• Family Matters,  party party,  Stealthy Spy Cooking,  Super Dad

    Happy Birthday Toby

    You know you’re a seasoned blogger when you’re bummed that everything turns out perfectly. It makes such a better story when life gets royally screwed up. Flat tire in the rain? Bring it on! Long lines at the DMV and an obnoxious clerk who gets your paperwork wrong and sends you to the wrong line where you waste your entire day? Yes! You can hear the chuckles from the cubicle walls already.

    What’s the fun in a chocolate cake from a box mix that turns out perfect without any lumps or bumps? It isn’t lopsided, flat or burnt, the icing goes on smooth without ripping off the top layer of moist crumbs, and you even spell the birthday boy’s name right in soft light blue loopy letters!!! Snore. This is boring. At least bake a pacifier into the cake or slop some of that goopy pudding batter into Baby Bug’s ear or something. Sheesh!

    Nope. Nothing hilarious happened. The cake was baked. The baby was securely fastened on like my personal little parasite. I didn’t bang her head on the oven door. I didn’t even make a mess with the eggs or chocolate powder mix. I had the whole day to plan out this little dinner shindig and everything went fine without a hitch.

    It does, however, remind me of other shindigs that have gone down with lots of hitches. In fact, I’ve made many chocolate cakes (very much like this one), that turned into lopsided icing messes. I have no idea why the icing went on perfectly yesterday. I have never had such good luck before.

    This all also reminds me of the first time Toby made me a cake. Way back when we were still dating (before the hills got dusty) and I had recently decided to turn away from my very tight knit family. I hadn’t spoken to my parents in months. It was a very very sad and lonely time for me. Especially on my birthday. Birthdays in my family were always grand events. Maybe because we didn’t celebrate Christmas we had to make up for it. (And no, my family isn’t Seventh Day Adventist…they’re just different.) There were always mountains of presents and any kind of dinner and cake your heart desired. The whole day was your day and I was pretty much the princess of the party every time my birthday rolled around. So you can imagine how pathetic I was feeling in my sterile white apartment in a new town with no family or friends or even a cat!

    I decided to cheer myself up by making myself a cake. Chocolate of course. I’d never baked a cake by myself before. I was up to my ears in chocolate powder when Toby decided to drop by with some birthday flowers he’d picked from the city landscaping. He was so romantic back then… What I didn’t know about Toby then was that he was the master chemist. He took one look at me and my mess and quickly took over. All those years washing rat lungs in a lab taught him that me making a cake was a quick disaster. I know nothing about procedure, precision or orderlyness. I speed read, transpose numbers and skip steps. I talk a lot and get distracted and lose track of where I am. How many cups was that I just dumped into the bowl? I’m a wreck in the kitchen. Especially back then.

    I think I fell in love with Toby when that cake came out of the oven. It smelled like cocoa heaven. I’d never seen a cake so beautiful outside of a magazine before. It was round without any sloping or bubbles that threaten to collapse into themselves. If food is the key to a man’s heart then chocolate cake is the key to a woman’s. Of course this is long before I discovered that Toby used to date a stripper, he smoked nearly a pack a day, he kept trash in his car a foot deep and he wears the same shirt for five days in a row*. But those were things I’d learn to love later.

    *Not really. He’s just freaky with his clothes. If he finds a shirt he likes, he buys five of them. So it seems like he’s wearing the same shirt over and over. It drives me batty.

  • Bug,  Family Matters,  movies

    The Greats

    Since Toby has put me and the baby on house arrest (a whole other blog post I’ll save for another day) until Baby Bug is three months old, my family has been coming to see me. Actually they are coming to see the baby, not me. But you know what I mean. They are making the trek through three hours of mind numbing traffic to visit me and the baby. My family mostly lives out in the sticks, far far away from me and the ocean.

    Yesterday, my great Aunt (who is ninety-seven or some ripe old age like that) and my Grandpa (who is five years younger) came to visit. Now that I’m getting older, I realize how special it is to spend time with them. They really are the “Greats”.

    My Grandpa is the best. You know what he brought with him to come visit me? His box of tools. He’s an inventor and he’s always fiddling with something. Before his visit, he called and insisted I give him a list of things that needed to be fixed around my house. I had to really think of things because I know he’s getting older and if I gave him my real list, he’d spend all day long doing back-breaking labor. Our place is falling to pieces. But that’s my landlord’s business, not my Grandpa’s.

    Just the same, I had to think of something because it really makes him happy to be fixing things. So he fixed the pull wand on my vertical blinds that don’t work and my little portable heater that won’t turn off at the switch. You have to unplug it at the wall and sometimes I’m too lazy to do that so I find it running away in the middle of the night, heating up a room that nobody is in. Cha-ching goes the electric bill.

    While my Grandpa fiddled and fixed things, I got to spend several hours chatting with my great Aunt. It is amazing that she is in such great health. She’s a funny character. She kind of reminds me of Katherine Hepburn in her sassy forwardness. She’s very proud of her life of playing golf and wearing slacks and showing off her great legs. She’s constantly on my mom’s case to lose weight. She has no concept that sometimes being overweight is a genetic thing and can’t be fixed by just eating less… but that’s a tangent. What’s funny about my great Aunt is her stories. She always tells the same ones, even though she is quite clear headed and coherent.

    The first story she always tells is about me when I was in second grade. I was at a new school and I was having trouble because all the boys would chase me at recess. I was telling my great Aunt this and she got a kick out of it because she then told me that the reason all the boys chased me was because I was “pretty”. Apparently I didn’t belive her, and that was hilarious to her. It’s not that funny of a story really, but it is to me now because she tells me this EVERY SINGLE time I see her.

    But I actually remember being seven and I remember that the boys didn’t chase me that much. I was really really shy and would mostly hang around in the fields looking for four leaf clovers. But on that day that I was talking to my Aunt, a boy had chased me (like they do when you are seven) and now it has gone down in history never to be forgotten.

    The other story she always tells is about her father. It really is a tragedy. Her dad died when she was seven. He was in his twenties. He was a great artist and he designed jewelry, as well as fixed watches and made lenses for corrective eye wear etc… Apparently he cut himself on something while he was working and got blood poisoning. He died in three days. Can you imagine that?

    Can you imagine your healthy father getting sick and dying in THREE days when you are seven years old? It was horrible for my great Aunt. She was very very fond of her father. He was a great man and used to tell her stories and illustrate them for her. I like to think maybe I inherited some of his drawing skills. I really wish we had more record of him.

    My Grandpa doesn’t even remember him because he was only two years old when his father died. And on top of that? It was during the depression. Their mother had to clean houses to feed them. She used to get hit on by the men she cleaned for and she would constantly have to find other work because she was getting sexually harassed. They used to eat dandelion greens and whatever potatoes they could find on the train tracks. There is so much history here. I did a report on my Grandpa and the depression when I was in sixth grade. I really need to find that. Anyway… I’m trying to sum it up without rambling too much. My point is, those were tough times. Times that shouldn’t be forgotten.

    Maybe this is why I feel so compelled to constantly record history. I can’t just live in the now and appreciate the moment. I do that. But I feel the need to write it down and remember it too. History is so precious. There are so many relatives with stories that have been forgotten.

    Just like Baby Bug is being held now by relatives that love her so much, I was held when I was little by relatives that are now long dead. I never knew my Great Grandmother but I know she held me when I was a baby. I know she loved me and she gave me her rocking chair that I still have today. Baby Bug has that rocking chair now. I just want her to remember my Grandpa and my great Aunt. So that is why I am taking these pictures and this movie (696KB quicktime) and putting it on this blog so that someday these memories won’t be lost. Hopefully this blog won’t be lost in the information age… It’s sad how that happens. There are so many leaps in technology that we can’t keep up and so much gets left behind.

    My dad took movies of me when I was little, learning how to walk etc. But those movies are lost because they are on super eight film and we can’t find the projector that plays them. We did find it one year and when we used it, it burned a hole in the film. There is even a movie of me when I was two, playing with that rocking chair that my Great Grandmother gave me… One of these days I need to find that old footage and preserve it.