An Oldie but a Goodie...

Martha Stewart's Holiday To-Do List

December 1 Blanch carcass from Thanksgiving turkey. Spray paint gold, turn upside down and use as a sleigh to hold Christmas cards.

December 2 Have Mormon Tabernacle Choir record outgoing Christmas message for answering machine.

December 3 Using candlewick and hand-gilded miniature pine cones, fashion a cat-o-nine-tails. Flog gardener.

December 4 Repaint Sistine Chapel ceiling in ecru, with mocha trim.

December 5 Get new eyeglasses. Grind lenses myself.

December 6 Fax family Christmas newsletter to Pulitzer committee for consideration.

December 7 Debug Windows '2000

December 10 Align carpets to adjust for curvature of Earth.

December 11 Lay Faberge egg.

December 12 Take dog apart. Disinfect. Reassemble.

December 13 Collect dentures. They make excellent pastry cutters, particularly for decorative pie crusts.

December 14 Install plumbing in gingerbread house.

December 15 Replace air in mini-van tires with Glade "Holiday Scents" in case tires are shot out at mall.

December 17 Child proof the Christmas tree with garland of razor wire.

December 19 Adjust legs of chairs so each Christmas dinner guest will be the same height when sitting at his or her assigned seat.

December 20 Dip sheep and cows in egg whites and roll in confectioner's sugar to add a festive sparkle to the pasture.

December 21 Drain city reservoir; refill with mulled cider, orange slices and cinnamon sticks.

December 22 Float votive candles in toilet tank.

December 23 Seed clouds for white Christmas. Festoon windows with worthless stock.

December 24 Do my annual good deed. Go to several stores. Be seen engaged in last minute Christmas shopping, thus making many people feel less inadequate than they really are.

December 25 Bear son. Swaddle. Lay in color-coordinated manger scented with homemade potpourri.

December 26 Organize spice racks by genus and phylum.

December 27 Build snowman in exact likeness of God.

December 31New Year's Eve! Give staff their resolutions. Call a friend in each time zone of the world as the clock strikes midnight in that country.

My fav is December 24! Way to go Martha!

Why I love/hate Martha...

While I continue to look for the letter I wrote to her (that librarian in my spare bedroom never seems to file correctly), here is a choice quotation from Martha Stewart's Christmas, p.13:

Family traditions evolve over time, and one of favorites is the yearly creation of the plum pudding. I made my very first shortly after my marriage, on the day after Thanksgiving. A friend and I concocted the recipe from old English cookbooks, and I served the pudding to our friends that Christmas, doused with brandy and mounds of creamy hard sauce. Word spread and requests poured in for puddings for next year. To keep up with the demand, I began collecting traditional English pudding bowls (in brown and white glazed pottery); I invented an oven-cooking method so we could cook thirty-two puddings every six hours; I discoved that the fruit could be chopped in a food processor a little at a time. That Christmas with just one helper, we made three hundred puddings in less that three days. While you may not wish to produce puddings on quite such a grand scale, this is one of the most wonderful giftsyou can give -- or at least to your ten dearest friends.



And you thought Carol and Elmo were scary!!!

Just think we are all already behind by 2 days. GET BAKING!

Coming soon... Martha Musings Galore

As soon as I find it, I am going to post a letter I wrote to Martha Stewart a few years ago.

Ah Martha, watching her new talk show is a little like watching for the decapitation scene in the movie The Omen. You know you should close your eyes because it's coming but yet you can't help yourself and watch the guys head fly up into the air as the plate glass runs right through his neck.

Although today in a rerun Martha had Elmo as a guest and I was shocked to realize that Elmo and Carol Channing (whom she had on as a guest a few weeks ago) have the same facial expressions. That blank, wide open mouth smile, stare directly into the camera thing that scares me to no end.

Welcome back Dolly, it's nice to have you back where you belong all right, in my nightmares of Carol Channing wearing a boa made of Elmo with that stare (and probably those oversize sunglasses!) Oh god, take me now before I have to sleep....

Happy T-day everyone!

Metaphysical Rambling

Why is it?

Why is what you may ask.

Well, why is that we as humans sit around and ask ourselves questions like why is it?

I have often said that I believe that if the human brain ever figured out how it worked that it would cease to exist.

Hence I love thinking about ideas that I know I will never understand.

Like GUT or the Grand Unified Theory.

How many other universes are out there and perhaps sharing the same space as us?

Well 88 was the number in one documentary I saw.

88 planes of existence all happening at the same time.

Wonder is there is someone sitting, thinking, eating cold confections in everyone of them.

A Poem

As I Look to the Sky,
Maize


Second, the wind in the corn
calls me as a mother cat
to her kit, first as a man --
whispers of unexpected
whispers form
on the broad leaves,
fall onto my skin,
caress my body on a longwalk,
crisscrossing paths
left by teens in jeeps,
joyriding in the field of ears,
creating noises not meant
for mounds of earth
and fish and seed planted
in spring, now taller
than a man in the
heat of late July
Tassels of silk toss
in the breeze, smelling
of corn mush, cakes
and corn whiskey that
Grandma held in her
hands back in Ohio.

I remember the husk
doll she gave me
at five, oatmeal in color
and dry enough to burst
into friendly flames
which once heated the
blackened fields,
furry that summer with
green seedlings.
The corn-silk hair
of the doll fell out
as I grew older and
Grandma fed me
Succotash, mixing
vegetables from
her garden behind the
white-sided house,
trying to recapture
the look of West Virginia.
I buried that doll with
Grandma, placed
a leaf and tassel in
her cold hands. We
planted her in the
hills of West Virginia,
waiting for spring
and the growth of Easter.

I pull a stalk
and rip. Yellow
teeth, milk-rich,
splatter my face with
sweet, cloudy liquid,
as I stand with
Matt in a cornfield
in Ohio, summer
before college. We
have been driving,
stop to breathe the rows.
We find a farmer,
blue-jeaned and working
his field, checking for
pests. He asks what
we are up to,
we explain our
love of corn and water
and the Ohio summer.
We wonder if he can
see love in our
hands as they join
together in flesh;
the other hands
gripping branches of
the abundant corn.
He must, for he
invites us to use
his field again.
The wind blows Matt's
messed hair, the color
of the silk on that
cornhusk doll.
We use his field again,
making love, hiding among
the corn as we lie looking
up at the moon
through the moving leaves.

As I near the
edge of the scarred field,
I remember yet
another time --
the wind blowing down
fifteen acres of a patch,
full-grown stalks against
the storm, a circular
pattern appearing where
corn had extended
to the sky.
That was the summer
you left for school
in the East, I for a
school in Ohio. As I
leave this field now
at the horizon, I wonder
about the rain, cooling
the scorched soil,
what sort of harvest
this year will bring.

Poker and Porcupines

Poker is a game I love and I hate.

I pretend to be an analytical type but alas I am not. Yet when it comes to playing poker I know what I am supposed to know when it comes to pot odds and other poker like terms, yet I still will every now and then make a call based solely on my gut.

Yet when I play Euchre in the weekly league in which I play, I almost will never make a call based upon gut feelings.

What's the difference I ask myself.

I need to investigate that one especially since I am playing poker for money more and more and have yet to play Euchre for money.

While playing tonight we began to joke about how porcupines mate.

Makes you wonder don't it...

According to one of my favorite web sites: http://www.straightdope.com/ :

"Well, one account of porcupine romance (in North American Porcupine, Uldis Roze, 1989) does begin this way: "Somewhere ahead, a porcupine is screaming." However, it's not what you think. The screaming porcupine is a female letting an ardent male know she's not in the mood. Male porcupines may give vent to the occasional scream as well, but it's from frustration, not pain: the female is only sexually receptive 8-12 hours per year.Porcupine sex is not the exercise in S&M you might imagine but it does have its kinky aspects. I quote from Roze: "Perhaps the strangest aspect of the interaction is male urine-hosing of the female. The male approaches on his hind legs and tail, grunting in a low tone. His penis springs erect. He then becomes a urine cannon, squirting high-pressure jets of urine at the female. Everything suggests the urine is fired by ejaculation, not released by normal bladder pressure.... In less than a minute, a female may be thoroughly wetted from nose to tail."So much for foreplay. If the female decides now is the time, she hoists up her rump a bit and raises her tail, the underside of which is quill-less, and curves it up over her back, covering the quills thereon and exposing her genitalia. The male then approaches in a gingerly manner from the rear, walking on his hind legs and taking care to touch nothing with his forepaws but the safe part of the tail. The relevant apparatus having been lined up, docking occurs, followed by "violent orgasm" as the male unloads a year's worth of jism. The act lasts 2-5 minutes and may be repeated several times during the half-day window of opportunity.All in all it makes me think my first time during college maybe wasn't so bad. But the porcupines probably like it just fine, Ms. Porcupine especially. As our author notes, "the female cannot be raped." If she doesn't like the looks of one of her suitors, a swipe with her tail will cool his ardor fast.It is also worth noting that the tip of the porcupine penis is covered with small spines or bumps, something humans can duplicate only through the use of certain exotic brands of prophylactic. "Undoubtedly the structures add something to the female's sensation during coitus," it says here, "but it is not known whether they help induce orgasm." Maybe not. But I find it interesting that once things get rolling the female is insatiable and will mate until the male is sexually exhausted.The real problem for a male porcupine is not getting intimate with the female but surviving the bar fights with his male rivals beforehand. Researcher Roze reports coming upon the scene of an interporcupine slugfest where three males had fought it out for the favors of one female. The ground was littered with nearly 1,500 quills and a few more could be seen in the nose of the apparent victor. How much easier to be a male human, where all you have to do to ensure reproductive success is buy a Mercedes."

Makes you want to go back to reading about me sitting don't it.....

Starry Night

Memories are funny.

You can just be driving one day and for apparantly no reason a memory can pop into your mind. Sometimes I think that the brain cell that holds that memory is up for death and throws that memory out into your conscious so that if you want you can re-plant that memory in another brain cell.

Sometimes it happens in a dream where someone you haven't thought of in years plays a significant part or sometimes just driving and thinking and pop! there is is.

This time the memory is of the summer 1 year after I had graduated college. I was lucky enough to be a chapporone for a bunch of students from the residential high school for gifted students where I worked as they went on a field trip to the Florida Keys for a Biology camp.

One of the nights we were there we all went out on a boat to gather specimens. The sky was so full of stars and the warm breeze and gentle rocking of the boat was so miraculous that I almost fell into a trance.

Then the bio-guy who was leading that night's jaunt began to sing:

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at 900 miles an hour,
That's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars
It's 100,000 light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light years thick
But out by us its just 3,000 light years wide
We're 30,000 light years from galactic central point,
We go round every 200 million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding Universe.
The Universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know,
12 million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember when you're feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
Because there' bugger all down here on earth.

Now I knew this was from a Monty Python movie but with the magic that I was feeling, it felt like this guy was making it up on the spot and the stars were singing along with him.

I miss that feeling.

A-bombs and Las Vegas

I spent the evening last with a few friends, eating and drinking at the Great Lakes Brewery celebrating the 40th birthday of my friend Jen. She is the 2nd of my friends to turn 40 and will soon be followed by others and finally me.

Most of my really good friends are older than than me. I am not sure if this is a reflection of I being more mature for my age or their lack of maturity (I love you all), but alas I am typically the young one so when I turn 37 next month that gives me a few years to gloat to those already 40.

AS I was driving south on I-71 this morning, listening to NPR (my favorite thing to listen to in the car) there was a story about a new documentary showing on PBS next week about Las Vegas. Well I have become fully entagling in gambling and Las Vegas over the last two years. (More later)

One of the points the documentary shows is how the Atomic Bomb tests of the 40's and 50's gave Las Vegas a reason for being. The people of the area could celebrate their little piece of helping the battle of the cold war by partying through the night to watch the A-bomb go off only 65 miles away.

Well timing is everything as just last night while eating and drinking we were talking about a newer friend of Jen's and now a new friend of mine, Jim's documentary about Atomic research right here in our own state of Ohio.

Conversations always seem to have a life of their own and always come back around again.

That's the way of the universe.

There is something said for sitting...

sitting with a freind watching TV eating brats and homemade potato salad.

Smiles in my tummy and on my face...

now off to bed to continue to sleep out this cold crap.

I sit.

As I usually do, most of the time, I sit on my couch.

I sit on my couch watching TV and playing on the internet.

I sit, and contemplate the world, my life and the broken nature of things.

Often while sitting I add to my useless knowledge stashed away in the sponges of my brain.

This information, gathered while I sit, is often of pop culture (hence the TV watching).

While pondering the world, my life and the broken nature of things, I wonder how sad it is that I sit and remember this useless knowledge.

But then again, as I sit, I remember that perhaps I am most blessed (in the completely non-religious way (sic!!!!) because as I sit I in little ways affect the world for the better. AS I make a quip and act fast on my feet with a comment and make someone laugh.

Laughter after all is what feeds us and makes us grow.

Well, that and cold confections.

Today I battle a sore throat as I sit. Sore throat and massive headache actually. I called in sick to work in order to sit today.

I will feel better, but as I sniffle and sit and drink some hot coffee I wish that I felt better, that the world was less broken.

But then again, cold confections help with that too....

I often wonder why I don't spend more time writing. After all, I graduated with an English degree with a Writing Concentration. I spent a year of my life working on a collection of poems for my senior honors project. So why don't I more enjoy riting now.

People change and perhaps I have moved beyong writing to a more sedate (read as couch potato) mentality.

This is one reason I decided to try a blog. I could not only write a fre thoughts down and get some input on them but perhaps, just perhaps that spark that made me a poet many years ago will return and start a forest fire of creative output.

Well... we will have to see.

I was reminded by a Friend's Blog that 3 years ago today she lost her mother. I got to know Liz a few years earlier and waited with high anticipation to the few trips I would make to visit her among the hills by the river in south-east Ohio.

To begin with the drive always left me breathless. One reason the beauty and the other the curves and scary cliffs that one drove under driving down Rt 7.

Liz lived in this big ole house that made one feel right at home the minute you walked in the door. One could sit down in the formal living room and sift through the old back issues of several decorating magazines then move into the dining room where she in her own special way taught us to play canasta then back to her kitchen for a warm pineapple tart but don't try to clean up after yourself.

I sometimes envy Jennie and the freedom she now has without parents but then quickly come to my senses that parents are special (d'uh) and not having them in your daily life must suck most of the time.

So my thoughts go out to Jennie and the rest of her family but then again Liz would be the 1st to say yea yea think a nice thought and get one with it!

Tuesdays are for me a rather uncomfortable day of the week. The stress and pain of Monday is over yet Tuesday has arrived and you are still trying to catch up from the Monday mountain that fell on top of you. Wednesday is better because at least you start the slow slide into the weekend, but Tuesday is just so..... Tuesday.

So how do I get past this Tuesday. Well one way I've done it for the past few years is to play in a weekly Euchre group every Tuesday night. My friend Lynne and I are team Natasha (we thought it sounded scary) and we are really bad right now. Not sure why but I am convinced that my energies have been attuned to gambling and poker instead of the niceness of Euchre.

so we leave tonight at 2 and 13 for our record. Not so go but the power of the Badger will come forth and dominate one of these times.