Thank You for Not Googling

I am going to completely change the subject and alert you all that I am a fricking genius.

I was 2/3 of the way through knitting a sweater when the unthinkable happened. Yes, again. I ran out of yarn. You'd think I would prepare for this unthinkability, considering the number of times I've failed to think of it. So I ordered more, but it was a vastly different dye lot, so the colour is...um, different. The company is actually notorious for that, because she dyes in such small batches. I love madelinetosh with all my heart, I truly do, company and woman, but please--for the love of cats, for the sake of my sanity--please, Amy, can you do something about the dye consistency in amber trinket? Pretty please?

Anyway, rather than rip the whole thing out and start over, rather than have a stripey sweater where it didn't mean to be stripey, I enlisted the help of my friend Mary O. Who really is a fricking genius. Seriously. She used to be an engineer. Even after a debilitating car accident that left her with brain damage, Mary O is still smarter than most people I know. Mary O announced a simple solution (though she originally suggested Kool Aid, apparently it doesn't come in green in my part of the world). Mary O suggested her close cousin Jell-O.

Y'all, I'm dyeing yarn in my kitchen as we speak. And it's working. The finished product is passably identical to the half-knit sweater. I don't even care that my apartment currently smells like some whacked out combination of wet sheep, vinegar, and lime Jell-O.

Yes, there will be pictures. First I have to figure out how to keep my newly matching yarn from jiggling away off the counter.

More Pie Dreaming: Cutting Butter

My husband used to joke that he'd married me for my pie-making ability. Apparently, he chose this over other, more useful skills, like visual acuity, common sense, or the simple powers of observation.

It is strawberry-rhubarb season here in Doodlehem. It is also farmers market season. Ergo (in parentheses therefore), it is also what we lovingly refer to as "Pah Season." (No, he wasn't Southern. Or a Kennedy. Don't ask me why he called it pah. He just did. But only mine.) Anyway. Since unpacking my eleventy-billion boxes of kitchen gadgetry--most of which I was surprised to have still owned, having not seen it in so long--I have gone on Red Alpha Seven Nesting Alert and made two different kinds of jam, orange-cherry conserve, weekly loaves of bread, lemon curd, and approximately half my weight in pies. All without the use of what I long thought was my trusty pastry cutter. I thought for sure I'd had one. If not in Putnamistan, then at least in Kingston before I got married. Then I thought I must be hallucinating, because there it wasn't, and I was the only one who ever made anything that even vaguely resembled pastry.

Which brings me to the current contents of the oven. It's hard to make pie crusts four at a time. The proportions get all hinky, the bowl gets small, things get coated in flour that should never get coated in flour, and when you apparently never owned a pastry cutter to begin with, it gets really damn annoying using a dinner fork. In the midst of the carnage, I called my dad to reminisce about a one-armed Jesuit we know who is an artisanal baker (among other goofy things, he mentions in his cookbook that he kneads his dough with one massive hand, but says he supposes it's ok to use two if you have them) and his story about cutting butter. It's an apt metaphor for a disabled man--trying to be content in the moment, using the one arm God gave you to cut industrial size bricks of butter into usable pound increments with a complex system of wires and handles--and so I called to ask my dad if I was "happy cutting butter". I allowed as how I wasn't, particularly.

Twenty minutes ago, I put into the oven the ugliest pies I have ever made in my life. The dough was sticky. I had to use unsalted butter. The lattice was crap. In short, they're going to be (I hope) one of those things that taste infinitely better than they look.

I had just started to do the dishes and wipe the drifts of flour and squished butter off the butcher block counter into the trash can when something came crashing down on my head from its hook above the sink, where it sits in plain sight every damn minute of the day.

You guessed it. My pastry cutter. Because apparently I can't just get the lesson, submit with grace, and then move on. Apparently I have to also have the Three Stooges squeaky-toy, hammer-to-the-head, pie-in-your-face (or in this case, pie implement on top of your face) moment.

Yup. That would be me.

Saturday Mourning

I am spending the weekend with my beautiful friend Asia, who lost her husband suddenly on Thursday night. I will process my own grief later, in private, because Joe was a dear, funny man, and I will miss him terribly. Right now I am sitting with Asia and doing what needs to be done: proofreading the email she is sending out detailing memorial plans, making sure she eats and uses her inhaler, cleaning the catbox, sorting the mail, laughing over things Joe would have loved and crying that he's not here to share them with us, and drinking endless cups of tea and trying to reassure the cats, who can't for the life of them find the other person who should be here. And every time I walk into the kitchen, I am struck by the saddest thing I think I have ever seen:

Three Signs I Am Losing Control of the English Language Forklift! Arthropod! Fleem.

I have uttered the following three sentences, in context, in complete and utter seriousness, during the course of the past 72 hours.

1. Drive safe, and please stop making poor peanut choices.

2. You can't buy an orange from a hole in the ground.

3. Call off the pillowcase dogs!

(Please note that this last one is in no way related to a sentence that will live forever in the archives of Weird Things My Husband Used to Say in His Sleep as the number one entry to top, namely, "Fire the dogs from the launching pad!")

This does not, perhaps, bode well for my career as a PhD student in this very language which I am so mangling. On the other hand, it might launch a career in comparative literature. Or performance arts.

Update and a Tour

No, my beloved thirteen followers and various hangers-on, I have not abandoned you. I have taken you with me to my new digs in Doodlehem (also known as Bethdoodle). In the interim, there were finals, physical therapy, more finals, more physical therapy, many many times my weight in books, and the reassessment of everything I owned, and just how damn much of it there was.

And then there was the whole Internet fiasco.

But I'm here, the internet's here, I'm pretty much entirely unpacked, and what's more I think I'm almost caught up on finding homes for things. Well, ok, maybe not that last one. But it's getting there. Give me a break, I've been here nineteen days and I'm not allowed to lift anything heavier than my own sense of irony. I am, however, newly allowed to run in tiny, tiny increments. As such, I had the best seven minutes of my life this afternoon, even though they weren't consecutive (that's what she said. Oh wait. Wrong post.)

Anyway. I'm home from my rehabilitative walk/jog scenario (during which I confess to studiously wearing gear from only the most hard-core races I've run, so I am not confused with an actual jogger) and a post-workout trip to the laundromat, where I discovered what a bargain "dollar-wash Wednesday" truly is, given that it's Thursday and the machines are now all jacked up to $1.75 per load. Highway robbery. In any case, many of my friends and relations--yes, including Alexander Beetle in the unlikely event that he actually visits this blog (if he does, hi dad, sorry about trash night)--have expressed interest in seeing the new digs.

Ok, so it goes like this. I was far too lazy to put on shoes and socks and go outside in the rain to take a picture of the exterior, and besides, that’s a little too creepy these days, considering Google Maps and all the things you can do with it. Not like I wouldn’t want you to stalk me, but you know what I mean.


There’s actually a little more room than it looks like, enough for a 2x4 rug and a door that leads nowhere (actually it leads to the downstairs apartment, but it’s painted shut and I’m pretty sure there’s a wall on the other side of it. Which is convenient, since I don’t have any desire to go walking into Brian’s bedroom.) There are a lot of those in my apartment,as well as doors that actually lead places, and places that don’t have doors.

As you walk up thestairs, behold my ability to put bookcases just about anywhere. This is a very important talent to possess when you are a PhD student in literature, as you may well imagine, both because the apartments you inhabit will be cozy and hobbitlike, and because the sheer number of volumes you amass will frighten even your librarian mother. (By the way, the official count was 38 boxes. You heard it here first.)

Now you come to the top of the stairs, where you notice there is some funky architecture and that, yes, they had to put a wall up in the middle of a lovely arch so that the kitchen wasn’t actually in the hallway. The dining room, however, remains in the hallway. That’s ok though, because the hallway is bigger than my NYU dorm room. This is good, as I have rather a lot of refinished kitchen storage cabinets, which will help alleviate the lack of actual kitchen cabinets (more on that shortly). Carefully not pictured here are a couple of piles of crap that have to go back to my parents’ attic because of same.

See what I mean? That’s all she wrote. Considering I haven’t used the dishwasher so far and don’t expect to, I’d rather have the extra cabinet space. Very sunny, though, which I love. What I do have, you’ll notice if you look carefully, is the second in a series of Doors to Nowhere. This isn’t an actual door, but a walled-in doorway. It turned out to be damn convenient and exactly the size of the bookcase that’s now sitting in it. Yes, I have a bookcase in my kitchen. Conveniently, it mostly has cookbooks on it. And my giant stockpot that doesn’t fit anywhere else, as well as my coffeemaker (ditto). Note stove conveniently hiding in alcove behind curve of hallway. Whoever converted this to apartments had some damn good luck in some places. This was one of them, since it seems that this is actually the width of that hallway, which presumably originally continued on to whatever happens on the back half of the second floor, also known as “someone else’s apartment.”

Say it with me now, “claw-foot bathtub.” The bathroom actually is as small as it looks, and thus this is as good as it’s going to get for pictures. Yes, I have a litterbox stuffed in there too. It’s truly awesome. And yet, it’s several orders of magnitude larger than any bathroom I ever had in New York, a town famous for putting claw-foot bathtubs in the kitchen in some neighbourhoods.

Anyway, behold it in all its bathtubby glory. The windowsill is a good six inches deep, too, which allows for storage of crucial items. Like books.

An interlude now about why I narrate tours through my bathroom; I started doing these (with hand-drawn maps and actual photographs) when I lived 3000 miles away from my parents in Spo-Vegas, and they wanted to see where it was I lived, as if it would somehow give them a clue what I was up to. Fortunately, most of the time it didn’t, but they enjoyed seeing the apartments anyway, since they didn’t get out there until I graduated, and so missed a couple of residences.

Ok. Meanwhile, back in Bethdoodle, meet the piles of crap in my living room, so situated because I don’t have an office yet. Hopefully that’s where that big pile in the bay window will end up. My dad just made the radiator table for me this week, so I would have someplace non-bumpy and cat-proof to put my tea in the mornings. Also, because, well, I have a lot of files full of crap, as you are about to see.


Told you. This room, in contrast to the bathroom, is not nearly as big as it looks from this angle. Or maybe it’s the four hundred bookcases flanking the doorway. In any case, what you also cannot see is the apartment’s one major flaw (I mean, other than not being rent-free or having laundry), which is that the desk is uphill from everything else. Like all old buildings, the floors in the apartment are a little less than level, and as I type this, my foot is hooked around the desk to keep me from rolling away from it towards the TV cabinet. The rug helps by catching me, but only sometimes. It’s fun, this acrobatic living room of mine. Also, pencils don’t stay put when you drop them. I try not to drop them.

Let us continue on our way. Back into the hallway, and—oh look. Another bookcase. What a surprise. Also, another Door to Nowhere. This one is actually a door to… stairs. That lead nowhere. Actually, they lead to a wall, the other side of which is a mystical land known as “Matt’s Third Floor Apartment.” I’ve not actually met Matt, I think he’s rather like Mr. Tumnus, or something. (Actually, what Matt is, is a PhD student. Which, come to think of it, isn't all that different from someone you might find in back of a wardrobe.)

Also visible here is an Actual Door to Somewhere, one of two in the apartment. There’s a reason they have doors. It’s not safe for you there. Like Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein, whatever sound you hear, do not open that door! The closet is currently under organization, and as such is a complete death zone, since by “organization” of course, I really mean “quarantine.” I brought more hangers home yesterday and hope to slay the Evil Closet Beast sometime before the world ends on May 21. Don’t hold your breath. Oh, and after the rapture, can I have your stuff? Since I have that kick-ass closet, and all.


Chapter Six, the bedroom, wherein FireCat wishes she had done a better job of making her bed this morning. Truth is, I was planning on changing the sheets and doing laundry later, if the Verizon guy ever shows up. Not pictured here: more stuff. Also, Bookcase, The Final Frontier. The bookcase where old books with no home go to die. Also, children’s books I still read and anything I might be otherwise embarrassed to be caught with, such as my beloved Alex Bernier mysteries. Pictured here but entirely invisible: the two cats hiding under the bed, though one of them might be on the windowsill checking stuff out.

And now to recap, since we have run out of rooms and up against a wall (well, door):


Itz mah howse. I live here. You don’t. And aren’t we all so very, very happy about that?

Litmus Test

So there I am, barely 25, at the hospital. Waiting to see if they're going to admit me to the mental ward overnight. But I don't know that yet. All I know is it's damn near 4:30 AM and I need coffee. So I deposit 50 cents into the machine and press "coffee, regular." (As a side note, never ever order chicken soup from one of those things. It tastes like I imagine the Gowanus Canal must taste, though I've never tested this hypothesis.)

Rumblings from within. Vending machine crane-arm noises. Suspense: the little light goes on. It thinks. I wait.

Creamer squirts out of the nozzle onto the grate. Eight ounces of tepid coffee follows. The cup clatters down, useless, onto the mess. The door opens.

I'm blinking at it. This is not quite what I ordered. Well, it is, but not in the order I ordered it. So I dig out 50 more cents and try again.

Creamer squirts out of the nozzle. Eight ounces of coffee descend in a putrid, infuriating stream. The cup comes down on top of it. Empty.

Fuck.

I'm on the verge of tears. Instead, I kick the vending machine. Say some choice words my longshoreman grandfather taught me.

Resident comes by, all arrogance and flapping scrubs. Scrounges in his pocket, comes up with 50 cents, presses "coffee, regular" just as I open my mouth to say something by way of warning.

But then his cup comes down, creamer squirts into it, and eight ounces of beautiful, perfect, glorious coffee flow into the mix. The door opens. The resident retrieves his coffee, lifts it to me in a half-hearted "cheers" greeting, and flaps away down the hall, innocently slurping at the caffeinated ambrosia being denied to me.

I blink after him. What the hell?

I realise I have 50 cents left. I decide to go for it.

Coffee. Regular. Goddamn it.

The creamer squirts into the empty slot. Eight ounces of coffee blast into space. I consider trying to stick my tongue under the nozzle, but decide I would either get stuck and the resident would have to come extract me, or I'd definitely get sent to the mental ward.

Not to mention the goddamned empty cup would hit me in the head when it was done.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

No, really.

I told you there was more to the story. Here's some of it, to date (more here and here):

It was December 2007, and I’d just received word in the mail that my husband’s divorce from me was finalized. I don’t remember if that’s what prompted me to finally call Dr. Lauren's office after two months of waffling, but as luck would have it, my first appointment fell on the morning of the winter solstice. Lauren and I had been knitting friends for several months before I randomly mentioned that I needed to find a new chiropractor, and she looked up over the top of her needles and said, "I'm a chiropractor." Whoa. Really? Awesome.

Since my heart and consciousness were more or less encased in a block of ice two years thick, I have no idea what Lauren said that afternoon that convinced me I should stay for the solstice fire, but it must have been good because there I was. I remember clutching a piece of paper with my now-ex-husband’s name on it, muttering over and over, “I don’t think I can do this,” as Wendy unclenched my fingers one at a time and helped me drop it into the fire.

That spring I decided I wanted to go back to school (again) for my PhD, something I’d once promised myself not to do until my husband got the bachelor’s degree he’d always wanted. Lauren convinced me to take off my wedding rings. I stopped seeing my therapist of twelve years. I made a New Year’s resolution to look for joy wherever I might be able to find it.

In February 2009 I signed up for Reiki I as a birthday present to myself and followed up with Reiki II several months later. I also built up quite a collection of rejection letters from PhD programs during this time, and decided to start with a second master’s degree.

December 2010 I arrived at the solstice fire on my third “anniversary,” having just handed in the final paper needed to graduate from that program, at the end of an autumn that involved horrifying take-home exams, more PhD applications, the murder of a student I’d previously taught, a marathon finish time I never thought I’d achieve, and the recurrence and treatment of a back injury that is simultaneously teaching me to ask for help and re-forging what had been a rocky relationship with my mom since moving back to Three Feathers.

2011 has brought a string of very strange Mondays filled with all sorts of news. I've been accepted into a PhD program, fully funded (!), and just this afternoon learned that I will soon be signing a lease on the apartment of my dreams. Although I never for a moment dreamed it would be in Pennsylvania.

Oh, and I’ve also found true love—right in my own skin.