What I Dreamed Last Night #1

Maybe it wasn’t last night (it was this morning), but I dreamed the relentlessly ringing alarm of the phone of my husband, the Relentless Troubleshooter, was actually a notification from his truck tires that the warrantee was almost used up.  Whether the warrantee of those truck tires is used up is not something I know, you understand, and does not appear on the Official-List-of-Things-I-Am-Responsible-For. 

I want to tell you, though, about the dream I had about my friend, F___. Mind you, her name is not really F___, but for the purposes of this telling it will have to do.

Two nights ago I dreamed about my friend F___. She was back living with The Badgers, and The Badger Daughter was her roommate.  The Badger Daughter roommate was a nurse for a Jug Band. She wore one of those dusky blue, old fashioned nurses' uniforms to work, complete with a tiny starched white hat pinned to the top of her hair. One night the Jug Band was opening for David Bowie, and my friend F___ was invited along. 

Now in this dream, it was not 1960s David Bowie, nor was it 1970s David Bowie, nor was it 1980s David Bowie. It was more like 2030s David Bowie: very old, very frail, and very wrinkled and spotty. Yet he retained his switched-on zeal. My friend F___ and David Bowie struck up a conversation backstage, and it turned out that they shared a love of polka music, card games, and puns. They could not resist each other, and spent the night together. The startling revelation that my friend was pregnant with David Bowie's baby woke me up.

Let’s get this straight: a magical entity did not put the baby there, David Bowie and my friend F___ did it together. Babies are created by a biological process which requires no intervention by magical entities. You might have learned about it in health class in 5^th grade.  I know this to be true, even in a wacky dream world where a Jug Band has a nurse.

Vacations and Imaginary Places

How often does a person need a vacation?  Certainly vacations are a first-world luxury, and even within the developed world, standards for appropriate amounts of time off vary from the American two weeks to countries like France and Finland where they have 10 national holidays and 30 mandatory days of vacation.  Even within the U.S. there is wide variability about holidays granted by employers; my husband, the Bacon Provider, earned his keep at Microsoft for almost 18 years, never once getting to enjoy Martin Luther King Day because it’s business as usual at Microsoft on Martin Luther King Day.  By my accounting, he worked 18 days that the federal government set aside to honor a civil rights leader and encourage shopping after Christmas.  This is almost four weeks of vacation.

For our spring vacation last year, we planned a trip to Japan and Hawaii. The Bacon Provider has been to Japan on business a number of times, and has been talking about taking me there for years. We were also taking our two kids still in the house these days, boys aged 17 and 13. I have been looking forward to going to Japan for a long time. We bought tickets in advance to visit the Ghibli Museum on April 14^th. You have to buy these tickets in advance, but it is not possible to purchase tickets from the U.S. online. Instead, you must make reservations over the phone. It is a complex transaction, where the purchaser is required to give the full name and birthdate of each ticket-holder.  This memorable phone conversation took up the better part of a morning, to a local Japanese tourism office in Seattle.

Obviously, rolling blackouts and food shortages and radioactive fallout from catastrophic failure at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima Daiichi meant that we did not go to Japan for this vacation. I have waited a long time to go to Japan, and I will have to wait some more. 

When I was a little kid and still believed in the possibility that the world was a very magical place, I used to imagine that nothing happened outside of what I could currently see and experience. If people went out of view, they stopped existing. Sometimes this was kind of a cool idea, because it meant that I did not need to worry about missing interesting things. Other times, this was a very scary idea, especially when my parents took me to stay at my grandparent’s house while they went out of town. I do remember wondering if places that I had never been actually existed, or if they would be conjured up just before I arrived.

One of the many side effects of being a parent is sometimes phrases get stuck in your head  from books and movies and books-on-tape enjoyed by your children when they were young.  My oldest (now an adult) loved Thomas the Tank Engine, and I can hear in my head, “A change is as good as a rest!” whenever I think about vacation planning.  I don’t think we travel to rest up.  I think we do it to get out of our ruts.

People closest to me know that this moving-to-New-York-thing has been a bit of a long, bad vacation.  A number of things have not worked out how we expected, and I find myself living in a spooky and lonely rural/suburban town for which there are no freeway exit signs, as if living here means getting away from it all, whether or not you want to get away from it all. I do not have all of my clothes or books or sewing supplies.  In early July I took a road trip, across the U.S., which ended with moving in to a furnished apartment. From there we moved to a furnished house. In the summer there were days when I had so much trouble getting going that I would sometimes get back in bed, fully clothed, at mid-day. The pets thought it made perfect sense. It was more of a function of needing a place to sit in a small apartment than a sign of suffering, but I did do it more than once.  These days I have too much to do.

That I am ready for a vacation means that this is where I live: amongst the long drives to everywhere, the deer, and the spooky water which goes to the faucets in Manhattan.   Right now, I am planning a trip to Barcelona in a few weeks. Only my youngest son will be able to come along, but the Bacon Provider has reason to go there for work and it sounds pretty interesting to me. I have never been to Spain.  Those magical people better get to work building Barcelona before I get there. 

The Joy of Cooking, Other Cookbooks, and Doing Without

Twenty years ago when being an adult, having a house and a kid, and homemaking activities still had plenty of novelty and appeal, I developed an enthusiasm for cooking (even under constrained conditions) and for cookbooks.  I asked for and received my own copy of The Joy of Cooking when I was still in college.  I owned a muffin tin.  I clipped recipes from the newspaper and kept them in a folder. I figured out how to cook asparagus in an electric hot pot.   

Last spring, as it became evident that a plan was afoot that might lead to our household’s displacement I began an experiment involving the most recent edition of The Joy of Cooking.  Simply put, I stopped looking in other cookbooks, and stuck to this one.  While this edition does not include the skinning of rabbits and preparing bear meat, it sufficed.

The contents of my kitchen were boxed up in the beginning of July, and in anticipation of this, I got rid of many things I imagined I would not need anymore. I jettisoned a number of cookbooks on the logic that I had not used them and was doing fine without them. It has been my experience in other, similar situations when I am taken with the zeal of getting rid of things, I get a bit ahead of myself, throwing out too much.  But it is done, and there is no getting it all back.

The house we are living in is stock with books—books of so much variety that I will have to save it for another day.  There are a couple of cookbooks, though: a fragile, antique Joy of Cooking, How to Grill, Miami Spice,  Great British Cooking. I opened one and had some success, and I will get to that in a minute. I am still waiting for the Truly Useful Cooking App, which can scan the contents of your pantry and tell you what you have the ingredients to make. I think we will be waiting a long time for it.

I am regularly frustrated by recipes found online.  When I look for pad thai, I want to be able to choose from maybe three versions, and not 1,710,000.  It helps to start with something like MarthaStewart.com, but Martha has access to ingredients I never seem to be able to find. I have noticed that hand-written recipes from friends end up being the things I make the most, and even though I do not have the recipes for “Salad Ann Makes” or “Sheila’s Chinese Chicken Salad,” I have made both in this house, guessing at quantities.

Thursday night’s dinner was notably successful.  I made a Greek Lentil Soup with Lemon which I modified from a recipe in one of the books in the house. “Modified” means I omitted ingredients because I didn’t have them.

Greek Lentil Soup with Lemon

Cook a 1 lb. bag of lentils in 2 ½ quarts of water or chicken stock for 30 minutes, according to the package. When done, add another quart of hot stock, along with 1 chopped jalapeno (seeds and stem removed), 2 t whole coriander seeds, 1 t cumin, 1 t each of oregano, basil and thyme, and 2 bay leaves.  Add 3 medium-sized potatoes, cut in small chunks. Chop and add a bag of fresh spinach. Also add about 2 cups of diced butternut squash.  Lower to simmer and cover.

Chop an onion and a small bunch of celery, leaves included and sauté in olive oil until soft. Add about three cloves of chopped garlic and sauté another minute or so. Add to soup. 

Soup requires a lot of stirring and occasionally adding more hot stock.  Just before serving, add about 1/3 c of freshly squeezed lemon juice.

With soup, I served a Greek salad with tomatoes, cucumber, feta, green pepper and a bit of onion, tossed in olive oil and lemon juice.  I also served a lot of warmed pita bread and homemade hummus.  I had forgotten how easy it is to make hummus, and made some in the blender out of a large can of drained garbanzos, 1/3 c tahini, ¼ c lemon juice, 1 t salt, 2 cloves of garlic, and 1 T olive oil.

Something that Came in the Mail #1

I have a few friends with whom I have long shared a correspondence. Email nearly killed it (there is no cute shoebox that a sentimental friend keeps email in—though this is a product idea), and Facebook and Twitter have not improved the situation.  I feel a personal responsibility to write and send a real letter from time to time, and I also feel a personal responsibility for the decline in fortunes of the U.S. Postal Service. Obviously, I need to write more letters again, and so do you.  Perhaps then I might have the courage to stand up to that one woman who works at the North Salem post office and insist she stop yelling at me when people use my street address instead of the P.O. Box number.

A friend sent this flyer with a note which says, in part: “It is so awful that I had to send it to someone and you are the only one I know who might appreciate its awfulness.”

Creepy is easy for dolls, especially the realistic looking ones: their soulless eyes and empty heads, their frozen expressions and stiff limbs.  This officially licensed doll is a study in contrasts: hyper-realistic creases and missing nipples; naked but for his hat and diaper; sitting up and pouting at a size and age he should be lying down and sleeping. It’s “Hand-crafted like a true champion.”

Go Niners. 

Shout Color Catcher Sheets

At $4.69 for 24 sheets, they are not cheap. On the other hand, 20¢ a load is quite a bit cheaper than replacing a load of ruined t-shirts and socks.

The simple fact of this product is that you throw it in with your wash, and any errant dyes released by the laundry process are trapped in the sheet.  Instead of dying your undies pink when your son’s red t-shirt from China (that never seems to be done releasing red dye at every wash temperature even after two years) sticks to the walls of the washer and pollutes the whites, nothing happens.   I also use one to wash a quilt the first time, because you never know what fabrics may run.

This product goes against many of my principles, being single-use, disposable, and mysterious. S.C. Johnson, “A Family Company” never misses the chance to share this motto with you. Are they making some sort of claim to “family values?” “Family values” are espoused by political candidates representing a particular kind of conservative view that is anti-gay, anti-women’s rights, and anti-religions-other-than-their-kind.  Nevertheless, S.C. Johnson is on its fifth generation of leadership by Johnson family members.  That’s what they mean by “A Family Company.”  Privately held, they have a PAC which funds a mix of mostly to Republican candidates (but some Democrats, too).  S.C. Johnson makes a number of things made out of scary sounding plastic (low density polyethylene) and a bunch of gruesome household chemicals that you pour down the drain. The Shout Color Catcher Sheet box says “Cloth made in Ireland,” but lists no ingredients.  I attempted to use a search engine to learn more on the internet, but all I was able to determine was that the sheets are “cellulose.” 

I decided to call the S. C. Johnson & Sons question and comment line (a number listed on the box).   After a single brief menu of options, I found myself speaking to a real person right away.

On the left, a new sheet. On the right, a used sheet, full of errant dye!

After describing my question, I was told the product is a “specially treated cellulose sheet,” and that it was designed to use “minimal chemicals” so that it attracts dies in the wash.  I was advised to consult two web-based resources, whatsinsideSCJohnson.com and shoutitout.com.  Then I was asked repeatedly if I wanted some coupons, which I declined, and then asked for my name and my address and my phone number and my email.  I might have made up a phone number, maybe. 

Both web sites are colorful and easy to use, reflecting the clean and bright packaging of their products.  If you hover over the drop-down menu of brands, it’s like a list of everything under a typical American’s kitchen sink: Drano, Glade, Pledge, Saran, Scrubbing Bubbles, Shout, Ziploc.  I learned that the Shout Color Catcher Sheet is a “specially treated cellulose sheet,” a definition you can click on to learn, “Our Specially Treated Cellulose Sheet is a cloth-like sheet that is processed so it will absorb loose dyes in the wash. It is designed to not break down in the wash, but instead retain its cloth form and keep the loose dyes contained.”

It has been my experience that the Shout Color Catcher Sheet works as advertised. I am not sure what to think about companies that bury ingredient information on their web sites, rather than including it on the box.  What are they assuming about their customers and potential customers? That most of us don’t care? That those of us who do care have excellent reading skills and internet access? S. C. Johnson & Sons, as a privately held company, is not required to publish its financial data, as are most of its publicly held competitors, like Procter & Gamble.  Do we assume that what we don’t know can’t hurt us?

  

Friday the 13th

I thought I wrote a blog post about Friday the 13^th. It was a number of months ago, and there wasn’t a Friday the 13^th coming soon so I stored it away somewhere on the desktop computer that is today deep in storage.  Now I have that forgetting feeling. 

Did I really write it? 

Did I already post it? 

I hate that forgetting feeling.   

Worse, I can’t remember what the point of the blog post was.

I had to wake up early today to catch a train to the city for a dentist appointment. Yes, I imagine that there are dentists in Westchester with perfectly decent credentials, but when we moved here there was urgent need of a dentist for someone, and we were in the city, and we found a good one right in midtown. So it is worth the train trip in to the city just to see the dentist.  I had the same nice dentist in Seattle from about 1993 onwards.  Someday, if you ask nicely and I am in the mood, I will tell you the story of the terrifying dentist that I saw as a child.

It is a sad reflection of the current state of enslavement that I have to my iPhone, but just as soon as I silence the alarm on my phone I check my email.  I was immediately suspicious, because twelve are too many emails for an ordinary night, and there were twelve unread messages. There were one or two actual emails, and then several automatic replies for folks out of town, and then many automatically generated failed delivery messages from the “postmaster” of Hotmail. I did hear from one actual contact, who sent an empty email with the subject line “have you been hacked?”  Yes, readers, my email had been hacked in the night.

The first step, of course, is to change the password on email (and everything else), and to run a dreaded security diagnostic to see if I had malware (I didn’t). My second step was to send a text to My Technology Department (otherwise known as the Relentless Troubleshooter, or the Bacon Provider). He responded right away, which was something of a surprise: he has been on a West Coast business trip this week. My 5:50 am text was answered from the West Coast.  That Technology Department is sure prompt! I was advised to change my password. Wasn’t I satisfied that I did the right thing?  So satisfied was I that I forgot about being upset about sending spam to people, forgot to hurry off to the train station, and forgot to apologize to the Technology Department for waking him up for nothing.   I drank some tea at a leisurely pace and drove unexcitedly to the train station and made my train by only a matter of second: it pulled up just as I descended the last step onto the platform.

Making this train was something I would call lucky.  I do not believe in luck as a magical power one can wield, or store up, or lose, or be due.  I believe in luck as a word to describe a near disaster that did not occur (like remembering your purse under your train seat at the last minute as you get off), or unexpectedly surviving something dreadful (like walking away from a train wreck), or having something fortuitous happen by chance (like meeting s person on a train who offers to interview you for a job).  Of course, Friday the 13^th is thought to be an unlucky day. 

I was very superstitious as a child, believing somewhat insincerely in the magical power of sidewalk cracks, chanting on the first day of the month, crossed fingers, unspoken wishes which could come true and spoken dreams which could not.  I do not recall having special feelings about Friday the 13^th, but I might have. Maybe that’s what I wrote about.

More likely, I wrote about my mother, who was the more rational of my parents and who actually died on a Friday the 13^th after a long illness. 

How to Make French Toast

Here in New York, we have had a winter completely unlike last year’s long, lingering, snowy and cold winter.  Despite a freak heavy snowstorm at the end of October, we have had no snow, and only a handful of actually cold days. Many days, like today, it’s in the 20s when we get up, but sunny and into the 40s by early afternoon. 

My husband, in addition to being a Relentless Troubleshooter, is the household’s designated Bacon Provider, and he takes his job very seriously. Whenever I have occasion to be away and he is in charge of feeding himself and the offspring, he makes breakfast-for-dinner or spaghetti carbonara, both of which include bacon.  I have been known to call home and ask if they’ve gotten tired of eating bacon yet, and they always say, “No.”

When you live with a Bacon Provider in a season such as winter, you are often called upon to create things that are eaten with bacon. The house we are renting has a wood-fired cooking stove (in addition to two other woodstoves), and when it is brisk and cold in the morning, an early-rising Bacon Provider can fire up the Waterford and get the bacon cooking. 

There is probably a rule which says Cook Things You Like To Eat. After eggs and grits or pancakes there is of course French Toast, a breakfast staple and bacon side-kick enjoyed by many, but not by me. I do not know if I ever liked French Toast, but I doubt it. I like things like Bread Pudding that are similar in texture and ingredients to French Toast, but I do not like French Toast.  So I do not eat French Toast. But I do make French Toast, because other people like it, including the Bacon Provider and the Offspring.  Not only do I make it, but I like to make it. I don’t know how good it is. They eat it with bacon.

French Toast

Beat 4 eggs and add 1 c. milk. Stir in a dash of vanilla, a pinch of salt, and a couple of shakes of cinnamon. Cut a loaf of quality stale bread into 1 ½” thick slices. Immerse the bread in the egg mixture about three at a time.

Fry in a hot, oiled skillet. Serve with butter, maple syrup and, of course, bacon.

Feeds two adults and two teenaged boys.