Update: Swiss Fire Drill

In a post from March of 2008 (http://debrant.blogspot.ca/2008/03/chinese-fire-drill.html) I told the terribly exciting tale of a dinner of Chinese Fondue at our home, back when I lived with Hubby. It was hilarious, and I encourage you to read it!

But there is now a new kind of fire drill: the Swiss Fire Drill, which was instituted by none other than my brand-shiny-new SON-IN-LAW! He and Daughter we having Swiss Fondue the other day, and, well, one thing led to another...

And now we have this lovely scorch mark in the middle of the dining room table, a perfect match for the scorch mark on our former dining room table, which is currently in my sewing room...

So maybe the next hobby I take up should be...woodburning?

The Waddin

Daughter got married! (If you click on the photos, you'll see larger versions.)

*sigh*

It was beautiful. 

If you look closely, you'll see the subtle Batman logo in the heart! That's for my son-in-law, who adores Batman!

It's hard to know what to write, after such an amazing experience! Maybe I'll just bask...

I will be posting some abbreviated videos from the wedding - as soon as I've finished packing away all my cake equipment! 

The Wedding Cake

Hubby has been over several times this morning, helping me with the wedding cake. I was short an ingredient, I wanted a different-sized board, I needed help with the engineering part of figuring out how to support the weight of the flowers on the top (tiny) tier.

And for weeks now half the house has been dedicated to cake paraphernalia. Poor Boyfriend hasn't had a meal at a table in over a month.

Boyfriend has also handed over his debit card. Many times. To me, and to Daughter. Oh, and lent the car to Daughter, and to me. And filled it up with gas after my many excursions to Ares, Bulk Barn, Michael's, and Omer Deserres. And Fabricville.

And Maxi, and Loblaws, and Metro, and Provigo.

Boyfriend has also had to pick up my share of the housekeeping during this past month. And cooking. And shopping. And grass-cutting. And laundry. And vacuuming.

Pretty much anything I do around here, he's had to take over.

And so today it hit me, as Hubby was leaving after having dropped yet another thing off for me -

It takes a village to make a wedding cake!

And, just for interest's sake, here's what my kitchen looks like. (And people ask me why I don't do this for a living!)

Fossil

In 24 days, the baby girl I gave birth to will be getting married. *sniff!

I'm doing the wedding cake, Montreal bridal shower, and the garter. Oh, and the speech traditionally given by the Father-of-the-Bride, because Daddy is  very nervous about public speaking. 

I'm thrilled to be doing all this...but I do wish I had paid more attention in gym class when I was a girl. Or that my various gym teachers had said plainly,
"You won't see any difference in the quality of your life for 45 more years, but if you stop exercising, you'll be in a nursing home by the time you're 60. If you keep exercising, you put that off by at least 20 years."

I'm bloody decrepit for my age! And fat! These issues by themselves wouldn't ordinarily land someone in trouble, but I'm  also the proverbial bull-in-the-china-shop. 

Let's be clear: at work, when I slam doors, lightbulbs shatter.

I never learned to be soft-spoken or gentle in my manners, and that also translates to my movements.

I'm an elephant. Moving with the speed of a charging bull.

So, I wrenched my knee (of course!) and have been in considerable pain, which slows me down most annoyingly! 

So here I've been, back and forth for physiotherapy, MRIs, cortisone injections, etc. And it's 24 days till the wedding, and one of the things I have to get done is my hair.

See? This won't do AT ALL!

So off I went to the Mall, intending to go to my favourite coiffeuse. They are my favourites, you understand, because they are close to where I live.

I can walk there.

But they have gone out of business.

I was actually standing just at the end of The Bay, gawking my disappointment in the direction of the closed-up shop, when saleslady from the Bay said, "Yes, they closed last week." Then she smiled at me and said "You know, Madame, that we have a salon here at the Bay. It's just over there..."

I nodded and started to plod in that direction, my head hanging low. I wasn't really old enough to have my hair done at The Bay, was I?

Well, I made an appointment. Sigh.

Walking towards the exit, I was in the middle of the displays of shoes and handbags. One display in particular caught my eye, and in fact seemed to be pointing a finger at me and snickering for all the world. The brand name is:

FOSSIL.

Yep. That's me. I is officially a fossil now.

"I know just how ugly I are.

I know that my face ain't no star.

But still, I don't mind it - 

Because I'm behind it! -

It's folks out in front get the jar!"

I

Don't get me started...

I'm so tired of reading "Here's what pink Himalayan salt does to your body..."

Pink Himalayan salt does the same thing to your body as table salt, without the added protection of iodine to prevent goiter disease. Salt from the Dead Sea. Salt from Siberia. If they find salt on Mars, it will react the same way in the body.

Salt is salt. No matter where it comes from, the chemical structure is the same.

I like those lamps made from pinkish salt. Because I like how they look. But I ain't gonna believe for one hare-brained second that they're going to absorb evil from the air in my home.

Hello - engage brain! Is there anybody really in there?

Same thing goes for sugar. Whether it's "white death" in a bag from the grocery store, made from cane sugar or beets, whether it's brown, whether it's maple syrup or honey or molasses, whether it's in apples or pears or watermelon, the sugar molecule reacts the same way in the body for all of them.

If you want to curb your sugar addiction, you have to stop eating sweet things. Period.

There are no miracle cures for anything. Except maybe walking - that may be our only miracle cure. Getting off our butts.

Humans evolved into humans by walking upright. And when we don't do that, we get fat, out of shape, sick. Yeah, we ate honey and berries when we were evolving. But consider the energy expended collecting them - walking while we collected them. For hours. Every. Single. Day.

There's nothing wrong with a bowl of ice cream - once a year. Once a day will add pounds, lower the quality of your life, and possibly shorten it.

So close your computer, get dressed, and stop believing that anything out there can "save" you from yourself.

It ain't gonna happen if you don't save yourself first.

How long did it take to learn that?

I remember when I wrote the only poem I've ever written that's worth a damn. It's called Canada Geese, and it's about the arrival and departure of the geese every spring and fall. All my life, since I was a wee lass, I would rush outside to see the geese flying overhead, and I would cry.

I don't know why I cried, but I always did, ever since I was a little girl. Then, one autumn day when I was married to my first husband D, after I cried looking at the geese I ran into the house and wrote the poem. It has been taken out and polished many times over the years, but actually I've made very few changes.

Some people who enjoyed the poem asked me "How long did it take you to write?"

Well, that depends on when you started counting. It either took me around  20 minutes, or 20 years, depending on when you started!

Well, two days ago I had a similar experience.

See this?

This is a bit of knitting. A rib stitch, to be more precise.

I started knitting on Tuesday. After a lifetime of not being able to knit.

Oh, I've tried. My Grandma used to let me play at knitting. She'd cast on for me, and I'd do the in-over-through-out" motions till I got bored. But I could never manage casting on myself, no matter how many times she showed me how to do it. I'd get one or two stitches on, then forget how to do it and get it wrong, inside out or backwards or whatever - just couldn't manage it.

I still couldn't manage it when I was married for the first time and two friends tried to teach me. I seem to have a problem with knots. In fact, if I stop to think about it, I can't tie my shoelaces. I either go quickly through the motions or it doesn't happen.

I always picture my friend P, trying desperately to hold in her laughter, as she watched me try to cast on. This after six lessons. She suggested I stop trying, and I thought that made sense, since I wasn't getting anywhere.

About two weeks ago, I started dreaming about knitting! I could see the needles, I could see the wool, I watched, in my dream, as I tied the first slipknot, then in slow motion I could see the needle going through the loop, could see the wool making another loop, watched in awe as I slipped the new stitch onto the first needle.

I had this dream about eight times in the past two weeks. On Tuesday, I scoured the house for some string and grabbed two barbecue skewers and tried it.

And it worked.

Not consistently. I kept undoing my ten stitches so I could practise casting them on again. I was so excited I called my cousin, who knits and crochets.

I was stunned. So I went out and bought one set of knitting needles and one ball of wool. And I started practising.

I'm still having trouble keeping the number of stitches the same from row to row, but I'm finally, after all these years, getting it!

You have to understand - this is simply unbelievable to me. Imagine if you'd never driven a car, then one day someone puts you behind the wheel, and you start driving right away with no problem. Or if someone gave you a violin, you picked it up, and started playing right away,

It's fantastic! I never thought I'd ever knit.

So how long did it take me to learn? Well...five minutes, or fifty years, whichever you prefer!

Navigation Issues

So I decided today was the day I would go hunting for summer-weight leggings. I've seen a lovely long blouse I want to buy for my summer wardrobe, but I need leggings to go with it. I've been poking around all the "large-lady" stores (there's a joke in there about big-box stores, if I could find it...) but all they have for summer are capris. I want full length.

There was nothing for it - I had to go to Walmart, something I rarely do, and usually dread. Because the Walmart is at the 10/30 mall.

For those of you who don't know, the 10/30 mall is at the intersection of highway 10 and highway 30. And it's not a mall you can walk around in, it's a small city. Every big-name store in Canada has a building here.

But there are no road signs. Plenty of streets with stop signs and traffic lights, but no street signs. Occasionally you find a street that has a name, but by the time you see the sign you're past the street.

I managed to find my way to the general area. I even saw the Walmart itself, and aimed the car at it - but, sadly, the road refused to let me turn that way and I found myself in short order on what appeared to be a highway. Luckily for me, there was an exit only 2 kilometers away, I turned right, and tried again.

This time I pulled into a parking spot and turned on google maps on my phone. It gave me directions, which I followed, which made no sense to me, but I've grown to have faith in the gps. It seemed to me I drove around the same block twice, but I did in fact end up at Walmart!

I had a very pleasant time there, actually. See, I avoid shopping like the plague. So when I do let myself out, it's kind of a treat...

(I can hear my Daughter's voice echoing in my head - "Mom - you have no life!")

I got an umbrella, some leggings, and discovered that Walmart sells fat quarters (fabric for quilting). A very enjoyable time.

As I buckled in for the ride home, this time I took no chances and turned on the gps right away.

And proceeded to get well and truly lost.

I don't think it was updating fast enough. I tried valiantly to find the street it kept insisting I turn right on. (No right turn here.) I found a street, and kept glancing at the little triangle on the map. Didn't seem to matter whether I followed the voice instructions or not, that little triangle was not going to line up with the route.

"In 600 meters, keep right at the fork."
"In 300 meters, keep right at the fork."
"In 100 meters, keep right at the fork."
"Keep left at the fork."

Did you see that? In advertising, they call this "bait and switch." I went left.

And found myself barrelling down some highway, to the sound of...

"In 9 kilometers, take the exit for blah blah blah blah."

(The "blah blah" bit is because the gps mispronounces names so badly I don't recognize them."

At which point I phoned Hubby.

"I'm on my way to Vermont," I said.

"What highway are you on?" he asked.

"Damned if I know! Listen, stay home for a bit, okay? I may need you to come find me!"

"Did you get your leggings?" he inquired.

"Oh yes," I told him, "and more. I got an umbrella, a bath mat, and some fat quarters!"

There was a moment's hesitation, then Hubby said, 

"Which you'll now have to declare at the border..."

Scones for Dinner!

Once upon a time, about 120 years or so ago, my Great-Grandmother wrote down her recipe for scones.

My GG was a true Scotswoman, born in Dunvegan, Ontario, where it is said aloud that "They're more Scots than the Scots."

She had a husband and two boys to feed. Somehow this is the only family recipe that came down to us. 

My guess is that Grandpa absolutely loved his mother's scones, and that he got her to write it down for him, or perhaps one of his mother's friends would have given it to him - I'm not sure how old he was when she passed away. And Grandpa was a real "man," never set foot in a kitchen, so the actual mechanics of how we got the recipe in the first place are a mystery. But I'm still convinced he was the venue of transmission somehow, since there were no daughters.

Like any armchair-anthropologist, I wonder what her life was like, and have sat contemplating her recipe, looking for clues.

1 quart flour
1 cup sugar
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
A piece of butter the size of an egg, rubbed into flour
3 eggs well beaten
1 cup milk

The first thing I notice is the sheer quantity - double that of any modern recipe I've seen for scones. Ah - two growing boys and a man to feed - I'm guessing these disappeared pretty quickly so she doubled an older recipe.

I notice the absence of salt, and at first I wondered if salt was hard to come by. But if she had a cup of sugar to throw into this, she was able to get ingredients. So then I think, the fat was salty. And why so little of it? Modern recipes use 1/3 cup fat to 2 cups flour.

And, everybody wants to know, what on earth is "Rubbed in flour?"

My wonderful 91-year old friend I explained it to me the first time I tried to make them. She said to take a bit of fat and flour together in your hand and rub it together as if you were feeling a fine piece of material.

I remember how it felt after the first time I'd done that. I stood there, looking at this bowl full of flour, with no visible fat, and all the flour looking slightly granular. I had never been able to get such airy texture into a mix before. "Rubbed into flour" was the answer to scones, to pastry, and to shortbread!

I see she used eggs partly as leaveners, because I put 4 teaspoons of baking powder into only 2 cups of flour. And that's my last clue - she, or the men she was cooking for, preferred their scones to have a light, cake-like texture.

In a modern or traditional scone recipe, there is no sugar, and only 1/4 - 1/3 cup of liquid for 2 cups of flour. So she went waaayyyyy over the top with 3 eggs and a cup of milk! That explains the sugar. It's cake. It looks like scones, but it's cake.

Real scones, traditional scones, are hard lumps. Figures - it comes from Scotland, after all! They were starving! Everything they could make was hard, all ingredients out of their price range.

So when they landed in Canada in the 19th century, and they were able to buy tenderizing ingredients like milk and sugar and eggs, they "fixed" their traditional recipes to make light, sweet scones that are a treasure to eat.

My reminiscing about GG's scones has been brought about because we thought the recipe was lost.

See, in the 1980's, my Stepmother M was given the original recipe card by my Grandma. Grandma had made several copies of the recipe, and M just loved it because of the connection with my dad's family. She was delighted when Grandma gave her the original. I was given a copy too, though I had my head in the clouds and had never so much as opened a can of beans.

Fast forward a few years, and there I was married to S, an Irishman, who wanted me to make scones, sighing long and loud over his mother's lost recipe. So I dug mine out, asked my friend I what "rubbed into flour" meant, and the family recipe was reborn up here.

Hubby S, being a computer guy, insisted I get the recipe onto a computer, so I built a recipe database in Filemaker, and my GG's recipe for scones was the very first one committed to the safety of the digital world.

But I didn't back up my computer, and I had a crash: not a software crash, a whole set of shelves was pulled over and my computer fell from a height of six feet onto the floor, while running. The heads jammed deep into the drive. S did his best and actually recovered a lot of the data.

But the recipe database was gone.

But that was okay, because I still had the handwritten copy my Grandmother had made.

Or did I? Sure enough, I didn't. Even then, I wasn't heartbroken, because I remembered it! So I kept making them, at least once a month.

And then I left Hubby. :-( 

Not only did I not have a family to bake for, I couldn't afford the ingredients any more. Faced with the day-to-day difficulties of keeping my head above water, I managed to forget the recipe.

Several years ago, when Daughter and I went down to Louisiana to visit my Stepmom and Daddy, my Stepsister D and I ransacked the house (as quietly as we could!) and went through all of my Stepmom's recipes and books, looking for the scones recipe. To no avail.

But last night Stepsister called me. She had been going through one of Mother's handbags and come across a small notebook. Yes, the recipe was there.

In her handbag! Bless her heart, she'd been carrying it around, basically on her person, for at least 30 years!

I'm very impressed! And absolutely thrilled that Stepsister found it, and once again left shaking my head in wonder at the generations before mine who simply will not throw anything out!

I mean, I don't know about you, but I wouldn't walk around with my mother's purse on my arm! So I wouldn't have saved it in the first place. I might have looked briefly at a notebook...I hope I would have! But when I get into my mind that things have to GO, well, get outta my way or you're gonna get hurt, buddy!

And other times, I am unable to throw away a single piece of fabric, an single piece of paper, because I am paralyzed with fear that I will lose something irreplaceable by doing so.

Well, all my faults aside, I am so thankful this recipe has been found by someone who is careful and thorough, who has managed to return to me a part of my heritage that was briefly lost.

There will be scones for dinner tonight!

A Stone's Throw

So, it turns out, A is passing a kidney stone.

Apparently it's been working its magic on him for some time now. He's come home from work - something he never does - he's been holding his side, groaning and moaning, and he's been sitting and sitting and sitting to the point where I'd come to regard him as more of a piece of furniture than as a companion.

Finally on Sunday he'd had enough and went to the hospital to get poked and prodded. And eight or nine or twelve hours later, he finally had an answer. He had a kidney stone, and it has about three inches to go, and it should be finished within ten days.

Now, neither of us is thrilled that he had a stone, but we are both very relieved to know what it was that was making him feel so terrible for the past month.

Better to know the name of the de'il that plagues you!

And to receive the wonderful modern meds that take the pain away and - no pun intended - help the trouble pass more easily. Among them is Morphine, that ought give you an idea of just how much pain he was in.

To my astonishment, once the morphine had kicked in and he was out of pain, lo and behold, he was laughing and chatty and moving around. And I suddenly realized that this poor guy had been really hurting for a long time. And that I'd grown a little inured to his suffering. That I'd been, at least inwardly, rolling my eyes at him.

Oops. That's not very nice...

In my defense, it is a learned behaviour to be unsympathetic with ailing people. I refer to my Grandma, around whom you were allowed three days to be sick, after which you went to the hospital or back to work. Either way, you got out from under her feet.

So now I've seen her reflection when I look in the mirror, I'll try to be more understanding and compassionate should A experience some other hurt.

But it's good to have him back to himself.