Older than dirt!

Yep, it's that time of year again, and this time I decided I'd put together a cake to illustrate how old I am!

Yes, it's a forest floor cake!

This one was kind of fun to put together because literally NOTHING was made from scratch. The cake is a chocolate ganache mini sheet cake from Trader Joe's. To make "dirt" I whizzed up some cacao nibs, then some hazelnuts, then a few Joe-Joe cookies (TJ's answer to Oreos) in the food processor, and sprinkled bits of those all over the cake. The "twigs" are chocolate baton cookies and the "mushrooms" are Japanese mushroom cookies. And the "moss," which I wish were a little darker and more clumpy, is Malaysian pandan snack cakes processed into crumbs. I guess I could have added some chocolate rocks and some frosting leaves for greater authenticity, but I'm pretty pleased with how this turned out.

Plus it was delicious. I've never had so much fun eating dirt.

I do not understand cats.

Us: Come on, Roxy, try this cat tunnel we bought. It will be fun!
Cat tunnel: *rustle rustle*
Roxy: nopenopenopeNOPEnopenopitynope

*6 months pass*

Me: Man, look at this thing. It's been gathering dust in the garage. I should probably just give it away... well, maybe we'll let Roxy give it a quick sniff for old times' sake.

*40 seconds later*

Roxy: IT IS THE BEST THING EVAR

Go fig.

Oh, yeah, also, it's my birthday. For those who take an interest in such things.

A birthday gift request

My birthday is only a few days away, and I'd like to make a request.

I don't need a lot of things at this point in life. (There are still plenty of wants, but I've slowly shifted from a desire for things to a desire for life experiences such as seeing the world, meeting interesting people, etc. If I can carry something around in my head, I'll never lose it.)

But there is something I'd like to ask of you, if you're an American citizen and you're so inclined:

Vote your conscience.

2016 has provided us with a horrible, messy, vicious circus sideshow of an election. In my opinion, neither major political party has produced a candidate worth voting for -- or, frankly, worth giving the time of day. And I suspect this type of election will become more frequent unless the body of Americans stand up to stop it.

Vote your conscience.

Don't settle for the lesser of two evils. Don't pick the person you think is most likely to win. Don't sit this election out because your vote "doesn't matter anyway." These are precisely the attitudes that prevailed during the primary elections and yielded this year's despicable candidates. Instead, choose another candidate -- even one from a small political party -- who is honorable and whose politics reflect your own. If he or she isn't on the ballot in your state, write in that candidate in the space provided.

Vote your conscience.

I know why people are afraid to do this. I've voted in every general election since 1988. From that time to this, I can recall many election cycles where, cowed by the bogeymen invoked by the two major political parties (the most common one being "SUPREEEEME COOOOURT JUSTICESSSSS! OOooOoOO!"), I held my nose and voted for the candidate I found least offensive. Well, I'm officially done with that. Holding one's nose to vote doesn't do much good if it allows skunks to be elected.

Vote your conscience.

That's seriously all I want for my birthday this year.

Thank you!

Happy birthday! HAPpy birthday! Happy, happy birthday to Tim!

It's my brother's birthday. And what better way to celebrate than with a Disney earworm you'll be trying to claw out of your brain for weeks to come?


Love you, Timmot. Hope it's a great day!

Forty-six

Woke to smoochas from my honey (always appreciated) and the Feed Me Dance from Roxy-cat (less so, but Captain Midnight took care of it). Shrugged into my caftan and drove CM to the bus stop. Wonderful fog this morning; the end of my street was a complete mystery, and the trees planted in the median strip only revealed themselves slowly and in misty layers as we drove.

Having returned to the house, I'm pondering the specifics of today -- what I might do with the first few hours of my 46th year. Thinking that getting horizontal for a few more hours sounds like a good plan. Will update later. zzzzzz

LATER
All right, enough of that, UP AND AT 'EM, ATOM ANT! Dressed for the day, fed Roxy again, had a nice long chat with my mom, did some visiting teaching, came back to the house to find a grumpy cat who made it clear she was displeased by my leaving her to her own devices, even for an hour. Also, a mysteeeeeeeerious bag was hanging from the front door; it held a container of mini-roses. Thank you, Sarah! They are lovely! Then had a late lunch -- mostly a nosh; CM and I are going out for Korean barbecue tonight. (You think I'm cooking on my birthday? HA! Not likely! But I think I will clean the kitchen.)

EVEN LATER
Partially cleaned the kitchen. Was interrupted by the advent of our delightful mail lady, who said, "Happy birthday!" as I opened the door. Just as I was wondering... wait, how did she know? she added, "It was on the box!" The box in question turned out to be a giftie from my in-laws, a wax warmer which is even now perfuming our kitchen and front room with apple-cinnamon goodness. (Thank you, Mom & Dad!) The mail also brought a spiffy new T-shirt, which I put on immediately. Finished loading the dishwasher, sat down to write a letter, and then CM came home (yay!). He needed some quality time to scheme and plot out my birthday chase, so I ran errands for about an hour and returned to receive well-wishing phone calls from several family members. CM had hidden the clues during my errand-running, so I am currently following them around the house.

EVEN MORE LATER
Finished the chase! At the end was a green quad-ruled Moleskine which will become my new bullet journal in January (huzzah for CM! and more huzzah for plans to Git Stuff Done!). After that we swept off in the car to cook and eat ludicrous amounts of Korean barbecue. Now returned, happily full of kimchi and banchan and meat (oh my!) and probably redolent with the scent of barbecued goodness. Roxy is meowing her displeasure at us because we didn't bring her any.

It's, like, 6 a.m. here.

ngh. Why am I even awake at this unholy hour?...

...oh yeah. Birthday! YAY BIRTHDAY! As always during this festive time, I bestow upon you all blanket permission to GOOF OFF. (But if it's an early hour, keep the noise down to a dull roar for your neighbors' sake, right? Right.)

For now I'm exercising my birthday right to be a complete bum and go back to bed. Will update this later.

ETA: A quiet but lovely day, and one of many books! I picked up a copy of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere for myself, V got me a copy of Under the Egg by Laura Marx Fitzgerald, and Captain Midnight brought his Birthday Chase game to bear, at the end of which was a copy of Shakespeare on Toast by Ben Crystal, plus a CD of Shakespeare in Original Pronunciation which I am very keen to hear. I had many happy-birthday messages and phone calls from family and friends, and we went out tonight for a sumptuous feast of Korean food (bring on the banchan!). Many thanks to everyone who made it a day worth remembering.

GO SOOZ IT'S YA BIRTHDAY

Yes indeedy, cats and kitties, it's my birthday once again! Time to leg it wildly through the streets, shrieking "RUNNING FREEEE! WOOHOOO!" at the top of your lungs. If the police stop you for going clothing-optional or something, tell 'em Soozcat gave you Permission to Goof Off today.

You're welcome.

And so on to Year 43!

Yes, thanks to Daylight Savings Time departing extra-late this year, I get to enjoy a full 25 hours of birthday festivities! WELCOME TO BONUS STAGE, folks. You have my official permission to Goof Off for the rest of the day, in any wise what seemeth thee good.

In fact, the only burdensome thing about my birthday this year was that my (out-of-state) license finally expired, and I was forced to get another one. And as I've pointed out on numerous occasions, I'd rather chew tinfoil than have my picture taken. Whenever I have to stare down the emotionless cyclops eye of a camera, I'm tempted to request a blindfold and a cigarette. At least it was all over quickly.

Still working on entries for Remedial Adulthood. I welcome your suggestions for future blog posts. BUT NOT TODAY! Today is Goof-Off Day! Forsooth!

Birthday!

On this day I have reached the ripe old age of 42.

This should mean that I now know the answers to Life, the Universe and Everything. However, since I was too busy goofing off to attain enlightenment, I guess I'll have to continue acting immature.

Neener!

My sister Jenny, who teaches sixth grade, called me up and had her entire class sing Happy Birthday to me. I'm delighted.

Also, in a very last-minute development, I'm participating in NaNoWriMo this year. I'm... ambivalent... about this. A friend talked me into it, and I went into it with absolutely no idea what I was going to write about, so I've been writing this stream-of-consciousness rambling about dead people. In all probability it's going to be a train wreck. Mostly I just want to see if I can do it. So cross your fingers for me; if the train wreck proves to be really amusing I may eventually post some of it.

And now it's time for some birfday wishes! In bad Dutch! YAY!

O, wat zijn wij? Heden blij!
Tara is jarig, Tara is jarig
O, wat zijn wij? Heden blij!
Tara is jarig in onze rij

OK, my friends who actually speak Dutch can stop laughing hysterically now. I had to suss out these lyrics knowing only how to sing the song phonetically and understanding literally half a dozen words in Dutch, and I pretty much gave up on the second verse (which, if I remember my great-grandma's translation correctly, involves asking God to bless and spare the birthday child for yet another year). You get extra credit points if you can follow it up by singing "Lang zal zij leven," which is what we do in our family.

That's right, it's Tara's birthday today. (No, she is not literally in my family line as the song has it, but she is a good friend.) Hmm. What to get for the lady who has everything but time? What, indeed.

No, I'm not gonna tell you here! Would spoil the surprise. Honestly. mutta mutta.

Snow day!

Here's what the snow looked like in my mother's back yard yesterday:


And here's what it looks like today:


You can't even see the stone stairs up to the next terrace. This would be an excellent day to go sledding... if I wanted to go sledding. I think I'd rather be warm inside, though.

Y Mountain, being all generally misty and moisty and cloudy in the weather. If you can't make out the big white Y on the mountain, don't feel bad; I lived here for years and had a hard time finding it today.

It's also Captain Midnight's birthday today! He is a solstice baby. His parents were sweet and wonderful and took us out to dinner tonight.

Here is where we went to dinner. The thin-crust pizza was awe-inspiring. I was also feeling quite frabjous when I discovered they had Apple Beer on tap. But what amused me even more were the signs over the soda fountain:

These may need to be viewed at a larger resolution to be fully appreciated. On the right: how to mix a "Mitt Romney." On the left, an admonition not to steal sodas, signed by the likes of Jesus and Captain Moroni. Hee. Only in Utah County.

A few random foties

Lots of birthday well-wishes today, which was awesome in many ways. Then Captain Midnight got home from work and promptly kicked me out of the house -- only because he wanted to set up my traditional Birthday Chase. (This year's chase was difficult, but not fiendishly so.)

Having been temporarily ejected from the premises, and without much to do, I had Miss V bring my camera to the door and started casting around for things to photograph.

It was a beautiful autumn afternoon.

The air was full of Nike-style swooshes...

...and waves breaking in a sea of sky.

Our rosebush was aging and dying beautifully.



This was less true for our post-Halloween squashes.

Mine was in the process of becoming less Voldemorty, more Nosferatu-esque.

Captain Midnight's, on the other hand, was busy shouting at the ding-dang neighbor kids to get the heck offa his lawn.

Eventually I was allowed back in and began looking around for clues. There were many, but they were all tracked down in due time.

Then I opened The Pile o' Loot.

(Not shown: moolah from my mommy. Thanks, Mommy!)

Many thanks to Mom, Dad, CM, Miss V, etc. I feel very fortunate over all this... and kind of excited to have a real actual Train album with a real actual "anthem" on it. How this differs from a "song" I have yet to determine. Ah, marketing.

Anyway, from there we hied on over to an Italian restaurant and filled ourselves with deliciousness. I didn't think to take any pictures, though, so you will have to fill in the blanks with your own florid imaginations.

When we returned there was a mysteeeeeerious package on the doorstep, which turned out to be the Altoids and copy of What-the-Dickens as shown above. (Thank you, Wendy!)

Then Miss V got to doing a copious amount of delayed homework, which had her up quite late. But procrastination tends to create its own punishment, really.

And that, in a nutshell, was my birthday evening! It made me smile.

HIPY PAPY BTHETHDTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDY

HICH, as we know from Mr. Milne's stories, means "A Very Happy Birthday."

It has been thus far! Got woken up with muchas smoochas and a gift of chocolate truffles to savor very slowly, one at a time. (Have I mentioned that Captain Midnight is my hero? It bears repeating.)

To Julie on her 35th Birthday

(No, I'm not remembering a movie title wrong.)

I was born first, in late 1969. My two brothers came along pretty soon thereafter, in 1971 and 1972. They shared a bedroom, with bunk beds that gave them more room to play (and to spread out their Hot Wheels track on the braided rag rug). I had a room all to myself, with a flowered bedspread and matching curtains. Most children would have appreciated not having to share a room.

But I was a child with an imagination that came alive with terrifying vividness in the dark. Not only was there unnamed horror in my closet, but also tentacled creatures lurking under the bed and vampires out in the garden, peering through the flowered curtains of my bedroom window at night. And there I lay, shivering in the gloom, all alone against the monsters.

I wanted a sister. I prayed fervently to God for a sister. And when my mom discovered she was pregnant again, I told her, "I don't care whether it's a girl or a boy. It sleeps in my room."

Julie was born in 1974, the year I was in kindergarten. I got special permission from my teacher, Mrs. Sugiyama, and my mother brought my baby sister to class for Show and Tell. I was so excited and proud, and she was so cute!

I finally got the roommate I'd prayed for; Julie and I continued to share a room, through several moves and numerous schools, until I got married and left home. We've also shared clothes, books, ideas, secrets. I've always felt a special sense of responsibility for Julie since I was the one who prayed for her to come, and I know I haven't always been there for her the way I would have liked. There have been painful times in both our lives, some shared and some apart. There are things I wish I'd been able to shield and protect her from when she was a child; there are painful episodes of her adult life that I wish she hadn't had to go through alone.

Sometimes when Julie feels depressed, she likes to poke at me a bit by saying, "This is your fault, you know... you prayed for me." But through all the ups and downs in her life, whether she was flying high or going through a wing of hell, I've never once regretted praying for Julie to come to our family. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather;
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands.

--Goblin Market, Christina Rossetti

Happy birthday.

The death of secrets

S I've wandered through the constellation of actual blogs (as opposed to spam factories and thinly-disguised storefronts), I've noticed what seems to me to be a singularly disturbing trend -- the tendency of bloggers, especially younger ones, to reveal intimate personal details to absolute strangers. There are people who give out their addresses and phone numbers online, people who post publicly-accessible photos of themselves wearing little or nothing, people who update Facebook and Twitter from inside public lavatories, people who give out blow-by-blow re-enactments of the last night's sexual encounter. The blogosphere is awash in TMI.

No, I'm not turning a blind eye to my own tendencies in this direction. This blog is called "CONFESSIONS of a Laundry Faerie," after all. Although I usually try to keep it light, over time it's come to be chock-full of personal information. Even so, there are some things I simply won't reveal here -- things that I truly believe are nobody's business but my own.

The confessional nature of our era encourages people to throw clods of information at each other. Witness the proliferation of meme lists (as Gretel points out, they should probably be called "me-me lists") like "100 books I've read" and "25 things I've eaten" and "20 BEST SONGS EVAR" and "68.3 fascinating facts about me." Yes, I've done these too; some of them are even posted here. They're seductive; it's fun to share such information, and these lists make you think you've learned something of interest about the person who's filled them out. But what have you really learned, apart from a collection of bullet-point trivia? It's like the difference between getting lost in the nuances of a wonderful book and skimming through the Cliff Notes. Part of the pleasure of making friends is the slow, gradual process of getting to know a person thoroughly -- and likewise, the process of cautiously unfurling one's external being and allowing the other person to catch glimpses of one's inner self. Part of the joy of making a true friend is recognizing when you can tell someone else a deeply-hidden secret, and know that it will be as safe in that person's hands as it was in yours. But how can that particular joy ever be obtained if you grow up in a culture that doesn't even understand what a secret is, let alone why someone would want to keep it?

I've known my mother my entire life. Like most people in my family, she's good at telling stories about all sorts of life experiences. Until fairly recently I was sure I knew about every major event in her life, including some highly personal information. And then Mom's sister came to visit, and while they were happily reminiscing on the couch together my auntie just asked a question in passing -- something like "Whatever happened to that one boy you were going to marry?" I was pretty sure I knew who she meant; after all, Mom had told us that she'd considered marriage a few times before she met Dad. But to my shock, in response to the question, my mother suddenly began to cry. I sat quietly and listened, and heard for the first time about her first true love in college, about their engagement, and about how her parents flew out from California and forced her to break it off because they didn't approve of him. It was a revelation.

My mother comes from a different generation -- one which recognizes, for the most part, that some things are simply too personal and private to share with the world. She understands the concept of the secret. I wonder how many people of my generation and younger could even recognize this concept, much more know how to apply it.

And speaking of not being able to keep secrets: today is my 40th birthday.

It's ya birth-day, it's ya birth-day...

Since it is now 12:54 AM Pacific Standard Time, it is officially MY BIRTHDAY! (Yay!) I have reached the advanced old age of 39 today.

Incidentally, that just happens to be the same age my dad was -- although he was pushing 40 -- when he died. No, I am not planning on kicking it any time soon.

Hmmm, what deviltry should I get up to today?