Chilly Days = Chili Days!

Several months back, I wrote about my Grandma’s homemade noodles. How she taught my mom to make them, and my mom taught me. We all make them the same way, yet they all taste a little different from one another. Being such a simple recipe, I have wondered if the distinctive ingredient is the unique love and care of the creator of the batch.

This weekend, in honor of the change in the air from toasty Indian Summer to crisp and sobering autumn chill, not to mention that football season is really underway (is it just me or does it not really seem like football season till it drops below 60 or so?), I made a big batch of chili. It’s a tradition in my life – the first cold weekend is rung in with the zippy, body-and-soul-warming spice of homemade chili. Yum! But unlike Grandma’s noodles, I don’t strive to duplicate, nor even refer to a recipe card. I’ve made chili so many times that I just concoct the base (an impressionist version of Mom’s with my own alterations) from memory now – and will then additionally hocus pocus atop my official chili-cookin’ pot as mood strikes, causing each batch to be a little different than any other. This particular time I added a pinch extra spice and topped it with pepper-jack cheese, hoping to chase the oncoming bug out of my system. As I’m feeling much better today than yesterday, maybe it worked.

The hub likes to come in the kitchen and supervise here and there, giving me tips on how to make a perfect batch. It makes him happy to contribute. I will admit, I started adding a jar of medium or hot salsa to my base recipe per his suggestion. It does add a nice infused zing. He always insists that I use Chi-Chi’s salsa, but I get whatever I get (usually Sam’s Choice). I sort of white-lie about it (“Did you get the good kind”? ~ “Yes, dear”) and he seems just as happy.

Chili on the first cold weekend is in league with a ball park dog on opening day. A funnel cake on a sultry evening at the county fair. A Cadbury Egg when Easter comes around again. It’s the essential culinary part of the experience, and without it things wouldn’t be quite complete. Like each new first-cold-weekend, each batch is similar, but has its own distinct charming characteristics.

And we enjoy each bite, of the batch and of the day, savoring until it’s gone.

Mmmmm.

URGH!!!

This weekend, it arrived - and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

Yes, it was very chilly. The sky was slate gray and the air smelled of oncoming winter. The thermometer didn’t even get above the low 50’s. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

The hub spent the day winterizing the boat, which is always symbolically the nail in the coffin of summer. But that’s not it either.

What I’m talking about is that itching in the eyes that makes you want to claw them out. Then the rib-busting sneezing fits. Then the feeling that your brain vacated your skull in order to make room for all the snot. The body aches and shivers, even though you’ve put two layers of sweats on. And the insufferable scratchy heat all over the underside of your face.

My first cold of the season. Curses!

My downward spiral commenced all day, and by the time I got Incrediboy in bed at 8, I was ready to die. My eyes were so puffy I looked like I’d been in a fight. The Hub announced that I looked like hell and should go to bed.

So I did.

Know what the worst part is? I can’t even take anything because I’m on these ultra-powerful antibiotics for a separate problem with a tooth, so I’m not supposed to take any cold medicine – so no relief for me.

Somebody kill me, please.

Actually that’s the second worst part. The worst part is I fell asleep before 9 and missed Breaking Bonaduce. CURSES!!!

Did anybody tape it? Can I come over? I’ll wear my breathing mask …

A GREAT Recipe for Your Halloween Gig

I caught a little sidebar discussion on a friend's blog comment page about fun Halloween menu items, and thought we'd have a little holiday fun today! This is a great gross-out recipe for Halloween parties that I ran across last year. Hope you have fun with it!

CAT LITTER CAKE

Ingredients:

1 (18 oz.) box German Chocolate Cake mix
1 (18 oz.) box white cake mix
1 pkg. white sandwich cookies
1 large box vanilla instant pudding mix
12 small Tootsie Rolls
1 litter box (a NEW one!)
1 plastic cat box scoop (a NEW one!)
green food coloring

Prepare cake mixes and bake according to directions (any size pans). Prepare pudding mix and chill until ready to assemble. Crumble white sandwich cookies in small batches in blender. (or just smash them up in a big baggie with a rolling pin). Set aside all but about 1/4 cup. To the 1/4 cup cookie crumbs, add a few drops green food coloring and mix using a fork or shake in a jar.

When cakes are cooled to room temperature, crumble into a large bowl. Toss with half the remaining white cookie crumbs and the chilled pudding. NOTE: You probably won't need all of the pudding, mix with the cake and 'feel' it, you don't want it soggy, just moist; gently combine. Put mixture into clean new litter box.

Put three unwrapped Tootsie rolls in a microwave safe dish and heat until soft and pliable. Shape ends so they are no longer blunt, curving slightly (I'll just say it - so they resemble poop). Repeat with 3 more Tootsie rolls and bury in mixture. Sprinkle the other half of cookie crumbs over top. Scatter the green cookie crumbs lightly over the top, this is supposed to look like the chlorophyll in kitty litter. Heat remaining Tootsie Rolls, three at a time in the microwave until almost melted. Scrape them on top of the cake and sprinkle with cookie crumbs.

Place the box on a newspaper and sprinkle a few of the cookie crumbs around. Serve with a clean new pooper scooper.

If you can actually get people to try it, it tastes great. Either way though, it's sure to be a hit and talked about for ages to come.

Enjoy!!! :)

FIN - A Remembrance

I first posted this in August. This week once again marks the anniversary of this moment in my life. I repost to commemorate.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

All is quiet and still, so I'm not sure what woke me up on this morning. I get up from the same position I fell asleep in and cast a long gaze out the window. The sun is just beginning to tint the sky above the clouds lazing on the horizon line - the last remnants of some tropical storm or another, passing by the peninsula a few hundred miles to the east.

I watch the surf wander in and out, sliding over the shore. Bits of seaweed trace the contour of where high tide had stretched in earlier hours. The dunes have been smoothed by wind and sea during the night.

I had come here, thousands of miles from anything familiar, to try and forget you - though I knew that wasn't possible. Particularly when I take you everywhere with me. Not literally, of course. But you are nonetheless ever-present. Your memeory, and "memories" of what could have been and what will never be, a perpetual constriction on my heart. The hole left in my world by your absence ever gaping.

I get dressed, having as little interest in what I put on as I do with anything else in life right now. I pad downstairs, grab a cup of coffee and wander out on to the silky sand.

I spend a lot of time lost in my own thoughts these days. I gather with friends, try to drown out the deafening silence with deafening noise. It works for a while, sometimes. But it doesn't last long. My friends hate to see me so sad. Cheer up! they say, and offer some philosophical self-help quip about how holding on to something that will not return can only hinder your own progression. No one seems to understand that I simply can't act as if nothing happened, that you never existed. That I never really loved you because you were here too briefly. No one understands that just because I cannot hold you in my arms, that you cannot still hold my heart.

Seemingly now that you are gone more than ever before.

Everyone seems to know what's best for you when they have no idea what it's like to love someone so much, that you nearly forget how to breathe when they leave you.

The sand is different here than anywhere else. It feels as if I'm walking on tiny pearls, and clings to my feet in white slippers. The perpetual breeze coming in from the sea runs invisible fingers through my hair. The waves are bigger by the shore than they appeared to be from my window, but oddly slow of pace. They rumble in and massage the shore. I close my eyes and let the sound rinse my aching soul. I breathe deep the sweet salty air and feel all other thoughts fall away but the ones which never do - the thoughts of you.

The sun is rising, and it glints at me over the wandering clouds. I ponder the dawn of my new life, what its purpose and meaning is, to have lost so much and lived to tell. I wonder if I will ever be happy again. If I will ever laugh once more, and truly mean it.

I've been praying to God for a long time now, calling out to Him for help in managing my heartache. Sometimes I feel Him with me. Times like this morning. We communicate without words - more with feelings and impressions - and He soaks into me much as the sea vanishes below the surface of the sands as it draws back into itself. I know that the best thing I can do is lay my burdens in His hands. But I just haven't been ready.

I think of you always. I can almost feel your skin, and smell your scent. I imagine your hands in mine. I imagine that you are walking the water's edge with me rather than I alone on this peaceful morning. I wish I knew why you had to go.

The morning sky is bright with color now. Down the beach a man is combing up the seaweed. In the other direction, a couple is combing for treasures brought in from the waves sent by that distant storm. Seagulls scream overhead. The surf carries on its continuous song.

Though I could swear I just took a sip only a moment ago, my coffee is now cold and bitter in my cup.

I look at the large dollup of fucshia and indigo cloud that is cradling the morning sun. I suddenly feel the time is right.

And so, I let you go.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Dare I Open My Eyes

If there’s anything can be said about me, it’s that I love ghost stories.

One October when I was in college, my boyfriend got tickets for a haunted tour of our city. The tour, taken by bus, visited spots around the downtown area, known or considered to be haunted. We would all get out in order to more closely feel the location, as the guide would fill us in on the corresponding lore of the site. We visited well-known places, such as the city’s oldest and largest graveyard, the downtown hospital where a ghostly nurse had been reported several times walking through the courtyard at night, and the old abandoned state penitentiary (now gone to make room for the NHL expansion arena), where many a rotten-souled offender had met his end.

We also stopped at lesser-known places. Small shops, historical buildings and residences. The one I remember most vividly was a Victorian home just east of downtown. I could have walked there from where I was living at the time. It had since been converted to an attorney’s office, but many years ago as a residence, it sat on the market for a long time. It was reportedly haunted, and people were more superstitious and easily scared away from such rumored places. Eventually a man, finding himself to be clever as he was unphased by such stories, finally bought it for a fraction of its worth. He moved in.

Not long after settling, he awoke from a deep sleep one night, feeling all was not well. He rolled over in bed and looked up at the ceiling. Suspended above him was an illuminated disembodied head. It faced him, wide black eyes fixated upon his, hair and ethereal gauzy strips of clothing floating wreathlike as if in water. The mouth was frozen in a strained and panicked silent scream.

The man was so terrified he couldn’t move. The two stared at each other until dawn, when the ghost face slowly faded away with the light of morning. Once he could manage to move, he got out and never returned to the house outside of daylight hours.

To this day, there are times when I will wake up at night feeling as though I am being watched. I will take a moment to brace myself for what I might see hovering above me if I open my eyes.

Conversion

The boy and the dog and I were playing in the yard last night as the hub was building shelves in the barn. We shot a few hoops, walked back to see the retired racehorse who lives behind us, explored the mysteries of the mini-thicket separating our property from his pasture as huffy goldfinches flitted over our heads and gave us what-for. We studied an iridescent garden spider that has taken residence in the window well. We played keep-away within the graceful bowing branches of the willows. We chased, played ball, tumbled in the cool dew of the grass. The streaks of early autumn clouds above us changed from white to golden, cantaloupe, papaya, and plum in the denim sky. As I threw the slobber-soaked tennis ball in a game of fetch during a downtime spell, the boy interrupted his own bark-picking and bug-studying to run over and give me a tackling hug and deliciously sweet kiss on my cheek.

Not long ago I had an interstate backing up to my yard, and the din of motors, sirens, and jake-brakes went unnoticed. We lived in a typical suburban neighborhood, similar houses placed 30 feet apart, convenient to shopping, banking, and entertainment. We lived in the court part of a court-style street, and chatted with neighbors from our porches. We all watched each others’ backs. Up the road lived my mother-in-law, in the house where my husband grew up. Further up the road were once high-end apartments that had since gone Section Eight. Addresses from that block were regular features in the Police Report section of the suburban newspaper. There is now a brand new Walgreens on the corner where that nice night club used to be. We used to go there for drinks and dancing on 80’s Night when we were first married. Someone was murdered there a few years ago, and six months later it closed down.

The hub and I both had lived in the city our whole lives. I myself had lived in various points of the suburbs, on the campus of our Big 10 university, and in the virtual heart of downtown, and felt comfortable and at home in each. The urban racket surrounding me was soothing, and a part of who I was. I liked it.

I now often see more deer than I do people. I walk an acre to get my mail rather than simply reaching out the front door, and in addition to just a driveway, neighboring houses are separated by alfalfa, soybean, and cornfields. The sound of a motorized vehicle whizzing by out front is an oddity, except during the fall harvest when farm equipment regularly lumbers back and forth. The dog has been sprayed by a passing-through skunk in our back yard. Twice.

I wasn’t sure if I’d adjust well to country living, but I now can’t see myself ever returning to the city to live. The hub and I are cozily content. The boy is growing up in a clean, safe, big sky, close to nature, close to God place.

I love country life.

Except for the de-skunking part.

Idle Musings on Time

I’m not sure what brought this on – maybe pondering the Mayans yesterday, as they were masters of time tracking and calendars – but an abstract thought has clattered around in my head sporadically throughout my life (cue the sound effect of the Yahtzee cup). Exactly what is time, as a thing? How is it structured? Where does it come from, and where does it go?

Is it in a straight line? Or is it … layered?

Have you ever been driving along in your car, and you go under a bridge or past a transmitter tower or move from one broadcasting range into another, and for a few moments you kind of pick up two stations at once? Or for you old folks/kids deprived of cable in their youth like me, remember the days before cable, when you had to tune in UHF stations? There could be several stations on that same UHF channel, but you had to twist the knobby around and wrangle the antenna to find them. What if time is layered in frequencies like that? What if different points in time or different dimensions all kind of occupy the same space, but on different levels? What if the beings we call ghosts or the experiences we call premonitions or visions, are just glimpses of another “program” or “station” that we get by accident?

Maybe time is organized like the pages in a book. Different points in time are actually lying very closely together, but are separated by the thin opaqueness of the page. But think back on, say, the encyclopedias in the school library. Remember sometimes there would be transparencies in there? Like the invisible guy where you could lay his nervous system and his muscular system and his vital organs over top of his skeleton and see all the layers simultaneously?

Could a setup like this explain déjà vu?

Or, maybe time does just go in an endless line in both directions, and I simply spend way too much of it conjuring up such nonsense in my head. But it’s just kind of fun to think about weird stuff.

CLEANSED - A Brief Reflection

The cool clean water enveloped me, and every cell in my body let out a nearly audible sigh. It was just so incredibly hot up above.

Moments before I had descended the stone staircase from the ground above to enter the naturally formed cathedral. The walls were draped in veils of ivy and moss, and long dreadlocky vines poured down from the skylight a hundred feet above, disappearing below the surface. Waterfalls wept from the rock, trickled and splattered on all faces. Small, inky black catfish swam in lazy circular samba.

Imagine, if you will, what velvet may feel like if it were liquid. Picture in your mind the deepest, richest color between cornflower and jade. You will then get an idea of the water there. They say the bottom has never been detected. It’s just as well, probably, as the sinkhole was once used for human sacrifices.

We’d spent the day exploring Chichen Itza, the long abandoned mecca of the Mayan empire. We’d stood in the center of the acoustically perfected ball field. We’d seen the observatory from where ancient eyes and minds contemplated the heavens. We paid quiet homage beside temples adorned with the serpent god Kukulcan and a sea of stone skulls. Skulls representing the lives of those sacrificed to the gods. We had climbed to the top of the great sun pyramid to survey the site from above. Ninety-one steps on each side of the great pyramid. Times four sides, plus the top platform made for 365 steps. The same number of days in a calendar year.

We’d spent an unparalleled day communing with a long-gone race as brilliant as they were brutal.

I climbed from the sinkhole feeling baptized.

Perhaps the wisdom of the Mayans had somehow penetrated my fibers. Perhaps their souls had somehow fused with mine. All I can tell you is that when I left Chichen Itza, I was changed.

D'OH!

Back in my early twenties I worked at this really cool store. They used to call them head shops. It smelled like leather and incense and wax, and sold stuff like windchimes, weird looking candles, bootchains, t-shirts, black light posters, and tobacco pipes. I had a couple buddies there, they were brothers. We worked together all the time and hung out together when we weren't working. We shared a lot of laughs and I have carried many fond memories of them throughout my life.

We have some neighbors down the road with an unusual last name - the same name as the brothers. We got to chatting with them when we first met than and it turns out they are their parents. Such a small world!

Long story short, she invited me to a Southern Living party this weekend. She is a quintessential Southern Living decorator woman, and though I am not, I thought it would be fun to go and meet some new people. The younger brother's girlfriend also attended, and he came to pick her up after the party. He'd aged, of course, and his hair was much, much shorter - but certainly I'd have remembered who he was. I struck up a conversation with him.

He didn't remember me. "At all", as he put it.

The hub later suggested that maybe he was only saying that so his girlfriend wouldn't get jealous or something. But I sure felt like a fool. Nothing boosts your mood like being completely forgotten by someone.

Urgent Care

I had to run to Urgent Care yesterday afternoon. While I was helping the hub lower the ramp on the utility trailer, I gashed the side of my finger open. It wasn't serious enough to need stitches, but I haven't had a tetanus shot since I was 13. Safe to say that was much longer than 10 years ago, so I thought it best to go get a tetanus shot.

I'd not been to this Urgent Care, so I had to fill out all the obligatory paperwork. Family medical history, drug allergies, all that stuff. Then I sat in an empty reception area for 15 or 20 minutes. It wasn't too bad, considering they had a TV and there was a game on.

A nurse who sounded like she had a 2-pack-of-Pall-Malls-a-day habit called me back. She weighed me (always my favorite part), took me into a tiny exam room, and asked me all the questions I'd already answered on my paperwork. She then told me, with a smile, that the doctor would be in in just a few minutes.

I waited.

I waited some more.

No TV in this room, so after a while it really started to suck.

I helped myself to the only reading material in the room, and read it twice. I now feel very in the know about middle ear infections. I sang a few songs to myself, in my head. I thought about singing them out loud - really loud - to remind everyone I was still back there.

I studied the floor and wondered idly if the black scuff mark in the center was from my shoe or someone else's. I noticed that the cabinets looked like they were made out of chipboard, which led to another idea. The best way to get someone to appear is to start doing something you shouldn't be doing. So I started peeking in drawers and cabinets. I familiarized myself with the locations of the paper gowns, latex gloves, microscope slides, iodine, and something that looked like miniature jumper cables. I tried to imagine what those were supposed to be for, and then decided I'd rather not know.

Still, no one came.

My back was getting tired from sitting on the exam table so I moved to the chair. There I dozed off.

The doctor came in and woke me up I don't know how long after. He asked me all the questions that the paperwork and the nurse asked me before, and then agreed I needed a tetanus shot. Thank goodness, I never would have thought of that. He told me the nurse would be back in to administer and it was nice to meet me.

More waiting.

Finally the nurse and my shot came. It didn't hurt too badly. She told me she'd be back in just a minute with my discharge paperwork.

More waiting. I finally left the exam room and found them all loitering around a counter, chatting. I said, "I'm sorry, was I supposed to come out here?" The nurse said, "No, honey, I'll bring your paperwork back in a minute."

Back to the exam room. More waiting.

Finally I got my paperwork, which just said I'd been assessed and given a tetanus shot, and I was free to go. I looked at my cell phone clock. It only took two hours of my Saturday and thrity-five bucks out of my checking account. Suh-weet! Better than getting lock-jaw though, I guess.

If you ever need to know anything about middle ear infections, just let me know.