Meringuey Christmas

A wild Frannie welcomes you in to CHRISTMAS 2015: THE CHRISTMASNING

CAN I JUST SAY I am well tired of xmas at this point? I’m glad that Strudel is still into it, and she gets super excited about it. We’re going to ride that wave for a while. Franny is getting a wee bit indifferent to it. I can smell my freedom. I want to go someplace warm and sunny but NOT make anyone wait on me who might like having a day off as well. I am thinking a condo near a beach and do the shopping early and then spend xmas on the beach.

One of the times when my mother ran away from home we had xmas in Florida, and my uncle grilled shark, and played one of Elvis’s holiday albums. That was really okay.

I admire people who like Xmas, I really do. Especially those of you who engineer it and cook it and execute it. If you do all that and still love it, I tip my Grinch fedora to you. But, it’s OVER. Let’s review the highlights.

Pete and I spent most of the 24th cleaning, and didn’t lean on the girls too much, since we were doing really deep cleaning. They did the bathrooms, yay. So on the day of, Franny volunteered to bathe the dogs, who weren’t really dirty, but were getting pretty aromatic.


Horace likes to bundle up in a blanket after his bath.


Edith does not have the patience for that shit, but appreciates the fire.

A fun thing about this xmas was candymaking. I started making candy when I was about nine–toffee, peanut brittle, and popcorn balls. I’ve left off it in the past couple of years, because we eat less sugar than we used to, and a lot of the classic recipes call for corn syrup or dairy. I did a little research and discovered that a reason to use corn syrup is because it will help prevent crystallization during cooking, but it’s not strictly necessary.

As I also mentioned I thought I would make the girls candy this year, since candy in stockings is one of our traditions. (Pretty typical, I’m sure.) When I was a kid I would get mini peanut butter cups in my stocking, and candy canes. I used to get the girls a big mix of stuff like fun Japanese candy from the 100 yen store and nice chocolate. In the past couple of years I had moved increasingly to “safer” candy like Surf Sweets. They are wonderful in that they’re made of cane sugar, but we found that we were reacting to the citric acid in them (probably that, but maybe something else, who knows). Citric acid is in everything.

I looked around with the purpose of finding candy recipes that I could make with real actual honey or cane sugar. I look at a lot of Paleo blogs since that lines up nicely with what I need for sauces, etc. As a sidebar, the trendlet of “healthy” Paleo desserts is fucking bullshit, but as long as I’m not trying to fool myself it’s fine. I guess my point being is that this sort of fantasy health bullshit is a nice aid to the allergic.

ANYWAY, what I settled on was gummy bears and peanut butter cups for stockings:

I told the girls that those two things was all I’d gotten to by the morning of xmas, but that I would be making candy all day and they could eat some as it came out. They munched on this candy as they opened presents, and I put some congee and coffee on immediately so we would have food sooner rather than later.

I decided on turrón, which I’d never had, but I know I love nougat. I couldn’t get marcona almonds that weren’t fried in mystery oil (“vegetable oil” is a no-go for us because it can easily be corn oil), so I went with plain ol’ roasted California almonds. I made homemade marshmallows, honeycomb, and my favorite thing that came out of this experiment, meringue mushrooms. I did not make the Yule log to go with it.

Meringue is my jam now! I’ve missed whipped cream sometimes and it’s a pretty substitute. I bought too many apples and so I made a simple apple cake from the Joy of Cooking last night that was tasty but didn’t turn out of the pan at all like it was supposed to. I put meringue topping on it, as the recipe called for, spiked it, and popped it back in the oven. Crimes concealed! I remember hating lemon meringue pie as a kid but now I love it!


Honeycomb

For dinner I made “sous vide” rack of lamb in my cooler, and Pete finished it on the grill, some squash, roasted potatoes, and a mint sauce that was more like chimichurri than the sweet jelly ones. It turned out.


Lil Squash sticker dog


Laura Floofs at Morgan’s boyfriend, who has committed the twin offenses of being in the backyard, and wearing red. He has no idea what kind of danger he’s in as he chats away on his phone. Does anyone want a perfectly nice heirloom turkey? I’m serious, hit me up. A special price of Free-ninty-nine for I, Asshole readers.

In Other News: Giving the Piss

Yesterday I went to a clinic to get a sports physical, which I’ve never had before, and an agility test. I was almost as nervous about the agility test as I was about the math test and interview. Using a combination of real actual muscles that remained after being lazy and tired in my office job this fall, plus adrenaline from really wanting this, I was able to pull of the qualifying deadlifts and such with no problem.

My tester was a woman physical therapist and I was alone in a warehouse, which I was kind of glad of. I’ll be messing up in front of others soon enough. She held her stopwatch while I did things like remove and replace screws from a metal plate, held a light fixture over my head while on a ladder, and carried 60 pounds of conduit up and down stairs.

“Can I come visit you and do this every day?” I asked. She laughed. I have to start doing it myself again!

Then I had to get a short physical.

“We’re going to test your urine again, but not for drugs this time. For things like sugar and blood,” the nurse told me.

Crap! I had come down early to beat traffic (turns out there wasn’t much, because holiday week) so I noodled around Walmart for a while and peed there. AS AN ASIDE, as I was wandering around I saw Pioneer Woman’s busted mug on a set of pots and pans. WHAT UNHOLY WALMART WAREZ IS THIS.

As an aside to this aside, I would license my name to:

  • ferret tutus
  • Victorian anti-masturbation shackles
  • toddler monocle
  • a special boot for stamping on mustard packets is that satisfying or what
  • Moving on. Then I peed again at the clinic and felt very ready to lift things without weeing myself. I was not prepared to give of the more pee. I drank 12 small cups of water at the fountain and sat with my book. I’m on a serial killer kick after seeing Zodiac recently with my sister and Franny, so currently I’m reading about Ted Bundy.

    “You ready?” the nurse asked as he cruised by the waiting area.

    “Almost,” I said. I wanted to be sure (and also finish my chapter–Ted was really ramping things up). “I don’t want to waste your time.”

    Finally I was ready to embrace the cup. I remembered what they said about blood so I told the nurse after I came out, “You mentioned you’re testing for blood, so I wonder if I should disclose that I’m menstruating.”

    “Disclose.” “Menstruating.” Am idiot.

    The other nurse there who had done my drug test on Monday chimed in. “Oh, are you complaining again?”

    “Yes!” I said, laughing. “Do you have a half hour or so?” She laughed.

    “Wait two minutes,” my nurse said, and I went back to the waiting area.

    “There was a little bit of blood, but I’m not concerned about it since you are having your monthly.” He brought a copy of the form out saying that I had passed everything very well and was fit for work, and handed it to me. Free to go and very sore today, urgh.

    I’m trying to jump into a yoga immersion next month like I used to do all the time, until my everything hurt so much I couldn’t even rest on my hands in downward dog without them tingling and being on fire and I dislocated my shoulder slightly.

    MAN I WAS A BROKEN-ASS MOTHERFUCKER THEN. The only pain I have now is “immediate” injuries, like knife cuts or grease burns (Chef Clumsy at your service) and muscle soreness. HOW DID I LIVE WITH CONSTANT PAIN FOR SO LONG? All scars are now psychic *BROODS*

    I also need to run and lift things. I have about a month to get into better shape during bootcamp, which I am taking full advantage of. Pete and I are also doing a Whole30 for January, which will really help as well. HAPPY NEW YEAR! See you soon.

    Gummibärchen

    Thank you everyone for your kind words yesterday! I do appreciate it. I think I’ve gotten over the shock now. ZING!

    I fell into the “fuckit bucket” with finding safe candy for the girls’ stockings, so I’m just making candy. I started with gummy bears.

    I’ve made some peanut butter cups as well. No pics yet! I got really sticky after they were done, but I will snap them.

    I got Pete to print off a Xmas angel at the last minute. I don’t think we even had one last year! So tired.

    Today we cleaned the house top to bottom. Literally–I was running around with a cloth looped through the end of the broom handle, shining a flashlight into corners and getting cobwebs. I cleaned the chandelier, which is usually a biannual chore.

    I also got a new set of lights because I had fabricated a memory that the old star lights had died. ??? Ok brain. I think I just wanted new lights maybe? I felt kind of guilty because usually I keep things for like 55 years. Everything’s ready for tomorrow. Cooking pictures to come!

    Banner Depressing; But I hate Fiddling with WordPress So Much

    My banner! So innocious. I have to think some kind of update happened. YUK PEOPLE. The font is even different. I’m playing with Squarespace a lot, poorly (podcast), but when I think of porting I, Asshole over there it terrifies me. I cant believe I used to handwrite html (also poorly) for my Diaryland diary. I so just want a place I can wordbarf now. NO CODE PLZ. NO FUCKING WIDGETS.

    I feel like everything’s on hold til after tomorrow anyway (interview). Pete said he would drive me if I am vomiting, since Strudel was supposedly vomiting yesterday.

    I feel for kids, I really do. On one hand they can never choose their days off. On the other, they get like HALF THE YEAR OFF. That choice thing is a big one, though.

    I’m out today to get a collared shirt that fits from Goodwill, I hope, the mall as a last resort. My lucky underwear (yes I get emotionally attached to my unders) is clean.

    Today I am also practicing interview questions. I am trying to remind myself this is really the sanity test, which I am super good at. I am also trying to remind myself that a trade is a training program and they are looking for aptitude and not all the experience in the world…though I am sure they wouldn’t balk at taking some working electricians. I had a realization recently that if I could just interview for a living for a while, I would, which is pretty sick probably.

    I just shit on Goethe’s parade a few minutes ago by making her drop a chickadee she was about to bring in and release, so she could murder it in a leisurely fashion in the house. She’s gone all Dexter since she lost a bunch of her teeth. They all look like this. The chickadee lay on the ground, twitching a little, but looked alert. I picked it up and held it in my hand. I tested out its little legs, and they hung limp. I thought it was just stunned since it was lifting its head a little.

    Laura came by with her bock bock gang and stuck her beak into my business as always. She usually looks like this, with her tail flat. She saw the minuscule bird in my hand and made a fluffy display at it until she looked like a disgruntled hand turkey. I think turkeys are fascinating (problem number two after wanting to be interviewed for a living), are obviously smarter (except when faced with a harmless chickadee), and I am tempted to let my chook flock dwindle down and replace them with all turkeys!

    Sometimes Laura gets on the fence, greatly concerning the neighbors (“Oh my god, is that…a TURKEY?”) and I push her down to back inside the pen. She saw me coming the other day and got down on her own! A chicken who is awake is pretty much on the verge of stomping on the chooky panic button all the time and it would be a coin toss what they would do if one saw you coming. Fly up? Scream? Go left? Go right? AHHH PANIC! Sometimes I have to grab a chicken that’s gotten out or hasn’t gone to bed properly and Laura puffs up at that, too. Very protective of her brooderbox chums.

    So the chickadee kept breathing and looking around. I was feeling more confident it was about to take off when Goethe, foiled, trotted by. The chickadee saw her and exploded out of my hand. I am starting to suspect I am releasing the same bird over and over again.

    I have been lazy about photographing the basement because changes are slow and incremental right now. It is hard for Pete to work 40 hours and fill in the last of the insulation and drywall, but it’s coming along. I was thinking about how I lived in a house flip/remodel in Crown Hill for three years and how I joked about it “ending my marriage” over ten years ago. I vowed to NEVER AGAIN live in the perma-remodel.

    Well, guess what. It is a lot easier when you like the person you’re living in it with, and it’s slow but eating up a smaller portion (or none) of your living space. I think we were smart to have the basement bathroom done, since that was plumbing, tile, etc, and it was tight sharing one full-sized but smallish bathroom with the girls and all of their stuff and all of our stuff. Waiting for this bedroom isn’t nearly as bad, because we are still in what will be the smallest bedroom/office space, but at least we have a closing door.

    So Pete is finishing the drywall and I am committed to doing the mudding, priming, and painting. Originally he said he would finish it all when I was sicker, but as I’ve gotten better I’ve been jumping in more. He’s less comfortable than I am with the finishing work, so it makes sense to tag out, since I will be home, I hope waiting for a call about my first union job in the next few weeks!

    Act Three

    It’s that funny part of summer where I feel like I’m assessing every day. Is this the last warm day? How about this one? Are the rains coming back? The clematis is blooming again. It does this little last hurrah mini-bloom, I think when the light gets the same as the beginning of summer.

    The bees are packing away the honey and the combs are getting really heavy. The girls are also getting shitty when we crack open the hives now. The theory there is because they have something to protect and know the season is ending. Wasps descend and attack when we open the lid now, and we try to help the girls kill them with the pairing knives we use to cut propolis off the bars. I didn’t know wasps and bees would literally tear each other apart until we starting keeping them.

    The orange hive, which is the one that lost its queen, is still struggling. We have moved more bars over and they did hatch some queens, but I think they were suffering from a lack of food. We’ve put syrup feeders inside the back of the hive, behind their active bars, where they can access them without fighting with wasps.

    So imagine taking the roof off of the hive and looking down into it.

    You would see a horrible Paint drawing. Just joshin. The point I am trying to make is that the fragile orange hive bees are protected from the kamikaze predations of the wasps because you’d have to go in through the front entrance, where you’d hit a solid follower board with a hole about the size of a small plum. Then you’d have to fight past all the comb covered in bees, who know you smell funny, make it through the last follower board/small hole in the back, and then get the syrup and come back out again.

    We have found dead wasps in the very back of the hive. It feels like an Indiana Jones thing when we open it up–behold the skellingtons of the foolish tomb robbers who have come before. We don’t see a lot of that in the purple hive because they have SO MANY FUCKING BEES OMG so there’s always a clean up crew.

    Ladies’ Hammer Club was busy busy this week but not very satisfying. I didn’t expect to have my head turned by any of the trades we visited this week, and I was not pleasantly surprised. I think because it’s summer and people are very busy working that we are kind of getting the bum’s rush quickly. Ironworkers were supposed to have us for six hours, but we got there and our guide said, “The usual guy is out crabbing, and we don’t have any ladies to pull in to talk to you today.” We cut some steel with a torch and were hustled out in two hours. The brick and tile masons seemed kind of similarly unprepared and indifferent about having us there. The trades that have been the most gracious, surprise, surprise, have the highest numbers of women and want to recruit them. I want to talk to you about the gender politics I’ve observed but I’m going to have to put a pin in for now since I have a frittata in the oven and am heading out to pick apples this a.m. Soon!

    I enjoyed being at the plasterers, but I don’t really want to plaster for a living. I wasn’t aware that McMansions, which look like stone, etc from a distance, are made of thick foam siding with a plaster or faux stone overlay.

    It was a great workout though. The mud is very heavy and you’re holding 10-20 pounds of it all day on your hawk and trowel, or heaving huge buckets of mud.

    I had fun pressing the hemp threads into the molds, which keeps it from crumbling.

    Yesterday I went back to Habitat for Humanity. They’re trying to expand into maintaining communities in need, rather than just building new structures, so I helped with maintenance at a retirement community. An area utility was there as well, providing LED lightbulbs, and the mayor of Renton gave a little talk. I changed furnace filters and fire alarm batteries while my Americorps partner gave a disaster preparedness talk to the home’s residents. I worked with her on the build I went to a couple of weeks ago and she taught me how to use a nailgun. She likes women in my program because we are handy efforty buttkickers and I like her! She said she was hoping I’d join her group.

    I was the only person in my cohort there, in part because yesterday was extra and voluntary. Lots of my classmates have to work around class time this summer. I really, really like my group, but it was fun to be solo. It reminded me of when I was doing apartment maintenance right out of high school–landscaping, change light bulbs, dig ditches, whatever. I was outside for most of the day and as soon as my head hit the pillow I fell asleep. We had a second partner, who was my sister’s age and had never done basic home maintenance, and expressed amazement when I could do things like take panels off furnaces without obvious handles or screws, and knew different models of fire alarms and how they worked (which I used to sell/copywrite for at Amazon, plus I’ve always been a little handy).

    I heard a lot of stories yesterday, about 50+ year marriages and divorces and children and retiring from good jobs from the state 30 years ago. I cannot fathom being retired for 30 years. I don’t think it’s going to happen.

    I’m in the home stretch now–four weeks left. We all have senioritis. I have two more three-day weeks, and then a four day week the week of Labor Day, and then my last week is a five-day including graduation. Next week we are going down to King County Metro to see the mechanics’ shop where they work on the busses, and to a real working construction site to get the lay of the land.

    I thiiiiink I may actually get a job when this is over. Whew.

    Say Goodbye to Your Old Friends

    WELL. Yesterday I went to my awesome dentist of a dozen years for the old semi-annual cleaning. I expected someone new because my hygienist of many years got promoted to more of a management position at the office and is now doing advanced dental work. She filled some of my teeth a few months ago. She was THE best and dealt with years of my sad bloody-as-a-stuck-pig mouth, which has since toughened up post-proper nutrition. She promised she would hand me off to someone who was a good fit.

    So I showed up yesterday and my appointment started 20 minutes late, which is unusual for this office, but shit happens and I didn’t have anywhere to be. A hygienist emerged who kind of looked like Angela Merkel, but with worse highlight work, and said, “Alexander?” I get that all the time and kind of shrugged it off. Most people apologize once I correct them, but not this lady. “Well that can be a first name, though, right?”

    She seemed kind of awkward and out of it at the same time. I had this funny feeling like she was really ill at ease and her sentences would start out kind of quiet and hesitant and increase in volume and certainty by the end, like she was at a terrifying interview and giving herself little pep talks every 10 seconds.

    I mentioned my allergies, because I could see some of the products out on the table that I knew had corn in them, like the tooth polish. “Oh, I didn’t see that. I’ll make a note in your chart about those,” she said. I thought this was weird because I knew my old hygienist had taken extensive notes last time I was in.

    I’ll skip past the rest of the weirdness, like her way of questioning me about what corn actually does not me (not a weird question–she just phrased it oddly like everything) and then her telling me all about how she went vegan five years ago and all about vegan cheese. I had to tell her like three times that yes, I have made cashew cheese. I felt like she didn’t believe me because she started quizzing me about the ingredients, which I knew and was able to tell her. And did I know about almond and coconut milk? What.

    There was some folderol with the water pik thing, which is so painful it makes me twitch involuntarily.

    “Are you okay?” she asked.

    “Well, no. I forgot how painful that thing is. It’s not been used on me for at least five years, thank god.” I didn’t want to explain to her that I thought I’d try it, since my teeth are overall less sensitive now. STILL PAINFUL.

    She switched to the old school metal picks, which is great with me. My previous lady did a great job with them, even when my mouth looked like the elevator in The Shining. Now I barely bleed. I noticed she was skipping around a bit, and being fairly perfunctory with some teeth when she stopped abruptly and I heard a “ting!”

    The pick had hit the ground. She bent over, retrieved it. I did not hear it being placed on the tray or put aside. Did the floor pick…go back in my mouth? It couldn’t be. I felt myself tensing up a little. She was letting the sucky tube hang on the edge of my mouth, like it was a hanger and I was that dry cleaning flippy in the backseat of a car. I started really tensing up.

    Okay, this is very pathetic but I got really anxious then. She was reminding me of the dentist who did my first filling when I was six, who had me hold my own Novocaine shot still inserted in my gums when he went out of the room to get something. I was very scared about the shot anyway, but to have to hold the needle in my head and be alone in the room was a bridge too far. I felt like I was right on the verge of being a little teary.

    I told myself to GET A FUCKING GRIP; it was just a terrible cleaning. Then the sucky thing fell out of my mouth and landed on the floor. I listened for a sign that she was changing the plastic, or the straw itself…nothing. It went back into my mouth. Something flipped in my head then, weirdly. I began to find the situation humorous somehow. “Just get through this,” I told myself. I think she dropped a pick twice more. When she finished my teeth weren’t clean. I was a tiny bit heartbroken my old hygienist had seen fit to pair me with this person.

    I asked myself in the car why I didn’t confront her right then and jump out of the chair. That was an extremely valid question to be asking. I think I still have this habit of shutting down sometimes when shit gets weird or off script. It’s a bad “habit,” and an old one. Shit got weird a lot when I was growing up, and there was absolutely nothing I could do to change or control it, so I always got pretty poker face. My sister had the opposite reaction. When she got pushed too far she would scream! I remember thinking to myself, “I did not know that was possible.” Part of me admired it, in a way, even though ideally she wouldn’t have had to repeatedly react to trauma with earshattering screams.

    It’s funny how you can step on an old rake, isn’t it?

    My dentist was also new, since I had to reschedule my appointment due to Lady Hammer Club. The dentist seemed very young and was wearing red Converse and sitting on a yoga ball. I felt about 90 then. Then he told me my teeth were “cute” and there was marveling over my intact, straight wisdom teeth. WHAT. (Again.)

    At the front desk on the way out I was scheduling my next appointment with the office manager, whom I have known from that office for many years.

    “Sooo is Angela Merkel new?” I asked.

    “Why, what happened,” I got from the manager, deadly serious.

    I told her about the dropped tools and she blanched and apologized. I told her my teeth didn’t feel clean. I told her that she was generally clumsy and kind of mashing my nose and face. I skipped the part about veganism because I wouldn’t say she was proselytizing or being mean really.

    “I’m not going to lie to you,” I told the office manager. “I eat food off the floor. I’m an animal. But I like to choose what comes off the floor and into my mouth.”

    I was given a free reclean for next week. Then something good happened. The office manager said, “Angela Merkel is covering for your new hygienist, who is visiting her family in Europe for a month.” She was just a sub! Whew. Anyway, that is enough about my trip to Spain, my childhood pain.

    Lady Hammer Club Update

    The apprentice wrangler at the carpenter’s shop was upset we’re spending time in shop class building birdhouses and not cement forms. Also we are not carrying enough plywood or driving enough nails. We’re being timed on 3 at various angles and I came in under a minute and was proud of myself. HA. Apparently the test at the carpenters’ is 21 nails in two minutes. NO FUCKING WAY. I do not want to be a carpenter. My sad hand got bruised just doing a total of 21 over the course of an afternoon.

    We have also been to see the glaziers’ (glass splinters, horrifying) and have had mock interviews. I showed up after being in bed for two days with my coffee glutening, thinking I was rolling into a math class. NOPE. Schedule change. I sat in front of a panel consisting of a cement mason (who I already knew), a machine operator, and a brick mason, and got highest marks. I wore my Adblock hoodie zipped up all the way since I was also wearing a shirt with a swear on it, genius. I think I brushed my hair.

    Then I got dinged for my absence. ARGH. “We want to see you at 90% attendance, or we won’t be able to give you letters of recommendation.” They also don’t release any of your certifications until and if you finish the program in September. They really have me by the short and curlies here, but the good news is I think they will be able to stuff me into an apprenticeship pretty quickly as long as I do the cha cha with them. Ironworkers is on Monday–very excited.


    It’s pouring today and Goethe is hiding under the eave. Stretching, not being furce. Horace is medicated due to thunder today.

    Let me take a page out of Pop Culture Happy Hour and say what is making me happy this week.

    1. Todd

    I’ve been buying 17-cent feeder goldfish to keep in my wee ceramic pond, which is a thing by itself I really enjoy, and waters my bees and wasps, but draws mosquito larvae. Drop some goldfish in there, and BOOM, no more larva in about half a day. The first batch croaked, and I went back for three more. Two of those croaked, and then Todd was The Fish Who Lived. I started feeding him, and the pond was looking like murky nitrogen city, so I brought him indoors to live in a pickle crock with the world’s ugliest mug that I got contracting at Amazon six years ago (we were near Kitchen). He can go back outside when the larvae come back.

    I forgot how much I like keeping a goldfish! I used to keep one for Franny when she was going through an intense Elmo thing at two.

    2. Vacation week

    P. took the week off last week and I wanted to hang with him, but I was sick for part of it and in class. But he had a nice time, and finished the electrical and did some insulating in the basement. When I had days off we did things, like renting a canoe.


    Look, he’s even happy trapped in some bitchass lilypads.

    We went downtown to the piers and ordered NOTHING BUT HAPPY HOUR OYSTERS and some neat vodka (me) with a lime and scotch for him and did not get ill. I had a feeling about going to a place with a dedicated oyster bar and I was right! We haven’t been out to eat anything since May.

    3. Camp

    During that week, Strudel had a MARVELOUS time at Celiac camp and did not get ill once! They were so good. She made a bunch of friends and I got her a photo album to put her pictures in. One of the first things she said when we picked her up was, “CAN I GO AGAIN?” Hell yes. Next year we might even go out of town during, but stay close enough in case she breaks a leg or something.

    How’s your summer??

    ABV Always be vigilant

    Compared to the usual, things have been very exciting around here this weekend. Don’t get me wrong, I LOOOOVE boredom. Super into it. But a couple of things actually happened.

    I got up early on Friday and fed the chickens and made coffee. I heard a car running outside the fence and peeked over–there was a sedan, running, empty, with the windshield wipers intermittently flapping. P. was actually wearing pants so I sent him outside the fence to investigate.

    “It’s stolen,” he said. “The ignition is completely gone.”


    Nightmere basking in the morning sun in the chicken pen

    We called the cops and an officer came shortly afterwards, and told me that the car had already been reported as stolen. It turns out the owners were right up the street, because a man and woman walked up a few minutes later. Franny espied on what they were saying–they had last seen the car at 8 p.m. and had gone to bed later, and it was gone in the morning. They got in and drove their running, ignitionless car home. It still had half a tank of gas (I looked).

    There’s been some progress with the bees. Somehow, we lost our first queen in the orange hive. It’s very possible that we crushed or drowned her, or maybe she up and died on her own. We could tell things were going wrong, because one week they were pretty mad, and then the population began dropping, and the only new bees being produced were drones. This means you have laying workers.

    It’s kind of cool if you think about it. No queen equals no fertililzed eggs being laid (fertilized eggs result in girl bees). So the workers take over and create as many boys as possible, which will then go out and hopefully spread their genetics with a queen in another hive. Nature is smarter than just waiting for everyone to die. This condition is commonly referred to as a “colony of lost boys.”

    However, you can maybe help turn things around if you have a “queenright” hive. We pulled bars with open larvae out of the healthy orange hive for three weeks in a row, brushed the adult orange hive bees off, and inserted that bar in between existing bars in the ailing purple hive.

    Miraculously this can do a few things. The larvae emit a scent that smells like a queen and can suppress laying in the workers. The workers are aware they are missing a queen, so they accept the open larvae, and raise them up to be a new queen. Old hands say this process of adding new bars can take 3-4 weeks before things get corrected again. In the meantime we knew we were providing the purple hive with already capped cells filled with girl worker bees, which would hatch and help nurse new bees and feed the hive. Bees accept unhatched bees as their own.

    Yesterday, on the third week after we had begun Operation Purple Queenright, we found many queen cups, which are special cells workers build when they are creating a new queen. Possibly the first strong queen to hatch took over. She then races around and kills any other hatching queens.

    So there they were as we peeped in–hatched queen cups. They look like they have little porch roofs over the cells, unlike worker cells (flat) or drone cells (domed).

    Here’s a close up of what was happening:

    The arrow on the left points to a vacated queen cup. Worker cells are flatter. As a bonus, you can see an emerging worker bee. This is what I meant by the bonus influx of workers you get from sharing bars among hives. So, already in this first year I am very happy to have two hives. Three might be ideal, but that adds a half hour a week to maintenance, and I am not sure we’re ready for that just yet.

    The weather is causing the bees to beard (aka “hang out on porch”) in the afternoon to cool things off. We are doing the same.

    I bought a silly pool from the drug store.

    We’re getting highs in the low 90s here, so the garden is doing great.

    1. Zucchini; 2. Tomatoes; 3. Shiso; 4. Thai basil; 5. Lemon cucumber; 6. Italian basil

    This morning I woke up to Strudel on the couch.

    “THERE WAS A RAT IN MY ROOM LAST NIGHT,” she said.

    “Oh lord. Was it big?”

    “YES IT WAS HUGE. IT WAS ON MY HEADBOARD.”

    Uh oh. We did some investigating and I found poo behind her bed, which did not actually look like rat poo to me. I brought the dogtectives in. Strudel had slammed her door shut, and if the rat was truly as large as she described, it was probably still trapped in there.

    Edith found the poo and gave it a good sniffing.

    “Yes, without a shadow of a doubt, this is definitely poo, Mother” she said.

    “Find Squirrel, Edith!” I said, hopefully. Extrapolation has never been her strong suit.

    “Yes, Mother, I have found this amazing poo that you have seen and discovered on your own and it smells weird. My job is done here.”

    I called in Det. Horace, who had been sent out to take a morning wee first. He inspected the poo.

    “FIND SQUIRREL, HORACE!”

    Within thirty seconds, had had tracked the rat to under a dresser. P. sighed and got some gloves and tongs (?), not knowing what he would encounter. He emerged with a baby possum that was the size of a large rat.

    “A cat definitely brought this in,” he said.

    “Put it in our sucky neighbor’s yard!” I said. He did not. Det. Horace got a raise!!

    Franny made a wee card. She said this is what you get when you die.


    I love it!

    The No 1 Ladies Hammer Agency

    Today Morgan and the girls and I went downtown to buy spices. I went a little apeshit (nigella AND sumac) and Morgan went more practical. She’s getting into vegetables too, and that means SPICES. I suggested a field trip since we both have the day off. Everywhere we went people talked to us like we were tourists, of course, since it is high tourist season here.

    A young guy with those nice evil “v” eyebrows at Pike Place made me feel a mango.

    “FEEL this mango.”

    “Okay,” I said, giving it a halfhearted pat like you would to a guinea pig recovering from mange. I was not going to be roped in to his bullshit.

    “How was that, EH? EH?”

    “It was okay.”

    “Listen to this one!” he said about me, as if I was being clever.

    “I’ve felt a lot of mangoes.” I just wanted to get my lettuce and to GTFO.

    Someone else at a pawn shop asked us if we were tourists as well, of course. I am still on my mission to find those rapper name plate necklaces from the 80s. Where did they go?

    “Were they melted down or what?” I asked the clerk behind the counter. He was quite rotund and looked sweaty even in the cool AC.

    “That’s what I would do with them,” he said. I didn’t expect him to know or anything.

    “Remember when we had lunch at that one place with Mom and some sketchy dudes wanted to pay for our lunch and you got mad?” my sister asked me. That sounded like me.

    “Man, no,” I said. “I am such a jerk.”

    “Well, it was really shady. Who does that! Mom was all delighted and you were all HELL NO.” I have taken the adage about free lunches to heart, I think.

    I had to say that I actually had completely forgotten about it, and it only sounded vaguely familiar. I have blocked a lot of stuff that happened with our mother in my 20s out, and I think that might have been the very beginning of my memory really going sideways. I just have no interest in storing those memories I guess. It’s funny, though, that it was another time when our mother was taking things one way and I was demonstrating a completely different set of behavior and values. Morgan came down on my side.

    I bought the girls slushy apple cider and was assured that it was 100% apple cider before I paid. I helped Strudel get her lid on and some slush dripped onto my fingers, maybe half a teaspoon. I licked it off without thinking about it. Strudel drank the whole thing down happily, as did her sister. I started feeling funny about an hour after we arrived home–what I call “balloon head on a string.”

    “How are you feeling, Strudel?” I asked.

    “Urgh. Bad. My stomach hurts and I’m spacey.” Shit. Franny is feeling unwell too. I think corn is the most likely suspect right now. I am sad to be corned this weekend. This is hard to write and I have found countless typos and poor grammar. I am sure I will leave some in.

    I quick pickled a bunch of asparagus recently.

    I’m not crazy about it so I haven’t tasted it. I am told it is “less Victorian than usual,” which probably means I backed off on the allspice a bit.

    Edith is on a reducing program on the vet’s advice. About six months ago our vet said she was getting into the chubby zone. Not dangerous, but a good time to stop feeding her pecans, her favorite.

    It may be hard to see here, but she has a bit of loose skin now.


    Strudel is having a good summer of mostly boredom, and hanging with a friend who just moved a few blocks closer. She came into my bedroom and told me that she’s “a tween now.” Followed up with, “I’m going to go paint my toenails.” She is off to Celiac sleepaway camp at the beginning of August.

    You may ask yourself, “What is this idiotic posing?” I started my class this week (Monday) and today is a holiday, thank god. I got my protective gear and boots right away. I think I am ready to apply for my chosen trade but I am keeping an open mind about the others we’re exploring, in case I want to apply for them too. I don’t want to be more specific because I am a tiny bit superstitious about counting chickens.

    It’s nice to be back in class. I don’t want to be an eternal student, but I am ready to learn something new, which is what a trade is in the beginning. I am kind of thinking of it as paid collage.


    “MOM I’M GOING TO POSE IN YOUR BOOTS KAWAIIIIIII” Ok.

    I’m enjoying getting to know the ladies in my group. There’s youngsters and I think there’s a couple older than me. I don’t say much because I mostly just want to listen. They all have incredible stories about what they’ve done. Women with records (Our teacher: “Trades don’t care.”), women who are currently in shelters, past homelessness, women who live with their parents with their children, women with past lives in many other careers and jobs. There’s stories about dire warehouse jobs, wage theft, being pushed around by corporations, and life-changing motorcycle accidents. There’s even a Microsoft refugee with two children close to my age and of course talking to her was very familiar.

    During the OSHA class, the teacher started doing some L&I payroll tax shit on the whiteboard that involved simple calculations.

    “Who has a calculator?” she asked. I started doing them in my head and calling out the answers before the person with a calculator on her phone could get an answer. “Who’s good at math?” the teacher said, turning around to see who was answering. I raised my hand. No one has ever said that to me before.

    So far I’ve gotten an OSHA 10 cert, first aid/CPR, and practice doing mock interviewing. I think I’m the only one who doesn’t hate interviewing. I’m just used to 1-5 hour loops, not 15 minutes, which is what I have to make a pitch to the committees I’ll be facing this fall when I graduate. There’s going to be math, but it’s easier than what I’ve done so far on my own. Some of it’s amazing and some of it’s kind of time filling. We literally run stairs almost every day, and it’s killing me, carrying this twenty-pounds-extra caboose. I’m doing really well, though, and losing at least a pound a week. I’m looking forward to job site visits and shop days (I’m going to build a bench).

    Sometimes I want to not pay attention in class and just interview all the women all day, students and the guest teachers, and find out about their histories and lives. We keep being asked “why I’m here” and I want to say “because I got sick and almost died and when I could walk again I found out I could run and do math.” This is weird, so instead I say Career Change and I Like Math.

    I wired this today and they all work, just some of the bulbs are burned out. These are the original ceiling light fixtures from the rec room downstairs. P. has implanted them into the wall and we will panel around them and put the brass and frosted glass covers back on, and then they will be ~arty vintage mood lighting~. My idea.

    Intoxicating

    Strudel fell into a hole on my street last week and sprained her ankle. Fortunately it was a very light sprain. I sprained my ankle a couple of years ago and Strudel theorizes it was the same hole. I don’t believe it–my street (and most Seattle streets) has lots of holes! Lucky for her, it was a very light sprain. It poofed up very dramatically on the first day, turned an alarming shade of yellow quickly, and then she was walking on it with no pain by day three. Lucky kid. A couple of years ago I don’t think she’d have healed up quite so quickly.

    I don’t feel any of my old aches and pains anymore, which frees me up to make new ones. I am just at the beginning of the 100 Push Ups challenge. It used to hurt to do push ups, but I did them anyway, sometimes. My back, my elbows, my shoulders. Now I only stop when my muscles do. Franny and I watched American Psycho late last night and it was okay. I thought she would like it because she enjoys horror and “mindfuck” movies. What I really enjoyed was Patrick Bateman and his “I can do 1000 sit ups now.” I used to think bodies like his were genetic outliers or Hollywood magic. Now, I think I can get about as fit as time and my motivation will allow.

    I used to have a very vivid “life of the mind” to the extent I was able, and even that was fading at the end, as my thought processes became increasingly clouded. I think I’m still mourning my old, more destructive, and just plain different former self. Anyone who has been reading me or knows me knows that I am a doer, and if I see a door I want to do through it. I see a lot of different doors now, and I am not hobbled by confusion or anxiety most of the time anymore. Discovering that I can do math this year (not fantastically, but well enough) and that my body will actually get fitter and do what I want–it’s pretty empowering.

    I am left with so many questions. I believe people can change, or at least change their own lives. But now I wonder, who am I? Who was I for 30+ years? Was that really me? Am I a fake me now? How much do I sound like a stoned 15-year-old in someone’s basement, listening to Black Sabbath. (A: A lot.)

    There’s a lot of before and after in life. I can think of before children, and after. Before divorce, and after. Hell, even before and after dogs was another big one. I am trying to accept this as another before and after, but it is taking time.

    So. Up betimes and alone. P. is out of town (Portland). I wish I could have enjoyed the bed a bit more, but the dogs just smash up against me regardless, so by the time I wake up, I am on my customary 1/4 of the bed.

    I watered the yard this morning and everything was looking very pretty.

    We used to live a block from the rose garden, and when they switched over to not spraying, we watched our favorite roses very carefully to see which ones would continue to thrive without pesticides. Hot cocoa (above) seems to be one of the winners in our yard, as it was in the rose garden. “Silver” roses are my favorite but I am told they are very tricky here. I tried to plant ones that are made for the PNW.

    Everything in the yard is absolutely going gangbusters this year. A hot summer is predicted. I am happy either way, as long as it’s dry. In 2009 my router melted. In 2006 I remember it was a glorious year for tomatoes. These things seem to cycle every few years.

    I’m really enjoying doing this lately:

    I’m not sure I’ll go back to fillets now. I was always daunted by the cost of a whole fish, and the…wholeness. Now I just walk in and ask them to scale and fin it, take it home, and stuff it with aromatics. This salmon was $40.00 (4 lbs.). We get about 4 dinners out of a fish like this. So it ends up being about $2.50 per serving. That’ll work. I figure if I can make giant roasts and always work with whole birds, then this is doable too. The fennel is from my garden! Since I’m not working right now, I am challenging myself to use every bit of everything. I mentioned I made gravlax recently and I dehydrated the skins and saved them for the dogs as treats. No wonder they like to sleep smashed up next to me.

    The bees in the purple hive were also up beetimes. They are lean, mean buzzy machines over there now. It’s impressive. Franny helped me work the bees yesterday and it was really fun. She did great. She did say she was worried about getting stung, of course, but neither of us did. The comb hole that P. and I left last week was almost completely closed up. I’m not worried about them right now because I see a great variety of babies, pollen, and nectar, including some capped honey. You can hear the chickens singing along in the background.

    I trimmed the roses out front around tax day, as some people say you should. It’s the first time I’ve touched them since I moved in. There was a lot of cross-caning and dead wood. This year they are looking great and are very pretty next to the raspberries. Year three here is when everything is taking off, plant and manimal.

    Hathor the Cudinator

    I can barely see a little wall in my house so I am still hard at work.



    Started curing gravlax today for a dinner on Thursday, considered rendering beeswax (I need more supplies like cheesecloth and a pot I can ruin). Yesterday we worked the bees per usual and then Franny and I went to Display and Costume and Goodwill to find elements of our Twin Peaks costumes for the contest. I will make a mini album of the process. Both of our costumes are going to be complex and we will model before striking out for Fall City in July. I will publish right before we leave. I know this sounds paranoid but I don’t want anyone to scoop us since they are such good ideas. I don’t know if we’re approaching the Cockeyed levels of awesome, but we are excited.

    I’m hopping back into a Whole 30 tomorrow to reset some of my habits, so today I made farewell banana/pecan/cinnamon waffles with syrup and P’s strawberry peach jam. Tomorrow I will be a good monkey and finish up lessons in natural logarithms. I will be glad to have log out of my life for now!!

    Upbeetimes and breakfast with wives

    Call me Samuel Beepys. If you have not seen this really cool video yet of a bee metamorphosis, I highly recommend it.


    pollen baskets ahoy

    Over the past three weeks we’ve been fixing a self-inflicted disaster. I was gripped by indecision paralysis about something called comb guides. Here is what the inside of our top bar hives look like, basically. You can see that there are literal bars that are supposed to remain movable, that is to say, not glued together with comb (wax) and plant goo (propolis). Check this out: it did not occur to me that if I did not make “guides” on the bars that the bees would get in there are perceive it as a big cave and just start building comb anyfuckingplace. Because surely horrible smoky bears will not come once a week and tear the roof off and poke around, right? Wrong. It’s like Minecraft except I’m the monster.

    So they started building their hanging combs on the cracks between the bars, or two to a bar. This was causing everything to be fused together and to fall down when we would try to inspect. I am so dumb. It’s like any hobby you get into–there’s a million ways to do one thing, and everyone has a different opinion. I just never decided on one thing.


    double combing

    So we went in and retroactively added some square “dowels” to some of the bars and fixed what we could. But this has caused a lot of chaos in the hive and for me to be stung many times now. Sooo I am over that fear. I get kind of feverish feeling and semi-useless for the rest of the day. Plus there is the big adrenaline dump (for me, some people are probably super casual about it).

    Also I have discovered that it is terrifying opening a hive and looking into it sometimes. I get kind of frozen, just seeing the thousands of bees and hearing them raise their buzz until it is louder and truly angry-sounding as we get close to the queen. I think this is the last day we will be wrecking shop and the new comb is being drawn straight.

    Even though you have done nothing wrong I have still made you a terrible drawing in paint to show how this works.


    cutting away the double comb veeeery carefully

    Fingers crossed next week I will not be stung. So far I think this is going well in that they are still alive and reproducing, and we have seen combs full of honey, but we are just leaving them alone for now.


    Too many Todds on the dance floor

    This is some wayward comb that we had to remove that had some drones hatching out of it. As we have been moving comb around and removing fallen comb from the bottom of the hive, we’ve been putting it back on top of the bars if it has capped brood. This means the baby bees are done eating, they are just sealed up and growing at that point. If they stay warm and safe they seem to hatch out okay in the “attic.”

    This is some of my favorite bee-behavior (beehavior): festooning. You can see fallen comb bits on the bottom of the hive. We had to clean those up, which caused the stings.

    They make funny little daisy chains between the combs. When we pull the bars to inspect them, they are often chained together like this. After we were done and my heart was all racing and I was starting to swell from stings, I had a snort of gin and then mopped the kitchen. I really look forward to Saturdays now.

    This morning I made sunscreen, because the last time I put on my (corny) regular sunscreen a few weeks ago I had one of my “narcoleptic” episodes where I fell asleep randomly, as I mentioned that I do recently.

    It was pretty easy. I joke about my narcoleptic episodes sometimes, but corn is no joke for me. When I worked for M$ I had a loooong bus ride home and I would deeply, deeply pass out. One time I woke up and the bus was packed and a guy was kind of pawing me. A. that shouldn’t have happened to anyone but B. if I am honest, I have to say it didn’t bother me that much. Would I like to kick him in the kidneys until he pees blood? Yes, I would take that chance. But (hey let’s get darker) much worse things have happened to me. I didn’t have anyone to tell at the time, so I didn’t tell anyone. I went into my trusty ol’ Don Draper mode of “it will shock you how much this never happened.”

    BUT LET’S AVOID THAT MOVING FORWARD, OKAY. Homemade sunscreen. HIGHKICKS.

    Let’s have a picture of a dog terrified by a robotic vacuum. I’d just gotten back from a run yesterday. She does this every time it runs. Poor baby.