Today, I’m taking a page from Stephany’s book and using blog posting as a distraction from the ongoingendless current heavy news. Losing myself in the mundane is soothing, in its way.
If you need a genuine smile, Michelle’s post about photo doodles was magic for me. In the meantime, here are five inconsequential things on my mind today.
Watch Me: I am having an Extremely Reactive Skin Situation this week. My underarms are itchy and inflamed, my lips are dry and peeling, and my face is sporting multiple spots and blemishes (including a Rudolph-esque cyst on my nose; a little late to be festive, no?). Plus, my Apple watch band is leaving an angry, painful red blotch on my wrist. Well, wrists plural, because I switch arms every day to give each wrist a break. I love my Apple watch and use it for various timers and alarms, and to track my steps, my exercise, and my sleep. Honestly, no wonder my arms are getting tired of it. But my wrist-swapping method is not working as it once did, so I need a new solution. My husband uses a leather watch band during the workday, and a nylon watch band for working out. I just use the silicone band that came with my watch; maybe I need a nylon watch band? Of course, as with everything, I am spoiled for choices… this one is utilitarian and simple and cheap. This one comes in fun colors/patterns. Or maybe I want a new silicone one, like this? I would prefer a watch band I don’t need to swap out every time I exercise (although if I do need to swap it out, I would be tempted to try a stainless steel band for non-exercise time. How can I choose? Do you have an exercise watch band you like? Or some way to prevent the skin reaction?
Everybody Plays the Fool: Some people in my life believe that I anthropomorphize my cat. Which is entirely true. I feel like he is a person in the purest, most universal sense of the word. Sometimes I get the feeling that he is trying very hard to see me as whatever the cat equivalent is for “person.” But I am so very stupid, and have such a very difficult time understanding his clear and simple wishes. Even though I do not understand his clear and simple wishes, I understand his frustration, and just how patient he is being with me, and just how very stupid he thinks I am. I mean, look at this face. I am the recipient of this face multiple times a day. This morning, he sat there staring expectantly at me for a good ten minutes before he gave up in disgust and left my office. I never did figure out what he needed.
I Won’t Back Down: Yes, yes, I know I made a big ol’ deal about how I’m FINE with giving up on books that aren’t working for me. But right now I’m reading two books – one with my eyes, one with my ears – that aren’t doing it for me, and I’m just unwilling to let them go. The audiobook is a mystery, and it’s kind of boring, and I don’t really care at all about the narrator/protagonist… but I’ve already given up four hours of my life to listening to it, and I’m more than halfway through it, and I just want to figure out who the murderer is and be done with it. Multiple times a day I tell myself, “Just Google it, and start something else!” and yet I keep plugging away. WHY. The other book is one that SO MANY PEOPLE seem to love, and I want to love it too, and yet it just isn’t striking the right tone with me. To be fair, I haven’t given it much of a shot – a few pages, at most – but I have no desire to pick it up. Seems like an obvious DNF… Except that I WANT to like it. There have been a handful of times when sticking with a book turned out to be worthwhile. I remember thinking The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was a drag for at least 100 pages, but then I ended up really loving it and enjoying the entire series. Of course, the best example is The Goldfinch, which I hated right up until the very end, when the book transformed itself into one of my all-time favorite novels. What if I give up on one of these two books and miss out on another Goldfinch?!
Take a Picture: When I was putting together a holiday card this past December, I found plenty of photos of the three of us, and tons of photos of my husband and daughter, but it was extremely hard to find any pictures that featured me and my daughter or me and my husband. I have only one or two very loose goals for the year, but one of them is to appear in more photos with my husband and child. The thing is, I’m not exactly sure how to accomplish this. My husband is a wonderful and prolific photographer, but he’s not always inclined to take photos of people – his eye is on scenery and artistic groupings. Plus, I’m usually the one who insists on taking photos on more mundane occasions. Like, he’s fine taking pictures when we go to Paris, but has no patience for pictures of all us around the Thanksgiving table, you know? I did announce my goal to both husband and daughter, and asked them to help me accomplish it. They seemed receptive, but time will tell. Of course, the other obstacle is me. I do not tend to enjoy seeing myself in photos. If only I can remember that I *do* like seeing myself in photos, long after the fact. My critical eye is kinder with the passage of the years. It is well worth the teeth-gritting of appearing in photos today to achieve the pleasant nostalgia I will feel when I see them in two or five or twenty years.
Long As I Can See the Light:Linda Gregg is one of my favorite poets. This poem, from In the Middle Distance, is bringing me a measure of solace today.
One of my gentle aspirations for the year was to repot my house plants and I am pleased to report that I have (halfway) accomplished that goal.
It seems irresponsible that I, a known plant murderer, should persist in owning houseplants. And yet I LOVE them, and I have strong feelings of affection for them.
I still remember the jade plant my mother bought me when I was a freshman in college. My mother, who is excellent at keeping things alive, has always had a jade plant in her home, and I have fond memories of the enormous jade plant in the room in my childhood home we referred to as The Library. It sat in a massive pot on a plant stand and its leaves cascaded nearly to the floor like the glorious mane of a beautiful woman. It was extraordinary. So it felt almost like I had a little piece of home with me, setting that jade plant in my dorm window and mostly neglecting it.
Each summer, I would take the jade plant to the dean’s office and they would look after it for me. Each fall, I would reclaim the jade plant – which always seemed to have grown and flourished in someone else’s care – and it would live in my room. After we graduated, my then-boyfriend and I drove to his home town where we lived and worked for the summer; the jade plant came with us. My housing situation was, in retrospect, a little precarious. My then-boyfriend’s parents had arranged for me to house sit for a family friend. But the friends had moved out of their house and were actively looking for a buyer. WHY was this a good idea? WHAT did I think I would do if they sold the house??? HOW did the realtor explain to potential buyers the evidence that a squatter was inhabiting the house??? Anyway, I think my furniture included a mattress on the floor of one of the bedrooms – not the primary bedroom, because the realtor or maybe the homeowner discouraged me from staying there – and maybe they had left a couch in the living room? Or did my then-boyfriend bring over a couple of lawn chairs? I can’t remember. But I had my jade plant there, too.
Once summer ended, my then-boyfriend and I drove across several states to move into the apartment we’d rented, sight-unseen, while I attended grad school. We had driven all day, with a U-Haul attached to my then-boyfriend’s car, and I had my jade plant in my car with me on the passenger side floor. We did get slightly lost in the worst part of the unfamiliar city – this was the age of MapQuest and printed directions, folks – but we eventually found our way to our apartment without being robbed or murdered. Only to discover that there had been a massive ceiling leak, which had a) filled up a ceiling light until it was so heavy it collapsed part of the ceiling and shattered onto the floor and b) created a mold field on the carpet and in the walls of the tiny closet that counted as a laundry room. CLEARLY the apartment had not been cleaned or prepped for new occupants – the bathroom in particular was a filthy disaster – which was not the best introduction to the city or to our scandalous life of premarital cohabitation.
We ended up staying in a hotel while the leasing company remediated the problem, and we had to stay in the hotel so long that we ended up unloading our U-Haul into a storage unit and then having to reload it into a different U-Haul when we were finally able to move in to the apartment. I remember our parents being extremely helpful about the whole thing, even though they were all strenuously against us living together. (It worked out okay.)
But our new city was very hot, and in all the chaos I forgot about my poor jade plant and it died in my overheated car.
Perhaps this incident has instilled in me a crawling anxiety about plant care, as well as an intense internal pressure to never kill a plant again. And yet, despite the emotional intent to be a good plant owner, I am not, in fact, a good plant owner. I try, I really do. I try not to be overbearing, and I try not to be neglectful. But I fear that I overcompensate in both areas.
Currently, I have five houseplants.
This is the whole sad crew, including the jade plant in the red pot whose health has since declined precipitously, and the very already dead cactus in the light green pot.
One is a small, spindly palm tree that has survived for nearly twelve years, which is when my mother gave it to me as a housewarming present. The African violet that was also part of the original basket succumbed to my black thumb several years ago. The long drapey plant that I think may be a philodendron persists. The palm tree looks increasing full of despair. (Although it recently sprouted a new head/branch/limb? So perhaps it is preparing for a second wind?)
I also have a jade plant that is really circling the drain. I have tried a lot of things, and I am coming to the sad conclusion that perhaps I am just not meant to be a jade plant owner. I can’t even bring myself to take a photo of it for you; I am too embarrassed. Consider the state of the little palm tree and then ask yourself what a plant must look like for me NOT to post it.
My orchid was a thank-you gift I received for being Carla’s room parent in kindergarten, so I have a strong sentimental attachment to it because it represents both a moment in time and time’s unrelenting passage. It has flowered several times since I brought it home, in November of 2021, April of 2022, and most recently in December of 2022, which is reassuring unless flowering is a distress signal. But it got to the point where it appeared to be attempting to crawl out of its pot and far, far away from me.
The orchid, listing violently to the right and readying itself for ambulation.
The anthurium is one in a long line of anthurium I have had and killed since I moved to this house. This is the first one I’ve kept alive long enough for it to re-bloom. Based on pictures, I think I have had this since at least July of 2021.
Anthurium in a too-small pot; orchid limb photo bomb.
The fifth plant is really Carla’s. It is a replacement cactus; replacement because we bought her a cactus last summer and promptly killed it. I didn’t even know you could kill a cactus? Well, we managed. But we saw this orchid cactus at the plant store and couldn’t resist buying it. Carla is in charge of its care even though it lives in my office; perhaps she will turn out to have a greener thumb than I do.
Orchid cactus. It can only sit in that little plant stand in that exact position because the plant stand is stupid.
One of the problems with my poor plants is that they need repotting. And yet I am so terrified of killing them that I cannot bring myself to do it. So when this adorable plant store opened just down the street, and I discovered that they will repot the plants FOR YOU, for the extremely reasonable price of five dollars, I knew that was my solution.
After a couple of false starts – for instance, Carla was off school on a random Monday, so we loaded the plants into my car and drove the plant store only to discover it wasn’t open on Mondays – we finally made it to the plant store and they REPOTTED MY PLANTS.
Well, they repotted the two I brought in – the orchid and the anthurium. It was such an easy process and such a relief that I am trying to get up enough nerve to bring in the palm tree/possible-philodendron and my ailing jade plant. I am a teeny bit afraid that one they see the jade plant, they will send someone to repossess all my plants.
Here are the plants immediately after the repotting:
I undertook this repotting exercise at the very end of March. And the plants continue to thrive (except for the jade plant, my god the state of that poor jade plant).
My orchid and anthurium are SO pleased. The anthurium is in bloom and has sprouted a bunch of new leaves. The orchid looks fuller and prouder of its situation, and much less like it wants to escape. And the cactus is cactusing along nicely. I am looking forward to the time when it decides to bloom.
So happy!
Not quite as stunning a transformation as the anthurium, but trust me that this plant is MUCH happier.
Orchid cactus; anthurium in the background, trying to pretend it doesn’t want all the attention.
Friday already, and looking down the barrel of another long weekend! So here are five topics I’ve been thinking about, beginning with MORE CAKE TALK!
A No-Cake Defense (TL/DR: This Is a Me Issue): I loved everyone’s comments on yesterday’s post about choosing my birthday dessert. One thing I additionally loved was how some readers took issue with my husband’s anti-cake stance. I just want to say: I love you. Thank you for defending my cakely honor. You are a treasure and a joy and I feel so cozy and loved.
While not knowing his exact reasons for not wanting to bake a cake, I can speculate. And so I do want to defend my husband a teeny bit. You do not have to accept these reasons! You can still glare in his general direction!
If I am understanding correctly, his first objection is the time. He fears it will take all day to bake a cake, and he doesn’t want to waste a big chunk of my birthday in the kitchen, when we could be doing something else. While perhaps baking a cake should not take several hours, it does always seem to work out that way. At least, it does for me. But then again, I always end up making some silly mistake that requires me remaking some aspect of the recipe.
Also, and this may be projecting, but he might be a little nervous about making a cake. He is not the cake baker in the family; I am. And I am in no way a good role model for The Ease of Cake Baking, in large part because I am always doing something that makes the whole process more difficult (cough cough leopard spots, cough cough rainbow layers). But my husband has never made a cake. I have no doubt he COULD make a cake (he is generally a better direction follower than I am), but for your first cake to be the Replacement Cake for your wife’s birthday, after her previous birthday cake was such a disappointing experience… well. That seems like a recipe (see what I did there) for failure.
However, these perfectly reasonable reasons aside, after I read the umpteenth comment suggesting that maybe my husband should just suck it up and make me the cake I want (I am paraphrasing; everyone reading this is much more tactful), I started to agree. If he has volunteered to make me a birthday dessert, why shouldn’t I ask for the dessert I really want? And I am sure that if I said, “honey, this is what I REALLY want,” he might grumble a bit, but he would make it for me.
So I spent some time looking online for The Perfect Cake Recipe to send him. But the process looking for a recipe to send him made me realize that there is a secret third reason he may be unwilling to make me a cake.
As you may already know, from reading all my food and cake related posts, lo these many years, I am one of those annoying people who doesn’t necessarily stick to a recipe. I might pair a cake from one recipe with a frosting from another recipe. Or I might make a smaller cake than the recipe recommended. Or I might take a cupcake recipe and turn it into a cake. Or I might choose a recipe that calls for poppy seeds in the icing, but I would exclude the poppy seeds. I am comfortable with this, both because I now have some experience in messing around with recipes and because I am comfortable with the idea that it might not turn out. My husband is NOT comfortable with either of these things. He doesn’t have the cake baking experience to draw on, for one thing. But he is also a Supreme Instruction Follower and would find it blasphemous to deviate from a recipe’s explicit directions.
And the thing is, when I search for My Perfect Cake… I can’t find it. It doesn’t exist. Okay, it DOES exist, and Kate found it (thank you!) but it is too large and too expensive for just the three of us. BUT, it’s very nice to know it’s there, if I need it! What I’m saying is the recipe for My Perfect Cake doesn’t exist. There is this perfectly lovely sounding cake, but it calls for lemon extract and I am a lemon purist. But I can’t ask my husband to just… exclude the extract. I mean, you probably can’t just DO that anyway, you’d need to track down other lemon cake recipes and compare various amounts of lemon juice and lemon zest and choose an amount that seems appropriately lemony for this specific cake. I can imagine how overwhelming it would feel if I suggested my husband do that. Even if I did the research, and wrote on top of the recipe, “omit lemon extract; use X tbsp of lemon juice,” he would feel worried that it wouldn’t turn out, and that if it didn’t, it would be HIS fault.
This recipe looks very close to my ideal… but there are so few reviews, and of the reviewers who seem to have actually tried the recipe, it sounds like the cake comes out too dense for what I would prefer.
I do love Sally’s Baking Addiction, and this recipe sounds similar to what I’m looking for and I trust her recipes, although sometimes the cake is a bit more dense than I prefer. But… there’s no lemon curd in this recipe. I want lemon curd. But I don’t think I could just say, “spread some lemon curd in between the layers” to my husband without him feeling like he needed additional, very specific directions to follow. (I actually used this recipe to make my daughter’s seventh birthday cake, and did put lemon curd between the layers.)
Are you beginning to understand that this is not really a problem with my husband trying to deny me the cake of my heart? That it is, instead, an issue of me being too picky?
Like I said, feel free to continue to feel irritated with my husband. But perhaps you can also spare some irritation for me, as well. I am hard to please.
***UPDATE***: I wrote all of the above last night, before my husband got home from work. After sending him the link to Kate’s cake, and deciding that it was really too expensive, and explaining to him that I have been thinking about this particular cake for more than a year, I thought we finally settled on him making me cupcakes. That would be great! Lemon curd filled cupcakes. I explained how to do the filling part, and my husband listened attentively and asked if I would object to him putting pink food coloring in the frosting which strikes me as very adorable. And then thirty or so minutes later, cake clearly on the brain, my husband asked me, “Should I just make you the cake you want?” and I said, “but I thought making a cake was too much?” and he said, “but if I’m going to make cupcakes, I might as well make a cake,” and I said, “yes, please.” And then there was some discussion about my favorite cream cheese frosting and whether I would be amenable to him adding some lemon zest to the frosting (yes) and whether I need homemade curd (no). So I think it is happening????? If there is cake in the offing, I will certainly share all the details with you. (Although cupcakes would also be excellent.)
Surely This Is Not Right: I went to the dentist and noticed this poster hanging prominently on the wall. I do not object to the sentiment, which is lovely. But it raises the question: how do you pronounce “hygienist”?
After spending far too much time listening to online pronunciations of the word, I believe that in British English, the pronunciation is “hy-JEEN-ist.” But in American English, it’s “hy-JEN-ist,” is it not?
In no way is the first syllable “hahy.” Not that I would even know how to pronounce “hahy.” Hah-hee? Hah-high? (My husband thinks this is a way of representing the diphthong of “hy,” but I think there are better ways to represent it than “hahy.”
I suppose this could be one of those words that you have only ever experienced in print and have not yet heard aloud, and when you do finally hear it spoken, the pronunciation is a shock. (Do you have a word like this? Mine is ravine.) But I don’t think that this is one of those cases.
Okay, I still apparently have more to say about this. If you were the person buying wall art for a dental office, a dental office in the United States specifically, wouldn’t you be uniquely aware of the correct pronunciation of dental terms? And wouldn’t you find this EXTREMELY ODD?
Freelance Does Not Mean Free: One of the most… shall we say interesting aspects of freelancing is the money aspect. Some clients are very on top of it, saying things from the get go like, “This is our budget,” or “We typically pay this for this type of project.” Other clients seemingly would never raise the topic if I didn’t broach it first. When it comes to invoicing, some clients are very clear to say, “This looks good, send me your invoice” while others drag out projects for months and would probably never even consider that I should be paid for work completed until I finally say something like, “Great, I’ve included an invoice.” (And I realize that I have a unique privilege of allowing projects to sometimes drag on without pay – and do so only with clients I have had for years and whom I know will pay eventually; it’s not something I would advocate when you are just starting out. And also, for big projects, it is important to ask for a portion [I do half] up front before you begin.) It’s just so fascinating to me that some clients seem completely oblivious to the fact that the work a freelancer does has a price tag.
Aspirations Mini-Update: I have been working toward all my aspirations. Well maybe not all, but many. (I have made progress on all but one of my Personal/Self Improvement aspirations, for instance.) One thing I did was start a very simplistic Excel spreadsheet where I could track the things I wanted to do regularly, if not necessarily daily. Playing the piano and writing and exercising and walking outside. That kind of thing. And what I have noticed is that I cannot do every single thing I want to do daily in a single day. There are just not enough hours in the day. I mean, I suppose I could break up my day in such a way that I could get to everything… but that seems overly rigid and also, to be honest, exhausting. There needs to be some flexibility. For one thing, if I walk outside for 30 minutes then it seems like overkill to also walk on the treadmill. For another thing, if I am really on a roll with, say, writing, I don’t want to STOP just because it’s time to play the piano for fifteen minutes, you know? So I am still trying to feel my way through what is a reasonable way to achieve these goals without achieving them simply for the sake of putting a check mark in my spreadsheet. Perhaps I do need to find a way to create some sort of a schedule, though.
Unusual Snack Foods: One of my all-time favorite snacks is a half a green bell pepper filled with cottage cheese and sprinkled with Lawry’s Seasoned Salt. (We called it “carrot salt” when I was growing up, probably because my mother also sprinkled it on carrots.) (Carrots are also delicious dipped in carrot-salted cottage cheese.)
Neither my husband nor my daughter would touch this snack with a ten-foot pole, but it is delicious and crunchy and full of protein and SO GOOD. I cannot be the only person in the universe (besides my mother) who enjoys it. Have you ever tried this amazing combo? If not, would you be willing to try it? (You won’t hurt my feelings if you say no; I am still very iffy on the chicken thighs situation, so I fully understand New Food Resistance.)
Are there unusual combinations of foods that you like to snack on?
That’s all I have for you today, Internet! I hope you have a fabulous weekend full of cake and weird snacks and reasonable pronunciations!
