December 13, 2005

• so much to blog, so late at night

  My regular readers know that my son Doug runs on a non-standard
  daylength.  On the planet he comes from, their days are longer
  than ours, so each day he wakes later and goes to sleep later still
  than on the day before.  Nothing odd about that after twenty-odd
  years, actually twenty-four decidedly odd years.  He has been like
  that for as long as I’ve known him.

  I, however, used to run on an ordinary 24-hour day, even though in my
  twenties I tended to be more comfortable sleeping during the daylight
  hours.  Alaskan winters cured me of that, and now I generally
  prefer to get all the daylight I can.  I started staying up later
  at night during our two-week cold snap after Thanksgiving, and got into
  some crazy pattern similar to Doug’s, staying up later each successive
  “night” – actually mornings for more than a week now.

  After finally getting to sleep around 7 AM a few days ago, I had
  started trying to reverse the pattern and get to bed earlier each
  night.  That made sense while the weather was warmer, up around
  the freezing point for a while.  Now it is back down near zero,
  and I’m wondering if it’s not better for me to just stay on the shift
  opposite to Doug’s to keep the fire hot and my houseplants alive.

  ---

  I condone everything… or nothing.

  Ren expressed righteous indignation at the thought that I was condoning
  vandalism.  I assumed I knew the meaning of the word, pretty much
  the opposite of “condemn”, but I looked it up anyway, just to be
  sure.  I found it in several dictionaries.  By some
  definitions, such as “forgive” and “accept,” I condone
  everything.  “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who
  trespass against us,” is more than empty words to me.

  In other senses, such as “pardon,” I condone nothing.  Pardoning
  implies judgement and I don’t judge.  I neither condemn nor
  condone in that sense.

  I accepted the vandalism at my old place, Elvenhurst.  I made no
  attempt to discover who committed it, nor had any desire to know. 
  I accepted the responsibility for leaving the place unattended. 
  When scroungers made off with some valued keepsakes of mine, and
  Charley saw them in their home and brought them back to me, I didn’t
  ask him who they were, and he didn’t volunteer the information.  I
  don’t need to know who I’m forgiving, in order to forgive.

  When I found my antique Christmas ornaments scattered in the yard by
  scroungers and vandals, I picked them up and brought them here for
  safekeeping, glad that the vandalism had been done in dry weather and
  that I’d gotten there before things were ruined.

  Going to my old home saddens me because of the library for which there
  is no room here, the gardens now gone to weeds, and all the lost time
  and work gone into that place, now gone to waste.  Finding that
  people have been there taking things is less troubling to me than
  finding things destroyed, but neither of those things is as troubling
  as the simple fact of my inability to live in and care for two places
  at once.

  ---

  I have enjoyed reading the comments about different people’s styles of gift shopping and giving.  Zvanoizu‘s
  practices sound a lot like mine:  frugality dictated by economics;
  and the focus on the kids and immediate family, with special, personal
  “gifts that keep on giving” all year.   Sandcastles‘s
  husband gives the sort of idiosyncratic gifts I tend to appreciate
  most, and which I also tend to give because such services are
  affordable for me.  ZashiaQSharr
  shops early and often, and enjoys seeing the pleasure her gifts bring,
  as I do.  She prefers getting handcrafted gifts, and hates
  toiletries, as I do, too.  Flaminredhead
  says:  “I enjoy the crowds, the lines, the chaos…”  I enjoy
  it, too, when I am people-watching and not trying to get something
  done.  There are more of them worth sharing, especially the ones
  from ItzaRoos, goddessfourwinds, and the long serious one about the true meaning of the holidays from flaminredhead, here.

  During the years when Doug was growing up here in this spread-out but
  socially warm and close neighborhood, we seldom had much money at all
  and never any to spare.  I often did have surplus produce from my
  gardens and greenhouses, seedlings in spring for setting out after
  frost, and abundant tomatoes, zucchini, kale, chives, rhubarb, and
  herbs in their season.  I gave my surplus to my neighbors, so that
  it wouldn’t go to waste and because I like sharing.  From time to
  time, even now, someone shows up with part of a moose, a chunk of
  salmon or halibut, and reminds me of a giant zucchini I’d given them,
  or a bundle of sweet marjoram and thyme.

  That feeling that getting requires some giving in return troubles
  me.  I don’t like the idea that those who receive my gifts feel as
  if they need to reciprocate.  For that reason, I used to wait
  until Christmas eve to deliver my holiday gifts to the neighbors. 
  I would collect baskets throughout the year, from dumpsters at
  eastertime, from yard sales and thrift shops, and fill them with
  cookies, jars of homemade salsa or spaghetti sauce, etc., and bake pies
  or cakes for the neighbors.  I made it a point to know who liked
  what, and Doug and I would do the rounds just after dark the night
  before Christmas, pulling his sled full of fresh-baked goodies, late
  enough that nobody was going to rush out and buy me a gift in
  “exchange” for my kitchen bounty.

  The first Christmas that Greyfox was here, he was miserable.  I
  have written about this previously and there are links to some of those
  entries in the left module.  Greyfox was scared and he was
  uncomfortable.  He had never lived this close to the edge. 
  He had always had money and creature comforts and plenty of status
  symbols and signs of conspicuous consumption to make him feel good
  about himself.  He cried a lot those first few years here, and
  that first winter he cried because we didn’t have enough money to buy
  gifts for his mother and sisters.

  I thoroughly misunderstood his motivations.  I thought he wanted
  to give them gifts.  He just wanted to have enough money to buy
  them some gifts.  He and the older of his two sisters had a
  longstanding competition, trying to outdo each other in the costliness
  of their gifts to their mother and each other. 

  I made a total fool of myself.  I questioned Greyfox closely about
  his family’s preferences, and I went through the house, searched
  through all my treasures, and found gifts that I felt were suitable for
  his mother, each sister, the niece, and both brothers-in-law.  One
  of his sisters, he said, always wears the color lavender.  I had a
  brand-new t-shirt in that color, commemorating the summer of cleanup of
  the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which had been given to me for working in
  the t-shirt booth at the Talkeetna Bluegrass Festival.  I gave
  some of my much-valued Alaskan gold-nugget and garnet jewelry to the
  other sister.  I don’t recall everything I came up with, but there
  was something for everyone.

  I wrapped each one specially, uniquely, beautifully, as only a
  perfectionistic Virgo can do.  I used some antique gift wrap, some
  handcrafted papers, silk wrappings for some, real satin ribbons, things
  I’d salvaged and hoarded.  I packed them carefully into a big box
  so that the bows wouldn’t be crushed, and mailed them in time to arrive
  for Christmas.  We got the report from the elder of the
  sisters.  She said everyone gasped when they opened the box and
  started taking out the presents.  She said they were wrapped so
  beautifully that the cheap little gifts inside were a big
  disappointment.

  For a few years following that fiasco, we got some cash gifts from them
  each year, in diminishing amounts.  The year that Greyfox made his
  last visit to Pennsylvania (2001, and he says it will be his LAST trip
  out there forever), he took along some handmade rag dolls I’d gotten in
  a trade for some jewelry I made, as gifts  for his sister’s little
  twin daughters.  A year or two later, upon learning that the twins
  were very into Barbie but couldn’t find any bedding for their Barbie
  house, I cut up some old thrift shop blouses and hemmed them as silk
  sheets, and made woolen blankets and terry cloth towels for two
  Barbies’ beds and baths. 

  Other than that, I don’t bother with gifts for his family any
  more.  My family understands, I hope, that there may be
  occasional, sporadic and spontaneous gifts from me when something
  appropriate comes my way, but that when my household routinely goes
  without things like dental care and new glasses, I don’t feel right
  about using our scarce resources to shop for gifts.  The neighbors
  don’t get the sled-load of goodies any longer, because few if any of
  them would appreciate the sugar-free, gluten-free stuff I eat now, and
  I don’t trust myself with a kitchen full of white flour, white sugar
  and all that.

  And that reminds me of this:

  It’s
  not a pretty pie, but Doug and I like these custard pies so much that
  between us we can put one away in an hour or two.  Need I add that
  they are nutritious?   They are quick and easy, too, since I
  quit going for the flaky butter crust and switched to more healthful
  and easier to make crust with vegetable oil.  The essential fatty
  acids in the olive oil catalyze with the cholesterol in the eggs to
  produce better nervous system function instead of arterial plaque.

  Preheat the oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Prepare the custard first:

  Beat together:
  2 cups milk (I use reconstituted non-fat dry milk if I don’t have enough goat milk for this.)
  3 eggs
  1/3 cup Splenda (or sugar, if you can handle its glycemic effect and the addictive qualities of it)
  1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract (ethyl vanillin is nasty, toxic stuff)
  1/4 teaspoon salt

  Set it aside while you make the crust.

  In a 9-inch pie pan, preferably a deep one, stir together with a fork:
  1/2 cup garbanzo and fava bean flour (The only source I’ve found for this is BobsRedMill.)
  1/2 cup sorghum flour
  1/2 teaspoon salt
  1/2 teaspoon xanthan gum (to hold it together – it will still be grainy and crumbly anyhow)

  When the dry ingredients are thoroughly mixed, whisk together:
  1/3 cup olive oil
  1 1/2 tablespoons cold milk

  Pour the liquid over the flours in the pie pan and mix lightly with a
  fork until all flour is moistened.  Then press the crust evenly
  over the sides and bottom of the pan.

  Prick the crust with a fork to release steam that would deform it, and
  bake at 450 degrees for “about ten minutes” (that’s what the old recipe
  says – 8 minutes works for me).

  Turn the oven heat down to 325 degrees F., and pull the rack out far
  enough to pour the custard mixture into the half-baked crust, then bake
  for another 35 minutes or so at 325.

  ---

  Almost done now – just this one thing more:

  
  Four kittens in a pile alongside my legs in Couch Potato Heaven, by the light of the PS2 monitor.

  Then, along came fat old Muffin and settled down right in the middle of
  the kitten pile.  I got Doug to turn on the overhead light for
  this one.
  
  

  • 9:03 am
  • 7 Comments