Yesterday was Tom's and my last day in Los Angeles before leaving for Honolulu. We spent the morning puttering around the house talking about how we really should get out and do something as the weather was so nice.
We decided we would go out. As soon as we got one more load of laundry done. And one more load of laundry. And the vacuuming done. And as soon as we checked our email. And read the paper. "What time is it?" I finally asked Tom. "About eleven, I think," he replied. "Oh, no wait, it's ten after one!" My lunch-o-meter agreed. So we decided to head to the beach.
For lunch we decided to head up the street to a local eatery called The Kettle, 
I ordered the Roasted Garlic & Bleu Burger, which was "half pound wagyu burger with melted bleu cheese& roasted garlic on a toasted brioche bun." I don't know what kind of animal a waygu is, but the burger was awesome. The fries, on the other hand, seemed like they'd passed their prime some time ago. Tom ordered two sunny-side-up eggs with fried potatoes and toast. The eggs were good, as was the toast. The potatoes were cold and probably eligible for social security. When our server came bay and asked if everything was tasting good Tom was upfront about the state of his potatoes, of which he'd only eaten a few. A few minutes later our server came by with a lovely plate of fruit for him to make up for the potatoes. Hopefully The Kettle was just having a bad potato day. From The Kettle we walked down to the pier,
After a couple of turns around the pier we walked back into town the went back to Maria and Justin's to putter around some more and fix dinner,
...until some of our participants found more engaging occupations 
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 Last Saturday morning Tom and I left the house at 4 am and ventured out into the 20 degree weather of Columbus, Ohio. Happily, though, we were heading to the airport, and 9 hours and three time zones later were in warm, sunny Los Angeles, home of palm trees, lemon trees, and best of all,
Though this visit is just a brief stop-over on our way to Hawaii - we leave tomorrow for Honolulu - as soon as we arrived we hit the ground running since Makaila's 4th birthday party was to be the following day. So there was decorating to do, tables to set, gift-bags to fill,
...and oh, so important, a birthday cake to be made. By early Sunday morning the house was almost ready for the party.  Makaila had gone around the house with streamers and a roll of tape to make sure that each area was decorated: 
Then it was time to make the cake, which was my job. Makaila had requested a pink heart-shaped cake with flowers on it. Now, there's actually a trick to making a good-sized heart-shaped cake. It calls for a square pan and a round pan:  Divide the cake batter evenly between the two pans (I generally use one cake mix). After the cakes are baked position the square in the shape of a diamond then cut the circle in half and "glue" with icing each half to the two top sides of the diamond. Maybe you can visualize from the above photo. As it turned out Maria didn't own an electric mixer, but that was all right, I was able to mix the batter by hand,
After the cake was baked I also had lots of help icing it, along with the batch of mini-cupcakes I made along with it:
The guests were due to arrive at 3:00 pm, at which time they promptly began doing.
Then the children and their parents all arrived, about 40 people, and the festivities began, starting with the water balloon toss,
...with brief pauses, at the parents' insistence, for eating.
...and, of course, birthday cake and cupcakes,
...followed by more running around, squealing, laughing, crying, then more laughing, squealing, and running around. Then one by one children and parents started going home until all the guests were gone,
But the memory was so sweet.   What's wrong with the above picture? There's a major, typo, one that got by me (who made it), the printer, the videographer, and, as of last night, all of my students and their parents and guests. Or at least no one mentioned it last night until after the recital was over and my nephew Randy,
informed me that I'd made a major typo on the program. But even then I couldn't see it until he'd pointed it out. Can you find it? Ah, well, it seemed to be an evening of confusion, anway. But not on our performances, thank goodness.  Everyone breezed calmly through their pieces.
 Except maybe me. I was a little nervous. As well I should have been, had I known how the evening was destined to transpire. It was all about the pizza. Last night was our Pizza Recital, as my Spring Recital is known. I have three recitals a year, each one catagorized by my students according to what's served at the post-recital dinner-reception (see post from 4/10/2014). After the Spring Recital recital we always have pizza. Hence, the Pizza Recital. I'd been ordering my recital pizzas from the same place for all the years that I've been having pizza recitals, but this year I thought I'd try a different local establishment that I'd heard had really good pizza. I stopped by this pizza place, talked to the very nice manager and made the arrangements to have 10 pizzas delivered to Peace Lutheran Church Connexions Center at 7:30 pm on the dot on Thursday, March 26 (if you haven't yet figured out the typo on my program, this is a big hint). The manager assured me it would be no problem. Except that it turned out to be. On Tuesday evening March 24 around 7:20 pm Tom, whom I'd given as the contact, received a call from the pizza driver who said that while in the round-about he'd had to brake suddenly and all 10 pizzas had fallen and were scattered on the floor of his truck but that he'd go back and get us 10 more. Aside from the obvious problems with this scenario, the pizza shop was a straight shot down the road from our venue at Peace Lutheran, while the round-about was at least four miles out of the way. I called the pizza place, whose manager had by then been apprised of the situation, and was promised that the confusion had been cleared up and that our pizzas would be delivered promptly on the correct date and at the required time. "Thursday, March 26, 7:30, right?" I said. "Right!" the pizza person assured me. The morning of the recital the pizza manager called me again to confirm my order. "Peace Lutheran Connexions Center, 7:15 pm," he said. "Actually, that should be 7:30 pm," I corrected him. "Oh, right. So that's 10 pizzas, Peace Lutheran. 7:15 pm." "Um, 7:30 pm?" I said. "Oh, right. 7:30." "7:30," I repeated for good measure, "Can you get them there at 7:30?" "Sure," said the manger, "7....let's see...30." "Right," said I, "7:30." I should have capitulated to 7:15 and cold pizzas. Anyway, the recital came off without a major hitch,
...until it was over and I stood before the audience, thanking everyone and then inviting them to enjoy the rest of the evening and have some pizza. It was at that point that I noticed Tom standing at the back of the auditorium trying to catch my eye, his arms spread in dismay. I knew exactly what he was trying to communicate to me. It was 7:35 and our pizzas were nowhere in sight. "I called them," Tom told me after I hurried back to find out what was going on, "and they said the pizzas would be here any minute. Which turned out to be not true,
Anyway, our pizzas finally arrived at 8:50.
And as for why the pizzas were so late, Tom relayed this explanation to me, which was the best he could piece together from what the driver told him:
It was all the pizza computer's fault. The pizza computer is evidently this HAL-like brain (as "2001, A Space Odyssey") that is programmed each morning for the day's pizza-producing activities. They had programmed the computer for 10 pizzas for 7:30. So at 7:15 the computer announced that it was time to start baking the pizzas. Which were done promptly at 7:30. Of course, they still needed to be boxed and delivered. "So see," said the deliver man, "if you wanted your pizzas here at 7:30, you should have ordered them for 7:15." This must be the New Pizza Math. I can't say the pizza shop manager didn't try to educate me..  I don't know how it is that time is of such a nature that sometimes it can drag along so slowly while simultaneously rushing along so quickly. This is how the winter went for me. It seemed as if the days of freezing temperatures and snowy, icy pavements and roads and being cold morning to night would never end. But the weeks between my last student recital back in December and my next one - which is today - seemed to rush by too quickly.  But fortunately everyone's nerves seemed to be fairly at bay during our rehearsal last Thursday (including mine, probably because I was preoccupied with a certain cinnamon roll at the time. See post from 3/20/2015) as well as all this week during everyone's last lesson before the recital. And I can say that everyone, thankfully, is off my Anxiety List. Which is an actual list. (Even my anxiety can't function without a list. See post from 3/7/2014). I organize my teaching year into trimesters, each of which ends with a recital. The week after each recital is the beginning of a new trimester, at which time everyone will be given their new performance piece for the next recital. At the beginning of each new trimester I make a list of each student's name and their new piece. This is my Anxiety List.  As soon as a student's piece is performance-ready their name is crossed off my Anxiety List. Students consider it special to be the first one crossed off the list, though that honor usually goes to a young student playing an elementary piece, as the more advanced pieces naturally take more time to conquer.  If, several weeks before the recital, it becomes clear that a student's piece will not be ready by recital time we pull out a review piece and quickly dust it off and polish it up so that it will shine as beautifully as a new piece.  I started my anxiety list years ago after an experience I once had with an advanced student who let their practicing go until, literally, the last minute. This student was so unprepared that on the afternoon of the recital I scheduled and extra lesson to see if I could somehow miraculously pull a half-way decent performance out of them. But alas, four hours before the recital they could not play the piece to save their young life.  That evening I cringed as the student approached the piano to mutilate their piece, kicking myself for not having taken them out of the recital altogether. But low and behold and to my total shock, they played their piece quite decently. During our post-recital reception the student's mother informed me that the student came home from their lesson and spent 2 1/2 hours knocking the piece into shape.  That was probably more practice time than the student had spent on the piece in the previous 4 months. Anyway, it was from that hair's-breadth close call that my Anxiety List was born.  And, paradoxically, having an anxiety list lessens my anxiety as well as the anxiety of my students once they know they are off it.    I suppose I should call it my Anti-anxiety list. 8D  The season is upon us. For the past few weeks and for the next few weeks Peepsaholics worldwide have been and will continue to be confronted with this: 
...just about everywhere we go. But then it occurred to me: It's not just us Peepsaholics who have to struggle through the season, going widely out of our way or staring strait ahead while humming loudly to avoid the ubiquitous Easter csndy displays that assault our line of vision in every store we dare to enter. This time of year has got to be even harder on that much larger segment of the population: the Chocaholics. As it is for us Peepsaholics, for the Chocoholics Easter time has got to be a purgatory of avoidance or a saturnalia of indulgence accompanied by the post-calorie remorse. Except that we Peeps folk generally have only one display per store to deal with, while the chocolate-cravers have to deal with this: 
Chocolate is everywhere. Actually, it's everywhere all year long. As a non-chocophile, I can't imagine how that must be. But for chocoholics, the news gets worse. A couple of days ago, after tearing into a package of Peeps that some "friend" slipped me, fully aware of my addiction, I gobbled down five chicks in one fell swoop. Well, maybe it was in two or three fell swoops. But I eventually ate all five of them before hiding the rest. That's how it goes with me. I can't eat one Peeps. I have to eat them in multiples. In fact, nobody ever eats one Peeps. A person either eats none or several. Anyway, I was riding along on a Peeps-satiated sugar high until I crashed and was then filled with post-Peeps remorse, and feeling the need to face my moment of truth, I reluctantly reached for the Peeps box and did what I'd been avoiding doing my whole life: I looked at the calorie count. And when I learned how many calories there are in 5 Peepchicks - or 6 Peepbunnies, though for me Peepchicks are the gold standar - my heart did a flip-flop. Not of horror, but of joy. It turns our that 5 chicks - or 6 bunnies - contain a mere 140 calories! That's only 28 calories per chick! (or 23.5 per bunny!)
Even 5 chicks - which is my upward limitation for one episode - isn't horrible, as dessert items go.
Who, except for those belonging to the tribe that is far more tempted by a marshmallow bird dipped in dyed sugar? And here's where the news gets worse for those mass legions of the Chocoholic tribe. The same number of calories in a hefty serving of 5 Peepschicks likewise resides in:
To which the results of this research my husband Tom replied, "But what's the point in knowing all that? Almost anybody would much rather eat a little piece of chocolate than a whole boatload of Peeps!" Though deflated by his point, I had to concede, "Touche." In truth, I only know of one other person besides me who loves Peeps enough care about the calorie count.
We are a tribe of two.
Dear Cyberarchivist of the future who happened to come across this blog as a chronicle of bits and pieces of life as it was during the early 21st Century A.D. of human existence on this planet: Yesterday evening in Gahanna, Ohio this was the scene from my front porch: 
This has been the scene from my front porch with more or less quantity of snow covering the ground for most of the time since the beginning of January. I know it ain't over 'til it's over, but cripes sake, yesterday was March 23! The French have a saying for this sort of situation: "Ras-le-bol!" (pronounced "rahl-buhl!"), which means "I've had it, enough already!" Anyway, it's doubly frustrating since we here in Central Ohio were rather led down the garden path last week with gradually warming temperatures which led us to believe that in spite of the relentlessly freezing and snow-bound winter, spring would nonetheless arrive on time as scheduled. Which it did, but then it suddenly changed its mind and bolted. But not before giving us just enough of a taste this past weekend of sunshine and temperatures in the mid-60's to make us all crazy when the temperature dropped back into the 20's with snow yesterday.
So to winter, I scream, you scream, we all scream, "Ras-le-bol!" (Too dang cold for ice cream, right?) And that, dear Future Cyberarchivist, is how it is. Which begs a question for you: Have we of the present left any winter for you of the future? My hubby Tom went to the Sunday breakfast at his church. He gave kudos to the sausage, omelettes, and blueberry pancakes served up to the congregation, but lamented that the tater tots were hard and unenticing. I can't say that Tom's critique on the state of those tots surprised me. Because it's hard to make a really good tater tot. Generally pre-frozen tater tots come out of the oven either mushy or, as in the case of Tom's church breakfast, hard.
That crunch, the sound of a crispy outer layer giving way to a soft interior is the gold standard for the tater tot - and not often achieved*. Unless you know the secret of how it's done. Which I do. And which I'm going to share with you here and now. Gold Standard Tater Tots
4. Place the tots in the pre-heated oven and bake for 18 minutes. (If your oven is cool, maybe for 20 minutes).
Then you'll know you've got the perfect tater tot. However, after I pulled my tray of tots from the oven and they'd cooled for a few minutes I had my nephew Randy taste-test them just to be sure: 
As he bit into the tot there was that distinctive "crunch" sound, perfectly audible from where I stood several feet away. It was the gold standard. *For that scene in the movie a "crunch" sound-effect was used to achieve the illusion of the perfect tater tot. Yesterday, again, my home internet was down. All day. It’s still down. About six months ago we switched from our dependable old provider, Time Warner, to WOW when a friendly, sincere-looking young WOW salesman came to our door pedaling a plan for half the monthly cost. Since then our internet has worked half the time. So late in the morning I schlepped my annoyed self over to Coffee Time (see post from 10/28/2014), my favorite hang-out as well as my current internet provider of choice when Wow plotzes on me – which is all the time. Little did I know that I was about to meet the cinnamon roll of my dreams. Now, depending on the day and the time, Coffee Time often offers an array of goodies baked up in their kitchen, and late yesterday morning there was a goodly variety of goodies on the shelves and counters:
But my eyes about bugged out of my head when I saw this: 
These were some unbelievable cinnamon rolls! They were huge, and all that icing, who would dare to make such a roll?! A young lady who appeared to be in her mid-twenties came up beside me. “I just baked those this morning,” she said, “I just baked everything, the muffins, the bread, the brownies…you should try one of those cinnamon rolls, they’re sooooo good!” Aha, thought I, Coffee Time has a new young baker on board who gets it! Who gets, that is, my own bold philosophy of icing, which is the 2-to-1 rule: two parts icing to one part cake.
And these cinnamon rolls, while perhaps not adhering strictly to my rule for reasons of practicality – I mean these were some big honking rolls – were pretty darned close! “Those rolls have been walking out of here,” the enthusiastic young baker proudly proclaimed. “The brownies have been walking out of here, too,” she said, “they’re so good!” I should have known right then that I was fated to walk one of those rolls out of here, either in a bag or in me.
So I resisted. I ordered a sensible grilled cheese sandwich and went on about my business. And while I sat in Coffee Time righteously munching on my grilled cheese and sipping my diet soda I couldn’t stop thinking about that sweet little roll with all the icing and nuts. And after I left the shop and for the rest of the afternoon while I rehearsed my piano students for their recital next week that cinnamon roll was humming along somewhere in the far back of my mind. And then, at 5:15 pm I had a 45-minute break before my next lesson, whose location, by chance or fate, would take me right past Coffee Time. And, taking unfair advantage of my 45-minutes of brain disengagement, the image of that cinnamon roll rolled itself from the back of my mind right up to the front where it plopped down, front and center. I made a decision. Since I had a little time to kill, I’d stop back into Coffee Time, grab a cup of tea and maybe a little snack to fortify me for the rest of the evening’s piano lessons. But not that cinnamon roll, of course. I doubted that cinnamon roll was even still there. After all, it was the end of the day, and the roll had probably already walked on out of the shop with or in somebody else. Of course, it might still be there. And if it was just baked that morning it would still be fresh and delicious enough. I made a deal with myself. If the roll was gone, that was that. But if, by chance it was still there…. When I walked into Coffee Time I was once again greeted by the friendly young baker, who was just leaving for the day. “You came back!” she chirped. “You remember me,” I replied, heading directly for the cinnamon roll display. “I sure do," she said in that jollying-the-old-folks tone of voice I'm starting to become accustomed to hearing, "Go on and get one of those rolls this time,” she said. “I put some more out fresh.” Indeed she had. And there amongst them, calling to me as if it had been waiting all day just for my return, was the roll of my dreams.
Was it a sublime gustatory epiphany? More than words can say. 
Epilogue: Earlier this afternoon I met my dear old college chum Linda for lunch at a little country diner right off the Mt. Gilead, Ohio exit. 
I didn't even catch the name of the restaurant. It was right off the exit, next to the Marathon gas station. Anyway, after lunch, on the way out the door I noticed this display: 
I've heard of drug users getting drug-high flash-backs. At that moment I got a cinnamon-roll-high flashback. I called to the restaurant cook, who was hanging around the dining room talking to some of the patrons. "Say", I called, "did you bake these cinnamon rolls?" "No," she replied, "Little Amish lady lives a mile down the road made 'em this morning." Which caused a compound flashback of another cinnamon roll from my past:
And so my story ends here as I head into an Amish-cinnamon-roll weekend. Whatever your indulgence, have a good one ;) 
 Does "Indian Women Washing Baby Like A Cloth" not sound like the title of a piece of contemporary abstract art?
Actually it's the title of a fetching 48-second youtube video one of my Facebook friends shared on their page a few days ago. And yet I would say that it is a piece of art, one that I find so fascinating - and enchanting - that I can't stop looking at it. Here, check it out: Indian Women Washing baby Like a Cloth I like this moving photographic art piece so well that I wish I could frame it and hang it on a wall in my house somewhere, where the images of the women and babies would move all day long like the magic moving pictures from the Harry Potter stories. Aside from the the story this picture tells of an Indian custom and culture that I, for one, had no Idea existed - communal baby baths, with special seats and foot-rests built just for washing a new born - there are all the left-out details of the story that one ponders while looking at the picture: Do the mothers bring their babies to the baths, or, as most of the women in this scene appear older, is baby-bathing the job of the grandmother? Or are these ladies baby maids who specialize in washing these tiny ones? Are all new-borns in India carted off to the communal bath, either by their mothers or grandmothers or maids or is this only how people who don't have bathrooms in their homes do it? Do well-off people have special baby-bathing areas in their homes? The appeal of this moving picture has to be especially primal for anyone who's ever bathed a new born. Admit it, everyone, unless your a neonatal nurse or something, it's frightening, right? And, if you're bathing the baby in a sink or little baby tub set up on the kitchen table or in the bath tub, it's clumsy and awkward trying to get into those nooks and crannies, not to mention getting the back side of the baby washed while you're holding baby up from behind. All you folks who've done it know what I'm talking about. And how do you rinse the soap out of baby's hair without getting into his or her little eyes? For a new parent, these are great all-consuming issues. But the method used by the Indian baby washers seems to have all those issues licked. And they look to be engaged in community in a labor of love and joy. Watching them makes me want to hold a newborn baby, even gives me the feeling that I wish I could try my hand washing a tiny newborn that way. Maybe just a time or two. In any case, it's a reminder of the amazing and wonderful variety among people that still exists on our shrinking planet. It's a work of art.
...Continued from yesterday:
As for the question I left dangling yesterday: I don't know why Ohioans are among the nations worst sleepers; all I know is that for most of my life I was among the worst of the worst. On and off. When I was about 4 years old I'd sometimes wake up in the middle of the night then toddle into my parents room and wake my mother up. I'd tell her I was hungry. I wasn't hungry, but telling my mother, who'd starved her way through her childhood (see post from 3/21/2014) that I was hungry always did the trick to get her up. She'd then take me downstairs and fix me either a bowl of Campbell's soup or a bowl of cereal neither of which I ever ate more than a couple spoonfuls because I wasn't actually hungry. Just wide awake and wanting my mother to keep me company. I started having trouble sleeping again in high school. I'd lie awake for hours in the middle of the night or sometimes, if it wasn't in the deep of winter and too cold to get out of bed (see post from 1/15/2015), I'd get up and wander around downstairs for a while. The next morning I'd doze off for half an hour while riding the local commuter train I took to school. Then in college I underwent a great circadian sea-change. I can't say whether the cause of the change was the comfy warmth of my dorm room in contrast to the cold house I'd grown up living and sleeping in, but all of a sudden I was sleeping all night, every night. And taking copius naps during the day. My room mate used to call me "The Horizontal Woman". I also put on 20 pounds, but so what, I could sleep! And so I spent about the next 10 years in a state of well-rested well-being. Then I started having kids. And what went 'round came 'round, as my babies were as bad sleepers for me as I'd been for my mother. Sometimes I'd be up in the middle of the night in the living room rocking a newborn with an insomniac 2-year-old up and playing on the floor as if it were the middle of the afternoon. Sometimes I'd have a newborn and a toddler sharing my half of our small double bed while I slept (or rather, didn't sleep) on the edge with one leg hanging off the side of bed. I believe it was about 12 years from the time my first baby began wailing its way through the night until the last one was sleeping through the night. And in that period there was never a time when some little person wasn't waking me up regularly at night. And then at last everybody in the house was sleeping through the night. Everybody, that is, except me. Now that I was free to sleep through the night I couldn't. Typically I'd fall asleep around 10 pm then suddenly snap awake around 1 am then toss and turn for two, three, or four hours. Sometimes I wouldn't fall back to sleep for the rest of the night. Sometimes I'd suffer the more traditional form of insomnia, falling into bed bone-tired but unable to fall asleep. I developed a princess and the pea - like hypersensitivity to the slightest irregularity of mattress or pillow. Too hard, too soft, too many blankets or too few and even a few hours sleep would be a lost cause. And after tossing wide-awake for hours even the most perfectly comfortable mattress would start to feel hard as concrete. I never lost my great ability to nap during the day, though. Though I couldn't sleep well at night, if the opportunity arose in the middle of the afternoon I could climb back into bed and fall into a swift, wonderful sleep for an hour or two. I could also fall asleep in almost any chair. I could fall asleep sitting in a metal folding chair during my kids' cello lessons. When a nap wasn't available I pushed through the day on cups of tea and bottles of diet Coke. For about a year I tried giving up caffeine altogether and saw zero improvement in my non-sleep condition. And so it went for many years. I thought people who could go to bed, fall asleep and wake up eight hours later refreshed and renewed were the blessed of humanity. I remember a couple of years ago when Tom and I were training for an up-coming 500-mile trek through the mountains of Spain (see "Tighten Your Boots", my daily blog of our trip) by hiking up and down the slopes of Hocking Hills outside Columbus. During one of these training sessions we happened to run into a man and woman who'd already hiked the same route as we'd be doing. When I mentioned that I feared that I'd never be able to sleep at all in the hostels where we'd be staying the woman said, "Oh don't worry, you hike 10 hours a day you'll sleep all right!" So we hiked for 10 hours a day and I laid awake half the night. Then, after almost 35 years of unrelenting insomnia, about a year ago I suddenly started sleeping at night. Crawling into bed and drifting directly off. I may wake up a few times during the night but now I can role over and fall right back into the arms of Morpheus, the god of sleep. I dream. It's a gift I don't take for granted. I don't know why after all these years I once again crossed over from the ranks of the sleep-deprived to the ranks of the sleep-satiated. All I know is that I've been among the 2/5 (see yesterday's post) and I hope to never go back. |
"Equal And Opposite Reactions"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa or from The Book Loft of German Village, Columbus, Ohio 
Or check it out at the Columbus Metropolitan Library
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