Happy Hour In Wyoming

Most days when somebody brings doughnuts to work I either:  1.  spend my day trying to avoid eating one or, 2.  spend the day rationalizing why I should be able to eat one.  Then there are the days I  crave a doughnut and nobody brings any to work.  I really wanted a doughnut this morning. It’s Friday. Isn’t there some unwritten rule that on Fridays somebody will bring a box of glistening, sprinkle-covered lard to the office?

You may wonder why I don’t just bring doughnuts myself. It’s the guilt. I would not be able to live with the guilt of bringing in a box of artery-hardening fat. Because if I brought doughnuts to work, I would feel obligated to eat one. Doughnut guilt is rivaled only by mother guilt in its all-consuming power. If somebody else brings them in, it’s out of my control. It’s not my fault there is a box of luscious, lardaceous, little cakes on the conference table. I only bear the guilt if I actually eat one. Then it just comes down to creative rationalization. If I walk by that conference table five times and the doughnut with the chocolate frosting, cream filling and sprinkles is still there, it means I should take it. Or, if even one of those doughnuts is still there at 12:30 p.m. it’s a sign that I should eat one. (That saves me from acting on the temptation most times because if there’s a crumb left by 10:30 a.m. it’s a miracle.) Now and then I use the reward system with myself. Remember three weeks ago when you went out for Mexican food and only ate one bowl of chips? You deserve one.  One of my favorites is, You worked out five extra minutes on the elliptical last week. Go for it. And then there’s the I won’t have a glass of wine with dinner tonight so I can eat this doughnut. (That’s just delusion.)

Yesterday after work, instead of my 35 minutes on the dreaded, hateful, torture machine we hit the Nordic trails on the mountain. It was an hour and a half of skiing on pristine snow. But it almost didn’t happen. Three blocks from home, as we were nearing the stoplight, I looked down at Dean’s feet. I wanted to be sure he hadn’t decided to wear his ski boots and risk my life by catching those big, square toes on the accelerator and missing the brake pedal when the need arose. I didn’t want to get up close and personal with folks innocently heading to the Mini Mart for the doughnut I didn’t get today. I was relieved to see he was appropriately clad in his tennis shoes. “You remembered your ski boots, didn’t you?” “Crap!” he said as he cranked the wheel, whipped into the right lane, missed the exit off the road, hit the brakes, and stopped at the light I had worried about only two seconds earlier. At least he wasn’t wearing the boots.

We retrieved the boots and arrived at the trails a little later than planned, to find our co-worker, Matt, waiting impatiently for us. About 15 minutes into our ski, I realized I hadn’t put on my ski socks. I was wearing the little thin socks I wore to work. You might wonder why that would matter. It matters because I have pilfered Abby’s skis and boots and the boots are about ½ size too big for me. Even on the days I actually remember to wear my heavier ski socks with the special sock liners, my feet slip around a bit in her boots. To keep my feet from slipping around as I skied, I was forced to curl my toes under and grip the inside of those boots as hard as I could. It didn’t help much. But that’s okay. I built up a lot of muscle in my toes last night.

As we skied further away from the main trails, the snow got softer and the tracks completely disappeared. That’s not a big deal if you are Dean and Matt and have worn your backcountry skis with nice metal edges. Backcountry skis that make a nice wide track and are heavy and solid and allow you to glide along, breaking trail, barely breaking a sweat. Nice wide, solid skis that allow you to ski in your zen-like state as you take in the breathtaking view, admire the pristine snow, and absorb the silent beauty. I did not wear my backcountry skis. I wore Abby’s classic skis. Classic skis are perfect for groomed trails with nice packed tracks. Not for breaking trail. I did not reach that state of peaceful tranquility as I skied. There was a lot of heavy breathing and carrying on complete conversations with myself as I tried to stay upright in tracks of soft snow created by the two men gliding peacefully ahead of me in their nice, wide, solid, backcountry skis.

Mean Me: What were you thinking, Cathy? Why didn’t you bring your backcountry skis? You watched it snow all day from your window at work. You knew the trails wouldn’t be groomed.

Nice Me: I know….but wasn’t it beautiful? It was so soft and fluf

Mean Me: Fluffy shmuffy. You screwed up.

Nice Me: Geez. I’m sorry. I guess I wasn’t thinking.

Mean Me: And holy cow! How could you forget your ski socks? You know those boots are too big for you already and you need to fill the extra space with thicker socks.

Nice Me: Okay! I said I was sorry. What do you want me to do? Go back down and get them?

Mean Me: They were in the box with your boots for pity sake. How could you miss them?

Nice Me: I remembered Dean’s boots—sort of. That must count for something.

Mean Me: Crap. Where’s a track I can follow?

Nice Me: Was that my ankle twisting? Uh oh. I hope I’m not getting a blister.

Mean Me: That’s what you get. You’re the one who brought the wrong skis.

Nice Me: Give me a break. I’m doing the best I can. I’m sweating worse than if I was on the elliptical.

Mean Me: You wanted a workout so stop whining………………..Idiot.

Every now and then Dean and Matt would stop and wait for me. I’d see them up ahead, standing, relaxed, resting on their ski poles, and gazing out upon the vista. I’d trudge up. They would comment on the beauty of our surroundings, sigh, rave about the conditions of the snow, and ask me how I was doing. Awesome, great. I’m great. Isn’t this just the best snow ever? Then they’d glide off, I’d curl up my toes, grip my boots and follow.

Mean Me: If you would have brought the right skis and remembered your socks you would have been able to keep up with them. You would have been able to stop and rest now and then and enjoy the view right along with them. And you could have even taken pictures.........if you would have remembered your camera.

Nice Me: Shut up.

That’s why I wanted a doughnut today. I deserved it.◦

Happy Hour In Wyoming

Stalking the wild rye

I was going to discuss real coffee drinkers vs. pseudo coffee drinkers in this blog post.

My cup of morning coffee is on the left and Dean’s cup is on the right. Seriously? His counts as (snort) coffee? .................  But then I saw the pancakes he was cooking for me, weighed the risk that making fun of his coffee might result in my weekend breakfasts becoming cold cereal, and had a change of heart.

Instead, this post is all about bread.

Sometimes when I want to bake bread, but no recipes are calling out to me, I will ask Dean what bread he would like me to bake. On the rare occasion when he actually cares, he will suggest rye bread. So for the past few months I have been on a mission to find the perfect rye bread recipe. I wanted to present him with a beautiful, brown, steaming loaf of rye bread. Actually, I should say a steaming, brown loaf of rye bread minus those caraway seeds. I hate caraway seeds.  I love him, but not enough to put caraway seeds into a bread I would also want to eat.  As it turned out, finding rye flour was almost as hard as finding the perfect rye bread recipe.  Who would have thought rye flour could be such an elusive commodity?  I was dauntless in my search for that flour and finally discovered it at Albertsons and even then it was in hiding. I, innocent bread baker that I am, thought it would be kept with the flours, but no. It was in a completely different section keeping company with other exotic food stuffs like soy flour and buckwheat flour.

Anyway, I have attempted to bake rye bread three times. The first time must have been such a traumatic failure that I have blocked most of the details from my memory. Dean will eat even what I consider to be a baking failure, which means he’s not a good judge of my baking skills. However, I kind of remember throwing my first rye bread attempt into the garbage, which means it was so bad that even Dean wouldn’t eat it. The second recipe was a sourdough rye bread. I really figured this would be a success. Every sourdough bread I’ve baked has been light and tasty with great texture. I knew rye bread would be a bit heavier, but the resulting bread from this recipe could have been used to brick a house, although it did have lots of flavor---if you had the strength to lift a piece to your mouth. That’s it, I told myself.  I quit.  I give up. There will be no fresh-baked rye bread in this house. Ever. Then Leslie called me last week and told me she had found a rye bread recipe in the collection of my mom’s recipe cards that my dad had given her. Really? Rye bread? From Grandma? Rye bread will not defeat me. I will not be bested. I refuse to give up.

I knew hoped this recipe would be THE recipe. Once I got hold of the little recipe card I noticed that “mom” was written in the upper right corner. This recipe not only came from my mom, but her mom. It had to be good. My mom wouldn’t keep a recipe that wasn’t good. However, that didn’t mean it would be good for me. I once told my mother that it was impossible to make good fudge in Wyoming. Your recipe just won’t work here. It’s the altitude, I told her. No matter what I did, it came out grainy or too hard or too soft. And rolling too-soft fudge into balls (which, it turns out looks very similar to elk scat) and sending it to school with your youngest daughter as her contribution to the Christmas feast, can cause irreparable trauma to one so young. My mom came for Christmas, scoffed at my altitude excuse, and whipped up a batch of fudge. It was perfect. It was not grainy. It was smooth. And it was soft but not too soft.  Not soft enough to make into elk scat.

So as I was saying, I mixed up my mom’s recipe for rye bread knowing it should be good, but under no illusion that it would be good. Guess what? It WAS! The only thing missing is pastrami and swiss cheese.

My mom's Swedish Rye Bread

3 cups rye flour

1/2 cup dark molasses

1/4 cup shortening

1 tsp salt

2 1/2 cups hot water

1 packet dry yeast

3 1/2 to 4 cups regular flour

Mix first five ingredients.  Cool to lukewarm.  Stir in yeast and flour.   Knead good.  Let rise til double (about two hours).  Punch down.  Let rise 30 minutes.  Shape into three balls.  Cover.  Let rise ten minutes.  Shape into round or long loaves.  Cover.  Let rise 1 to 1 1/4 hours.  Bake 35 minutes at 375 degrees.

Bon Appetit!◦

Stalking the wild rye

Hablo espanol un poquito

It’s been two weeks now since I began my dogged resolve to learn Spanish. I have diligently sat at this laptop ten times, for 30 minutes a whack, reciting words to Maria and some guy who refuses to tell me his name, taking tests, and playing vocabulary games.

I’d been gloating to myself about how easy this learning Spanish thing was, how smart I was and how shortly I would be strutting around spewing out Spanish phrases like I was a native. Lessons one and two had lots of parts and lots of words but they were easy. I’m a natural, I gloated to myself. And then Wednesday night I clicked “Lesson Three.” Who knew that the first two lessons were made up of the few words I remembered from my two years of college Spanish. I have somehow managed to retain these words since that ancient time when only real nerds knew what a computer was and they used those nerdy brain cells to program and print vitally important pictures of animals made up of xs and os. Wait a minute, I’ll bet those weren’t just pictures of penguins and giraffes. This Valentine weekend has got me thinking about xs and os. I’ll bet those nerdy boys were encoding secret love language into their pictures hoping that some nerdy girl would figure it out. With each x and o programmed into the room-size computer, nerd-boy would dream of a girl jumping on the back of his Schwinn, throwing her horn rimmed glasses in the wicker basket, and riding off with him into the sunset.  And she probably spoke Spanish.

Wednesday night I needed a nerd to ram those new Spanish words into my brain. I was disheartened and frustrated and sad to be faced with the knowledge that I wasn’t all that smart and this whole project was not going to be a piece of cake.  (I could have used a piece of cake). And speaking of cake, since this whole learn-Spanish ordeal has started, I’ve been eating more things that aren’t good for me. The seven number limit has begun taking over. I’ve become a person who not only can’t speak Spanish but is constantly on the lookout for chocolate or cookies or cake. “Excuse me. Are you going to finish that chocolate bar? Because it’s just been sitting there.  Next to you.  And you're not eating it.  I’m trying to learn Spanish.”

Thursday night I repeated lesson three. I remembered a few more of the vocabulary words and a couple of phrases, but most of the time when mystery man asked me questions like, "what would you say if someone opened a door for you?", I drew a blank. Oh, I could think of what I wanted to say. For one thing I wanted to say, "hey buddy. What’s your name? Maria told me hers. What makes you think you can keep asking me these questions and you haven’t even introduced yourself?"  But instead, I groaned, willed my brain to come up with the answer, and then finally gave up in defeat and clicked the “next” button so Maria could cheerfully tell me what I should have said.

Friday night I forced myself to sit at this hateful laptop, open the Spanish program and repeat, again, lesson three. Just suck it up and do it whiney girl I told myself. I furrowed my brow, pushed the headphones tight onto my ears, squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated. I forced myself to answer before Maria confirmed or (more likely) denied my answer. Friday night I got a few more right than I had Thursday night. I’d surprise myself by remembering a phrase that was brand new to me, like “escucheme” (listen to me) but in the next question I’d forget that thank you was gracias. I’d answer puede ayudarme? (can you help me?) correctly to mystery man’s question, but I’d forget how to say I speak Spanish. I was really annoyed with myself, and to top it off I’d already eaten everything sweet we had in the house.

After my lesson, since I didn’t have any chocolate to keep me busy, I was surfing the TV and I ran across a Spanish language station I didn’t even realize we got. Don’t ask me why, but I’m a sucker for those reality wedding dress TV shows. You know, the one where the bride comes in searching for the perfect dress but the one she wants costs $6,000 and her budget is $750.00 and the rest of the show is all about the drama of “will she or won’t she break her budget to get the dress of her dreams.” Anyway, I’m flipping channels and next thing you know I hear Spanish being spoken, and a woman is looking at a wedding gown. How perfect is that? I say to myself. I can get my wedding dress reality show fix AND maybe learn Spanish at the same time. And guess what? I not only heard Spanish words from that miserable lesson three, but I knew those words. Yes, I knew them! I understood them! I’m not saying I understood the whole sentence but I knew somebody said, “estoy bromeando” (I’m just kidding) and then not long after, I heard “listo?” (ready?) Really! I wanted to jump off the couch and slap myself on the back. You know what? They said them over and over and I knew them over and over. Estoy bromeando. Listo? Listo! Estoy bromeando!

De Veras? (really?), you say. De Veras! I say. No estoy bromeando!◦

Hablo espanol un poquito

A Short Update

For any of you who wondered what the heck was going on in my last blog post, as in........why did that dingbat write words that made it sound like there would be music to listen to but all I'm seeing is a big empty space? Or, why is there a music player here, with a little play button but nothing is playing? Well..............gosh...........I don't know.  It worked for me Saturday. But now it appears to be so slow that the little players either don't show up at all or they do show up and then it takes forever for the music link to load.   Here's the deal.  I spent hours (really....hours) trying to figure out how to load those stupid little music players.  It involved alot of Google searching and nerdy techno reading and finding code and then finding out that code didn't work and searching for more code and testing it and FINALLY finding something that worked.

I was so close, so many times.   Dean would gaze longingly at the computer and ask if I was finished yet.   I would confidently respond, "just five more minutes.  I've almost got it.  Just testing it now."  Next thing you know it was an hour later, then two hours later, then three ...  Dean's standing by me again, sigh, "are you finished........now?"  So I just wanted you all to know that I realize you're all busy and don't have time to wait minutes for a music player to load just so you can listen to songs that I dream about or make me want to learn to dance.  Okay, me learning to dance is a stretch but I'm trying to be positive here.  Anyway, just pretend like you saw a music player, and it actually played music.  I could should have been scrubbing a toilet or cleaning a catbox, but instead, I spent hours in a vain attempt to entertain the one or two of you out there who had already scrubbed your toilets and cleaned your cat boxes and had nothing better to do than read the ramblings of a code-impaired techno-nerd-wanna-be (and that's just sad.)◦

A Short Update

Aye Carumba! La Vida Es Loco!

An interesting progression of one thing leading to another has begun happening in the five days since I accepted my own challenge of learning to speak Spanish.  (114 days to go, but who's counting).  First of all, right this minute, as I typed this post title, I realized I've been learning  Spanish since I was a young child and I just didn't realize it. Crazy, no? I honestly don't know what aye carumba means or if I'm even spelling it right. But I'm pretty sure I learned that phrase while Speedy Gonzales was chasing down Wiley E. Coyote just before he blew up Bugs Bunny as Bugs was stealing spinach from Popeye.

I have two music cds propped up against my computer at work.  Yes, only two.  Get over it.  I play  these two cds during those times when my normally challenging, they-want-it-when? workday is reduced to a boring, mind-numbing, who-has-candy-outside-their-cubicle-I-need-something-to-stimulate-me effort to maintain an upright position in my chair while at the same time appearing to be challenged. At least when the boss walks by. Clicking my mouse to the beat of a song can be stimulating, and if I alternate the clicks with each chew of candy/doughnut/pretzel/cookie, it can be downright challenging. Some days that's the only way I can keep myself from falling face-first into my keyboard. This week I increased my cd collection by one.  I now have the additional choice of a spanish music cd Abby and Jorge gave me for Christmas.  This complicated process of  listening closely in order to pick out the words I recognize from the spanish songs, while rhythmically clicking and chewing, has the additional benefit of  forestalling Alzheimers.

However, a side effect of all this spanish music listening is that I have begun to dream with spanish music playing in the background.  Really. Two nights in a row I was dreaming spanish music. And not only that, I was singing it! Yes, singing! The real spanish words. To this song! 



How weird is that?

And here's something even more crazy. spanish music has taken control of my brain and I have signed Dean and I up for a salsa class!  I intend to.  I have the form.  I will be filling it out.  Soon.  Really.  If you have ever seen Dean and I dance, you know that our prospective Salsa instructor has no idea of the challenge ahead of her.   I will be trying to lead.  Dean will be one beat off.  He'll go one way when I want to go the other.  I'll lose my count and stop dead in the song, wait, count, start again.  Dean'll still be a beat off.   I'll move like an arthritic ostrich, arms flapping, head bobbing.  Dean will duck and sway, still one beat off, hoping to avoid my flailing limbs, now and then grabbing a wing arm to twirl me.

Listen.


Are you feeling it?  My foot's tapping. My head's bobbing. My left hip just moved.....it's Salsa Time!

Aye Carumba! La vida es muy loco!◦

Aye Carumba! La Vida Es Loco!