and see for yourself just how fricking *great* you are. Also don't tell amusing anecdotes about relatives who could beat you up for revealing a secret recipe, secret dog or secret love child. If you should reveal such things you should ensure there's a few thousand miles between you and them not to mention you should get a one day head start.
• Another thing (aka number four) I have learned during my year of blogging is that comments are gold. No better than that, they're chewy pink edible gold! Meaning, woohoo they're great BUT, first and foremost I write my blog for me and for my sweetums. If you rely on comments to fulfill your blogging satisfaction you just might turn into a dried up, puckery old prune who can only write scathingly cruel posts about un-commenters. And I have a sworn oath to only pucker up from a lemon or for a smooch. Though like I said, comments are great and I'm not above leaving subliminal messages on my blog for people to leave them, such as barely visible text or just going ahead and leaving myself comments.

Nothing warms the cold parts of my little heart more then getting an email with an announcement that myself left me a comment. Aww shucks self, you're too good to me, and most often myself has been quite kind in it's complimentary and flattering comments. I think I might like me!
I've been kicking around the idea of what I can do to celebrate my entire year of blogging. At first I considered getting the words "I rule the blogging world, oh yeah, uh huh, that's right!" tattooed on my arm but there's no room there what with the "honk if you love Jesus" and image of an apple pie already holding a place of honor there.
Then I considered having a wild party, you know with all my friends and relatives and fellow bloggers but I'm not a people person. I'm more of a sit in the corner and watch every one else with a mild look of disgust on face, sucking down coffees sort of person.
I also considered writing a poem but all I could think of to rhyme with Blogger was hogger, flogger and snogger. Trust me, you don't want to read the sort of poem I could write with those words.
Finally, I thought I'd do something I've observed other people in the blogging community doing. You don't need to start getting scared and begin covering one eye in preparation of anything nasty. What they do is award a little treat to some lucky reader/commenter to celebrate their blogiversary. Usually by a random drawing, entering every commenter who leaves a comment between a specific set of dates. Well sounds cool huh?
EXCEPT......
What if there's been a commenter who has been faithfully commenting all this time and some yahoo I don't know from Adam happens to stumble across my blog on the day of the contest and leave a comment and win the little treat I'll send...is that fair?
Hell no!
So first thing I did was look over the number of comments I have had on my blog for the past year. By my calculations, as long as my fingers weren't too jittery on the calculator buttons from the overdose of celebratory caffeine, I have had a whopping 173 comments!
Wowsers!
Who knew? Then I tallied up the comments to see who left the most, so that I could award their faithful commenting, their generous spirit, their kind words and often visits with a treat.
The number of most comments left by a single person is an astounding...(can I get a drum roll from the people please? thanks)
119!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Congratulations to the lucky commenter who must seriously enjoy what I've been writing...umm...er.....what's that? Ahem, seems I'm that commenter. Wow, I ought to get myself something really fricking nice huh? I had been thinking along the lines of a really good chocolate bar or some such thing but now I'm thinking I ought to be endowed with magical powers or at least the ability to turn water in to port. I suppose I should admit that at least half of those comments I left myself were actually in reply to real comments people had left me...makes you wonder about the other half though huh? *grins*
In the interest of fair play, since no one could be as big a fan of me as I am, I then looked to see who came in second. A much more reasonable number of comments totaling 18 by a single person. My Mother-In-Law! Wow, thanks Mary you can expect a little treat in the mail before too long!
NOW, if I do a random drawing I've already taken care of the fairness side of things. Myself and Mary will be excluded from the drawing. Leave a comment on THIS post between March 4th and March 11th and you will be entered in a drawing, the winner gets a little treat and my conscious is clear because it'll be fair to all involved...*howl erupts off screen*
Ah shoot, my sweetie pie howls a good point. A lot of my commenters are family members....soooo...it's gonna look pretty suspicious if I have a random drawing and my dear sweet mama happens to win, even if it's completely random...I mean I wouldn't even buy that. So I will have TWO drawings, one for the strange people...er...I mean strangers and one for family. The winner from each category, strange people and family will be announced on the 11th (as long as there's nothing good on tv and then it might have to wait till the 12th)
You can only be entered once and every one who wants to participate for a surprise treat can! (and I can avoid having an angry mob on my doorstep....again)
Holy cannoli I'm glad this only happens once a year, it's fricking exhausting trying to keep this all straight.
It's been a fabulous year, though I expected nothing less. I became a permanent resident of the united states, I co-wrote an entire novel with my husband (maybe we'll get it published some day, a whole book full of run-on sentences, cool huh?) I only bought 3 or 4 loaves of store bought bread (that I recall) because I made all the rest, I learned to start the car, made my own Marmalade jam, did NOT get a cow, drank a hell of a lot of coffee, made our own Halloween costumes and not once did I ever scream bloody murder at who ever the heck it is at the grocery store that's been fondling the cilantro so much it's falling out of it's bundles, I resolved a few personal wrapping paper issues, and I turned 30!!!! All that PLUS 76 blog posts.
*pats self on back*

Hello Again All Hallow's....

(me and my sweetums 2004, regular ol' store bought costume bits)

I loved Halloween. Seriously, deep in love, will you marry me and live happily ever after in a haunted mansion type love with Halloween. I was totally committed, Halloween of course knew all about Christmas and was ok with our arrangement. BUT, October was dedicated solely to it's needs. We didn't talk about jingle bells, the man with the white beard and trees were ignored in favor of fake spiderweb. Halloween turned a blind eye to the Christmas projects that would creep up earlier and earlier in the year and I'd make the extra effort to carve a jack-o-lantern that had at least 5 spiky teeth. We got a long great.
Halloween let me dress up as a grim reaper, a jester like clown, a black scary cat, an old woman, a cow and a dead bride.....all back in the hay day of our relationship of course. Perhaps I'm actually legally married to Halloween and don't know it.....I'm not sure that spraying one's hair black with fake-o-colour in a can constitutes a binding agreement with a holiday but it damn well should.

(me and my sweetums 2005, costumes made frantically in about 2 hours as Halloween breathed down our necks)

Of course like any relationship, at least like the ones you see on tv (and you just know those are all accurate depictions of real life), Halloween and I grew apart. What with the whole "you're 19 and have been out of high school for a year and are too big to go trick-or-treating any more" attitude I was getting back then.
Now I know better, it wasn't Halloween who pulled away from us...it was me...me and my fear that a 20 something woman was more creepy than cute if she dressed up and kept trick-or-treating in to her thirties..... So I bit back the urge to keep trying, shoved aside years and years worth of feelings and Halloween faded a bit........though I know it was seeing other people. Didn't those little neighborhood brats show up anyways, dressed to the nines as ghouls and goblins, just to shove it in my face that Halloween was with them? I had to satisfy my urges to rip off their masks and just politely hand out the treat bags by pilfering candy from each one before hand. You hear that you little kids of 10 years ago??? You were supposed to get TWO mini chocolate bars plus the soda and chips in each treat bag but you only got..ONE! So ha, sweetest damn chocolate I ever stole.
The nice thing though about a soul mate is that a connection like that just doesn't disappear.

(me and my sweetums 2006, awesome handmade skull heads, wigs and sweetum's armor!)

I know what you're thinking but it's o.k. My sweetie knows all about Halloween, in fact we've come to a pretty good understanding about the whole thing. I don't do any housework during the month of October and he gets to play with my paints and clay. It's a good arrangement, a solid marriage should always be based upon letting your husband paint his own skull and make his own teeth.

( sweetums 2006, check out those teeth, I love a man who can make his own teeth!)

In the beginning, when I moved away from home and got married my sweetums and I experimented a little the during our first year. Dabbled our toes in the spookiest of seasons, bought a little candy. A few hats and some rubber masks.....Testing each other, and of course Halloween...would it have me back??? Would it have us both together? We eyed each other over the wads of fake spider web and tentatively both reached for the little plastic spiders...fingers touched, our eyes met and we both knew.....we both wanted Halloween back. We wanted to experience it together.

(me 2007, a very scary fairy!)

It doesn't happen all at once, you have to work at it but after a few years of marriage we were ready for more. We needed to take Halloween to the next level and we did...oh my we did. We embraced Halloween with open arms, fake blood and teeth bared and were met with the loving acceptance of a holiday that had waited patiently by my side when I stumbled, ready to take me back at a moment's notice. I had just been too blinded with stolen chocolate and stupidity to see this.(me and my sweetums 2007, handmade wings, helmet head pieces etc.)

A holiday that's been turned in to the celebration of costumes and candy....that's my kind of day.
We started out with a few easy costumes, store bought bits and pieces that we wore with childish glee. Then we graduated to embellishing with more custom bits...now the custom bits are embellished with just the occasional store bought bits. Now all our bits and pieces are thrilled and October seems to get bigger every year.
I'm thinking we might even...can I say it? Dare I? We might even go trick-or-treating again some time. Sure our knees will ache like a son of a gun from crouching to look like 10 year olds but...candy...free candy.
Of course I'm jumping the gun here, look at me dreaming about Halloween in February. When I really ought to be planning my latest scheme to catch that damn rabbit. He's got a lot of explaining to do, one year he leaves me a basket full of candy and the next he just ups and doesn't...ever..again. They got names for people..and rabbits like that but they aint purty and my mama reads this (she taught me most of them words, but still, you get my point)

A sweet bone to pick.....

(saigon cinnamon)

I have the loveliest memories of crunching on chicken bones.
Gawwwd, I would munch, and suck and crunch to my lil heart's delight. I would smash them bones with my teeth until all but little pink shards remained in my mouth, slurping on the dark innards, letting the whole mass melt away to sweet nothingness on my tongue. Then pop, crunch..... Start all over again.
My tongue would become incredibly sore but I ignored it's plaintive wail.
“Shaddup tongue, it's chicken bone season.”
And it was, I never lied to my tongue. I might lie to my brothers about who had the last chicken bone...but never to my tongue.
Ahhhh chicken bones.
The last time I had the intense cinnamony, chocolate filled delight was when some kind benevolent soul from the Canadian side of the family sent us a bag for Christmas.
I don't see chicken bones very often (if ever?) in California. In fact I am not even sure the American side of the family would know what I was talking about if I said I had me a hankerin for chicken bones. I might end up with a dismantled piece of poultry if I wasn't careful with my words!
In Nova Scotia, chicken bones (the candy not the skeleton of the bird) were readily available during Christmas. Light pink little round tube-ish bits that were was almost a danger to eat, between the *hot sizzling cinnamon shell that splintered like real bones and revealed the dark chocolate within* AND the addictive *can not possibly just eat 9 and leave them be* nature of them.
So I associate chicken bones with the holidays and a sore tongue. Because I seriously did eat a whole bag at a time, the texture and flavours were that addictive. My goodness I was a chicken bone addict...when Christmas passed I'd shake and shiver for a full hour, licking the pink dust from the bottom of the bag and cursing the fool who only bought enough of the good stuff to last us a few days.
Our supplier was some chicken bone pusher in Truro, Nova Scotia.
We used to sell crafts at the Zonta craft fair every November and some how...coincidentally (yeah frickin right) the chicken bone lady was always set up across from us. It was a pretty dang big fair for the area, over 70 booths, and she some how manages to almost always be across from us? I don't believe in coincidences, I believe in the fine art of stalking your customer and knowing their weakness. I mean she probably tailed me, noticed my nefarious and lustful glances at her goodies and then bribed the candle lady to mover over so she'd be in my direct line of sight!
And there I sat, as innocent as the day is long, surrounded by all our crafty goodness, looking directly across at a lady with nothing but a table piled high with candy.
Chicken bone candy.
Sometimes we'd buy a few bags, all friendly like, to keep the peace in the snooty atmosphere of sly looks and whispered words about each others booths. Better a friend then an enemy in the hot and frantic world of a Christmas craft sale put on by a charitable organization. Hoo boy it could get intense, what with the lil old men tottering up and demanding in suspicious tones if we'd actually MADE all this stuff.
“Yes sir we did!”
“You actually MADE it?? (asked suspiciously with enough derision in his voice to have me thinking I can take an old guy down right quick between chomps of my chicken bones.)
“YES!....ahem..yes sir, we made everything ourselves.”
“Hmmm, some people they buy stuff and then pass it off as their own. This here's a lot of stuff.....Yep, lot -o-stuffff.......... What sort of saw blades you use?”
Quick as a snake this old fool would try to trip me up, as if I might suddenly crack under the pressure of his intense questioning and admit that I own and run a small but tasteful sweat shop.
Luckily I was saved from saying something foul and very un-Christmas like by quickly popping a couple of chicken bones in my mouth and crunching like mad, smiling fiercely, teeth exposed in a pink speckled grin of unwavering intensity as I stared the man down and forced him with nothing but the heat of my gaze back to his own booth to whisper to his wife and glare back at me with vindictive eyes.
Good times, good times.
The closest thing to a chicken bone flavour I could replicate till recently was to eat a handful of red hot cinnamon hearts followed quickly by a chunk of chocolate. But I must admit, though that got me like ¾ of the way there, I haven't done that very often because of my deep and abiding fear of food dyes.
Seriously, the more I think about yellow number 47 and Red number 42 the more I shudder. EVEN if I didn't know they make some red dyes from insects, I'd be bothered by it.....it's just so...wrong.....so damn wrong...
But those chicken bones, those succulent, mind numbing, gots to have as many as I can get chicken bones......I have to face facts....I know cinnamon isn't pink so I'm even beginning to think my memories of chicken bones are sweeter then the actual thing....
But cinnamon...cinnamon hasn't let me down...(yet)
In fact if anything cinnamon has only gotten better or have I?
For I have discovered REAL cinnamon. I mean cinnamon that makes the stuff you buy at the grocery store taste like bitter brown nothingness. BLECCCCK! REAL cinnamon actually tastes so good you can dip your finger in and mmmmmm, straight from the jar. NOT that I do that.
Heck no, even though this saigon cinnamon we get is sooo flavorful that it has a sweetness all it's own and can make cinnamon toast with little to no sugar. EVEN though it's as spicy hot as those dastardly little red hearts...I don't stick my finger in the jar. AND if I did.....by accident several times then y'all can just bugger off it's my cinnamon and I'll slug it from a shot glass if I choose....which I did.
Oh dear, If I can pass along one bit of advice from my wise and doddering age of 30 to all the youngins out there...don't slug cinnamon from a shot glass. Even if you've just stuck a chunk of chocolate in your mouth and a wee tip of a teaspoon of cinnamon to follow so that your mouth can become the scene of a chicken bone flavour factory...even when your senses start reeling from the exquisite combination of reallllly good chocolate and reallllly good cinnamon do not, I repeat...DO NOT SLUG CINNAMON FROM A SHOT GLASS.
It may seem like a brilliant idea to just admit you're going to eat more cinnamon and more chocolate in a slightly manic, one bite after another, after another...after another moment that stretches into at least a half a dozen moments so you might think that being mature and admitting this you ought to just sit down and fully commit to your snack of chocolate chunks and cinnamon.....
But let me tell you, sitting down with a plate of chocolate chunks and a little shot glass of cinnamon you can tip back (hypothetically) and have a little taste of doesn't work. What does work is you ending up breathing cinnamon in a choking out puffs of cinnamon, coughing extravaganza, none of which resembles the desired chicken bone flavour experience you were going for.
Waving wildly at your husband in the universal “I'm ok, Im ok, I'm only breathing cinnamon powder and trying to recover from my lungs violent, albeit correct, response to said attempt at breathing something other than air” hand gestures.
I expect in the future I shall whip up some sort of melted chocolate and cinnamon type delight, something a little safer that doesn't have me coughing up a red hot spicy dust storm and causing my husband to think that any normal person knows what a shot glass is for and it's not for a snoot of cinnamon.
Can I get a “DUH” from the crowd?
But do not worry, I don't blame the cinnamon, it's not to fault. No, I blame the Truro, Nova Scotia craft sale chicken bone candy lady for instilling in me a deep and abiding affection for a treat I can't readily get my hands on.
If both my saigon cinnamon and a bag of chicken bone candies were dangling, precariously of course, over the lip of a volcano and I could only save one I think my decision has already been made. As much as I loved the chicken bones, my brain argues with my tastebuds that we don't care for dyes that much any more and hardly ever buy candy, so why not save the cinnamon? The potential in a handful of REALLY kick your ass good cinnamon is much greater than a bag of cinnamon candies.
Hmmmmmm I just had a thought....*runs to the kitchen to check something out*

(very sad but honest to goodness extremely tiny sample of cinnamon coca powder toast made with left over bread crust bits I scrounged from the bread box thingy)

Oh man...cinnamon....cocoa powder.....this is a very very very good combination. I am now in agonies because there is no bread made or else I'd be whipping up some crunchy, buttery cinnamon, coca powder toast and sitting back dreaming of chicken bones.
Instead I'm contemplating a wee tiny shot glass of cinnamon and cocoa mixed together.............
This is also one of those moments where I am severely ticked off at the bread maker for not keeping us well stocked in bread for such cinnamon, cocoa powder testing emergencies. (Never mind that I'm the bread maker, I can be mad at myself can't I?)
But wait, I'm more then just the bread maker...I'm a gull dang biscuit maker when I want to be is what I am........and biscuits can be made in like 30 minutes...I'll be right back.....
(time passes, approximately 30 some minutes if you're picky about such things........)
One batch of biscuit dough, dived in two, one half flattened on a cookie sheet and covered with a mixture of coca powder, cinnamon and brown sugar, second half of dough spread over the top. Baked, one big cinnamon chocolate biscuit sandwich. Taste test...YUM! Second taste test...mmmmm YUM!
It's not a chicken bone.....but it is warm, cinnamony, like a cinnamon roll only flat and with chocolate. A chocolate, cinnamon flat.
Hearty enough for the grownup in me, not a speck of unnatural colour added, and best of all, satisfies the incredibly overpowering chocolate/cinnamon taste I have been craving for the better part of forever now..........

Mama Marmalade....

I have been making orange marmalade.
Then eating orange marmalade.
Then rapidly realizing my eating orange marmalade to making orange marmalade ratio is way off.
The appalling facts are that if I continue at the same rate of chowing down on sweet, citrusy goodness with just the right amount of bitter and NOT producing more of this sunshine in bottle, at the current rate of speed...it means....KABOOOOOOMMMYYYYYY
Marmalade melt down.
This is allllwaaaays the problem with making something yourself that's waaaay better then what you get at the store. Once you have mastered (I can be called a master after 2 batches...right?) some new and secret technique that house wives and gourmet cooks and jam makers have already been doing for years, breaking open the barrier of silence around something as exotic as ORANGE Marmalade....you can't go back. But....unfortunately you're too lazy to get off yer ass and make some more.
Damn it, why did I have to be so awesome at making orange marmalade? Why does a recipe for it only make a pitiful few bottles that some of us, in a haze of orangey goodness, already promised out for their Mother. Damn Mom for being so good to me, for sharing homemade wild strawberry jam, if she'd been more of a bee-otch then I could hoard my precious stash of orangey delight all to myself.
But no, my Mother has to be all sweet and caring and sharing with her only daughter....damn it.
So here I sit, orange tree loaded, mocking me with it's silent but fruit filled presence. My orange Marmalade supply rapidly depleting, feeling secure in trying my hands at a new technique but oddly guilty over casting a lustful eye on the promised out bottle.
I'll crack. Oh it's no secret, I'd eat me own dear mother's orange marmalade before giving up this goodness for good.
*sigh*
It shall not come to this though as I have a plan. One that involves launching my self physically from this trap that is my computer chair and in to a frenzy of jam making that shall provide me with at LEAST a few bottles more of what is quite possibly elixir of the Gods.
You think I'm exaggerating? No jam could be that good? HA! Ha, I say! My sweetie pie says it's the BEST orange marmalade he's ever had and confirms that it is indeed elixir of the Gods, would both of us say that if it were not true? If I was going to lie I can guarantee you it would be about something a hell of a lot more useful like an alibi for when the last scrapings of homemade birthday ice cream disappeared completely with out so much as a "would you like some?" for any one...muaahhh ahhh ahhh (by the way I was out picking oranges when that happened....I swear)
I'm not looking for an excuse to keep the bottle of jam that's ear marked for my Mother though. I mean if I did need one the obvious would be that orange marmalade is the longest jam making process I have ever participated in. I mean no offense mom but what did you do? Go out and pick a few handfuls of wild strawberries that are so itsy bitsy you have to practically crawl through the grass to find them and risk getting bit by mosquitos and God knows what else and risk swelling up the way you do when you do get bit by God knows what else...ummmmm.........this isn't heading the direction I had intended which was a comparison of my extremely labor intensive marmalade making process to my Mother's easy squeezy strawberry jam making process.
On a completely unrelated note my Mother once beaned me in the head with a soup ladle, it was by accident but I think now I deserve it.
*sigh again*
O.k., O.k., you'll get your Marmalade, that you never even asked for and I'll make some more for me so I can have some too and we'll all be satisfied in a very sticky sweet way.

(please note that the spoon in the photo is one I stole from my Mom so I think I might have to send her two jars of m-m-m-y Marmalade. Damn it.)

Why Some People Can't Have Nutella.....

Celebrate all that is Nutella on February 5th!

Once upon a time a young woman lost her Nutella innocence in the parking lot of a Trader Joe's.

Logically this woman knew what she was in for, logically.
That Nutella was a chocolate hazelnut type spread, it said so right on the jar did it not? Said young woman liked chocolate and coincidentally hazelnuts so she decided what the heck, I'll give this Nutella a whirl.
What was the harm? (insert ominous, foreboding music here)
She threw a jar of the Nutella into her basket this one fine shopping day and moved on towards the more mundane things on her list, candied ginger, coffee beans and tortilla chips.
Now it might come as surprise to some people exactly all the things this woman was known to get into whilst in a parked car. Whilst in a parked car in front of a Trader Joe's on a sunny day.
She'd sample cheddar cheese right off the block, who needs a knife just bite off a hunk and enjoy. She'd scoop into ice cream with her emergency ice cream spoons always kept in the glove compartment of the car. She'd nibble on bits of bread ripped from the loaf, on handfuls of nuts and occasionally a gourmet soda.
She was a car snacker.
But it's ok, so was her husband.
So they basked in sinful car snacking glory together. Sitting under the hot California sun, with the air conditioning running and harried shoppers giving them the evil eye as they'd yet to give up their parking spot.
So this one day, happily sampling the goodies they'd bought. Sitting in piles of crumbs and grinning toothily at each other over their respective snacks of choice. (He salty, she sweet) The woman glances coyly under her eyelashes at her husband, cranks the air conditioning up another notch and breathily asks her sweettie..."Care to try something........different?"
He pauses, handful of tortilla chips clutched in his hands and slides his wicked blue eyes towards her. "What did you have in mind?"
This was the moment.
The moment before everything changed.
The silence stretched out, thin and sweet in the summer heat as she drew the jar of Nutella from her bag. Triumphantly showed it to her husband, cooed over the colour, the shape of the jar and pointed out that since it was both nuts AND chocolate that it covered both of their craving preferences.
"Let's do it." her husband purred, grabbing the emergency ice cream spoons from the glove compartment, silver glinting in the bright sun, smiling contentedly they popped open the lid.
Can you see it?
The way time slowed to a crawl?
The way they dug their spoons into the Nutella, unknowing of what they were about to unleash?
The drifting laughter from a child passing by the car with their mother. The music on the cd player fades to the background of the moment. The way the light caught the dull glossy spoonful of chocolate nut spread just so, ahhhh just so, as it traveled, for what seemed like an eternity to their mouths?
Nostrils flaring as the rich scent leaps ahead of the spoon, eager to greet their noses. The fading smiles, the open mouths, eyes widening first in shock and pleasure, then narrowing. Darting towards the still open jar that one of them holds.
Which one?
Does it really matter?
There is a small moment of recollection in the woman's memories, of the intensity of flavor and lush silky texture that greeted her unsuspecting tongue. Of the unbridled lust for something she'd barely begun to taste. Of hearts beating faster, breaths quickening and suddenly the air conditioning can not keep the car cool enough.
There's an intense flash point of taste, lust and greed rolled together in one amazing Nutella sized ball.
Two spoons descend in perfect harmony towards the jar, they clash, metal rings brightly, impossibly the spoons tangle together like lovers, unable to part. Each vying for the open jar, each desperately trying to dive into the new heavenly delight that has been discovered, right here on earth.
Everything grows dark as greed takes over.
She doesn't know what happened. There are days of darkness that will never be regained, sweet chocolate scented memories that flit away into nothingness. Some how they got home.
It's as if it never happened, though the inside of the car is suspiciously clean, all but for an empty jar. It too oddly clean, as sparkly spit shined up like a new penny.
As she stands there, dizzy for a moment, memories burrowing deeper into her subconscious, as if hiding from the light, she recalls the moment of revelation.
The one conscious, full memory of glory that was Nutella on her tongue for the first time. Then nothing more till this moment.
She doesn't wonder what happened.
It's best to leave some things be.
She buries the jar in the recycling bin, and even with out memory she knows...some things are so powerful, some things are so intense that they are not for human minds, hands or tongues.
Life goes on for she and he.....
Though occasionally, when walking through Trader Joe's their footsteps falter as they pass the Nutella.
Hands unconsciously reach, in perfect synchronistic movements towards the jars at the same time, they hover, shaking over the closest one. Hers bumping his, his bumping hers. Fingers finally curling into fists, retracting....the moment passes and they get peanut butter instead. Faithful, trusty old peanutbutter.
They can be trusted with peanut butter.

(on a completely un-related to the dark, sinful Nutella ways, note.....if you think you can handle something so freaking good it will blow your mind then I invite you to partake of the rich decadent flavours of Nutella. If you're like me...er...um.....that is....I mean.....if you're like SOME people who choose to remain anonymous and can not be trusted around delicious goodies and have a will power that is so non-existent it actually registers as a negative number then...beware...beware.)

Weathering the Changes....

It's happened.
There was no bell ringing to alert me of the change. No deep toned gong that reverberated through the house, my ears and soul. Not even, if you can believe it, one little alert from any one, anything or all.
There was no hint, or forewarning that it was even ABOUT to happen. It just did. Quietly, and with out warning I have changed.
I'm a Southern Californian. Oh hell yeah I knew that part, logically, already. You can't go through the whole INS paper work love fest with out KNOWING what you're doing and becoming....at least on paper. A permanent resident of the United States, fine, sounds good, specifically a resident of Southern California. Sounds better. And I was prepared for what that all meant.....on paper.
BUT
I didn't realize how I'd be changed on a molecular level.
I am thinking it is a mixture of living in a sunny state of existence for so long now, increasing my pepper consumption by over 7839% and having only touched snow once now in the last 7 years.
And that snow was in the desert after a quickie trip to Las Vegas so I hardly think it even qualifies as snow.
I mean sure it had all the right qualities, icy, white, frozen and on the ground but....it was in the desert. Cacti, rocks and tumble weed live in the desert....so what ever this frozen white mounds of stuff was....it wasn't REAL snow.
It's more like the third cousin twice removed from snow. (so says the former resident of Nova Scotia, Canada)
All I know is today it's raining, the sky is grey and the wind is whipping about and I stare out across the neighbor's yards from behind the safety of the patio doors. At how wet the ground is. At the puddles that have formed here and there and how everything is green and shimmery, slick with rain....barely February mind you, and I am shivering.
Imagining the trek to the grocery store through such miserable dark weather as akin to tramping through 2 feet of snow down an icy driveway just to check the mail. Oh wait. I've done that.
I've lived through 20 plus Canadian winters, have oodles of family STILL experiencing the joys of knocking snow off their firewood and drying mittens out by the fire and sitting close to the wood stove and eating hot soups and sitting under the blankets with hot soup in your lap and your feet soaking in another bowl of hot soup as you sip a mug of hot soup and try to relax the slight tick under your right eye when the weather man says cheerfully "only 3 inches tomorrow" Lovely.
And it can be, there's no denying the elemental beauty of snow. But when you get away from it, out from under the hypnotic spell of winter after winter....after winter.....after yet anotttthhhhhherrr winter, the never ending cycle of nice weather followed by freezing your toes and other even more important bits off, you change. Be it for better or for worse you change.
I changed.
I didn't mean to. I didn't make any sort of conscious decision.
But I've changed.
I'm almost embarrassed to admit it, my husband kindly points out "it's all relative." I agree, but am only reminded once more of my Canadian relatives, big strong Canadians, who casually mention that the schools were closed today because temperatures dropped to -45 degrees Celsius. I shivered so hard at the thought that I fell off my chair and had to console myself with chocolate....
Later, I contemplate the insanity of REAL winter weather like that as I shivered some more in my t-shirt while picking oranges off the tree out back. Glaring up at the California sky that has dared to darken with much needed storm clouds. Actual drops of rain fell and splattered on my arms, IT TOUCHED MY SKIN! And I shivered, ran for the safety indoors, in to the arms of my husband and more chocolate. Oh yes I have certainly changed, she who once ran outside in a t-shirt when it was MINUS degrees out, literally in a blizzard to grab a stick of ice coated firewood with bare hands. She who stepped out on to a snow covered porch in bare feet to grab the cat who wanted in. She who now babbles incoherently, chocolate smeared face, wide eyed pointing in distress at the drops of rain on the oranges to her husband.
Once, when we were walking down the stairs one evening to the car, we paused, literally to smell the flowers. Mysterious little unnamed blooms that smell sweeter then any rose and I saw my breath puff out in distinct white clouds. YEAH, it was THAT cold.
After I awoke from my dead faint, we continued on our merry way to the grocery store, ran our errands, drove back home under the waving branches of palm trees and twinkling stars and agreed that we were both glad we wore our gloves and that we'd best light a fire in the fire place as soon as we were inside.
Yep.......I've changed.
There used to be a time when snow drifted against the side of the house and I crunched on icicles I found outside. Made snow balls with my bare hands, rolled in the snow making angels and went sledding for hours.
Now, well...now....when the skies are grey and the patio slippery with rain, when the palm trees shiver so do I. When puddles gather on the patio, rain drops splash against the windows and when the wind howls...so do I.
I've most definitely changed.

(dressed in all my fine cold weather gear to brave the elements in the out of doors.)

Eyeing My Memories.....

When I picture my late Grandma Shirley I always see her faded blue eyes, looking at me, a small smile on her face. There were other things about Grandma that really stood out, her love of a good bargain, a handy treat every time I visited, calling me baby doll...... But always my memory zeros in on her blue eyes, a sort of sweetly vacant expression in them.
Alzheimer's does that.
So, imagine my shock when I recently had a dream about Grandma's blue eyes and in the retelling to my Mother she says "they were brown."
What?
I mean what the F*%$?
All these years, I would have swore on a stack of anything you want me to swear on that Grandma had blue eyes.
I have memories of her and crucial parts of those memories involve her faded blue eyes.
I have had 3 or 4 dreams of Grandma Shirley since she passed away many years ago, and in 3 of those dreams a key part was her blue eyes. They were the star of my Grandma Shirley dreams.
Because in each of those 3 memorable dreams she would turn and stare at me, but unlike real life her eyes are vivid blue, incredibly sharp in colour and mental alertness. Intelligence and humor I could see and an awareness I don't think I remember in real life.
Alzheimer's takes that a way.
The last dream I had, literally last week, my husband and I are living in some house I don't recognize and suddenly all these people show up. Relatives I haven't seen in years. It's practically a party. Some one says Grandma Shirley is here. I get excited because I want to see her, in my dream I don't remember she's no longer with us.
In my dream my Grandma doesn't look much like she did in real life, but I know it is her. She is tall and thinner but she turns and stares at me with the most amazing blue eyes. In fact they are huge, almost one and half times the size they should be, they are so blue they start edging towards green. We stand, about 2 inches apart and she stares into my eyes and I in to hers. As before, in other dreams her eyes are sharp, they are aware and it feels good to look in to them. Then the moment passes, the dream progresses, I start looking for a coffee pot big enough to make coffee for a crowd because I know my little bialetti won't make enough.
I wake up.
I tell my mom about the dream the next day and just like that the fabric of my reality and memories is torn, just a little bit.
Brown eyes...not blue?
I confer with cousins, their Mother is Grandma's daughter.
Interestingly enough one cousin says blue, the other brown.
At the end of the day the general consensus is that Grandma had brown eyes.
Ummmmm........so......my brain just made that up? The whole blue eyed thing? Why? What's the purpose? The fact that I had significant dreams that I remember clearly, that showcased her blue eyes supports my entire belief in her eye colour.
I could have passed a lie detector test, I was that convinced.
A wee part of me is still convinced they were blue and that all those other relatives are the wrong ones.
They might possibly be conspiring against me...Hmmmmmmmmm.......
Or maybe they were blue in another time line and I have shifted from that to an alternate one where her eyes were brown. (I think like this, it's true.)
My cousin has a theory that Grandma's cataracts made her eyes faded looking and that might have made me think of them as blue.
But if I could be so wrong about Grandma's eyes then maybe every one else could be so wrong as well. Good golly, Grandma is laughing her ass off some where in the great beyond because her eyes were probably green or something.
Now I am stuck though, I can't photoshop my memories. I can't just change her eyes to brown, they are blue in every picture I conjure in my brain.
Makes me wonder what other things a person could be so wrong about about, utterly believing a false thing and being entirely convinced it is truth.
Kind of freaky.
I am going to go look in the mirror now to double check on my own eyes..umm..brownish with a bit of greenish right?
*sigh of relief...*
yep, they are.......for now.....I'm going to keep my eye on them.
p.s. Alan's are still blue too, thank goodness, as I'm partial to his pretty blueberry eyes.

I won't Mince words here....only pies....

I'm going to brag about my fried pies here but don't ask me for the recipe...no really. I'm not being coy. I'm not clinging to some tiny bit of home maker glory to make myself feel superior to you. I'm certainly not trying to hide it in an attempt to make that scrunched up whiny look appear on your face. Heavens no, that's just a bonus. The truth is I don't have a recipe.
Did these lovely little morsels of fried pie goodness just appear in my kitchen of their own accord, unaccompanied by earthly means?
Well...noooooooo...not exactly.
It's just that so often (and really it's more like more often then not) I do not follow a recipe. Or if I am following a recipe I am changing so many things in it during the first trial run that what I end up with can not possibly be anything but a distant cousin to the original recipe, heck maybe not even a cousin, maybe more like the person your distant cousin dated for 3 days when they were 17.
If I were to give you the recipe of something I made that you 'd sampled and liked and you tried making it yourself you might be tempted to shake your fist at me and call me a cheat. Why? Oh did I forget to mention I changed the butter to coconut oil when I made it, I added cinnamon and dark rum instead of vanilla....oh hmmm well are you saying you didn't guess I would leave the water out and replace it with Kefir? And ummm...shall I confess that I can't remember the last time I baked with white flour....suppose I should have mentioned that I changed it to stone ground whole wheat........
See what I mean?
It's first time out alterations like those that make sharing a recipe hard. I probably should have tried to remember to write every thing down that I was changing as I went....snoooooooooooooooooze... Sorry I was boring myself already. If I can't even finish the thought I'm hardly likely to do the actual work of recording my alterations. And that's just the recipes I'm sort of actually following.
What about the made up as I go along, completely pulled from my own brain kind? The taste as you go and see what it needs a pinch more of kind?
Perhaps it's not even fair to brag about those.....
Well hell who ever said sweets are fair??? The fact that they're loaded with little nasties called...(psssttttt cover your eyes if you're sensitive to reality) ahem, as I was saying sweets are loaded with...(deep breath) CALORIES.
Cripes I hate calories.
I remember the exact moment I learned of the existence of calories. When I was a kid every one was yakking about fat this, full fat that, half fat the next thing. I was no dummy, fat was the big bad scary wolf of the dessert world. I munched my way through bags of gummi bears in smug delight. I scoffed at the fat fear-ers as I delighted in my boldly emblazoned bag of "NO-FAT" gummi bears. What's that saying about all good things....? I bragged one too many times to the wrong person...or the right person depending on how you see your glass. I'm seeing this one half empty till I get over the horror.
"Look" I say, "They're fat free."
"Yeah but they have sugar...." he says.
At this point I was hovering in the nicely padded, cushioned zone of ignorance is bliss. Little did I know my world was about to change for ever.
"yeah but, they're fat free, so you can eat as many as you want." I was so confident, so much that if I didn't vocally add a "DUH!" at the end of those words I'm sure a "DUH!" was written all over my face.
"Yessssss but..." (has there EVER been a good but?) "they have sugar, so they're full of calories."
Insert that perfectly appropriate sound of a *record player needle being dragged across the record ending the harmonious beauty of my calorie innocence* right here.
*sigh*
They say life changes when you hit puberty, pbbbbbbbbbtttt, big frigging deal it's not puberty that messes us up it's calories and the knowledge of their existence.
I have a theory about this too. Physicists say there are actually particles that behave differently just because of the fact some one looks at them, acknowledges their existence.
That's...mind blowing...BUT I've known this for years, calories only start having their evil little caloric effect on people AFTER they become aware of them.
That's why kids run around in glorious sugar highs asking for candy for breakfast, donuts for lunch and ice cream for supper. They don't KNOW yet......but they will.......Some one will burst their strawberry flavoured bubble. Some one always does.
Sweets just aren't fair. They're mind numbingly delicious, life changingly scrumptious, make-you-sneak-out-to-the-fridge-for-one-last-nibble addictive it's true.....but they aint fair.
So that's why I can brag about what I made and how tasty it was and not even give you a recipe for it. Suffer. It's ok, it's just the sweet life.
O.k.....now I feel guilty and I can feel your giant puppy dog like eyes staring at me with shock, blinking back tears as you sniffle and hiccup unbecomingly.
So just for you cry babies, a quick run down of my spur of the moment mince fruit fried pie.
A quick and delicious filling made from a blob of coconut oil, frozen cranberries, half an orange, the juice of an orange, raisins, salted pecans, one red delicious apple chopped up, the zest of one orange cut into satisfying little strips, cinnamon, ground cloves, nutmeg, a sploosh of molasses, a splash of dark rum and a wee tiny bit of cornstarch to thicken the whole lot. Cooked up till it was thick and dark and smelling like Christmas in a pot. (which is a good thing)
When it was cool I rolled heaping spoonfuls of it in eggroll wrappers, sealed it with a bit of beaten egg and fried it in coconut oil till golden and crisp. Sprinkle with more cinnamon and...yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuummmmmmm.
Actually if I recall the exact words of my husband when he bit in to his first friend mince fruit pie they were and I quote. "Ohhh, oh yum....." Then a breathy silence as his tongue absorbs the flavours followed by "Oh man, that's good, that's really good. Yummm. Wow what's in this?"
So, that's why I'm bragging up my fried mince fruit pies and not even giving you an exact recipe. Because I don't have one and sweets aint fair.

Favorite Childhood Christmas Memory....

I feel I should premise my favorite Christmas childhood memory with the statement that I could care a hoot about Christmas morning. I care like, maybe a quarter hoot but all the rest of my hoot is for Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve is what holds all the sparkling, fairy dusted memories for me. Christmas Eve is akin to the sensation of being on a roller coaster at the top of the climb, suspended for what seems like eternity before free falling into the rush and madness of Christmas day.
Actually what do you call that time of Christmas that exists between Christmas Eve and Christmas morning? You know the dark quiet time when Santa's already made his visit, the stockings are bulging with mysterious little objects that poke it out in odd bumpy shapes and there's slick red and white candy canes peeking from the top? When the family is still asleep but it's after midnight and I shouldn't dare open the living room door for a peek because there'll be "hell to pay" ever since the incident of the whole "santa just LEFT and went to bed half an hour ago why are you up at 1:30 am????????" The real question is did you actually think I slept? I'm not up, I'm STILL UP! It's the time between waking and sleeping when nobody was up but me, Christmas tween time! It's no longer Christmas Eve, it's not quite Christmas morning it's the sweet spot right in the middle.
Christmas Eve was the sweetest torture imaginable, I never slept a full night's sleep until I was 21 I believe, it might have even been 22. And even then I was sort of shocked and a little sad that I'd passed some invisible mile marker of life that let me sleep instead of laying in bed bicycle kicking, legs in the air, to try and tire myself out.
I didn't have to walk to school barefoot through 5 miles of snow but I did actually live in a time when us kids did NOT have televisions, video game systems let alone cd players in our bedrooms. So there was no mindless entertainment, no light on for that matter because that would give away the big secret that I was still awake. So no book reading, just bicycle kicking and listening to fascinating rustles from the living room and Christmas carols on the kitchen radio.
A time or two I dozed and it was like a Christmas miracle, up to 40 minutes at a time could wink away in a flash. 40 minutes is like 40 years on Christmas Eve. I'm not even sure you can call it actual sleep, if it was actual sleep why didn't I sleep for 4 hours, or 8? I think it was a childhood form of meditation, I bet I was doing what them monks do, slowing their heartbeats and if I'd sat outside in the snow I wouldn't have turned into a kid-sicle because of my monk like meditation techniques. Sweet.
Eventually time would pass.....it sure seemed like it wasn't but it must have as now I'm married, living in another country and no one can make me go to bed on Christmas Eve if I don't wannnnnnna....*chuckles nervously because she's not entirely sure her mama doesn't still have that power*
The house would be silent, the occasional creak from a cat prowling around, Christmas carols still playing on the radio. A perfect time to go exploring wouldn't you think? AHA! WRONG! Rookie mistake, sheesh you do not get out of bed half an hour after Santa's gone to bed, are you asking for another lecture??? Ever heard of REM sleep? Well I hadn't back then but my childish mind did know you have to wait a certain amount of time to make sure the parental units are 100% asleep. THEN you slip out of bed and start tippy toeing about. It's most likely 3:00 in the morning, I've given plenty of knuckle biting time for every one to be completely asleep but still every creak of the floor is a crack of thunder that booms "KID OUT OF BED! KID OUT OF BED!"
I ease open my door, and immediately damn this hallway. Damn it for being so longish and narrow, why do there have to be so many doors so close together at the end of it? Sure one of them's the living room, right beside my room but why does my parent's room have to be directly across from it? What cruel twist of design inspired this trap?
Worst of all, they shut the living room door, to discourage kids from poking about too soon and cats from playing Tarzan in the Christmas tree (again) not to mention ripping open presents prematurely. (the cats not me)
Even worse than the forbidding living room door that creaked and groaned and made as much noise as a marching band falling off a cliff was the fact my parents left their bedroom door open. Rats, all they have to do is open an eye and I'm caught.
Plan B if I can't just walk into the living room unaccosted by warning tones hollering "get back to bed" is to find a flashlight. Luckily I've memorized 90% of the creaky spots on the hall way and kitchen floor. What did you think I was doing all the those days leading up to this moment? Some kids dream of what would be under the tree, I was casing the joint.
The flash light in hand I literally crawled up the hall way, at this point I should say My parents were cool people, a quick holler of back to bed was all I was in for, I just liked adding all the drama for my own Christmas tween time entertainment. What fun would it have been if I just walked straight up to the living room door and opened it? None I tell you, belly crawling up the hall way beneath the level of the bed in my parents room till I had my nose jammed under the crack of the living room door...that was excitement.
We had some pretty good crack at our place, which is a bugger if you're worried about things like heating but for peeking at what Santa left....ohhh it was a perfect crack. A good inch and a half of face pressing space under neath the living room door. Nose freezing because the air was frigid under there, our house was heated by one wood stove which was located waaaaaay out in the kitchen, the further away from the stove the colder it got, shut a door for a couple of hours and it was literally freezing behind it. But I swear it made the coloured lights on the Christmas tree branches twinkle all the more. Well what I could see of the tree, an inch and a half provides a tantalizingly small view of the scene set by Santa. A bit of wrapping paper that looked unfamiliar, a mysterious object shrouded in shadows that hadn't been there when I'd gone to bed. That's it, so I sigh under the door and finally belly crawl backwards to the warmth of my bed to regroup.
3:30 am..........too early to wake my younger brothers up, it was bad enough I was awake they shouldn't have to agonize over each ticking second till the magical hour of 6 am when it was ok to start actually being *up* and waking the parents up. (I now realize it was pretty cool of them to get up at 6am, they never growled, just said put the coffee on and within minutes were up, putting the ginormous turkey we raised ourselves in the oven to start baking.) No, I decided, very maturely, let my little brothers sleep in till 4 am. They need the rest, I can pass a half hour by myself......I could pass it a lot better if I could get a decent peek inside the living room.
The crazy thing is I wasn't even thinking of the gifts I was getting, it was just the magic of it all, the whole scene, the tree loaded with ornaments, presents piled high under neath, stockings full, the perfect Christmas card look of it all before 4 kids, an unnamed number of cats and 2 adults wreaked Christmas morning havoc on the place.
Then a thought occurred this particular Christmas....a beautiful shiny thought like a luscious fruit on the forbidden tree bloomed in my mind. Logic said if I couldn't see in to the living room through the door what other way could I? There was the living room window I suppose.....Now I was in state of secret Christmas tween time glee, flashlight in hand I tippy toed my way around the mind field of squeaks to the kitchen, jammed my feet in to some one's rubber work boots which were only about 7 sizes too big for me.
You know some times my husband jokes that it doesn't seem like I come from Canada because I don't know how to dress for the cold. Perhaps he's right about that as I headed outside, 3-ish in the morning on Christmas, feet stuffed into rubber boots, no coat, no mitts, no hat or scarf, just my pajamas and a flashlight. I was brilliant, not thinking about hypothermia, not thinking about the fact no one in their right childish mind leaves the house in the middle of a Canadian winter to tramp through the snow around to the back of the house to peer inside the window at the Christmas scene. Well I never claimed to be of right mind. Luckily the only hardship I faced out there was icy cold water dripping down my neck, it wasn't Christmas snowing so much as Christmas raining. I remember the rain was cold but that's all, it didn't deter me as I clomped around the house to the living room window. God Bless snow drifts. As snow had piled up against the house enough that I could stand on it, extra water dripping from the eaves on to the back of my neck, flashlight held high to shine through the window (really it's a damn wonder I'm not a cat burglar)
And what did I see...well...mostly the Christmas tree, who's idea was it to put it in front of the living room window? That was daft! Sheesh, I could see around it a little, stockings were bulging from their hooks on the wall just as I imagined, The room was dark but for the shine of tree lights and the beam of my flashlight and it was beautiful. It was wonderful, a mostly obscured view of the Christmas scene but it was so worth the freezing walk outside at 3 in the morning to see it. I'm pretty sure that's what got me through to 4 am. Cuddled in bed munching on Christmas oranges a.k.a clementines or tangerines. We only bought them at Christmas time and to this day the scent of fresh oranges makes me think of Christmas. I think I plowed my way through half a dozen of the little suckers before I deiced it was appropriate to wake up one of my brothers. Michael is 4 years younger then me, which when I was a kid meant he was pliable and easy to convince getting up when he's sleepy is a brilliant idea.
Once he's conscious enough to understand he has to be VERY VERY VERY quiet or else (or else what who knows, he was always game to play along though and the unspoken threat and excitement was enough) he headed to the bathroom, tippy toeing like I urged him agreeing to meet back in my bedroom with more Christmas oranges so we could strategize and I could tell him what I'd learned. All still and quiet for about 30 seconds till I hear a sound as sharp and loud as a machine gun going off. RAT A TAT TAT TAT, RAT A TAT TAT TAT. WHAT THE BLOODY HELL WAS HE DOING?????????? Taking up a new hobby of metal smithing on his way to the bathroom? I flew out of my bedroom in a sort of half tippy toe run, shushing as loudly and quietly as I could to find my brother standing in the middle of the kitchen feeding the cats with dry cat food, pouring it on to a metal pan on the floor from a great hight of at least 2 feet. "stopppppppppp" I hiss. O.k., a born sneaker he was not. That's like a cop on stake out who likes to play a little drums in the back seat of the car to pass the time, maybe check the working condition of the sirens every few seconds.
I scurry him back to my bedroom and explain the finer points of sneaking during the Christmas tween time, like NOT dropping hard things on to metal objects at 4 in the morning. We come to an understanding over more clementines. During which time I also hatch an ingenious plan to actually get us INSIDE the living room. All we have to do is get our parent's bedroom door shut...*cough cough* did I say we? I meant he, all HE had to do was shut their bedroom door. Don't worry, it wasn't like I was throwing him to the wolves, I did explain the finer points of ever so cautiously pulling the door shut so as not to make a sound, and how he didn't have to latch it because that would make it click but instead just pull it until it held closed by itself by the door jam. I watched with enormous eyes and plenty of hand gesturing to encourage slow closing until the door was finally closed, then we froze for a good 30 seconds to see if they noticed...not a sound, not a rustle...not a peep.
Did I throw open the living room door and have my way with the scene? OF COURSE NOT? I'm no Christmas Tween time rookie. Remember that REM sleep thing we were talking about? Well chances are the minute sounds of the door closing might have stirred our parents enough that any new sound could waken them fully and result in us being caught red handed in the living room at 4 am. I was nothing if not a devious sister at Christmas time. We adjourned to my room to wait a full 15 minutes of silence before attempting phase two of getting a better look in the living room. (Being the generous sort I'd already loaned my brother the flashlight so he could peer under the door as I did. I didn't drag him outside in the freezing rain, that would have been going too far.)
At 4:15 am we attempted phase two, it consisted of him standing in the hallway behind me while I ever so carefully eased open the living room door. No person ever finessed an old squeaky door like I did that door, murmuring sweet nothings to it under my breath whilst I eased it open with the classic pull upwards at the same time routine so as to minimize the noise. Oh wait...that was only common knowledge to me you say?
Once the living room door was open a wide enough crack to allow a small, Christmas crazed child inside I took the flashlight from Michael and made him stand guard against cats, that's all we needed was for a cat to get in the living room and do all those crazy loud cat things like sniff things, purr and possibly meow....
I of course explained to Michael all the very good reasons it was he who had to stand outside, guarding the door against cats whilst I alone entered the Christmas Living room for a solo peek at heaven. I can't quite remember my reasoning, perhaps it was simply that I was older and I said so. I eased inside and closed the door behind me....Darkness but for the flashlight and tree lights. It was freezing cold, puffs of white out of your mouth as you breathe cold. But there were glorious mounds of presents with large tags in curvy print that said "Love Santa".
The stockings we'd so eagerly hung just a few hours ago really were as full and plump as they'd seemed from the living room window. Tasty looking candies practically spilled out of the tops. A long wooden toboggan for sledding down the hills out side leaned against the wall. Everything was beautiful, the air was sharply scented with the sweet smell of a real Christmas tree, every icy breath I inhaled was like I was standing in a forest. Knowing Michael would be growing impatient and possibly getting the urge to do some other insanely loud thing like open the fridge or something I backed out of the room as carefully as I entered. I touched nothing, not for fear of fingerprints but because the scene was perfect. It didn't need me meddling with it all. How could knowing what made that funny little square bump in my stocking make it any better?
I almost left the living room completely, shutting away the perfectness of an as yet untouched Christmas morning waiting to happen before I remembered my anxiously awaiting partner in Christmas tween time crime. I led Michael in to the room, kept a sharp eye on him as he was younger, a boy and also more prone to impulsive ideas like picking up a present to shake it....the impetuous fool.
When I had deemed he'd had enough time to stare in wonder as I had we backed out of the room, closed the door as carefully and quietly as we'd opened it, tippy toed back to my room to the growing pile of clementine orange peels and huddled under a massive pile of quilts to warm up. We grinned and chattered quietly over what we'd seen, munching on the apparently infinite number of Christmas oranges.
Time passed, 6 am rolled around and by this time our younger brother Jacob had been awakened to join us. We voted that Michael should again be the one to risk the most by waking the parents. I made the coffee.
Things become blurry after that, memories of the lights coming on and seeming overly warm and bright when the world was still pitch black out side, calling up the stairs to the attic room where my older brother Jason was surely PRETENDING TO BE ASLEEP? Getting the ok to open the living room door and raid our stockings, all of it fun, all of it sweet but none of it quite as magical as the tween time of Christmas when I was up by myself, as quiet and sneaky as a shadow. Getting a taste of Christmas before any one else. Christmas Eve is wonderful, Christmas morning is amazing....
but Christmas tween...............is perfect.

This photo is of our house in Canada one winter, not the winter of the Christmas memory but still...you get the point. The arrow shows the direction from the front door where I walked out, around the side all the way to the back where the living room window was.....just to see the Christmas scene.

My Christmas Nemesis.

I, like most people, have a Christmas nemesis. Nothing unusual there. However in my case it's a bit peculiar as my Nemesis, the Christmas one, is my Aunt. Nothing makes the holidays more stressful then casting dark eyed suspicious glances over the turkey at your own relative.
In my case it's not a fight over the wish bone from the turkey, the last piece of pumpkin pie or who gets to stuff snow down some one's collar (ahhh the good ol' days) that has caused a life long holiday rift between me and my Aunt. No it's...the gifts. Well actually the gifts are fine it's the damn wrappings.
For years as a young impressionable teenager, hepped up on Christmas clementines and Quality Street chocolates, I'd have to bear witness to my Aunt's presents....presents NOT presence..... I don't recall her ever actually coming to our place for the holidays. Not that it matters, her presence through her presents was strong. Her gifts were always so expertly wrapped that who gave a flying frig about what was inside the be-ribbioned, perfectly papered with mitered corners and precision taped packages.
My Mother upon seeing a package arrive from her sister was always all "ohhhhhhhh my ,how lovely, how divine, how much more wonderful then your own wrappings my inadequate daughter dear." O.k. so she might not have said that last part but I got the hint. Every ooh over my Aunt's gifts was a stab to my artistic heart, every ahhh of delight was a needle in my side, every breath of enamored amazement was like a full fisted punch to my face.
It got so bad that for years I admitted defeat with out even trying, her presents with their sparkling perfection were so beyond my own skills that I slapped some wrinkled paper around the gifts I wrapped, stuck some duct tape, electrical tape, masking tape or spit on it to keep it closed and called it good enough. All the while suffering under the mocking presence of the damn presents from my Holiday Nemesis.
THEN I moved out, I escaped the horrors of the holiday depression I experienced every year from my enemy. It's not that I was jealous of her amazing gift wrapping prowess or anything, I just really wished it was me with that talent and not her.
BUT I shall stress no more, in fact I'm taking her off my Nemesis list, I'm sure she'll be relieved...well if she actually knew she was my Holiday foe. I mean it's not the sort of thing one shares with a relative. "Oh how nice to see you, I'll get you next year, you're making my holidays a living hell!!!! Muahh ahhh ahhh (evil laugh..obviously)."
This year when gathering my materials to properly gift wrap the prezzies I was sending back home to Nova Scotia for my family I hit upon an idea that killed two birds with one stone.
NOTE: NO BIRDS WERE ACTUALLY KILLED, WITH STONES OR OTHERWISE IN THE MAKING OF THIS BLOG ENTRY!
I had amassed a collection of corn chip/potato chip bags that were non-recyclable and I was too guilt ridden to just throw in the garbage and I had presents to wrap....
a ha, you see where I'm headed don't you?
If I'm already mailing a huge box of gifts to Canada why not send Mother my garbage as well AND as the cherry on my sundae of brilliance...wrap the presents so cleverly so as to blow my Aunt's present wrapping mind. The fact that I could spend the money I saved on wrapping paper to buy myself something pretty...that's just my reward for cleverness.
Genius, go ahead, say it. I can take it.

So what you see above in the photo is a pile-o-prezzies wrapped in:

• corn chip bags
• potato chip bags
• lime fruit mesh bags
• plastic and mesh potato bags
• candy bags from Halloween candy
• department store plastic bags
• bits of cardboard from food packaging
• sour cream containers
• candy wrappers

I did use tape, I mean I'm a genius not a frigging miracle worker. I dare ya to go up and play your own little identification game and try to figure out what's made of what. Sorry Americans I gotta spot the Canadians a few extra points as the brands and logos will be less familiar to them. Hey maybe we ought to organize a garbage swap between our countries, that way we can wrap our prezzies down here in Canadian trash and Canadians can wrap theirs in American..eh?
So there you have it Auntie dear. I win, WOOOHOOOOO.
Perhaps the idea of wrapping presents in garbage is a bit peculiar, but it's not like I used banana peelings or something (haven't figured out how to get tape to stick to the skins...)
When you think about it wrapping paper has the most bizarre life span of anything in the known universe. It's whole lot in life is to look pretty, obscure the identities of presents and get demolished and thrown away.
So why not use stuff that was already destined for the trash, give it a second life?
For that matter why use wrapping paper at all, why not just stuff your holiday gifts up your shirt and let people yank them out? Fun for you, fun for the family and good for the environment.

Memory # 7894...

Remember when I used to dress up as a 16th century prostitute and walk back and forth outside your kitchen window? Well walk no, strut yes. A prostitute, especially one from the 16th century, NEVER walks when they can strut.
It was cool how you'd sit there and paint, glasses pushed up on your nose, shooting me sidelong dirty glances out of the corner of your eye. Were you amused at my waddling around in thigh high pleather boots? Or was it the frilly white shirt with so many ruffles it HAD to be from the 16th century? Or maybe it wasn't even my get-up, as authentic as pleather thigh high boots are to the fine art of 6th century prostitution, perhaps it was because the only action I could score was from Big Louie. HA! What a quack.
Good Times Momma Bee, Good Times.

(Big Louie was a duck, may he rest in peace. The Don of the duck cartel that ran all the business in the yard)

A Recipe for Confessing....

Confession is good for the soul....
So they say, though I doubt it's as good for the soul as chocolate or coffee....or...(hang on to yer britches people) Coffee AND Chocolate...hummina hummina
So anyways believe it or not I wasn't a rebellious teenager. *gasp* are you shocked? Or perhaps not so much. The only two times I've been grounded in my life were for wearing mascara when I was 13 and for lighting a match in my bedroom. Ohhhhhhh what a rebel eh? Anyways my point being I didn't do any horrendous teenage acts of rebellion that had my parents chasing me round the country side, that involved authority figures (except for getting kicked out of school, one time for a fight I barely participated in) never went cow tipping, parking or soaped any windows. I never smoked, except when I was 4 and I took a drag off my father's girlfriend's cigarette and it was NASTY. I never stole (cookies, ice cream and chocolate and chocolate related paraphernalia do not count.) And the only deliberately malicious thing I ever did was start a rumor that 2 guys in my class who I detested in grade 9 were having a secret love affair with each other. That was pretty satisfying, though now I feel a little bad because what if they really were secretly gay and I destroyed them emotionally by starting the rumor, and also I don't think there's anything wrong with being gay so I've felt a little guilt over that one for a long time. Anyways the rumor didn't really take off but I felt satisfied that I'd done something to express in a creative way my dislike of these two, macho idiotic jerks. I can't remember why I thought they were jerks but I must have had a good reason. Like maybe they were breathing the same air as me, when you're a teenage girl in the 9th grade that's reason enough. Oh shoot, while I'm confessing I used to kick this one other guy in high school, I'm a tad passive aggressive I am now realizing. Him and his buddies all sat in a hall way and stuck their legs straight out as if they owned the place, as if they had the bloody right to be quietly rude to every one who walked by making them have to step over their legs. Funny thing is, I always *tripped* on his legs....*snicker* oh my how clumsy of me to always accidentally kick him. I quit doing that though when one day he *accidentally* raised his leg higher and *accidentally* tripped me as I was *accidentally* kicking him, wouldn't want an accident to happen would I? So I found a new hobby, er route through the school.
My point?
There is no point, I'm confessing, it's supposed to be good right?
I thought I'd start off with the heavy duty stuff like bruising some poor guy's legs every day at lunch time with my sneakered feet and end with stealing 97% of the delicious, mind blowing squares that were too damn good to share with people at the baby shower I brought them to.
It's my cousin's fault. (hee hee)
She lusted after those squares as much as I did, one little nudge in the direction of greed and gluttony was all it took. Actually I don't remember who suggested it. All I have is a faintly chocolate and coffee infused memory of arriving at a baby shower, hosted at my cousin's house.
People frown upon bringing tequila or twister to a baby shower where I come from so my Mom and I settled on a classic. Super, uber rich Arrowroot squares. (a family favorite recipe)
I had to hold that plate full of sinful goodness on my lap all the way to shower during the car ride...if I accidentally stuck my fingers under the plastic wrap and a bump in the road jostled my arm into hastily flinging a chunk of square into my greedy little mouth, can I be blamed? Hell no.
One taste was all it took to fill my dazzled mind with thoughts of sweet thick coffee frosting layered over chocolatey heaven. Do you really want to know how bad I had it? Do you reallllllllllly? I haven't a fricking clue who's baby shower it was I was going to, not a clue. I was all like "Baby? What Baby?"
I carried that plate of loveliness into my cousin's house with more care then I've ever held a kid, if some kindly relative smiled hello and asked "What ya got there dearie?" I growled, maybe drooled a little.
Thank goodness my cousin was there, she saved me from having to wrestle Auntie so-and-so or other cousin whats-her-face to the kitchen floor. My cousin in all her genius saw the potential of that plate of arrowroot squares to be OURS. And only ours, as arrowroot squares were so obviously meant to be.
With a little diversionary tactic that consisted of loudly saying "I'LL JUST PUT THIS PLATE OF SQUARES ON THE COUNTER OVER HERE!" Then we oh so cleverly slid off one or maybe two of the teensy tiniest squares from the whole batch onto another plate. See how clever that is????? All the relatives would each think the other relatives had gotten to the squares before them! Brilliant! While off we made with the loot, down to my cousin's bedroom, where we shut the door and proceeded to scarf down sickeningly vast amounts of Arrowroot squares. Hummina Hummmina Hummina. Oh man, if one of something is good then you KNOW a dozen of it is heaven.
The baby shower...it's a sugar induced high like blurry memory. I don't even remember going home, I remember when we shut the bedroom door and started in on that plate of stolen sweets and then....nothing.
Hmmm, I feel a sort of tickling sensation on my right foot....is that my soul? Feeling better after all this confessing?
It's not as satisfying a sensation as I expected...damn.
If you have the urge to make your own Arrowroot Squares let me tell you this.....if you can find a way to some how steal them from yourself or deprive others from enjoying them they'll taste ever the more sweeter. I'll have to ask my Mom where we even got the recipe. The original called for Arrowroot cookies to be crumbled up in the base but me dear Ma and I always used chocolate chip cookies. The name Arrowroot Squares has stuck for us though.

Arrowroot Squares


Lightly grease an 8"x8" pan and prepare your self mentally for a sweet mind altering experience.

In a bowl:
30 small crunchy chocolate chip cookies (or the cookie of your choice)
crumble these up leaving some dime size pieces and chunks. you don't want them too fine.

In a pot combine the following and cook on medium heat, constantly stirring for 8 minutes:
8 tbs. of white sugar
2 eggs well beaten
1 tsp of vanilla
4 tbs. of cocoa
1/3 cup of butter
1/2 tsp of salt

After 8 minutes dump the mixture over the broken cookies and stir up, then dump it in to the 8" pan and press down firmly.

Icing:
In a bowl combine:
1/3 cup of soft butter
1 1/2 cup of icing sugar
1 tsp of vanilla
1 tbs. of cocoa
Some super strong coffee


Mix this together and add the very strong coffee till you get the right frosting consistency. For the coffee I usually use a couple teaspoons of instant coffee in a bowl with a little bit of water, so its super dark strong. It doesn't take much of this strong coffee liquid to get the frosting smooth and creamy.
Then you frost the squares and enjoy. They get firmer when they cool, yummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmers!

The only other thing I can add to this ramble down memory lane and recipe sharing is that it's seriously a damn yummy square and also I hate calories. (actually make that I F$#%ing hate calories)

It's about Time.....

(you can't plan and pose a photo as great as this one)

I am in love with the self timer mode on my cameras.... that's right, cameras as in plural. Cause if there's ANYthing better then taking one photo of yourself with the self timer... it's taking two.
Now it's a little known fact that the self timer mode with a camera is also known by photo taking aficionados like myself as the *perv* mode. I like to sweeten that up a bit by calling it the happy mode, is there anything more joyous then being able to slap your camera down on a handy garden wall, table, or hood of the car and running, hell bent for leather, to get into position whilst the camera blinks, counting down till SNAP! Photo's taken and there's nothing you can do about it, forever immortalized with a slack jawed expression of surprise, half bent in a bizarre parody of some one about to sit down, or have a seizure.
I love the timer mode.
So many photos taken by human hands at the controls are soooo...what's the word I'm looking for? Predictable, boring, staid, regular...boring?
Too perfect smiles, with too perfect poses with too perfect everything, yeaaack, makes me sick.
Remember the good ol' days before digital cameras when photos had to be taken with that antiquated stuff called FILM? Oh you don't remember, you were drunk that year? Well shame on you, I remember. We had a sweet little 110 camera (I have NO fricking clue what the 110 means, but that's what we called it) and it was used as sparingly as any precious antique. Photos were snapped and if you were lucky a few months later the film was developed and that's when the magic happened. People would be horrified to find photos of themselves, forever frozen with their eyes closed, listing to the side, petting uncle Joe's ass. (all at once in some cases) There was such an element of surprise with film cameras.
Girls wondered if they looked fat and couldn't even find out for weeks, until the money was scraped up to get a measly 12 photos developed.
And people couldn't throw the photos away, a very few and very brave souls would grab the offending photo of themselves and run upstairs to their bedroom where they'd rip it into a dozen pieces and stuff the remains under their mattress to be later doused in kerosene and burned at a more opportune time. (the photo not the mattress)
Most people though recognized the value of the photo, the time, energy and hard earned moolah that went into 1/12 of a roll of film. Oh sure there were those fancy schmancy 24 count rolls of film but those were only for the rich people. Only rich people got twice as many photos of a birthday or Christmas. Us poor folk had to make due with a lowly 12 photos per holiday and you'd be damn lucky if you were in one of them.
Any one you know who likes to put on airs of richness, just have a look at their family album and you'll know soon enough if they're old money or new money. It would make you an ass for even wanting to know but I'm just saying, that's how you'd find out.
But of course all that has changed, the digital age means I can take 163 photos on our walk down to the get the mail, and on garbage day, oh mama I can take an easy 332 with out blinking an eye. You think I'm kidding?
That's why I love the self timer mode, brings the spontaneity back to photo taking. It brings the level of danger and excitement associated with snapping a photo up to whole new heights.
I've got photos of myself that are so stunningly horrific in their blurred, vacant eyed, vaguely creepy half seated poses that I am saving them just in case I need to black mail myself some day.
Also, when I die and people go through my stuff what a joy it will be to them to find not only the sweet perfectly arranged smile with the one quarter turn to the left and slightly raised right eyebrow photos but all the other embarrassingly weird and disturbing photos taken with the self timer that show me in a truer to life moment. Man that's gonna be so fricking sweet.
My only beef with the self timer is that it only goes as high as 25 seconds, I really, and I mean reallllllllly need a 25 minute timer. Some poses take longer to get into then others. (what have I told you about minds, gutter and filth? bunch-o-pervs see why it's called the perv mode now do we?)
Our dream pose with the self timer is to prop the camera on the patio, set the timer, get in the car and drive down the road and across the valley and up to the hill on the other side, get out, sit on the hood, arms extended up in a friendly wave, smiles on our faces where we will then freeze in that pose for how ever long we think is left in the allotted 25 minutes. I've got a pair of binoculars that I can watch the camera through to see if I can tell when the light on the camera starts blinking faster to indicate it's gonna snap.
I know, awesome idea right?
Until then I satisfy myself with setting the pathetic little 25 second timer and then run around the living room, heart beating joyously in anticipation of...what? I don't know! That's the cool part, who knows what wonderfully, unscripted moment the camera will catch.

A little Cheesey...

I used to think cheesecake was some bastardized version of wonderful regular cake with something as odiously disturbing as cheddar cheese added to it. Don't get me wrong , cheddar cheese is a beautiful thing, just not in dessert. I mean come on, CHEESE cake, what was I supposed to think? Plus I was like 6 so give me a break.
Of course when I dared utter these complaints in my childish ignorance I was bitch slapped, metaphorically speaking, in to shape by nobody.
I recall two life altering cheesecake moments from when I was a little girl. Strangely enough each was with a Grandmother. I remember visiting my Grandma Shirley and we'd some times go for jaunts in to town. All I can recall of this one particular jaunt was harsh fluorescent lighting, cafeteria style tables, a lunch counter with glass fronted area, you slid your tray along the counter and pointed at what you wanted.
Grandma got cheesecake, it looked rather ordinary. brown bottom with white stuff on top and brown crumbles to top it off. It wasn't neon red or ice cream so I'm sure I wasn't too impressed. It was a dessert though so I was more then willing to give it a try. My love affair with all things sweets started waaaay back.
Can you see it? A little frizzy red headed girl at a cafeteria table with her Grandma, sliding a fork through a dense, moist layer of cheese cake, scooping up the dark buttery graham crust and having an epiphany. Right there, right there in the middle of the cafeteria at Wool-Co!
It wasn't just good, it was LIFE CHANGING! When you're a little kid cookies are the height of culinary genius for your wee under-developed taste buds. Sometimes pie if you were feeling crazy, always ice cream and anything you could get in a brightly colored packages at the check out counter and had words like Gummi, Fizzy, Gooey or Sour in the title.
If I'd been given my choice of dessert that day, oh how my heart falters at the thought, if I'd been given my choice I might have picked a sundae, an ordinary, uninspiring sundae from a cafeteria. But my Grandma Shirley she picked cheesecake! Oh it was AMAZING! I can't remember much else but the feeling of glorious silky, thick creamy, slightly tangy wonderfulness. Nothing fancy, no fruit or chocolate or anything to muck up the purity of it. JUST cheesecake. I was a changed girl leaving that cafeteria.
Cheesecake wasn't something we had often when I was a kid, actually more like never. For all I know that might have been my first and last bit of cheesecake for a long time to come. But I never forgot it.
The next memory of cheesecake is a little sharper, a little brighter. I suspect it was my second experience with cheesecake, so I was older and ever so slightly more prepared. Of course how prepared can one be when it comes to cheesecake, it's like holding a bright shining star in your mouth and feeling the glory of the universe for an instant. Even if you did that a thousand times could it ever be dimmed, could you ever be truly prepared?
This time I was with my other Grandma, Grandma Prest. Perhaps it was even during the visit when my family were luxuriating in homemade root-beer at home while I was away for a week or two for a summer holiday with Grandma.
I remember it was her birthday and the sun was super bright. I remember that people were coming over, I haven't a clue if it was 2 or 200 but I remember the busy feeling of *company's coming*. Grandma was making dessert in the kitchen. I can see her at the counter putting ruby red slices of fresh strawberries all over a...... glossy white cheesecake. I don't remember the agonies of waiting for a piece, thank goodness things like that do fade in time. I don't remember who the company turned out to be, I don't remember finally getting a piece of the cheesecake. I just remember the tart sweet strawberries and vanilla creamy cheese cake and rich crumbly graham crumbs combination that was even MORE heavenly then the cheesecake from Wool-Co.
I don't think I asked for the recipe. I wish I'd been sophisticated enough to realize I could maybe MAKE this glorious dessert for myself and got the recipe out of my Grandma. I remember going on and on and on and ON to my Mother about this amazing strawberry cheesecake that I got to have at Grandma's. Since our family budget didn't run to cheesecake when ever we wanted I was probably torturing her with descriptions on the cheesecake I got to have and she didn't. Of course...if this WAS during the fateful summer of the best root beer I never got to have then perhaps she got her JUST DESSERTS, so to speak. hahahaha
At some point during my teenage years my Mom got a cookbook from my Grandma Prest. I was well in to my infatuation with desserts then. Some girls save up and buy makeup I bought chocolate chips. Well this one time I was flipping through the cookbook and found a recipe for cheesecake that seemed familiar. The thing that both of these mind blowing childhood cheesecake experiences had in common was the TYPE of cheesecake they were. Unbaked. No eggs, just cream cheese, whip cream and sugar. Oh Mama.
I saved my pennies, and I worked damn hard for them pennies too! House cleaning at a Lady's house every Saturday and I bought myself the ingredients for the cheesecake with some of my earnings. Look I wasn't a total bi-otch about it, I shared, for the most part, with my family.
The first cheese cake I made I topped with slices of bananas. The bananas were pretty good.....but the cheese cake....
HALLELUJAH! HALLELUJAH! HALLELUJAH!
There were angels singing and the skies opened up bathing in me in golden light when I tried my first bite of that cheesecake. Well, maybe not exactly but I'm pretty sure there was a lot of "MMmmmmmm MMMMMMMmmmmmmmmm MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM"
IT WAS PERFECT! The cheesecake part I mean, you can top it with anything you want but the cheesecake is the essential part. And this recipe was EXACTLY what I was looking for. It was easier to make then I could ever imagine and it started a whole new world of flavors for my family. It was easy to get them addicted to things like that. Sure I spent my hard earned dollars buying cheesecake supplies....ONCE...muahh ahhh ahhh, but after that they WERE addicted, not so subtly hinting "make that cheesecake, what do you need for it?"
A funny thing, this is the only cheesecake recipe I've ever made. It's that good. It's like my husband, why would I stray to another? I hit on the perfect thing first time up to bat so why would I mess with perfection?
Oh, I'm sorry. Were you wanting the recipe? Hmm, all that lead up and nada, zilch, nothing. Just the cold empty cruelty of me denying you your own cheesecake perfection? Don't freak out, I'm not one of those *family secret* kind of gals. Here's the recipe and enjoy. I don't have the name of who originally made this cheesecake but if I ever find it I'll include it here too. I have changed it a wee bit from the original anyways. You can too, sometimes lime pie filling on top, some times lemon, sometimes fresh fruit. Yummers. Customize to your wee precious heart's delight!

Lemon Cheesecake
INGREDIENTS:
For Crust:
1 cup of graham cracker crumbs
2 tbs white sugar
1/4 cup of melted butter
For cheesecake:
1 package of cream cheese (8 oz.)
1/2 cup of white sugar
1/8 tsp of salt
1 tsp of vanilla
1 tsp of lemon juice
1 small container of cool whip
Lemon Topping: 1 package of Jello lemon pie filling, just follow directions on the box.

DIRECTIONS:
Mix graham crumbs, butter and sugar and press in to 9” square pan, bake in pre-heated oven at 350 degrees for 10 minutes. Remove and cool.
Soften cream cheese to room temperature, resisting the urge to just eat it on crackers and skip the whole cheese cake thing...Stir the softened cream cheese with sugar, vanilla, lemon juice and salt in a bowl till well combined. Fold in the whip cream, dont forget to take it out of freezer before hand so it will be soft enough to fold in. Spoon cheesecake mix on to cool crust. Keep in refrigerator while you prepare the lemon pie filling. When the pie filling is ready, pour hot over the cheesecake and let cool. It’s yummiest if you have the will power to leave the whole thing in the fridge a few hours till it’s good and chilled and set up!

This recipe is one I've played a lot with, you can use lower calorie ingredients, you can make homemade lemon or lime pie filling, home made whip cream etc. Replace regular ingredients with organic. You get the drift, it's super simple and super delicious EVERY time I've made it!