All the Ingredients

 I am SO CONFLICTED about blogging right now. Angus is only home for a week and I am both trying not to smother him by trying to make EVERY SINGLE MOMENT A MAGICAL FAMILY TOGETHERNESS TIME to make sure he will want to come home again (he's bearing it very well) and also very much wanting to have a bunch of magical together family time. So I should not be blogging. On the other hand, I can't get enough of everyone's 'how we do Christmas/holiday cards/various other traditions" posts, and they seem like fun to do. So I should be blogging. On the other hand, I still have a fair amount of shit to get done FOR said Christmas. So I should not be blogging. Also, I finally remembered to check my comments awaiting moderation for the first time in forever and found SO MANY really amazing comments which made me feel dumb and also good. 

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Matt drove to Hamilton (the city, not the musical, not making THAT mistake again) Thursday and brought Eve home Friday. I saw her briefly and then she had to go to Marianna's house because friends. They are all going to Toronto for New Year's at Alison's apartment where Jackson will then be LIVING and we are reaching a whole NEW stage of the next stage where our kids PLUS ALL THE FRIENDS WHO ARE KIND OF OUR KIDS are growing up EVEN MORE and now New Year's Eve is happening in a whole nother city for them. Great. Independence, fulfillment, self-actualization. Hmph.

Saturday was our big group Christmas party (much like the big group Halloween party I started NaBloPoMo out with) and this was the first time Eve was here for is since first year university, so that was fun. The party will probably get its own post again, but just to hit all the high points: obscene fruit, a salt rifle, "My penis is locked!", awkward family photos, "My penis is now unlocked!", the phone is lost forever, I will cut you if you steal my Yetis, the phone is found it's a Christmas miracle. Angus flew in Saturday and his flight was delayed, so he was technically here in time for the party but he was exhausted so just chilled at home - he's been at the party more recently than Eve anyway.

Sunday Eve went to visit my parents, we hung out in various configurations and then had tacos and all watched the new Knives Out movie (Wake Up Dead Man), which is not a Christmas movie but, for a recovering Catholic with religious trauma was actually a really great movie for this time in my life.

Today Angus went to see my parents and then do Christmas shopping, and brought home a 500-piece puzzle for us to try to do before Christmas. A few years ago he suddenly decided he and I should do a puzzle together and we did a really hard one and it was really fun even though he had to go home before it was done and I had to finish it and send him a picture. We haven't had enough time to do one since, and I was just thinking we needed a 500 piecer. He said his gifts suck this year, but this was already the best gift ever.

We've gotten fewer cards than in many years - Canada Post rotating strikes, people are busy, postage is expensive - but we got enough to fill the pockets in our card stocking. Suzanne's post introduced me to Swistle's card rating system, which somehow I had missed, and it is fire. I am totally stoked at all the extra points my multiple random pictures would garner according to this system, but I did not have enough time or hand strength to write in all the cards this year WHICH IS FINE. I did about thirty-five and still had about 20 left to do when I had to clear all the stuff off the table. I'm hoping to finish most of them between Christmas and New Year's. 

I love any card I get - photo, no photo, just a signature, a signature and a written version of the card's actual message - but I am going to give top card honours to the one my friend Liz and her wife:

Multi-faith, multi-photo, baby, cats, Star Wars, nature, politics, and a group message that legit felt like it was spoken to every single person. Ba-bam, mic drop. 

I started Christmas baking much later than usual, which honestly is probably fine, given the number of toffee shortbread cookies I ate out of the first batch. Today I mixed another batch and Eve rolled and baked them while I wrapped. Now she is off with her friends again and I am going to do a puzzle with my son. Also, it was supposed to rain the last three days and instead we have gotten a gentle fall of snow every day. 

Peace, love, sugar and butter. And to all a good night. <3 

Small Frustrations, Tiny Satisfactions

I generally make it a habit of grabbing my apron from the hook and putting it on on my way into the kitchen no matter what I'm going in there for. I am not a neat and graceful person and I don't enjoy changing clothes several times a day. This was amply vindicated just now when, without an apron, I turned around from the counter and decided to take the lid off the slow-cooker to check the pulled pork and got splattered with hot meat juice, burning a tiny spot on my chest and leaving brown spots on my pink tank top (sorry if this made you gag a little, Nicole). This was annoying, but the pulled pork smelled delicious, which is a not bad little microcosm of this whole day.

Angus talked quite a bit with his guidance counsellor last year when he was offered a spot on the Team Canada's roster for the Oklahoma Junior Sunbelt Tournament, which meant he would be missing a week of school right before exams. The guidance counsellor liaised with his teachers and everybody was quite nice and helpful in making accommodations so he could go and not have his marks suffer too much (we also realized how much he sucks at blowing his own horn since a couple of his teachers were like, "he plays baseball?"). We realized that we'd kind of been underusing the guidance person as a resource too, since she mentioned she could have worked with us to have his first semester loaded with heavier courses since baseball always ramps up from January to June. She said she could help him with that this year, but today when he went down to guidance following the regular guidelines, the person he ended up with could not have been less helpful, and none of the changes he needed got made, and we have to go in again next week. Which is frustrating.

As for me, even just getting ready to look for a job is setting my anxiety on fire, which is stupid, because it's not like we're looking at getting evicted or becoming food insecure, I just want to be a productive member of society and contribute a little to the education fund. But while the decision to wait until after the summer to look was right, I should probably have gotten my ducks in a row in some fashion before now, and I feel kind of dumb and obscurely ashamed for no good reason. I'm also thinking of just applying to work part-time at Indigo until I find something related to my diploma, which would probably be fine, but I'm already stressing about what happens if Matt's away and Eve has basketball and I'm working and I don't even know if they'd hire me yet. Deep breaths need to be taken.

Angus and I both have trouble with uncertainty. The teachers that understood him best in early elementary school would write the day's schedule on the board so he wouldn't have to constantly be asking "what are we doing after this?" Every time I go to the doctor for reassurance that something isn't dire or life-threatening, I know that what I really want is to be told that I'm never going to get cancer or ALS or whatever, and life just doesn't work like that. A year or two ago I came across a phrase that went something like "if it can be helped, there's no sense in worrying. If it can't be helped, there's still no sense in worrying". I'd like to say it changed my life, but it didn't, not hugely, because my neuroses are entrenched and intractable. But I try to remember it.

A few weeks ago, I noticed that something (Lucy, probably) had left a mark on the cream-coloured carpet in the doorway of our bedroom. I took our Bissell Little Green Machine out of the closet. Then I realized that it was cleaning day the next day, and there were a couple of other stains on the upstairs hallway rug (Lucy definitely) and that Matt was about to go away for a week and when he's away Lucy has the distressing habit of crapping on the rug on the landing even when I let her out late and get up early to let her out again, so I probably didn't want to deep clean until after that. And I left the Green Machine on the floor of our bedroom instead of putting it away, and it stayed there for weeks as I kept missing my window and thinking I'd do it soon. Well, today I finally cleared the piles of outgrown clothes and empty shoe boxes off the landing and deep cleaned all the spots I've been meaning to clean, and put the Bissell back in the closet. I think when I closed the closet door I actually said "There!" out loud.

So. Many things are unsettled, but one or two things have been set right. For now, that will have to do.

(On the off chance that the dreary minutiae of my day didn't turn your crank, there are tortoises making love on the Queen of Mediocretia's blog. You're welcome. Or I'm sorry.)

Day 8

I'm going out with a group of friends to a comedy club for my friend Janet's birthday tonight. I'm having vexatious, near-paralyzing intrusive thoughts, and my hair, in the run-up to my haircut appointment this week, is nearing Medusa-like proportions. Basically, I'm a mess from the neck up.

I'm hoping to laugh my troubles away tonight, and/or soak them off in a hot tub , with an option on burying them under an extremely jury-rigged coconut raspberry layer cake.

See you tomorrow.

Camping - Food Edition (after which I will stop milking one measly camping trip for blog posts)

I was prepared to rough it in the bush food-wise - Collette told me "just forget trying to eat healthy - it's easiest if you just buy crap." I went to Loblaws and crowded my cart with club pack boxes of every processed snack available, and filled in the spaces with chips and cookies. I only bought meat that had enough nitrates in it to last three weeks without refrigeration. I bought CHEEZ FREAKING WHIZ.

I had not reckoned on my husband, "Hibachi Man". We had a Coleman stove, but I don't think he used it at all. He used a little Hibachi and the grate over the campfire. He also brought actual meat. He made hamburgers.

He made steak and potatoes. And lit candles. 

He made french toast and bacon. 

He warmed up cinnamon buns in a cast iron pan over the fire. 

Then there was the parade of giant hunks of meat, courtesy of Mark and Dan and Auspit.

This is pork.

This is beef. 

...wrapped in bacon. 

It was four days of torture and deprivation, obviously.

Since my husband spent much of his youth practically camping professionally, I left the set-up and procedures pretty much entirely to him - I just put stuff where he told me to. I probably should have paid some attention to the fact that he hasn't actually camped for twenty years or so, and double-checked with him that ALL of the food had been put in the van before we bedded down on the first night.

Instead, I woke up to strange sounds outside the tent. Since I have marked tendencies to over-imaginative hysteria and I DON'T CAMP, I naturally thought "AXE MURDERER", not "FORAGING WILDLIFE", and whacked Matt frantically so he could.... I dunno, get out of the tent and distract the psychopath while Eve and I ran away? Since he was in his compact sleeping bag and he's a little less, um, compact than in the past, he kind of flopped off his air mattress still IN the sleeping bag, opened the tent flap, yelled something, then wriggled out of the sleeping bag and got out of the tent. After a moment, I realized two things: 1) I didn't hear anything that sounded like an axe thunking into a person, and 2) I had to pee. I crawled out of the tent to see Matt standing a little ways away, trying to figure out how to wrestle our cooler lid out of the grip of two raccoons, who didn't look in the least inclined to give way. I looked down and said "did they take my shoe too?" and he said "no, I threw it at them". The raccoons eventually wandered away, Matt gave me my shoe back, and I went to the outhouse while he put ALL the food in the van.

A couple of nights later while we were at the drive-in, another family had their kitchen tent ransacked and plundered for a number of bread products, which made Matt feel better. After we got back from the movie, he lit a small fire for us after the kids went to bed. We were sitting there talking, and then he got up to adjust the firewood, so I clicked on the flashlight for him. Then I heard a rustling sound off to the left, in the wooded lot behind out campsite. I turned the flashlight beam to the left, and - okay, I didn't get a picture, so you have to imagine this one dark, and just the heads, stacked one on top of the other.

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"Do you have any Grey Poupon?"
Photo by Auberon_

They stared at me for a second, then very subtly pulled their heads back behind the tree trunk. You could almost hear them whispering "I don't think she saw us."

We came home with part of the beef roast (score!), forty-two granola bars and a couple of good stories.

Flying by the Seat of Pants Recipes: Citrus Almonds

So my friend Collette is notoriously cheap -- really, she likes being called cheap, if we try to tone it down to 'frugal' or 'sensible with money' she gets offended. At one Christmas craft show we went to, they had citrus almonds for sale, which we sampled. They were delicious, but she refused to pay five dollars for a tiny little bag of them (even though it was fetchingly wrapped in sparkly gold snowflake-printed cellophane and tied with an adorable ribbon). I, of course, bought the five-dollar bag of almonds, brought it home and stuck it in the cupboard waiting for an occasion auspicious enough to warrant hideously expensive almonds, until they went stale and I had to throw them out. I'm not sure what the word for me is, but it's even less complimentary than 'cheap'.

Can you believe that there is no recipe for citrus almonds online? Well, okay, I'm by far no computer whiz, but I've googled dozens, nay, hundreds of recipes from 'chocolate caramel coconut pecan shortbread' to 'yak in blueberry brain sauce' and always been able to find something at least approximating what I'm looking for. But I googled 'citrus almonds' and nothing. Nada. Niente. I got citrus cake with almonds, almond cake with blood orange sauce and Miley Cyrus sits naked in a tub full of almonds and orange juice (okay, I made that one up). But Collette winged it and made some that turned out quite well. So today she came over and attempted to walk me through the same thing.

I'm not what you'd call an organized cook. I don't line up my measuring implements, chop things into perfect matchsticks or follow recipes to the letter. When my sister asks me for a recipe she says "and don't do that thing where you say 'add a bit of this and then smell it' -- I need exact quantities!". This took even my style to an extreme. So without exact quantities, or pictures (because I just didn't think of it), for fun and profit, here you go:

CITRUS ALMONDS
Beat two egg whites with mixer until stiff peaks (hee hee) form. In large bowl, mix together zest of one lemon and one orange, then squeeze the juice out of the suckers into the bowl. Add honey -- lots. Like, squeeze the bear until your wrist hurts and then squeeze a little more. Add a pinch of nutmeg, or maybe cinnamon, perhaps pumpkin pie spice or just something that hasn't been off the spice rack in a while. Throw in some orange oil, or blood orange flavoured olive oil that you bought because that's what you thought Collette meant when she said orange oil, because really, how the hell do you get oil from an orange? Blood from a stone no, but oil from an orange yes? I'm still skeptical.

Then move towards the almonds, remember the stiffly peaked (hee hee) egg whites, dump the egg whites into the bowl. I bought one tin of Planter's almonds and one container of Farm Boy Natural Almonds. It was like the townies meeting the rough-hewn farm folk, or private school vs. public school -- those puny little canister almonds looked scared shitless. Toss until coated. Oh, before all this you should have preheated the oven to 350, or maybe 300. Place them on a cookie sheet and stick them in the oven. In a few minutes, your house will be filled with an aroma so foul your children will cover their faces and beg to be sold to the first available passing stranger. The good news is they won't ask to watch TV in the family room which is attached to the kitchen. The bad news is you start to suspect something crawled into your oven and died before you put the almonds in. Be strong -- all will yet be well. Toss the almonds every ten minutes until they look on the verge of burning. Take them out and let them cool. Resist the urge to toss them down the garbage disposal or send them to Afghanistan as a lethal terrorists-fighting weapon. Toss them in a buttload of icing sugar (yes, that is the metric term). Wonder briefly why you didn't just spend the goddamned five dollars at the craft show. Ransack house in vain search for sparkly snowflake-printed cellophane and ribbon. Stick almonds in crappy tupperware container. Tell kids it's safe to come out.

Enjoy.