Under duress

Do I have company right now?  Yes.  Am I sitting here typing right in front of them? Yes.
Is it the rudest possible way to be a hostess?  YES.  But I'll be damned if I'm going to blow it on the penultimate day of the December challenge.  So here I am.

Now I'm crowd sourcing the content.  My guests are calling out suggestions drawn from the top hits of this evening's conversational topics:

1. Sewers
2. Vertically jumping crocodiles
3. Why Florida is the most dangerous place in America.  Also crazy.
   3a. "No. You need a better word than crazy. That's totally overused. People are constantly using it. Like, 'Oh my god the frappucinos at Starbucks are CRAZY.'"

These are all pretty compelling, obviously. But for me, the jumping crocodiles are the big winners. As I pointed out over hors d'oeuvres, are crocodiles not already sufficiently terrifying?  They are.

A photo of an actual sign taken by a non-imaginary friend in India. Presumably, she has been eaten by now.  I'll miss her.

Interestingly, another friend told me just a couple of days ago that there is a beach in Australia where people have gotten wise to the crocodiles in the late, so have begun avoiding the water.  Ha HA.  The crocodiles have also gotten wise to the people getting wise.  And now they sneak around to the woods on the far side of the beach whence they RUN out and CHASE people into the lake the better to kill them.  Are you kidding me with this?  And now the jumping?

So the morals of today are:  avoid crocodiles (which evidently will be more challenging than you previously realized) and springform pans are totally worth the money (the cake was a huge success).

What? That's not enough for you?  People, I'm having a dinner party RIGHT NOW.
 

Learn something new

I am basically Martha Stewart today. Well, not exactly. She probably doesn't have laundry strewn around her living room and she probably doesn't shop at Trader Joe's, but in spirit...No. You know what?  Strike that. Here's what it boils down to. Tomorrow I'm having a very small dinner party. It has been--gosh--maybe years?--since I had a very small dinner party (this is the only size dinner party I ever have, incidentally. It is not large here. Plus, I'm not a "let me just whip something together for 20" type of girl). Today, I'm accomplishing hostessy things, not at all in the manner of Martha Stewart, but in the manner of someone who got a new cookbook for Christmas and who is, at least, planning ahead.

On my way to the grocery store, I stopped at Thrift Town to check out the bakeware. This, I want to confess, made me feel like a money-saving super genius. I realize that that is probably an overreaction. Nevertheless, I did walk out of there with a loaf pan (hello, grapefruit cake of the future!) and a bunt pan (oh, when you use your never-used fancy punch bowl to wow the book club, you're supposed to put an ice ring in it?  How the hell...?  Oh. In a bunt pan, you say? Lined Martha Stewartly with citrus slices?  Well guess who has a bunt pan now?  And citrus? Look out, 2016.) They also had a springform pan, but it was a very dubious springform pan that looked like it was more about springing than forming. Still, two outta three ain't bad.

Shortly thereafter, at Trader Joe's I learned that Cointreau and Triple Sec are the same thing. How did I not know that? Thank you, edifying Trader Joe's sign that spared my asking a team member and being judged for my total lack of cocktail savvy.  In a pinch I could have evened the score by telling them about my ice ring plans, but I'm glad it didn't come to that.

Next up: non-dubious pan.

Scene. Interior. Bed Bath and Beyond. I am wandering, squinting helplessly though a sea of useful kitchen items.

Salesperson: Do you have a question?
Me: Oh!  Yes. Thanks.  Do you know where I can find a springform pan?
SP: A spring? form? pan?
Me: Ah. Yeah. It's that kind of baking pan with the buckle on it?  So you can take it apart when the cake is done.
SP: Ohhh. OK. They're right here.
he leads me to shelf, empty save for one springform pan.
Me: Sure enough.  Springform pan. New vocabulary for you.  Well, I guess this is the one for me.
SP. from other side of shelf There are some more over here if you want to see them.
Me:  Ah. There they are. I just thought there'd been some big run on srpingform plans.
SP: Ha. No.  This is the shelf where they're supposed to be.
Me: I just thought, well, it is baking season.
SP:  Yeah. That's what I'd like to do.  Just spend the day in the kitchen watching somebody cook.  It's been so cold out.
Me:  It is cold. I notice you're planning to just sit and watch.
SP: very earnestly.  Oh, I mean I'd be breaking off little pieces and eating them too.
Me: ...

Aside from useful BB&B vocabulary, there was another lesson learned in this story. And that is that a spingform pan is MUCH taller than a regular baking pan, so if you've been wondering why, when you ignore the springform stipulation in the recipe, your cake is overflowing in the oven, now you know. (You weren't wondering that, but I was.  "Do I really need to buy such highly specialized equipment as a springform pan?" I've been asking myself for cake after overflowing cake.  Yes, you ninny. Yes, you do.)
 

By the way, the entire time I've been writing this, I've also been roasting a brisket.
I know. It's almost dizzying. Clearly someone should be dating me.

There goes the neighborhood

I am, as everyone knows, not so good with change*. I have not the slightest doubt that I would have a better life if I regarded change as an exciting development or, at the very least, as the natural order of things, but I tend to regard it as scary or sad. Silly, but there it is.

In my neighborhood, various things come and go, but the first closure to really make an impression on me was the hardware store. There is something about a hardware store that lends legitimacy to a neighborhood. My hardware needs are few, but it was a very nice little hardware store, where they had once done me a kindness, and I was (and continue to be) sorry to see it go.

There are other things that hold on through very mysterious means. Sorcery maybe. For years, every time I walked by this 1970s style stained glass shop on the corner, I wondered how on earth it could still be open, until, one day, it wasn't.  That was a little bittersweet.  On the one hand, it provided a sort of punch line to a secret joke, but it had been there for decades and I did feel a little pang of regret for whoever had opened it, condemned to see their passion for stained glass be shared by fewer and fewer and fewer people, until there were so few customers they had to throw in the towel. Also, whatever did they do with all the leftover stock?  Does someone just have an insanely multicolored living room now?

Today as I passed its papered windows, smiling ruefully at the old secret joke (Q: how can they stay open? A: they can't), I happened to look across the street and I stopped dead.  Whaaaaa?

The toy store is empty.  I somehow had failed to notice.

Now, while I may be a little snide about stained glass window hangings, I am pretty serious about toy stores. I've been pausing at those picture windows for years, seeing what the stuffed tigers and knights and dollhouse families were up to and now they've all decamped and I never even said goodbye.  Oof.  If a neighborhood of wealthy people, where it is practically decreed that you have a baby (I'm not doing it. Don't tell), cannot keep an independent toy store afloat, then where I are we? 

In joyless, toyless houses where the windows allow the passing of boring light-colored light, which is just as well, because even if we had a nice egret-in-the-marsh-at-sunset stained glass window hangings, we wouldn't be able to get the necessary hardware to hang them. That's where.  Ah, San Francisco, and your insane rents, you're chipping away at my spirit.

In three days, the soap shop that keeps me stocked in Pre de Provence is shutting its doors. I bought a couple of extra bars to tide me over for a while, but my future looks, well, dirty, really, if you must know. On the bright side, that weird shop that sells, as far as I can tell, pajamas and novelty chocolate? Yeah. That one's still going strong, but you might want to hurry. Just in case.

*Exceptions will be made for the departure of the upstairs neighbors, not that they have any plans to move, I'm just saying that I would be willing to greet that change with nothing but joy. If that helps.

Phantasm

I don't know what it is that touchscreens are meant to be sensing when you touch them--a pulse? DNA? Human skin cells? Plain old heat?--whatever it is, I seldom have enough of it to please our technological overlords. I tap, nothing.  I swipe, nothing. The other night, my mother thrust her iPad mini into my hands and instructed me to do a digital jigsaw puzzle (mostly, I think, to get me to stop making snide remarks about the terrible script of The Mentalist so she could concentrate on the mystery at hand).  Try though I might to drag a puzzle piece from the sidebar to its home in the emerging picture, it stayed steadfastly where it was, ignoring me completely.  Through trial and error I discovered that rubbing my index finger vigorously on my sock for a minute rendered it human fingerish enough to please the puzzle.  The question is, should I have to be going out of my way to please a puzzle?

Of course, the stakes are pretty low in the "will I or will I not complete an online jigsaw?" conundrum, but I once almost missed a plane as I stood there unable to access my boarding pass, hitting
zero bags to check
zero bags to check
zero bags to check
over and over to no avail until a ticketing agent yelled at me (it was JFK. I think they're allowed to yell at you there.), overrode the system and told me to run.

I understand that touch screens don't think MOST people are dead, so I'm willing to accept that they're useful. Most of the time. For many. But I am totally unwilling to concede that there is the slightest need for toilets that flush themselves or motion-activated sinks.  I know what you'll say.  Hygiene!  Water conservation!  And to you I say, stuff and nonsense.

If touch screens think I want nothing from them, self-flushing toilets are eager to respond to my slightest movement. The mid-pee flush is a startling and damp-making experience that I hope you will be spared. It is generally followed by the standing-up flush, the awkwardly mopping my water-sprinkled arse flush, and the putting-my coat back on flush. Gallons of water needlessly gone. In a drought.  Besides, I never said I needed any help with this, technology; you can just run along home.  The old fashioned lever was working fine.  In a really dodgy WC, one can always employ the foot flush, but generally, the hand works fine.  After all, seconds later, you'll be washing it.

Oh.  Except that now I can't do that either.  Thanks, futuristic sink.  Would that the sink would check in with the toilet and get some water-spurting tips. Alas, it is in cahoots with the damned touch screen. Oh, the long minutes I've spent waving my hands about like a hysterical maiden aunt in a melodrama, only to be regarded as imaginary by the very thing I'm waving at.

Maybe I should start carrying a bar of soap in my purse. I could always just wash my hands in the toilet. What's one more flush, after all?
 

Reduce, reuse, recycle

Illustration by Nancy Ekholm Burkert

Of late, my mother has been thinning things out.  She occasionally insists that I regain ownership of boxes of nostalgic detritus that have been placidly sitting in my parents' garage for the past 30 years or so. I do not want these things. I also do not NOT want these things. Mostly, I want these things to be sitting undiscovered in my parents' garage, just in case, at some unspecified year in the future, I want to revisit my past. I don't want to do that now. Nor do I want to store these random things in my own garage (who knows how long I'm even likely to HAVE a garage).

To this, I imagine my mother would say, "Exactly."

Fine. 

A recent box seems to have been packed away when I was about 18.  It contained a lot of things I've been doing just fine without:

• My Eeyore costume from the production of Winnie the Pooh I did my senior year of high school.
• A rather sizable figurine of Fagin from Oliver Twist.
• A small pink and green plush turtle
• A box of little nursery rhyme characters (Miss Muffet and her tuffet and the spider who sat down beside her, etc.)
• A doll whom I don't remember in a fancy dress
• A..um..plush Merlin head on a stick?  With ribbons hanging down.  In case you wanted to wave around a Merlin head in a magical/Medieval parade?  I don't know.
• A dinosaur comically dressed in the uniform of my manager at the toy store where I used to work during the Christmas break from college
• One hand-made Eeyore
• One Disney Eeyore
• A penguin on a wheel sort of thing, with an accompanying stick, so that if you push it along, its flippers flap along the floor
• A plain white mask of my own face, made in high school
• And a human-head sized handmade seagull mask

In other words, priceless heirlooms which we should thank God have survived unscathed.

I have enormous difficulty getting rid of things, even demonstrably useless things, if they ever had any sort of sentimental value. Hence my fondness for the "stored forever in my parents' garage" method of historical preservation. I kept that box in the middle of my living room floor for weeks. The fact that I had preserved these things in a box meant that they had once evoked Feelings with a capital F, ergo, I must keep them until I die.  Finally, I convinced myself that perhaps it wouldn't be so very bad to unburden myself of things the sentimental value of which I could not strictly remember.  I threw away the (super creepy) mask of my own face and the Merlin head (I felt bad about it, but it had a broken stick and its parade days were over). I gave the doll and the flippety-flappety penguin to a friend with young daughters. Having removed its Imaginarium uniform, I gave away the dinosaur. Ditto the Disney Eeyore.

That leaves me with the eccentric collection of a Fagin, a turtle, some nursery rhyme characters, an Eeyore costume, an actual Eeyore and, most bafflingly, a seagull mask that I didn't remember AT ALL.

Hold on to the friends of your youth, that's my advice. In case you find a bewildering seagull mask among your possessions, your best friend can tell you that it is from a production of James and the Giant Peach, wherein the peach needs to be rescued from the ocean by a flock of seagulls (not that other Flock of Seagulls you're remembering from the 80s).  Mind you, I was not even in that play, so I still have no idea how I ended up with this mask. But it was such a very good mask, that I couldn't bring myself to throw it away.  I had a vague plan to try to sneak it into the costume closet of the school where I work. Meanwhile, it's been in my kitchen for months, looking up at me when I put the kettle on.

And then: lightbulb!

My brother has a strong nostalgic streak, but is not great at keeping things for decades. And here was I with an artifact from a play that HE was in.  Well, all it took was a box and some paper and we had on our hands a Christmas miracle. He opened the box and was, predictably, delighted.  Hooray!

Of course, when you are presented with a seagull mask, your first instinct is to try it on. (You may not have had this experience personally, but you'll have to trust me.) Well., I don't know whose tiny head that thing was originally modeled on, but it sure wasn't my massive noggin. Or my brother's.

That's when, after a lifetime of trying on disappointingly too-big hats, my mother had her big moment. 

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Surrealist Christmas.  You're welcome.