Christmas is a’Coming

07. December 2022 · 2 comments · Categories: Domestic

… perhaps the goose is getting fat but given how much a frozen goose or even a duck costs at the local grocery (which does stock such exotic fowl in the freezer case) the body mass index of a frozen goose will forever remain a mystery to me. We’ll do Beef Wellington for Christmas dinner, having maxed out our toleration for turkey leftovers after Thanksgiving. I blame this on Mom, whose’ insanely developed sense of thrift led her to prepare a gargantuan turkey for Thanksgiving, and then part it out into a series of leftover meals for most of the following month; Hot turkey sandwiches, cold turkey sandwiches, turkey croquettes, turkey stir-fry, turkey a la king, turkey and noodles, turkey pot pie… ad infinite. Just when we had finished the turkey soup, brewed from the bones and scraps of the carcass, here came Christmas with another month of eternal turkey, strong to save. Still, turkey and the interminable trail of leftovers is more appetizing than the bugs that our international self-selected overlords would want us to eat for supper, because of the allegedly-imperiled environment … ahh, enough of those cynical thoughts.

It’s coming on to Christmas, and although certain commercial establishments have been laying on the Christmas stuff for at least a month or so (looking at you, Hobby Lobby) now that Thanksgiving is done and dusted, in my house we are looking forward to Christmas. We have a lighted tree and a boatload of decorations, and my daughter has collected several lots of ornamental Santas, nutcrackers, angels, lighted candles, and a small city of small ceramic houses. Out go the usual bookshelf and tabletop ornaments, and in come the Christmas things. And we haven’t even gotten around to putting up the Christmas tree and decorating it, yet.

Our Christmas season really begins with Christmas on the Square in Goliad. I looked back in my various archives, and it appears that we did that event for the first time in 2009, and returned every year since then, on the first Saturday in December to participate with my books in Miss Ruby’s Corral of Authors. Sometimes we were in a pavilion, sometimes in a covered porch, or most often, in a small shop front on the Square. This year is the very first time that I went alone, as my daughter had her real estate brokerage Christmas party that very evening. The drive to Goliad is two hours each way; too exhausting a day to then go out and party all evening. So I went by myself, with two tubs of books; the Corral was only mildly busy this year, although we have known worse; the year that it was 20 degrees, with a howling icy wind comes to mind. I was disappointed at only selling five books, but one of the other authors only sold a single book, and she had brought a huge inventory. Wierdly, four of my sales were for sets of Lone Star Sons and Lone Star Glory; my YA collections which re-tell the Lone Ranger, only historically accurate and ditching the mask and the silver bullets and all.

Then, after decorating the inside of the house; the mantle, the bookshelves, the doorway, and the big shelf in the den, and hanging lights along the eaves outside, the next element is the yearly fudge making. We make big batches of fudge to give away to friends, neighbors, trusted businesses, delivery drivers, and a large plate each for the fire stationhouse across the way, and the police substation – all that is a chore which takes up much of a week, what with making, packaging and delivery. We like to do about six or seven varieties; regular chocolate with nuts and cranberries, brown sugar pecan, a white chocolate with coconut, peanut butter with chocolate, and a creamsicle orange or berry, and a couple of other more conventional chocolate fudge varieties. We hit upon this as a seasonal gift for friends and neighbors after a visit some years ago to a candy shop in Fredericksburg, after which my daughter mused, ‘how hard could it be?’ and it was such a hit with the immediate neighbors that we went on doing it. It’s a chore, and an not-inconsiderable expense, although to our relief it looks as if it will be doable this year, anyway. We have a stash of chocolate and other ingredients, and Costco has bulk chocolate on offer. So we’re good for this year. And that’s were our Christmas stands, by fits and starts – what about yours?

A Necessary Sense of Adventure

05. December 2022 · 2 comments · Categories: Domestic, Memoir

My daughter has been following a thread on one of her mom’s groups, to do with the military life; a discussion on what happens when the dependent spouse doesn’t really want to move on to the next assignment with the active military member. That, we agreed, likely spells doom for the relationship, either right away or somewhere down the road. My daughter and I both knew families – well, spouses, mostly, who basically confined themselves to the base, base housing, a tight circle of adjacent friends, and simmered for months or years with resentment over being separated from family and the community which they had come from. I remember a fellow servicewoman in Greenland, who had her mother mail her cake mixes, because she was too apprehensive to go and shop for simple ingredients at the little general store on the Danish side of the base. She was afraid the staff would be laughing at her.

Stationed next in Greece, I ran into many families who were mildly terrified by the rampant anti-Americanism in the local media, and among some local nationals there; they went from their local apartments to the base, to the BX and the club and back again, and never went anywhere else or saw anything interesting, and lived for the day they could pack out and leave Greece behind. Frankly, I never encountered anything of the sort personally, and I diddy-bopped all over Athens and the Attic Peninsula, small blond daughter in tow and driving an obviously foreign car with base license plates. I came back one day from an excursion to several fabric shops in the Plaka – that is, the old town in Athens, centered around the narrow streets at the foot of the Acropolis heights and went to the BX annex to buy matching thread and notions. Another woman there admired the bag full of pretty fabrics and asked where I had bought them, since there was nothing like them in the BX. When I told her how I left my car on base and took a regular Athens city bus downtown to the Zappeion Gardens and walked to the various little shops … holy moly, from her expression of horror and revulsion, you would have thought I went hitchhiking naked down Vouliagmeni and paid for rides with blow-jobs.

Later on, when I transferred from Greece to Spain, I took all the leave that I hadn’t taken during the tour in Greece and drove my own car to Spain. The car ferry from Patras to Brindisi, up the length of Italy, over the Brenner Pass into Austria, across Germany and France and into Spain, guided mostly by the Hallweg Road guide open on the passenger seat next to me. I only ever met one other military family, during that long eccentric journey, although I did meet a handful of other adventurous Americans. Over the six years we spent in Spain, several summers worth of leave were spent in long road trips, staying in the many campgrounds in Spain, to facilitate sight-seeing on the economy plan. I know that other military families did this, but again, I never met any of them in the campgrounds.

Shortly before we departed from Spain, I took the wife of a neighbor in San Lamberto firmly in hand and frog-marched her through the little grocery store on the ground floor of the apartment building that she and her husband and children lived in. I had met her by chance that afternoon, when she lamented that she had missed calling her husband at work to tell him to bring home a packet of frozen peas from the commissary. That’s when I lost it – I told her to collect up the peseta coins and notes that she had in the apartment; I would show here where she could buy a packet of frozen peas! And other stuff: ‘This is where they have the fresh bread, daily – pan, which is white bread, and pan integral, which is whole wheat. In here is the fresh milk – it comes in bladders, but the shelf-stable stuff is in cartons. The chocolate flavor is good and my daughter will drink it, but the regular long-life milk has an off-taste that we don’t like. This is the meat counter – just point to what you like the look of and say, ‘Media, or una kilo, por favor.’ Up there are bags of little lemons – just ask for ‘una bolsa limon.’ The case of frozen stuff is over here – this is ‘guisantes’ or peas. There’s a picture of peas on the front of the package – most grocery items do have a picture on the front! This is sugar – called ‘azucar’ – and ‘harina’, which is flour, and ‘queso’ – which is cheese. Yoghurt is over here. They spell it ‘yogur’ which is enough alike that you should recognize it…”  I think she was good with shopping at the little grocery store, after that tour. I just thought it was a pity that she would so limit herself, when most things that she might want were available in the little grocery downstairs.

It purely amazed me how well one could get along with a limited vocabulary of necessary words: ‘Yes, no, please, thank you, excuse me, how much? Numbers from one to twenty Do you accept credit cards/traveler’s checks, half a kilo, please, left, right, stop here, take me to/the American base/railway station/youth hostel/museum,’ and the names for local food items or dishes. I used to know all this in about six languages, and got along very well, considering that I was an absolute dullard at languages otherwise. Needs must, though. And you need a sense of adventure, and a willingness to go out and try things. Otherwise, you’re just sitting in a room, wishing that you were somewhere else, and that’s no way to live a fulfilling life.

The Album Project

28. November 2022 · 4 comments · Categories: Domestic

A good few years ago – in the mid-1980s, as a matter of fact – when I was on home leave with my daughter at my parent’s then-half-built home in the wilds of Northern San Diego County, I had it my mind that my then elementary-school aged offspring should know about her various ancestors, since a number of them had already passed on. So I took a number of pictures of ancestral pictures in the family horde with my trusty Canon camera – this being, Oh, Best Beloved, before the wide availability of printer/scanner/copier/fax machines. Not that my parents would have ever embraced such technology with anything but the deepest suspicion. Although Dad would have been open to internet connection, and the endless possibilities presented to the DIY enthusiasts on YouTube. Mom remained and still remains adamant that such is a temptation to an indecent waste of time, at the very least. So I came home with a round of photographs of photographs, eventually to be developed and printed, and set into an assortment of small frames, for the edification of my daughter. See, my child – these are your ancestors!

Thank the deity for this fortunate impulse, and for the fact that I scanned a number of the resulting pictures in the years since – because my parents’ retirement home burned to the ground in 2003, destroying everything in it, including photo albums and all the original photographs. Gone Mom and Dad’s wedding album, the studio picture of Dad in his Army uniform, of Uncle Jimmy in his … and me in the official picture, taken at Lackland AFB in 1978, in a uniform jacket that wasn’t mine, and very dark lipstick that wasn’t mine, either. Granny Jessie had both of those official pictures displayed in a sacred place in her household, until her dying day. Which is mildly embarrassing, because Uncle Jimmy didn’t like his official picture either. He wrote in his letters home about it – letters that I fortunately transcribed before they were all burned in the 2003 conflagration. Die in a bloody war, and your fate is to be memorialized in a picture that you didn’t like and were only harassed by the family into having taken…

But anyway … the other fortunate thing about having taken pictures of pictures and scanned about all of them … is that I have them all, or at least most of them. And now I have the ability to print them out on photographic paper, having tweaked and corrected them through various photo-editing programs.  The various framed versions all got pissed on and ruined by a particularly destructive cat over the last couple of years. Is there any more destructive element in the world than cat pee, other than straight-out nuclear? I don’t think so. All the framed versions and their frames too, are comprehensively ruined, and out into the trash they go. In this iteration, they took up too much space anyway. Now I am going to put them into an album, with everyone’s name and approximate year, for the edification of Wee Jamie, when he begins to wonder where he came from and who his ancestors were.

Ah, Thanksgiving!

22. November 2022 · Comments Off on Ah, Thanksgiving! · Categories: Domestic

Day after tomorrow, so Turkey day is about to descend upon us, in this troubled autumn of 2022. Frankly, after reading all kinds of direful stories around the holidays in 2021, we were wondering if we would be able to celebrate at all … so we cannily bought a turkey at a bargain price the day after Christmas last year and stashed it away in the garage deep freezer. We’re always a bit mixed in feelings about turkey for Thanksgiving and Christmas anyway. When I was growing up and the grandparents were unable to do the feast alternately as they had early on, Mom was in the habit of doing an absolutely gargantuan bird … and then we would be eating the leftovers in various guises for three weeks. Just when we had finished the last of the eternal turkey soup, then we would start the cycle all over again with turkey for Christmas. I like roast turkey, really I do – but six or seven weeks of turkey leftovers is just too much. We’ll do turkey for Thanksgiving and practically anything else for Christmas. Last year we did Beef Wellington and it was lovely. We stashed away a beef tenderloin roast in the freezer, when it was comparatively cheaper this summer, so will do that again for Christmas.

The other thing is that my daughter and I don’t really care for the traditional sides, either. Green bean casserole is revolting, and so is baked sweet potatoes dotted with marshmallows and brown sugar and whatever. Mom used to make a casserole of tiny onions baked in cheese sauce, because her father liked it, but hardly anyone else did. Even stuffing – if barely OK the first time out, is disgusting when warmed over. I like pumpkin pie, but my daughter doesn’t, unless it’s just a thin wedge. We both dislike the tasteless take and bake rolls that almost everyone has. It’s all too heavy, and too much, and frankly, I really don’t care for eating myself into a coma, anyway. It’s nice to be with friends and family for the holiday – but honestly, I prefer my own cooking best. (And I still shudder over the ghastly Thanksgiving dinner when my Air Force supervisor invited me, with small daughter in tow – to his house for the holiday dinner. Only he hadn’t told his wife that he had, until we showed up at the door. Talk about an ice-cold atmosphere… I never accepted another invite from a supervisor for Thanksgiving, the rest of my time in the military. If it meant just my daughter and self with a half-breast of turkey baked in a small oven, then so be it. Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.) Of the traditional sides, mashed potatoes with giblet gravy, and cranberry sauce is about all that we really do relish. A couple of years ago, I found a recipe for a medley of brussels sprouts, red onion and slivers of Kielbasa sausage, spritzed with olive oil and broiled until done and served with a lemon-mustard-cream sauce – which we both adored and repeated frequently as a holiday side dish. This year, I found another recipe for a simple cheese and corn casserole, which looks pretty enticing, so will try it out – if successful, this will be added to our personal repertoire.

I did a batch of home-made cranberry sauce today – just cranberries, orange peel, sugar, water and a splash of Grand Marnier, and baked a pie. Prepped the brine mix for the turkey, and maybe I’ll put together the corn casserole … or maybe not, as the brined turkey will be taking up just about all the available space. And that’s my planned Thanksgiving – yours?

The Pleasures of Yew-Toob

21. November 2022 · Comments Off on The Pleasures of Yew-Toob · Categories: Domestic

Last fall, when my daughter and I both fell temporarily to the covid plague, one of my respites was sitting at my computer with Wee Jamie the Wonder Grandson in my lap, watching various videos on YouTube. We were not exactly sick … just not very well; easily tired, devoid of energy and interest in anything that lasted very long. Wee Jamie had a low-grad temperature for a day or so, and sniffles, so his health was never in any particular danger. Neither was ours, once some serious drugs had knocked out the covid-induced pneumonia … but the two of us, Wee Jamie and I came away from those weeks with a decided fondness for ten or a dozen YouTube series – some of the home renovation off-the-grid living, a couple of ‘build a shelter from raw materials and a few basic tools’ – look, hard work fascinates me, I could watch it for hours. (Our Restoration Nation, Red Poppy Ranch, Trent & Allie, Lesnoy_Craft … respectively, various locations in the south, somewhere in the inland northwest, in Utah, and somewhere in … maybe Russia? We also liked some of the model-building shows; one an Australian, the other a German, both of whom do the most amazing dioramas and small structures. (Luke Towan, and Samy-Modelblau. Oh, the things that you can make from thick cardboard, and a range of model-making supplies! And wire … and resin…)

But the ones that we liked the best, and from which I came away from with a severe case of power-tool envy were the various renovation/restoration channels; a variety of specialists doing amazing things in renovating, refinishing, and repairing old furniture, restoring seriously wrecked and rusted agricultural or domestic items, and restoring them to attractive functionality. It’s kind of soothing, watching rust being blasted away in a sand-blasting booth. I so wish now that I had been permitted to take wood and metal shop in junior high school – instead of cooking and sewing. I already knew how to cook and sew … but this was when shop classes were strictly reserved for the boys, and the home-making sills were likewise reserved for girls. (You know – back before the Noachian flood. Although Dad did his best to teach my brothers and sister and I, outside of school)

The thing that does get me is that these various specialists really ran the gamut of nationalities – and that some of them never even appeared as more than their hands, doing the work. Veradona Restoration is Czech, AT Restoration, as near as I can figure out, is based in Estonia, one of the Baltic States. LADB is French, and so mysterious that all one ever sees of the experts featured is their hands. I think that there are three of them – one young, one middle-aged, one old, just to judge from close-ups of the hands doing the detail work – woodwork, metal fabrication, rust removal. They have a charming ginger cat-familiar hanging about the incredibly-well equipped workshop; Avril, who appears in most episodes.

Then there is Epic Upcycling, featuring a stone-faced Canadian carpenter-genius, who builds the most ornate and substantial furniture out of old pallets and miscellaneous scrap. Seriously, never give this man an acre of old shipping containers, I think he would build a whole fantastically-original city, or at least a suburb out of them. The pieces of furniture are fantastic – complicated, ornate … and he builds his own metal hinges, handles, locks and stuff. My thought is that of course, the designs are that ornate because the wood he builds them out of is basically waste product, of which (from the occasional glimpses of his wood stash) he may have cornered the available market in used pallets. What he could do with fine wood would rival anything built for Versailles. Or any other 17th, 18th or 19th century palace.

Ah, the pleasures of watching knowledgeable craftsmen and women at work … although I am pretty certain that all the disasters are off-camera or edited out.

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