Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

Tiara

So, last week was a Bye Week for the opera, but tonight brings the premiere of Fire Shut Up in My Bones, and given that I muttered "trigger warning" at the intermission of Rigoletto with its rapes and abductions, I don’t know how much I'm looking forward to an opera that might be about incest and sexual abuse. However, the author of the original book showed up on T.V. last week and if he comes I’m certain I could spot him due to his distinctive beard, so that’s exciting.

I am wearing my frayed fringed duster vest for the opera this week, in contrast with next week, when I am blinging out for the Coronation of Poppea.

A big part of the Coronation costume arrived last Friday:

It was purchased for twenty bucks on eBay, and I knew it would fit my tiny pea head because I had tried on similar ones at David's Bridal.

I told the saleswoman why I was getting a tiara at my advanced age, that it was for the opera, and I thought I had explained the situation completely when she asked me, "When's the happy occasion?"

I blinked at her a few times. "The opera? It's later this month." (Jeez, lady. Look at me.)

The e-Bay tiara is missing two rhinestones, but as they say, it'll never show on a galloping pony.

Toto Fails Me

The Toto toilet has been dependable (read: doesn't clog) since last August when we met it and it became part of our family.

Last week began with a four-day period of bowel inactivity. This is average. This is not cause for concern. It is well below my personal best of two weeks. However, when the inactivity was ... over ... the Toto did not dispose of it in its usual charming way, with the deluge and the woosh and the disappearance and the satisfying ca-chunk (go here, jump to 32 seconds in). Instead, there was the deluge, the disappearance, and then it acted like a normal toilet. It filled and it drained, only slowly, and no soul-satisfying ca-chunk.

I told Gary, and thus began an evening of toilet diagnosis. We got quite an education in plunger types and plunging technique. He would see a video, try that technique, I would read an article, try that technique, and all along the Toto would just drain slowly and, as I say, no ca-chunk, the Toto way of saying, "Poop? What poop? No one poops in this house."

This lasted till two in the morning when I pleaded with Gary, "Stop. It. Stop flushing. Stop plunging. I have to get up in the morning."

In the morning, of course, the first flush showed great improvement, and the second ended with the ca-chunk that filled my heart with song.

This week, it has now been five days.

One More Opera Story Before We See the Next Opera

I was in the lobby of the theater, admiring the effort people put into their attire for the opera, especially the two women in full-on ballgowns. One wore a silver ballgown: she had blonde hair, and she was followed by a brunette similarly dressed up.

I nodded at the brunette and said, "Nice." as if to say, "I approve of the effort you put into your dress." She smirked at me, or winked at me, or somehow acknowledged me.

Imagine my humiliation when I looked on stage mid-opera and saw the silver ballgown, with the blonde still in it, because she was playing Countess Rosina. And then I realized the brunette I spoke to was Susanna, the other female lead.

So, evidently the cast moves through the audience in the lobby beforehand and are not just cute kids playing dress-up who need your encouragement! Who knew? Not me!

I will be looking closely at everyone in the lobby tonight who appears to be well-dressed and might have lung power.

 

Irritable Shopping Syndrome

Last week I had to find something to wear to the opera. It was almost an impossible task. From Wednesday through Friday I was shopstipated, and then on Friday the floodgates opened and I bought like mad.

Wednesday, everything looked adequate. Not special. I kept seeing things that would be great for work, until I touched them, and then the rubbery polyester made my skin crawl. I bought three work-worthy natural fiber blouses, but nothing special that said, "I made an effort for the opera."

Thursday, I gave up on my mall on the rural side of the Missouri to one closer to the city (West County). Salesladies would ask if they could help, and I would either touch some polyester and shudder, or I would shake my head and say, "I think I'm in the wrong store." Truly, I would go into a store to discover the demographic had changed from opera-lover to pot farmer. Nordstroms was particularly jarring: all shabby linen shorts.  I saw a few things that might have been nice, but instead in this on-line age it seems stores want to display their clothing in the same fashion you would see it in an Amazon box: wrinkled and wadded up.

Friday, though, I got my act together, and I knew where to go and what to say. "Floaty, with sleeves, for the opera." I had done some pre-shopping and found a kimono at Anthropolgie, a store I had only ever gone into as far as the first price tag. I then had a purpose: find all the kimonos at the Galleria (even closer to the city), test the limits of "One Size Fits All," and then coordinate from there.

After I scooped up three kimonos, linen pants, plus seven work-worthy bras, tanks, and blouses, I was set for the opera season.

Did I have on last-minute beer goggles on Friday? Not sure. We shall see in a few weeks when I attend the Opera in these pants (they're linen, so picture them bunched up around my knees).

I will pair them with the thirty-four year old silk Kimono from my trousseau, and a tiara, because the opera is the Coronation of Poppea.

It's Tornado Season Again

In the last week or so I've heard the tornado sirens twice, twice watched the Channel Four Storm Tracker point the tornado Parallelograms of Death directly at my house, and even took cover in my basement once.

(The Channel Four weatherman is a big fan of phoning up your friends who are in the tornado's path and telling them to seek shelter. At one a.m. during the Jefferson City tornado he exhorted us to call our friends in JC, wake them up, and tell them to seek shelter. Had I any friends in Jeff City I might have done it, but what if they were already in the basement? I would hope they would stay in the basement muttering, "Yes, Ellen, I know there's a tornado.")

Everyone at work has a tornado story: just tree damage like ours, or a roof gone, or entire rooms gone. Friend 4 once lived in the apartments that were damaged in the Jefferson City tornado.

Tornadoes are getting too close.

(Photo of Channel Four weatherman pointing approximately at my house alerting me I have 14 minutes to live.)

Where I Could Live

I know at some point in my life I will be alone. No kids, older husband, unwell brother.

I think about leaving. I know, no matter where you go, there you are, but by the same token, I could be me anywhere. Anywhere on earth.

A friend planned to move to France upon retirement, but it turned out she still has family obligations that held her at home. I don't have those obligations.

Would I stay in the States? I wouldn't have to. (Seriously, States, President Donald Trump?) Would I stay in a city? I think I need to be close to an MRI machine. And croissants. Would I need the English language? Well, that would certainly give my neurons a workout: learning German or Italian.

Freedom, though. Incredible.

I suppose if I'm old enough to be free of my location, I'd be old enough to want the familiar, though.

Opera Fan

After Friend Anne and I went to the opera last year to see The Trial and La Traviata, we got season tickets for this year. This year we get to see The Marriage of Figaro, Rigoletto, The Coronation of Poppea (quite old), and Fire Shut Up In My Bones (a modern story).

I am very excited to see The Marriage of Figaro in particular. Still, a little bit of me is afraid I've already heard all the good parts. Will it be like a movie where the good stuff is all used up in the trailer? I'm worried. Don't tell me! No spoilers.

Add Birding to the List of Old People Behaviors

The other day I was looking out on the patio and I saw a new bird. I raced to the birding book, misidentified it as a Fox Sparrow at first, but now I know it's a Brown Thrasher. (By his song ye shall know him.)

It's an entertaining animal. It hops, and with every hop its tail bounces like a lever, like it's a railroad handcar.

When I thought it was a Fox Sparrow, I had Gary buy birdseed with millet, for that is what Fox Sparrows eat. Brown Thrashers will have none of that -- we have plenty of what they eat: nuts.

(In the same vein, if you want skunks in your yard, buy Purina O.N.E. Lamb and Rice Dog Food. Back in the day we had loads of skunks selectively eating the lamb chunks: now that Gary's stopped putting out dog food we see no skunks.)

I suppose birdwatching is an elderly person hobby for the same reason doing jigsaw puzzles are as well. Both rely on your subliminal powers of observation. I've started to notice that I race through jigsaw puzzles after a minute or two, not because there are fewer pieces, but because my subconscious has observed all the details and I don't have to manually pick them out. I think at some point you have seen enough birds in your life that eventually you move into a new detailed level of observation. Birds stop being "brown bird" and "mean bird" to Fox Sparrow/Brown Thrasher and Blue Jay.

Really, I'm not even 57. I shouldn't be eating Werther's and birdwatching. What is left? Bingo?

Ring-Naked

I generally don’t take off my wedding and anniversary rings, but I need to prepare chicken wings and then I have landscaping ahead of me, digging up rocks, so I am going to be ring-naked for a couple of days.

I hate being ring-naked. These rings are on me almost every day and night (except for that one morning I woke up and they were in the bed; I pray that I was having some sleep-walking divorce dream). I had to boil them recently because raw pie crust had embedded deep in the setting.

On the rare occasions the rings come off I stroke the spots where the rings usually are. It feels so odd, and so youthful and slim. Strangely, they also feel like the muscles under the ring have atrophied. 

So my ring fingers feel either 1) untouched by marriage or 2) deformed, like with foot-binding. Either way it isn't pleasant. 

Doris Do

I well remember the day that Mom and her friend/hairstylist Sherri cracked the code with Mom's baby-fine hair.

"We call it the 'Doris Day Do'," Mom said. "It takes a lot of hairspray. I can't do it myself, but Sherri will do it for me once a week."

It was somewhat like this:

... that's how it looked on Doris Day, anyway. This is how it looked on Mom (after a week of sleeping on it and a day of gardening):

It's coming apart a bit in her photo, but essentially it was a lot of hair teasing, especially at the crown, plus hairspray and bobby pins. It looked quite nice on her (photo above nonwithstanding).

Of course, only someone "lucky" enough to have baby-fine hair could make it defy gravity well enough to stay in an up-do for a solid week. You know Doris Day with her healthy hair sneezed once and it all sprang apart.

I have a definite bald spot now at my crown, and I have to use a lot of hairspray to arrange the strands so they cover my pasty white scalp.

I finally gave in and adopted my Mom's hairstyle. That's a turning point.

Now all I have to do is constantly keep my nose in the air, as in the photo above. It stretches the wattle.

Sheet Turnover

How often does a normal human buy sheets? I don’t think I’m normal.

No matter the thread count, a bottom sheet will only last me a year. And they always wear out in the same place. Evidently when I sleep I rub my heels into the sheet like I’m a giant cricket or something. There’s always a tear there after six months. I then sew up the tear, flip the sheet around to hide the tear, and start working on the new, fatal tear.

I have the solution, wearing socks to bed, but is this normal? I do not remember this level of sheet turnover in my past. 

 

How Did I Miss This Part 2: The Yippies

So, the Gore/Buckley documentary revealed to me that the Chicago Democratic convention riots were not right outside the convention hall, but in Grant Park, along Michigan Avenue, by the hotels where the conventioneers stayed. The actual convention was in the stockyards miles away.

”I didn't know that.” I thought, “Now I must research all the details exhaustively.” 

And here again, I take you in order through all the details I knew about the Chicago Democratic Convention to the main salient point that I did not know at all.

• The 68 Democratic convention was held in Chicago.
• Dan Rather was roughed up by security while reporting on the convention floor.
• Young people (Yippies) protesting the war rioted on the streets. 
• There was a trial later, and the leader of the rioters was bound and gagged during the trial.

Of course, looking at that list you can see there’s a lot I did not know. The salient point I didn’t know?

When arrested, the Yippies were charged with disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, and [SPOILERS] bringing a pig to Chicago.

I immediately Googled “Yippies Pig” and found a newspaper image of Chicago policeman, holding a pig. The caption was “Pig arrested.”

Again, how did I miss this? Was this information suppressed when I learned about the Chicago Seven (née Eight) in history class? Free yourself, click the link and read the story of Pigasus, nominee for President ’68.  

I had no idea that the Yippies led up to the convention by nominating a literal pig for president, and that their scheme to nominate a pig was discussed at their trial. I also had no idea that it was illegal to bring a pig to Chicago, unless you got a license and bribed the appropriate officials.

Also, search Google Images for "Pigasus arrested." I can't get you an image because Getty Images appears to own it. The better to SUPPRESS it. Pigasus in 2020!

 

Rocks

Here's a little detail of some landscaping I did in my front yard.

I want to curtail the creeping of the Creeping Jenny, so I'm testing to see if it can jump across rocks.

This will make my friends at TeddyJ laugh, because it's an obvious homage to the lovely landscaping at TeddyJ, shown here:

As always, don't be jealous of the rocks that I got.

Bath Face Done

Gary in Bath is as done as it is going to get.

From photo:

... to this:

... then this:

... and I'm stopping at this:

I'm done because it's going backward, and the glasses are all wrong now, and the lenses are two different sizes and yes, it's time for this one to just stop. Not a good experience. Instead of Gary making a humorous face next to a statue with a funny mouth, it's Gary with dead eyes next to a demon in Hell. I could chalk that one up as a study, and try again, but I don't think I will. Portraits are hard, and not satisfying at all.

Sheets

I was cleaning out my linen closet, and I found the light brown art nouveau patterned sheets that I used on my twin bed the one semester I spent away in college.

I have not used those sheets since 1981. The dorm bed was the last twin I was in until I got the guest room bed, and the old sheets do not match the guest room color scheme. 

What they did match, perfectly, were the wood closet doors in my WPA-built dorm room. And then I bought this Mucha poster, which I still have, and the whole room came together, as they say.

It was a heartless move, but after almost forty years I pitched the dorm room sheets, sad for the loss of my first independent attempt at decorating, and my first attempt at independence. Really, though, who has a sentimental attachment to sheets?

Electrical Outlets of the Semi-Rich and Almost Famous

In my teens I cleaned for some of the Saint Louis near-rich and near-famous. Not well-off enough to have both a staff and backup staff, but well off enough to hire our team of maids (who arrived in a Cadillac) when the housekeeper took vacation.

For the most part they weren't big names, more like people who had siblings who married into big names. Big enough names that I'm not naming them, for fear of some Saint Louis-style retribution.

All these tangentially influential people had two features in their homes I'd never seen in my middle-class world.

First, they all had carpeting so plush it was exhausting to vacuum. (An added vacuuming indignity: we were required to leave post-vacuum nap marks that were exactly parallel.)

Second, the rooms were large enough to require something I'd never seen elsewhere: electrical outlets engineered into the plush shag carpeting.

It made sense. Say you have a room with a huge bed positioned dramatically dead center, and the room is so large the bed is six feet from any wall. Where do you plug in your reading lamp? If you have one of these houses, the electric outlet is built in to the floor by your bed:

(I take it they never rearrange the furniture, given they'd have to rewire the house.)

Now, no doubt the fancy in-laws of the people I cleaned for had these brass outlets like the one above, with the protective doors. My clients had exposed metal outlets that were embedded 2 inches into the plush carpet, with the electrical fixture exposed to the carpet fibers and any potential bathroom floods.

You would think that you could trip on the tangle of lamp cords that made a nest around the embedded outlet.  We were always instructed to take up any slack by wrapping the cord around the base of the lamp, or humidifier, or whatever.

Since then, even though it was forty years ago, I feel deep middle-class shame when I see my lamp cords swing from tabletop to floor, touch the floor, then (the horror) arc up again to the wall outlet. I have an unreasonable connection between class and cords.

No contact with the floor and the cord! It’s tacky, and it’s dangerous. 

Does that seem rational? No. Still, it is why my tables look like this from above:

and this from below:

It makes me feel that if I can't have a lamp that plugs into the floor, I can at least have a table that plugs directly into the wall.

 

Comet Croissanterie

A few weeks ago, I found a day-old pastry on the break table at work. I ate it, because the diet I have stuck to for three years has been impossible to follow the last few months.

Even a day old it was the best pastry I have ever had. I immediately set out to find where it came from. One department-wide email later I found that it came from Comet Croissanterie and Creamery in Kirkwood. Take a normal pastry and make it more flaky and laminated, and then toast it or deep-fry it or something to make it extra-crispy. I became intent on having another, because this was no normal pastry.

Attempt 1: This place is in Kirkwood, and happily the next Saturday I was in Kirkwood picking someone up from the train station. I was early, and I set off to get to the Croissanterie on foot, but I realized I couldn't get there and back in time for the train.

Attempt 2: The next day, I had all but convinced Gary to go there, but then he balked at going to Kirkwood, 24 miles away.

Attempt 3: The next week I traveled there specifically, and I was three miles away when Siri alerted me they would be closing in two minutes. 48 miles round trip, no pastry.

Attempt 4: I looked up the closing hours (noon!), and got there at about 11:30. I walked up to the door! Victorious! Croissants would be mine! No! Door does not open! Door has this sign!

"Or until sold out." I suppose they've been selling out often enough they officially close an hour earlier and then sometimes even earlier than that. Another 48 miles wasted.

Attempt 5: The next day, Sunday, I was up at 6:45, dressed, ready to go, and Gary wheedled, "I can go with you if you wait." I gave him half an hour, and he was up and moving in time. So, 96 miles into this endeavor, I decided to given it another 48 and drive there one more time.

And they were there! And open! And we got one of everything:

(Not pictured: a breakfast sandwich and half of the work pastry, which ended up being an Almond Bear Claw, only served on weekends, which was a "croissant wrapped around homemade sweet almond paste." And deep fried or something, I don't know, it was heavenly. Also shown: some kind of off-the menu muffin, a croissant, a pain au chocolate, and a strawberry-rhubarb turnover.)

Two things on the web menu were not there: the cinnamon rolls and the biscuits and gravy, which astonishingly did not sell well. I would think if one were decadent enough to frequent a pastry shop, one would not draw the line at biscuits and gravy.

Perhaps because it was lamb gravy? Now I really want biscuits and lamb gravy.

Car Key

Last Wednesday I dawdled away my last fifteen minutes at work: went to the bathroom, checked in with friends, divvied up my hours worked and tracked them in the computer system. This is my daily Farewell To Work Dance. The last dance step is snagging my car key - and - I couldn't find it.

I assumed I had just done the car key snag early, so I retraced my steps: I checked my pockets, bathroom stall, friends, laptop bag - no key.

I had to assume I had dropped it in the parking garage that morning. And a Mini key lying next to a Mini car - who could resist that temptation? (Besides Gary - one time we were in a closed used-car lot and found a car key on the ground that did indeed open a nearby car.  We just sat in the car for a bit, and then returned the key through the service department drop-slot with a note that said the car cornered well.)

Since I imagined someone finding the key by the car then driving merrily away, my anxiety immediately bought a new car (fully electric). I didn't mourn the Mini for a minute. But before I contacted the authorities, or even went out to the parking garage to see the burnt rubber and tread marks leading away from my empty spot, I retraced all my steps from when I hit the building at nine in the morning.

I rounded the corner by the first room I'd been in that day and shouted, "OH. THANK. GOD." Because there was my car key, sitting calmly in the middle of the table. Electric car fantasies went dark when I saw my familiar key fob.

A friend within earshot called out, "Was that your car key?" 

I staggered out of the room, "IT HAS BEEN IN HERE SINCE NINE IN THE MORNING!" I said, aghast.

He replied, "Yeah, we wondered whose key it was."

I covered my car key with kisses and I've kept a close eye on it since.

 

Improvement: Interior

Someday I will have to update the interior of the house. The house is like me: even if I exercised and lost weight I would still be old and unattractive. Even if tried to update my house -- paint over the stenciling, remove the Waverly wallpaper -- it will still be an eighties house with a kitchen visible from the great room / beamed ceiling / fireplace. It would be like trying to update a house with a sunken living room: you’d always expect Mary Tyler Moore to wave at you through the kitchen pass-through.

Some maintenance needs to be done on the inside. In particular, I want another Toto toilet, so enamored am I of the first one. I am crushed every time Gary hogs our one Toto toilet and I have to do my business on the original crappy crapper. So low to the ground. Such tardy flushing. I barely feel human using it.

That does mean an update to our time capsule master bathroom - virginal and untouched this 30 years. Never been painted. Builder toilet and lighting and tile. I confess that a little bit of me feels that the whole house will collapse if we pull that thread.

 

 

Improvement: Side Yard

We are staying close to home again this vacation season, so that means we will again invest in home improvements instead of memories. The driveway absolutely needs to be resurfaced or replaced, and if I put in a large, slow-growing evergreen, a mugo pine perhaps, the front bed will be done.

The side yard and back yard also need to be attended to. I am at a loss on the side yard. We've had a side yard like our neighbors: a bed extending a few feet from the side of our house, only ours had the added attraction of a rotting wood border. 

I have been looking at a lot of Pinterest images of side yards. I do not need a spectacular side yard: just a place to keep peonies and flowering plants and one evergreen to cover up the spot where the hail dinged the siding. 

I want something between this, which everyone has:

and this Pinterest extravaganza:

Cleaning Regimen

My cleaning regimen is that I clean when people are coming over. There was a brief episode last week when we thought the tax preparer was coming by and I hurriedly cleaned the public spaces: the guest bathroom and the great room. 

However, yesterday I was in the non-guest bathroom, shaving my feet, as I do, and I was too enthusiastic with my pedicure and a bit of blood got on the floor. Wiping up the bit of blood set off a domino effect and half an hour later the bathroom was spotless. 

When Gary noticed the cleaning noises had stopped, he appeared in the bathroom doorway and asked. “Why are you cleaning? Is someone coming over?”

Sweater

I spied a young thin woman at work wearing a very eye-catching asymmetrical sweater. It had ME written all over it. (Or rather, unabridged, it had LOOK AT ME written all over it. The fringe, the asymmetry, the cowl neck were all designed to grab attention.)

I complimented her, and immediately stalked that sweater online. In a few hours I had found it, surprisingly in my size, in China, and I purchased for $13. I did not feel good about it.

I suspected I would never see my $13 or the sweater, and I got the email the next day saying they couldn't fill the order. Surprisingly, a few days later, I got my $13 back.

For a few days after that the sweater became my Idée Fixe. By the end of the week I had plans to buy it in a smaller size, locally sourced, then take it apart, make a larger pattern, reverse-engineer it out of t-shirt material, fringe the t-shirt material, and then add BEADS, yes thread BEADS through the fringe YES BEEADSSSS, and thankfully Amazon intervened and said, "Recommended for you!" They recommended The Sweater, from another source, and in my size. There it was. Well, still in China, that's where it was specifically, but eventually it was mine.

Strangely, the first day I wore it no one even looked at me, but a week later I tried again and three friends and a stranger complimented my new sweater. I suppose my air of "Screw you guys, I LIKE this sweater" helped me carry it off the second time around.

Spring Cleaning

I understand why people wait until spring to clean. Everything looks so filthy in the winter light anyway, so why bother? You clean, and then the sun shines a floodlight at floor level and every speck of dust casts a foot-long shadow.

But last week I was outside and the air was full of oxygen, and I thought, "I could go back home and clean." But I did not, because the sun was setting.

That made me wonder, what are the perfect conditions for spring cleaning?

1. Your house has to be reasonably clean already, because spring cleaning is devoted to crazy stuff like dusting the baseboards and door tops.
2. The house must be filled with spring sunlight, and ALL the interior lights must be on, the better to see the filth.
3. Daffodils must be up so you can place a vase of them on your table.
4. It cannot have rained in the last day, because wet footprints will mar your shiny floor.
5. No one can have mowed in the last day, again, because you don't want grass bits on your floor.
6. It cannot be too hot. Eighty degrees is too hot.
7. It has to be a weekend, because you won't get the full sun during work hours in the spring.

And of course, this is why I haven't done any spring cleaning for ...let me think ... five years.

Cookbook

So here is my 1,000+ page America's Test Kitchen Cookbook. (Sans dust jacket: dust jackets are bogus).

I went through the index and started putting post-its on all the pages that interested me.

I used up the entire pad.

I am very excited. 

Sin Upon Sin

8:45 am: apple for breakfast, because I am visiting the new Dapper Donut mini-donut franchise and I don't want to be hungry. Just one donut.

9:00: Minimum order of donuts is three. I order three. Gary balks at three. Gary overrides me and orders 24.

9:01: Three hot mini-donuts for brunch.

9:02: Eight hot mini-donuts for brunch.

12:00: All the leftover Chinese for lunch, because all the wicked foods need to be gone by tomorrow when the diet starts anew.

4:00: Hazelnut ice cream bar that's been in the freezer for months because Gary won't eat it.

5:30: One leftover slice of pizza that MyFitnessPal says is 490 calories, which seems steep, especially since we got the thin crust, St. Louisans that we are.

It is 10:19. I am going to go eat the last bit of garbage food that is floating around the house (a frozen Lindor truffle) and then go to bed and digest this 1,500 calories into the half a pound it is destined to be.

Progress of Bath Face

Here is where we last left the Face of Gary in the Roman Baths:

I scribbled away with the marine blue to get the values right.  This is how it looks now - his face needs to get a wash of pink so it isn't so blue:

His mouth still isn't right. He just looks cranky, not pulling a face like he is in the original photo below:

The statue's mouth is wrong as well. I think there needs to be a lot more shadow on the statue's upper lip and a shade more on Gary's.

I meant this one to be much looser, more alla prima, but it didn't happen. Since I did that one teacup value study it appears that I don’t move on until I get the darks right. So that means just like the teacups, it won’t really be right until the highlights go on, and that’s the last step.

George Bernard PShaw

What’s your opinion of George Bernard Shaw? My opinion just plummeted in half an hour last night.

Here's what happened. I thought of that line, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

I reminded myself that George Bernard Shaw said that. Then I figuratively patted myself on the head for knowing that. Then I wondered, “What play is that from? Major Barbara? I bet it is. I’ll look that up.” 

Nope. It isn’t. I don’t know why I thought GBS said that: the Internet said definitively it was said first by Irina Dunn,  then made popular by Gloria Steinem. 

Annoyed, I wondered, “Why did I think that was Shaw? I suppose because he has strong female characters. You know, like how he was interested in phonetics, so he’s the guy who proposed you could use G-H-O-T-I to spell ‘fish’.”

Looked that up. Again, not George Bernard Shaw, but at least it’s often credited to him instead of its originator, Charles Ollier.

So, I had started the night thinking I knew five things about GBS: 1. Paired fish and bicycles (wrong), 2. Invented creative spelling of fish (wrong), 3. Wrote Pygmalion (confident about this one), 4. Wrote Major Barbara (checked and verified), 5. Wrote Passion, Poison and Petrifaction (hard to believe)

Back in my Senior year of high school, I told Mom I was going to be in a production of Passion, Poison and Petrifaction, a one-act play by George Bernard Shaw. It was a small role, the Landlady, but it was all written out phonetically so the cockney accent was easy. Here I am in costume in a typically awkward pose (I'm facing forward):

My prom date Virgil played Adolphus.

Mom cornered me after she saw our performance. “I thought you said George Bernard Shaw wrote that!”

“He did!”

“What, did he write it in junior high school? That play was awful.”

You can go here and judge for yourself.

Last night, because I was already questioning everything I thought I knew about GBS, I double-checked and he did indeed write it, as an adult, the same year he wrote Major Barbara. He wrote it to raise funds for charity, though, and dashed it off in a few weeks.

So, that is why my option of him took a nose-dive in one night. He isn’t responsible for two clever quotes I’d attributed to him, and I re-read the horrible P,P,&P play. Not the man I (erroneously) gave him credit for.

Crust, Continued

Of all the crusts I have made since my big crust breakthrough, I would say all told only 40 percent of them were good. Most were sandy, or tough, or tender to the point of dissolving. I just could not get a reliable result even though I felt the raw dough was consistently the same. 

This weekend, just when I was planning to make quiche, I watched America’s Test Kitchen and The Ladies were recommending we take a new approach to pie crust: a food processor.

”Done that,” I yawned, “and it was not good.” I am a purist.

I ignored the recipe until they grated some butter and froze it. 

I sat up. “What was that again?” It was almost like the frozen butter dots I wanted last year.

The Ladies explained that the way you you make this processor crust is that you combine two doughs: one for tenderness and stability and another for flake, instead of trying to make one crust that can do both and always erring to far on one side: too stable or too flaky. 

The next day I made two batches, one with unbleached flour and one with bleached, and the unbleached one was significantly easier to roll out, so it won.

Looookit. Yum.

Here you go. I really recommend you watch the episode of America’s Test Kitchen if you want the science and the The Ladies amusing commentary.

• Take 10 Tbls cold unsalted butter. Grate off 2 Tbls and freeze, then cube the rest.
• Weigh 3.75 oz all purpose unbleached flour and add 1 Tbls sugar and 1/2 tsp salt.
• Put the flour mixture in a food processor and pulse twice.
• Add cubed butter and process for about 30 seconds until it turns into a ball. 
• Take that ball out and break it into pieces and put them back around the blade.
• Sprinkle 2.5 oz flour on top and then pulse five times to make the dough incorporated and crumbled.
• Take the crumbly mixture, put it in a glass bowl, and add the shredded frozen butter.
• Stir in 2 Tbls ice water.
• Press the mix with a spatula to judge if it seems rollable or if it needs another tablespoon of water. If it does, add an extra 1-2 Tbls ice water.
• Make into a tight 5 inch disk, wrap in cellophane wrap and rest in fridge 2 hours (yes! surprising!) to 2 days.
• Sit the disc out for ten minutes, then roll it and put it in the pie pan.
• Rest in fridge 30min before baking at 350.

 

Latest Oil Painting

My latest painting attempt: I want to reproduce this photo of Gary in Bath:

So far, it looks like this:

They had to cozy up to go from the landscape photo to the square canvas. I sketched the outline in paint before I decided I might want to glaze instead of alla prima. Next step: I need to shade Gary's face.

New Apollo 11 Documentary

Gary is a still a little sick, so I left him at home while I went to watch the new Apollo 11 documentary. 

Summary: Do you get excited when you hear there are lost episodes of The Honeymooners or I Love Lucy? This is The Moon: the Lost Episodes. Remember that beautiful footage of rocket stages dropping away into space? Evidently NASA lost the equally stunning film of the Eagle docking with the command module, and Buzz getting out of the LEM, and now it’s all in this movie along with Kissinger greeting the astronauts and astronauts shaving in space and Michael Collins and his jaunty mustache. Dazzling.

Detail:

• I saw it on an IMAX screen, from a seat in the third row. That was actually great, because it filled my entire field of vision and all the coughing and germs stayed behind me in row six where the good seats were. 
• It was a little exhausting because I had to keep looking left to right to catch everything. I gobbled that movie up with my eyes.
• I was also exhausted because every time there was a photo of a crowd of people I had to scan over every face for technical father Jerry. It sounds pitiful, but he could have been there. Really, he worked there at that time.
• I have always thought that when I was five, Jerry pushed me out of Mission Control during our tour of NASA, but my brother contends it was the computer room, and evidently he is right. There is an amazing dolly shot of Mission Control, and the exterior is not where I was told that girls were not allowed.
• Seriously, though, how do you LOSE film of a billion dollar space mission? Did you confuse it with the footage of all the other moon missions going on at the time? 

Disease, Continued

If I have been sick in the last two weeks, and you have been sick as well, then God help you.

Our conversation goes one of two ways:

You: *Sneezes*
Me: "OH DO YOU HAVE A COLD?" (Makes Sign of Cross, leaves)

or

You: "Ugh, I just got over the worst cold last week."
Me: "Oh! I just had a cold. Did it start with insomnia, and then the next day did you have congestion for a few hours, but then that night your nose started running non-stop for the next two days, but only on one side, and then you puked and had epic diarrhea and then you felt better?"
You: "Yes!" (or sometimes, "Noooo ... ?")

I will always try to see if we had the same virus, not to find which of us is Patient Zero, but to bond. 

One time I had this conversation:

Him: "Sorry I missed the meeting last week, but I was out with the stomach flu."
Me: "Oh! I just got over the stomach flu. Did yours start with distinctive, echoing gut noises, and after that did you keep getting dizzy because all your bowel contents, like, repositioned really fast?"
Him: "Yes! It was just like that!"

And you know what, I forgave that guy for almost certainly giving my that stomach flu, because the enemy of my virus is my friend.

Guitar Again

Since I reached the end of the teacup painting, I returned to my guitar after a week's hiatus. I intended to return earlier, but I made a delicious meal of thinly sliced pork tenderloin, sliced caramelized onions, and caramelized apples. What does that have to do with the guitar, some of you ask. Some of you do not prepare meals. Those who make the meals know what happened. I played the mandolin too enthusiastically.

Not this mandolin.

This mandoline.

It bit a gouge in my thumb, and yet I did not stop until I filleted my index finger knuckle two minutes later. Of course, in both cases when it bit into me I stopped immediately, so all the flaps of flesh were still attached to my body instead of in my dinner.

And yes, I know, who is injured by a mandoline twice in a row? One is wounded, so one stops, or slows down, or something. In my defense, the first bite was just a nip. I did stop entirely after the second incident, which involved hands held over my head and Neosporin and gauze. Gary had to be waved off. He was quite concerned, and he didn't even see the flow of blood.

It was on the thumb and index finger of my right hand, so no guitar finger-picking for me for a week.

That means my muscle memory had a week to establish, or set, or whatever magic thing it does, and it would seem that now I can think the three variations of the C chord and one G chord and my hands play them without conscious thought.

And, I have been eating a tasty pork tenderloin melange all week. Can't taste the blood at all.

High Pressure Trivia

Friend #3 and I were invited to a trivia match by Friend Anne and her new team at work. I went in thinking it was very nice to be invited to trivia by, essentially, a group of strangers (plus Anne). When we got there we discovered that Anne, #4, and I were there as ringers, specifically invited to put a W in their column. They were very nice and paid for our seats and our food. 

I did better than usual. When no one else could answer, I knew who invented the steel plow blade (John Deere) and the location of the world’s largest bat (Louisville, KY), I identified the HP logo sans initials, and I knew Sopranos was the first HBO show to win an Emmy - though Friend #3 questioned my answer, and stubbornly talked me out of it. I was robbed of that answer, but still we lost by three points, not just by one.

We were in the lead until one of the final rounds, in which we were asked to identify all the McDonald’s mascots. It was brutal. I actually joked that the green blob character was O’Grimace, and if anyone had written that down we might have only lost by two points.

I felt bad we didn’t get the win, especially since this was our first outing as Trivia Hired Guns.

Teacups: Done, Because I Have Run Out of Patience

I am done (so so done) with the teacups.

It is odd. The teacups seem to follow you with their eyes! No, but they do look very different depending on the lighting and the orientation. I hated it in the basement, I liked it upstairs in the kitchen, and I like it much more when it is sideways.

Usually when I turn something sideways, the flaws jump right into view. I think I like this one sideways because it puts the middle of the left teacup in the optical center, and the middle of the left teacup is the best part. Only, I grew tired of the gold-on-blue pattern and I got sloppy, which is fine, because it isn't like the Medicis are drumming their fingers waiting for this.

Also the highlights on the cut glass bowl should be brighter and sharper, but they just would not adhere. I know there are three oil painting rules:

1. Slow Over Fast - paint slow drying things last  (like white highlights)
2. Fat over Lean - you have to add oil for each new layer (thins things out so they won't crack)
3. Thick over Thin - and there's my problem. If I follow the previous rule and  add oil to paint the white highlights, that will thin them down so much they won't make an impact. I suppose I'm supposed to make two layers of increasingly thin white.

Ugh. So that means I am not done.

Stockpot

A tedious post ... In Which I Document My Purchases. (Ah - if only I had thought of that category thirteen years ago.)

The induction stove only works with ferrous metals, so one thing I had to give away was Mom's giant aluminum stockpot. The replacement was a $15 Walmart stockpot.

That stockpot lasted five years, until this past Friday when I burned some apple pie filling in it. I went at it with the Brillo pad until I remembered that Facebook had been set on me buying a gorgeous stockpot via one of their ads. A stunning, heavy stockpot that would match all my other cookware. I scrubbed a little more before I said goodbye, old stockpot, you served me well this five years on, and we had many soups together, but now you have burned the apple pie filling and I can't look at you any longer. There are younger, hotter stockpots to be had.

And then, it turned into one of those Missed Connections personals. I had seen this mouth-watering photo of a stockpot, and I didn't go for it, and missed my shot at long-term stockpot happiness, because Facebook would not show me that stockpot photo again. After a day of searching I put this on Facebook:

Facebook kept mum. So I gave up on the Facebook Tease Stockpot (probably some bogus Russian stockpot put there to foment discontent), and paid an old-school in-person visit to the Bed Bath and Beyond. I found a friendly knockoff of an outrageously priced All-Clad Bells and Whistles stockpot set. Honestly, this one was a third of the All-Clad price. It was also three times the price of my original Walmart stockpot, as if there’s some stockpot logarithmic scale in which each level of stockpot is three times the price of the previous level. 

I don't make bulk corn, or even bulk pasta, but I can see throwing bones and aromatics in the insert and later lifting it out instead of trying to strain 12 quarts of stock.

And yes, I did take careful measurements, first thing.

 

Teacup Progress

So this was the start of the teacup painting:

After the first glaze I just hated it:

But then, adding the cranberry glaze on the bowl and the cream glaze on the cups perked it up:

The blue ellipse on the cup is wonky on the right, and somehow adding the blue to the table threw off the bottom of the right teacup. The line at the right edge of the cast shadow is accurate but now wrong, somehow. Cast shadows.  Why are they so hard?

But you know what's easy? Highlights. The bowl needs cut-glass highlights, that'll be fun, and the cups need more color, especially in the shadows. And I have to wait days before I can do it because the glaze has to dry. Maddening.

Das Tut Mir Leid Calypso

"Das tut mir leid" is about the only bit of German I know. It is from the Sarcastic Grandmother dialect of German, and it means, “Oh, poor pouty baby, sucks to be you.”

I was a pouty baby today when I got my copy of David Sedaris’ Calypso from Amazon. "CALYPSO," it said on the dustjacket, “vom autor des weltbestsellers NAKED.”

”Nooooo,” I whispered. Nein!

I turned to a random page. 

“Tiffany ... Cool. Stoned. Hacke. Durchgeknallt.” 

(Tiffany ... Cool, Stoned, Hoe, Girl Interrupted.) [sic]

It is all in German. I should have been alerted when I looked at the price, but I didn't look at the price, or the faint, tiny German text on the image of the cover.

I'm a little verärgert.

Typing Diagnosis

Since October, when we moved into the new office and I got a laptop, my typing has been horrendous. People at work make comments like, "Who wrote defect summary 87 - oh, it was Ellen, I can tell from the typos."

It's as bad as when Caroline felt my typos warranted an MRI.

I've been blaming my new keyboard, but that's a dodge. The typos are equally bad no matter which laptop I'm on.

Finally, I realized what I'm doing wrong. If I'm using a normal keyboard, I'm sitting erect and watching my hands as I type, but if I'm using a laptop or iPad I am reclined and ignoring my hands.

One would think that if I could teach myself finger-style guitar, I could learn to touch-type. Perhaps I should take up typing as a hobby.

Placebo Revisited

This just happened: I found a bottle of turmeric among my medicines. "What on earth?" I thought. "Why do I have a bottle of turmeric?"

Side effects of turmeric: loss of memory of events that happened less than a month ago.

It would seem that burping up a capsule of the stuff was enough to put me off turmeric. I did not have enough success to get the delusion we all get when drugs work: "I feel better so I don't need these drugs that are the reason I feel better."

Work Ellen

One of the reasons I've been quite happy that Gary quit his job five and three-quarters years ago is that I don't have to deal with Work Gary anymore. Work Gary was an ass. He would come home angry, yell at me, I'd ask why he was angry, and it always turned out he was angry at someone at work. But of course he couldn't yell at them, so he'd end up yelling at me. I would always point that out with, "I am not the person who is making you angry. Take it out on the people at work. I am not a punching bag."

Not that he's retired, the stress ball has been passed to me. I'm the one yelling and having nightmares. I've been routinely annoyed about work the past month, not pleasant to Gary, and at one point he said, "Take it out on the people at work. I am not your punching bag."  Touché, mon chere, touché.

Gary is now the one studiously avoiding conflict. Case in point: Wednesday his car battery was dead, and in the past some of our most epic fights happened while trying to use jumper cables, with the combination of Fear of Death and our main fight trigger: Lack of Knowledge. Add in a touch of Man Shame and every fight was inevitable. This time, he bought new cables, researched how to use them, gathered supplies, put on his headlamp, and all I had to do was start an engine. It was amazing. No fight at all.