Life

It’s A PLAYSET.

Posted on November 16, 2008 by Debora

Friday I picked up the kids from school and we headed down to Temec to see Madagascar 2. We had some time to kill after we’d gotten some lunch (primary rule of family outings: eat first, hungry children are the devil’s playthings) and before our showing started, so we decided to kill some time in the mall.

One of the shops we popped into was an American Greetings outlet. We spent about twenty minutes in there because Luke could not be pulled away from the big rack of 2008 collectible Christmas ornaments. Specifically, the Model T ornament, the “antique console-style television that shows the Andy Griffith Show on the screen and whistles the theme song when you press the button” ornament, the Union Pacific vintage aerotrain ornament, the John Deere tractor ornament…you get the idea. This isn’t the first time I’ve suspected that my son was born in the wrong era: he has an ardent passion for gadgets and vehicles built during the first half of the 20th century.

Sadly I could not afford to buy any of them for him — the matinee movie and lunch at Souplantation were our big splurge for the week, because we’re high rollers that way — and eventually we got him out of there.

After the movie (which was hilarious) we did some grocery shopping. Our last stop of the night was at Henry’s, one of those save-the-planet whole foods stores. We were in the dairy aisle when suddenly Luke’s eyes lit up and he pointed to something up high on the wall. “I want one of those!” he announced in tones of suppressed excitement.

I looked where he was pointing, and saw this:

“You want…a dollhouse?” I asked uncertainly.

“It’s not a dollhouse,” he said, sounding mightily affronted. “It’s a playset. And also I want a Model T that’s the right size for the garage, and a little TV. And a fireplace.”

“I…um…” Possibly I could afford to get him these things for Christmas, in addition to the Satisfactorily Manly microscope and pocketwatch he’d already requested. But…well, I’m not proud of this, but…my brain was seizing up at the thought of what would happen if word got out that I had bought my eight-year-old son a dollhouse for Christmas.

It must have shown on my face, because Luke’s own expression lost some of its self-assurance. “It’s a playset,” he repeated, but he didn’t sound as sure of it this time. “Except…I guess that one does look a little bit like a dollhouse. I want a playset that doesn’t look like a dollhouse. With a TV and a fireplace and a Model T.”

Well then.

Yesterday while the kids were visiting their dad I was surfing the net, searching for the manliest dollhouse — er, playset — I could find.

Turns out there really are some fine manly dollhouses out there. This one’s nice:

It’s also $250. Apparently you pay extra for the manliness, because pretty much every “playset” that isn’t made of pink plastic costs upwards of $80. Which didn’t seem like a lot last Christmas when the bucketfuls of money were still coming to this address, but now it sounds like a big damn chunk of cash. And naturally they don’t come STANDARD with Model T’s and fireplaces and televisions, so THAT’S going to be another limb. Why can’t he just be into Pokemon like all the other eight-year-olds?

Elizabeth has asked me for exactly one thing for Christmas: a metal detector. She is SO OVER the whole budgeting thing, and wants to use her metal detector to find loose change wherever she goes so that she can return to the good old days when she actually got to buy stuff from time to time.

Ah, the heartwarming spirit of Christmas.

Can you feel it?

Categories: Christmas, Family, kids, Life, NaBloPoMo | 5 Comments

My Favorite Apple Pie Recipe

Posted on November 15, 2008 by Debora

Years ago I used to subscribe to Family Fun magazine, and this recipe was included in the October 1999 issue. It’s simple enough for even the most casual cook to make, and it’s really delicious.

THE CRUST:

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
8 tablespoons ice water

The original recipe calls for 1/2 cup cold butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces, and 5 tablespoons cold vegetable shortening. Possibly this makes a flakier crust than using all butter, but considering how spectacularly unhealthy partially-hydrogenated oils are, I’m willing to sacrifice whatever textural benefits Crisco offers. I substitute an equal amount of butter. Your mileage may vary.

The secret to a perfect piecrust is to keep all the ingredients COLD, and to not overmix the butter. The method Family Fun recommended is to measure the dry ingredients into a gallon-size Ziplock bag, seal and shake it to mix them, then add the chilled butter pieces (and shortening if you opt to go that route) and just sort of press them in. The idea is to flatten the butter and coat it with flour to produce a flaky, layered crust.

I use a regular mixing bowl and just flatten the butter pieces with my fingers before tossing them in with the flour mixture.

If you’re already an old hand at making pastry crusts, just do whatever you usually do. :^)

Once your chilled butter is LIGHTLY mixed in with the dry ingredients, add the ice water. If you’re using the Ziplock method, open the bag, add ice water, reseal, the press and shake until the dough holds together (add more water if necessary, but not too much!).

Turn the dough onto a lightly floured surface, knead it together, then divide in half. Work quickly, because you don’t want your butter to get warm and melt.

Flatten each half into a disk, wrap in plastic, and chill for at least 30 minutes.

Then roll out one of the disks on a lightly floured surface until you have a circle that’s about 12 inches in diameter. Line a 9-inch pie plate with the dough, trimming any extra dough from the edges with a sharp knife. Return it to the refrigerator until you’re ready to make the pie.

THE FILLING:

6 to 8 pie apples such as Granny Smith, Cortland, Rome, or a local variety of tart apples. I highly recommend using local apples whenever possible, ideally from a “U-Pick” orchard. A freshly-picked, locally-grown apple is always going to taste better than one that’s been trucked across the country, chemically ripened in a warehouse and then stacked under bright lights in a supermarket. Also, I think the small local growers tend to go a little easier on the chemical pesticides and whatnot than the big commercial growers. And if you can find a local organic orchard, score!

Okay, where was I? On my soapbox, apparently.

Juice of half a lemon
3/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg.
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons butter, cut into chunks
milk (for glaze)

Heat oven to 425º.

Meanwhile, peel, core, and slice your apples into 1/4 inch slices. You should have about 6 cups worth of sliced apples; place them in a large mixing bowl.

Pour the lemon juice over the apples and add the sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and flour. Toss well. Spoon the spiced apples into the lined piecrust and dot with the butter pieces.

The top crust can look like whatever you prefer. You can roll it out, cut it into strips, and make a latticework crust if you’re really ambitious. Or just roll it into a circle, set it atop the apple mixture, and crimp the edges together with the tines of a fork. Remember to cut slits in the dough to let the steam escape. Brush the top with milk for a glaze.

Place the pie in the preheated oven and bake for 45 minutes, or until the crust is golden brown and you can see the juices bubbling. If the crust begins to brown before the pie is fully baked, cover it with foil.

Let the pie cool before slicing it into wedges. Serves 8.

Sorry I don’t have a picture.

Hey wait — this is the Internet! Here ya go:

PS. If you actually succeed in making a pie that looks like the one in the picture, do let me know your secret. Mine come out very tasty but not nearly that pretty, and I’ve never gotten the hang of getting decorative cutouts to hold their shape during the transfer from countertop to pie.

Categories: environment, food, Life, NaBloPoMo, Nutrition, Recipes | 2 Comments

Memory Lane, Part Last: Bailey Ranch

Posted on November 14, 2008 by Debora

Life at Bailey Ranch (the place Steve and I were caretaking when we first moved in together) was pretty sweet at first. Sure, there was an epic mess to clean up that the previous caretaker had left behind — it took us MONTHS of working every day to get it all hauled to the dump — but in exchange for that we lived there rent-free. The caretaker’s house was a tiny, ancient mobile with cardboard walls and a nonworking oven, but compared to where I’d been living it felt like the Taj Mahal.

And the part of the ranch that we lived on faced a big green-year-round pasture that needed to be grazed down, so our horses and cows were fat and happy and our feed bills were practically nonexistent.

Which was good, because money was TIGHT. Steve was working part time as a veterinary assistant, and I was collecting unemployment from the closed-down machine shop and searching for a market for my art. Collectively it would have been enough to live on, but to complicate matters, Steve knew literally nothing about managing money. The term “drunken sailor” comes to mind. When he lived at home with his parents (which was right up until we both moved to Bailey Ranch), they had given him his own credit card to cover all his living expenses, and THEY paid the bill every month. So Steve had it in his head that credit cards=free stuff, and somehow that didn’t change when it was MY credit card we were using and the bills were coming to us. “What do you mean we can’t afford that?” he would protest in exasperation. “There’s almost seven thousand dollars left on the card!”

Adding to my frustration was the fact that Steve’s father was constantly swooping in, paying some outstanding bill or handling some repair that Steve should have taken care of, and then WHINING INCESSANTLY ABOUT IT. And it was no use me asking Steve to ask his father to please let us handle our own concerns, because financial independence was a completely alien and totally unwelcome concept to him.

I know, I know…and still I married him. What can I say, I thought it was something he would outgrow once he got used to living away from his parents.

Anyway, so we were always looking for ways to supplement our income. So when a local horse-trader asked Steve to put a little training into a couple of problem horses he had, Steve agreed and they came to live in our pasture.

One of the trainees was a striking pinto Mustang filly called Bunny, so named because of the perfect rabbit shape on her right shoulder. I was inspired to paint her.

When I showed the painting to the horse trader, he bought it from me and asked me to do two more of his horses, a mare named Sixxy Miss…

And an aged Thoroughbred stallion named Jet T Chub:

Chub was gorgeous for his age. I ended up breeding Stormy to him, but as with all of her pregnancies the embryo was reabsorbed before the second trimester.

Word got out, and other people asked me to paint their horses.

In the middle of all of this, Steve got a decent-paying job working security at the new casino and we got married. And pretty much the instant the knot was tied, he started talking about having kids right away.

I was not on board with with this. There were too many aspects of our relationship that still needed work before we brought another human into the equation, not to mention the appalling state of our finances, and frankly I personally did not feel ready for motherhood.

But it was all he could talk about. How much he wanted to be a dad, how much he had to offer and teach our children, how he wanted us to be a family instead of just a twosome. To prove his sincerity and devotion to being a good father he quit smoking, quit Copenhagen, stopped overspending and paid off all our debts.

So, about ten months after the wedding, I got pregnant. And it turned out that when Steve talked about how much he wanted to be a dad, what he actually meant was that he looked forward to hanging out drinking beer with his teenage sons, because that whole gestating-infancy-toddlerhood-childhood stage? Was noisy and messy and inconvenient and a major buzzkill and he wanted nothing to do with any of it. His parents helpfully told him that just because I no longer had the energy or desire to hang out in smoky bars, didn’t mean that HE had to stay home. So they all went out partying together, and he went back to smoking and chewing and spending money like he found it in the road, and oh yes, apparently that’s when all the cheating started too.

Looking back, that was pretty much the end of our marriage: the day I gave in and got pregnant. It took another eleven years for me to admit it and give up trying to save it, but that was really when it ended.

And coincidentally that was when my art career ended as well, because as soon as I got pregnant all of my creative juices started flowing in a different direction and the part of my brain that did the art thing completely shut down for a year or so. It took me most of my first trimester to finish that picture of old Tank, and I wasn’t happy with how it turned out so I gave it to the owner for free.

I tried to get back into it when Elizabeth was a baby, but once she started walking (and climbing!) there was no place to work that was safe from her. So aside from a Christmas card or two, I haven’t done any artwork in about eleven years.

I’m thinking maybe it’s time for that to change. I could paint, print and sell greeting cards maybe, or get serious about writing and illustrating children’s books. Or go back to doing pet/horse portraits. Even in this economy there has to be SOME kind of market somewhere that I can break into.

So…there you have it. The Twenty-Year Retrospective of Debora’s Artistic Journey, Which Actually Only Spans About Ten Years Because I Hopped Off The Art Bus Halfway Through.

Further updates as events warrant!

Categories: Animals, Artwork, Family, Horses, kids, Life, Marriage, NaBloPoMo, Ranching | 10 Comments

Love: It’s Not About Personal Dignity

Posted on November 13, 2008 by Debora

Last Friday the kids and some friends and I got together up in Idyllwild for a rousing evening of karaoke. I hadn’t done the karaoke thing in about ten years, so I wasn’t sure what my voice was going to sound like, but I was feeling the need to introduce my kids to this great American pastime.

As it turned out, yes my singing voice was a bit rusty, and no that didn’t infringe upon my merrymaking one bit. It was a slow night, so everyone in our group who wanted to got to sing six or seven songs each. Luke got up and belted out “Day-O” with me, and it was horrible and awesome and everyone clapped and cheered at top volume when it was over.

“I’m surprised no one laughed at me because of all the mistakes I made,” Luke confided to me later.

“Oh, baby, that’s the fun of karaoke,” I assured him. “Nobody cares about the mistakes, they just love that you got up and sang.”

Elizabeth declined to join in; somewhere in the past year she has become very self-conscious and unwilling to just be goofy. That makes me sad. It is now one of my goals in life to get Elizabeth hooked on the “screw personal dignity” adrenaline rush of karaoke.

******************

There was no school on Veteran’s Day. Around here November 11th is also the occasion of Gericault’s and Brodie’s birthday, so it’s EXTRA-special for us. Here they are as babies…

…and big strapping three-year-olds:

I chose that particular photo because today is Love Thursday and it suits the theme better than all those other photos where they’re literally trying to rip each other’s throats out. Let’s just say that Gericault and Brodie have a sibling rivalry sort of love/hate thing going on.

So there we were on Tuesday, all home from school and overflowing with leisure time, and…we just weren’t having a good day. Elizabeth was cranky in a way that I can only describe as hormonal, and Luke was whiny and complainy, and by 10am I was ready to sell both of them to the gypsies.

But alas, there were no gypsies to be found, so instead I announced that we were Going For A Walk. Originally this was just going to be a stroll around some backroads to clear everyone’s heads, but then we decided to go to a nearby sandwash where there are rocks to climb and a culvert to crawl through.

The dogs enjoyed their birthday outing , and climbed rocks with full enthusiasm.

By the time we got home, everyone was in a much better mood.

Which lasted until the next morning, when I discovered that my credit union had pulled a Big Chunk Of Money out of my savings account because Steve is behind on his truck payments.

This is a new savings account that I’d opened after the separation, and only my name is on it. But it’s with the same credit union (although a different branch) as Steve’s truck loan. Which I am listed on as the primary lendee, because I am the one with pristine credit. Because I, you know, PAY MY BILLS ON TIME.

What makes this all the more ridiculous is that the money Steve makes is measured in BUCKETFULS. On a good DAY he can make more than twice the amount he pays in child support per WEEK, and that’s my sole income these days. And he lives with his PARENTS, who FEED HIM and DON’T CHARGE RENT. And which one of us has a (slowly) growing savings account rather than mounting debt? Why, that would be me.

I called Steve and he said that he would repay my money and see about getting my name off of the truck loan. Since the only way to do this is for him to refinance the truck in his own name, we need to do it QUICKLY before he destroys his credit and no longer qualifies. Our CU is very very picky about who they will offer loans to, and I don’t think that’s gotten any less true of late.

I’m trying to think of a way to tie that last part of today’s post into the whole Love Thursday theme, but I don’t think it can be done.

So I’ll close with some good news: the chickens have all been running around loose for a few days now, and so far no fatalities.

AND we had our first frost Sunday night and a really hard frost Monday night, and somehow my bell peppers and tomatoes just shrugged it off…

…and then the weather turned warmish again, so the garden’s probably safe for a while yet. I LOVE tomatoes and bell peppers and lean heavily on them in all my cooking for as long as they last, so I’m very happy about this.

Happy Love Thursday, everyone. Here’s to…stuff not dying, and imperfect-but-joyful public singing. And rocks!

Categories: Animals, Birthdays, Dogs, Family, Friends, kids, Life, Love Thursday, NaBloPoMo | 2 Comments

Wordless Wednesday: Autumn Rainbow

Posted on November 12, 2008 by Debora

Categories: Life, NaBloPoMo, Weather, Wordless Wednesday | Tags: Rainbows | 2 Comments