Category: another day in the life

A Gentleman Buries the Cat.

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The fifth of May came and went without a party at our house this year.  While there were a few Friday afternoon threats of popping over tomorrow from neighbors, no one actually showed on the day itself.  It probably didn’t hurt that at party time, it was pouring down rain.  As I sat in my bathrobe watching the rain come down, talking on the phone to Betty, cancelling our plans to drink margaritas that afternoon due to a very sore throat and under the weather feeling on my part,  she remarked that the party would have been a disaster this year had we gone through with it and that the sore throat and rain were just a message from the universe confirming this.
I thought so too.
All my productive weekend plans were thrown aside by the weather and whatever bug I happen to have.  Instead of gardening and working on the chicken house, I curled up in bed, watching movies with the mini-me when she wasn’t building a LEGO garden in the den.  It’s incredibly easy when not feeling 100%, the weather outside being crummy and being a single parent, to give in to the digital boxes like computers and television for entertainment.  Heck, being home all day, even with my husband working from home, draws me in at the prospect of a conversation of sorts, even if it’s virtual.  It’s even worse when he’s gone, as he was this weekend.
Last week, both online and in person, I’ve seen and heard others talking about various aspects of this.  Jenny over Frecklewonder wrote this really inspiring and thoughtful post this past week that got me thinking about the long list of blogs I have either bookmarked under a folder in my favorites (I’m old school that way) or that I follow in my reader.  I went through and started cleaning out the ones that I realize don’t do it for me.  Thank you for the inspiration Jenny.  I had been thinking maybe it was time to purge, but you got me to do it. 
As I’ve pondered Jenny’s post all week, I had a moment Friday, where I realized my entire morning, while being spent off-line, was being spent with friends I had either made or gotten to know better on-line.   I went for a walk with Jen.  As I came home, I saw Vikki heading into the park, so I ran over and had a visit with her.   I came home to find a package from my Send Something Good secret pal.   I realized that I had yet to go through the entire list of blogs participating in the swap – there are something like 160 of them and while I’ve made it through part of the list and I do intend to sit down and make it through all of them at some point, that’s alot of time in front of a screen.  And I’m having trouble committing to that.  I think if it were the dregs of winter and I didn’t have a neglected garden calling my name it would be easier.
Like everything in life, online life is about balance.  Knowing when enough is enough.  Sitting here, home alone in my jammies, it’s easy to lose track of time as I surf the web, seeing the latest and greatest things I could be doing.  I also realize that if the internet weren’t here to distract me, something else would.  Something else always seems to distract me.  There are pluses and minuses to the internet and putting yourself out there on it. Mostly, I’m grateful for the relationships I’ve gotten out of it.  I love comments and emails, love hearing how I’ve inspired someone, love hearing how my babble here has touched them in some way, but most of all, I love when someone is moved enough by what I have written here to call me, or to say, let’s get together.  Because no matter how much time you spend staring at a screen,  real time spent with real people can’t be replaced or replicated.

Which brings me to the title of this post.  It’s a quote from a friend, a reminder of a good time, as well as a reminder of what’s important. You can make new friends, get inspiration, ideas and how-to’s from the internet, but what’s most important are the real things you do.  Like spending time with friends, your family and yes, burying the cat.

Weird.

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For the last 10 years, we have had a Cinqo de Mayo party.  What started out as drinks with friends on a sunny Saturday afternoon has grown into a fest.   A family friendly one at that.  We just refer to it as The Party.
A pitcher of watermelon margaritas became 5 gallon containers of them mixed in a cooler, served in my granny’s punchbowl.

We just kept inviting everyone we know.  It started out word of mouth and at some point, became actual issued invitations.  People who ‘made the list’ always told us how excited they were to finally be invited.  Apparently it was quite the bash.  I’m a little modest about it, since you know, I’m the hostess and you always think your parties are legendary and fabulous.  But people were always surprised at who all was here.  Worlds collided in our front yard on a Saturday in May.    We invited all the neighbors around us who might be disturbed by the loudness of the party.  We invited all the neighbors from a block up who would walk by and chat us up about the garden, about school, about whatever.  Anyone that might walk by and be offended we were having a party and didn’t invite them.  We invited our friends and coworkers.  Edie invited her school friends, first her preschool friends, then her elementary school friends.  Every year the party got just a little bit bigger.  Once you showed up and made the list, you were on it.  We did a purge a few years ago, but added just as many on as we had taken off, plus some.   We’ve been told our party is the one of the most eclectic mixes in town.
And the crashers. There were always crashers.  Some of whom are now dear friends were crashers the first time they came, invited by mutual friends.  It’s the kind of party you bring a carload along.
I don’t remember how old Edie was when she asked when our ‘disco’ party was going to be held this year. 
 What disco party?
You know the one you guys always throw. 
We do not throw disco parties.  We are not disco party people.
Uh-huh, your disco de mayo party.
That was when the party started having a disco theme.  Then, one year, a certain someone suggested a pinata might be fun for the kids.  So we did that.  After all, what’s more fun that adults standing around drinking tequila while watching children bash a pinata and battle it out for sugar? 

Last year our friend Eddie made this glorious disco ball pinata.  I think there are still shiny bits of it’s outer layer in my front yard. The last two years running, a very sweet now 6 year old girl has taken the pinata out.  She has two older brothers and is fierce.  I don’t think it hurt that last year, the stick given to the children to bash the pinata was actually a stake from my garden that had a pointed end.  She just stabbed that sucker. Clearly, there was drinking involved and no one was paying close attention to the stick we had just handed over to 50 kids to hit a pinata with.  Tequila + pinata= fun.

The Party was always held on a Saturday, since you know, we’re responsible grown ups who can only throw huge parties on weekends.  But the theme was always Cinqo de Mayo, no matter the calendar date.  Without fail a few folkswould be confused by invitation and would call or show up on the 5th, but hey, that was just part of the fun.  The party officially started in the afternoon, with the pinata being the high point a few hours in (generally right before or right after the Kentucky Derby, which also happened to also run the same Saturday we’d have the party).  After the pinata, there was a shift in the party, with families clearing out, more kidless folks showing up.  As it got dark, the party would wind down to just those who could stumble home, a bonfire would be built in the urban bonfire, there would be smores for the kiddos and some years, the party would linger until the wee hours of the morning.  One year our last guest arrived at 11 pm. 
It was a party that took months of yard work to prep for.  The week of, we’d start putting tents up on Thursday.  A friend lent us his huge tent with big metal poles that had to be picked up in the pick up truck it was so big, that was 10′ x 20′ or something insanely huge like that, that was dubbed ‘the funeral tent’ because it was so big and indeed, looked like a tent you see over a grave site.  There would be several dining tents set up throughout the yard in addition to this.  For shade or in case of rain, whatever the weather demanded.
The day of the party was a marathon.  From the time we got up, there was a long to-do list.  A grocery store run was needed for ice.  We’d run around the neighborhood and borrow most of the picnic tables in a three block radius.  The lawn needed to be mowed, the last of the tents needed to go up, prepwork for making 15 gallons of margaritas and 10 gallons of lemonade needed to happen.  Did I mention the party would go on until the wee hours of the morning?
We served watermelon margaritas for the grown-ups, lemonade for the kids.  I learned to label the punchbowls because teenage boys will try to sneak the loaded punch.  We asked our guests to ‘Please bring something to nibble on and anything else you’d like to drink’.  We usually ended up with a case of beer left in the coolers, some years more.  We had some phenomenal food, although everyone was always surprised to find out who brought the Velveeta sausage dip. People would show up with bbq, with chips and dip, with enchiladas, with brownies, with goat cheese they made from their goat’s milk.  Last year someone showed up with sangria and I had to break out a third punchbowl.
Yes, I have three punchbowls.  I keep them on hand for occasions such as this.
We’re not having the party this year.  Pat left for a Waterkeepers Alliance Conference in Portland this morning.  It feels weird to not be having the party this year, but it’s a relief in some ways.  I realized the other day it was May 1 and I’d yet to get my front porch plants out and lined up, I hadn’t planted my hanging baskets, all things that had to be done by the party every year.  Without the party deadline hanging over my head, I have spent the last month digging up the back yard and neglecting other parts that normally are planted and weeded by this time of year.  There were no house projects, no major house cleaning that I felt needed to be done on a deadline of a Saturday in May.  Truth be told, the last few years the party has gotten to be more than alot of work. It’s not just the marathon day, the hardest part is hosting it.  Last year there were people here neither one of us were able to greet.  Making margaritas and lemonade from scratch, by hand in 5 gallon batches is helpful, but when you go through one of those guys in a hour, you’re back there in the kitchen making another one.  (Thankfully, I learned to do all the prep ahead of time, so all I have to do is mix them up.).  The party needs to change somehow, but we’re not sure how.  Do we hire staff to help out? Do we cut the guest list?  How do we cut the guest list?  So we are sitting this year out, using Pat being out of town as an excuse really, to see how life goes on without The Party.   Today is the Thursday before the party, and I should be getting ready to watch a tent go up in my front yard for Saturday.  There were watermelons at the grocery store that I didn’t buy to start juicing for Saturday.  I may even be low on tequila in the liquor cabinet.
This is not the end of The Party.  We’re talking about holding it next year.  Maybe make it an semi-annual event, to give us time in between to recover.  I joke that we host 300 of our closest friends, but really, our third of an acre is wall to wall people at the height of the party – it really is several hundred people. We’ve been telling people since New Year’s Eve we’re not having it this year.  It hasn’t always gone over well.  I’m curious to see if people actually show up as threatened on Saturday.    We’ll see, won’t we?

May Is.

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May is a month in which possibilities seem almost endless.    Spring has fully sprung and summer lies just beyond, with it’s warm weather and long lazy days.  I still think there’s time to plant all sorts of things in the yard, to start new projects that will carry us through the summer.  May is when we got married, it’s when we discovered we were having a baby. 

May is a month in which the fleetingness of life comes home.  We find ourselves trying to help baby robins that have fallen out of the nest too early.  We start realizing we have overbooked parts of our summer.  I lost my father and my best friend in the month of May, both way too early. 

May is the month where I have had the most life changing events of my life happen to me.  I get anxious about what the month has in store every year.  I think it’s gotten worse as I’ve gotten older and gotten closer to the age my father was when he passed away.  My father’s passing caused my family to implode, which Mother’s Day, also in May, helps to send that message home.  Becoming a mother myself has done much for me to realize that my mother treated me the way she did not because I was a bad person, but because she’s not in her right mind.  You simply cannot wrap a rational mind around behavior that isn’t rational.   Becoming a mother myself brought about the definite end of my relationship with my mother, as well as bringing healing to some of the wounds she inflicted.

May is an emotional roller coaster for me every year.  And it’s here again. 

Sunday Funday.

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 Despite the fact that the annual Dogwood Festival Carnival has been going on for over two weeks within walking distance of our house, we’ve yet to take advantage of it.  Sunday was the last day of the carnival, it was armband day (meaning for a flat rate the kids could ride all the rides to their heart’s content all day long), the weather was cooperating and we finally had to time to head over there.

Edie went with her bff Sophia.  Sophia’s sister and her bff tagged along as well.  The four girls walked arm in arm, chatting about very important things the whole way over.
As soon as I got the girls their armbands, I made a bee line for the funnel cake stand.  I love funnel cake.  I have been known to walk over to the Dogwood Carnival JUST to get funnel cake.  So when I saw this sign:

I was absolutely crushed and bitterly disappointed. 
Seriously.  NO FUNNEL CAKE?!?!?!?
At least there were corn dogs.

And Edie made due with a caramel apple, but I felt that was way too healthy.  I know I complained to absolutely everyone I saw.  I complained the entire walk home.  I came home and complained on Facebook about the lack of funnel cake.  I am still bummed about this.
Their fryers were busted.  It had been that way all weekend.  I found this out when I complained to the people working the corn dog stand.  They didn’t understand why it wasn’t fixed either.  I heard plenty of other people walking past the closed funnel cake stand complaining, so I was in good company.
As we walked home and I complained about the lack of funnel cake for the 90th time to my daughter, she thanked me for taking her & her friends anyway.  I assured her, their happy faces as they rode every ride multiple times came very close to making up for the lack of funnel cake. 

Really, they did.

A Rock.

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A notice came home in the “Thursday Folder” that someone’s mother, who works at a local bank, would be coming in to talk to the kids about saving money the next week.  Attached was an entry for a kid’s contest the bank is currently running.  Across the top was “I’m saving for ______________.”  There was a cartoon pig to be colored in for their entry into the contest to win one of a few savings bonds with the bank.  The children were asked to have this filled in for her talk on Tuesday.

Monday over dinner, I reminded Edie she needed to do her ‘homework’ for tomorrow’s talk. 
“I don’t want to.”
“Well, you have to.  Everyone will have theirs.”
“I don’t want to.”
“At least say what you want to save for.  You don’t have to make it fancy.”
“I don’t want to. I don’t need her to talk to me about saving my money.  I already have a savings account and I have even more money in my piggy bank.  I don’t know what I want to save it for, I just do.  Every year she comes in and talks about money and it’s always the same and I know it already.”
“Well, according to this letter, she’s going to go around the room and ask each one of you what you are saving for, so you need to say something.  Say anything.  Say ‘a Wii’.”
“I don’t want a Wii.”
“Then say ‘a new bike’.”
“I don’t want to save for a new bike.”
“Then say ‘a rock’. Say anything.  And then you can be entered in the contest.”
“I don’t want to be in the contest.”

She came home from school the next day.
“Well, what did you say you were saving for?”
“A rock.”
“Really.  Did you color the picture in?”
“No.  She kept trying to take my picture and I kept telling her I wasn’t finished.  Finally, I told her I just didn’t want to be in the contest.  And I don’t think she liked my answer.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, everyone laughed, except her.  I don’t think she got it.  I told her ‘a rock’ could be jewelry, it could be a nice cabin on top of a mountain by a stream, it could be a bunch of different things, but she didn’t get it.  Also, another boy in my class came up to me and told me he couldn’t think of something good to save for either, so he said a puppy, but he thinks my answer was better.”
“I saw that your class was on the news for this.  Was the camera crew there when you gave your answer?”
“Oh yeah.  They laughed too.  Everyone laughed but Mrs. G.  I don’t think she liked my answer.”
And with that she shrugged her shoulders and was done with the topic.

That’s my gal.  She’s saving for a rock.

Running Past.

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We woke up Saturday morning to the sounds of a race being run in the street past our house.  I later realized when Saturday became the longest day I’ve had in a while, that there was a certain message from the greater universe in that.

The phrase that best describes the end of last week into the weekend is ‘everything at once’.  Seriously.  Starting Thursday afternoon, I found myself having to be in two and three places at once.  I know from having spent the better part of almost the last 20 years with a man who is an environmentalist that this is his busy time of year.  It’s this point every year that we become ships passing in the night, communicating by post-it notes on the counter and emails.  I go to bed before he comes home some nights, he’s gone before I get up and the only way I know for sure that he actually came home is when I woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, he was beside me in bed.  Also, he might sometimes leave a fresh pot of coffee on.

Friday night, we made a little time for a date night.  Sharon Van Etten was playing down at the Jefferson and as she was on the everyday rotation there for a bit with my better half, who, by the way, puts almost no one on the everyday rotation, it was definitely a must-do.  It was a lovely show and didn’t run too late, although Pat & I, being the music geeks that we are, even when we know we have to get up and be productive first thing in the am, can’t just come home from a show and go to bed.  Oh no, we have to talk about it and listen to more music and maybe have another beer into the wee hours. 

I had gotten an email from my hairdresser last week, telling me she had a spot for me on Saturday morning.  She stopped being a hairdresser full time a few years ago, but she still is kind enough to do the hair of those of us who couldn’t find someone else we trusted enough with the task.  I will go months on end without a haircut and then frantically decide I need one immediately.  Over the years, she has figured out almost precisely when this is about to happen and will call or email me to say, I’ll see you this day at this time.  I love this about her, almost as much as I love how freaking fabulous she is with my hair.  Even when I haven’t had a trim in months people tell me what a great hair cut I have.   She knows how to cut my hair so that I don’t need a trim every 6 weeks, something else to love about her.

I have taken Edie for exactly one haircut in her entire life.  I trim her hair myself, because really, it’s not that hard, I cannot take her to one of those el cheapo places that I know will ruin her hair as they did mine growing up and I’m not springing for a haircut I can give myself. (I am THAT cheap.) This is what I’ve told myself for years.  Last summer, I trimmed her hair and I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but I butchered it.  Really.  One of my neighbors got an eyeful of it and immediately asked ‘was there wine involved?’  No, there was not.  Our then 13 year old babysitter looked at Edie and said, “I can fix this for you” and that is how a 13 year old became my daughter’s new stylist.    She had not had a cut since and her ends were getting horrific.  She refused to let me trim it and so I would mention maybe I’d take her for a cut.  Maybe we could just go to one of those hair places….and I’d trail off.  That kid held her ground.  She told me for months that I should just take her to my gal.  She’d throw in little comments like ‘Oh, you’d take me to one of those places at the mall?  That means you’d have to go to the mall.  You’d do that?’ because she knows that in addition to being cheap, I just cannot bring myself to go to the mall.  Last time we were there, we were totally accosted by one of those perfume people and neither one of us has yet to recover.

So, when Boop emailed me last week, I asked if she could fit us both in. I waited until Friday night to share this with Edie, mostly so that she wouldn’t gloat too much.  Boop could indeed fit us both in, so we headed downtown early Saturday morning to get our hair done.

We hit the farmer’s market while we were downtown, headed home for quick change to soccer gear, grabbed a sandwich, then we headed out to soccer.  Her soccer game was west of town and Pat just happened to be working a festival just 10 minutes west of where we were, so as we left the game, she asked if we could go visit Daddy.  He was scheduled to not just work this festival, but attend a dinner that evening, then work another festival the next day, Sunday.  And he’s got to work the next few weekends, so any face time we can grab with him this time of year, we take.  I had every intention of making it back for the upcoming elementary school garden festival committee meeting later that afternoon, but I had forgotten the festival he was working was also a wine festival.  Fly fishing AND wine tasting?  That is something for everyone in this family.  There were only a handful of wineries there, but most of them were new to me, so I had to check them out.  Meanwhile, Pat had to boogie off to a talk on the Jackson River Lawsuit, where he presented a check on behalf of his employer to the defendant to help with the now $80,000 legal fees he’s racked up in trying to keep Virginia’s rivers open for public use.  It was interesting to hear about the case from some of the other interested parties, including Beau Beasley, a most entertaining fly fishing writer.  We somehow ended up staying for the festival’s foundation dinner at the nearby country club that evening.  Prime rib dinner I don’t have to cook or clean up and there was chocolate cake for dessert?  Twist my arm. It was a lovely evening, but driving home at 9:30 that night, I realized I had been on GO since I had awoken to the sounds of a race early that morning.  Needless to say, when we woke up to cold, gray and rainy yesterday, along with the news that the Earth Day Festival Pat was supposed to work that day cancelled, we joyfully all stayed in our PJ’s, read and watched movies all day long.  It was glorious.  We introduced Edie to “Gone with the Wind”.  Apparently some of her classmates have seen it and some thought it over hyped and not nearly as good as “Mama Mia”.  She expressed an interest in seeing it and since it is one of my all time faves, I jumped at the chance to watch it with her.  She liked it, although she thought it was too sad in parts (welcome to Southern Gothic my dear, my absolute favorite genre) and she thought the ending left you hanging.  We told her that was the classic problem with GWTW, does she ever get him back?

Today was another cold, rainy day, but I already know this week is going to be a repeat of last week, so there was no more glorious curling up in PJ’s like yesterday.  I have successfully knocked out most of my to-do list in a wild burst of productivity and put off the fun stuff until last.  I have a birthday cake to make for a dear boy who is turning 13 this week.  He requested chocolate, chocolate, chocolate and maybe some fruit, so I need to go figure out exactly what cake I’m making him.  I need to figure out what my Girl Scouts are doing this week, as the meeting I had planned was panned by the girl in my house.  (I may just ignore that and take my chances, which I know, can end in disaster.).  I swapped some bee balm for raspberry bushes so they, as well as the rest of the veggies for the garden need to get in the ground.  (Today’s 40 degree temps definitely made me happy I’ve waited until the right time to plant, despite the unseasonably warm temps.).  There’s end of the school year things piling up, like camp applications (We got confirmation today she’s off for another 3 weeks at Camp Lachlan!!), class picnics to plan and last night the evening news reminded me to purchase pool passes.  Ah, summer, I can hardly wait!  Not that I want to rush the season though – as it is spring is running past me!  How is it the end of April already?

All about me.

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I read about Send Something Good over at Gastronomical Sovereignty and since it sounded fun and I end up getting a present out of it (okay, a package.  All for ME!), I thought, why not?  Today is a link up where all the bloggers involved are introducing themselves.  Welcome to my all about me post.
I’m a forty-something mother who despite my extreme dislike of soccer, has become a soccer mom. Don’t tell my daughter.  I have a very handsome hubby that I met when I fell off the roof of my garage at a party in college.  He is a Riverkeeper, which when I try to explain to people what that is, I just call him the old man of the river.  He monitors and advocates for the river.  I don’t really talk about being eco-friendly a whole lot on my blog because I prefer to just walk the walk rather than talk about it.  I also like to say that Environment Non-profit isn’t just a job, it’s a life style.  Together we have one completely amazing 10 year old daughter.  She is the most responsible, punctual member of our family.  She thinks that cleaning bathrooms and making beds are fun.  I’m really not sure where she got this from.  She also watches Martha Stewart and Julia Child and then comes up with these insane craft projects.  I know exactly where that came from.
I love thrifting.  Just about everything in our house we have gotten second hand.  It’s the thrill of the hunt as well as I am just that cheap.  I prefer old things.  Among the vintage things I like to collect and use are tablecloths, napkins, aprons and cookbooks.  You might notice a theme there.
I love to cook.  I will rant about the state of our food system, which I think needs to be completely overhauled.  There are changes that need to happen at the top, but we need a good grassroots effort to help make this happen.  To this end, I am involved in local food issues where we live, I am on the vegetable garden committee at my daughter’s school and have committed to starting up a garden at the school she will attend next year as she moves up the upper elementary school. At the same time,  I also have a fondness for food that really isn’t food, like Twizzlers and BBQ corn nuts.  I think that fresh cotton candy and a perfectly roasted marshmallow are a certain happiness that can only come from sugar melting on your tongue.  Everything in moderation, including moderation.  I keep exactly one processed food in my pantry and that is Kraft mac & cheese.  We don’t eat it alot, but man there are times when that is the bomb.   
I love to bake.  I show up at friend’s houses and immediately start baking in their kitchen.  I love chocolate cake and will make you the best chocolate cake you have ever had.  I am the sort of person who will make a cake that takes 2 days to complete.  It is so worth it.  It’s that good.  And this is from a girl who used to never make a recipe that was longer than a paragraph.  My husband dared me, I never stand down a dare, and the rest is history.  He also bought me a stand mixer on the condition that I use it at least once a month. 
I love to garden.  Digging holes in the ground is my ultimate happy.  My love of gardening and cooking are somewhat related, as I’ve had a garden so that I can have my own tomatoes most of my life.  I even attempted a tomato patch in college.  Somewhere along the way I learned to can, so I do a good bit of that.  I even teach canning classes. My jams and jellies don’t always turn out, I prefer to just make fruit butters in the crock pot, but I might try jams again this summer, since you know, I am a canning instructor.  I love to pickle things.  I will pickle anything and everything, including radishes, green beans, okra and watermelon rind.  I like to try things just to see if I can do them, which explains all the pickles.  We grow all kinds of native flowers, flowers I just really like, vegetables, fruits like strawberries and blueberries as well as a few fruit trees (cherry and peach).  We have squirrels that think all of this is grown for them and some years they win.  They will hop up on my kitchen screen door and yell at me.  I am trying to convince my daughter, who learned to shoot and liked it at camp last summer that if she wants to move up to moving targets as she claims, then she should start on our squirrels and I’ll get her a gun just for that.  She just rolls her eyes at me and says shooting squirrels is not the same as shooting skeet.  She truly is a little lady.
I love to read.  My husband is pretty convinced we’re going to die in a crushing avalanche of shoes and books.  He tries to keep me on a no-net gain of both of those and so far is only successful on the shoe part.  He says I get a certain glow when I buy a new pair of shoes.  Also, if I have the mini-me with me, she will rat me out if I made a shoe purchase around her.  I’ve been known to keep a new pair of shoes in the box, hidden in the closet and he STILL can tell I bought a new pair.  But books, I have books on everything. We are big do-it-yourself-ers, so we have books on that.  I have quite the cookbook collection.    Novels out the wazoo.  I love British Chick Lit, Stephen King, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Louisa May Alcott, Anne of Green Gables, John Steinbeck and more, but I have never read the Twilight series.  I just refuse to.  I read the Anne Rice vampire books.  One vampire series is enough.  Pat got me a kindle for Christmas, hoping that this would mean maybe I’d get rid of some books.  HA!
I am often called ‘crafty’ because I sew and knit.    I am fascinated by quilting and the mini-me thinks this needs to be ‘our’ new thing, but honestly, I have enough trouble finishing any project besides dinner in a timely fashion – a quilt will take me freaking forever.  I have been working on a sweater for my husband for over a year.  Most of my knitting gets done on roadtrips, at soccer practice and watching tv.  College football & basketball season are prime knitting times.  I have a hard time sitting still, I definitely have a hard time sitting and doing nothing, so knitting fixes that for me.  Also, you can drink and knit much easier than you do anything else while drinking.  I like being productive, even if I have just sat on my rear and watched college football all day long.  Knitting gives me something to show for that.
At one point, I ended up with a monthly wine column for a lovely local publication that is no longer.  I will sometimes write about wine on here (some of my regular readers are still waiting on my post about Riesling and it’s coming, I just have a wee bit more research to do…).  Despite this, I still claim to not know a whole lot about wine.  But I like it.
My living room is painted orange and contains a purple velvet sofa with leopard print throw pillows.  I mention this because every time someone new comes to our house, they walk in and stop to take it all in.  I love color, even though I tend to wear black as much as possible.  (It’s very slimming and forgiving of how much food I spill on myself.  I don’t eat a meal that I don’t wear.)   Those also happen to be my favorite colors – purple, orange and leopard print.
When I’m not babbling on here, digging up my yard, volunteering at school, running my girl scout troop or any of the other things that keep me running all day long, I have a small home-based business I started last year, where I provide home-cooked-meals-to-go for busy working people.  It’s slowly growing by word of mouth, which keeps the growth manageable.  I cook the way I cook for my own family, because I do feed my family the same thing – there is an emphasis on local, organic, whole grain & primarily vegetarian.  We don’t eat alot of meat because I don’t like to touch it when it’s raw. What meat we do eat, we normally tend to be a on first name basis with, because we have a number of friends that raise livestock. The pig that is on my header is currently in my freezer.
And that is probably much more than you’ve ever wanted to know about me.  I tend to blog about all of the above, as well as how much I avoid cleaning my house.  Two bathrooms seemed like a good idea at the time, but having two bathrooms means you have to clean two bathrooms.  Ugh.
Here are the rest of the bloggers.  Go check some out and see if you can’t find some fun new blogs to follow.

Spring Break, 1992 Style.

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Friday afternoon I posted on Facebook I was getting ready to head out to spend a weekend with a certain group of girlfriends from college.  One of our mutual friends commented that it was “1992 all over again”. Good call Todd, because that probably was the last time all of us were in the same room together and surprisingly enough (or not), not a whole heck of a lot has not changed when we all get together.  We drink slightly excessively, we use language that would offend the saltiest sailor, we really do not behave well in public and that’s on a good day.
I have not laughed that hard in I don’t know how long.  It’s Monday morning and my sides still hurt from laughing.  I laughed until I cried so many times I ran out of tears.  I laughed most of the way home just thinking about how much fun we had had.

While there is a notebook of notable sayings from the weekend, the most used phrase was definitely
 “You are such a fucking bitch.”
Yep, not much has changed.   

 

When I say we really don’t know how to behave in public, we really don’t.  No one was safe.  
Definitely not men wearing clam shell bras and tiaras.
Sheilah lives in Virginia Beach with her family, so we descended upon them for the weekend.  Sheilah packed up the fam and sent them to a hotel, while we got to keep the house. 
It was evident within minutes of us all being in the same room how little some things have changed.  Or why her family got the hotel room and we took over the house.  No way were we all sleeping in the same room together.   I was told even though I am currently wearing the ‘costume’ of  PTO-Soccer mom type, I’m still Becky.  I still will jump out of the car to go ask the guy outside of the T-shirt shop if they will make us custom T-shirts because I couldn’t get his attention by yelling at him from across the street, then, as my friends take off without me, run down the middle of the street chasing the car.  I also still apparently dress pretty much the same way I did back in 1992 (black t-shirt, demin skirt, cowboy boots), I still manage to inexplicably lose my underwear in really bizarre ways (I’m not alone in this with these ladies though),  still use my bra to store items instead of a pocket and no one is at all surprised I’m not a good housekeeper.  We throw beer at people,  we may have left a bigger trail of sand than a pack of 4 year olds (Somehow it’s all over the interior of my car too. I really thought I dumped all the sand out in Sheilah’s front hall.) and plenty of other things that I will be polite about and leave off the internet (because it does get worse.)
We do drink better wine these days, out of glasses.  Some of us may have wattles and the wattle status was established.  We quit smoking cigarettes.  We are all starting to experience ‘women of a certain age’ things, like our hot & cold being a bit off.  I learned how to cook.

College was really the first time I felt like I fit in somewhere.  Being around these girls all weekend I kept remembering why that was.   The rest of them were all former roommates  – I was the only non-roomie, but as Sheilah said, I was a ‘lifemate’ and a package deal with Andrea.  As you get older and are expected to behave a certain way, it’s hard to find friends you can really let it all hang out with (although I don’t always let that stop me).  Honestly, I can’t remember how I met Andrea and I can’t remember exactly when we became inseparable.  I remember spring of my first year at Auburn, standing over a keg at a party at her brother’s house calling each other names, not the first time we met, but that may have been when she became my standing Saturday night date, in my uniform of black, demin and boots.  I met Candy that summer, when she lived next door to Michael, Sheilah when she started hanging out on my front porch the next spring and Clara when she showed up at my front door that spring (or was it summer) and told me I was going to move into the house she was currently living in, with Toni as my roommate.  To this day, whenever Clarabelle shows up in my life and tells me what to do, I listen.  And I don’t listen to anyone. 
In addition to none of us really ever giving a crap what other people thought of us, not taking no for an answer, foul mouths and a small leaning towards dressing like bag ladies (okay, that one might just be limited to me & Andrea), I was so happy to discover that most of us (not Candy) still share the trait to absolutely butcher the English language in the most honest way. I had forgotten this about them. They really and truly are my people.  We are most certainly not going to let another 20 years go by before we are all in the same room again.
I showed up Friday and baked a cake.  Not sure why, I just thought we’d need a little something sweet.
Maybe it was to prove that yes, I really do know how to cook these days. Anyway, at some point Friday night, this cake was renamed “Sex Cake”.  (We really are inappropriate.)
I promised I’d share the recipe, so here it is. It’s based on a recipe from Green & Black’s Unwrapped cookbook. 
Dark Chocolate Mousse Cake
1 tablespoon ground almonds (or sugar or cocoa), with extra for dusting the pan.
Three 3 1/2 ounce chocolate bars
1 1/2 cups sugar
2/3 cup (1 1/4 sticks) salted butter
pinch of sea salt
5 large eggs
Preheat oven to 350.  Butter a 8 or 9 inch springform cake pan (Or tart pan with removable bottom) and dust with the ground almonds (or cocoa or sugar).  Melt the chocolate, sugar, butter & salt in the top of a double boiler.  Beat the eggs with the almonds and fold into the chocolate mixture.  The batter will thicken after a few minutes.  Pour the cake into the pan and bake for 35-40 minutes. 
Remove the sides of the pan and leave the cake to cool.  You can sift confectioner’s sugar or cocoa over it before serving, or not.
Note – I tend to end up using three 4 ounce chocolate bars, which is an ounce and a half more chocolate than what is called for and I generally skip the almonds.  It doesn’t make that much of a difference in the end result to be honest. 
Thank you for such a kick-ass weekend girls.

Current Happy Things.

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  • Yard art from an old neighbor that keeps popping up in new places.  I think among the ferns under the magnolia is the best spot yet.
  • Finding out that she was the one that moved the yard art.  And then took a picture to capture the moment.
  • The chicken statue peeking out from the may apples and lily of the valley bed. 
  • All those foot shots, with the close up on the toes and the pedi she got from Ryan’s Brooke last month. (and clearly, it’s time for a new one.)
  • She’s got my dad’s weird duck toes.
  • Her feet don’t look like little baby feet anymore.  That just happened.
  • Garden Gnome.
  • That I found all these pictures Edie shot on her camera uploaded onto my computer.  They are freaking cool.
  • That she still takes so many pictures of her feet.  They have been well documented since she learned to use my camera at the age of 4.
  • That I am ditching them this weekend to go hang out with my college girlfriends.

My Sweet Easter Gal.

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People say I’m crafty and creative, but the true creative soul in our house is the wee one. Ever since that spring break where I let her have a little too much unsupervised TV time and she watched Martha Stewart decorate Easter Eggs, she hasn’t been content to just ‘color’ eggs.  Oh no.  There was the year she made the drying rack, just like Martha’s of course, out of foamcore and straight pins.  She made it entirely herself, all I had to do was contribute the materials.
Every year, she starts collecting ideas for how she’s going to decorate eggs this go round.  This year she broke out the box of crayons and got festive with it.  Among the highlights:
A flower.

Polka-dots.

This crazy cool graphic doodle one.

I don’t know how she got this one to have the spider web look (before the shell cracked), but this one was wicked cool. 

As you can see, the fancy drying rack did not get broken out this year. I may have disassembled it in order to get my straight pins back to sew something and never did put it back together. Thankfully, she was able to make due.
I’m pretty sure this is the last year she will believe in the Easter Bunny.  Frankly, outlasting her at bedtime so that we can get all the treats put out is hard as all get out, so I think I’m ready for this, sad as it may be.  The nun I had in fourth grade was the one that spilled the beans for me on Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, so I’m curious as to how she’s going to give up this belief of hers.  A few weeks ago she asked if I believed in Santa and while I answered affirmatively, I wonder what’s going on in her mind on that topic. I’m afraid if I dig too much, she might lose that faith and I don’t want to be the one responsible for it.  The memory of that nun telling us that only spoiled rotten brats believed in those silly fairy tale things like Santa Claus haunts me to this day.  From a parent’s point of view these days, I see her as an even more bitter person than I did in the fourth grade, because frankly, the longer my child believes and stays just a wee bit young is a wonderful thing in today’s day and age.
Edie has a number of big changes coming up on the horizon – not only does she move from her sweet little elementary school to the bigger upper elementary school up the street (along with every other current 4th grader in the city), her bf who lives just down the street is moving to another country.  She’s frequently out of sorts about all this, as you can imagine.  Sometimes she just wants these changes over and done with, so she can stop waiting for them.  Sometimes she just wants to stop time and always live in this exact moment and I can’t say I blame her for that either.  Her planned sleepover with her friend the beginning of spring break fell through and she cried herself to sleep the first few nights of spring break because of it.  I think I’m getting used to her little outbursts about all this and thankfully, she’s getting better about being able to notice it’s anxiety about all the big changes coming up that cause these outbursts. Throw in the fact that she’s a 10 year old girl and all over the place and well, we have our hands full with her right now.   One minute she wants to dye her Easter Eggs all by herself and the next, she wants me there to watch her do it.  Like her belief in the Bunny and Mr. Claus, I’m embracing it for all it’s worth, because I know, this moment is fleeting.