cringe

Listening to a surgeon talk to your husband is wild.

To me: “It’s a relatively quick procedure, we’ll remove the bad stuff, then wake you up, and you can go home after a few hours in recovery, with pain meds that you can take if you feel like you need to. You can go back to work in a couple days, if you have a job where you can sit and not move much.”

To Mike: “I’m going to use a cold blade, rather than a heated blade that sears the flesh as you cut, because we want those raw margins for testing. I’m going to cut in at an angle to remove a large cone of tissue, going as deep as possible without hitting a major blood vessel and causing uncontrollable bleeding, because that would be emergent, and we’d have to do a hysterectomy to save her life.”

Alright, I’m going in.

Edit: I’m alive. Now I get to find out if my paintings are better on oxycodone. 

ready

Dealing with the nervousness by staying busy; scraping the old paint off the house, re-screening the windows, knitting mittens and mini sweater ornaments, and seasonal baking for the kids. On Friday we walked down to the town Christmas parade. This year everyone booed the decorated tow truck, the football team forgot their haka, the people handing out candy were dressed as Ghostbuster Mario & Luigi, and the animal rescue group dressed all the dogs in light-up skirts. Quality small town content.

The tree went up

Without the help of the teenager

Turtle pie, from the Perfect Pie . This one is a winner.

Droopy wants to crack all those lights like pistachios with his teeth

Our Mittens Mean Death (pattern here)

Mini sweater for Lili. I don’t use a pattern for these, I just make them up as I go, but there are lots of good ones on Ravelry.

We are in the “you have to make it look worse to make it look better” stage of things

Christmas parade-goers 

Once the tree is up, the first box of chocolates is opened

Lilikoi is barely a kitten anymore, but she still makes biscuits like one

Gingerbread cake, from the Perfect Cake

Pre-op appointments and ultrasound results today.

Results

High grade pre-cancer, surgery on Wednesday the 7th, general anesthesia. If it goes further than he expects, or if the deeper tissue shows cancer, then there will be more surgery.

I feel like throwing up, but at least it’s speedy action.

43

This is the year my youngest son grew taller than me. The year I joined a fitness cult, worked out every day for 4 months, and gained 8 pounds anyway because my doctor had to put me on medication to stop my uterus from exploding. At least I have muscles to punch him with now. It has been a year of medical stress and financial strain, with Zenny in the hospital for kidney surgery, then bringing home Covid, then thinking I was going to die on the floor of an ER in Chattanooga (and being really irritated about how stupid that would be), and now an invigorating round of "is it cancer?"

But it was also the year I sold some paintings and bought an oven. The year I climbed around underground in a crystal cave like a goblin, drank whiskey that was so foul an entire line of librarians spit it out, got a very tight hug from a very old friend, rescued a whole bag of kittens, and helped two homeless library patrons achieve food and housing. Zenny's kidneys are now working like they're supposed to, the type of cancer we're looking at is highly survivable, weight is losable, and everything is okay.

xoxo,

h

(I'll add more pictures later.)

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.