Thanksgiving 2016

Wherein the only family brawl is between my mother and a pie, instigated by an uninvited turkey.

Every year, the local grocery chain offers a free turkey with a $50 purchase, and every year we end up with extra turkeys taking up all our freezer space until New Year's Day. This year, with my aunt hosting the meal, my mother decided that after the teenagers were done with the holiday bird there would not be enough for her to enjoy as leftovers, so at 11am on Thanksgiving Day she put her own turkey in the oven, just for turkey's sake. And then she checked the weight on the package, and realized it was 4 lbs heavier/ 2 hours longer than she had planned for, with no room in the oven for the pie and casserole she was supposed to bring to dinner. By 1pm, she panicked and removed the mostly-raw turkey, slamming the pie and the casserole in where it had been. As soon as the filling began to bubble, the pie erupted and spewed hot apple syrup all over the casserole on the rack beneath it. Then the hot sugar spilled out on to the oven floor and caught on fire. She hauled everything out, scraped the flaming goop out of the bottom of the oven, put the pie - dish and all - into a cake pan to finish baking, spooned all the apple syrup out of the spinach casserole, and called me on video chat to show me the smoky disaster unfolding in her kitchen. "I could be over there drinking wine! But no, I decided I needed to BAKE AN ENTIRE EXTRA FUCKING TURKEY FOR NO GOOD REASON." The apple pie finished cooking in a pool of its own goo, which she tried to clean off with a paper towel, but it caramelized and adhered the towels to the bottom of the pie pan. The turkey went back into the oven to finish cooking, and she loaded the car. As she was arranging the casserole and the wine, she leaned on the pie and smashed it. "Because of course I did," she said. She turned the oven off with the turkey still inside, hit the road, and zoomed through the mountain toward my aunt's terrifying tower in the sky - right into a tunnel full of smoke and a mile-long traffic jam because someone's car had caught on fire right in the middle of the highway. "The firemen were smiling and laughing," she said. "They had all their equipment out and they were having such a good time together." (I swallowed the rest of my wine in one go.)

But she made it just in time, and the pie was delicious in spite of everything.


Normally my mother - who used to cook at a nice restaurant while earning her teaching degree - can pull off a huge feast without scorching a thing, but this year I tipped the cooking karma when I hit the kitchen the night before and knocked out two pies (pumpkin and cherry) that were just AMAZING. I can cook pretty well, but these pies were something else, I tell you. And then the cat licked a hole in the meringue, because she's the worst. We cut around it and ate it anyway, because we are also the worst. I'll post the recipe, because it's going to be a holiday favorite from here on out.

Also new this year: I made ricotta-stuffed dates wrapped in bacon. These are a fun thing to make with kids because you just pipe cheese into dates and wrap them in bacon, and then you get to tell them that they're bacon-wrapped cockroaches after they bake, because that is what they look like. I thought the kids wouldn't really be into them because they didn't know what dates were, but as soon as they became cockroaches the tray disappeared.

PICTURE DUMP.

My cat is an asshole.

My aunt likes old lady cocktails made with Chambord, 
and I like being handed them in fancy glasses.

We give our kids glass stemware so they can learn about manners and first aid.

Turkeys.

The man has a hundred relatives to exchange greetings with while I hide off-screen

The teenagers pause their game of Munchkins to eat cockroach clusters and fight about their characters.

Kids jumping the gun a bit, ready to eat all the foods.

See that window? All the windows open straight out onto a horrifying 30-story drop. NOPE.

Sweet potatoes in Hawaii are purple, which look very festive on the table and are also good for scaring visiting relations.

cockroach clusters on the bottom, 3 minutes before the kids scarfed them

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

My super sleuthing skills fail again

We live in a quiet old neighborhood near a haunted gulch, a few blocks from a small hospital. The streets empty as soon as it gets dark, and the only sounds are the occasional distant ambulance siren, the muffled rattle and boom of artillery and machine guns at the base during training weeks, and Mr. and Mrs. Down the Street screaming at each other about text messages and relationship problems every few weeks.

So I was drawing on the couch late in the evening, listening to a netflix show on my phone, when somebody screamed like they were being murdered. I turned off the show and sat up to listen, and there was another scream - gutteral, unearthly, terrified, whole-body screaming. I jumped up, there was a third scream, and then a gunshot. Silence. I ran outside. The street was dark, nobody else had come to their doors, and I didn't know what the fuck had just happened. Had Mr. and Mrs. Down the Street finally murdered each other? There hadn't been any arguing. Nobody was sobbing or staggering out of their garage with a bloody rolled-up rug with feet sticking out of the bottom. But it had definitely been a gun shot, and the last time we heard a blast in the night it had turned out to be a drive-by shooting one street over. That street is not filled with nice old Japanese grandparents with fat little Shih Tzus. It is filled with cock-fighters and youths with shitty sub-woofers in their Hondas.

I was standing there trying to decide if I would want someone to call the police if I had just been murdered in my home (and I would, but maybe I could have yelled, "I'm being murdered!" to clear it up for the neighbors?), when a man started rage-screaming one street over, and cars began speeding away along the side roads. They could have been horrified witnesses to a hit! A clue! I called the police, because I am not running into a cock fight/murder scene in my reindeer pajamas. After explaining really badly what I was freaked out about, I asked them if they could please send someone to drive around and just see if anyone had, like, really obviously been murdered, thanks.

Nobody had, evidently. So what the hell had I been hearing? I went to work the next morning, mentally devising a plan to order luminol and then casually black-light scan the driveways for body-carried-to-the-truck-in-a-rolled-up-rug trails of blood while pretending to be on an evening jog. Maybe running through the neighborhood with a spray bottle and a black light bar would not be very stealthy, but they'd have to catch me to stop me, and while I am not in good enough shape to outrun even the fattest of Shih Tzus, I could definitely hit an old person with a light bulb when they caught me by the back of my sweatpants.

I explained all this to my boss, and he said, "Don't you live by the Botanical Gardens?"
"Yeah."
"... They hire people to kill the wild pigs in the gulch so they don't gore any visitors."

Oh.

Ohhhhhh.

So that's one murder mystery solved. Not by me, though. I was the one who called the police for a pig.

 My skill set needs improvement, I have solved zero mysteries so far, unless you count the Mystery of the Severed Heads in the Library Dumpster, and even then it was my co-worker who found out who was ditching the bodies. I should take an online course or something.

woe cakes for Thanksgiving

Before their careers veered off into academia, my grandparents met in art school. My grandmother painted with watercolors and oils on Guam as the kids grew up, and explored pottery and ceramic sculpture when the family moved to Bloomington, where my granddad earned his PhD. She was a medical librarian in Newfoundland when we lived with her, painting rocky Atlantic beaches. My granddad's art turned into woodworking, and these days he is a good-looking old man in the woods of upstate Washington, playing guitars he made himself and singing sad songs about his long-lost love.

Grandma died in 1993 due to a medical mistake. During a diagnostic scan, the technician hit her with 200x the radiation he was supposed to. She developed leukemia and died within a few years. My grandfather was desolate. They had moved to Vancouver for the relative warmth of the West Coast, hoping that would help her kick the cancer, and they left most of their belongings in storage while living in a small apartment. When my grandfather was too heartbroken to remember the bills, the storage unit was auctioned off, and all of my grandmother's artwork was lost.

Then a few years ago, a handful of well-loved old paintings that hadn't been in that storage unit were discovered, and the siblings divvied them up. My mother and aunt had two paintings each, hung prominently in their homes; a cresting wave, a rocky Canadian beach, an Arizona house with cats in the windows, and two of the sisters as naked toddlers on Guam. Then about a week ago, one of the paintings - the wave - fell off my aunt's wall, the frame broke, and she put it on the table to repair in the morning. When she woke up late, she was horrified to discover that her part-time housekeepers (this sounds fancy, but they were clients of a friend who works with the homeless/disabled and needed work as a favor) had thrown the painting down the high-rise garbage chute. My aunt jumped into every dumpster and searched, but the painting was gone. She said she felt as if her mother had died all over again.

It was gut-wrenching, we all had a hard cry over it. So we are convening around my aunt this Thanksgiving, and having the feast in her terrifying tower in the sky.

And now I have this memory, which I need to track down and verify - when I was 10, I went to summer camp in Maine. The owners were friends of my grandmother, and I remember sitting by the camp phone, waiting for a long-distance call from my mom and examining a statue on a side table. It was a dark brown (bronze? glazed ceramic?) figure of a little girl with Christopher Robin hair crouching down to cup a frog in her hand. One of the camp directors walked by and saw me looking at it. "Oh, your grandmother made that! It's your mother when she was a little girl." That camp is still there. The owners are still alive. If this is a real thing that happened, there may be one surviving piece of sculpture, and it may still be there in that room.

A QUEST! And then - A PILGRIMAGE!

I have consulted the oracle

And we're all fucked. 

Either that or putting Milk Duds in cookies is just really stupid. Cracked, crumbled, with holes scorched straight through. It's a damn tragedy, any way you look at it. My cookie divination method has never been wrong yet. 

Today I was home with the littlest because the sitter called in, so we cooked things and I introduced her to the outdoor shower. She waited until I had shampoo in my hair and opened the door to let the chickens in. So that's going well.

sit down and eat some tarts

I am throwing social media out the window - or throwing myself out the window away from it - because it's absolutely flooded with propaganda and false news right now, and I don't have the patience or cardiovascular fortitude to pan through it all. I can do a shitty job of following the news and coming to horrible conclusions JUST FINE ON MY OWN, thanks. (I mean, I think I actually do a pretty good job at it, as a professional researcher-type, but rule #2 is "don't believe everything you think".*)

That is not to say I'm grabbing my towel and thumbing a ride out of here. Should an authoritarian regime ever come to collect, I already have a spot against the wall labeled with my name just by virtue of upholding the ALA Bill of Rights. Librarians watch the edges, dig our heels in, and link arms to hold the line and defend intellectual freedom. This is a job that is mostly complaints about library fines and questions about where the toilets are, punctuated by violent opposition to content, and that is what we are here for. We are the quiet, sturdy picket fence of liberty. The problem is that we are also flammable. When the library fires start, that will be a very good time to panic.

In the meantime, at the end of your conflict-riddled day, sit down and read some Pratchett. You can get an armload of his novels at your library. Here's a bit that has been coming back to me this week:

“There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment about the nature of sin, for example,” said Oats.

“And what do they think? Against it, are they?” said Granny Weatherwax.

“It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray.”

“Nope.”

“Pardon?”

“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”

“It’s a lot more complicated than that—”

“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes—”

“But they starts with thinking about people as things.”

Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum


And while you're reading, scarf down some tarts. You already have all the things in your pantry, go dig them out and make them right now. Feeding people doesn't solve all their problems, but it solves the ones that involve feeling freaked out and hungry. You can calm down and think and make plans if someone puts a hot drink and a homemade pastry in your lap.

This recipe is from a British cookbook, so I've modified the measurements here and halved it because I use a toaster oven for almost everything. Also I don't have a food processor, so it's your basic messy hand-mixed pastry. It's good for you, just do it.

"We do right, we don't do nice" Mini Lemon Tarts

1/2 cup flour

3 tbs powdered sugar

1/3 stick of cold butter, cut up into bits

1 egg yolk (reserve the whites)

1 can of whatever old pie filling you have lurking at the back of your cupboard. Or pudding. Or jam. Or nutella. I used lemon pie filling in an old rusty can and it did not kill me.

Stir together flour and sugar. Add bits of butter and smoosh them into the flour with your hands until it's mealy and lumpy and crumbly. Add the egg yolk, mix with a fork until it comes together into a dough. Turn it out onto a floured cutting board and pat it out into a nice flat lump. Put it in the fridge to chill for an hour. Make a pot of tea and STAY OFF THE FUCKING INTERNET while you wait.

Preheat oven to 350. Roll out chilled dough to however thick you like pie crust. Punch circles out of it with a small glass or maybe a proper biscuit cutter, if you're showing off. Press the circles into a mini muffin tin. Pop it in the oven. Wish you had pie weights. Do not improvise pie weights out of nails and screws you found in the junk drawer, you will get tetanus or something. When the tart shells are golden brown (10 min or so), take them out and cool them on a rack for a couple minutes. 

Find some filling. Dollop filling into each shell. Take your reserved egg white and beat it on high with a teaspoon of sugar until it comes to soft peaks. Don't overbeat them and forget to add sugar, as pictured below. Pop them back in the oven for 10 min, until golden and toasty. Refresh the pot of tea. Make it decaf, because it's been that kind of week.

Eat the tarts. Read the books. Contemplate taking up photo journalism or activist graffiti or subversive zines. 

The library has photocopiers and how-to manuals.

5 ingredients that are probably already in the cupboard

Here in Hawaii you've got to whip through this step and get it into the fridge 

before it wilts and dies and leaves you with dough mittens.

QUICK GET THEM UP BEFORE THEY MELT TO THE BOARD

Love this cookbook. It has breakfast cocktails, you guys. It's my holiday handbook.

*Rule #1 is "Says who?"

Heartsore

Goddamn, my chest hurts. 

My in-laws sided with the KKK even though our niece is half black and about to go to school on scholarship in South Carolina. 

My cousins sided with the anti-gay VP, even though our sweetest cousin just married her long-time girlfriend a few weeks ago. When she cried and asked what would happen to her, they patted and soothed her like people taking their dog to the vet to be put down.

Yesterday a friend I've known for 14 years found that someone had spray-painted "GAS JEWS" and "KILL ALL NIGGERS" along with swastikas and "Trump" on the mountain above her town.

Another longtime friend saw "HANG OBAMA" tagged on the train she was boarding.

Last night a friend in Seattle stopped two young men from threatening a Middle Eastern convenience store cashier.

A friend in Arizona came outside to find her neighbor had added 4 new stickers to his truck - a confederate flag, an american flag, "Fuck your hybrid" and a naked woman in heels bending over above the caption "Fuck it like you stole it".

These are first-hand accounts of these instances, not internet re-tweets from strangers - and there are thousands of those pouring out. The leash is off, the racists and mysogynists have been validated. Protests are turning into riots, people are getting shot. This isn't whining or pouting. This is horror. 

I was looking at this graphic novel I'm writing, and suddenly it seemed uselessly fluffy. Maybe I should be writing something substantive and harrowing. But we have to model the world as we want to see it, and this story has no sexual harassment, no racial slurs, no body consciousness. It has butt jokes and nudity and swearing and misadventure, but nothing that will make a person feel like shit about themselves while they sit and read it and relax their gut for an hour. So I'm crunching down on it and trying to finish the color and text in part 1.

Working backward from page 51 - on pg 40 now.

Yeah, cliche selfie, I know, but nobody takes pictures of me.

The sky over my library. We can do this.

Well that happened

When I was in 11th grade, our English teacher assigned us to do a mock debate. We had to pick the topics ourselves, and on the day the suggestions were due I was out doing some kind of sports thing and came skidding into class just before the period ended to submit my picks. I had decided that the main function of this assignment was to teach us to use persuasive arguments in public speaking, and that it would be more fun for everyone if we had to persuade people of something harmless and ridiculous. My teacher took the paper I handed her and wrote "Cockroaches, kill 'em or keep 'em?" on the bottom of the board. And while she was writing I felt my stomach drop, because the rest of the chalkboard was filled with my classmate's topics, such as "ABORTION" and "GAY MARRIAGE" and "SOVEREIGNTY". I felt so stupid seeing my fluffy topics go up on the same board as those, and clammy-handed with dread at the realization that this would just be a week of people screaming at each other every 7th period.

My teacher paired us up randomly and assigned a topic. Ours was "Should gay people be allowed to adopt children?" There were only two rules: you had to research four points to argue, and you could not use the Bible as a source.

I took the "pro" stance, of course. I was raised by a community of teachers on the reservation, and among them were two lesbian couples. Donna and Dianne lived down in the hogan with no power or heat. One year, someone gave us a body-bag-sized sack of walnuts, and we spent the entire winter cracking nuts. We saved the shells for Donna and Dianne's wood stove, and on cold days Donna would come up to watch our VHS copy of Lethal Weapon 3 and crack nuts. She used to be a cop, so she thought it was funny to sneak inside and scare me (I was a latch-key kid and usually alone in the house), then unload her gun on the table. I loved Donna. She had a vendetta against the panther who would stalk her at night when she had to use the outhouse, and one day she accidentally shot herself through the leg while cleaning her gun ("Don't tell Dianne!" she said to my mother as she tied up her leg to stop the bleeding. "I think she's going to notice," my mother said). She never did get that panther. The other couple, Mary and Patty, adopted a couple of children stuck in the foster system. One of these kids told me she had seen her friend shot point-blank in the head with a pellet gun and killed, showing me a newspaper clipping. Mary and Patty took in older children with behavioral problems, because they had the education and experience as teachers to help the kids that nobody else wanted.

These were good, funny, loving people, and I didn't even know up until that moment that folks would think they shouldn't have had children. My best friend in high school was gay, and deeply uncomfortably with the debate topics. He was being asked to sit in that class for a week and listen to his own classmates argue against his decency and human rights. So I took this task seriously. My teammate refused to help because she didn't agree with the topic, so I went to the library and wrote notes on science, sociology, and child psychology. I was prepared. I was determined. And when I got up there to deliver my argument, the other team stood up and said, "Gays shouldn't have kids because the Bible says so." I reminded them that the Bible wasn't part of the assignment, and that the Bible doesn't even specifically address gay parenthood, and that we needed factual argument. I explained my points, they rebutted with "but the Bible says." As this went on I saw my friend in the front row, his fists balled up so tightly his fingers were white, staring at his desk and not making eye contact with anyone. I delivered my closing argument, I didn't choke or stutter, I thought I was doing a good job speaking coherently with facts and compassion and logic on my side, and then right at the end, the opposing team leaned back in their seats casually, and said, "Who here thinks gays should NOT be able to adopt children, raise your hands." And the entire class raised their hands. One or two of them hesitated, looked around, then raised their fingers weakly, but they raised them. The only person who did not was my friend, tight-fisted and perfectly motionless in his seat. He looked like he wasn't even breathing, he was trying to stay so still. They smiled at me and said, "See?"

And I did see. I got an A on that assignment and they got an D for not following instructions, but I lost that debate because it had been decided in the hearts of my classmates before I even stood up to speak.

I was completely heartbroken by that debate. I decided that the best way to make a meaningful difference is to do good for the people in front of you. Help people who need help, whether or not they like you or you like them. Be the person to break up a fight. Walk someone home if they feel unsafe. Stand beside them when they are facing something scary. Give them a safe place to sit and talk if they need one. Give them a glass of water or a bandaid or a cookie if they're freaking out. And we suck at it sometimes and we get scared or startled into inaction, but then we regroup and do better the next time. We can't make anything better without trying to be better.

There is only one important time, and that time is now. 

The most important one is always the one you are with. 

The most important thing is to do good for the one who is standing at your side.

(Tolstoy)


So many of us are absolutely gutted today, but just keep repeating those things.

So the shower is finished

And it's a beautiful outdoor shower. Woodsy, natural, makes you feel like you are bathing beside a lake with the smell of the forest around you. And, if you turn slowly in a circle while standing completely naked, you realize that between the top of the wall and the bottom of the roof there is a 360 degree crack* through which you can maintain eye contact with the neighbors. That you are a phone-on-a-stick away from being broadcast live on facebook by someone sneaking up on you behind the neighboring wall. The three inch gap** is not enough to allow a glimpse of your wobbly parts, but it sure feels like it. That narrow slice of sky and windows renders the entire concrete and wood structure completely invisible, so you are standing exposed and nervous under the luxury waterfall shower head. It is a blessing, then, that the man forgot to put a light in it, so I can shower under cover of darkness. Last night I dreamed that I was taking a shower and all my old boyfriends came in to look at me with their heads tilted in disappointment. Thanks for that, brain.

Okay this is before the bench and the final waterproofing and floor cleaning, but STILL. Nice. Despite the Terrible Crack.

edited to amend:

* alright, fine, I stood in the shower and turned around and it's more like 45 degrees. But they're a REALLY WIDE 45 degrees. Someone with binoculars might see my forehead if they look hard enough out the upstairs window.

** it's way bigger than 3 inches. Massively bigger, on the house-facing side. I could climb up and squeeze through if I ever got locked in, especially if covered in soap, and then fall into the fish pond. 

"anything at all" is the hardest question to answer

Google search terms for today include

DIY time machine pinterest

standing stones north america

goat species of the Rockies

medieval carding spinning 

turning rabbits into boots patterns

why can't you touch the rabbit while skinning it

history of rabies in rabbits 

how to make penicillin 

easy nomadic hiking trails for beginners

Halloween 2016

Observations on economy SNZZZZZ

We've been doing this thing at my mother's house for 14 years now, and back in '02-05, Halloween was a huge thumping block party with pyrotechnics and special deluxe prizes and full-sized candy bars snuck in among the treats. The decline of the economy from about 2006-2012 saw doors go dark as people lost their jobs, lost their homes, and couldn't afford candy to feed the hordes. The houses that hung in there gave out lollipops and pixie sticks with one bite-sized chocolate. Then about three years ago, doors opened back up. Lights came back on. New decorations started going up. The candy became fun-sized chocolates again. (And also pencils, because that one lady is REALLY DETERMINED that kids need pencils, and 14 years of sad faces hasn't deterred her.) This year was the first year that Halloween slammed it home again, and the kids came staggering through the door dragging more candy than they could lift. Christmas hasn't even gone full-saturation in the stores yet; it is waiting modestly as it should. These things are economic indicators: absurdly early Christmas displays are signs of desperation. Exuberant Halloweens are signs of vitality. Thumbs up for visible economic improvement.

So anyway

Saving their fancy costumes for trick-or-treating, the kids dug through the costume bin and grabbed easy accessories for school. Gavin, who's spirit animal is Roomba Cat, grabbed a toddler turtle costume, squeezed into the plush shell, and jammed the little bulging-eyed hat over his head.

When I picked him up after school, he flapped his hands in exasperation. "They asked if I was a frog. I'm wearing a giant puffy turtle shell and they asked if I was a frog. FROGS DON'T HAVE SHELLS. I'M CLEARLY A TEENAGE BOY CRAMMED INTO A TODDLER FROG COSTUME."

"Oh yeah," Leif agreed, "I wore a big furry buffalo hat and they thought I was a bear. Because of all those bears with GIANT HORNS." 

I patted them on their heads. "Poor little public school urchins."

PICTURE DUMP. The power went out and my phone died, but my aunt got a hasty shot of us before that happened, so it is proof we still exist. The eldest cousin ditched the family in favor of playing video games with his future-reddit-troll friends, and the younger cousin failed to make himself barf, so the evening was pretty much perfect.

The teen in his winter coat, which he might be talked into shedding by Easter.

Dwarf with his favorite real-life possession: an old mallet from a garage sale. He sleeps with that thing, you guys. People thought he was dressed as a viking and called him by his actual name, which freaked him out. 

Sweet little pirate who cut the neighbor girl's throat when she tried to bop her hat off.

I dressed in black. That was all.