Normal

HILE it's all still clear in my head, here in early 2025, I thought it might be worthwhile and potentially educational to write an (incomplete) list of things that have long been considered part of normal life in the United States:

• Taking a trip across or outside the country without asking a government official's permission.
  
• Crossing state lines without going through checkpoints. 
• Being able to use interstates, state highways, bridges and local roads without a second thought, because they've been reasonably maintained and are open to traffic.
  
• Being able to get by on a single income. (NOTE: For many families, this is no longer "normal.")
  
• Being able to afford keeping a pet.
• Being able to afford meat and eggs.
• Being able to afford the occasional meal in a restaurant.
• Being able to send a letter or package to someone else in the USA via USPS and knowing it will arrive within two weeks.
  
• Seeing same-sex couples in public just living their lives.
• Seeing mixed-race couples in public just living their lives.
• Understanding that the phrase "all men are created equal" doesn't mean we are all born into equal circumstances--we're obviously not--but that we are all considered equal under the law. Even the President.
• Having your basic civil rights secured even if you're not married, middle-class or higher, white or male.
• Not having to be a Christian (or even religious) to participate fully in public life.
• Not having to justify your existence if you're a childless woman.
  
• Being able to get the book, music, movie or game you want from the public library.
• Having access to a public library.
• Being able to vote in local, state and federal elections without intimidation or coercion.
  
• Having a reasonable expectation of the peaceful transfer of power between one administration and the next.

What are your expectations of "normal life" in the USA? Are there things you anticipate might change in the next few years?

It's always something, isn't it?

So some of you have already been made aware of this, but for those who haven't: Captain Midnight's last day at work was October 1st.

This wasn't what he wanted. He was hoping to have this job until he retired. But more and more companies are treating their employees as expenses rather than assets, and will cast even their best people adrift after years of productivity if they think doing so will improve their bottom line by the tiniest amount.

I have a lot of spicy thoughts about this subject, but that's all I plan to share publicly. Meanwhile, if anyone is looking for a superlative quality assurance software tester based in Western Washington with over 25 years' experience in the industry, hit me up in the comments. Thanks.

It's October! Welcome to CHAOS BAKING!

I know a couple of people who are afraid to bake. They're good cooks, but something always seems to go wrong when they slide cookies or bread or some kind of baked good into the oven. And I can see why they're nervous about baking. We've been practically brainwashed to believe that baking requires precision measurements, careful treatment of every ingredient, and an oven calibrated to the perfect temperature if we're going to get a quality result.

Nonetheless, every now and then it's worth attempting some chaos baking -- just making stuff up to see what happens.

It's easy to forget that people have been making baked goods for a long time, and for most of that time baking was much more a seat-of-the-pants process than it is now. Medieval baking required working with rustic, unsifted flour and a sourdough starter, using no standard measurements to bring a dough together, heating an earthen oven with a wood fire for many hours, then raking everything out so there would be no ash on the bread, then carefully sliding the loaves in, sealing the entry shut with a wooden door that had been soaking in cold water for hours so it wouldn't burn, and leaving the loaves in long enough to bake them through but not long enough to dry them out or scorch them. One way to check oven temperature back then was to toss in a little raw flour; if it turned brown the oven was ready, but if it turned black the oven was too hot.

If medieval peasants could successfully make bread with no measuring cups, no electricity, not even a set recipe -- then we can go a little off script with our baking and still turn out something worth eating.

You want proof? Here ya go!

Right now I have a whole lot of milk that's just gone sour (about 4 cups total), and I'm wanting to do something with it before it actually spoils. Thing is, milk that's just barely soured may not be great on your breakfast cereal, but it's still fine for baking and can be used, cup for cup, as a substitute for buttermilk in most baked goods. I'd just settled on making a homemade sour milk spice cake when I went to the store for supplies.

Well, what to my wondering eyes should appear but a pile of Betty Crocker cake mixes for 98 cents apiece. In this economy, that's hard to beat; I haven't done the math but I'm not sure I could make a cake from scratch at that price. There was no spice cake mix on sale (or even available for purchase), but that wasn't going to stop me. So I changed my mind and grabbed a yellow cake mix. (Also impulsively picked up a six-count of pumpkin spice flavored old-fashioned donuts, which will be important later.)

In the car on the way back from the store, I ate too many of those donuts. Yeah, sometimes I'm not very smart. Captain Midnight doesn't care for old-fashioned donuts and is neutral about pumpkin spice stuff, so I knew he wouldn't want any of the remaining donuts. He doesn't even like frosting on his cake. This spice cake is probably going to be pretty plain --

Oh hey. No it isn't. I have a potentially brilliant idea.

I mixed up the cake mix mostly according to directions, swapping in a cup of sour milk instead of a cup of water, and adding 1/2 t. allspice, 1/4 t. cinnamon and 1/8 t. nutmeg to the mix. (Now it's a spice cake! There ya go.) Poured it into a greased 9x13" glass pan, then did the brilliant thing: I dropped the remaining pumpkin spice donuts into a bag, mashed them into crumbs and used them as a streusel topping to scatter over the top of the cake batter. Baked about 25 minutes in a moderate oven.

Here's the result.

I didn't even wait for the cake to cool down, I just cut myself a corner piece.

NOM.

This is good, but if anything, this doctored spice cake needs even MORE spice. (My English ancestors didn't do insane things to find better spice routes just for their descendants to be terrified of "1/4 t. black pepper" in a recipe, dangit!) I'd at least double the amount of spices if I were to make this again. As it is, though, it's delicious all on its own and would also be great covered with whipped cream or served a la mode. There's no indication in look or taste that this cake was made with sour milk. And the streusel topping was a genius idea -- soft, light cake covered by a crunchy, sugary, spicy topping.

In fact, it was so tasty that the minute I left the kitchen, Charlie-cat jumped up on the counter and helped himself to a big mouthful of cooling cake. BAD CHARLIE. NOT FOR YOU. So now the cake is safely cooling in the oven with the door cracked open because our cats are mad jonesing for our chaos baking experiments.

Flash fiction: Inciting Incident

HROUGHOUT the Huldrealm, preparations for the Chosen One's imminent appearance were underway. The hidden entrance behind the abandoned church was swept and tidied and discreetly garnished with violets and tuberose petals, festooned with crystalline rocks that glowed subtly in the darkness to light the Chosen One's way. The clearing into which the Chosen One would enter, pushing through the choicest cobwebs and the ferniest undergrowth, was exquisitely misty and mossy and mushroomed. The Hulda fiddler tuned his instrument to entice to the wild dance, and the Hulda bakers created a magnificent twenty-layer pavlova lashed with passionfruit jam and dotted with silver dragées that would drive any child into a mad sugar frenzy.

But the Chosen One was playing Candy Crush on her phone that day, and did not come.

Puzzled but undaunted, the Hulda tried again. In a few years, they prepared another entrance through an overgrown bike path at the end of the Chosen One's street. Beyond it, in a meadow lush with long grasses and purple wildflowers, waited a glorious coal-black mount, fiercely wild yet willing to accept an apple in tribute, and prepared to convey the Chosen One deeper into the secret recesses of the mystic Huldrealm.

But the Chosen One was posting pictures on social media that day, and again she did not come.

Now carefully considering their options, the Hulda next spun up a castle of ice and moonlight (accessible through the disused final stall in the high school's basement restroom) and in its exact center, like the stamen of a frozen flower, arose the ever-youthful ruler of the Huldrealm -- snow-haired, sloe-eyed and fine in deep blue silks, haughty, sometimes cruel, but possessed of a feral beauty and grace, and obsessed with dancing.

But the Chosen One was busy texting her crush that day, and again she did not come.

So time passed, and again and again all the beings of the Huldrealm expertly stitched together scenarios of tantalizing and dangerous enchantment, always close by and discoverable with just the tiniest bit of digging -- and the Chosen One simply refused to dig.

Until one particular day like any other, a fifty-year-old woman with bushy hair graying around her temples stumbled into the most hidden sanctum of the Hulda royal palace without anyone noticing.

"Wait," cried the palace guard, "how did you get in here?"

"Well," said the Chosen One, shrugging, "it's the weekend, there's an electrical storm and all my devices went down. I had nothing to do and I guess... I guess I was just bored, so..."

How the Internet occasionally saves my sanity

(Pumpkin spice peanut brittle image courtesy of Target.com)

I enjoyed a piece of pumpkin spice peanut brittle today (go get some at Target, it's really good!), and as I crunched on it a phrase from a book bubbled up to the top of my head -- something about someone buying peanut brittle for an older relative, who would "clatter and crunch" over it later. I knew that particular phrase, and I knew I'd read it many times in the past, but couldn't place it.

People born after 1990, I want you to get a little taste of what life was like in the 1970s and early '80s. Barring my finding that phrase in a book through happy accident, or my subconscious managing to dredge up where it came from, I would have no choice but to let the phrase "clatter and crunch" bounce around in my skull for weeks to months, with no easy way to look it up because there was no modern internet.

As it was, I had my answer within 90 seconds. It comes from an early passage in the book We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, and it describes the narrator's Uncle Julian messily enjoying his treat.

Once again the internet has saved my tenuous sanity. Thanks, Al Gore!

Happy Strawberry Shortcake and Nothing Else Day!

 

Don't worry if it snuck up on you. As a movable feast, it tends to do that. The good news is, you can celebrate Strawberry Shortcake and Nothing Else Day any time it gets too hot to cook or strawberries are on sale for cheap. I actually ended up making these because I got a Too Good to Go bag that included some pre-made shortcakes, so all I had to do was prep the berries and add some whipped cream. Super simple and delicious!

I'll always miss my mom. This is one of the small reasons why -- she chose to do a few spur-of-the-moment things that became regular occurrences every year. (Including making nothing but strawberry shortcake for dinner on a summer night when it was just too hot to cook.)

GROW, my pretties!

Got a minute? I gotta share with you this thing I've got going on my back porch.

(No, nothing like that, don't make it weird.)

I can hear some of you now saying, "Okaaaay, Sooz, you have a veggie and two herbs growing in cut-down gallon milk jugs. Yippee. Whaddyawant, a gold star?"

Listen, I can't properly explain how nuts this is. Ordinarily, I'm Plant Medusa. All I need to do is glance their way and plants shrivel and die. I haven't had real house plants in my place for ages because I forget to care for them and they perish and then I feel guilty about it.

And yet. Chard and coriander and basil are starting to FLOURISH on my back porch. (Not to mention the mysterious air plant at the upper right.) I mean, the chard's getting to a point where I'll need to chop it into quarters soon and give each quarter its own, more spacious pot.

Which leads me to ask: What in tarnation's goin' on hyar?

All I can figure is that the fairy who moved in here around the same time we did has a green thumb and a fondness for culinary herbs.

She also has a thing for Tolkien

Thanks, good neighbor! Take as much as you want!