The Next Steps

Inspirational song: Only Time Will Tell (Asia)

I admit it. I was pretty freaked out yesterday. Let's just say the conversation over whiskey in the hot tub last night took some seriously dark twists and turns. Things we never thought we would seriously say out loud. Things we hinted at but stopped short of saying might actually happen. I am not sure there was a single optimistic prediction. The events of the last eleven days have given us a lot to think about. The idea that we should "wait and see" is out the window. This is the Gish Gallop as a governing philosophy. Throw as much crap at the populace as you can, assuming that they will be so overwhelmed trying to process each thing that hits them that they'll never be able to get to them all, and they'll admit defeat from the sheer volume of information. It is exhausting seeing it in real life, coming from the country I thought I knew. I don't know this place anymore. I can't imagine what's going to be left when the dust settles.

I'm experiencing real doubts about the future of my new career. How many prospective home buyers are going to be as pessimistic as I am, and will now be scared off of getting a mortgage when the prospect of civil unrest is at the edge of our periphery? I'm doing everything I can to hold it together inside, but I have a lot of moments of absolute panic. I had a long anxiety attack last night, at blogging time. There may be more to come. Okay, may nothing. There will indeed be more. Whenever I feel like I can, whenever it is best held inside and not written about, I'll hide it from you.

I had more to discuss tonight, but I am still feeling hung over from my plunge into anxiety. I felt like I had been hit by a freight train during Rotary lunch, and I haven't perked up since. When I am up to it, I'd like to open up a dialogue and try to read the mood of the rest of you. I think conversation with multiple inputs would be most useful at this point.

Barbarians at the Gate

Inspirational song: The New Kings I - Fuck Everyone And Run (Marillion) (AGAIN)

I just can't, y'all. I can't keep my promises. God damn it. God fucking damn it. This is not my country. Or yours. It's not any of ours right now. But if we don't want to lose it forever, we have to act now.

Resist.

Talk among yourselves, and be ready to throw in ideas tomorrow.

Cover Girl

Inspirational song: Cover My Eyes (Marillion)

Do you realize how rough it is to keep on the path I've carved for myself? This is not a political space. This is a place to escape that. These essays are intended to calm, to inform, to amuse. Never to incite. Rarely to rile. It sometimes feels like I have to keep my head in the sand, or at least work very hard to make my writing the Seinfeld Show of blogs -- a blog about nothing. It's getting a lot harder to write about gardening and cats, the official topic of my charter for Smith Park. I'm upset and I'm freaked out. I have reached the point where I am jarred not by political posts in my Facebook feed, but by cat videos! I see these frivolous things come by so infrequently now that they startle me with their incongruity to everything else I'm looking at. I think to myself, how can these people still talk about any of this? I'm running around panicking like my hair is on fire, and they can look at robot videos? I need to calm the hell down and look back at the little things that make me happy before I totally lose touch. I need to make sure I'm not passing my anxieties on to anyone else, who more than likely already has plenty of their own to deal with. I'm trying. I promise. If you can still look at pretty landscapes and goofy pet faces, I'm going to try to provide. As evidence of my commitment to the sweeter side of life, I have pictures of Athena and Agnes doing exactly what I need to be doing - hiding their faces from the scary outside world, and making their inner worlds much better.

Taste Tester

Inspirational song: My Favorite Things (The Sound of Music)

Part of what makes invention potentially frustrating is the difficulty in recreating the results of successful experiments. Getting lucky once is fairly easy. Duplicating a method and seeing favorable outcomes feels like magic when lightning strikes twice. So tonight, when I attempted the high-degree-of-difficulty trick of preparing two of my new grain-free recipes that I invented last week, with my neighbor over to taste-test for me, I really didn't know what to expect. I had to time everything perfectly, while consulting my hand-written notes, and making the changes I thought of last time I made these unrelated food items. More than a week ago, I made beef stroganoff and I concocted a recipe for spatzle noodles that surprised even me. I decided that I needed to try it with schnitzel, and so tonight, we asked the neighbor to come over and evaluate my cooking from the perspective of someone who never tries gluten-free or grain-free cooking because he doesn't have to. (He is my complete opposite. He surrounds himself with grains, brewing beer every single Sunday.) I had a large family-pack of pork cutlets from Costco, and I had Mr X flatten them, in order to conserve my energy for the actual meal prep. The schnitzel was not grain-free -- I did use corn meal as a coating. It was an unusual splurge for me, but I wanted to focus on just the two new inventions, not add a third. While the pork fried, and a pot of green beans steamed, I mixed up a batch of the noodle batter almost exactly like the last time. I say almost, because where the first recipe had a half of a cup of cassava flour, this time I was out and used tapioca starch. They're made from the same plant, but use different prep methods (or so I have been told). I think the change may have been a happy accident, because the noodles had an even better texture than last time. Before he went home, my neighbor asked me to use them to make a macaroni and cheese dish for his superbowl party next week. When someone who has no reason to eat gluten-free asks you specifically to bring a GF dish to a potluck, you know you have done well.

The other recipe was for the ginger-molasses cookies I had warned my neighbor I'd be throwing at him. I mixed up the first batch early last week, and discovered that the dough needed time to condition as the days went by, to come out to the consistency of ginger snaps. Today I made it early in the day, using a tablespoon more coconut flour and adding baking powder in addition to baking soda. I let the dough chill for about 6 hours, and put cookies in the oven as soon as the neighbor came over. This time, I didn't have to wait days for the coconut flour to absorb extra moisture. They puffed up exactly right, and came out crispy and spicy, the perfect ginger snap, first day. Again, my test subject granted the seal of approval. I feel like a gymnast at the Olympics. I just performed a crazy-difficult vault and stuck the landing. Twice.

I need a favor from anyone and everyone who is willing to help out. For most of my grain-free cooking, I rely on two alternative flours: garbanzo bean and cassava. I have to buy them in very small amounts, the garbanzo at the grocery store, and the cassava I order from Amazon. I would give anything to be able to buy them in hoarding-for-the-next-great-depression sized bags at Costco, but they don't carry these things. If you are a member of Costco, would you go into your local store (or at least do this next time you're there) and request one or both of these flours? I went to the customer service desk at the one north of Denver last week and asked for garbanzo flour. I need to go to the other two locations I frequent, and ask it of them too. But it may take more than just my voice for them to see the need to source this stuff. Please join me in this request. And while you're at it, try a little of it in your own cooking. I am not kidding, this makes the best white cream gravy I have ever had, and as a woman of Oklahoma origin, this carries gravitas. However, don't expect to eat raw dough made from it. It has to cook -- has to, has to, has to. Raw garbanzo dough tastes weird and very disappointing, especially in sweet batters. Still, I highly recommend it.

Wide Awake

Inspirational song: Bad (U2)

I'm on information overload. For about two months, I was hiding. I tried not to look at a whole lot, because I just couldn't absorb anything. Certain images made me flinch, and I didn't want to look, didn't want to read, didn't want to talk about it. I still get upset, but I'm not in hiding anymore. I'm reading everything put in front of me. I'm playing videos. Watching television. And (gasp!) engaging in conversation again. Unfortunately I've swung the pendulum so far to one side, now I've gone from refusing to face new data to overloading my circuits and plugging up my bandwidth.

I thought that I'd get a chance to reset tonight. I splurged on a two hour massage. I expected to come out of it as stiff as a bag of porridge. At best I came out of it slightly more flexible. And well-rested. I'm fairly certain I slept through the entire back section. I asked whether I snored, and he said no. Just some involuntary muscle twitches. I'm pretty sure that was when I was asleep and jerked awake briefly from something in my dream. Was a nice nap, though.

I need to find a way to stay more alert, on so many levels. It is becoming even more important for me and for all of us. I can't hide from information anymore. I just have to figure out when to store my energy and when to expend it. One is a whole lot easier than the other.

Prisoner of Technology

Inspirational song: Victim of Love (The Eagles)

So much for my plans of bragging about the new recipe I'm working on, or the fun time I had at the Rotary social at Oskar Blues. I've been trying for half an hour to boot up my big laptop, the one I keep in the basement, where a lot of my important works of fiction are stored. I shut it down a few days ago, which I rarely do, and ran updates. Ever since, I can't get it to do ANYTHING. It won't load any programs. It freezes in startup. It gave me the option to end process when Windows stopped responding. And after multiple hard restarts, it is doing pretty much Jack all. So now I'm trying to type on my iPad. This is a toy. It is not a word processor. I am going to punt all of my stories to another day when my technology is behaving. For now, I'm going to go off in a first-world-problems huff. Lenovo let me down. Or whoever pushed that last update can bite me. Either way, I'm cranky and done now.

Yay, Poop

Inspirational song: Her First Mistake (Lyle Lovett)

I was told that unless that was the title of tonight's blog, Mr X wasn't going to unlock the door, while I danced behind him, regretting every bit of tonight's dinner out. So fine. Yes, I made mistakes, in my choice of restaurant and in my choice of entree. Over a long, alcohol-fueled conversation, he might have tried to convince me that at some level my choice of dinner companion was also wrong, but I refused to concur. I refuse to regret that much of my life. But saying yes, 3 Margaritas was an okay substitute for Cyclhops, or that pollo con crema would be okay when I recognized instantly that "special Mexican sour cream sauce" was code for "there is wheat flour in this, steer clear," these were absolutely mistakes. As we pulled up to the house, I said I needed him to hurry and unlock the door because "remember when I said that was most likely a Bechamel sauce?" It was then that he insisted I use our favorite phrase to keep us from getting upset when Murray does his thing on the floor of the garage (on a daily basis) as my title. I have fulfilled the terms of our bargain. He did unlock the door, and I did race inside, and I did have the expected response to eating a sauce that most likely had wheat in it. This is going to be a long night. I'll spare you further details, and I will not refer to this incident tomorrow unless hospitalization results (so you're probably safe).

Despite how frantically the evening is ending, this had been a remarkably good day. And I mean a really, significantly, write details on the calendar sort of good day. I was invited to a local furniture shop that has been around in Boulder county for 45 years. They wanted to meet up with realtors in town to talk about how to refer our clients to them, and what they had to offer, and they provided coffee and danishes (since they did sell primarily Danish modern furniture). Not as many realtors showed as they had planned for, so I got plenty of one-on-one time with one of the sales women. She was very cool, and at one point she suggested that on a Saturday, I schedule an "ask a realtor" day, so that I could come in and talk to their customers about buying and selling houses and things they can do to stage, etc. I am thrilled by this suggestion. I want to do this. Also, before I left, the person who forwarded the invitation to the breakfast came to the store, and in conversation she mentioned a fundraiser she's part of. For Meals on Wheels, they are selling tablescapes at the country club. You put together a place setting for 4 on a card table, with tablecloths, dishes, glasses, and flatware. It can be new or vintage, themed or just artistic. I said yes, I am totally in for a table. I need to decide on a theme. First suggestion was actually a sort of family game night/turn off the wi-fi night, with snack plates, mugs, and board games. It's intriguing, but I have a few weeks yet to decide whether anything else feels more compelling. I know that the lady I spoke with all morning is doing an Asian theme with her settings, another person is doing a picnic basket (with paper plates), and there was talk of donating vintage crystal pieces and things like that. I have lots of room to play here.

Finally, I am amazed that after a day like I've had, I've made it this far and still have oodles of energy. This is further proof to me that all the things I am doing to treat my autoimmune disease is having a significant impact. Over dinner I pointed out that even as recently as October or November, I needed entirely down days, like all-day-no-shower-can't-brush-my-teeth sort of down, at least once a week, maybe twice. Now my down days last about 4 hours, and I rebound to nearly normal levels of health (note I said "nearly") very quickly now. I had a big morning, and I immediately came home to burn off my nervous energy by pulling out all the piled up debris on the table side of my kitchen, scrubbing and mopping everything, and even bleaching my trash can (it was due). I couldn't find a good place to stop, so I didn't. For something like five hours, I kept going, cleaning, mopping, wiping, tossing, schlepping to the outside trash and recycle bins, and more all that time. Even when I finally tried to sit down and rest, I kept trying to tidy up my usual spot in the living room. I couldn't stop. I'm not sure I've had one of these days since before my diagnosis. This is absolute victory. I can't keep quiet about it.

Young Love

Inspirational song: Bungle in the Jungle (Jethro Tull)

Another Tuesday, another writing prompt. This is getting really fun. This week, we were asked to write based on the prompt "loving," in honor of the upcoming Valentine's day. This morning, as I faced an empty page and an hour long ride in the passenger seat on the way up to retrieve the 4Runner from it's mountain resting place, I said out loud that I needed a story based on that. Mr X suggested the basic theme, and my initial reaction was "Hm. Write what you know." So I did. I took a real day from my life, changed the timelines and names, and sprinkled in a few real details. This is the result.

*******

Alice Free wandered toward the back porch of the little old building on South Broadway. It used to be a house, but for years, since way before she was born, it was her grandfather’s dentist office. Well, half of it was. The other half of the building was closed off, and she had never been over there, not in all of the nine years she had been alive. She sort of remembered Grandma saying that another dentist used to work over there, but he was dead now. Or something like that. Whatever it was, that side of the building seemed scary to her, and she never felt like trying to go into it.

She was supposed to be staying with Grandpa this afternoon, while Grandma was at the beauty shop getting her hair done and Mom was at her new job. It was fun for a while, as long as Alice was playing with the dental plaster, filling the little rubber molds of animal shapes that Grandpa kept around for days like this. But now she was waiting for the plaster to set up, and Grandpa was busy filling the cavities of some old lady who acted like she knew her, but Alice couldn’t remember her from anywhere. The dental drill whined loudly, echoing down the otherwise quiet hallway. Grandpa never talked much while he worked.

So Alice went in search of a Coke and a change of scenery. There was an old soda machine from the 1950s in the back of the office, filled with the little glass bottles that she liked way better than aluminum cans with the pull tabs that hurt her fingers. Grandpa usually let her have a soda when she was here, so she thought it might be okay to help herself this time. The old porch where it sat was closed in with windows that rattled in their frames when the little girl walked across the floorboards, no matter how gently she stepped. The soda machine was rigged so that Alice didn’t have to put in any coins, and the bottles made a satisfying clink as she pulled one through the narrow door and the rest settled to fill the void. She pried off the cap with the opener on the side of the white Coke machine, and wondered what else to do while she waited for the plaster to dry.

She looked outside, deciding that it probably wouldn’t be too hot to be out there. It was late June, and starting to get really hot most days, and Alice was having a hard time getting used to how sticky summers were in Oklahoma. Of course, this summer had been harder on her all around. A month and a half earlier, her mom had loaded up all of their stuff into a U-Haul truck and Alice, mom, and their cat Butch drove away from the house they had only moved into the year before, leaving Dad behind in it. Both Mom and Dad assured her that they still loved her, but Alice was having a hard time understanding why they couldn’t love each other enough to stay married. And then on top of that, two weeks after they arrived at her grandparents’ house to live, Butch died from feline leukemia. This was the worst summer ever.

Alice stepped out and sat on the back stairs, sipping her Coke. Big fluffy clouds kept passing in front of the sun, keeping her from getting too hot. She sat facing the alley, watching cars go through the drive-through bank on 13th Street. She could hear the tellers talking to drivers through the tinny speakers, but she couldn’t make out the words. She was still learning to understand everyone’s heavy Oklahoma accents, after years of living all over the world, wherever the air force sent her with her dad.

There was a rustle below the stairs, and Alice looked down in time to see something small and orange move near her. She set down her Coke carefully, and held her breath while she moved quietly and swiftly. She grabbed the little kitten she had seen with one hand and held him up close to her face so she could see him more clearly. The little thing was startled at being scooped up by an unseen predator, or so he must have thought, and he bit Alice on the finger. This surprised her and she dropped him into the thick plants that grew as ground cover between the alley and the office, where he all but disappeared.

That might have been the end of it, but Alice wasn’t about to give up once she had seen him. It was almost as if she was enchanted the moment he bit her hand. Her plaster toys were forgotten once she caught sight of her quarry. The kitten ran back and forth through the dark green leaves in the flowerbed, too young and scared to be still so that he would have been invisible. For almost ten minutes, Alice darted up and down the edge of the flowerbed, thrusting her hand into the leaves and narrowly missing him over and over. Finally she connected with him, and this time she used two hands to capture the little guy, and she held on tightly.

He must have been quite young, because even in her little girl hands, he was very small. He was orange all over, and striped clearly. His head was big for his body, and his eyes were big for his head. He was actually kind of an ugly kitten, she thought. But that didn’t matter one bit. From the moment he bit her, she was in love. He didn’t belong to anyone else. She found him, and he was hers. He was even starting to be calmer in her hands, now that he seemed used to the idea of this human who held him still, unlike before when he was flying through the air held by a terrifying creature much bigger than he. Alice put him against her body, freeing one hand enough to start to pet him gently. He held himself stiffly, but he didn’t try to bite again.

Alice and the kitten went back into the dentist office through the back door. She needed to ask Grandpa whether she could go back to the house, even though Grandma wasn’t back from her hair appointment yet. They lived just four blocks from the office, and she thought if she left now, she could make it all the way without the kitten jumping down again. She wasn’t about to lose him now that she had found him. He just didn’t know yet how much he was going to love her. He soon would. They both would. This summer just got a whole lot better.

To the Rescue

Inspirational song: Time After Time (Cyndi Lauper)

This is not how I expected my evening to play out. I was winding things down, experimenting on bake times and temperatures with my first attempt at creating a recipe for grain-free ginger molasses cookies. I was trying not to eat the first test batches with all the enthusiasm and gusto of a mid-1970s Cookie Monster (before they made him eat like a gentleman). The cookies were the opposite of cakey -- they were super thin, very chewy, almost candy-like. Honestly, this is exactly how I like cookies, but I'm trying to create a recipe that is more mainstream, to put in my cookbook. So I need to keep tweaking the proportions, and sharing with my husband and my neighbor for feedback. I had just found the discipline to turn away from the cookies and start making a chicken Alfredo for dinner, to be ready right about the time I guessed Mr X would be back from taking his mountain neighbor up to their adjoining properties, making sure each was doing well in mid-winter. Mr X called, but the signal was terrible, and I couldn't understand anything he said. Not one syllable, when they haltingly came through. The line went dead, and I shrugged and went back to making dinner.

A few minutes later, he called again. I hadn't seen his text come through, so I was surprised when he told me what was up. Or rather, what was down. Down off of the side of the road, about ten vertical feet below the road surface, sat the 4Runner, in ice and snow. He'd hit an icy patch, and skidded off toward the edge, and once one wheel popped over the edge, it was unstoppable. He slid sideways down the slope, started to roll, but instead smacked into a dead aspen tree (or if it wasn't dead before, it is now), knocked it over, and eventually stopped. He really wasn't going all that fast when it happened. He was just on a steep grade, already in four wheel drive, and was in the process of downshifting to first gear when he hit the ice. As the conversation went with our daughter, whose beater truck this actually is, there is no frame damage apparent, and just some new dings and dents from where he hit the tree. She said that it just adds character, and since she calls that thing her Doomsmobile, I think she is telling the truth that she's okay with it.

So once I got the word that I was needed, I swung into action. Actually, I waited until he said yes, come get me in Idaho Springs, and then I turned off the heat to the chicken, threw on jeans and boots, and sent the dogs outside for a pee, and THEN I drove to get him. I had made it about halfway between Boulder and Golden, when I thought, did I really turn the stove off, or did I just think about it, and walk away, and now my house is burning down? So I asked my neighbor to verify that yes, it was all off and cool, and I drove the rest of the way into the mountains with less worry.

Idaho Springs is a tiny little town along I-70, and I have rarely had reason to go visit it. So I suppose it's not too surprising that I took the wrong exit (twice), got totally turned around, and missed the restaurant where Mr X was waiting. I was so flustered and frustrated from getting lost in a one-horse town that once I finally found him, it took me about twenty minutes to settle down and stop talking uncontrollably. We have to go back up in the morning to try to have the truck towed back to the road, so maybe I can pay better attention about how to get there and how to navigate near or in the town. The three hours of driving I did tonight wore me out, from all the dark, twisty-turny canyons to the foggy, pretty, almost spooky lights along the ridge between Golden and Boulder. I'm almost too tired to sample one of those thin, chewy cookies before bed. Almost. Or not too tired at all.

Say Yes

Inspirational song: Lovesong (The Cure)

Around ten years ago, the size of our family increased. Our younger daughter started bringing her best friend home with her, which was a bigger deal than you might expect given our remote location at the time. We lived on an army post twenty-five miles away from where the girls went to high school, so bringing a friend home usually meant she was staying at least overnight, more likely for a whole weekend. Once she was with us for several weeks. By that point we knew she was one of us. It wasn't until a year or two later, right after we moved to New Mexico, that she became an official part of the family, forever. She came to live with us, and while she was still a minor, we were her legal guardians. From then on, as far as I was concerned, I had three daughters, not two. She moved out once she was in college, and we have been separated by many miles ever since, but I still refer to her as my "foster daughter," and she still sometimes uses the technically inaccurate but affectionate title of "stepmom" for me. We have stayed in touch, even though we usually go weeks between conversations. It's become easier in the last year, when she moved out to Colorado to be near the rest of us.

Saturday I got several hours of quality mommy-daughter time with my younger biological daughter, and today it was time for foster mommy-foster daughter interaction. I really can't remember the last time we got to have this much one-on-one conversation. Surely it's only been months, not years, right? However long it was, even if it was just a month or two, it was overdue. She is engaged to be married later this year, and she has asked me to help her with the dress. And by help, we mean construction thereof. In my younger days, I would have immediately started sketching and creating my own designs, custom tailored to her specific shape and desires. These days I am more stingy with my spoons, and I suggested we use a purchased pattern as our jumping off point. So we met at the fabric store down in Boulder, and said yes to the dress (patterns). I was trying not to influence her too much, since this is all about her idea of how she will look, not mine, but I think that the design I found and showed to her might actually be the winner. We talked about how to customize it with the fabrics she already bought, and she seems to like it. I suggested that she keep the pattern (we bought it) near her where she can see it every day this week. If she still likes it by next weekend, we will be in the dress making business. Thankfully, when she was still living with me, in high school she took a clothing construction class, so she will be the perfect seamstress' apprentice for this project.

I'm very fortunate that my biological family and my volunteer family is so good, and so solid. I've collected people over the years whom I will never release. They are my kids, my sisters and brothers, my aunties and uncles, no matter what the law or biology tells me. It flatters me that in this spirit, I have been entrusted to handle honorary mother of the bride duties, as is appropriate and as I am able with my limitations. When we brought this young woman into our home, way back in the California days, we didn't fully understand at first that it was for always. But we know that now.

I did not take any pictures of the dress pattern. I'm not sure that I will before the wedding, because the fiance wants it to be a surprise, and I don't want to spoil that for him. Or perhaps I'll take photos of the process, and save them in an album to show after the big reveal. Until then, I'll stick with coy little cat faces, or dangerous sleeping lizard poses, or whatever other random things I can use to distract from my secret project.

I Aim to Misbehave

Inspirational song: Bitch (Meredith Brooks)

I didn't march today. I would have loved to, but I feared it would be unwise to test my physicality in such a way. I've attended a few rallies in my day, like the one for Bernie Sanders in Boulder a year and a half ago (when I thought the sun was trying to kill me, and it turned out it was), or the one five years ago watching Stephen Colbert at the College of Charleston (when the weather was perfect but the walking and standing was a lot for me). I ought to have tried to join my 100,000-150,000 sisters who marched in Denver. Or met up with my actual relatives who marched with 130,000 women in Seattle, 500,000 women in Washington DC, or 750,000 in Los Angeles. As a protest, as a worldwide movement, this one has teeth. And I am pleased.

I'm proud of my cousins, daughters, aunties, friends, and spiritual sisters around the world for standing together in this moment. I've loved seeing their photographs, hearing their stories, and in the case of my daughter, watching her interview by The Young Turks at a protest yesterday. (I'll share the link on the Scenes From Smith Park Facebook page.) The millions of women who rose up around the world have only just begun. There is a lot of work yet to be done.

I've seen a lot of women who don't understand what the protest was about. They think it was just about abortion or racism or just to be poor sports about the election. It was all about so much more than that. The way I see it, it was a not-so-subtle reminder that women are strong, smart, vocal, and powerful. The last year, including the election cycle and all that went with it, felt like there was a concerted effort to downplay the strength of women, to roll backwards the advancements of the last century, to revive misogynistic policies, and to normalize sexual assault and oppression. This cannot be borne. Women marched to amplify their voices, and to provide evidence to each other that we are there to provide support to our sisters everywhere. The men who marched with them lent their support as allies and as friendly voters and activists.

It wasn't just about women's issues. It was about science, the environment, the justice system, freedom of speech, freedom of and from religion, and so many issues that Americans and people around the world feel are threatened by the sudden dark turn of the global political climate. I read an essay this morning that cheered me, though. It posited that this is not necessarily the start of something oppressive, but rather the end. It's the last gasp of the policies of the past, of division and antagonism. These things can't die quietly with a whimper. For them to go, they have to explode in a disaster of their own making. It isn't going to be fun living through this final convulsion, but when we are on the other side of it, with the next generation thinking running the show, it will be worth the effort.

Blackout

Inspirational song: God Save the Queen (Sex Pistols)

When the kids were little bitty girls, there was a made for TV movie, called Merlin (I think). The villain of the piece was the character of the witch Queen Mab, played by Miranda Richardson. In the end, she was vanquished when everyone turned their backs to her, ignored her, and allowed themselves to forget that she existed. She vanished, defeated.

It was in this spirit that I stayed off of all social media and ignored the Internet all day today. I looked at one Facebook notification, and retrieved one email with an approved referral to physical therapy so I could make an appointment, yes, but I didn't scroll through anything. No news. No Twitter. No Twit in Chief. I know it will take more than just ignoring him to remove his power, but it felt like the proper statement. My television was on in the basement, unwatched, blaring Zombieland loud enough for me to hear it upstairs. Mr X said it seemed like the appropriate choice. It felt like a training video.

My rule number one for tattoos, which I've adhered to for 30 years, is that you have to want the design for a year before you put it on your body, to be sure it isn't just a whim. I'm seriously considering breaking my primary rule. All week I have been thinking about getting the circuit diagram of a resistor, the zigzag lines interrupting the flow of current, as a tattoo somewhere on me. I just don't know where yet. I'm open to serious suggestions.

I'm very late in posting again. We spent another Friday night in Central City, and are just now heading down the lonely black canyon, past 1 in the morning. I needed a little fantasy and reason to hope when all hope seems lost to me. Life is a gamble, dear readers. Without risk, there is no reward.

Golden Calf

Inspirational song: Mad World (Tears for Fears)

Six or seven years ago, when it first occurred to me to write essays for the internet, I was inspired by someone I had never met who was spewing vitriol at me in a mutual friend's Facebook thread. There was absolutely no call for the hateful language. I really hadn't said anything inflammatory, or even particularly opinionated. But this woman questioned my parentage, accused me of all sorts of conflicting political viewpoints, and called me vulgar names. Like internet trolls do. Although I didn't think she was necessarily a troll. I think she was either the sister or the daughter of an old friend I haven't seen in 20 years. I was so thrown by having this poo flung at me, I thought, maybe what I will do to cleanse my soul is to start a blog called "On Civil Discourse," and I could wax poetic about the days when people spoke politely in conversation with strangers, and when it was assumed that you could disagree with someone and still believe they were a good person at heart. I'm afraid those days are lost to us right now. I've been reading Twitter a lot more often lately, and I am absolutely stunned at the filth that follows even the most banal of tweets. I know better than to read comment sections, but I keep doing it anyway. It's destroying my faith in humanity. Can this be changed? Is there hope for humanity?

I'm trying to pretend that everything is normal during a week when it feels like nothing will ever be the same again. I went on another house showing tonight, hoping that my clients will be ready to try again to put in an offer. I have been feeling like the world is ending, but I have to believe that it will indeed go on, and that people will continue to buy houses. I just have to mope a little before I feel confident about it all again. I might spend all of tomorrow drunk. At the very least I'm going to lock myself away from all media. At best, I'll be told to write an offer on the new house we toured after dark.

The house itself was pretty cool. It was a study in how thoroughly pictures can mis-represent a space. It wasn't a disappointment. Quite the opposite, actually. The longer we were there, the more it grew on all of us. I particularly came to like the kitchen, the longer I looked at it. However, it might have been a result of a little bit of intoxication. From the moment we walked in, I noticed that it smelled strongly of natural gas. It reminded me of the garage apartment in Oklahoma where my Granny lived, where it always smelled like the pilot light on the floor furnace was out. I called the listing agent and the co-listing agent, and left voice mails about it. But other than that, it was a great place. Huge back yard, wonderful outdoor kitchen. It looked cool in the dark. Also, it had something I NEEEEEED: a 2/3 scale steel steer that was a charcoal smoker. I want this, but I also think it should be painted gold. Especially now.

Noodles

Inspirational song: Der Kommissar (Falco)

Anything worth doing takes practice. It takes jumping in and trying new things, and not being afraid of failure. In fact, embracing failure and learning from it is essential to success. I'm learning to apply this to so many aspects of my life, from my dogged determination to succeed as a realtor despite the obvious setbacks of the last year, to my endless attempts to improve the quality of my life despite the setbacks of decades' worth of doctors and friends telling me everything was in my head. Incrementally, I am indeed moving forward. I am showing another house tomorrow, to clients who swear they are still in this game with me even after our stumbles in November. I am feeling healthier overall, but not beating myself up over whether or how often I need pain killers. I'm still writing every day, and I'm putting more emphasis on fiction, where I've wanted to thrive my entire life, since I was in grade school. But that isn't the only genre I'm working in...

I've found it necessary to modify recipes for a myriad of reasons over the years, to make dinners cheaper, to accommodate food allergies, to improve flavors, or to avoid going to the store so I make do with what's already in the house. Since I was forced to give up all grains (except corn, which I occasionally come running back to, crying, "I can't quit you!"), I have learned to be even more creative and self-reliant in the kitchen. To be clear, I have ALWAYS been creative and self-reliant in the kitchen, and I refuse to be anything other than arrogant about my skills. But eliminating a whole food group has made for some interesting trials and errors over the last three years. Gluten is the protein that creates stretch in dough, trapping air bubbles to make foods light, and it makes things chewy. Non-glutenous flours just can't recreate this trick. Trust me, if I could find any non-grain flours that could truly make a big, chewy sourdough pretzel, my fortune would be made. Even without that magic unicorn, I have compiled enough recipes of my own invention to make a fairly decent grain-free comfort food cookbook. Older daughter has been riding me for three months now to rush it to print. But I am not to be hurried. I'm in the testing phase. I don't write things down when I cook, and I certainly do not measure. I cook by how things smell, taste, and feel. It takes repeated tests to verify the quantities I'm writing down are the right ones. If this means I have to make spectacular gourmet meals over and over to confirm my results, then I am willing to throw myself on that grenade. Mr X seems willing to be my taste-test-dummy as well.

While I am revisiting recipes I already know are winners, I still try new things. I'm glad I haven't already published, so that I still have time to add in new successes. Like tonight. Holy crap, like tonight. I had to make something with ground beef, because I'd bought a bunch of it at Costco, and had to decide by tomorrow whether to cook or freeze it. So tonight was beef stroganoff night. I've made it a few times over the years, but it was mostly mediocre. I always avoided mushrooms, but discovered last time that if I chop them up small enough, I can get the umami taste they provide without having to chew their nasty texture. I let Pinterest give me a few hints at ingredients I'd been missing, but I didn't bother to read the instructions. I substituted to remove grains and added a few herbs and spices I liked. It was superb. But it was only the dressing for my real success: Spatzle. I've tried once or twice to make egg noodles, and I honestly failed before. I wanted to make a grain-free spatzle to accompany the stroganoff, so once again, I set out for Pinterest. The first and only pin I looked at said it was flour, eggs, salt, and milk. That's it. Well, I knew I needed a blend to replace the wheat flour, and I chose garbanzo, cassava, and potato starch. I also knew that I needed xanthan gum to bind it. I followed instructions, got creative, and lo and behold, I made spatzle noodles. Not just that. They were absolutely indistinguishable from noodles made from wheat flour. With stroganoff on top, they were perfect, but they were even good alone with a little butter and salt, when I sampled them. I think this means that before this cookbook is ready to sell to the public, I am going to have to practice making schnitzel and spaztle. Lots and lots of practice.

I did not take pictures of my dinner, but I have been taking several of Murray lately. His wheelchair is on its last legs (pun intended). It has been beaten to hell, and he has torn through several harnesses. Right now the only thing that keeps him in it is the strap over his shoulders. So sometimes when he gets rowdy chasing Bump or protects the yard from the evil trash truck in the alley, he ends up arse-over-teakettle in the mud. Most of the time it doesn't bother him in the least. Sometimes he actually enjoys the chance to lie down in the yard without his butt in the air. Once in a while he ends up cold, muddy, and covered in poo. Regardless, once he is righted, he is just fine. It seemed like a good metaphor for my cooking experiments.

Art Therapy

Inspirational song: Maneater (Hall & Oates)

I love Tuesdays. I really do. Going to Rotary and writers group has become the highlights of my week. These activities almost never let me down. Lunch today was with people I adore, and the program was applicable to my own life experiences. We had a speaker who had a major health crisis, poisoned by long-term chemical exposure in his teens that left him in a wheelchair for years, who found treatment that allowed him to regain use of his legs. His presentation was what he used to get the rest of his life back after losing his youth to ill health. He turned to art to piece his mind back together, and he talked about the avenues he pursued and the progress he made along the way. His paintings, photos, and even knit products were wonderful, actually. They made me want to drag out the paints myself. But really, I do have art that I've been using to keep it all together on a regular basis. I live to write. I write to live. I will never give this up.

And on that note, tonight was a second swipe at that flash fiction exercise like the one that I led two weeks ago. We had some of the same people present, and some different ones. We used a different topic (this time "revolution" in any way we wanted to interpret it) to sketch a plot line, a character, and an emotion. I interpreted the topic as "Eric was grounded. He had spent all day learning the guitar lick to the Beatles song "Revolution," even after his mother complained that it was giving him a migraine. But he was obsessed. Now he was trying to sneak out of the house, so he could meet his friends, and rehearse for their punk garage band, "The Resistance."" When I got my three cards, and saw how well they related to each other, I threw my hands in the air, knowing I had won. It was never a competition, but I won nonetheless. Here is what I wrote, so quickly and furiously that my hand cramped and hurt for the remainder of the meeting.

------

Sheila spotted her mark in an instant. His hair was sightly disheveled, his tie was crooked, and his eyes were so bloodshot that she could see the red from across the bar where they had arranged to meet. He had asked her to meet in Santa Clara, but she thought it unwise to be seen with him so close to his work. Fisherman's Wharf was crowded and touristy, and no one would think twice about seeing a Silicon Valley businessman and a voluptuous blonde who was obviously not his wife. Any observer would conclude that their association involved a much different sort of transaction.

She uncrossed her long, tanned legs that were revealed beneath a black pencil skirt, and she leaned slightly forward at the waist. That was all it took for her mark to notice her. She raised her glass of red wine to bring his gaze from her cleavage to her face, and once he made eye contact, she gestured for him to join her.

He approached like a man facing the gallows when he saw how beautiful Sheila was. She flipped her long hair over her shoulder with one delicate hand and said in a husky voice, "You are here to see me?"

He stammered slightly, "Y-yes. I'm Matt J--"

"Shh," she cautioned, touching one perfectly manicured nail to her ruby lips, causing him to startle and immediately stop talking. "No names. I don't want to know."

"Right," Matt said. "It's just... I need... I've never done this kind of thing before." He looked longingly at the bartender, wishing he had gotten a drink before joining Sheila.

"They are phasing out my entire department. The whole thing. It's going to be completely automated. I don't know what I will tell my family."

Sheila raised one soft brown eyebrow and asked, "You started a computer revolution in your industry, and now you are surprised when they've come for your job too?"

That made Matt angry, as if he couldn't accept that even he was vulnerable to the advances of technology. "I am not hiring you to give me job advice. We are here to make a sale. That's it. Do you have what I want or am I walking now?"

And just like that, Matt appeared to be wriggling off of her hook. But he wasn't going anywhere. Sheila was the best in the business, and she had never lost a sale yet.

"I have everything you want. I'll even let you have some of it, if the price is right."

Sheila stood and grasped one of Matt's lapels, pulling him out of his seat. He trailed her from the bar into the parking lot. For all the world, he looked like a man about to get exceedingly lucky.

They came to the trunk of her rental car, and she hit the key fob with her thumb. "What caliber were you looking for first? 9 mm?"

Topical Vacation

Inspirational song: Eye In the Sky (Alan Parsons Project)

I'm at a loss. I don't know how to recapture attention. Maybe I fell into too deep of a rut, and everyone turned away. I thought I was switching things up last week by throwing a fictional curve ball, but it didn't do the trick. This has happened before, nearly every winter when we denizens of Smith Park burrow in for the cold months when very little is happening outside. I'm not doing all sorts of crazy activities this month, or at least haven't been thus far, and I've had to dig deep into my imagination for compelling subjects. It doesn't seem to be working. My metrics for how well I'm reaching people tell me that I'm failing to get beyond a core circle. I suppose I need to do a little research, find out what I need to be writing about that people want to read. I try not to harp on the lupus too much, because even though that might be educational and a public service to people who need to learn how to help others they know with chronic illness, it tends to feel like too much of a downer to me. I don't want to complain all the time, and sometimes even acknowledging that there was pain that I fought through seems like whining. Likewise, I don't know how much to write about the topic of writing (even though that's what this is). I do a lot of thinking out loud about it, breaking down the fourth wall as it were, and I'd love to go on for hours in that vein, but it also gets somewhat repetitive.

I wrote at length over the summer about the problems with my relationship. I feel like those posts should slow down while I am in a detente period. Nothing has turned the ship around completely, even though everyone is living here through spring, and we are being cordial and cooperating with each other. If anything changes, I will eventually return to that topic.

This leaves me with animal stories, doesn't it? I spend every minute of every day that I am in this house with a quadruped of some sort within arm's reach. Normally one or more felines is pressed up against my body somewhere, either on my lap, along the back of my chair, or pinning me under blankets in one room or another. It's natural that I'd include them in my daily writing as well. I'm never in a position where I don't feel like I'm under surveillance. There is always a monitor for my activities. Well, almost never. I stepped out of the shower today and found that I was the only one in the bathroom at that moment, which hasn't happened in months. Before I could fully get that thought processed in my mind, three cats came in to sit on the counter and ask why I hadn't filled their water glass next to the sink yet. The outside world is causing me too much stress to think about these days. I might end up retreating into pet stories more and more often, especially over the next week when the external stressors crank up to 11. If I spend more column space than seems appropriate fawning over how cute I think Athena's tiny, fluffy paws are, feel free to assume that there is something else that I just don't want to look at going on in the big outside world, so I'm focusing on what makes me feel much happier. Like paws. Tiny, black, fluffy paws.

The Language of Sportsball

Inspirational song: Don't Stop Believin' (Journey)

How is it possible that at the end of a day when no sports game turned out like I wanted or at least expected it to, that I'm feeling so positive about sports in general? It was proven to me that although I am socially awkward at times, often slow to warm up to new people, that the language of sportsball is a reliable crutch for me to fall back on when I'm in danger of retreating into shyness. I forget to be awkward, forget to stammer, forget to hold back my opinions when discussing which teams I like and what sports I follow. Live sporting events are bonding experiences for me, and I feel like I'm surrounded by best friends who I've never met (and whom I will likely never see again). I love being in a crowd at a game, even if they're cheering for the opposing team.

Tonight I was at a game that was almost entirely cheering for the home team, as was I. My buddy and I took the new foreign exchange student from Rotary to a CU basketball game. (New because he transferred here from a smaller town over the holidays.) His current host family had helped him create a bucket list of things he wanted to do while he was in Colorado, including camping, snowboarding, and attending events like the Stock Show or a CU or CSU sports game. I'm not the girl to take anyone camping or skiing, but I immediately jumped up and offered to take him to a CU basketball game. I was so glad when he accepted my offer.

I'd been excited about going for weeks, and was so pleased that it was finally time to go. We picked up the young man from Spain at his local home, and stood around a bit talking to our Rotary sister and her husband. (While we admired her house, her large black dog and blue-eyed brown cat competed for my attention. They absolutely recognized me as the animal lover I am, and they each took turns holding out a paw, asking for pets, while I was showing affection to the other. What a pair.) We drove to Boulder, learning about what sorts of sports the teenager enjoyed and played back in Spain. He says he is considering trying out for the baseball team at the high school here, even though he's never played before. And I was surprised that he says he likes watching American football so much. We made a mental note to try to take him to the CU Spring Scrimmage so that he gets to see a game while he's here.

The basketball game was exciting. CU led for the entire first half. Early in the second half, USC tied it up, and then they switched leads a few times before USC opened up a few points' lead near the end. A well-timed 3 pointer gave CU a one point advantage in the last minute, but USC answered and went up by one. All CU had to do was get a regular basket, not a 3 point shot, in the remaining 26 seconds. But the referees had other plans. There were many questionable calls (e.g. there was NOT tripping--we all saw the replay on the big screen), and a foul at the end put CU down by 3. They tried, but could not tie the game in the final seconds. I really wanted the exchange student to be there for a win, but alas, it was not to be. Perhaps we could take him to see the women's team. They're playing much better this year than the men. We shall see how February plays out.