Not Worth It

Inspirational song: Little Lies (Fleetwood Mac)

I've been lied to, my whole life. I always heard that the way to take out a red wine stain is by using white wine. Wrong! It didn't work at all, even when applied within a minute of the red wine hitting my t-shirt. So I went digging through the arsenal of the less-caustic cleaning supplies within a foot or two of the sink. Hydrogen peroxide, no effect. Baking soda, useless. Peroxide on top of the baking soda, why did I bother? Dish soap, just laughed at me. I rinsed and scrubbed with a nail, and rubbed the shirt against itself, with no change. I had one last thing to try, before it was back to the Polo store at the outlet mall, hoping for another sale. I grabbed the big gallon of white vinegar. The stain was gone like it never was. Whew. Maybe the people who created the white-wine-beats-red-wine myth misspoke. Maybe it was white wine vinegar. Either way, I am happy to be your teacher.

I had to have dental work done this morning. I don't know how I managed to get a giant cavity, right at the gum line, so quickly. There was no hint of it at my last checkup in the spring. I guess I was storing just a pinch of sugar between the cheek and gum, and not knowing about it. No hard candies, no gum. It's a mystery to me. My first dentist was an old country doctor (also known as my grandpa), and I don't know whether it was his delivery with that giant, steel-handled needle, or him encouraging my innate toughness, but by the time I was in junior high, I was absolutely done with novocaine. The pierce of the needle is worse than a drill bumping into a nerve in the middle of the tooth, and the effects of the drug are unbearable to me. I've refused anaesthetic for decades. I'm mad at my own mouth that I couldn't get out of this one. There's no way I could handle the damage to the gums, that I knew was coming and was worse than I budgeted for. My dentist, who is usually really cool and listens well to me, somehow got it in his head that my desire to refuse novocaine all this time meant that I have a resistance to it, and I don't bother because it doesn't work. Au contraire! I told him I needed to be able to speak clearly today, so he said he'd just numb the immediate site, not the whole mouth. He shot up the jaw, then left me a few minutes while it took effect. Then he did it again, with the justification that he thought I needed a lot of it to work. I can't believe he thought this would leave me capable of speech for the day. He said it would just be the one side of my jaw. He either lied, or he had no idea how much novocaine he was giving me. I came home and tried to have some mint tea, thinking it would be soothing. It was a challenge to drink, since I couldn't tell whether I had a good seal between the cup and my sagging, lifeless lip. I felt awful the rest of the morning, and by noon, I thought maybe a nap would help me metabolize the drug. Two hours later, and I still could barely speak. I managed to make my phone call I had scheduled for the afternoon, but I never felt coherent enough to go discuss that jury duty summons I received yesterday. Now here, more than 13 hours later, and it still doesn't feel like I actually own that part of my face. What isn't throbbing feels like I borrowed it from a corpse. If this dentist gets another crack at my mouth, I'm going to have to be more convincing. I'm not lying, the needle is worse than the drill, hands down.

Civic Duty

Inspirational song: Up the Junction (Squeeze)

I seem to be having trouble communicating properly these days. I think I'm saying what I mean, but as I so often need to explain to the man, I don't think we are speaking the same English. Several times lately, I have been repeating myself, and no one seems to hear me. Case in point, today, I had a jury summons in the mail. The date they want me to report is three days before I am leaving for Colorado for the annual football trip, and to check on the progress on the condos. I don't want to get out of the jury duty. I'm actually kind of interested in doing it. I've wondered why I haven't received a summons in all these years that I've been moving around the country. Maybe I was called up after I moved. I asked a general question on whether I would be able to move the date earlier, as I will be very busy later. I had a long list of suggestions on how to get out of jury duty entirely, some serious, some very funny. I repeated myself several times, that I don't want to get out of it. That didn't stop the tide of ideas. I must not be the communicator I think I am.

For all that humans didn't seem to be catching on to the signals I was sending out, apparently was my day to charm all the reptiles. I don't usually walk close to the display of reptiles up for sale at the pet supply megastore, so I do not know whether they tend to be as enthusiastic as, say, a cage full of puppies. Today, the sign caught my eye, that they were selling skinks for 30 bucks. I was surprised by that. That means my back yard must have a fortune in potential pets, because the little guy in the cage was the same run of the mill blue striped skink that lives in the Park. The tag claimed that they live for something remarkable, like 20 years. Are you kidding me? The life expectancy of a skink at Smith Park is 5 minutes past the moment Jackie spots it. The skink's cage was throwing off too big of a glare for me to get a good photo, so I started looking at the other reptiles who were dancing for my attention. There were several other lizards of varying sizes, including a little tan guy who dropped from the ceiling of his cage, and then ran back and forth, looking up at me, wanting my attention (for better or for worse). There was a googly-eyed chameleon who was difficult to pass up, but he would have been a cat's breakfast for sure. And there was a little ball python who was more energetic than any snake I've ever seen. I started wondering whether I was speaking Parseltongue and not realizing it. Do reptiles see colors? Was I dressed in a particularly attractive way? The looks I was getting from some of them, particularly the chameleon, made me feel like they were cheering me as the great savior of lizards, for all of my early efforts to protect them from Jack the Lizard Killer.

Talk Amongst Yourselves

Inspirational song: We've Got a Bigger Problem Now (Dead Kennedys)

I've had too much on my plate lately. I have decided I'm going to take a cue from Linda Richmond, that classic character on SNL, whenever the talk got too serious and emotionally overwhelming for her. I'm going to provide a topic:

What if genetic modification of plants is not about increasing crop yields and resistance to pesticides, but about patenting the seeds so that Big Ag controls all plants grown as foods, and demands a profit from every person on earth who wants to eat?

There. Talk amongst yourselves. I'm going to go to bed early tonight.

While you formulate your answers, here are some pictures of my grandbabies.

No Magic Today

Inspirational song: Voodoo Child (Jimi Hendrix)

I'm a rational, intelligent woman. I'm skeptical, I believe in science, and I am willing to do my research before I believe most claims, dubious or otherwise. So how is it every Saturday, from September to November, I find myself doing the silliest little sports fan voodoo moves, as if they make a bit of difference? It's more than just wearing the team colors. If I'm listening to the game on the internet, and playing a repetitive game on the computer while I listen, I start to think ridiculous things, like that every hand of solitaire I lose means the team will fumble or punt. When we are making a goal line stand, I close my eyes and focus on the announcer's voice, like paying attention will aid the defense. Today, I was channeling my grandmother, whose nervous energy during sporting matches always sent her off to clean house when the tension was too much to handle. I was doing dishes and mopping the floor, and somehow, doofus that I am, I got it into my head that we were playing better while I was standing. During halftime, I ate something that made my stomach flip, and I sat through the third quarter. Cal scored three unanswered touchdowns. So I was back up for the fourth, and for overtime. My muscles were tense, my mind was absolutely absorbed with the game, but funny, the voodoo just didn't work today. We lost by a field goal, in a spectacular match. And I am left feeling like a very foolish fan.

I'm starting to feel the need to prepare the nest, now that we are getting down to the home stretch on my man's project. The weather is cool, and the sun is going down so much earlier. It feels like the rest of the time could just fly by, if I turn my attention to all that I have to do before he gets here. There are a lot of projects I tabled, a lot of piles of paperwork or laundry that I just stopped looking at, so I didn't have to put them away. Now it's time to open my eyes and address the things I ignored. There might be more lurking here than I am aware of. What did I think was going to happen when I turned away from all of this? I need a magic spell to put it all to rights. Funny, that's not going to work today either.

Why I Don't Make Long Range Plans

Inspirational song: Sounds That Can't Be Made (Marillion)

I've been floating in a cloud of memories and denial all day. And every hour or so I stop, lose focus in my gaze, and I just say her name. I catch myself shaking my head without any real understanding of what set me in motion, other than a deep need in my soul to say No. The world is wrong, and I am impotent, unable to change it back.

I went back in my messages, to read our last conversation beyond little comments and fantasy football. She had written me in June, asking whether I was planning on going to the Marillion superfan convention in Montreal next year. It is sold out, and neither of us had ever gone to one of these three day weekend events, much as we wanted to. She and I agreed that we would make it to the next one on this continent, which we assumed would be in 2017. We were determined to make it happen, even if our significant others weren't as enamored of the band as we faithful. (My man does like them, for certain, but he's not quite as devoted as my friend and I.) The last message I sent said, "Between now and 2017, we'll make concrete plans." It is very rare that I am able to put voice to long-term plans that span years. I've had to move too many times, I've left or lost too many jobs, I've seen too many friendships crumble. But there I was, confident that we would both still be here and still be friends three years from now, excited about meeting in Montreal for a long weekend.

I have looked up to my friend professionally for more than a decade, and she inspires much of my writing. She has had success as a playwright, having many of her plays performed throughout the Midwest, winning several awards for her writing. But oddly, it was an old short story written in the "before time" that I loved the most. It was called "Don't Cheat the Tooth Fairy," and it was a dark tale about a divorced couple in an ugly custody dispute, and the child in the middle. I hope you read it some day, so I won't give it away, but imagine a tooth fairy not resembling Tinkerbell, but more Scrooge's final ghost, with a cloak made of millions of collected teeth. It's a fabulous story of justice served to the petty ones in the most satisfying way.

A final thought about deep vein thrombosis. People, take this seriously. I mean it. All day I have had conversations with loved ones about what happened, and this makes the fourth person I am close to who has faced it, and the survival rate among the four is only fifty percent. That is unacceptable! My mother and one of her best friends have both suffered them, and of the two, only my mother is here today. This evening, another good friend of mine with an Oklahoma connection reminded me that she had a DVT early last year, and exactly like my mother did, she had to fight to be treated in a hospital, demanding second opinions, and refusing to be sent home. My friend who has been taken from me yesterday was told that despite finding clots in her lungs, they were planning to send her home today! What is wrong with the medical profession?

God dammit. I can feel myself sliding through the stages of grief. Hello, anger. I'm going to stop writing and put up a picture of a cicada that was making silly poses on my door. I need another drink.

The Butterfly Woman

Inspirational song: The Invisible Man (Marillion)

I'm processing some heavy, heart-rending news tonight. I saw that one of my Marillion friends (it's the easiest way to describe us) posted that she had lost a friend tonight. Automatically, I told her I was sorry for her loss. She had to tell me that we shared this loss, and I sat and shook, heat radiating from my hands and face, while I waited for her to type the name of the friend we had in common who has been taken from us. It took my breath away when I learned. It was someone I love forever (I am using the present tense intentionally). I don't know how to absorb this. This person taught me a lot about self identity and love on one's own terms. And I really don't know how to tell this story without giving away personal details that even in death are not mine to share without permission. My friend was one of the most complex humans I have ever known.

I need to start more than a decade before we met. When I was a teenager, months before I started college, the Marillion album Misplaced Childhood was released. I found it, and I found my lifeline. I listened to it all the way through (these were the cassette days) over and over, and every time I felt rested and at peace by the end. Within a month or two of getting it, I was using it as medicine, when I would wake in the middle of the night with my gallbladder on fire (undiagnosed), and listening to that album straight through would relax me enough to go back to sleep, and survive the painful attacks. On Christmas Eve my freshman year of college, one of these gall bladder attacks actually turned out to be a precursor to appendicitis, and I listened to the album three times during the night, not wanting to wake up my dad in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve, asking to go to the emergency room. I have always credited it with saving my life. That night earned the band, in its various incarnations, my eternal devotion.

In the late 80s, the band switched lead singers, and separately, their clout in the music industry diminished. It wasn't until 1997 that the former lead singer, known by the nickname "Fish," made it back to the US for a concert tour. I was living in North Carolina at the time, but I flew to Denver by myself to see him at the Bluebird Theater. It was at that show that I met my friend for the first time, wearing a t-shirt with Fish's logo on it, and the catchphrase, "With an 'F,' dammit!!" (As opposed to Phish.) I asked about the shirt, having heard about them on the internet message board called the "Freaks list" where I lurked, too shy to speak up. We had a nice little chat, for being strangers seated next to each other, but I recognized my friend's name as a regular contributor to that list.

Five years later, I was living in Oklahoma temporarily, taking care of my grandfather's properties after he passed away. The Freaks list had a few splinter groups, and I had found my voice on one of them--the Freakout group, one I joined just before I met many of my now beloved friends in real life, at another Fish concert, that time in Atlanta. The Freakout group was planning a get-together, officially, a "garden party," in Oklahoma City. How perfect. I went. This is where I really got to know my friend from that show years earlier. The friend was now on spouse number two, who I met, along with a son and daughter from the first marriage. Other garden parties followed over the years, including one in Omaha, when this friend lived there. We grew close, keeping in touch mostly online, and we were jolly rivals in fantasy football.

It was a few years after the Omaha garden party, after my friend divorced a second time and moved to Chicago, that the transformation happened. We were told that there would be a Facebook hiatus, and then a triumphant return. Our friend came back an entirely different person, in all possible ways, with a new name and a new outlook on life. It was shocking, but the absolute joy this brought was unmistakable. I supported the change then, and I still applaud the courage it took, and the love of self it showed.

Two years ago, my man and I flew to Chicago for a whirlwind vacation, for the express purpose of seeing Marillion (with their second lead singer, Hogarth not Fish) perform two nights in a row. We got a hotel downtown, walking distance to our friend's tiny apartment now shared with a new love. I had the time of my life. I didn't hold back anything, hugging my friend (I'm not usually a voluntary hugger), smiling and laughing more than I usually do around people I haven't seen in years (I'm strangely shy that way), and I made it perfectly clear how happy I was that my friend had uncovered the true self and found pure happiness.

A horrible accident a year or two prior, when a schoolbus ran over my friend on a bicycle, meant a cane, and some pretty cushy handicap-accessible seating for the four of us at the two Marillion shows. We settled in to a four-top table on the first riser, facing the stage, drinks in hand. Steve Hogarth came out to open the show, singing "The Invisible Man." It's a thirteen and a half minute powerhouse of a song, that starts out haunting, and ends up screaming in rage and pain before admitting defeat, and begging "leave me be." The song begins:

The world's gone mad
And I've lost touch
I shouldn't admit it
But I have
It slipped away while I was distracted
I haven't changed
I swear I haven't changed
How did this happen? I didn't feel myself
Evaporating

I turned to look at my dear friend, that first night of the show, right as the line "I swear I haven't changed" was sung. There was a look of utter bliss and humor at how dramatically EVERYTHING had changed. We made eye contact and laughed like best friends.

A few days ago, this darling person told us that deep vein thrombosis had forced a hospital visit. Then, two days ago, the report was clotting in the lungs. Yesterday, we were told to expect a release today, and a prescription to coumadin. The quote was, "This experience has been extremely and emotionally frightening. I'm looking forward to many, many more years of sunrises."

And tonight, there will be no more sunrises. It is too much to bear.

Love you forever, my friend.

A Break

Inspirational song: In My World (Moody Blues)

It's here. Relief is here. I begged for it. I whined about it. I swore violently when it took too long to arrive. But this week, my cries for mercy were answered, and autumn arrived with perfect autumnal weather to go with it. There's a wedge pattern just off the coast, that pushed rain and much colder air through my Park. The last three days have been utterly gorgeous, at least according to my standards. There has been cloud cover, occasional spitting rain, and a freshening breeze. Nothing could be better, as far as I am concerned. The poor girl at the bank thought I was crazy when I came in grinning broadly, raving about the beautiful day, as I was folding up my still-damp umbrella.

The Pride was rewarded for good behavior today. It was so beautiful outside, for the first time in months, I left the back door open, and let the kids roam for an hour or so. It has been so long since we went out to play as a group, they acted like they had forgotten what to do. But in just a few minutes, they fell into their old habits. Jackie ate grass, Alfred camped on the rail of the deck, Rabbit followed me around the lawn everywhere I went, and Athena hid. Just like old times.

I have no more excuses not to be putting the Park to bed for the season. It will still warm up a few times between now and winter, but it shouldn't be so bad I can't get out there most days. The mosquitoes still run the joint, and I can't walk with my head down unless I want to wear a spider web as a diadem. The far fence shows how badly I failed with my "no vines whatsoever" rule. While I had the back door open, I drained off the water drowning several of my container pots, and brought inside several of the herbs that I had given up on while the giant spiders controlled the deck. I scooped a few of them out of the windowboxes, and repotted them in appropriate containers to bring to my inside world. You may look at the pictures and ask me, Anne, did you really just bring a large catnip plant into your kitchen, and expect that your herbs will survive? Yes, yes I did.

Editing

Inspirational song: For You (Bruce Springsteen)

I feel like such a mean girl. Here today is Bruce Springsteen's 65th birthday, and everyone is wishing him well, and making lists of their favorite songs by him. Me, when I thought of my favorite song, it was an easy choice, but forgive me, Boss, my favorite version of it isn't the original one recorded, nor even the live one a couple years later with just the keyboard. I'm sure I'd be kicked out of New Jersey to admit that my favorite version of my favorite Bruce song--For You--is the highly edited one from Manfred Mann's Earth Band. There is no doubt, Bruce Springsteen tells a hell of a story, as his entire catalog proves. He paints pictures that are instantly recognizable truths to all of us. But sometimes, early in his career, I felt like he got a little tangled up in his words. I didn't mind so much that Manfred Mann cut that song down to its core, bringing out the passion and the desperation, but leaving out a few of the more clunky phrases. (But bless them for leaving in that line in one of their other Springsteen covers, so that for decades music fans could wonder what the hell it meant to be "Wrapped up like the Deuce.") I feel like the original lyrics focus more on the suicidal woman, but the sparer edited version focuses on the action, the determined attempt to reach through her despair, and the outpouring of emotion that represents. The original sounds very much about "her," whoever she is. I always felt like the cover was being sung to me, the listener. I get drawn in every time.

I made a point within the first week of writing to make these essays short. I don't want them to be a drag to read. They are supposed to be fast and digestible, even when I wander into heavy subjects. I self-edit compulsively. I delete at least a quarter of what I write, on average. I read it over and over, and I will agonize over articles and conjunctions and tenses, until it is as perfect as I can make something I'm writing right before I go to bed. I think if I'm going to have the chutzpah to critique a 24 year old Bruce Springsteen, and say that he should have edited a tad, then I have no excuse whatsoever to just write a couple pages of dreck and turn it loose to the world. The hardest part is re-reading a day or two later (yes, I do it), and finding typos or grammatical errors, or worse, learning later that I have key details wrong that change the entire tenor of the scene I was trying to describe. It is my greatest challenge to leave those posts alone, as snapshots in time.

When I rearranged the rooms upstairs, clearing out what was half office, half dumping grounds, I pulled out my bookshelf full of trashy romance that I admit without shame that I collect, and moved it to my room. Buried among the yellowing books is a stack of white paper an inch thick or more, of one of the earliest books I ever tried to write. In my early 20s, I wanted desperately to write a Medieval romance, and I researched it, and I had a hundred double-spaced pages written, give or take. I had sent this half-manuscript to my mother for editing. She had written in red felt tip on the first page that at first she was just going to look for typos and grammatical errors, but she got so wrapped up in the story that it became too much fun not to let loose and help add to it. I miss having that collaborative give and take. I need to bring back some of my previous attempts at fiction, to see whether she can help me edit some life back into them.

(I keep looking to see whether I already used this photo of my mother's handsome kitty boy, who crawled out of a wildfire burn zone last year, looking thin and dehydrated and smelling of smoke, and giving her that look that said he came for her. Seems right for tonight.)

Get On With It

Inspirational song: Wake Me Up When September Ends (Green Day)

What an awful summer it was. What a horrible year. What a difficult year and a half. What a stressful nineteen and a half years. But as of today, summer is officially over. My annus horribilus is winding down, with progress reports from the condo restorations and my gaining acceptance over friends lost forever. And soon, very soon, the long distance part of my relationship will end. Not tomorrow, or even next week, but soon. And then, barring any major catastrophes on the horizon, the next stage of our lives can begin. We have so many plans for "after," some of which we are even acting on. (Did we really need a little mining claim in the mountains? Depends on who you ask, but most people wouldn't call it a need. Nonetheless, we have a contract on it, even though neither of us has set foot on it yet. Next year is going to be very interesting. I wonder whether there is gold in them thar hills. Or silver. Or copper, or anything else that would be worth the extracting. Probably not. Doesn't matter. The main thing we want from that hill is peace.) I do sort of wish I could just go to sleep for the next few weeks, waking up just in time to tidy up the house, and maybe clean out the garage before the man's jeep is fully restored from the body shop. I'm not sleeping well, and I haven't been for quite some time. I'm awake until two or three every morning, and I spend the hours between seven and ten in the morning waking up over and over, and trying to pretend the dogs aren't listening to every change in my breathing. I often think I should try to shift to a more standard sleep cycle, but there's always something preventing it. Sleeping straight through the next week wouldn't solve anything, but it sure would make these agonizing last days go faster.

We have all had those moments when a smell or a sound takes us back to a vivid memory from our past. The smell of bacon and coffee sends me to my grandparents' house all the time. There's a certain janitorial grade spray cleaner that places me back in high school or junior high, especially to those moments when I lay my sleepy head down on a desk, close enough that I could practically taste the residue from that cleaning foam. And I've gone on at length about how the sound of a really good drum line transports me to some of the greatest moments of my life, to the point where I can feel the wool suit making me sweat and my right ear starts to ring from the phantom shriek of a piccolo. Today I had one of those little time warps head me in the wrong direction. It was disconcerting, feeling displaced to a time and place that hasn't happened yet. But sure as I know my own name, I recognized my forever house. I was inside it. I could feel it around me, and I could almost see it. It smelled different, it sounded different, and there were people there I am not sure I have met yet. For perhaps a full second, I was there. It has left me beyond impatient to get on with my life. September is just in my way now. October is coming, and with it I will have a birthday, and a football trip, and the fire lit under my ass to prepare my nest for papa bird to come home. Forever is waiting for me, and I'm through with the obstacles trying to hold me back. Wake me when September ends.

The Jitters

Inspirational song: Real Wild Child (Iggy Pop)

My nerves came back to life today. After all those days feeling wan and pale, suddenly I feel like I have a live current running through me, and it's a little more than I can handle. I feel like a little kid in kindergarten who has been told she has to sit still for an hour while the teacher drones on about something boring, when her body is telling her to get up and run in a random pattern, making every weird noise she has ever discovered her voice can produce. Where did this come from? Sure, I can see getting a little spun up about football over the last two days, having listened to two games on internet radio and watching bits and pieces of three others on television. I don't think that's the whole of it, however. It doesn't appear to be over-caffeination, unless caffeine is getting slipped in somewhere as a vapor through my a/c vents. I just needed to get up and DO today. The kitchen is a lot cleaner, the recycling is finally taken to the outside bins, for which I'm glad to have the nervous energy. I reached the limits of what I'm willing to do on my carpentry project upstairs, until I have someone with stronger hands and shoulders to help me finish the details, and I find or replace my power sander before I paint it. The day bed I have been trying to create for months is put together but not trimmed out, and now it has the mattress, sheets, a blanket, and a large assortment of pillows on it. And it has a very rotund black cat who is beyond thrilled that I made her a very special bed, just for Jackies. She has been singing about it all evening, and rolling around, getting tangled in the sheets, and covering the new blanket with black fur. I hope it all survives until there is daylight for photographs. I guarantee nothing. I still can't decide whether to go ahead and put the new matching Persian carpet on the floor in the freshly redecorated guest room. Is that just asking for cat barf?

Not even a nice bourbon on the rocks has been able to cool my jitters. If anything, that just made me feel warmer, thus aggravating the situation. The laptop is too hot to snuggle with, so perhaps I will cut it short, pick a short project I can complete before bed, and leave you with the pictures of the lizard I surprised on my front door when I took out the trash, and the moment Athena noticed that it was there. She was not allowed to kill it.

Beta Carotene Bonanza (ATK No 5)

Inspirational song: And I Am Telling You (Dreamgirls)

Remember a day or two ago, when I said I saw the very end of Secrets of a Restaurant Chef, and decided I needed to deconstruct Anne Burrell's pot roast with squash and figs? Yesterday I bought the beef, squash, and fresh figs, and today I spent hours modifying her recipe (found on the Food Network site) based on what I already had available and the flavors I like best. For the last three or four days, I have been feeling crummy, and my appetite was non-existent. Now, with a full belly for the first time in days, I am changing my tune. I was just saving myself up for this meal, and it was so worth it. I also missed most of my favorite Saturday cooking shows, but while I listened to my football game, I watched Martha Stewart make a potato puree with brown butter. I tweaked that for my own purposes, mixing a large sweet potato in with two smaller (organic) russets, and it was the perfect complement to my roast and veggies. Holy mama, you wish you were at my house tonight.

Both of these recipes were a bit fussy. Okay, they were a lot fussy. This is the kind of thing you would really only make for someone very special, unless you have nothing better to do than spend hours in the kitchen, which apparently I did today. I have my choice of some of the best restaurants in the country within a half-hour drive from my couch, yet this was easily as good or better than entrees I've had downtown. I can't say I really saved any money, because it still cost me at least $17 for a plate, all things considered. But I didn't have to change out of my football jersey, I ate with my feet up, and the only tip I had to hand out was letting two very enthusiastic doggies clean up the bowl and sieve from the potato puree. (Turns out, the easiest way to assure the professional eater dog doesn't literally nose out the little red-headed dog is to offer them a strainer with food on both sides.) This would have been really good with a bold red wine, but in deference to how I've been feeling, I stuck with water.

I'm better at writing recipes in paragraph form, so bear with me. I will put the outline at the very end of the blog. Also, I was cooking for one person plus leftovers, so adjust as needed for the number of people you want to feed. I highly recommend cooking mis-en-place, cutting up everything ahead of time and having it in bowls as needed, ready to go. It helps prevent any one stage getting overcooked or burned.

Preheat the oven to 350. I started by heating a little peanut oil (just my preference) in a Dutch oven, patting dry a chuck roast with a paper towel, salting it, and browning both sides of it to caramelize the edges of it. (It doesn't "seal in the juices." That has been scientifically disproven.) I put the roast on a plate, and in the same oil, sweated half of a thinly sliced yellow onion and a couple stalks of celery, chopped, plus a heavy sprinkle of dried red pepper flakes. Once the onion started to turn translucent, five or six minutes later, I dropped in a little minced garlic. That only cooked a minute before I added tomato paste (get the kind in a tube--less waste!) and a bay leaf. Once that was warmed, I put in maybe a quarter cup of sherry vinegar, used a bamboo scraper to deglaze the bottom of the pot, and added about half a box of good organic chicken stock. The recipe called for orange zest, but I had lemons, so I used that, taking large sections of one with a vegetable peeler. I also added thyme and coriander, plus salt and pepper. The meat went back in, lid went on the pot, pot went in the oven, Anne went to listen to the football game for an hour (we won). Pulled out the Dutch oven, and turned the meat over, adding chicken stock to keep the meat covered halfway up. At this point I dropped in two chopped carrots, again deviating from the original recipe, before putting it back in for another hour. The original also called for dried figs and butternut squash. I found fresh figs, and once the stems were cut off and they were quartered, they were perfect. I can't tell you the name of the squash I used. It looked like an acorn, but it was speckled green and white, and it had an orange blush spot on the bottom of it. It was a little unwieldy to peel and chop, so even though it was delicious, I might use butternut next time. At the two hour mark, I picked up the roast, poured the chopped squash and figs into the cooking liquid, and set the meat back down on top of it, flipped again. Back in the oven while I made the potatoes. One large sweet potato and two smaller white potatoes, peeled completely and chopped into large pieces, boiled (covered) for about 15-20 minutes in only an inch or two of water, and then pulled out with a slotted spoon, to a bowl where they were mashed with a traditional potato masher. I poured a third of a cup or so of half and half on them and mixed gently. I put a couple heaping tablespoons of butter in a small saucepan, and heated it on medium heat until it just started to turn brown and smell nutty. That went into the mashed potatoes, along with salt and pepper and freshly grated nutmeg, and I stirred with a fork. (A blender or food processor would have turned them to glue--don't use it for this.) I got my fine mesh sieve and with my bamboo scraper, I pushed spoonfuls of the potatoes through to make a fine puree. This is labor intensive and messy, but it was worth it. The roast had cooked lidded for a half an hour with the squash and figs in it, and another 15 minutes with the lid off. I pulled it out of the oven, removed the meat to a platter and the squash and figs to a bowl, and then on a medium high heat, reduced the pan juices as long as I could wait until I was ready to eat. I got out the good china, because after all this effort, why not, and put a large spoonful of the potato puree in the center. I sliced the roast in half-inch thicknesses, and piled a few pieces on the puree, surrounded it with squash and figs, and poured over the reduced pan juices. It was amazingly complex. As I ate, I could taste the sweet of the figs and squash, the savory of the browned roast, the earthiness of the potato puree, the nuttiness of the browned butter, and even the heat of the red pepper flakes. Every layer of flavor was necessary. I would not leave any of this out. I even enjoyed accidentally eating some of the lemon zest.

This was a wonderful burst of autumn in one meal. I even was able to open a window tonight, for the first time in months, as it is finally cool enough to do it again. The world is finally tilted at the right angle for me.

Pot Roast with Squash and Figs

Chuck roast, patted dry
1-2 T oil
Yellow onion, thinly sliced
2-3 ribs of celery, sliced
Dash red pepper flakes
1-3 cloves of garlic, minced
1/4-1/2 c tomato paste
1/4 c sherry vinegar
2-3 c organic chicken stock
Thyme
Ground coriander
Zest of one lemon
2 carrots, chopped
6-8 fresh figs, stems removed and quartered
Acorn or butternut squash, peeled and chopped into 1/2 inch pieces
Salt and pepper to taste

Sweet potato, peeled and chopped in 1" segments
Russet potato, peeled and chopped the same
1/3 c half and half
2-3 T browned butter
Nutmeg
Salt and pepper to taste

Rain Cooled

Inspirational song: Down By the Sea (Men At Work)

I'm listening to tonight's song while I wait for the words to start flowing. It's an agonizingly slow song, that seems to take forever to develop. How apropos. I have no energy and no strength today. I stayed in bed, sleeping heavily, until well into the afternoon. I checked, and I have no fever, and only a few signs of the intestinal illness that has been laying me low for a month. I don't know whether it's a relapse or a stray virus. It's just enough to make me move slowly for a few days (so far), and it makes me feel like such a failure that I'm not springing up to action already. Last time this nastiness took four months to clear, so I'm trying to be patient. I'm already seeing how it is playing with my head, just like it did last year. I am cranky and paranoid, and I can't think straight. I've been doing a lot of ruminating on the origin of the phrase "gut feeling," and deciding that it really does make a difference in how well your entire system works, when your gut bacteria are out of balance. Perhaps one day I'll stumble across the right medical journal paper that explains how it affects the brain so thoroughly. It's probably out there, or will be one day soon.

We've had a lot of rain blowing in off the sea today. Lying in bed, closer to the roof, I was serenaded by the sound of heavy bands of precipitation soaking my street. By the time I left the house this evening, the air was still wet but rain-cooled. It might even get cool enough to open a window tonight. Wouldn't that be welcome?

The signs of autumn keep showing up. I stopped by the grocery store and found two big piles of pumpkins already up for sale. I didn't get any yet, but I did get a lovely little speckled acorn squash and some figs to braise alongside a chuck roast. I only caught the very end of the television chef tasting this combination, so I need to poke around online to see what would round out this recipe. I also found a collection of fireplace options. This is the deep south, y'all. Why would you think we need to light fires already? If we're lucky it might be cool enough by November for this stuff. And are those "light 'n go bonfire" logs molded and pressed? It looks neat, but what exactly is in that? I think I like our Bonfires better.

Initiation

Inspirational song: The Leader of the Pack (The Shangri-Las)

Three years ago, when we first moved into the Park, we were surprised on a trip to PetSmart to buy cat food. There were two giant tents in the parking lot, and big signs that said "Adoptathon." Every animal shelter in the tri-county area was represented. I had been begging the man to agree to getting a kitten as soon as we moved in the house, so when we saw the tents full of dogs and cats, I got more than one sideways pointed glance, and the question, "You knew about this, didn't you?" I didn't, and I said so, but I don't think he believed me. I went through the cat tent, looking through all of the little baby faces for the female black kitten I had been begging for. I had trouble finding the one I was looking for. But when the man removed the little tuxedo who didn't want to be held by me, and plopped down the black and white boy kitty, I knew in a heartbeat that he was coming home with me. He still gives me that same, "I'm gorgeous and you love me" expression that he did that first moment, and he is absolutely right. I turned my back to fill out the adoption paperwork (in the other tent) for just a few minutes, but by the time I came back I found that my man was already holding a little black girl kitten, saying that we were taking that one too. Who was I to say no?

Raising more than one kitten is just asking for destruction. Much as the trio of kittens that included Cricket was collectively known as Godzilla's Kittens, I began referring to this pair, Jackie and Alfie, as my Minions of Chaos. Many things broke in those early months. We used to have a much smaller cat tower where the current large one is, and I used to have a second pottery masque that I had made and was very proud of. I was stupid enough to hang it on the wall above the cat tower. I had loaned my last laptop to the man, after he wrecked his old one. He parked it on the floor, directly under the cat tower one night, when we were both out of the house. I came home from a movie, and found the Green Man masque had been knocked off the wall, landing on one point of an acacia leaf on the shell of the laptop, shattering the computer screen and breaking the masque into several pieces. It took me weeks to pick the masque up and throw it away. I don't think I really thought I was going to glue it together, but I just couldn't bring myself to deal with the loss. The sight of it reminded me not to put any more of my irreplaceable art pieces in vulnerable positions.

Athena has always been very much her own kitten. Her life story was nothing like the Minions, coming here as a three-week old foster, switching to moist canned food far too early (I think the fact that she barely even touched a bottle here is why she is so bitey now), and having to go back to the shelter twice a week for three months, getting the awful lime dip until she was finally declared ringworm-free. I think her early stresses are what made her a little wild, a little stand-offish. She wants to be part of the club, but she is just too weird, too socially awkward. I think today she was trying to prove to the Minions that she's one of them. Her gang initiation was to destroy something of mine, and it appears that she succeeded. I was upstairs finally getting back to a carpentry project that has been very difficult to finish, and I was listening to all the music I have stored on the old Model T computer on shuffle. I didn't give Athena enough attention, and she went wandering to see what trouble she could find. She crawled behind my old CPU, and started fiddling around with the tangled spaghetti pile of cords in the corner. When the modem fell off the shelf and scared her away, I realized where she was, but I don't know exactly what mischief she managed. The music shut off, the computer screen went dark, and the CPU started beeping an alarm that I can't fix. I don't know how to fix it, although I tried. So I shut it down. I no longer have access to my entire music library, nor to the bulk of my photographs that are all still stored on that computer. No, I haven't backed it up onto my portable hard drive in ages. In all this time, I have never worked out how to transfer my entire iTunes library from the old CPU to the new laptop, and without a disc drive, re-burning all my CDs is not an option.

I wonder what symbol Athena will be sporting now that she is initiated into the Minions of Chaos. A Pink Lady jacket? A tattoo? A pledge pin on her ROTC uniform? I think I hear the big kids chanting. "One of us, one of us, we accept her, we accept her..."

I'll Never Learn

Inspirational song: Try (Just a Little Bit Harder) (Janis Joplin)

Not every foodstuff that passes through Annie's Test Kitchen comes out a tasty success. Some things never live up to their promise, and some things really should have been obvious that they were doomed to fail. I found a recipe for gluten free cinnamon baked donuts that were made primarily with coconut flour. I should have known better even to attempt them. Coconut flour is so dry and gritty, and really terrible in large quantities. At least I had the forethought to halve the recipe before I started, so I didn't end up with a giant pile of cinnamon dog biscuits, only a modest plateful. After they turned out horrible, underbaked and tasting of wet sawdust, I was glad I was more interested in getting good pictures than chasing Athena away from the eggs, to protect the integrity of my worksite. When she tried to roll the whole eggs off of my notebook where the recipe was written, I grabbed them and carried them with me as I went for the camera. I put them back exactly where they were, but she wasn't as interested in batting them to the ground as she was before the camera came out. Once they were cracked, the little weasel definitely wanted a taste of raw egg. (It's what weasels like best.) After the recommended 8-12 minutes of baking, I ate almost one and a quarter of the original product, and fed the rest of the second one to the dogs. I left the other seven "donuts" (more like cookies in cupcake wrappers) in the oven while it cooled, and reheated some leftovers for my dinner. They came out more hard-baked than before, but I haven't had the nerve to try another. I'm not going to bother posting the recipe. I will fiddle with alternate flours, maybe use tapioca starch and a dash of almond meal, to see whether I can make a softer product. Then, and only then, I will share a set of instructions.

Since we were barely twenty-somethings, my man has been taking me on "roads" that terrify me. He will take any vehicle off-road, whether it was intended for such driving or not. Back when we first started dating, I was driving a 1979 Datsun 210 coupe that was a hand-me-down from my stepmother. I let my then-boyfriend drive it up in the mountains above Boulder, trying to find Jamestown or Boulder Heights or someplace on an alternate route that didn't actually reach the correct destination. In fact, it didn't really reach any destination. At some point, the bumpy, unpaved, four-wheel drive jeep track just fell off the side of the mountain. The road simply disappeared in a tumble of rocks and tan dirt, as gravity took over. There wasn't a whole lot of room to turn around, and driving in reverse wasn't an option. The man had to make a twenty point turn to get headed back the right direction to get out of there, and I was absolutely unable to remain in the car while this happened. I made him let me out, and I walked about forty feet away and leaned on a big rock while I hyperventilated and shook in terror. I was sure that I was about to lose both my boyfriend and my car to the edge of the mountain, and I wasn't sure which was going to be harder to explain, his possible death to the mountain rescue crew, or the damage to the car to my father. We managed to get out of there without injury to ourselves or my vehicle, but that was just the opening salvo in a lifetime of scaring the living crap out of Anne in the passenger seat of a whole series of cars. I hate four-wheeling. I hate it, I hate it. But I keep getting taken for a ride.

I've been back on the really bad schedule lately, staying up until three every morning. So this morning, when my man called me at nine, demanding that I check my email, I was very groggy and susceptible to suggestion. He sent me a link to a mining claim he has wanted to buy for about three years: five acres in the middle of nowhere in the mountains, that doesn't actually have a road leading to it. I have recognized his legitimate need for a GFO property (he likes three-letter acronyms, so it's going to be his "G F's Off" property), and we have just been looking for the right place at the right price. The last time he mentioned it, I told him he could have it only if we could have a purple helicopter to get to it. But today, he called me to say that it had a 50% price reduction, and he's ready for it right now! This is what happens to me when I'm sleep deprived. I said yes. Once I had a chance to wake up with a little coffee, I studied the "road" that runs near the property (but doesn't come closer than about three-quarters of a mile from the edge of the claim) on line. When I zoom in super-close with the satellite view, I think I'm seeing another rough dirt track. I can never escape these damned things. He sent me a topographic view to make the case that the road leading in is sort of level, but that isn't comforting me like he hoped it would. But I made a promise that he could have any land he could afford up there, in the hopes that it would let me win the argument that we should actually live in town when the time comes. I'm going to try to stay calm when we drive out to view it. And then I'm going to demand to be taken to the nearest watering hole, where I can drink copious amounts of alcohol to calm myself down after letting my man drive me on yet another "road." I can't believe I'm volunteering for this.

Deep Water

Inspirational song: Theme from Flood (They Might Be Giants)

That's right, kids, the theme for today is flood. It just keeps coming up, and I can't fight it anymore.

It has been raining heavily for two days, plus raining a little off and on for a week. If I'm reading the maps right, my neighborhood has received at least five inches of rain in the last 48 hours, maybe more. I know today I was amazed by how long the deluge lasted. Normally the really heavy downpours last only a few minutes, but today, it just kept on going. I stood on the porch and watched it pour over the gutters, soaking those new fascia boards that were such an issue to be installed back in February. My poor dogs were so bored, when I refused to let them go in and out of the back door repeatedly all day, their favorite make-mommy-annoyed game. One of the local tv stations posted area photographs on its website, one featuring a police cruiser flooded up to the top of its wheel wells, reportedly in my neighborhood. I spent a good twenty minutes scouring Google maps to figure out that it was a couple of stoplights away. I never went anywhere today, partly because of the heavy rain, so I didn't have to worry about drowning my little compact car. I've had just enough of a break from the precipitation, through August and September, to be glad for the free water, even if it is a mite too much. Coming in behind it is a cold front, and I welcome that with open arms. Open, bare, overheated arms.

This week last year, I was surveying the damage to my condos in Boulder, after the biblical-level floods of last September. A year later, one daughter has given up and moved out forever, and the other is still stuck in her sister's old unit while hers still has no cabinets, appliances, or floors. I've given my cabinet and trim preferences to the company doing the rebuild--the THIRD company--and now I have to send them links to my flooring choices. I have to make my case that an engineered product, a click and lock bamboo, is not actually an upgrade that will cost me money, considering we had travertine marble tiles covering approximately 50% of that condo. It's actually a downgrade, and I'm not going to pay extra for it.

I learned this evening that it is also the fifteenth anniversary of Hurricane Floyd, that struck North Carolina when I lived there, knocking out power throughout large portions of my city, and closing down most of the town, including the library where I worked. My only real memories of Floyd were its gigantic pink Doppler radar signature (thus, "Pink Floyd" to me), and seeing my librarian boss show up at work three days after the hurricane hit, wearing a t-shirt and shorts, not having had access to a shower or refrigerated food in all that time. She came in to work to clean up, and I realized how lucky I was that my home was not as affected as hers.

Not all my floods were literal today. It was the metaphorical one that hurt me most of all. I am running out of room on the chip in my phone that stores all my photos, and I went through deleting the old ones I've already transferred to the computer. I assume there is a way to delete them in groups, but I can't seem to find it, so I was going through one by one, judging what I'm ready to cease carrying at all times (even though I rarely look through the old pictures). There were over 3,400 pictures on the chip, and I managed to delete fewer than 400 of them in an evening. I knew it would be hard, when I hit the pictures from March and April, when I was letting the entire Pride outside to play in the Park, but it still took my breath away, how much it hurt to see the pictures of Cricket and Torden. It was like a cannonball to the chest, and it kept hitting me over and over, the flood of emotions when I saw them, looking old but still healthy in appearance. That wound is still too fresh, and every time I am reminded of what happened, it's like ripping off a giant scab. I have cried more tears than raindrops fell today, and there is just no end to it. I'm still drowning and I don't know how to save myself from it.

Temptation

Inspirational song: Pictures of Matchstick Men (Status Quo)

Oh, save me from myself. Please. I know that I'm backsliding into some awful habits in the last week or so, and it is only by a tenuous thread that I am controlling the urge to repopulate the deck with fall flowers. Wasn't it just last month that I was whining about being over the obligation to care for my container gardens? I didn't want to go outside at all, to face the heat, the bugs, the spiders, and that awful sticky humidity. Now September is halfway through, and the official start of autumn is next week. My favorite season is nearly upon us. I'm allowed to wear maroon and gray and dark orange anytime I want, and I won't look odd. I pulled a pair of brown jeans out of the closet yesterday, and sighed in relief as I felt seasonally appropriately dressed. But there I was today, using the garden entrance at Lowe's when I went in search of a specific brand of home siding cleaner (I did not find it), and there were yards and yards of mums, dianthus, gerberas, snapdragons, and violas. I managed not to buy any, but I can't guarantee it will hold for the whole week. I always get excited when the mums show up in great quantity. It's the sign that autumn is really upon us. I don't know which reason is stronger to explain why I love autumn so much. Maybe it's the colors--of clothing, advertising, bulletin board displays, and flowers. Maybe it's football season (although that is a bit rough this year, all things considered). Maybe it's because it's almost time for my birthday. Maybe it's because the damned heat is finally retreating. October and November look gorgeous, smell crisp and inviting, taste spicy and sweet, and feel magical. I absolutely love them.

We had heavy rain today that helped keep things cool most of the time, although it managed to sneak up to above average heat briefly, enough to steam the water off the streets as I drove home from the dentist today. When I moved near the coast, in the humid Deep South, I truly expected it to be foggy here as often as it was when we lived in North Carolina, or the Central Coast of California. No such luck. Today's rising steam was the closest it has been to foggy. I guess it's too warm here for real fog. I've said it many times, since I was a young girl, my absolute favorite day of the year, every year, is the first very cool day in autumn, when the overcast is so thick that it is battleship gray in every direction, drizzly, and just chilly enough to make you sniff the air for woodsmoke, while you dream of hot chocolate and blankets. Unbelievably, that day has already happened back in Boulder. A couple nights ago, my younger daughter sent me a selfie where streaks of snow were distinctly visible in the foreground. I probably have to wait until Halloween or later for it here.

I'm not the only one with bad habits around here. I foolishly gave in to a sugar craving yesterday, and bought a big bag of gummi bears to take to mah jongg, and of course very little was eaten during the course of the evening. So after dinner, I set the crinkly bag on the couch next to me while I split my attention between the television and a paperback novel. In no time, Rabbit was sitting on my lap, her little white head casually drifting towards the shiny gold plastic, her eyes closing in anticipation as her mouth opened, and her broken teeth sank into her favorite substance. Who knew that a cat could be so addicted to chewing on plastic? I chased her off, and she has been pouting ever since. And when the dental hygienist loaded me up with samples to take home, I said out loud I needed to be more careful with them than I was last time, when the professional eater dog devoured the tube of toothpaste before I could even get it up to my bathroom cabinet. Just yesterday, I found the unopened box of the new foundation makeup I bought on the landing of the stairs, where she sleeps during the day, and where she constantly hides yogurt cups, candy wrappers, dental floss, and any other thing that might vaguely smell like food, that I don't get put away or into the lidded trash can quickly enough, under her rug (that she refuses to sleep on, even though I bought it to keep the carpet clean). Between the two of them, any time I let myself be lazy, or not a good enough housekeeper, they are there to remind me that someone is always willing to chew up things I leave in reach. And here I thought I didn't have to worry about that sort of thing once my children grew up and moved out. No toddler ever made off with as much contraband as this cat and dog.