2022 Annual Questionnaire

1. What did you do in 2022 that you’d never done before? I scored an alarming quantity of Percocet from an emergency room in Kentucky and learned about auditory hallucinations. Talked with a detective about a bullet hole in the library window. Had surgery. Wore booty leggings.

2. Did you keep your New Year’s resolutions? I ticked off all my art goals (sales, shows, competitions) and you know what? I'm just going to get fit this year. It's a classic, and there are no deadlines and gallery fees.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? My cousin, who is my age, is having her SECOND grandchild.

4. Did anyone die? Both of Mike's grandparents died this year. My college friend died of MS. One of my high school classmates was murdered, another died of natural causes. My friend's little sister, who I knew growing up on Molokai and had Thanksgiving with every year, killed herself. One of my college professors died last week. My old fat cat died in my arms. The body count has been getting out of control in recent years, I DO NOT LIKE IT.

5. What places did you visit? I went to a library conference in Chattanooga and made it a whole day before ending up in the ER with my organs rupturing. Went to a concert in Waikiki. Scared myself in a cave. Ran from a woman screaming about the devil on a ghost tour. Took the kids on a spooky nighttime ride on the historic Ewa train.

6. What would you like to have in 2023 that you lacked in 2022? Another year gone, and I am still not wearing metallic pants.

7. What moments from 2022 will remain etched upon your memory? 

The long minutes watching Zenny wake up from general anesthesia. The seizure a week later, when we were sick with Covid. 

One of my regular library patrons threw a chair and screamed that he was going to kill himself, then gave a speech to the door counter, which he thought was a security camera, accusing Jack Johnson of a murder conspiracy.

The abandoned kittens, chewing the meat off their dead mother, and the long hours sitting there with a trap, trying to rescue them.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? I joined a fitness program and worked out every day for 4 months, following the meal plans and blowing most of the food budget on fresh produce and high quality proteins.

9. What was your biggest failure? I had no visible fitness results and gained weight anyway.

 

 

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? Months of losing energy and thinking I just needed to exercise harder/take more vitamins/eat more vegetables, and it turned out I was developing cervical cancer, lol.

 
11. What was the best thing you bought? An oven that would not be used as an elimination challenge in a cooking competition.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration? Zenny was a beast this year, tackling kidney surgery, running the kids Spartan race, reading piles of books, and learning to ride horses. Leif learned CAD in robotics and started manufacturing pieces with the scary water-cutting machine. Gavin got a job on campus and made some friends, finally. They're all pretty great.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled? Drunk Wife lost my grandfather when she sent him to the store for beer and he got confused and drove all the way to Phoenix. Also she canceled his Meals on Wheels because she was too drunk to open the gate for the delivery guys twice a week. (My aunt reinstated it before he starved, and she gets points for NOT bonking the woman on the head with a shovel and burying her in the desert.)

 

Also I signed up for Reddit, because Twitter was dying. I'm sorry. (Some jerk stole my regular name, so I'm "muu-mo".) 

14. What did you get excited about? Catching an angry mongoose in a cat trap was a very exciting couple of minutes.

15. What song will always remind you of 2022?  Fleetwood Mac's the Chain, in Our Flag Means Death, my favorite 2 minutes of cinematography of the whole year.

 

And that old fork in the ear, Kate Bush, had her moment this year.

 

 

The radio did not catch me crying in the car. Achieving those #relationshipgoals. 

 

16. Compared to this time last year, are you:

a) happier or sadder? More determined to be happy.
b) thinner or fatter? a bit fatter. Also a lot stronger, even if you can't tell unless we’re arm wrestling.
c) richer or poorer? A bit poorer. Leaning into whole foods and nutrition during an inflation year was rough on the budget.

17. What do you wish you’d done more of? I wanted to want to hike more. I have been following around sportsy people, wishing I liked what they like. But I do not. I like wide foot paths and little wooden bridges and benches to have snacks on. More of that kind of outdoors activity would be nice. 

18. What was your favorite TV program? Our Flag Means Death, Travel Man, and Stranger Things. Ms. Marvel and She Hulk were fun. We’ve been watching Better Call Saul with the teenager, which is the first serious adult show he’s been really into.

19. What was the best book you read? Fairy Tale, by Stephen King, and Go Tell the Bees That I am Gone, by Diana Gabaldon. I have been trying so hard to read the Butcher and the Wren, because it was written by one of my favorite podcast hosts (Alaina Urquart, Morbid), but I just can not. It is very bad, and I can't figure it out, because the podcast is good, and it doesn't seem like writing research notes and writing a story should be so different.

 

20. What did you want and get? My child made it safely through surgery with most of her kidney function. Also I got a camera. And an oven. And I did not die, which is a thing I enjoy.

 
21. What did you want and NOT get? I have somehow still not managed to repaint the house. I just scraped enough peeling paint off of it to make it look like shit. Baby Jesus is going to skip our house and go next door for his whiskey. Better luck next year.

22. "So! How's your love life?"

23. What was your favorite film of this year? Thor: Love and Thunder. Also I watched Everything, Everywhere, All at Once on an airplane while high on pain killers, and that was actually a really good way to experience it, because I was in the right mindset and the dildo fight scene was censored in a very funny way.

 
24. Did you make some new friends this year? I have a new co-worker, which is kind of like having a new friend, in the same way being trapped in an elevator with a stranger is like having a new friend.

25. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? Punching a real person during my boxing workouts. Just one person in particular, actually.

26. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2022? "I'll buy new clothes when I've lost 10lbs" ie: rags.

 
27. What kept you sane? Pets deserve a lot of credit for stopping you from wearing yourself down just by piling on you like muffins when you’d otherwise be getting yourself another cup of coffee or getting ready for work or washing dishes or changing the laundry. Be quiet and still for a little bit, it's okay.


28. Which celebrity/public figure were you into?  You think I am going to say Taika Waititi in a beard, but it was Richard Ayoade absolutely hating every amusement attraction in Europe.

29. What political/news issue stirred you the most? It's been a calmer news year, locally. Someone got eaten by a shark, a medical airplane crashed, and an air glider smacked into a building, but none of my patrons were involved in anything they got caught for.

30. Who did you miss? If dream appearances count for anything, I was missing my high school boyfriend a bit this year (the good one, not the one who's in jail for getting high and stealing a door). We kept bumping into each other, saying hi, and then moving on with the regular dream. Another guy also showed up a few times, usually in a crowd and avoiding eye contact, so I'd keep walking, pretending not to have noticed, and then fall down a flight of stairs or something. I am missing being friends, I guess.

31. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2022.  It's not vitamins, you need to see a doctor.

like that guy from Memento, but with no note-taking system

Having an impaired short term memory might be more fun if it didn't come with the risk of burning the house down. And being pantsless when the fire department shows up because you started organizing wrapping paper halfway through getting dressed, and then went to put laundry in the washer and got distracted looking for chicken eggs. I wonder if now would be a good time to angle for a service dog.

 

nailed it

 

The Christmas Spirit got hold of me for a few minutes this weekend. It was not the good Spirit, though. It was the Christmas Spirit that tries to run over you in the parking lot. On Sunday, the man was having anxiety about elf pajamas. This is his family tradition, and he is in charge of it, but it got away from him this year, and there were no pajamas left anywhere, so I finally felt sorry for him and ditched the kids with my mother so we could drive to the "good" Target and see what they had. I had a moment at the checkout, watching the items add up on the register, looking around at everyone miserably pushing around carts full of garbage that will end up in a landfill, and I suddenly wanted to throw the pajamas at the cashier and run for my life.

 

But that is a cynical and unhelpful way to look at things. Get yourself home. Put the kettle on. Make (forget, burn) some cookies. Sit under a pile of pets. Everything is done for now. There are a lot of reasons why the holidays are hard for people, but we are here right now, and that's not nothing.

20

Gavin came home yesterday, after a close shave at the airport when he realized, almost too late, that no Lyft, Uber, or taxi drivers are awake at 4am on a Thursday in Rochester. Some tired driver finally logged in at 5:30 and he pounced, making it to his terminal just in time for boarding.

Today he’s 20. My tiny baby with feet like potstickers. 

And now I have to go buy a bunch of jeans, shirts, and underwear, because he didn’t pack any. His bag was full of electronics and Trader Joe’s candy. Youths.

Surgery

I’m still recovering from general anesthesia, which turns out to be a longer process than you feel like it should be. I’m mostly fine, so I tried to go back to work today, and it took me about 10 minutes to realize that a) being vertical is no good, because my legs are wobbly in a kind of unpredictable and exciting way where they just GIVE OUT,  and b) my short term memory is in the toilet, which means my reading comprehension is also in the toilet, which is no good for a librarian. I can read words, I just can’t connect them to anything for longer than a minute. Writing this is an adventure.

So I’m back home, winding a ball of yarn and watching cozy British murder mysteries that I can’t follow at all because I’ve forgotten who got killed halfway through. 

Surgery was fine. They dressed me in a plastic gown that made we sweat like a rotisserie chicken, and I told my doctor I would not apologize, because he was the one who decided that this was what he wanted to do with his life. After he left, my nurses all started talking about how handsome he was, and I said, “yeah, well, he came recommended anyway.”

In the recovery room, after I had come around and had a glass of water, the nurses talked freely with one another, banking on their patients having the memories of gold fish. But SURPRISE, terrible work stories are my special interest, and I just jettisoned all my other memories to make room for it.

What one of them said was this:

“I have to work another late shift. Last week I worked one of these shifts, and I got off in the middle of the night. I was driving home on the Pali, and the roads were empty, and I drove RIGHT ONTO the scene of a motorcycle crash. There was a MAN laid out in the middle of the road, and here I was, the first person to come along. And I was like… should I stop? YES, I stopped, don’t worry, I stopped. His friends were all just standing around, talking and looking at him. I didn’t really want to move him, but he was in the road, and he was moving, so I started assessing him. And this guy was MEAN. I said, “do you have a head injury?” And he was like ‘HOW WOULD I KNOW?’ I said, ‘Were you wearing a helmet?’ His friends looked around and found his helmet, which had a crack down the middle and had flown off him, so yeah, he had a head injury. I rolled him over, and he complained, and I was like, ‘I’m just checking you for road rash, settle down.’ And this guy, he had road rash from his lower back aaaall the way down his butt, his pants were pushed down, and pieces of his underwear were, like, embedded in the road rash. I asked his friends if they had called an ambulance and they said no, they had called a guy with a truck. A GUY WITH A TRUCK. I said I could call 911, and the guy was yelling, ‘nooo, hospitals are so expensive, I’m fine.’ His friends were more worried about how they’d get his bike home, like it was this big inconvenience that he’d crashed his motorcycle and now they didn’t know what to do with it. I’m sure alcohol was involved here, and that’s why they didn’t want to involve the police or paramedics. ‘WE CALLED A GUY WITH A TRUCK.’ Ridiculous.” 

I didn’t get to find out whether she called an ambulance anyway or let the dummies roll their buddy into a truck and take off, because the nurses had to wheel someone out of the room. 

Everything is ok for now. Going to pop a pain pill and take a nap. Thanks for thinking of me, folks.

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.