hurricane billiards

Remember all those hurricanes we were having over the summer? There was a record-breaking number of them this year. Here they all are in one graphic, bouncing off our invisible shield:

This is probably because Hawaii is an implant station of the Galactic Confederacy. Thanks, Xenu!

The boy turns 13

Both of us are shrugging, having expected this transition to be more momentous, teenager and aging parent-of-teenager that we now are. I did pin him down and check his armpits for hair, which they didn't have. He posed for a birthday picture by making hork face. I caught him looking normal just afterward.

Awww, he's got my grimace.

We ate pre-birthday Thai takeout with my mother, and the kids largely ignored my traditional gruesome retelling of Gavin's birth - which started with my sudden and urgent demand for Thai food, and the restaurant owner who knowledgeably informed my mother that if I was yelling for Thai food, I would have the baby that night. I did. The kids have all heard this story, so over the years I have had to add pantomime and gross exaggeration to keep them interested. By now it goes like this:

And then the doctor FINALLY came in, still half asleep and in his pajamas, shuffling with his arms outstretched like a zombie as the nurse swooped him into a gown and snapped gloves on his hands, and just then the baby SHOT out PEEEEEW and the doctor just casually caught him like a football and held him up, yawning, "It's a boy." And granny clapped her hands in delight and cried, "Oh! He looks just like Danny Devito!"

Common phenomenon, actually

Mike always tells the bit about how my stomach turned into a perfect square during a crucial contraction, and my mother likes to mention that it was she who dragged me bodily off the toilet when I decided that it was the only comfortable place to deliver the baby. Leif does all the sound effects. Gavin likes the small things, like how he held his head up and wobbled around looking at us all, and how he had soft tufts of hair on the tips of his ears like a cat.

The first real sign of teen-hood appeared when I took him to the bakery to buy a few dozen donut holes for his robotics team (the 6 kids in his group). I dropped him off at the workshop with the big box of pastries, turned the truck around, and before pulling out of the parking lot he had texted me three messages - "5 left", "2", and "They're gone." Holy shit. Next time I'll bring a garbage bag full of chips and oreos.

There was cake and loot and a disaster with his miniature tree crashing off the table. There will be Star Wars and arcade shenanigans this weekend. I don't brag about my kid very often, so let me do it now: Gavin is kind and funny and loving. He adores cats and doesn't give a shit. If people tease him, he laughs and makes nyan noises. He reads fantasy novels and listens to D&D podcasts and hyperventilates with excitement in role playing stores. This child has been telling us that he would be a robot maker since the age of 4, and now in his first 6 months in robotics, his team has won two competitions and he's won two individual Think awards for his programming. If they continue their winning streak through state championships, he'll be flying to Kentucky for Nationals. If he nails it at Nationals, he'll be off to China for the world championships. His robotics teacher took us aside and whispered, "He is such a neat kid. He gets it - he could be a world champion." My head exploded in pride. He's going to cost us so much money. And I'm so excited for him as he heads into this new adolescent landscape.

Happy birthday, baby boy.

butts and cats

The other day I was reading a few threads on my phone while drinking coffee, and could not understand why one person was flipping out about a slug in their house and another was gagging because they saw someone trimming their toenails. Wondered why I was not bothered by these things, worried that maybe I was a revolting person. Got to work and discovered that someone had shit in the urinal. Again.

At home, the toddler climbed up on my lap while we were chatting about our days at work. When she hopped down, I realized that at some point she had taken off her diaper, because there were two round toddler buns printed in white oily butt cream across my black shirt. The kind that smells like fish oil, because it was on sale.

So maybe it's just a matter of content saturation, this not giving a damn about slugs and toenails.

I was considering these things when one of our regular library users wandered up to the desk. She had been wearing a boot on her broken foot for months, and it was gone. "The boot is gone!" we said helpfully, because she might not have known. She cringe-smiled and held up her hand. It was now in a cast. This is no good, because she is a piano player. We told her that, too. It turns out that what happened is this: she was playing piano for a holiday party at an Admiral's Club. As she was playing, there was a crash and a cat came falling out of the ceiling panels onto her head. It battened onto her hand with its teeth, and she ran screaming from the room, trying to flap it loose at the end of her arm. It broke her finger and ran like the devil. I went limp across the desk, laughing.

My job keeps me centered, folks.

Buffalo Sponge Candy

It's Christmas candy time! Every year I try to make a new confection. One year it was peppermint patties. Another year it was a brandy-soaked fruitcake. Five years in a row it has been homemade marshmallows, which I still haven't been arsed to do. It's not a perfect tradition. This year I decided to make Buffalo Sponge Candy, using this recipe I found on Pinterest - my go-to source for inspiration, consternation, and disappointment. This stuff is like Violet Crumble or Crunchie bars; a light honeycomb dipped in chocolate. YUM. Can it be done in Hawaii? The land where candy sweats and dissolves and gets slogged away by ants before you can get back to the table with your hot cocoa? Let's find out, I said! I knew, people. I knew. So this candy is pretty simple: sugar, corn syrup, an infinitesimal amount of gelatin to bind the bubbles, and baking powder to make it explode. Also "very good" chocolate, for dipping in afterward. (Actually, looking back at the recipe, it doesn't say this at all, but "very good" was what I was chanting in my head while tossing aside bags of generic chocolate chips at the grocery store. It's a safe enough rule to live by, very good chocolate.)

 

1/2 tsp gelatin (bloomed in 1 tsp of water and reheated to liquid just before adding)

1 ½ cups sugar

½ cups corn syrup (light or dark or medium or whatever you have)

½ cup water

1 tbsp baking soda (sifted)

We had to make sure the chocolate was very good, first. Sometimes they poison these things, you know. My kids all know the "just to make sure it's not poisoned" sampling procedure we perform when opening anything made with chocolate.

So you boil up the sugars with a bit of water to 300 degrees. I don't have a candy thermometer, but I have made and ruined enough candy over the years to know all the stages of sugar. Boil it to hard crack, testing with a bowl of cold water every half a minute or so. You'll know because it stops balling up and becomes long threads of hard candy when it drips in the water. Don't stick your fingers in it or lick the spoon. It's 300 fucking degrees.

Then you mix in your bloom'd gelatin and whip in the baking soda and pour the thing out while it's very foamy and alarming. Yell, "10 points to Hufflepuff!" because you know this is really a Hufflepuff kind of thing.

I got a bit sidetracked at this point, because something on my counter smelled like a rotting corpse. I sniffed it down to the gelatin dish. Turns out that just because it's made of boiled horse's knees, gelatin smells like boiled horse's knees.

Tip: follow the directions and use baking parchment, or you'll be chipping this shit out of your pan with a knife later, and then chipping bits of Pyrex out of your candy when that goes wrong.

Let it cool for a few hours. Spend this time chasing cats out of your tree. 

I finally put the dish in the fridge, after determining that it was just going to sit and sweat if I left it out on the table, assuming the ants didn't find it first. Which they would, because they had formed squirmy black sweaters of themselves all over the drips I had gotten on the floor, and I murdered them with a sponge.

It sweated in the fridge anyway. When I broke pieces off, the inside had the right crumbly texture, but by the time you got it in your mouth it was already moist enough to glue your jaw shut when you bit down on it. I pried candy out of my fillings and then dumped rice in the bag, hoping to soak up the moisture and dry it out a bit. This is a trick that works with salt. If you visit Hawaii and discover restaurant salt shakers full of rice, this is why. That "when it rains it pours" girl on the Morton carton LIES.

So of course, the rice glued itself all over the candy.

Well, shit.

I got the chocolate out anyway.

And just ate it.

Ew. This picture is kind of lewd. I'm sorry. That is how it happened. MOM STAYS IN THE PICTURE.

So now I have a brick of candy covered in rice sitting in the fridge, because I remain naively optimistic that it'll still dry out and I can just flick the rice off and break the stuff up to dip in chocolate. I'm wondering if I could combat the humidity by boiling the candy just a bit longer and omitting the gelatin, which in my mind could be responsible for the bit of chewiness where I want a bit of crumbliness. For all the money I'm going to waste on this endeavor, I could have just bought half a dozen Violet Crumble bars, but that is beside the point. It's the doing of the thing. It's the thrill of the endeavor. It's the conquest and the victory dance and the remorse of eating it afterward. It's the staying off of Facebook and not arguing with redneck uncle about news articles.

Opt for adventure, folks. And go make this candy, because it's really easy and fun, actually - if you live ANYWHERE drier than the mid-Pacific.

Edit: YOU GUYS IT WORKED. I chipped the thing up and dipped the things in melted chocolate and at first it all softened into toffee, so I chucked it in the fridge and the chocolate did some kind of alchemy and IT SOLIDIFIED INTO CRUNCHIE NUGGETS.

I am so impressed. Naive optimism ftw!

the big Thanksgiving weekend

FAMILY PHOTOS. I forgot to take any. But I did take eight pictures of the turkey. I was hungry.

FAMILY DRAMA. My 13 year-old cousin threw himself down sobbing because we told him to stop laying across the floor like a slug and tripping everyone, then he built a pillow fort around himself because WHY NOT EVERYONE HATES ME ANYWAY YOU SHOULD ALL BE HAPPY NOW NOT TO HAVE TO LOOK AT ME. And because he is my cousin and not my precious nephew or beloved grandchild, I threw all the pillows off him and told him to stop being an asshole. "DRAINS AND RADIATORS," I yelled tenderly. "People will like you if you radiate good feels, and they will not like you if you drain all the good feels from the room." Yes, I said 'feels'. I had had a glass of wine. "BUT," I hollered on, "People will also immediately forgive people for being assholes if they just take a minute to think about it and then turn it around. TURN IT AROUND." He turned around and faced the wall and sobbed loudly. I made sucking noises like a drain. Gavin and I put on a podcast and laid around playing with Zenny until the sniffling stopped and the teenager came oozing quietly across the floor to listen with us. Someone made a dingledong joke and we all burst out laughing. The rest of the evening went pretty well, with pie and tea and dingledong joke reenactments. "I turned it around," cousinface quietly told me as we packed up to leave, and I was stunned that someone had actually listened to something I had been yelling. Leif just lets his eyes go unfocused while I try to pop my own head with my internal barometer.

TWO MORE PAYCHECKS TO CHRISTMAS OH NO. We set up the tree as soon as Thanksgiving was packed away in tupperware. It was a fake tree, but it was pre-lit, which turned out to be important because we forgot to pack any lights when we moved. Also missing: almost all our ornaments. And our stockings are somewhere at my mother's house. BUT WE HAVE A TREE UP. And there are cats in it, so that's kind of like ornaments. The first door on the advent calendar is open, the man baked coconut macaroons, I made lychee liqueor out of the fruit we've been soaking in gin since July, and in general we are panicking and flailing around, trying to pull off the holidays on a shoestring. I was going to make a fruitcake again, but it is a month's worth of work for something the kids won't eat anyway, so we decided just to drink the bottle of brandy and make a plum pudding instead. That is time/booze economics.

Next: "sponge candy". With pictures. And hopefully no fire extinguisher, because we don't have one.

36 in pictures

We tried to get a proper picture of me to document the aging process going on here. I have the fine-photography modeling skills of a lemur, and the man has a knack for taking pictures of people blinking, so these are the best we got.

Look down. To the side. That's no good. Smile. TOO MUCH. Whatever, good enough. *click*

What I actually look like most of the time. 

The year my last baby was a baby for the last time. 2.5 going on 12.

What I look like the rest of the time. 

More on Thanksgiving in a bit.

hunger and games

When the stores are full of cardboard cutouts of grinning turkeys in Pilgrim hats and shoppers are flinging coupons for free birds at haggard cashiers, you will know it is time for my birthday. This year my birthday falls on Turkey Day itself (appropriate), and so the annual birthday beer-and-a-movie date with husbandface was shoved up to Monday. The rule is that we have to lunch at a place within staggering distance of the theater, so this year we found ourselves at a place called BUFFALO WILD WINGS. Which sounded like a chicken wing place, but turned out to be a sports arena with sad-eyed teenagers dressed as referees guiding us along dotted yellow lines to a table surrounded by enormous blaring televisions tuned to sports channels. The effect was that of being seated in a Colosseum and not knowing from which direction the gladiators would be set upon you with short swords. As we tried to work out the scoring system on the menu, a group of military guys leaped up, cheering.

"Someone scored a goal," Mike said, goggling around at all the different games on the walls. 

"It was that one," I said, pointing over his shoulder. 

"That is Nascar."

"Yes, but while you were turned around, I took your beer."

"Ahhh, you scored the goal."

"Ten points to Griffindor!"

He took his beer back.

Consoled self with a Kona Longboard.

We gnawed chicken and talked trash and skipped to the theater afterwards. I took a picture in the bathroom, because I always do. And because it is always empty, which is kind of weird.

The last Hunger Games movie was just fine - maybe because I read the book 5 years ago and couldn't remember the damn thing at all. There was no blood, which is fine, because book-gore and movie-gore don't sit in the psyche the same way and I am a bit of a weenie.

We ran into Walmart on the way home, and plunged into a crowd of holiday shoppers yelling, "PATTI. WHERE THE PIES, PATTI?" There were no pies. There were only desperate mothers with visiting relatives trailing after them, shoving baking ingredients into their carts and sneaking pre-made mixes in while their mothers-in-law examined bags of Kona coffee. We did likewise, got in a fight with the self-checkout machine, and made it home in time to pick up the kids. VICTORY.

And that's that for another year. After four years of watching Jennifer Lawrence shoot things with flaming arrows on my birthday, I'll be adrift in a sea of cinematic woe next year. Throwing my vote in for an adaptation of Pratchett's Tiffany Aching series. GET FILMING, HOLLYWOOD. 

balls.

I can knit celtic knots and shetland lace, but I can't knit around a fucking foam ball.

Oh, hey, that looks alri-

#@%!?

HOLIDAY SPIRIT SURGING.

This is the holiday spirit that runs people down for spots in mall parking lots and throttles old ladies over 75% off snuggies. 

My mother shoved a box of lights in my hand and told me to get festive, so I hung them over the window just in time for the winter rain to arrive. Suddenly we are huddling under couch blankets with tea and breaking into choruses of Silent Night and watching crap holiday specials on youtube. 

And furtively reading Dean Koontz novels

It's working, folks. I had feelings.

In other news:

Went to storytime workshop and am now MASTER OF COLORED SCARVES. And I learned these action rhymes, which my kid will not let me stop doing. Will need both knees replaced by the end of the week:

I'm popcorn in a pan (crouch down)
Don't forget the top (pretend to put a lid on your head)
Soon I'll start to sizzle... (sizzle sizzle sizzle with your wiggly bum)
And then... I'll... POP! (JUMP UP OH MY GOD MY KNEES) 

Then when you can't take it anymore, you sit down and distract them with this one:

Pour the popcorn in the pan (rock your kid back and forth on your lap)
Shake it up, shake it up! (jostle poor helpless child)
BAM BAM BAM (bop up and down mercilessly)

Bonus: counts as exercise. Go get a mini snickers bar out of the secret pilfered Halloween stash.

annual holiday pep talk. DO THE THING.

It is very nearly inevitable that, eventually, life will crap on your sense of holiday magic. I'm lucky to have made it all the way to adulthood before a spectacularly awful Christmas with the in-laws dropped that particular heap of shit on my warm-fuzzies back in 2003. Maybe some people manage to nurture the fragile blossom of wonder deep into their lives and then conveniently die before any grim life event can slap it from their hearts, but then they've gone and snuffed the joy for everyone else who loved them dearly, so GOOD JOB.

Adulthood renders toy companions into lumps of plastic and fairy lights into electric bills, and you learn pretty quickly that if the holidays are to have any chance of surviving to the next generation, you have to fight back. It won't mean you'll feel the thing again, but it's better than being a miserable old asshole.

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT, I tell myself every year. And it's worked, because my kids dance with excitement and tell stories about magical Christmases Past that I can barely recognize from where I'm standing with my oven mitts tugged on like boxing gloves. There were divorces and deaths and layoffs and illnesses that I've had to run ahead and kick out of the way and bury under tinsel and drown in eggnog, flicking cookies like ninja stars  - and IT WORKED. The kids are whole and shiny. These are the good old days, this is the payoff, and I will take it and eat it and wash it down with hot buttered rum, because this is the point of the whole thing. Existence is too big and important and incredible to get run flat by grubby human bullshit. You get to be here, to be part of it. Make that shit happen. Grab it and throttle some joy out of it even if that joy is real instead of magical. So nobody stuffs my stocking or remembers to buy me Santa presents? I will cram a whole bottle of St. Germain's into that sock and buy myself all the yarn I want and knit while swigging booze at 6am on Christmas, and SO THERE. That is how you do this thing.

This year we vaulted a cancer diagnosis ('pre-cancer'? I win for another year!). We skidded around animal heartbreak (Xebo died, but he was 20 years old and OH LOOK WE FOUND A KITTEN). We avoided hospital visits (caught the toddler's head with my goddamn FOOT on two occasions). You can't dodge everything - my mother lost an internal organ, the childcare budget flared up and consumed the grocery budget, and last night I broke the cartilage in my nose when I accidentally headbutted a flying cat - but WE FIGHT.

6 weeks left. Get to it.

Figgy

Figs are kind of moist and pink and a bit uncomfortable to paint the insides of.

Ooer. And gross.

Up on the produce portraiture wall it goes. I'm going to fill it stove-to-ceiling. And across the doorway. And all around the kitchen, until I run out of produce and start drawing cans of corn and jars of olives and granola bars with little hats on. My grandchildren will shake their heads and point and say, "That's about where grannie went mad, there amongst the individual noodles." And I'll hit them with my cane and yell about the relevance of cultural preservation through art. "WE WOULDN'T KNOW WHAT WATERMELON LOOKED LIKE IF IT WEREN'T FOR GIOVANNI STANCHI."

It's all worked out.