Archive for November, 2008

NaBloPoMo ends today. So what’s next? I mean, can I really keep up with daily posting? Not bloody likely, though I’m more likely to try now. I’m disappointed that I can’t figure out how to put a “hooray, I did it!” badge in the sidebar; I suspect that is something I can only do on a self-hosted blog. Last year I moved from Blogger to Wordpress because I got tired of Blogger’s limitations, especially in replying to comments. I suspect this is the sort of pebble in the shoe that will nudge me to self-host. Last I checked, the web address I wanted was available (just double checked…yup, still available). Methinks I should jump on it if I still want it. But then I’d have to play with my header, and the design, start to change the name of the blog (which shouldn’t be too hard, since I appear to be known by two separate names), and then update the blogroll, and then I’d be putting all sorts of stuff in the sidebar that I couldn’t before, and if I was going to all that work then I’d be inserting ads, and hell’s bells that was a great run-on sentence hey look a puppy! I’ve been doing this for almost three years, so we all know I’m going to do it at some point (and if you self-host on Wordpress, I’d love to chat with you!). I just can’t do something halfway, which is a problem when you have several dozen things on your plate. My life and interests? Look just like a Thanksgiving plate, also with the resulting indigestion.

So what will I do now? Well, I have two weeks to get all, and I mean all, holiday preparations completed before we jump in the MomVan at o’dark thirty and drive (yes, drive…whimper) to Chicago. And then Iowa. And then back home, where I will kiss the non-interstate ground and curl up with a bottle of wine and a straw. I loves me some car trips, but driving cross-country in the winter makes me a wee bit nervous. Especially with holiday-hyped kids, who won’t be visited by Santa until we get home. Going to make for a loooong drive back. (Cuss, just remembered I have to replace a couple of tires on the MomVan…that just shot a morning this week). I have a scrapbook hovel room to shovel out. It has become a crafts dumping ground, which doesn’t make for much creativity. The boys have been looking at old scrapbooks lately, which tells me I’d better get going making more for them to enjoy, before they think they’re too cool to enjoy them. A has his appointment at the EE clinic on Tuesday, so I’ll be freaking out sorting through all the info from that. I’m playing a big ole’ piece of music at church next weekend, and I might maybe wanna practice. And then there’s just the ongoing to-do list from hell. So I’m sure I’ll keep busy.

And right now? Besides keeping the boys from beating on each other (how the hell have I become “base?”), I’ll probably waste the day playing with the header, the blogroll, the website address, the design…hey look a puppy!

Today and tomorrow and NaBloPoMo will be over. I’m actually quite surprised I got this far. Granted, I have to finish this post and get something up tomorrow, but really, I’m surprised I managed to do a post a day. Especially this time of year; the holidays are crazy enough without me adding one last thing. Yet, I did it. I’m surprised how fast the month went and how painless this was. Mostly. I still have several post ideas listed on the board above my desk, so at least I’ll have more to write about in the coming days.

Hm. Been awhile since I set and achieved a goal. Kinda like it. Think I’ll do more of it.

Yet I wanted to write a thought-provoking post today and time got away from me. I had errands to run and the house to clean and just things to do today. Holidays and having company throw me off my game, and that’s ok. (Oh, bless my hubby, he’s vacuuming for me…can’t scare off the sitter; we’re going to a Thanksmas party tonight).

So I’ll leave you with the knowledge that it snowed here in Colorado today. Cold enough to not melt quickly and warm enough that snowmen sprouted from the hands of excited children, outside in the snow for the first time this season. The first snow of the year always makes me happy, I don’t know why. The other gazillion snows of the season tick me off, so I enjoy the first one and try to keep that fresh optimism through all the others. Snow simply covers the land in fresh possibility…and covers the “Rosie Bucks” out in the yard as well. Ah, snow.

I’ve been making the pecan pie for Thanksgiving dinner since I was about 12. I used to actually crack the nuts by hand and then make the pie. I’ve since gotten over that and pre-shelled is fine, thankyouverymuch. So you’d think I’d have the hang of making one by now.

You’d be wrong.

On the left, you see my lovely coconut pumpkin pie, with a gingersnap crust (note: never, ever try to find a gluten-free crust the day before Thanksgiving. You will fail. And then you will have to pray to the pie-making gods that a cookie crust saves the day).

And, there on the right, is the “Holy God, what is that THING!?!?!?!?!” pecan pie of 2008. With chocolate cookie crust. Yes, it did overflow, thanks for asking. What I was most thankful for yesterday was that I had the foresight to put the pie plate on a baking sheet and thus, am not scrubbing out my oven today.

We didn’t bother trying to slice it, we just scooped out the goo. Tasty, tasty goo. The pie plate is still soaking.

Now, please excuse me, a secondary tryptophan coma is hitting. Yawn…

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. Enjoy the turkey. Pass the pie.

Tomorrow is my favorite holiday. Thanksgiving. If I had to give a reason why it was my favorite, I’m not sure I could. It just makes me feel happy inside. There’s no stress about it for me, unlike Christmas, with the picture and the card and the letter and the gifts and the travel and the expectations and the music (which I do love) and the letdown. And then four months more of cold and dark and snow. Thanksgiving is just about the food and the parade and the hangin’ out. The day looks something like this:

Parade

Cook

Eat

Hang

And that’s it. Tom makes his incredible crockpot stuffing (which will be slightly different this year, with gluten free bread and low sodium chicken broth), I make pecan pie (my all-time favorite), and well…yum.

Thanksgiving has always been like this for me. Food, family, and fun.

Which brings me to my favorite Thanksgiving memory. I must have been A’s age, seven, when this happened. My Gram was visiting us for the holiday and she and I were watching the Macy*s Thanksgiving Day Parade. My love for this parade probably came from watching it with her; I still get all verklempt watching the Rockettes. So we were watching the parade together, my folks were in the kitchen working on the meal, and here comes Santa. The music is playing, Santa is smiling and waving, and he stands up.

And his pants fall down.

She and I laughed until we cried. Now, what you have to know about my Gram is that she was a proud Irishwoman, native New Yorker, and her personality was exactly like A’s. Outgoing, didn’t know a stranger, great sense of humor. She and A would have been best friends. She laughed til she couldn’t talk. She laughed until she could barely breathe. She told everyone she could find. I mean, Santa’s pants fell down!

Is this story true? I have no idea. I have tried to find online confirmation of this happening and come up with nothing. But it is truly one of my very favorite memories of Thanksgiving and of my Gram. I miss her dearly, and most of all on Thanksgiving Day.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, everyone. May your turkey be moist, your yams be marshmallowy, and your blessings be many.

Today I did two things you couldn’t pay me to do tomorrow.

I went shopping for Thanksgiving groceries and I picked my folks up at the airport.

Not enough money in the world to do that tomorrow..

Now, I am exhausted and I’m crashing on the couch.

So yesterday’s post/rant on gluten free living came out more as rant on food safety, and less on how we’re dealing with living gluten free. For the most part, it’s not that tough. When I’m cooking at home, I have a vague idea of what to cook and what not to do. Bonus points! When eating out, it’s more hit or miss. No bonus points! In my quest to find what is safe and what isn’t, I happened across the US Food Safety website, and signed up for the recalls email list. At least I’ll have a stronger chance of finding out what has been recalled and why.

(Note: I didn’t really stumble across this. I’m on an email list from Ideal Bite and got it from them…I think. Sign up for the general email list, and then also the list for your local community. For the Denver email today I learned where I can take Princess the PMSing Laptop to be recycled when I get tired of her shenanigans. Good thing to know, since she may be going there by this weekend if she doesn’t start moving a little faster!)

Food safety affects all of us. One of the most recent ones had blue plastic bits in a frozen meal. Um, ick. Others we have heard about have been poisonous dog food (and oy, I just started buying Rosie’s food at the natural foods store. Hey! She had a seizure and we still don’t know why, and she needs to lose 10 pounds. Health food it is.), e coli scares, you get the idea. It’s not just unmarked allergens.

So today I soldier on. I have a post done for NaBloPoMo (really, I’m stunned that I have kept up with this. And it gets easier every day to write something. Duh, you think I’d know by now that the more you do something the easier it gets!). The boys are cleaned and fed. I’m fed, not cleaned. Yet. Dinner is in the crockpot (if you haven’t checked out A Year of Crockpotting, shame on you! Great recipes and happen to be gluten free. Love her), the to-do list is going to be ignored today (mostly) so I can clean and play in my scrapbook room, and holyhelltheboysareoutofschoolthiswholeweekwhatamIgoingtodowiththem????? Eh, my parents will be here tomorrow night and in the meantime it’s nice enough outside to throw them out on the blacktop.

While I try to figure out more of this whole gluten free thing.

I’m feeling kinda blue today. No real reason, just…meh. Tom got home from a business trip this morning, the weather is beautiful and the boys are playing on the blacktop, the basement is cleaned and vacuumed (must be done after a cereal explosion), at first glance everything in my happy little world is in order.

And still I’m blue.

Might be because I’m really tired of waking up to a to-do list at least 15 items deep every morning (something I’m sure my parents will smack me upside the head about when they get here this week). Might be because I can’t just kick back and do nothing without feeling guilty. Might be because I’m still in the throes of my mid-life crisis.

Or it might be that I’m starting to realize that living gluten free (and possibly other allergens) can be a real pain in the ass and takes more learning than I first realized. Especially when I keep reading articles about foods that are mislabled.

(May I inject this here…or it might be that my frakking computer has been running so frakking slow lately that I can type two full frakking sentences before they show up on the frakking screen Ihavesohaditwiththisgoddamnedcomputer!!!!!)

The Chicago Tribune has been running a series of articles lately, that have been reprinted in our local paper, about the mislabeling of allergens on foods. Even items from Whole Foods, that you think might actually be safe.

This pisses me off, yes, but it also makes me pretty sad. It’s hard enough trying to keep to a gluten free diet, without the labels I so rely on being inaccurate. Thankfully we’re not allergic enough to need an EpiPen, but some families are, and have had to use them after a food they thought was safe turned out to be mislabeled. My life is too crazy for me to do 100% cooking from scratch. I just canNOT make pasta from scratch, it’s difficult to NOT rely on some packaged goods, and damn it, why aren’t these items properly labeled? Even items that were labeled “gluten free” were found to have significant amounts of gluten.

Earlier this week I thought I was coming down with something. I was really tired, I took an afternoon nap, I was grumpy, and basically didn’t feel like myself. I kept wracking my brains, trying to remember what I ate, thinking I had inadvertently eaten something with gluten in it, and kept coming up blank. By Thursday I felt much better. And then Friday, as I swallowed literally the last bite of my lunch, it came to me. I make ham balls (it’s an Iowa thing and we love them) and since they’re so time-intensive to prepare, I make huge batches and freeze them. I made the last batch last spring, before A and I went gluten free. One of the primary ingredients in ham balls is graham crackers. Graham crackers have wheat flour. Crap. I had eaten some ham balls earlier in the week, and again on Friday for lunch. And today I feel blue, I’m tired, and I don’t feel like myself.

I can screw myself up without any help from food manufacturers, I don’t need their “help” to do that. What I do need, however, is to be secure in the knowledge that what I’m buying and making for my family is what it says it is, is safe, and won’t harm us. The whole “I need eleventy billion flours to make bread” thing is difficult enough when you’re just starting out, mislabeled products just make it more difficult and frightening. As we move into Thanksgiving week, a holiday based on food, I have to be even more vigilant about what we prepare for the meal.

There was more I wanted to write here, and I’m sure it was good, but my memory is failing me, I’m too tired to dig through the dusty memory banks, and the boys are clamoring for lunch. Plus I am about to toss the damned computer off the roof, because I’m three sentences ahead of it right now.

note: Some are blaming the FDA for not keeping up with the labeling of these foods. While I do agree the FDA is negligent in its duties, it is not entirely its fault. The FDA needs something like 20,000 inspectors to do an accurate job of food inspection/testing, especially with the amount of food coming from other countries (see food from China recalls). As I understand it, they have roughly 1500 inspectors. Do the math. It is truly my hope that the new administration will order up a huge honkin’ budget increase for the FDA so we can all rest easy knowing our food and drugs are safe.

So the plan for today was to go on a Cub Scout hike. A quick little jaunt, only 1.3 miles. It started at noon, so I figured we’d be done by 1:30, home by 2:30 or so and still have the rest of the afternoon.

Right.

This quick little 1.3 mile jaunt somehow morphed into a 2 and a half mile “when the hell is this death march going to end?

That was my thought, not the boys’. They were great. I’m a wuss.

Of course, if I had someone to carry me 1/4 of a mile, I’d be fine too. Love ya, J, but you’re getting heavy.

It was the perfect autumn day for a hike around a lake at a local state park. Sunny, cool, a slight breeze.We saw some wildlife.

It was a great time, despite the surprising length and the “OMG, please stop talking, I don’t care about the long history of Barr Lake!” ranger.

But…we were gone nearly five hours, when I anticipated maybe 2. This is what welcomed us when we got home:

I.HAVE.TO.PEE.

It’s ok, Rosie. We’re not going anywhere tomorrow. I have to do all the stuff that didn’t get done today.

You know, Sarah, how can we miss you if you won’t go away?

Did you notice the second turkey twitching? This is disturbing and yet, one of the funniest things I’ve seen in awhile. How can you be oblivious to a turkey killing field?