Thanksgiving 2022

Thanksgiving and I usually get along, but this year I just really wasn't feeling it. The cooking marathon started with a caramel tart incident that turned one of my saucepans into a solid lump of sugar with a wooden spoon sticking out of it like Excalibur, followed immediately by a second caramel incident that destroyed my other saucepan and melted a hole through the garbage after the burned sugar lava escaped from the tinfoil containment unit I tried to dispose of it in. Made a pecan pie, instead. 

Everyone else seemed to be having a good time, though, and did not seem to care that I accidentally overcooked the turkey, because nobody even likes turkey anyway and ignored it in favor of the beef. Next year I'm going to roast a chicken, instead, and see if anyone notices.

 

the foods 

 the peoples (except me and Mike, because we are terrible at taking pictures of each other)

 

Gavin made it safely by train to his aunt's house for the holiday, and we were glad to see him on the family zoom, sharing a meal with his grandma and cousins. He'll be home in just over 2 weeks, I can't wait to see him again.

Best dish: the runny Gorgonzola my mother found at Whole Foods.

 

Worst dish: the squash brown butter sage pasta I made for the first time, which turned into a giant gluey yellow wad. That is the last time I take recipe recommendations from hosts of a murder podcast.

 

Happy Thanksgiving, folks.

Sunday dessert: French Apple Cake

Every Sunday, we have family dinner at granny’s house, and every Sunday I get a bit fancy with dessert. I’m going to start keeping track of them here (credited, rewritten with modifications; we’re not trying to plagiarize anyone, we’re just making dessert here). I usually bake half-batches of everything to avoid leftovers.

Last week’s dessert was French Apple Cake, original recipe from The Perfect Cake (great book). It’s a perfect, mild, cozy Sunday dessert. My modifications: different ratios (it’s hard to halve an egg, and I’m generous with booze), and different liquors because I don’t have apple brandy.

French Apple Cake

3 sm/med tart apples, peeled, cored, and sliced pretty thin

1 overflowing tbs St Germain (elderflower liquor), or rum/brandy

1 tsp lemon juice

1/2 cup plus 1 tbs flour

1/2 cup plus 1 tbs sugar

1 tsp baking powder

Dash of salt

1/2 cup vegetable oil

1/2 cup whole milk

1 egg plus 1 egg yolk

1 tsp vanilla extract

Heat oven to 325. Spray a 6-inch spring form pan with cooking spray.

Place apples in a microwave-safe dish, cover, and microwave 1-2 min, until slightly soft. Toss apples with booze and lemon juice.

In a small bowl, whisk 1/2 cup flour, 1/2 cup sugar, baking powder, and salt. In larger bowl, whisk oil, milk, whole egg, and vanilla until smooth. Add flour mixture to milk mixture, whisk until just combined. Put 1/2 cup of batter into a smaller bowl, set aside.

Add egg yolk to remaining batter, whisk. Gently fold in apples, drippy liquor and all. Pour into prepared pan and smooth to edges.

Add 1 tbs flour to remaining batter, whisk in. Pour over batter in pan, smoothing to edges. Sprinkle 1 tbs sugar evenly over the top. Bake until center of cake is set and top is golden brown, about 45 minutes. Let cool in pan for 5 minutes, run a knife around the edges, and let it cool completely before taking the springform ring off.  Dust with confectioner’s sugar if you’re fancy (I wasn’t). Serve with a big pile of whipped cream from a can.

biopsy by Guillermo del Toro

My doctor did not hide his tray of tools fast enough after the procedure. It looked like a vampire's charcuterie platter.

"Whoa, gruesome."

"It's not as bad as it looks!" 

I think, if you explained the whole procedure to a doctor of the future, they would agree that it was exactly as bad as it looked.

Results in about a week. 

 

I have commandeered a power washer and I'm getting ready to prep the house for painting. Ivory and charcoal, probably.

Or, before anyone can stop me:

A surprise visit

The morbid thoughts are back; enough that I finally, after 26 years, told Mike what my song was, so he could play it at my service. 

“I plan to outlive you, though,” I assured him. “Which, you know, is going to be unfortunate if I’m on my deathbed in 6 months.” 

My brain decided, logically, that the best thing to do would be to paint the entire house. “For baby Jesus,” I said. In Newfoundland, people paint their houses before Christmas, just in case the Christ Child shows up for a dram of whiskey. I’m a non-believer, but it’s always good to be prepared for unexpected hospitality at this time of year. Even if you are someone with a doormat that says “GO AWAY”.

But I did not get to paint the house. This weekend we had to trim the lychee tree and fire up the wood chipper, instead. For baby Jesus. And also for our elderly neighbors, who asked if we could please trim the damn thing because it was out of control and taking over their carport. The painting will wait another week.

In the middle of this, I had a dream about an old friend. In the dream he was the same as he had been in high school, and I hugged against his shoulder, relaxed completely for the first time in a very long time, and started crying in relief. He’s the guy you want to talk to when you’re worried about cancer, because he had it as a kid and can crack a joke about it. 

The next day, the boy texted me. He’s not a soft-shouldered teenager anymore, he’s a ropy beef-stick man, but he feels the same anyway.

He’s back on a plane, returning to his rock star life in Portugal, but this time we have a loose plan to meet again in a year, instead of another 15.

Needed that.

Also needed THIS NEW CAMERA. Arrived just in time to get some good pictures of one of my oldest and my best.

I ended up with a Nikon Z6 with a Sigma art lens, because my friend’s son is an underground music photographer, and there is no way I could do better camera research than that kid, so I bought the one he uses. Solid decision.

Dr appt on Wednesday. I am prepared.

AHA Annual Miniatures Show

My tacky tiki painting won first place. And the strawberry guava painting sold on the first day. I was shocked.

Ho’omaluhia has to be the most beautiful setting for a gallery there is, even if you trip over dress-tossing influencers and their camera-snapping boyfriends every few feet. After the reception, we walked down to the lake, and Leif fell in love with every duck in the park. I told Mike to grab an armful of ducks and make them run across the park benches for me so I could hear their little feet go flap flap flap flap, but evidently that is where his devotion to my mental well-being ends.

After we were all muddy up to the knees and nearly lost my mother to a fairy ring of mushrooms, we packed the family off to Kin Wah, and Zenny discovered that she really loves tiny cups of loose leaf tea and giant lazy Susans covered with shrimp and noodles.

It was a perfect day. Really needed that.

well, it's a journal after all

Okay, so here is what happened: on a scale from normal to cancer, my tests came back somewhere on the bad end of the range, but they won’t know exactly what is happening until they nip a few chunks out of me in 2 weeks. The good news is that if it is cancer, they can just take my parts out; I’m not having any more kids anyway. The bad news is if it’s not cancer, all they can do is carve the bad stuff out of me like a jack-o-lantern every few months until it becomes cancer, because that is how health insurance works. My doctor is going to snoop around for another excuse to remove the parts and just get it over with, since they've been giving me general woe anyway.

Kept everything together on Halloween until the kids were asleep in bed, and then Mike put his hand on my shoulder and I suddenly started crying. The deep, full-body kind of crying, not the dignified film-heroine kind. 

The next morning, I was supposed to be dropping off artwork for a gallery show, but I had forgotten the required labels at work and there was no time to get them. I was ready to give up on the whole thing, but Mike said no, went to the drug store to print new labels, and then took off of work to drive me across the island. At the gallery, the women in charge of the show frowned at the saw-tooth hangers on the back of my frames and said no, they needed to be wired, as stated in the prospectus. I felt hot-faced embarrassment, because I had read the prospectus, but thought it just meant the art needed to be ready to hang on a nail, not that they needed literal wire. I quickly packed the paintings up and said we could go home, but Mike said no again, drove us to the hardware store, and wired my paintings in the parking lot. I started crying again (the dignified kind this time). When I got my shit together, we went back into the gallery with the properly labeled and wired paintings, and the ladies cheered when they saw us coming. They were glad we hadn't given up and gone home, and by then I was, too. The Association of Hawaii Artists show will be up at the Ho'omaluhia gallery until December. Opening reception and awards ceremony this Saturday. Fingers crossed for my three little paintings.

On the way home, Mike pulled into Best Buy and took me to the camera department. We played with all the floor model cameras until the store employees had worked up a sweat, jogging back and forth to deactivate the anti-theft alarms we kept setting off.

The man went full Dad Mode on me, and I appreciate it.

So that's what's going on. It's going to be fine. Just not how I wanted to be spending pie season.

Halloween 2022

So, I don’t get to buy a camera, but close. I am PISSED. But also just depressed and indifferent. Feelings are complicated.

Had roast beef and did shitty karate up and down the neighborhood with the kids. Couldn’t find any old Coors bottles to fit my Cobra Kai costume, so I drank Guinness out of a kombucha bottle. 

Oh boy

Zenny forgot her hoodie-vest at school, but she did a good job as the kid from Thor: Love and Thunder anyway. Leif was a knight, cousin Teddy was a mobster with a bad mustache.

 Much spoop

I'm probably going to buy a camera anyway.

- - -

Before all of that, we went to to the historic Ewa train Spooktacular.

We have been riding the spooky train since Gavin was a baby. Now the boy is away at college, but the train remains the same. It's $5 for a 20 minute ride along the old train tracks at night, with teenagers dressed as zombies lurching out at the train as it rumbles by, and cheap snacks available at the concession stands.

Zenny and Leif represented.

So creppy

Whoa scary

Much blood

It was a good Halloween, and I'm not dead.

it's fiiiine

Something went wrong in my latest round of screenings, and my doctor wants to sit down with me on Monday to go over it. While booking the appointment, I was too busy analyzing the receptionist's voice for clues to realize that Monday was Halloween. If I get bad news an hour before handing out candy to trick-or-treaters, it's going to be a rough night. Luckily, I'm dressing as Johnny Lawrence, so if I start throwing candy bars at kids, it'll be in character.

I didn't like Cobra Kai when it first came out, but workplace peer pressure got to me, and it does have its moments

 

This time, if I get bad news, I am not going to do something stupid like a book a trip I shouldn't take and delete 10 years of journals. A plan will be in place. 

The plan so far: 

Step 1. Leave the doctor's office, get in my car, drive to the beach, wade into the water, and give that shark another chance to finish me off.

Step 2. Buy the Nikon D850 I've been wanting.

 

It isn't a good plan, but I have all weekend to think about it.

Just chop the organs out already, Doc. I don't need them anymore, and I'm not interested in having interventions every 5 years until they finally decide to kill me. I have arch enemies to outlive. 

surf, goats, and scotch

For the first time in two years, the Menehune Surf Contest was back on, and there I was, sitting at a plastic fold-out table with Scholastic books to give away and a cute scratch-art jack-o-lantern craft, ready to enrich young minds and get a free lunch.

Wholesome youths waiting for their heats 

The first kid to walk up took a pumpkin, scratched in a pair of eyes, a big smiling mouth, and a dick and balls for a nose. "Look!" he showed his friend, "He's a Chad!" 

I took the child's phone and shot-put it into the ocean. 

Depraved youths in line for free açaí bowls

Next time I’m skipping the craft and just giving them stickers.

On Sunday, we were up at the stables for another horseback riding lesson. One of the students was a toddler in diapers and a spiked helmet, being led around by a nervous-looking instructor who was trying to coax him into patting the horse with the brush without getting stomped into the mud or kicked in the head. Seems like a lot of money to pay to endanger your baby when we have a beach full of sharks right there, for free, but okay. While Zenny trotted in circles with her teacher (and a horse), I wandered around and took unflattering pictures of all the farm animals.

Pretty sure this one was actually a puppet

Mr. Sneeze in Your Face, some blonde kid with great hair, and three copy/pasted ladies in the background 

I asked Chicken Nugget to pose for a portrait and this is what he did

Someone dropped a goat pellet, RUN

Did not get snot on me this time, I have natural aptitude for farming.

The Royal Scottish Country Dance Society got together for a party to kick off the season of dance classes. These used to be fun, back when members hosted the parties in their own homes and everyone got loaded on fried noodles and booze, but these days the event is hosted in a meeting room and everyone sits stiffly on plastic chairs and sips cheap wine. 

 

whoa there, reign it in, folks

I brought a Costco custard pie, the only dessert I know for sure a group of elderly people with finicky diets will polish off in one sitting, and my mother plonked down an entire bottle of good scotch. I don't get along with scotch, but I do enjoy bolting half-shots of my mother's drinks when she walks off and forgets about them. "My scotch keeps leaking out of this hole in the top of the glass," she said, getting another refill. It was a good night to play this game, because after I swiped my third half-a-glass, my aunt announced that my 15 year-old cousin had joined an Air Force program and is going to be allowed to fly actual airplanes. 

 

oh no

Well, why not?

How complicated can planes be, anyway?

 

The rest of the week has been the wrong kind of adventure; doctor's offices, auto shop waiting rooms, long phone calls with the insurance company about out-of-state ER invoices, surprise orthodontics bills, trying to help a Ukrainian immigrant with housing paperwork through a heavy language barrier and sprinkles of anti-vaccination propaganda she heard on Russian TV. 

Punching my way through the evening workouts, feeling very ready for a weekend of pumpkin patch hay rides and Sunday dinner dessert.

Painting and fitness content

Painted some strawberry guavas and started a new 6 week workout program. 

I didn’t make a ton of progress in the last 6 weeks (I got a bit derailed by exploding organs), but I definitely gained strength in my arms, and my knees hurt less with more muscle to hold them onto my legs. 

This next 6 week program has more boxing and MMA training, so I can get my Eagle Fang on and hone my storytime crowd management skills.

Feeling good today.