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 |  Because I am the most interesting person I know |
| I lead the most boring life. I have challenged myself to write about my life so that it seems interesting. |
Over at "Invalid Item"  , Spink is sharing his pet peeve about slowpoke pedestrians. My pet peeve is elderly grocery shoppers. I don’t mind that they shuffle impossibly slowly down the aisles using their carts like walkers. Some of them even have their walkers folded neatly inside their carts. No, what drives me totally bats*** is that they insist on shuffling down the middle of the aisle, preventing me from maneuvering around them. Adding to the slowness, they make frequent stops to choose items from the shelves. But first they have to examine every … single … item … on … the shelf. I don’t know why. I’m quite certain that they bought the same size and brand last week, last month, last year. There is no reason for them to scrutinize every … single … item … on … the shelf. After what seems like an eternity, they place a single can/bottle/box in their cart, shuffle a few feet and begin the process all over again. Whenever I see an elderly shopper, I go on to the next aisle. The agony continues at the checkout counter. After slowly and painfully loading their carefully chosen groceries into the conveyer belt, the cashier rings them up and announces the total. It’s always a complete shock. But wait. They have coupons! Out comes the overstuffed envelope with hundreds of coupons which must be carefully separated by shaky hands and arthritic fingers. Groceries must be unpacked and examined to see if the carefully chosen items match the coupons. If not, then the envelope re-appears because the senior citizen is sure that s/he has the correct coupon. Just give them one minute. I was raised to respect my elders and I admire older people who remain independent, but for the love of God, if you knew what you were going to buy, why didn’t you sort your coupons at home? Coupons are scanned and a new total is announced. It is deemed acceptable and the dreaded change purse comes out. There seems to be a rule that older people are not allowed to use a debit card or hand a fistful of bills to the cashier. They must, instead, give the cashier exact change. A very painful process when your fingers are gnarled with arthritis and/or your hands shake so badly that you spill your precious coins. At this point, I am gritting my teeth and keeping my hands firmly clamped on the handle of my cart to prevent myself from reaching over, snatching the coin purse from their hands and counting out the change for them. Would it be terribly ageist to suggest that grocery stores set aside certain hours for senior citizens to shop with the understanding that they may only come during those hours and no other time? I once lived in a town that kinda sorta tried that. They ran a shuttle bus for senior citizens which picked them up at their homes, brought them to the grocery store and then brought them home. That shuttle bus was a godsend for them and me. Whenever I pulled into the parking lot, if I saw the shuttle bus parked in front of the grocery store, I turned around and went home knowing that the store and everyone in it would be moving in extreme slo-mo. If I should live long enough and remain healthy enough to become one of those senior citizens who shuffles slowly down the center of the aisle and then holds up the checkout line sorting coupons and looking for the change that I’ve dropped, my friends all have instructions to shoot me, thereby putting me and everyone around me out of my misery. |
| Last night, I was sitting in front of my computer, minding my own business, when the toilet in my bathroom flushed. That toilet had no business flushing. I live alone. Except for The Fur Patrol whose litterboxes don’t flush. So either my house had been broken into by a very quiet burglar who had to answer the call of nature or there was something very spooky going on in my bathroom. I nervously tiptoed into the hallway, took a deep breath and peeked into the dark bathroom. Furball was sitting on the toilet (I always keep the lid down). He gave me one of his patented “I didn’t do it” looks and went back to lazing on the toilet, all four paws now carefully tucked underneath him. Nuts! I thought I was going to have a great spooky story to enter in some of the spooky story contests for the month of October. |
| Okay, enough with the depressing posts. It’s time to post something positive. I won second place in a photo competition this past weekend. It was a total surprise because the photos that I entered were, shall we say, not my best work. I volunteer at a local public garden. This year they revived their Fall Festival due to popular demand. They added lots of new activities, including a photo competition that was open to amateur photographers, no professionals. Only photos taken this year (at the garden) were eligible. I didn’t take many photos this year due to the heat and my monster depression. But I wanted to support the event and entered a couple of not so great photos. As I said, I wasn’t expecting to win anything. In fact, I had completely forgotten about the competition. Photos had to be submitted by September which seems like a lifetime ago. So I was taken by surprise when a volunteer friend dropped by the table where I was working on Sunday to let me know that I had won a ribbon. I quickly excused myself and dashed into the nearby building where the photos were on display. Sure enough, my entry in the Landscape category was sporting a second place ribbon. My suitor had earned a first place in the Animals category and a second place in the People category. I told him that he owes his first place win to me. He had wanted to enter one of his frog pictures, but I had told him that everyone would be entering frog, butterfly and dragonfly photos** so he should enter something completely different that would catch the judges’ eyes. He had a fabulous photo of a Hummingbird Moth sipping nectar from a Verbena bonariensis. I told him to enter that one. No one else would be entering anything like it. Against his better judgment, he entered it and nabbed first place. Aren’t I grand? I’m glad that he got his first place ribbon. He was determined to win. Men are so competitive. I overheard another man crowing about his third place win in the Plants category. Until he realized that the second place winner was his wife’s photo. He wasn’t happy about that at all. One of my friends has a similar problem. She loves playing Scrabble, but her boyfriend won’t play with her because he doesn’t like it when she wins. And she wins a lot. She plays online against expert players or against a computer. Offline, she plays with me now because I don’t care who wins. I just like learning new words and strategies and chitchatting with her while we play. Hmmm…now I wonder. My suitor and I both entered photos in the Plants category, but neither of us won anything. I wonder if he would have been upset if I had won first and he had won second? Or if I had won second and he had won third? Or, worst of all, if I had won a ribbon and he had won nothing at all? **Frogs, butterflies and dragon flies are favorite subjects of both professional and amateur photographers who shoot in the garden. |
| Brooke Marie in her blog "Invalid Item" talked about her longing for a husband. Not unusual for a woman. I can definitely identify. It was KelticMyst’s comment that set me off. I’ve heard it so many times: be patient, there is someone out there for you. I’m so tired of hearing that. It may be true for most people but there are exceptions to every rule and apparently I am the exception to that one. Because I’m still waiting. After I graduated from college and began a career on Wall Street, it was time to get serious about finding a husband so that I could get married and have children. I wanted children so badly. In junior high (now called “middle school”) and high school, I was the neighborhood babysitter. I was so in demand that parents had to reserve me weeks in advance. I used to joke that I learned to cook on one leg and with one hand because I always seemed to have a baby on my hip and a toddler attached to my leg. I couldn’t wait to have babies of my own. I wanted a big family. My problem was that I just wasn’t meeting anyone suitable. I seemed to be a kind of Weirdo Magnet, always attracting strange men with even stranger hang-ups. It was funny, in a way. Until suddenly thirty was staring me in the face. In those days, doctors believed that after age 30 women’s fertility dropped off precipitously. I panicked and married the least weird of my suitors. How bad could it be, I asked myself. It was a nightmare. I finally divorced him when his weirdness turned into outright mental illness for which he refused to get help. At this point, I had a child and I needed to protect her. I was still young, still in my thirties and thought I still had a shot at marriage and children. By this time, doctors had “discovered” that they had been wrong and fertility didn’t disappear until after 40. Everyone remarries and has children, right? Not me, apparently. I was still attracting weirdoes plus a new class of suitor, older men in search of trophy wives. I have nothing against trophy wives. I certainly wouldn’t have minded being one except that these guys didn’t want to have children. They already had grown children. They wanted arm candy, not babies. Forty was looming and I was in despair. Complicating things was the fact that her father’s genes began to assert themselves and that beautiful little girl that I treasured became The Spawn of Satan. I lived in hell until I gathered the strength to evict her from my home when she was 20. It was the most difficult thing I have ever done. People had been begging me for years to save myself and kick her out but I couldn’t put my own flesh and blood out on the street with no job and nowhere to live. It was only when it came down to a choice of my life or hers, that my instinct for self-preservation kicked in and I was able to turn her out the door. Free at last to have a life, I promptly jumped back into the dating pool. But I was too late. I’m too old to date now. The men my age are all looking for younger women. They divorced old bags like me. Now they want someone youthful and sexy. The only men who want to date me are elderly. To them, I’m youthful and sexy. Even as we speak, I’m being courted by a very nice gentleman in his 70’s, the same age as my father. Everybody say it with me: EWWWWW!! I’ve grown accustomed to the looks of revulsion I get when I tell people that I very much want to get married and have children. They see the outside, a pathetic, lonely, possibly delusional woman in her 50’s. But inside, I am still 20, still believing in “happily ever after”, still looking forward to meeting and marrying The One and having those babies that I have dreamed of for so long. (Yes, I am still depressed but the depression seems to be lifting a little because I am able to write.) |
| I can’t write. I’m drowning in depression. Nothing is going right in my life. No matter how hard I try to make improvements in my life, it only gets worse. I always thought “great” writers suffered from depression. I don’t know how they could write anything feeling the way I feel. |
| The latest tropical storm, Nicole, was due in town last night. According to The Weather Channel, it was supposed to dump rain on us in similar amounts to Hurricane Floyd eleven years ago. That kind of rain is guaranteed to flood my basement but that’s not what concerned me last night. What I was worried about was taking out my garbage. My town has a rule that you can’t put your garbage cans on the curb until after 6 pm. I start work at 4 pm, so I normally put out my garbage when I get home after midnight. I’m waiting for my neighbors to complain about me waking them up in the middle of the night, dragging my garbage can to the curb. Perhaps I haven’t heard from them because they realize that I could counter with complaints that they wake me up in the morning when they bring their garbage cans in. I hate putting out the garbage in the rain. It’s not so awful dragging a garbage can on wheels with one hand while carrying an umbrella with the other. It’s the heavy bags of used litter that make it difficult. I can’t put them in the can because it makes it too heavy. Honestly. I was actually ticketed for having a garbage can that is too heavy. When I called to complain (“I’m old enough to be your mother. If I can lift those bags, you should be able to also!), I was instructed to put the bags of litter out separately. Nicole was scheduled to begin dumping unholy amounts of rain on us at 8 pm last night. I was dreading making the trips up and down the driveway with can, bags and umbrella in flooding rains driven by gale force winds. But I fretted for nothing. Nicole apparently stalled somewhere south of here, so only the outer edge with sprinkling rains had made it to NJ by the time I got home. I didn’t even need an umbrella. I am grateful for small blessings. |
| Cats always prefer occupying the highest point in any room. Furball loves tables but I don’t love cat feet on any surface where I eat or prepare food. Those paws have stepped in litterboxes. After moving my kitchen table into my living room, creating a dining area, Furball adopted it as his favorite hangout. It took more than a year of yelling “GET DOWN” and loudly clapping my hands (cats hate loud noises) to convince him that the table was off-limits. Now he sprawls on the coffee table. I’ve been chasing him off of that also. He frequently knocks the magazines onto the floor or lays on the remote, changing channels at crucial moments of whatever TV fare I am watching. Rory, who has been living with me for about three years now, has suddenly discovered my kitchen counters. He has also been the subject of much yelling and hand clapping, as I try to train him to stay off of my counters. Sorry for the long lead-in. Here’s the punch line: Last week, Furball was stretched out on the coffee table in the living room. I yelled “GET DOWN” and clapped my hands. He merely looked at me. I advanced menacingly into the room, again yelling “GET DOWN” while clapping my hands. He leapt off the coffee table. At the same time, I heard the familiar sound of paws hitting linoleum and Rory came running out of the kitchen. Rory had apparently been on the counter and responded to my commands to Furball. A twofer! Hmmm…I wonder if I can just randomly yell and clap to keep my tables and counters feline-free? |
| I’ve been working on The Book, trying to stick to my 500 word per day goal. This week, I’ve been working on the chapter about Furball. Yesterday, after I finished moving scenes around so that I could smoothly add The Ghost Cat to it, I realized that I hadn’t written anything about his dental woes. I’ve already written about them from Furball’s point of view ("Invalid Item" ). Now I have to re-work it to my POV. The Book is always on my mind. Today, as I was cleaning up Rory’s latest hairball, I was reminded of earlier this week when he was throwing up all over the house and I was chasing him, trying to get him into the kitchen because cleaning up vomit is so much easier on linoleum than carpet. Sneakers was so smart that I had him trained to only vomit/hack up hairballs in the kitchen. When he forgot, I just yelled “KITCHEN!” and he would stop in mid-heave and race to the kitchen. Now I have to add that little tidbit to his chapter. Rory, by the way, loves to vomit/hack up hairballs in the least convenient places. Some of his favorites are: the communal waterbowl, the communal kibble bowels and anywhere that I am likely to walk. I no longer walk barefoot indoors, especially when I get up in the morning. Even wearing slippers or flipflops, it’s no fun doing the step & slide. |
| This is an entry for my cooking blog. The person referred to as "A" is my co-blogger who prefers to remain anonymous. I am respecting her privacy on this forum also. One would think by now that I would have learned the two most important rules in cooking: Never try out a new recipe when company is coming for dinner and never, ever enter an untried crust recipe in a pie baking contest. First, I think we need to explore why I am so obsessed with this contest. It’s an annual apple pie baking contest sponsored by a non-profit group that offers no prizes aside from ribbons and tickets to other events sponsored by the same group. There is no publicity. Not even the local papers or TV stations report the event. The only people even aware of the contest are the members of the non-profit group, the six or eight entrants and the 50 to 75 visitors to the harvest festival event itself. And yet, I am truly obsessed by this contest. The first year, using my standard Betty Crocker recipe for crust and filling, I placed third. The following year, I tried a different apple variety in my filling. Third place again. This year, I went back to my usual MacIntosh apples but used a different crust recipe and managed to claw my way up to second place. The contest was this past weekend, but I am already thinking of new ways to tweak my recipe for next year. Rework this year’s crust recipe or trial different crust recipes for the next 12 months? Perhaps pastry cutouts artfully used will garner me a few extra points. Should I consider an egg wash which was popular with the judges this year? And so on and so forth. But back to that pie crust recipe. Even I can’t believe that I had no idea how it tasted when I entered my pie on Saturday morning. Especially considering what I had gone through to get to that point. The Granny Smith apples that I had used in last year’s filling were a disaster. They were too tart and too hard. I don’t like my apple pies to be crunchy. Since I was going back to my regular filling, I decided that I needed to change my crust recipe. I took a peek into my Silver Palate Cookbook and fell in love. Pastry crusts with shortening or butter are familiar, but one with both? And who puts sugar in their pie crusts? I had to try it out. I have arthritis in my hands, so mixing stiff pastries is difficult for me. I used chilled butter, but opted for room temperature shortening. Mixing wasn’t as difficult as I anticipated so I probably could have used chilled shortening also. As for the ice water, I distinctly remember the woman who gave me the cookbook and who was also the most fabulous cook I had ever met, told me that ice water in pie crusts was absolutely necessary. Cold water wouldn’t do. It had to be ice water. So I gamely filled my glass measuring cup with water and dropped ice cubes in to create my ice water. I used a pastry blender to mix my ingredients but balked at tossing it with a fork after adding the ice water. In the past, I have tried using my favorite wooden spoon to blend in water with disastrous results. Now I always use my pastry blender. Judging from “A’s” comments after tasting the crust, perhaps I should have used a fork. I also skipped the “smearing” step. I couldn’t see the point. Not surprisingly, the toughest part was trying to roll out chilled pastry. I couldn’t find my heavy maple rolling pin so I had to use my lighter everyday rolling pin. I wasn’t able to roll the pastry as evenly or as thinly I wanted. Big disappointment. Something I should have remembered about pastry dough using butter is that it browns/burns more easily than pastry dough using shortening. I should have left my aluminum foil edging on longer than I usually do. I wasn’t happy with how brown the edges became. As for the big taste test, I was happy with it because it tasted much less flour-y and dough-y than my usual Betty Crocker recipe. “A” had a different take on it. She pointed out that it was tough. There are two things that can make a crust tough: too much flour and too much handling. I think that I was guilty of both. “A” just got a new silicone mat that she is raving about. I am still using my old fashioned pastry cloth to roll my pastry. I have to use a lot of flour to keep my pie crusts from sticking to it and my rolling pin. I’m definitely going to take “A’s” advice and invest in some new technology. And now I understand the “smearing” step. In my zeal to mix the water and dry ingredients, I probably went overboard with the pastry cutter. If I had tossed it with a fork and then smeared the result on the counter (or my new-fangled silicone mat), I could have mixed the ingredients just as effectively but with a lot less handling. I’m going to try this recipe again but follow the directions to the letter. If the result is still not great, I have plenty of time to find a new crust recipe for next year’s apple pie baking contest! |
| Sunday was a gray rainy day. I spent it with a couple of girlfriends telling ghost stories. Of course, I told them the story of "Invalid Item" . When one of my friends mentioned that her cats had shared her ghostly encounter, I realized that I have had not one but two experiences with ghosts: When our first cat, Sneakers, died it left an enormous hole in our lives. He was very intelligent with a huge personality. He had been our gentle tyrant, running our lives and our household to his specifications. We were miserable without him. We knew we wanted another cat so we searched PetFinder and the adoption centers at PetSmart and PetCo, but none of the cats seemed “right”. I steered Daughter away from the Tuxedo cats warning her that if we got a cat that looked like Sneakers, then we would expect him to act like Sneakers. It was better that we got a completely different kind of cat. When she mentioned that she wanted a Maine Coon, it seemed like a good idea. Maine Coons are the largest breed of cat and behave more like dogs than cats. I was confident that we would end up with a cat that neither looked nor acted like Sneakers. The kitten that we purchased from a breeder indeed neither looked nor acted like Sneakers. We found out the hard way that “black” in the Maine Coon world means brown, not an attractive color for a cat. He was not very handsome, not very bright and seemed terrified of everyone and everything. Yup! Nothing at all like Sneakers. But gradually, he seemed to settle in to the rhythms of our household. More and more we noticed him occupying Sneakers’ old haunts and even exhibiting his behaviors. Every time we saw him acting like Sneakers, we would find ourselves saying “Look! Just like Sneakers!” It took a few days for us to realize that every time we said it, the kitten would turn to look at us and slowly and deliberately wink at us. With his left eye. Sneakers’ blind eye. Sneakers had come back to help the new kitten. He showed him all the best spots in the house to nap. He showed him how best to draw our attention. He even showed him a few of his signature moves. I’m sure that they also had many long conversations about the two exasperating, but lovable humans who lived in the house. |
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