Construction With Cookies – Day After Day After Day After Day ….

Has it really only been a week or so since I updated you on my cookie addic uh, our basement remodel?  The intervention … and the therapy …  seem so long ago …

So after we finished the floor I ran upstairs and ……………. have you noticed how often people begin their sentences with so?  I have.  I hear it more and more.  For example, “So tell us about your new cookie therapy practice, Dr. Sweet.”  “So, I’d heard of this crazy lady who was in the midst of a basement remodel and …” I don’t know why Dr. Sweet doesn’t just begin his sentence with I’d heard of ... ? Why the so?  Pay attention people.  So the thing is, when you’re watching the news anchors on TV and listening to the reporters on the radio you’ll start hearing it too.  So I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to NOT hear it anymore and next thing you know you’ll begin saying it yourself and before you know it you’ll be out of control and you’ll be writing it.  So I'm just sayin’ –be careful people.  

So, anyway………………….right after we finished laying the very last plank on the newly remodeled basement floor, I called my head bee to tell him we were ready for the baseboards to be installed.   “The bees will be out next week,” he said.  The next morning a bee showed up, table saw in hand.  Okay, not in his hand, but in the back of his truck.  It was Saturday morning and there was a bee at my door!  And I had no cookie plan!  Well, I had a cookie plan but that was for Monday and I hadn’t been to the store yet to buy the ingredients. 

I offered him my plate of cream cheese crepes covered in cherry sauce but he declined even though I told him I hadn't taken a bite yet.  I understood.  It would have been hard to keep the cherry sauce from dripping onto the saw blade and gumming everything up.  I couldn’t let him work without a treat but I wasn’t sure how much time I had to get something mixed up and in the oven before he would finish.  So I had to fall back on my tried and true brownie recipe.  

I just crossed my fingers and hoped I wasn’t giving him a repeat.  Anyway, even if I’d made them before, I couldn’t think what else would be quick and easy and good.  I just checked my blog and I’m ashamed to say, they were a repeat.  

Baseboards and door handles!

As we got closer and closer to the end of the project, the bees didn’t always come every day or stay very long when they did come.  I never knew if or when they’d show up at my door or if I’d need to bake, so I finally just made sure there was always a stick of butter softening on the counter and a selection of recipes lying nearby.  

Monday morning we knew we’d be gone most of the day but I couldn’t risk having a bee show up again with no cookies so I got up early, baked pumpkin-chocolate chip cookies and left them.  

But nobody came.  Until Tuesday.  I’d made the rash decision not to get up early and bake that morning which meant when my bees pulled up just as we were putting on our coats to leave again for the day, all I had to offer were the day-old pumpkin cookies – which is what I shamefully gave them. 

If only they would have come the day after when my electrical bee came to put in all the lights and plugs and switches.  I was ready for him.  I made him Irish Lace Cookies in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.  

And when he came back the day after that I baked him lemon cookies.   

Once the electrical work was done there was nothing left but the handrail.  Once again my bees showed up unannounced even though when I’d handed them those day-old cookies I had specifically asked them to tell me ahead of time when they’d be coming so I could be ready for them.  Honestly, this erratic work schedule made construction cookie-baking tough but you know what they say, when the going gets tough, the tough get baking.  So I did.  I baked the lemon cookies – again – because I still had lots of lemons and I knew they hadn’t eaten that cookie. 

And that was the end.  Of them.  But not the end.  Nope.  A couple of days ago we finished laying the flooring in my sewing room.  And that’s the end.  Of the flooring.  

Before

After

But not the end.  Of everything.  I’ll be posting some more.  Some day.  We've been moving furniture.  And organizing.  And I’m still baking.  Pumpkin muffins for Leslie and Ryan and the kids.  

Banana bread for our neighbors.  

You didn’t think I could stop cold turkey did you?  Wait, when did Leslie and Ryan and the grandkids show up?  And why is everybody sitting on the couch together … holding hands … looking at me ….?

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Construction With Cookies – Day After Day After Day After Day ….

Wire There No Vampires?

Halloween, the holiday I love to hate, is looming.  But just because I whine about it  doesn’t mean I don’t celebrate it.  I do.  Nearly every year I dress for the occasion in my witch’s outfit of comfy lounge pants, sweater and footies and cackle all the way from the dark and gloomy first floor of the house down to the basement where the only light is the reflected glow from the television in the cat’s eyes.

 

I don’t want anybody to think I’ve always been this way.  I loved Halloween as much as the next person until I had children.  And they went to school.  And the school had Halloween parades.  Halloween parades where ghouls and witches and fairies and mummies marched from room to room just before they gorged on apple fangs, pudding brains and skeleton bone cookies, followed by the awarding a prize for the best costume.  Yes.  You heard me.  Uh, I mean, read that correctly.  There was a Best Costume prize.  

I know for a fact that costume parade was not for the kids.  No sirrrreeeee.  That parade was an insidious mother competition that gave unfair advantage to mothers who knew how to turn on a sewing machine read a pattern and expertly use a sewing machine; creative mothers who felt compelled to sew a costume which actually FIT their child.  Smelly, wrinkled, torn and jelly-smeared garments pulled from the dress-up box were not good enough for their kids to wear in a Halloween parade.  Nooooooo … those mothers stayed up half the night sewing dinosaurs with twitching tails and princess dresses made of yards and yards of tulle glittering with hand-sewn sequins.  Consequently, those mothers who flaunted their resourcefulness and professional sewing ability and crushed any inkling of confidence I might have felt after my attempts at costume creation are the rea that costume parade is the reason for my intense dislike of Halloween.

After this year though, I may not be the only one whose painful experience will be forever tied to this candy-devouring holiday.  Or, in Myra’s case, this NO-candy-devouring holiday.  Recently she fell and knocked her face on a table, leaving one partially descended front tooth hanging by a root while pushing the other one, which had not yet descended at all, further up into her gum.  That was horrible enough but after Ryan, covered in blood, rushed her to a dentist, she spent an hour lying patiently in a dental chair while her tooth was wired back into her gum and that was, well, kind of gruesome.  But not being able to wear her vampire teeth on Halloween ...  or eat any of the candy for two whole weeks … that's an unspeakable trauma which may very well haunt Myra every Halloween for years to come. 

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Wire There No Vampires?

Grub On A Wire

It’s funny how things sometimes just drop in your lap.  I’d been trying to figure out how to write about our recent trip to see friends in Yuma, Arizona without being responsible for bruised foreheads or electrical shock due to heads and drool meeting keyboards and then yesterday I saw this. You may wonder how words on a watch list have anything at all to do with a mid-winter break from snow and cold.  What would a watch list have to do with drinking pina coladas, beer and wine on a patio with friends?  How would a watch list be remotely related to the freeing of our piggies from wool socks?  And how could baking out the rest of the virus I’d been sick with be connected in any way to a watch list?  Here’s the thing.  If you’re drinking pina coladas and wine and beer, soaking up the heat, watching that one cloud in the sky, you need to get some exercise so you can drink more pina coladas and wine and beer.

So we did a lot of hiking.













 

And every day as we drove out of town to go hiking we saw a white maggot-shaped object floating high in the sky.  It was as spooky as a word watch list.

We didn’t know what it was but it was always there.  Every day.  It sometimes faced a different direction but it never moved.  We couldn’t figure out why it didn’t float away until one day we noticed it was tethered to a long string.  Every day when we drove to a new place to explore we tried to figure out what it was doing up there. 


We joked that it was spying on us and even though I didn’t truly believe that, it made me uneasy to see it up there.  But not quite as uneasy as a word watch list.

It’s not like we didn’t have astounding intuitive abilities and superb deductive reasoning when it came to other mysteries.  We’d already determined exactly why there was a wide “street” out in the petroglyph area we’d gone to explore.

It was obviously a boulevard for a wedding processional.   

Back “in the day” the king and his nubile bride-to-be would march up the boulevard, crawl regally across the rocks until they reached the top of the sacred monument where the king would 

scoop a handful of “nectar” (made from mashed creosote bushes with a drop of snake urine) from the cups carved into the stone and offer it to his bride as the masses watched and cheered from below.  

Then they all gathered at the pavement for post-ceremony reception. Either that, or the monument was an altar and the cups were for collecting the blood of the sacrificial virgin who was offered to appease the gods.  Either way, it sounded plausible to all of u … me.

Besides the maggot there were a few other mysteries we couldn’t solve.  Like ―

How can a cactus grow out of a rock? 

Why would palm trees choose to grow here?!

If you were a killer bee, wouldn’t you choose  to make your hive somewhere closer to flowers?

What the heck are these?  Halloween alien bugs? 

Does Buford know this is not what Betty had in mind when he told her to pack up the kids because they were moving somewhere warm?

And finally ―

How many conglomerates will a conglomerate collector collect when a conglomerate collector collects conglomerates?

We did finally figure out what that maggot was through questions and Googling.  It IS spying.  And that’s spooky enough, but learning that tweets and facebook comments and all that social media stuff we all use so blithely is being monitored kind of sends a chill up my back.  Especially now that I look back and realize that I’ve used several of those words in this post. 

But I’m not going to worry about it.  Today it is too beautiful for worry.  As I write this I’m sitting by an open window, glancing up now and then to look at clear blue skies, bright sun, and … what's that … ?

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Grub On A Wire

Not Every Witch Wears a Pointy Hat

I need to take moment in between my Ecuador trip posts to go on a mini tirade about Halloween. Let me begin by saying up front -- I hate Halloween. I don’t have a problem with the candy. I love Snicker bars and licorice almost as much as Dean loves the bag of chocolate chips I keep trying to hide and he keeps finding. And I don’t have a problem with trick or treating. Trick or treating is a bit like eating potato chips. You can’t stop at just one … or to put it in Halloween terms … there’s always another porch light calling your name. I say this from personal experience. When the girls were young we lived in Rock Springs and I was the parent who took them trick or treating. Every year we were out there, together, through blizzards and howling winds and sub-zero temperatures while Dean remained stoically behind in a cozy, warm house handing out the candy. In Rock Springs we didn’t need the Farmer’s Almanac to know when winter would begin. We knew it would begin on Halloween night. Always. And no matter what the weather was, when we were out there trick or treating, those porch lights drew me toward them just the way my cat is drawn to a fly buzzing on the patio door. “Come on, girls. Just one more block. This block has FOUR porch lights on! If you walk fast the shivering will stop and the snow will barely stick to you.”

I don’t hate Halloween for the sick stomachs after gorging either. And I don’t hate Halloween because it afforded my girls the opportunity to hone their skills in lying in order to prevent my discovery of the candy they hid and which lasted all the way til Easter. I hate Halloween because when my girls were in elementary school, every year there was a Halloween Costume Parade Day where the kid wearing the best costume won a prize, and I couldn’t (and still can’t) sew. I told my girls they had to use the wrinkled and mashed dresses, hats and shoes that were crammed in the dress-up box for their costumes because “that’s what I had to do when I was a kid” and if it was good enough for me it was good enough for them. In reality, the pressure of even attempting to sew a dinosaur costume with a ten-foot tail that waved back and forth when the kid walked, or a princess dress with five layers of tulle and glittering jewels hand-sewn on the skirt was just more than I could deal with. I hate Halloween for the pressure it puts on mothers (and I suppose, some fathers) to be expert seamstresses (or seam-misters). But lately I’ve also begun hating Halloween because of Halloween parents. Yes. I hate Halloween parents.

I hate Halloween parents who drive their children miles from their own neighborhood to my neighborhood to trick or treat. Do they really think I’ll have better candy than their own neighbors? Guess what? I don’t. I buy the cheapest candy I can find because I know that every year I will have more kids (who do not live in my neighborhood) than I can afford to “treat”. And I am stingy. I don't give handfuls of candy. I give them two tiny bite-size candy bars because if I gave each kid more than that I would have to turn my light out even earlier than I did last night. Last night, by 7:00 p.m., 153 kids had come to my door. Let me say that again. By 7:00 p.m. I had given candy to one hundred and fifty-three kids. Kids who do not live in my neighborhood. By 7:00 p.m. last night I had run out of candy. And dang it, I was handing it out so fast I only managed to cram one piece into my mouth before it was all gone.

I hate Halloween parents who drive their children across town, to my neighborhood, and then do not get out of their cars. They creep along, bumper to bumper, following as their children walk from house to house – even on a beautiful, warm, fall evening – like it was last night.  (Dorothy, we're not in Rock Springs anymore....) If they feel compelled to drive their children to my neighborhood, they should at least get their lazy butts out of their cars and walk with their children.

I hate Halloween parents who bring their babies and tiny children trick or treating. Babies and tiny children who don’t even have teeth. Babies and tiny children who are too young to eat anything other than formula, baby food, mashed bananas or dog food. Come on, when those parents hold a plastic pumpkin out toward me and say, “it’s for the baby”, do they really think I'm stupid enough to believe they're going to grind up Butterfingers into pablum or let them chew on Hershey Bars with their toothless baby gums?

I hate Halloween parents who hold open their pillowcase and say, “it’s for Johnny … Sally … Iris … ” and then point to a sleeping child in a stroller or a lifeless body draped over their shoulder. Maybe if their child is snoring and drooling down their back it means they don’t NEED any more candy. Maybe it means that child should be taken home and put to bed.

Next year I am boycotting Halloween. I will not be at the door handing out candy to babies and sleeping children and parents who should have stayed in their OWN neighborhood. That is, unless, of course, these three little trick or treaters ring my doorbell. I’ll answer the door to them and give them handfuls of candy. Even if they don’t live in my neighborhood.

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Not Every Witch Wears a Pointy Hat