07.31.08
lost at c
I had an entire post written up, it was brilliant and took me a ton of time and effort, but my computer farted/burped/barfed/fucked me over and I lost everything. This is not the first time this has happened to me and yes I should have saved it sooner but fuck me this should not have happened at all. I’m pissed about it now and I don’t have enough time to rewrite everything. We came in from the lake last night and I worked all day today and we’re heading back out tomorrow as soon as I am off work and the groceries are boughten. If only I had a word processor that I could take out with me I could post like a madwoman when I get home every week without scrambling trying to put it all together in a hurry.
I’m crabby now.
I guess my tale will have to wait until next week to be told or I may just say ‘fuck it’ and not bother rewriting it at all. Like I’m punishing my mac for being a cunt. Yes, I said the “c” word and I meant it!! Maybe I will take a pen and some paper out with me tomorrow and try to write the old fashioned way…blah. Now that I can type if blows to have to write longhand, not to mention that my long hand is shit and most of the time I can’t even read my own scrawl. Maybe I need a dictaphone…or ice cream.
Hmph.
Beyond all of that I had a good birthday, I appreciated all of the greetings and a special thanks to Miss Krissy (Honeychild) for the beautiful necklace and earrings I received this afternoon in the mail. I love them, they are gorgeous and I am so touched that she thought of me. Thanks sweets, the gift means more to me than you know.
Alright, enough blathering about since I am not posting anything terribly noteworthy I might as well keep it brief. I would like to apologize for being a lousy blog friend at the moment, as I mentioned I am not home much these days and while I try to catch up with everyone there is a time factor…I am on a hectic camping schedule! I will catch up eventually but until then know I am thinking of all of you, I miss you and hope you are all well and enjoying your summer…or winter depending on your hemisphere.
Speaking of winter…it’s supposed to get down to 6 Celsius here tonight, yes that’s 42F(ucking) degrees American and bloody near freezing!!!! I’ve said it before and I will say it again, GLOBAL WARMING MY ASS!!! It’s the end of July not the beginning of October! After our seven months of winter I was hoping for a hot dry summer and it’s been cold and rainy. I’ve been determined to enjoy this summer despite the crap weather. Oh yeah, that and the fact that my husband has been laid off again (for two weeks this time and when they return it will be to three shifts a week), plus we’re having issues with the boy’s health care coverage while he’s working in Indiana, plus plus plus I think I am PMS’ing which doesn’t help anything at all. I am trying to let go of all of the worries so that I can chill and just enjoy life for a while without the stresses and pressures. It’s not total denial, we know we have to make some decisions soon but the cabin is our priority at the moment…we have to get the roof on it before snow flies or we’ll lose everything we’ve put into it. Let me just say the universe is not making stress free living easy for me right now. My cunty computer isn’t helping either. Apparently the universe thinks I need a lesson in patience. I’d be happy with a lesson in document recovery.
07.23.08
genetic malnutrition
My great grandfather died (of a ruptured appendix) when my Nana was only ten years old, her mother, my Granny, had only ever been a wife and mother and in those days it was far more difficult for a woman to find work especially when she had four young children at home. Granny managed to pay the bills by doing a bit of sewing and housework for other people but there was little left at the end of the week for anything extra…even food. The five of them had to subsist on what they had or could grow which was very little at that time so their cupboards were bare and their meals were meager at best. Granny tried to stretch her groceries as far as she could but times were tough and she had to fill her babies tummies as best she could with what she had. There were a few staples that could be bought cheaply back then and it’s funny to me that many immigrants used similar ingredients to feed their families…Italians had gnocchi, my husband is of Russian descent and his Doukhoubor ancestors made perogies from flour and potatoes, my Irish clan did about all that can be done to a spud and were nearly wiped out without them. Granny could buy old potatoes for much less than the new ones and was often given the soft spongy spuds that other people thought were no good. Flour and salt pork were also inexpensive so she called upon her Swedish heritage to fuel her family.
We call it palt but when I looked it up online it had other names as well, pult, kumla, kropps and klub, and some just call them Swedish potato dumplings. Apparently the original recipe was for blood pult and called for blood (cow blood I would hope) instead of potatoes…I am thankful that that was not the version handed down in my family. We peel the tubers and grate them…last time I used my food processor and that saved the added bonus of knuckle meat in the mix…we then add a little salt and enough flour to glue the shreds together in a sticky doughy mess. The salt pork is chopped into small pieces and while some suggest pre-frying them we prefer them raw. The dough is formed into baseball sized orbs and a tablespoon or two of the salinated pig is inserted into the center. The balls are then placed in as-big-as-we-can-find pots of boiling water and let them cook for an hour. We salivate waiting that sixty minutes for the palt to be ready. It’s sick really but we can’t wait to dig into the leaden spheres of high carb, high sodium pasty goodness. This may very well be the most dense dish ever but it slides easily down the gullet with the slab of butter we slather on each hemisphere as the balls are cut open. It sounds disgusting (and honestly they don’t look terribly appetizing either) and really there are very few non-family members who enjoy the heavy meal like those of us who were raised with it…though there are a few who don’t mind it fried up the next day with a little ketchup…which is a waste and sacrilege to those of us who preserve the purity and blandness of the freshly boiled blobs. We only eat palt once or twice a year (because it takes six months to digest it) but when we do we make it to share with as many relatives as possible… which also serves to distribute the guilt that comes with eating such a meal.
My nana called my (tattooist) brother a few months back and after their chat he was so homesick he made palt for his family. It’s just one of those little ties that bind my maternal family together. We were going through my grandmothers old photos a few weeks ago at the lake when we decided we should boil up a batch the following weekend. My youngest brother (sic) is a celiac and unable to eat gluten (flour etc.) so he has not had the ‘treat’ in years. He and his wife were coming to the lake the morning we decided to make the dish so I made them a few with soy flour, it may not have been the same but he enjoyed it nonetheless and I think he appreciated being re-included in the tradition. We boiled the balls over the campfire as we all sat around visiting and drinking coffee, celebrating the moments of our lives (General Mills International coffee) as we waited the sixty minutes until we could dig in.
I think part of the appeal of palt (because really it’s not about the gourmet-ness of it) is that it’s a meal that is prepared collectively, we all pitch in, peeling, grating, chopping mixing and whoever is not in a palt-coma afterwards even helps wash up the messy pots. It’s a beautiful thing really…too bad we don’t get that excited about salad.
Last Saturday my mom’s cousin Kris and his daughter were on their way home to northern Alberta when they decided to pop out to the lake to visit us and take a break from driving. We were all quite excited that they stopped in, it’s been far too long since we last saw them and it was barely moments after hugs and greetings when he announced in what is like a familial battle cry “We brought potatoes and salt pork!” We didn’t have the heart to tell him that we were still digesting the palt from two weeks prior so first thing the next morning with our peelers and graters in one hand and our coffee cups in the other we tackled yet another batch. It was while we were waiting for the palt to cook that Kris told us of their origin and the hardships my great-grandmother faced and triumphed over. I think my granny would be proud to know that what was once a monotonous staple to her children is now a delicacy and as much about comfort and family to her descendants.
07.17.08
ham ‘n’ wogs
My mom’s sister Jen came to visit us at the lake last weekend. This aunt has always been on the familial fringe and only chooses to partake in gatherings when it suits her…which is rare and that suits the rest of us just fine. Aunty Jen is a bit of a black sheep, her husband is a redneck asshole who lives to kill critters and takes pleasure in groping his nieces. Gross. Their children are not exactly popular with the rest of us either. Harold is not a bad guy but he and his sister Glenna both smoke a bale of weed a day which makes them less than scintillating as conversationalists and their lifestyles about as appealing to me as housework. They are all fairly monosyllabic and ignorant but worse than that they all self-centered, self-serving and self-righteous. They have a collective chip on their shoulder and they think the rest of the world owes them, they know the way the universe ‘should’ be and in every way shape and form is ‘should’ benefit them. Glenna is pissed that her neighbor’s son (he was 22 years old) died in a car accident because it ruined her life…though she doesn’t give a shit what it did to his mother. He was supposed to live quietly next to her with his horse-loving girlfriend but he had to go and die and that land got sold to someone with noisy kids and now she has to go into debt for a ten foot fence to tune out the volume of the new people and block their prying teenage boy’s eyes from watching Glenna suntan naked. Seriously, the fence is in the kid’s best interest, he’d be more likely to turn to stone after seeing that homely witch in the raw than get any sort of pleasure from ogling her hideosity. Glenna is a total douche, in fact she is such a douche that even other douches think she is a douche.
Harold has a bloodhound that he and his wife can’t be bothered to look after so the responsibility often falls on his mother. The dog is pretty cute and about as threatening as a butterfly but he is big and he is very slobbery. My aunt calls the oodles of drool “wog” as in “The dog shook and flung his wog all over the inside of her truck.” Thick, ropy, white spit hangs from his jowls at all times so when he shakes you need an umbrella. Aunty Jen is used to the soggy mess but Aunty Eddie is not. Eddie is Trixie and Barry’s mom and she’s so not a dog person at the best of times. It always cracks me up that it is these kinds of people that canines are most attracted to. Eddie was sitting in her lawn chair visiting with her sister when Diesel (the hound) decided to make her acquaintance. He first nuzzled under her hand so she gave him a perfunctory pat. Diesel took this as a sign of affection and rested his head on her shoulder but as she pushed him away he left in his wake a mouthful of slobber that trailed across her shirt like something left behind from a slug…a really really big slug. We all noticed the ‘wog’ before my aunt and when she looked at her shirt to see what had us all giggling she made a face somewhere between horror and revulsion which had me literally pissing my pants. If it had happened to anyone else it would not have been nearly as funny…and even though I am a dog person I would have gagged had my shirt been the one drenched in the slimy drool.
The visit with Aunty Jen was not so bad really, she was far more sociable than usual and she did have a great story to tell us. It is no secret that her husband is a drunk. The man has his first beer to wash down his breakfast and continues pounding them throughout the day. Lawrence can polish off twenty to thirty beer in a day and not get ripped but if he gets into the rum it’s a different story entirely. One weekend at the lake (they camp at the same lake but about fifteen km away from us…which is still too close) some of his cronies stopped in to see him and they brought with them a bottle of Captain Morgan and it didn’t take long for the Cap’n to work his inebriating magic. Aunty Jen had planned a lovely steak dinner for Lawrence that night and because she went over her budget purchasing his gorgeous slab of cow she figured she’d cook herself a hamburger to balance out the cost of the meal. By the time Lawrence began demanding his dinner Jen was already disgusted with him for getting so loaded and she knew he wouldn’t appreciate either the steak or her sacrifice so she cooked up a little something special instead. She went into the trailer and opened a can of ham, sliced a ‘steak’ from the moulded meat product and grilled it on the barbeque. Lawrence gobbled up his dinner like it was his last and when he was finished she asked him how he liked his steak and he told her it was fantastic. When he passed out she cooked the real hunk of beef for herself. By the next morning everyone knew the story and they were all chiding him on not knowing the difference. It took some time for him to believe he had been duped and he was not very happy with his wife’s deception. Still, when he gets all ripped up he doesn’t know the difference so she continues to deceive him whenever she can. I think it’s her way of calling him a drunken loser…since she can’t just say it aloud like the rest of us do…and getting a piece of meat that has to be better than anything that waste of barley can provide. Now if only she could figure out how to exchange his beer for prune juice.
07.10.08
anniversary present
Twenty years ago today a pregnant twenty year old took her father’s arm and walked (waddled?!) down the aisle toward the boy who knocked her up. There were over a hundred people in my parent’s back yard that day but that boy with the big 80’s hair and the atrocious mustache was the only person I saw. He had tears in his eyes by the time I reached him. “You are so beautiful.” he whispered to me as he took my hand from my dad.
It was not a fancy wedding, my parents were caterers back then so they did the cooking, my cousin tended the bar, my maid of honor wore her grad dress from two years earlier, a friend of my mom’s made my dress (they don’t make maternity wedding dresses), the DJ was a family friend and the cake was a gift from my former boss. It was a lousy day for July, cloudy and blah but just as we said our “I do’s” the sun broke through. The day was full of stresses beyond the unsettled weather (rain really puts a damper on an outdoor wedding), the mosquitoes were the worst I had ever seen, there was a smorgasbord of scents to attract them and the bastards were ravenous. My brother-in-law spent the entire weekend telling anyone who’d listen that I was trapping his baby brother, I only wanted him for his money (HA!! If only!!) and that we were too young to get married. The biker neighbor got loaded and passed out before the ceremony even started but fortunately (NOT!) he woke just in time to strategically place himself in the background of several of our pictures. Some people have a flowery background in their photos…we had a drunk biker they called Klinger. The best man broke his leg the week before so he hobbled around trying to keep his crutches out of the photos. The same photos that were taken by a supposed professional photographer friend of my MIL, the photos that got ‘lost in the mail’ only to resurface six years later when she was moving, sadly they were mostly crap anyway. None of that matters any more now than it did then. Yes I was disappointed about the pictures but even they were not what that day was about. I didn’t care that we had to string up ugly orange tarps in case it rained, I didn’t care that my brother-in-law was (is) an asshole, I didn’t care that it looked like a shotgun wedding (I totally would have loved it if my dad had walked me down the aisle carrying a shotgun!), it wasn’t about the gifts or the food or the music (although they were perfect) the day was about celebrating our love and future together with our family and friends. For my mother-in-law however it was about ensuring that her grandchild not be born a bastard.
The preacher stood atop the lid to the septic tank as he joined us in matrimony. We giggled about it later knowing that it was not a sign that our marriage was bound for the shitter, it was more about not taking things too seriously. Laughter has gotten us through some pretty rough times over the years, my husband knows how to tickle my funny bone…even when he doesn’t mean to and it’s really hard to stay mad at someone when they make you laugh. The ceremony was short and sweet and the word ‘obey’ had been removed from the vows at my request. It was easy to promise to love and honor but I told the minister “Obeying is for pets and children.”
We spent our wedding night in a hotel not four blocks from where we lived at the time. We thought we’d have some dirty hotel sex but I was so exhausted that I couldn’t stay awake to consummate our marriage on our wedding night. The evidence of our premarital consummation was six months along in my belly so between him and the whole wedding thing I was worn out. My husband had a feeling things would work out that way so he thought ahead and booked the room for a second night and we made up for the momentary abstinence.
My husband is upset that we can’t afford to give this milestone the attention that he feels it deserves. Financially it’s just not possible to do anything big this year. We are putting any extra into our cabin and that’s more than enough celebration for me. We could have gone into (more) debt for a vacation but what we’ll spend on that little shack by the lake will be far less than what a holiday would have cost and it will last us much longer. We fully intend to sit on that deck and watch our grandchildren play on the lawn one day. Still he feels bad that he isn’t giving me some kind of gift. I know it sounds corny as hell and it’s all I can do to keep from gagging on the syrup of it, but he is my gift. He is everything to me and all that I want from him is his love (and patience) and he gives that to me freely and without condition. He is my best friend (I typed ‘fiend’…that works too) he is my favorite companion, he knows me better than anyone and loves me in spite of it and he still rings my bell in bed…or on the picnic table or the kitchen counter or in the bathtub or the front seat of the truck etc. etc.
It doesn’t feel like we’ve been married twenty years, I still adore him as much as I did back then and I still get all squishy when he gives me that look that tells me that I still make his heart flutter too. Sure he makes me mental some days and we’ve had plenty of rough (and some really shitty) times where it would have been easier to go our separate ways than to do the work to stay together. I guess somehow we knew if we could make it through those bad times intact that we could survive anything. I can’t even imagine a life without him and I look forward to the rest of my life with him.
I don’t normally post pics of myself but this was too good (bad?!) not to share. Please note the drunken biker behind us and the pathetic attempt at photography…wtf?!
just the two of us...and Klinger
