Visions and Revisions

Solstice

2009-12-21T14:55:00.000-05:00

As I have mentioned before, Christmases acquire a slightly different flavor each year, depending on where the Lohrenzes happen to be dwelling at the time. I maintain that nobody does Christmas--Westernized, undeniably Christian, undeniably consumerist Christmas--like Germany. Every year as soon as Thanksgiving is over I find myself hankering for a nice Weinachtsmarkt with all of the trimmings: wooden toys and puzzles and novelty candles, nutcrackers and incense burners and tree ornaments, wurst on brötchen slathered in mustard, paper cones full of candied almonds, cups of gluhwein and kinderpunsch, freezing-cold cathedrals and life-sized nativities. And if one is very lucky, snow.

But this year's yuletide in Fairbanks is perhaps the first time I've felt the significance of Christmas as a celebration of light. Because it is dark around here, people. And I am forced to admit that yes, it is bothering me a little. I don't find the darkness depressing, exactly, but I do find it rather oppressive and distinctly frustrating, because it feels like being sent to one's room. So far, the cold weather is neither here nor there; it's the light that dictates the patterns of one's days. The sun sneaks over the southeastern horizon at perhaps 11:00am, then scoots low across the sky to set in the southwest by 2:30pm. The low-angle light during this time is incredibly beautiful, and even the knowledge that it's filtered through innumerable layers of woodsmoke and emissions from the power plant (the air quality in Fairbanks is dreadful because there is no wind to move it around) doesn't dampen the loveliness of the pinks, oranges, and purples reflecting off the snow. But I find it hard to concentrate when the days are so short. Four hours after sundown my body is convinced that it's time to go to bed. Intellectually, I know can carry on with my activities regardless of whether it is dark or light, but there is no denying that the darkness works on the mind. Go home. Eat something fattening. Stay warm. Sleep. I'm actually quite grateful to have a job that commences at 5am, or I'd never get out of bed. It's interesting to talk to coworkers who have lived in Fairbanks their whole lives; they find the darkness comforting, cozy. They can relax into it and read books or smoke pot until the earth tilts back around. But I haven't quite gotten there. I want my days back so I can go do things and not feel so much like a caged animal. On the solstice I feel enormously relieved at the knowledge that from here on out the days will only get longer. Pagan traditions of plonking a festival squarely midwinter makes a great deal more intuitive, and not merely academic, sense--dare I say it?--in this light.

Double

2009-12-13T01:15:00.004-05:00

What happens when you take two plain, socially-awkward, clever thirteen-year-old girls, and throw them together in the eighth grade? They become friends. What happens when they part ways, and meet again twelve years later?

It's a little jarring.

Dani and I were friends in Vicenza when we were both suffering from acute adolescence. We got along with each other principally, I think, because we didn't get along with much of anyone else. Considering that there was a brief period in Vicenza during which I got anxiety hives all over my arms and legs in my sleep, I think I could safely say that it was a rough time. Being thirteen is rough. I spent a lot of time sitting under a hairdryer and wishing to be pretty and well-liked and coming to the realization that I never would be; and it made me angry because I was good at nearly everything else. It was nice to find someone who was feeling similarly alienated, because it suggested that I wasn't just completely out of my mind. Dani and I had sleepovers and watched Star Wars; she came to my fourteenth birthday party. But when I moved to Germany I never gave her a second thought. The sad truth is that I had mostly stopped trying to hang on to friends by then, and she wasn't one I would have made the effort for in the first place. (It was Nina who came to stay with me in Zettmannsdorf, carrying with her volumes one and two of Daria.) I have no idea what Dani's parents did or do; I don't know if she has siblings, or if she plays tennis, or whether she is allergic to peanuts. There are thousands of miles and a lot of formative years between us now. She friended me on facebook a couple of years ago and I accepted the invitation, but her name would not ever have occurred to me as one I ought to search. And now it just happens that we wound up in Fairbanks at the same time.

A quick look through Dani's facebook page spelled out plainly that our interests had diverged drastically. She has literally thousands of facebook friends. She headed back to Atlanta after her family's stint in Italy; she attended University of Alaska here in Fairbanks and majored in "Broadcast (TV/Radio), History, Military Journalism / Political Coverage Focus"; she's socially and politically involved; she wrote for the Fairbanks newspaper at one point, and reported for MTV on behalf of young Alaskans voting in the 2008 election. She has a job in an office that pays her a salary. She likes to shop and to shoot at the skeet range, and she updates her facebook status hourly via mobile phone. She knows how to network. I spend my days off at the public library or wandering the hills, and avoid bars and parties; gatherings of more than six people make me uncomfortable; I have two friends in this world and think myself very lucky; I went to Reed and painted a thesis; I scoop cookies for a living. Dani suggested we get together after I arrived and I've put it off and put it off under the double heading of asocial cowardice and practical acknowledgement of twelve years' breach in what was a pretty fleeting friendship to begin with. (I didn't "reconnect" with my best friend from kindergarten when I was in Oregon either. She has a toddler daughter and lives with her mother not twenty miles from where we chanted the ABCs together as six-year-olds, and let's just say I doubted we had anything to say to each other.)

One would think that three months' silence in a town as small as Fairbanks would speak for itself, but Dani finally tracked me down at work. One of the baristas stuck her head in the kitchen and said there was someone to see me, so I washed my hands and headed out to the front. I did my best to be friendly and interested--and I might add that a few years in food service has done wonders for my public demeanor--because I was a little embarrassed at not having called her. But truly it was the oddest thing. Dani has so earnestly and determinedly pursued her social supremacy, and yet she seemed nervous talking to me. Perhaps because she asked to see me, and was therefore backed into the awkward position of having to say something. Maybe seeing each other in person brought home to her just how much time--and not just in years--has elapsed since we met last. She's shorter than I remember--much of a size with me. Smartly dressed. She bought a green tea but I saw her tuck one of those monstrous magic bars up her sleeve, too (ha). I asked what she was doing these days and she related with some pride her position in some kind of office (in all honestly I still not sure what she does), and when I made some inane comment like "good for you" her response was, "Yeah, if only those guys could see me now!" (Those guys?) She'll be moving to Juneau or Anchorage in January for the sake of her work, but says that she thinks of Fairbanks as home. She asked how I liked it here, and I said truthfully that I like it well enough but doubt I will stay, that I am still looking for a place that I can think of as home. There were a couple of pauses in which I felt distinctly that I wasn't quite what she had expected to find.

She also burst out at one point, "Your hair is so red!" That in itself was amusing since I think there are few now who remember me as having anything but red hair. I could as easily have commented on hers, since we were both dishwater blondes twelve years ago, and at some point since then Dani dyed her hair black. The power color! (But then I knew that already from her copious facebook profile photos.) Perhaps it speaks volumes about the places we've tried to carve for ourselves in the world. Whores, mystics and Weasleys have red hair. Businessmen, presidents and priests wear black.

She permitted me to get back to work with an admonition to call her later, but I rather doubt we'll meet up again. She appears happy and prosperous, but I don't know what to say to her. For me talking with Dani is supremely surreal, like speaking with an alternate version of myself. For as much as I bellyache about how aimless my life seems at times, standing there in my dirty apron and green glasses (and red hair, which needed washing), exchanging banalities with a another short, round, intelligent young woman was deeply reassuring on some level: I would not trade places with her. I wouldn't be surprised if she felt the same.

Gingerbread Shoe

2009-12-06T12:40:00.008-05:00

I don't even remember how I found out about this, but Fairbanks holds a gingerbread house competition every December. So I decided to participate! About midway through mixing up the dough I realized that I've never made a gingerbread house in my life--really!--but that didn't prevent me from putting together the most ambitious thing I could think of. I am really pleased with how it turned out. I even wrote a poem to explain what it had to do with Christmas. Initially I'd planned to put together a team of eight gingerbread children pulling Santa's sleigh, but I ran out of time (and patience), and after going to the trouble of producing a lovely three-dimensional house it seemed a bit of a waste to cut out two-dimensional characters to populate it. Behold! The old woman who lived in a shoe. (My backup idea was Noah's ark, populated by a whole bag of animal crackers.)

There was an old woman
who lived in a shoe.
She had so many children
she didn't know what to do.

She gave them some broth
without any bread,
then sold them to Santa
to help pull his sled.

Santa sent them to the workshop
for his own cryptic reasons,
where they learned to make toys
between holiday seasons.

Then one year Rudolph thought,
"I'm way past sixty-five.
Time to kick up my heels
and let someone else drive."

All the reindeer retired
on a generous pension.
And although the child labor
at first caused much contention,

the following Christmas
eight kids pulled the sleigh.
It turned out that flying
was quite simply--child's play.

Being children themselves,
they know exactly which toys
are the ones most desired
by good girls and boys.

Now they travel the world
in their noble endeavor,
and sleep soundly, protected
by more than shoe-leather.

Every house that they visit
leaves a plateful of carrots,
which far outweighs broth
in its nutritional merits.

So everyone is happy--
most especially one old crone,
who knits socks by the fire
and spends Christmas alone.

Here!

2009-11-25T21:34:00.000-05:00

Well well. Having some aspirations that my adventures in Alaska might turn out to be Momentous! I had resolved to keep good records of dry-cabin dwelling and my evolving impressions of this frozen land. But it has been a busy time, this past month or so, and after the initial period of withdrawal from intravenous interweb access, I found that I didn't miss it as much as I had expected. (Which is not to say that I've stopped composing blog entries in my head.)

I rather abruptly found myself employed full time at the ACRC, which is no bad thing since the 300 gallons of oil that heat this cabin cost a small pile of dragon gold, and each month one must cough up sums for all of those boring essentials like rent and food and student loans. Fortunately, I quite enjoy my little job as a baker. I don't have to scrub floors or keep the inventory like I did at the chocolate factory; I've been trained to cook flatbreads, pita, and empanadas in the wood oven, which is hard work but novel and interesting; plus, the kitchen manager discovered my predilection for fancy pastries and informed me very clearly that as long as it will sell, I can make whatever I want for the dessert case. It's great! Suddenly the ACRC is selling zucchini muffins and coconut macaroons and mini pumpkin cheesecakes to a delighted clientele. I get to play with food and get paid for it.

And I've already redone the chalkboards. The infiltration curve continues to accelerate. Less than six weeks, that is surely a record.

Unfortunately the owner of the business is a miserable human being who has a gift for stressing and depressing his hardworking staff. He is not often in town; he races Formula One cars and has business investments in all sorts of odd corners--southern California, Dubai, Málaga--and spends weeks at a time overseas. But when he is here every single baker and barista walks on eggshells. He seems to suffer from a kind of attenuated tunnel vision, and rather than filling his day by doing anything useful--I don't know, washing dishes or going over the accounts, or maybe even steaming lattes for customers--he drifts around the store with a doppio in hand, alternately chewing the fat with customers and zeroing in on what he perceives are monstrous shortcomings in the kitchen. Why is the pita sponge so big? (It's RISING.) Why is there a pan of water in the oven? (It's a STEAM OVEN.) Why are the scones salty? Hoo boy. I caught the edge of his bad temper by making herb and cheese scones one morning--nevermind that they all sold, evidently he doesn't like savory scones, so nobody else is going to like them either--and that day I went home thinking that a job sorting mail for FedEx didn't sound so bad. We'll see. Most of the time he likes me just fine. I'm a perfectionist and a hard worker; what a shame I waste my energy being creative. But I do not have the kind of even-keeled temperament that is so necessary for dealing with people like him; rather than battening the hatches and waiting it out, I'm more likely to drop whatever I'm working on and storm out the door. But I really do enjoy puttering around the kitchen when he isn't there, and the freedom I'm given, so I'm making an effort not to be such a volatile human being.

Work is no excuse for apparently falling off the face of the internet, though, so imagine, if you will, living in a dry cabin when the weather suddenly veers into the negative side of the thermometer. Somewhere during the third week of October winter showed up, surprise!, and very rapidly I discovered that my lovely little cabin wasn't quite winterproof. As I think I mentioned before, I am the first person to have lived in it. At first I tried to be clever, and used a candle to track the draughts back to their points of origin. But have you ever attempted to follow a breeze? It's harder than it looks. (Ha ha.) The cold in the Interior is (so far) not aggressive--there hasn't been a breath of wind in the three months I've lived here, the weather doesn't eat into your bones as it did in Iceland and sometimes in Boston--but it is pervasive. The -30 degree temperatures march steadily, implacably through walls that seem increasingly like a mere film standing thinly between yourself and the cold. I borrowed some plastic sheeting for the windows from Dad, and put a snake at the bottom of the door. And pretty literally every spare hour of the last three weeks I have spent armed with a table knife, standing on a chair or cross-legged on the floor, sticking yellow wads of fiberglass batting into all of the cracks in my walls. All of them. And come to find out, when the temperature opposition surpasses 80 degrees--so when the mercury dips below -15 F--the cracks multiply. Noisily. Scout has picked up an interesting habit of staring at apparently blank spots on the walls until I think she is seeing ghosts; sudden hairline cracks appear like magic, with a mighty CRACK. I'm making headway, and I expect that by the end of November this cabin will be about as snug as I can get it without calling Christo to wrap the whole thing in canvas, but the task has taken some time.

And you might wish to alert the media, because I have finally learned to drive. Not well, I daresay, but then I have never been above a passable cyclist either, and I think I can claim at least that I drive safely. (E.g. like an eighty-year-old woman out to do her weekly shopping.) The state of Alaska, in its infinite permissiveness, has issued me a license to that effect. I have a car, even; a dark green Kia Spectra with a reconstructed title that Mom and Dad bought and said I could use for as long as I am in Fairbanks. Her name is Fagin. (The license plate includes the letters FGN, and Fagin popped into my head--and stuck--before I could do anything about it.) I don't enjoy driving very much, but I've discovered that I hugely enjoy playing very loud classical music while I am pootling along the highway in the snow. Fagin's speakers are much better than the ones on my computer, and the library's collection of classical music is pretty good. But for the most part my car seems to have been compartmentalized in my mind as a large movable storage unit.

I'm also still getting used to the dynamics of cold-weather car ownership, things like keeping the gas tank topped off to prevent condensation and remembering to plug in when I get home at night. In the Arctic, cars tend to freeze over. Irretrievably. A "winterized" car has an industrial grade of antifreeze in running through every vein, and heating pads in strategic places under the hood to keep the engine fluids…fluid. Extension cords protrude from the grilles of nearly all vehicles in Fairbanks, and electrical outlets are available outside most houses and businesses for the purpose of plugging in the cars. Otherwise when people go to the theater they simply idle their cars for the two and a half hour duration of a movie. Idling Fagin drives me absolutely crazy--I paid for that gasoline! With money!--even though my coworkers assure me that it is necessary to warm up the engine for fully twenty minutes before driving away. (I don't.) Some folks even buy remote controls to "autostart" their cars, eliminating the need to go outside to perform this crucial function. On the whole I am trying to be flexible about the necessity of driving because it is simply another facet of this Alaskan lifestyle--new customs and concomitant ways of thinking, like having late-afternoon dinners in Spain--but it isn't something I'd want to do forever, and the impossibility of walking from one place to another is, to me, a very sound reason to live somewhere other than Fairbanks.

Details

2009-10-08T19:53:00.002-04:00

Finally I have fixed the comic links on the right-hand side. Probably nobody noticed but my website (not this blog, the website) quietly expired towards the middle of September, and took the image links with it. Oh well. I kept a copy all the code that Paul so laboriously wrought, so if I want to set up shop again in future I can do so, but I just wasn't making use of that site, so it didn't seem worth the cost of renewing my subscription.

The excellent Clay, with his bifurcated beard and apparently infinite knowledge of how things in the house work (from loft ladders to Toyo heaters) duly showed up, discovered a LEAK in the connection between the tiny furnace--the furnace what runs by burning things--and the 300 gallons of raw oily fuel standing on spindly steel legs just outside my front door......tightened a valve, and departed, all in five minutes. With instructions to call him if the problem continued, because then he would simply take the whole thing apart and reset the valve using a new piece of copper. As soon as he'd left I found a puddle of oil in the tray under the heater, in the corner nearest Scout's litterbox, which had evidently leaked from the valve and collected. Dad and I cleaned that up, set some papers down to absorb any oil that continued to drip, and left the Toyo overnight. Checking back the next day it was all clear, so I have moved back into my cabin. An energetic round of breadmaking drove out the oily reek, so we are a happy household once again.

I think I have a part time job, too. There's been a sign posted at a cafe near my parents' house--the Alaska Coffee Roasting Company--for well on three weeks, advertising for bakers and baristas. On a whim I printed off a copy of my [K.M. Self-Approved] resume and handed it to the counterperson as I was leaving with my latte. Two hours later the store manager called to set up an interview; the following morning at 11am the kitchen manager walked me through the maze of refrigerators and industrial mixers, and asked when I could start. I've never gotten a job so quickly in my life. It's enough to make me suspect I may have strayed into the Overqualified Zone.

Supposedly I'd only be working two or three days a week, shifts start at 5am, and pay starts at $9/hour (the cost of living in Alaska is not so much lower than Boston that that is a living wage). So I wouldn't go so far as to call this job a commitment. A fling, maybe. (Other people have interpersonal relationships, I have jobs.) But may I direct your attention to the wood-fired oven? Looks like that could be great fun. They make all sorts of things that I've never baked in my "professional" guise: cheesecakes, empanadas, flatbreads, quiche. A fine chance to learn something new. Plus I will not have to double as a barista when the front counter is short-staffed, I get to lurk in the kitchen and stir the tuna salad.

Of course nobody from the company has contacted me since Tuesday when I was interviewed, but they gave me a copy of the baker's manual so I assume they were pretty serious about hiring me.

The Rest of the Story

2009-10-04T13:38:00.003-04:00

Dad and I spent a good three days ferrying my belongings from my parents' house out to Little Fox as September drew to a close, and I officially took possession of the cabin on October 1st. "Taking possession," to those of you who don't know, means bringing the cat out. A little background here: Scout is a bold soul and a good traveler. She doesn't like to be touched by strangers, but she is not afraid of their presence. She doesn't run and hide when we arrive in a new place. The three weeks we spent in the hotel were a breeze; the space was a little smaller than she was used to, but she had a rollicking good time harassing Morgan and being her usual catty self. She was instantly in love with Mom and Dad's new house because it was HUGE, full of hidey-holes and catwalks for her to examine, and smelled like Irish Wolfhound. For all the trouble that Scout's health has caused me, she has a delightfully flexible personality.

So I was a little dismayed when, an hour into unpacking at the new cabin, I found her bundled into a catloaf on my bed in the loft. And there she stayed. She wouldn't come down except to eat and use the litter box, and that very reluctantly. I thought at first that she was cold, because my house runs a good eight degrees cooler than my parents', and the loft is colder still because the heater is on the main floor. But if that was the case why wouldn't she come downstairs where it was warmer? And why did she perk right up the minute that (at her insistence, and against my better judgment) I let her outside to explore?

Maybe she just didn't like my cabin.

I relayed all of this to my parents over the course of two days' phonecalls. My dad drove out on Friday so that I could go to the bank, and immediately commented that my house smelled very strongly of oil. No denying the truth of that statement, for sure. But it had smelled that way since the day they installed the Toyo. Our house in Germany smelled faintly but distinctly of oil; that's just what happens when you're heating your house that way. In smaller quarters, naturally the smell would be stronger, right? I figured I was just being a wuss and would have to get used to the odor. But coupled with my report of peculiar Scout's behavior, Dad was concerned enough to take the CO monitor out of my parents' house and loan it to me.

Meanwhile Scout is still tucked into herself on my bed. I notice she's a little glassy-eyed. Maybe she's ill.

Mom appeared yesterday to take me shopping (understand that the destination of most of these trips is not as important as the fact of my driving there; must practice). She gave me a big hug and told me I stink like oil. I take a big sniff of my clothes and find that she's right. My whole house stinks like oil. We bundle Scout into her carrier, since a "playdate" had been planned with Morgan (the cats bonded over their stint of cohabitation), and head to my parents' house to drop her off. She perks up immediately. Letting her out at Mom and Dad's house, she bounds out like a crazy thing to make sure the food is in the same place it was three days ago. She and Morgan make noises like thundering elephants as they chase around the upper story.

Hm.

We run into one of Mom's coworkers at the hardware store. He and his wife have both spent time living in dry cabins (it's a kind of rite of passage, right along with one's first winter in the Interior). I tell him that my Toyo is putting off a really heavy oil smell, and is this normal? He and his wife inform me very seriously that it is not at all normal, and something must be amiss in the setup of the stove. Do I have renter's insurance?

No I don't have renter's insurance. And you want to know the sad truth, I haven't even signed a lease, or a renter's agreement, or anything. People around here operate on the gentlemen's agreement, it seems, and for something as important as renting a house it goes sorely against the grain with me, especially in light of all the difficulties that Si and I had with the landlord in Massachusetts. But I've been trying not to be uptight about the lease, or the legalities of my residence. This is Alaska! People look out for one another. If there's a problem the landlord will get it fixed.

Except one landlord (they are business partners) is in New Zealand until mid-December. The other is in Canada until the 14th. My "substitute" landlord is the carpenter who built my loft ladder, a good buddy of theirs. And it's the weekend.

So I have called him. I have also gone out to the cabin long enough to turn off the Toyo, grab my toothbrush, and beat a retreat. Scout and I will be sleeping on my parents' couch until further notice.

Dry Living

2009-10-03T21:22:00.002-04:00

Back in June, Kim and I were riding the subway to Manhattan with my parents when I mentioned that I'd looked at housing listings on Craigslist and discovered that I could rent a "dry cabin" for $350-600/month. I asked my Dad, did "dry" indicate a sound roof, a prohibition of alcohol, or a lack of running water?

Obviously, the latter. And immediately ensued a robust round of heckling about Amelia and her dry cabin. Trips to the outhouse in subzero temperatures and sticking to the toilet seat! Stumbling home once a week to wash the laundry--and maybe her hair! Moose loitering on the doorstep! Marrying a mountain man and never being heard from again!

I'm pretty sure the reason for all this ribbing was the fact that they knew that, faced with a choice between an apartment in town with a hot shower, a flushing toilet, and two roommates, or having a whole cabin to myself and heating my wash water on the stove, I would take the dry cabin in an instant. And so I have. I am renting a beautiful two-story log cabin on a hillside above the Chena River Valley (where Fairbanks is situated), about six miles from town, twelves miles from my parents' place.

There are actually several thousand dry cabins clustered around the north side of Fairbanks--most of them inhabited by students attending UAF. The prevailing attitude seems to be that the young possess enough elasticity (or insanity) for dry living. (And if you spend most of your day on campus, and don't mind living in one of the smaller or uglier cabins, dry living can be really easy on the pocketbook.) The cabins are variously owned, variously built, variously sized, variously furnished, variously priced (though almost entirely heated by the same means; wood-burning heat drives the insurance into the stratosphere, because of the risk of fire). Around here, if you have a bit of money to invest you don't bother with the stock market; you buy some land, build one to a dozen dry cabins, and rent them out to students. Craigslist is full of them. I encountered this one by the grace of the gods of The Alaskan Way, when my parents mentioned my search to their real estate agent, who just happened to know of a cabin recently refurbished. I loved it instantly, and the "landlords" were pretty easy to bully into letting me live here.

The dirt road in front of my house is called Little Fox Trail, and just to give an example of the nature of my surroundings, I first saw this place on the ninth of September and only today I found out what the house's address really is. (Turns out I don't yet have a mailbox; the fuel company delivered my winter's supply of oil, and my address was on the bill.) The area is actually pretty well populated for Alaska, but because people around here don't concern themselves too much about the size or quality of their "lawn," and instead leave the trees and weeds thriving around their building sites, everyone lives in his own wilderness. Dad swears I will see moose under this particular tree outside my "living room" window. Sitting in the outhouse I am more likely to be interrupted by a snowshoe hare than a human being. Cell phone reception is uneven; I can usually make and receive calls without trouble, but they are dropped frequently. Because I am situated pretty well up on the hillside I won't have to suffer the notorious Fairbanks ice fog, however; by all accounts hillfolk enjoy winter temperatures some 15-20 degrees warmer than the town dwellers, so isolation (and I use the term advisedly, since I don't feel isolated) can lay claim to a few practical compensations.

My cabin, as I said, has two floors: the kitchen/dining room on the first floor, and a full sleeping loft above. ("Full" means the floor stretches clear to all four walls and the pitched roof reaches a good seven feet at its peak; a "half" loft is a crawl space with a mattress.) It is sturdy and well insulated, though you may be sure that I'll be chinking the shit out of some of the siding as draughts make themselves more evident. I can boast all of the conveniences of your average first world home, meaning electricity and everything that can run off of it, lights, refrigerator, four-burner range and oven (the latter carted over from the unfinished second cabin on the property at my special request), microwave, sink with a drain pipe that leads outside (no slop buckets), and a Toyo heater fed by a 300-gallon oil tank. (No internet yet, but we'll see.) My outhouse sits at the back of the house, facing into the woods, and it is new, and sturdy, and clean. Special bonus: five doghouses occupy my "yard," left by the former tenants who seem to have kept a sled team. (I am enormously tempted to get a dog.) Add to these native charms the fact that I am living here, with all of my books, arty crap, and innate good taste, plus the furniture and kitchen implements that my parents pressed me to carry away, and the result is a supremely comfortable habitation. This is a nice cabin, ladies and gentlemen.

Dry living is something I'm still sorting out. So far it's a bit of a cross between car camping--because you have as much "gear" as your heart could desire, and then some--and backpacking on the beach--because there are no spigots and you have to tote all of your water. Possibly I will find the fact of an outside toilet more burdensome as the temperatures drop into the negative numbers, but presently it's the least challenging aspect of dry living. The wind never seems to blow, and I have a nice warm styrofoam plank to sit on. My outhouse smells a helluva lot better than the bathroom at 21-R frequently did. And I am well equipped with hand sanitizer, so Kim can rest assured that I will not die of dysentery. Washing my person so far also proves pretty straightforward. Soap and hot water are not required in quantity for this exercise, and stripping down in an oil-heated cabin is a far cry from shivering through one's morning ablutions in the open air. I can shower at my parents' house whenever my hair becomes unbearable, and since I don't yet have a job there's no fuss about how frequently that happens.

No, the hardest part of dry living so far seems to be washing the goddam dishes, because I have spent so long swilling bakeware in gratuitous quantities of hot water. Were I content to eat Annie's macaroni and cheese out of the pot for the next year, there wouldn't be a problem, but come on. I will cook my six-course banquet from scratch and eat it too. Part of the difficulty is that my waterworks are still operating out of two one-gallon milk jugs and a Nalgene, which I feel obliged to fill every day. Seeing all of the available wash and drinking water sitting before one's eyes is a sobering experience that promotes extreme frugality. (Consider that the average toilet uses a good three to five gallons of water to do a flush.) How to wash and rinse the dishes--thoroughly enough that I can consent to eat from them again--without using the whole supply? I learn as I go. A little more precipitation--in any form--and I could set up a rain/melt bucket for wash purposes, but interior Alaska is a subarctic desert. Gives a whole new meaning to "dry" living. Most dry dwellers acquire several five-gallon blue containers, like those for gasoline, and fill them once a week at the water stations available around town. No scrimping necessary, except perhaps in the name of the inconvenience of immediately renewing one's water supply. (An aside: because the ground water in some areas contains unwholesome levels of arsenic, entire communities have to import their drinking water. Dry living isn't that much of a leap.) I'm reluctant to use my carefully hoarded supply of Food and Warmth tokens for buying empty plastic jugs, so I'm planning to collect an army of milk containers, but that will take a few weeks. Until then I cringe inwardly every time I pour out another measure of water. Baby steps.

Alaskaland

2009-10-02T15:06:00.004-04:00

While I was in New York in mid-July to help Mom and Dad with their packout, being hungry for any and all information on my impending new home, I devoured Lonely Planet's travel guide for Alaska in two days. What it had to say about Fairbanks was not encouraging:

It may not be pretty, but Fairbanks is certainly evocative--and the key is the people. While Fairbanks and its surrounding areas do have some interesting sights and activities --from paddling the mighty Chena River through the bordering-on-bleak downtown area, to heading out to remote hot springs--it's really the frontiersman persona of the locals that makes it a worthwhile stop.

Here you have back-to-landers, businesspeople and bureaucrats, gun-toting conspiracy-theorists and freaked-out survivalists, professors and hygienically challenged students at Alaska's flagship university and, last but not least, the rugged individuals who chose to build their own cabin and grow their own food, living their lives on their own terms 'out there' in log-cabin communities like Fox, Manley, and Ester. It's a place where some escape the strictures of society, never to be found again.

But unfortunately for visitors, the landscape here is simply not as dramatic as other spots in the state. Sure, you have views of the Alaska Range to the south and the White Mountains to the north. But the area around here is hot and buggy in the summer, and freezing cold in the winter, a slightly wrinkled hill country covered with the soft fuzz of birch, spruce, arctic meadows and the occasional granite dome. [...]

A spread-out maze of strip malls, snaking rivers and bleak storefronts, [the city of Fairbanks] holds very little attraction for the independent traveler. [...]

The best part of Fairbanks is generally leaving Fairbanks.

And it's all 100% true. This is the seediest damn town I've ever been to in my life, even counting Wichita Falls.

Fairbanks was founded, very practically, by a trader, when the Chena River grew too shallow for his boat to travel any further. Accordingly, since its inception Fairbanks operated as a trading post for prospectors (the Fort Knox gold mine, about 40 km from town, still produces the shiny stuff in the hundreds of thousands of grams per year), trappers, and homesteaders throughout the Interior.

And Fairbanks still operates as a trading post. Many people come to town every couple of months, buy their supplies, and promptly leave again. The general stores have been replaced with a Wal-Mart, the saloons gave way to McDonald's, and the shiny, standard-issue exteriors of Big Box Highway contrast depressingly with the peeling, dun-colored structures that predate the 1967 flood. The city itself is appallingly ugly; people who inhabit the surrounding hills refer to it appropriately as Bareflanks. It's very nearly impossible to walk anywhere--what with a complete absence of town planning and plenty of room for expansion, the city sprawls over nearly 33 square miles, and walking simply takes too long--which means that even A. Lohrenz has been lately found behind the wheel of a car. (Juddering through stoplights and crawling along at what seems to a confirmed pedestrian a whopping 50 mph, but nonetheless driving.)

The average personally-owned vehicle is approximately the size of a whale and consumes a gallon of gasoline every ten feet. People have more firearms than children. Dress code for every venue, from an art gallery to a Italian restaurant, is muddy Carharrts and a flannel shirt. The front yard of most houses sports a couple of dead cars slowly becoming one with the land (one place was cultivating flowers in the bed of a pickup), heaps of scrap lumber, broken-down household appliances wearing proud coats of rust, children's bicycles, that thing that uncle Joey picked up and the transfer station two Christmases ago, and several barking dogs (at least one dog per firearm, but that is an estimate).

One major tourist attraction ("major" here referring to the percentage of tour buses that stop here, not the total number of tour buses) is a little clearing where people can touch and have their picture taken with the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Another is Alaskaland, a tiny "amusement park" built around several dozen salvaged original storefronts, a grounded sternwheeler, and a railcar that President Coolidge once traveled in. (Walking through it reminded me irresistibly of that scene in Shrek when they first enter DuLac. "Where is everybody?")

Sarah Palin is a local hero. (There are comic books!)

The city has a freaking curling club.

And yet, right now I can't think of anyplace I would rather be.

Note: this photo was taken on September 9th. Two weeks later there was an inch of snow on the ground.

"Welcome Home"

2009-09-12T01:10:00.003-04:00

The fences of Fort Wainwright have been inundated with banners over the last two weeks, to welcome the soldiers returning from Iraq. I wouldn't call them art, but some of them are pretty creative. And others are pretty heartbreaking.

The Eagle Has Landed

2009-09-02T12:28:00.005-04:00

Ladies and gentlemen, I am HERE!

As it happens, Mom has decided that all members of the Lohrenz clan should be in attendance for Grandma's memorial service on the 12th, so on the 11th of this month we three kings will be flying down from Fairbanks, and Silas from Boston, to the glorious city of Portland. It promises to be an interesting occasion. Upon being informed that I would be present for this function, I suggested that if Mom could find me an oven (they're still living in the Army hotel here on Fort Wainwright) I would put together a couple of batches of Dreadful Sugar Cookies in the classic style of Joyce Conibear. To celebrate! Mom thought this was a brilliant idea, and when she passed it along to my aunt Pat, the cookies snowballed into a complete Festival of Follies. We're going to have--that godawful cranberry jello salad she always made! And! Everybody has to wear an appalling collared sweatshirt with some smarmy scene of frolicking kittens on the front! AND! We're going to play SIX MILLION GAMES OF YAHTZEE.

In the mean time, I feel like I've been given a two-week dispensation from all of the standard New Location responsibilities (e.g. finding a job). There's no point going in search of a place to live before I've helped Mom and Dad move into their new house (pictures to follow) and there's no point passing out resumes before I'm ready to begin working because, by the looks of it, everybody and their mother is hiring right now. Not that I particularly want to work at Sears--my grand goal this time around is to find work that will pay me for my SKILLS rather than my TIME, gadzooks--but I have a strong feeling that if it comes to that I will not have difficulty finding employment. So there's no hurry. I've got some time to look around and take stock. It's a bit like being on vacation from myself.

Walls That Talk

2009-08-27T15:38:00.004-04:00

I think I mentioned some while back that the use of an oven at the chocolate factory was finally approved, but I never detailed the finer points of the victory. Funny story! We should have been able to go to city hall as soon as we'd discovered the deficiencies of our victualler's license, paid a fine, and rectified the situation within the week. But because the fancy clothing retailer next door to us was (at the time) suing us for noise--I know, right? We're very sorry for being so successful!--which bled into concerns about the numbers of customers occupying our store, and the seating capacity allowed by the fire marshal, the fine minds at city hall wound up lumping all of these matters into one ludicrous lawsuit.

I still don't know how it was resolved, or if it was resolved at all. But eventually the lawyers from both parties elected to conduct a series of practical experiments. First they had the chocolate factory turn on every machine in the building--coffee grinders, espresso machines, refrigerators, freezers, air conditioner, ice makers, blenders, dishwasher, Kitchen Aid mixer, anything running on electricity was switched to LOUDEST POSSIBLE, and then the staff started talking at full volume and bellowing drink orders to some very bewildered customers. By all accounts, none of this ruckus could be detected by the persons listening carefully next door--all they could hear was the dull thud when someone tapped out a used espresso shot (a puck, yes, that is what it is called). Then, for good measure, they came back to the chocolate factory after closing time and unplugged everything. Our store sat at its quietest post-apocalyptic setting and the folks next door could still hear a mysterious, pervasive hummm, that noise that so haunted their days and nights! AND, LO, IT WAS COMING FROM THE BUSINESS UPSTAIRS.

Evidently the clothing retailer could not bear to provoke another lawsuit after losing face so completely. Instead the proprietor arranged to sound-proof the shop and thus protect the delicate ears of his employees. So beginning last week we have heard nothing but a raging cacophony of whirrs, bangs, hasps, and thunks from our dear neighbors as they tear down the walls, insulate them, and put the store back together again. It has been the dearest wish of many chocolate factory employees to walk over there and say, "Hey guys, sorry to bother you, but the noise is disturbing our customers. You mind keeping it down?"

(Nobody has, of course, because we are not allowed on the retailer's property--any more than he or his minions are now permitted within the doors of the chocolate factory.)

Early last week, on the first day of construction, I was covering lunch breaks in the café (one of many newly-invented tasks for the pastry staff thanks to the innovation of one A. Lohrenz) and listening interestedly to the knocking from next door. Business was slow, a combination of the hot weather and the construction, and have I mentioned that I have an acute case of short-timer's disease? So I announced that I was going to find out if the construction workers had a sense of humor. I marched up to the wall, paused to listen for a knock, and when it came I smartly rapped shave-and-a-haircut in precisely the same spot. The other employees and I stared at each other for about fifteen seconds, waiting, but no two-bits came knocking back. Disappointed, I went back to juicing oranges.

About five minutes later a man, obviously a construction worker, complete with hard hat, came in the door of the chocolate factory asking to speak to the supervisor. Bill volunteered his presence, expecting a discussion about Making Measurements or other construction-related masculine topics. To everyone's surprise the man explained that one of his larger workmen had been pulling down siding and suddenly got very scared by a knocking coming from within the wall. The workman was convinced he had disturbed a ghost, and in an attempt to allay his fears the more sensible foreman had come to ask if we were "hangin' pitchers er som'thin'" and had been banging on the wall. At this point in the proceedings I was ready to implode with suppressed laughter. Bill dryly told the foreman that the 200-lb worker with a crowbar that he'd just described had been spooked by a 5' 2" redheaded poltergeist covered in orange juice, who thought she was being funny. Congratulations! The foreman found this enormously amusing, rolling out a huge beery construction-worker's laugh, and said he'd send his worker over to see the ghost for himself. "No no no..." Bill said seriously. "Do that and she'll just disappear!"

I Just Work Here

2009-08-25T16:10:00.003-04:00

I have short-timer's syndrome like you wouldn't believe. Less than a week from now I will BE IN ALASKA!

I am completely out of patience with work; all of the little niggling irritations seem to reach their most unbearable pitch right before I leave. The important thing right now is to suppress that insidious urge to tell everyone exactly what I think. And that is not something I am saying to be funny, it is a serious problem. It's a classy company, and I've been working for these people for a full year now. For most of that time I've enjoyed myself immensely, bringing my particular skills to the table whenever possible and steadily pushing the learning curve along so that I wouldn't get bored too quickly, and I can immodestly say that I've done excellent work for them. There is a darn fine reference to be had there.

But I can also say quite baldly that on a purely personal level the manager doesn't like me. This makes me uncomfortable because there was never anything that I ever seemed able to do about it. She's a brusque woman against whom a goodly portion of the staff nurse some resentment. She is very good at saying the correct thing, but a terrible judge of the relationships between her employees. She knows perfectly well that I am a very good worker and she has gone through all of the appropriate motions of commending me for it. But for whatever reason we never hit it off, and having a conversation with her is like trying to parse Japanese. The words are all there, but it just doesn't function as communication. I suspect, too, that there are some chain-of-command tensions between us, because I started in chocolate and then moved to the kitchen, and since on an official level she manages the café I don't feel that I was ever quite accountable to her. I work for the chocolate company, not for the manager. Gian and Jaime were happy to let me run my own show; the manager had a harder time accepting my outside-the-system attitude. I think she'll be glad to see the back of me. I spend too much time rocking the boat.

So I am trying simply to stay out of her way, or not to speak to her at all. I don't have anything to gain from pissing her off, not even the double-edged satisfaction of taking the boss down a notch, because even though she isn't the greatest manager I've ever worked with, neither is she the worst, because she is highly responsible about her business. I just can't seem to damp down completely the flaring urge to burn all my bridges before I leave. It's a very bad habit.

I also harbor a bit of a grudge against the company in general for 1) the whole oven license fiasco, and 2) not paying me more, because I have genuinely tried to prove myself worth their investment. Talk about above and beyond the call of duty; my presence has literally rewritten the job description for pastry. Suddenly the bakeshop position isn't just a throwaway for some derelict who is inappropriate for exposure to the public. I've carved pumpkins and dressed window displays. I've arranged flowers and drawn chalkboards for both Cambridge and Walpole. I've worked in every part of the store and assumed responsibility for all of the aspects of pastry previously dependent on a supervisor, like inventory and ordering. I made-over the pastry bible for the next generation, and I'm currently training my replacement (the latter was not something I volunteered for). It's hard to find complete satisfaction in the knowledge of a job well done when I know that other bakeries in town start their employees at $13/hr. Come oooooon, I just want to feel important! I won't go as far as to say that I wouldn't leave if I had a higher wage or a real salary. (I mean, it's Alaska!.) But I'd probably be more inclined to stay. For that matter, anyone would be more inclined to stay, and then maybe they wouldn't find themselves hiring new kitchen staff every six months.

Live and learn. I've certainly learned a lot at the chocolate factory, one way or another. It's been a fun job, a decent job. I ate embarrassing and wonderful quantities of chocolate. I'm just very very ready to leave, and try something new.

Grandma

2009-08-21T22:06:00.004-04:00

There's a rather sad trend unfolding this summer, one fairly new to me. I mentioned before that Matisse died shortly before Mom and Dad moved. Lady, the golden retriever who occupied much of the same post in Kim's household that Matisse did in mine, died last week. And earlier this week Grandma died after a long and difficult winding-down. She went peacefully, which was a relief to everyone, and in some ways she's been gone a long time, so her passing didn't come as anything of a surprise. But I'm going to miss her. Death at a distance does strange things to memory.

She was the last of my grandparents, and unquestionably the one I got to know best--when one is the late offspring of parents who were themselves late offspring, the timing just doesn't work in one's favor. I could recite vast catalogues about visiting Grandma, each memory in full color and high resolution: the thrill of ringing her doorbell; playing with a veritable zoo of multicolored plastic animals in a tub overflowing with bubbles; the smell of the "powder room" half of the bathroom; watching in fascination as she worked on yet another of those silly hook rugs; solving word-search puzzles; eating popcorn for dinner; humming along to the chiming of the clock that hung above her sofa; repainting the beak and legs of the godawful concrete chicken that stood in her back yard with red nail polish; later, harassing Neeko until he fled to the back bedroom to hide; choking down dry Christmas sugar cookies that had been baked before Halloween; and playing hundreds, thousands, countless games of cards.

Her visits to us, holidays at the houses of various aunts and uncles, and our shared vacations to northwestern Washington are, if not more difficult to recollect, at least several orders of magnitude less clear. I remember Grandma in her house. At Grandma's House. I feel almost guilty about it, as though I am imprisoning her in her own apartment. But the fact of the matter is that Grandma and Grandma's House were a permanent fixture in a transient child's life. She rarely rearranged the furniture and never seemed to buy anything new. I can recall the minute details of her house with a vividness that I find startling. It's one of the only places in the world where I could mark time, where the surroundings were so familiar that I could feel the presence of my own age--at Grandma's house, I was the thing that changed. Grandma got older, but she was always there, and the reassuring sameness of her house tended to occlude the slow changes wrought in its occupant. I could always go back to Grandma's. Her house and her presence in it exist so permanently in my mind that, to be honest, her death doesn't seem very real.

Here We Are Again

2009-08-12T14:57:00.008-04:00

I feel like we've been through this before.

Following the glorious, albeit expensive, success of Scout's spay day, I thought we were done seeing vets. Fortune favored us with a rabies-vaccination due date of September 15, and since we fly on August 31 she was all set to just slide in right under the wire. But it appears that Alaska Airlines requires (at least officially) a health certificate for all animals on their flights, regardless of whether they are flying in the cabin or in the hold, domestically or internationally. Funny, because when we traveled with AirTran in May 2008 this was not an issue. And in fact when Mom flew north on August 1 they never enquired after Morgan's paperwork. If she hadn't declared the presence of a cat, they probably wouldn't have registered that there was one on the flight at all.

But it would be just my luck to go to the airport with no documentation and wind up being the random search victim. I'd wind up choosing between leaving Scout behind and missing my flight. I am also hesitant to forge the paperwork, even though I have a copy of Morgan's certificate (for reference) and all of the pertinent information at my fingertips. Again, it would be my luck for them to discover my false documents and fine my sorry ass for trying to carry a broken but 100% free-from-infection cat across state borders.

So I called the vet again, god are they tired of hearing from me, and arranged an appointment for next week. They are supposed to do an exam, $65, before they can issue a health certificate, $5.25. I elected to pass on their suggestion of an early rabies booster. Frankly I'm surprised that they brought it up, because they've all seen Scout's records, they all know how the shit hit the fan last fall. Today I went in to discuss, in person, our "options." It's about 98% likely that nobody in the building will be able to lay a hand on Scout without a pair of long leather gauntlets and a muzzle. Under normal circumstances I'd let them get on with it and just assuage the cat's damaged dignity with a can of tuna afterwards. But as we are all aware, Scout's fine frenzy will have some pretty dire consequences. So I asked the receptionist, first of all, if, since Scout was just there on June 30, and she is an indoor cat anyhow, they could possibly just issue a health certificate right now, date it August 13, and in exchange I and my volatile companion will never darken their doorway again. Promise! The receptionist and the technician laughed nervously at my joke. Several moments elapsed before they realized I was in dead earnest. It would save their time, my money, and Scout's general health. Everybody wins!

No, they will not bend the rules for me, they could get in serious trouble. Blah blah blah. I'm tired of their feeble female excuses, I've shelled out nearly $1000 to those fools over the last year, THEY OWE ME. So I asked, quite reasonably I think, whether they are going to insist on being very thorough in their examination. Scout is going to flip out. This isn't really a question of probabilities anymore, that's just what is going to happen, and what do they suggest to do about it. My philosophy, personally, is that any cat wholesome enough to fight back cannot possibly have anything very seriously wrong with them. If they insist on holding her down to execute the terms of the exam, it may well kill her. Would the vet kindly evaluate Scout from the far side of the room and proclaim her general soundness? No, they can probably dispense with the full-scale organ palpation but they must at very least TAKE HER TEMPERATURE. And they are not equipped with an ear thermometer, so it would have to involve sticking a glass rod up her ass.

I remember what happened before. I stood there in silent, furious disbelief as the vet who had just told me I should keep Scout's stress levels to a minimum, knowingly sent my cat into cardiac arrest. I said nothing. I just let him do it. I cannot do that again. I can't stand and watch. And listen. And god knows that it would precipitate a whole string of events just like last year's. I just. Can't.

My options are as stands: I pay for them to sedate her somehow and carry out the exam. (That sounds simple but they still haven't come up with an answer for me. First of all they seem to be under the impression that they can sedate her if it proves necessary. If she's already freaked out it's too late; they'd have to give me some pills to pop down her throat in advance, or gas her. Gas costs the earth. Furthermore, I could tell as I was discussing this with the technician that the need for gas is rapidly encroaching on the tenuous ground where the measures we have to take just to EXAMINE Scout indicate that she is, in the vet's mind, unfit for air travel.) Or I find Scout a new home in Massachusetts and leave without her. Or, since it is as unlikely that anyone will adopt a broken cat as it is that they would buy a broken bicycle (unless they want her for parts?), I have her euthanized.

And I feel like the world's most insensitive pet-owner for always bringing up that last option, but every time we go through this rigamarole I feel like I'm pouring money and affection down a well to feed the magical fish that lives at the bottom. I love her enormously, but Scout is broken. Broken enough that strangers can't handle her without causing serious failures in her life-systems. Broken enough that I thought she was going to die last time she got shots, broken enough that I had to sign a Do Not Resuscitate Order before they would spay her. She isn't a miracle cat, she isn't ever going to heal, and I've lived with that knowledge for most of the time I've had her. Nevermind paying for traumatic vet visits, how much more of myself can I (do I want to) invest in her? Could I even live with the decision to put her down? I don't know.

When Matisse got so sick back in June Dad kept taking her back to the vet for more work, even though it seemed apparent to the rest of us that she wasn't going to bounce back, and she had accepted her fate when she decided to stop eating. And this seems unrelated, maybe, but Grandma crashed last week and the family are all highly resentful of the EMTs that resuscitated her against her wishes; Grandma is bedridden now, doesn't know who she is or what is going on anymore, and in the natural order of things should have died last week. It was a waiting game with Teazer; it's turned into a waiting game with Grandma. But they were/are old, and Scout's not even two. Most of the time she's fine. But she can't do normal cat-things like get shots. And I acknowledge that I've been letting her play outside for the last two weeks or so, and even though she's having the time of her life it puts a visible and audible strain on her cardiovascular system. How long do I really think that can last?

What I want to know is, am I doing the same thing as Dad? I've brought her back from the dead once. If Scout starts coughing and her gums start turning white like last time I won't hesitate, I won't put her through that again, but am I knowingly allowing that to happen by taking her back to the vet? Is it more or less ethical to sidestep the seemingly inevitable panic attack, to spare her that since they won't let me bend the rules? Does doing what I think is right have to involve graphic certainty that Scout had reached the end of her road? How much of a waiting game am I willing to play on my very dear but irretrievably damaged girl? How do you know it's the right time to let them go?

Happy Birthday, Harry!

2009-07-31T15:49:00.002-04:00

"Amelia, what on earth is that?"

Why, Internet, I am so glad you asked!

In honor of Harry Potter's birthday I was originally going to make cupcakes. While cleaning up the employee shelf of ingredients last week, though, I found a bottle of Lyle's Golden Syrup. Suddenly I decided that I should make a treacle tart instead! It's supposedly Harry Potter's favorite.

I have no idea if treacle tart usually has lemon in it, but I'm glad this recipe did, because the filling would otherwise have been even blander than it was (in this sense it is quintessentially English; I am convinced that the quest for more interesting food prompted the expansion of the British Empire). My guinea pigs seemed to enjoy it.

Half-Life

2009-07-10T20:52:00.003-04:00

Mom and Dad were in town over Fourth of July weekend, and when they left they took with them the majority of my material encumbrances. All of my books, nonessential cooking implements, articles of special magical significance, and pretty much anything made of wool, fleece, or flannel will be moved to Fairbanks in their household goods courtesy the US Army, which is to say free of charge for me. Everything remaining will either be sold, abandoned, or carried in a suitcase. Scout finds our newly stripped-down living space mildly puzzling; she has more room to run around, but fewer things to knock over (and indeed, fewer surfaces to push them from).

Furthermore, Mom transferred a few thousand frequent flier miles to my shiny new Alaska Airlines account, which means my ticket north, set for the 31st of August, cost a whole five dollars. I still need to make arrangements for Scout to travel with me, and lord knows that every move entails dozens of little unforeseen expenses, but the rent for August has already been paid in the form of our housing deposit, so all in all this is shaping up to be a very low-cost move.

I'm really getting excited about Alaska. The closer that Mom and Dad get to their departure date, the more real my own becomes. I'll be heading down to Staten Island to help them pack out next week, and to eat a last round of those incomparable New York bialys. Mom's told me stories of those aspects of Alaskan living that particularly struck her fancy, but I have to admit that much more than the seafood bars, the arts and crafts centers, or the absence of state taxes, I am achingly looking forward to the open space. I don't even remember the last time my shoes hiked across anything but concrete. The funny thing about living in a lot of different places as you are growing up is the multiple standards you wind up idealizing. Intellectually the Cambridge area reminds me of Europe, and that efficient and wholly civilized realm is certainly where my mind daily chooses to dwell; but there is something about the western United States and its vast expanses of open space that...I initially wrote "calls to me" but that's wrong, it doesn't do anything of the sort. It is completely indifferent to my existence. Pursuing that kind of indifferent, inhospitable space seems to me a kind of self-erasure, not unlike what I suppose many people look to experience by vacationing at the seaside. (Bloody Transcendentalists, you have corrupted us all.) In the two years since leaving Reed I feel like I've been very busy. Bustling, efficient, setting daily tasks and fulfilling daily obligations, which I admit are satisfying in their way. But it was all with the underlying understanding that I was biding my time until I could head to grad school, and when Edinburgh didn't work out I found myself suddenly and alarmingly staring into the void. What am I doing this for? What is it that I want? I think some reevaluation is in order, and I hope that Alaska will be a good place for it.

Of course, I haven't breathed a word about the impending move to anybody at the chocolate factory, and this has created a rift in my brain that widens daily. (Tomorrow's going to be really bad, since I bought my plane ticket this afternoon.) We got our oven back! Yes, just last week we had a veritable Christmas in July, what with getting our oven license granted and receiving a full delivery of pastry ingredients in the same day. Going to work has been so much more fun this week. I've got a new pastry, the Brown Butter Rhubarb Tart, and plans are in the works to bring little jam-filled shortbread cookies into the lineup. Very exciting! But remember that our oven was out of commission for more than two months; I had a lot of time on my hands to find other creative outlets. Awhile back I drew a chalkboard sign advertising frappes, and it caught the attention of the owner's wife. She invited me to do some drawings for the main store in Walpole, and I countered her invitation with a request for some better drawing materials. A shiny new set of chalk markers were duly delivered, and I accordingly stepped up my game. Last week one of the managers and I took a trip to HQ, where I spent seven hours redrawing their menu chalkboards (and had mussels for lunch!). They were very pleased with my work, and the managers here in Cambridge took the opportunity to petition for some chalkboard menus of our own (we have these hanging scroll things that are covered in typos, discontinued products, and price adjustments). Here I am, a veritable goldmine of untapped talent, and for only ten dollars an hour! What a shame they didn't realize this a little earlier, say when I carved these lovely pumpkins (on my own time) back in October. But don't get me wrong, I would love to make some new menus for our store, and I know full well that the project will be cancelled and I will incur a lot of ill-feeling if I blurt out my plans to cut and run. So I just keep drawing. Quietly.

And thinking about going north.

The Scary-Go-Round grinds to a halt

2009-07-10T19:23:00.003-04:00

John Allison, one of the pioneers of the webcomics universe, has decided to retire his seven-year-old project, Scary-Go-Round, this September. I will miss it terribly! He's promised that the broadcast will continue uninterrupted--he has new and shiny stories to tell--but this means that Christmas will probably be too late for any of you to buy me the printed version of his witty tales of Tackleford.

Here it is now!

(And as long as we're at it...

I missed out on Octopus Pie because of the dreadful long line at MoCCA...only to find out that the cartoonist moved to PDX a couple of weeks ago! If we buy Meredith's books now, maybe we can convince her to reprint the first volume!)

All Present and Accounted For

2009-07-02T19:31:00.004-04:00

Guys, it has been a really good week.

Scout went to the vet on Tuesday to be spayed, and she is doing just fine. Better than fine, I've never seen a cat bounce back so quickly or so fully as she has done. Instead of delivering anesthetic with an injection, they simply put her entire carrier into a tank and knocked her out with gas. It worked beautifully, for all Scout knows she went for a ride in her kennel, waited in a room full of strange smells for a few minutes, and came home again. (Although the shaved belly puzzles her mightily.) They patched her incision with skin glue, rather than sutures, so she won't even have to go back to have the stitches out. I've had her sequestered in my room for a few days so that she doesn't reopen the wound by running up and down the stairs, but she is just fine. I can't even say how enormously relieved I am.

I made the appointment early in June, and particularly the week leading up to surgery was dismal; I wrote one blog entry after another in an attempt to redirect some of that energy--by turns nervous and fatalistic--and I deleted them all. It seemed unlucky even to mention it in a public forum. Every time we've gone to the vet in the past I glibly sauntered in the door of the clinic expecting a routine visit, and then left sobbing, convinced that my cat would die within the hour. So this time I felt that there was no use fooling myself, nothing was going to be fine, I just had to steel myself for the fact that Scout was going to die and it was going to be my fault for demanding an unnecessary operation.

Tuesday morning I took her in at the appointed time and (rather shakily) signed all of the waivers, and the tech said quite seriously that they would call me if anything happened, so that I wouldn't have to wait in suspense for the rest of the day. I went home and worked on my bike for a couple of hours, and about 10:30am the phone rang. I simply froze, and listened to it ring again, because Scout was dead and I didn't want to hear it. The mental remonstrance--a voice curiously like Paul's--very quickly scorned my cowardice and demanded that I act like an adult and answer the damn phone.

"......hello?"

"Hello, this is Melissa at Union Square Veterinary Clinic calling for Amelia Lohrenz?"

".....speaking?"

"Hi Amelia, I just wanted to call and say that Scout is awake and doing just fine..."

The rest was kind of drowned out by the fireworks going off in my head.

Of course the whole operation, given all the adjustments to the usual protocol, plus the cost of the usual protocol, set me back $400. But Scout's only got one set of ovaries and what else am I going to spend that money on, shoes, golf clubs? There was a part of me that was academically horrified by the bill, but on the other hand I can't remember the last time I put my earnings towards something I wanted so badly. I took her home and in her drug-induced state of affection she cuddled up to my arm while I was reading and purred. Scout has a pretty awesome purr. I think I mentioned that a year ago, in a very different sort of entry.

Wisdom: -2

2009-06-20T15:32:00.005-04:00

On Wednesday I got two of my wisdom teeth removed. I wish I had something to show for it, but I don't, but it isn't for lack of trying. They wouldn't let me keep the teeth, some sort of malarkey about a biohazard, whatever. And then my plot to take some really gruesome photos of my stitches and bleeding gums ran aground on the fact that the new holes in my head are on the upper storey of my mouth. Juggling a headlamp, a small mirror, and a camera proved too much of a struggle--especially when simultaneously trying not to breathe and fog up the mirror--so the world has been spared visual evidence of my toothlessness. But I assure you it's ugly! Monstrous!

The hardest part of this whole experience isn't the extraction, or the aftermath, or even paying the bill--it's the RULES! They gave me a dreadful long list of Thou Shalt Nots before I stumbled out the door, and given my powerful aversion to forking over more money to the medical men, I have done my very best to abide by them. Seems like anybody who doesn't have a horror story about their extractions has a horror story about a dry socket. No straws, no smoking, no spitting, no sneezes if you can help it; rinsing gently at least six times a day with mouthwash or salt water; no vigorous exercise; no very hot or very cold food or beverages; and nothing crunchy, chewy, crisp, stringy, sticky, gummy, or requiring any more mastication than the pressing of your tongue to the roof of your mouth.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this last is much easier to follow when you are hopped up on generous doses of Vicodin and spending a few days after surgery vegetating on the couch. But I went back to work the morning after, and apart from a bruised feeling that you'd expect from getting a [removable] bone neatly torn from your face, it's been a pain-free three days, and business as usual. This means I'm hungry! Soup, scrambled eggs, oatmeal and yogurt are neither satisfying nor interesting. I'd give darn near anything for a nice chewy ciabatta and an apple. And some HOT coffee.

But I reiterate that as of this writing the extraction sites are still as ugly as hell and do not bear the smallest resemblance to healed gum tissue, and it's a good thing that I know I don't know anything about dentistry or I'd think they were both terribly infected. Possibly I am looking at the blood clot that my list of rules is so keen to preserve. But you might say I'm a little jumpy about it. They don't hurt, but they leave a strange taste in my mouth, and last night I woke up several times thinking my mouth was bleeding profusely, only to find I was merely drooling all over my pillow.

I bought a few cans of V8. And my skin won't thank me for it later, but cooled hot chocolate is always at hand. Another few days on a mostly liquid diet won't kill me, but I never realized how much store I set by food with TEXTURE.

The actual visit to the oral surgeon took half an hour at most, and was vastly less traumatic than everyone ominously foretold. An hour before my appointment I took one of these fancy little anxiety-inhibitor pills, Lorazepam, and by the time I arrived at the office I had only the vaguest memory of walking there, I might have floated in the door on pink clouds. They sat me down in a lean-back chair, hooked me into one of those blue bib-things, and took my blood pressure and pulse while I cheerfully signed waiver after waiver with increasingly freestyle initials. After a few minutes the surgeon arrived, examined my teeth briefly, and enquired about my general state of being. The assistant told him my pulse, which for some reason was tremendously funny to everyone in the room. They dabbed something on each tooth (an adhesive?), gave me three shots of anesthetic in each side of my mouth, I think, and then everyone sat back on their heels and studied me closely for a moment. I might have been humming at that point, and looked at everyone inquiringly.

"Do you feel alright?"

"Yep!"

"You don't feel like you're going to pass out?"

"Nope!" They probably could have sawn my nose off without my giving it a second thought.

A minute elapsed and the surgeon said alright, let's get this finished, and one assistant kind of cradled my head from behind, another held a mirror and suction tube, and the dentist warned me that I would feel a lot of pushing, but I shouldn't feel any kind of pain. I daresay I was quite comfortable, apart from having a lot of metal instruments in my mouth. There was a crunching kind of noise and there went my tooth! Ha ha! The left one (which hadn't erupted as far) left a root behind, which they had to fish out (another twenty seconds, perhaps), and the right one came away perfectly cleanly. Ha! The dentist hardly had time to stitch up the holes in my gums and stick some gauze in my mouth before he was off to his next appointment, and I sat up demanding to see my teeth, where are my teeth, can I take them home, my teeth!

The assistant parked me in a quiet room and asked me if someone had come with me. I said no, but my brother was coming to fetch me. Her response was phrased in such a way as to make me giggle inwardly, because clearly they had no notion that Si would be walking me back home again. But that was my little secret! I kept wandering to the door in order to peek in the waiting room--how else would anyone know if Si was there?--and was summarily ushered back to my seat, burbling something about "tall" and "blond hair" through a mouthful of gauze. The assistant came and went a couple of times to change out the gauze in my mouth, and to deliver the dreadful sheet of rules for me to sign, and then one of the secretaries popped her head in. For whatever strange reason, perhaps she was well accustomed to conversing with the medicated, she put one forefinger across her upper lip and said, "Your brother, does he have a mustache?"

"Yosh!" I replied jubilantly, imitating her gesture. "A boshtashe!"

Matisse

2009-06-18T20:20:00.010-04:00

One of the first lesson sets in my ninth-grade art class focused on Henri Matisse, the French artist who pioneered Fauvism around the turn of the twentiety century. I had a hell of a time imitating or even appreciating his cut-paper style--it was one of Mr Krauchi's many failed attempts to improve my sense of composition--but when Mom came home with a brightly-colored, energetic kitten that October, it didn't take long for me to dub our beautiful new "wild beast" Matisse.

And it seems that she was well named, because Matisse found her way into most of my artistic endeavors. Black and white photography suited her striking markings well; black and white drawings even more so. As Dad never tires of remembering, she once walked across an oil painting that I had foolishly set out to dry on the floor, and left a trail of paw-prints that were a hundred times prettier than the painting itself. The bulk of my AP Studio portfolio, put together during a hectic and sleepless three-day drawing marathon, concentrated on my ever-present model; and even my senior thesis was not complete without the inclusion of my feline alter-ego.

She had kittens once--three very different babies that we dubbed Chaos, Phaeton, and Cezanne--before we got her spayed. After the kittens found new homes (in their various fashions) we spent a while looking for a companion for Matisse, and eventually we wound up with Morgan, a runty black kitten with huge yellow eyes. Morgan never quite outgrew her kittenish ways, but turned into a massive cat and positively adored Matisse, who would have none of it. They were a bit like the Odd Couple of the feline world; Matisse never lost a chance to grouse that Morgan was breathing loudly or crowding her peripheral vision, but every so often you'd find them sleeping within the same ten feet of one another.

In 2002, my family and I returned from a weekend trip to Heidelberg and found Matisse lying in the grass in front of the house. We never found out what had happened, or how long she had been lying there--she may have been kicked, attacked by a dog, hit by a car, who knows--but her hip was broken, and she had dragged herself home. We fully expected to have to put her down--any American vet wouldn't have thought twice, given the extent of the damage and the unlikelihood that Matisse would ever walk again--but the German vet carefully put our girl back together, and returned her to us. I don't think any of us expected that she would recover as completely as she did; until quite recently, she rarely evidenced signs of stiffness or pain, or favored one leg over the other. We liked to joke about her titianium hip, her lead bottom. She was our Miracle Cat!

I think we all knew, however, that the kind of trauma she had survived had likely shortened her life. For perhaps a year now, one of the cats had been peeing in the bath tub instead of the litterbox, an anomaly that Mom and Dad hadn't been able to puzzle out. A few months ago Mom mentioned that Matisse was getting very skinny, a sure sign that something was amiss because Matisse was a cat who clamored loudly for her treats every morning, and would sell her soul for a lick of cream cheese. A few weeks ago she couldn't hold her food down any longer, and when Mom and Dad took her to the vet he reported that Matisse's kidneys were failing. When Kim and I visited New York last weekend Matisse was a scarecrow of the spoiled cat-princess I was used to seeing. She seemed pleased to see me and happy to be petted and coddled, but all of the fight had gone out of her. It seemed to me that in the quietly definitive way of cats, she'd made her decision. So it came as no surprise last night when Mom called and said they'd gotten home to find Matisse curled up to sleep in a quiet corner.

We'll miss you, Teazer.
1999-2009

Yukon Ho!

2009-06-12T17:05:00.005-04:00

Well well well. Kim has been set along her merry way home, where she might spend the next three days scraping the mold off her person. Since I decided that it would be too confusing to back-track and post about her visit before I post about all the other developments of the past three weeks, here is a sweeping account of current events.

Silas graduated. Congratulations, Si!

I now have a driver's permit for Massachusetts. This makes the fourth or fifth permit I've acquired over the years, and I just walked in and took the test cold turkey. I've totally got the theory down, I just haven't ever learned to manipulate an automobile in real time. But this time it's really going to happen! I am determined! This girl is getting her license before she is a quarter century old, that's a promise.

Speaking of licenses, the hearing for the chocolate factory's oven license took place on Tuesday, with inconclusive results. The second hearing is scheduled for the 23rd of June, and I sincerely hope that the morning of the 24th will find our kitchen back in full operation. I'm tired of walking the croissants to the restaurant up the street every morning at ridiculous o'clock, and the mice and I long ago exchanged all that could be said between us. Now there's nothing but awkward silences.

I visited the oral surgeon a while back, and this next Wednesday he is going to remove my top two wisdom teeth. People here are very preoccupied with insurance; he seriously didn't want to have to charge me for general anesthetic and the full surgery costs of removing impacted third molars, and suggested that I wait to deal with the unerupted teeth until 1) they start to bother me, or 2) I have dental insurance that will cover it. As it is, he has agreed to do an extraction of the top two. I even got a prescription for anti-anxiety medication to take prior to surgery. The pharmacist that it will make me very C A L M. Fun stuff. Maybe the dentist will let me keep my ivories, and I can make a necklace! Or earrings!

I'm fighting an ongoing battle with the local vets about getting Scout spayed. The poor cat is in heat almost all the time, and spends the five days to two weeks between estrus cycles in a state of such deliberate maliciousness that it's like living with a schizophrenic. And she seems to spend a lot more time lurking suspiciously in doorways. Sooner or later she's going to figure out that Luther is waiting for her! Right outside! And there is no way in hell that Scout's little body will be able to support a pregnancy. So at this point, as I have made clear to anyone who will listen, we're just going to have to gamble on getting her spayed. If she dies, well...a year ago they told me she was doomed, and I honestly didn't expect to take her home after our little adventure last October, so at least it won't come as a surprise. So far all the vets I've talked to have been dragging their feet, either referring me to another clinic or refusing flat-out to perform the surgery. The funny thing is that if I asked them to euthanize her, given her medical history, they wouldn't ask twice. But ask them to do a common parlor trick with full knowledge that it may end in disaster, and suddenly nobody wants the job. I am reluctant to take Scout to one of those low-cost, walk-in spay clinics that will ask no questions, because if she dies on the operating table they might wind up with all sorts of legal problems, and they offer such an important service to the animal community that I don't want to jeopardize it. But it may yet come to that.

And if you've been paying attention, you might have noticed a certain wrapping-up-loose-ends trend underlying my summer activities. Since it is all official now, I am able to announce that Mom has accepted a posting in Fairbanks, Alaska. They pack out the third week of July, and she reports for work August 1.

I have always wanted to live in Alaska, and I will never have another opportunity to move there with so little expense or inconvenience as under the present circumstances. The lease on this house is up at the end of the summer, and I have no reason to stay. As much as I still enjoy my job, it isn't all-engrossing, and I'm getting mildly frustrated earning only ten dollars an hour in a city that gobbles my paycheck with its eyes closed. So I'm moving! My books are already culled (again) and packed, and after the fourth of July they, along with the heavier belongings that I can't bear to part with, will quietly insinuate themselves into Mom and Dad's household goods. The rest will be sold, abandoned, mailed, or packed into suitcases. Scout and I will get a plane ticket and crash on Mom and Dad's floor until we can find a cabin of our own. I have a good feeling about this move.

Adult Finance

2009-05-29T18:36:00.006-04:00

Kim is coming to Boston! Yes, Miss Self is rolling into town next week and I am immediately spiriting her away to New York, because I have a driving desire to attend the MoCCA Festival and bask in the glory of comic and cartoon arts and their creators.

So Tuesday night I was purchasing bus tickets and event tickets in a foresightful, grown-up kind of way. MoCCA has passes available for purchase through PayPal, and I clicked through the ordering process without paying a lot of attention to the print on the screen until I got to the "your order has been processed" notification and noticed that my PayPal account is still linked to my US Bank account. US Bank, despite its very misleading name, does not have branches all over the country; the nearest one to me is in Cincinnati. I dislike being unable to go up to a desk and talk to a human being when I am having a problem with my money. So I opened a local account when I moved here, and I've been steadily emptying the US Bank account by using it to pay my bills. Last month I finally used up the balance with a student loan payment. It is empty.

But it is still active. And that $20 purchase would bring all sorts of overdraft hell onto my head.

Shiii-eeeet.

Immediately--I mean literally within seconds of the purchase--I sent an email to the PayPal customer service desk begging them to cancel the order. It was eight thirty in the evening here on the east coast--for most of the United States, bank operating hours were over until the following day, surely I could nip this mistake in the bud. Realizing that the email probably wouldn't be read for the same reason, however, I called the PayPal helpline. After holding for eight minutes and repeating my problem in various phrasings to the polite Indian man on the other end, I was informed that the purchase had already been processed by PayPal, and my best bet would be to call my bank.

I was not hopeful but I accordingly did so, and after holding for six minutes, I passed all the security checks and asked if I could cancel an eCheck--one can cancel a real check, right? Unfortunately the withdrawal had not yet gotten as far as the bank, and until it had done so she could not cancel it. Yes, I said, but once it had reached the bank it would result in an overdraft. I need to initiate a preemptive strike! The woman on the phone didn't offer any hope of putting a hold or a flag on my account, or even freezing it. Why don't I make a deposit before the withdrawal had a chance to be processed, so that there would be funds available for withdrawal? Well ma'am, I live in Boston and the nearest branch of your bank IS IN CINCINNATI, could she accept a payment over the phone? She could not. My only other option was to send a deposit via conventional mail, and that would manifestly take longer than an eCheck traveling at light speed. I emphasized that the time-lapse, over which I had no control, would incur overdraft fees for every day that my deposit tarried in the postal system. The woman said that no, I was given a grace of four days before the overdraft fees began at $8/day. And that was the best that I could do.

Unconvinced, and furious that the computer system managing my entirely fictional "worth" could not be bypassed to stop a payment, my last act of the evening was to email MoCCA directly and ask them to cancel the PayPal transaction. I slept very badly that night but woke to find an email from MoCCA, who had accordingly cancelled the order. For a few hours I was hopeful that this action would curb the rest of the process. Around noon another email arrived, this time from PayPal customer service, in response to the frantic email I had sent the night previously. They acknowledged my problem and apologized for the confusion, but offered no solution. However, they saw in the transaction history that the seller had cancelled the order at my request, and warned me that the withdrawal from my bank account would proceed as usual; the money would simply wind up in my PayPal balance.

Swearing fluently at the idiocy of The System and moreover at my own foolishness for NOT PAYING ATTENTION in the first place, I rummaged through the rubbermaid container that serves as my filing cabinet and found the last two remaining deposit slips for my US Bank account, then wrote a check to myself for $30, which I figured would cover the cost of the withdrawal, and cover the possibility that it might arrive a day after my grace period ended. (But surely no more than that.) I mailed it that afternoon--Wednesday.

This morning the withdrawal finally reached the bank, and I was officially overdrawn for the amount of $20. Then this afternoon I was charged at $19 overdraft fee. What what? I called the bank again--by now I am so sick of listening to hold music, especially when it is "Dancing Queen" for god's sake--to find out what this was all about, since I had been informed that I had four days to spare. The woman on the phone said that yes, the four days was my grace from the daily fee--but the $19 was the fee for having overdrawn in the first place. Which means I was now $40 in the hole, and my sad little check was zooming its way to Cincinnati $10 short. I explained the problem of geography, and asked again if there was any way I could pay over the phone, with a credit card, anything. She transferred me to one of her superiors. This new woman was at least able to grasp the fairly impossible situation at hand--the payment I had already sent would probably not arrive until Monday, it wasn't enough to cover the overdraft plus the fee, never mind the rapidly increasing cost of a simple mistake. I have plenty of money, I just don't have any way of GETTING IT TO THEM. She examined my account information for a minute and then observed that I had been pre-approved for a US Bank credit card. If I enrolled now, I could use it as overdraft protection, the card paying off the original amount and thereby preventing the fees from mounting into next week. I cringed inwardly but agreed, so now I am signed up for a credit card I don't want, to pay off a transaction that I didn't intend to make, and I STILL DO NOT HAVE TICKETS.

And then I remembered suddenly that in the hassle of numbers and addresses on Wednesday, I had forgotten to endorse that $30 check to myself.

Reality check: as frustrating (and daily more expensive) as this is becoming, there isn't that much money at stake. I didn't overdraw with a rent check or the purchase of a computer.

Lesson: bank locally. Like, ideally keeping your money in a coffee can buried in the back yard.

Edit: Dad has bought tickets for us. So I'm still sorting out my mess but we have tickets!

Longer Days

2009-05-08T17:00:00.007-04:00

It's been three weeks since we reluctantly shut down the oven at the chocolate factory, and we are only just beginning to recover. The company has a lot of irons in the fire at the moment, what with the recall of California pistachios, the ongoing lawsuit from the retailer next door to us, and the upcoming hearing concerning our cooking license--not to mention keeping up with seasonal matters like Easter, Mother's Day, and the imminent Student Exodus (and concomitant graduation ceremonies). So I'm not surprised that they've responded slowly to our pleas for a solution, a replacement, anything to compensate for the croissants and tarts that I'm not allowed to make anymore. But the false starts, and moreover the endless miscommunications, have been...frustrating.

A little over a week ago we underhandedly got the strawberry roulade back. This is a pastry that we usually introduce in late June (when strawberries supposedly come into season in New England), but desperate times call for--honesty. We buy our strawberries from the fruit vendor, who gets them from Florida just like everyone else. The pastry kitchen in Walpole obligingly sent me sheets of vanilla-citrus sponge cake and a bottle of elderflower syrup (is this a German flavor? WHY YES I THINK SO), Gian gave Draw and me a ten-minute demonstration, and lo! It is an instant success. The whining about absent the raspberry tarts has nearly dried up.

The roulade resembles a strawberry shortcake, but sexier. I like it because it is essentially very simple (three ingredients: cake, strawberries, flavored whipped cream), but involves a few invisible magic tricks (sheet gelatin to keep the cream from weeping, the elusive elderflower flavor) and requires a certain amount of deft handling. (Ever tried to roll a cake? How about slicing a rolled cake? And then decorating those slices. That's right.)

Then last weekend Gian sauntered into the kitchen at 7:20 and said that I needed to head over to the Charles Hotel in ten minutes to pick up breakfast pastries from the hotel's restaurant. Bam. The owner had gone over all of our heads and made some misguided arrangements for the oven-less interim. Accordingly we received a sheet each of croissants, pain du chocolate, and assorted danish, and the entire café staff spent the day apologizing to customers who bluntly informed us (with unexpected perspicacity) that our croissants weren't as good as before. Which was unquestionably true.

By afternoon the rest of the plan unfolded. We were to recommence production of our own croissants by walking them over to the hotel every morning and borrowing the Charles' ovens to bake off our product. I tried to express my disapproval of this brainwave as diplomatically as I could. Any arrangement is better than nothing, but the hotel is inconveniently several streets from our café, and the idea of elbowing the hotel kitchen staff aside (while they are trying to get breakfast ready for their own customers) and demanding the use of their ovens during the busiest part of the day made me want to get on the phone and ask if everyone at chocolate headquarters had taken leave of their senses.

Fortunately, the plan never progressed that far. We continued receiving baked pastries from the hotel for a few days, and then I received word that we'd made an arrangement with a restaurant a block and a half up the street. It isn't flash ideal by anyone's standard. I got yelled at by their pastry chef on the first day, because I hadn't disappeared into a puff of smoke by 8am when her shift started, leaving only a lingering warmth in the oven. She actually pulled the tray of madeleines out of the oven when they were only half cooked, and I had to (illegally) finish baking them back at the café. If only someone had TOLD me that she would need the oven back at 8 on the dot, I can't say I EXPECTED it given that the restaurant doesn't open until 11:30. At any rate, consequently my workday now begins at 6:30am to give me some extra lead time. I have to say that lugging four very heavy trays of croissants down the street when I have not yet had any coffee is not my notion of the beginning to a beautiful baking day. But they're offering us their kitchen for free, and even supplied me with a key to the side door. And ~~the customers~~ the staff have croissants to eat with their chocolate again so everybody is happy.

I am really looking forward to getting that goddam license.

Fortune-telling

2009-05-04T15:09:00.004-04:00

I was chatting with Paul on IM and left abruptly to eat lunch and talk to Si, so Paul's sugar-coated diatribe went on far longer than it should have. But he likes to hear himself talk.

Paul Burdick: I think you should be a Baker!
Paul Burdick: With a bookstore next door
Paul Burdick: And two cats.
Paul Burdick: And you should marry a fellow named Mulligan
Paul Burdick: Mulligan will, naturally, be artistic and build things out of metal and wood
Paul Burdick: Secretly, he is a wealthy man, but you would not let that stop you
Paul Burdick: Tragedy comes when you realize he has no knowledge of theatre as he sees Silas' first performance and as he gets up from his seat at the end of the performance mumbles to you, "I don't get it..."
Paul Burdick: As it was a production of My Fair Lady with Silas in the principal role, you are a bit miffed.
Paul Burdick: Your father adores Mulligan as they can lose fingers together on idle Saturdays
Paul Burdick: By this time, of course, your mother has finally gotten around to bringing about World Peace and you are tickled pink when I hack the teleprompter so that the President actually calls your mom the Mothership during his speech

Wolf Teeth

2009-04-29T15:35:00.004-04:00

Since I won't be going to grad school this fall, I figure I should direct some of my carefully hoarded dimes towards domestic matters. I'd really love to pay off one of my loans, but I'm not quite in a financial position to do that just yet. And here we have a more pressing (ha ha!) matter: wisdom teeth! I went to the dentist last week and to my complete delight and astonishment I have no cavities. I haven't been to the dentist in six years, and in that time I've worked at Ben and Jerry's, Starbucks, Two Fat Cats, and Burdick's; not to mention going to college, which is probably just as bad for one's teeth as sugar. So I was pretty pleased. The dentist was a very nice woman who charged me the student fee for an exam and some x-rays to see what the situation is with my troublesome wolf teeth. I am showcasing them here not because I think anyone is particularly interested (except my parents), but because I REALLY LIKE X-RAYS.

The upper right tooth in this photo is the reason that I went to the dentist; although it erupted straight, it is out of alignment with the rest of my teeth and bites into the side of my cheek. It's gotta go. Fortunately, since it is fully erupted it can be removed through a simple extraction (rather than surgically).

The bottom right tooth is blessedly dormant. I can practically hear it humming peaceably to itself as it twiddles its thumbs in my jawbone.

The upper left tooth is about 80% erupted, and the problem is that although it emerged straight out of the gum, it stopped erupting. Because it sits so low, it is difficult to brush and tends to trap food particles, presenting an ideal situation for what the dentist referred to as "extreme gingivitis"--aka infection. Once she found that I have no dental insurance, she assured me that because it wasn't presenting any immediate threat, I could probably ignore it for several years. Sweet of her, but I'd rather sidestep that issue entirely and have it removed. This is the same one that was bothering me last August, and again around Thanksgiving.

The bottom left tooth is obviously an accident waiting to happen.