Spirit of Bees

Happy New Year

Somewhere in between the Christmas ironing…

And the Christmas garbage…

Christmas happened. And it was good.

Things do have a way of working themselves out. Somehow we procrastinators are always able to pull it together on time. We actually are pretty much ready for Christmas. Here’s the evidence.

An added bonus is that the Christmas cactus is blooming beautifully. No thanks to anything I did. Benign neglect rules!

Tomorrow more cleaning and some cooking and then we are really ready!

The Papaya, my 18 month old granddaughter, is sick with a cold and cough, and I agreed to be default caretaker when she can’t go to daycare if possible. So here I am, and this a little excerpt about how my day is going, or more accurately how Maia’s day is going so far.

“Hi Gegah!”

“Boppy seeping?”

“Peek-a boo Boppy!”

“Doggie ou’side?”

(Me: Yes.)

“Doggie ou’side!”

“Mimi?” (Asking about the cat.)

“Mimi!” (She sees the cat)

Gegah house!

Boppy house!

“Gegah shair.” (chair)

“Boppy shair.”

“Maia shair.”

“Rocky?” (Her chair is a rocking chair.)

“Keeness?” Asking for a kleenex.

“Dirty!”Passing keeness to Gegah.

“Paci?”

“Yump!”

(Me: “What?”)

“Yump!” (Making a little motion like trying to jump up.)

“Me: Oh, Jump!”

“Yeah!”, smiling, happy that I have understood, and trying to jump again.

“Mimi yump!” as she catches the cat jumping of the desk.

“Boppy yump?” Boppy accommodates.

“Gegah yump?” (Afraid not. Knees don’t allow for it.)

Meantime we stroll around the house looking for things to amuse her, me getting my coffee, taking time out to do the hokey-pokey which she thinks is great fun, despite my off key singing.

We turn on the Christmas music and it’s Alvin and the chipmunks and she is fascinated and laughing she points to the radio and says, “Baby, baby sin’in!” In fact it does kind of sound like babies singing.

We go back to playing.

“Ball!”

“Two Ball” (There are in fact, two.)

“Poker ships.”

“Mimi ‘tick.” (Cat toy on a stick. which she then uses to try to entice the cat, but instead ends up just poking the cat who retreats.)

“Boppy, awa.” Which means Boppy’s agua (Spanish for water) bottle. She learned to use agua for water in a previous daycare, and now this is always what she calls water. She likes to play with Boppy’s water bottle so she can take the cap off and put it on again.

(Me: “Time to take a nap, Maia. “)

“No!”

But Gegah is serious and puts her to bed. Not without a lot of protest. I hear her saying “Wa ma Gegah!” “Wa ma Gegah!”. But I am firm. Sorry little Papaya, but you really do need a nap because you are sick. In two minutes, not a peep.

Now Gegah is going to make cookies.

My dining room walls are filled with pictures of all sorts of relatives.

Space being a limiting factor, I have to put some thought into who goes up on the wall. The oldest photos of documented relatives, looking pretty stern and scary, are my father’s Great-Greats, Hiram Dietz and Mary Jane Reynolds Dietz.

Of course, there are my parents, my brothers and me, pictures of my grandmothers, a special aunt, all along with the cute baby pictures of my children and grandchildren.

All the people I love or have loved the most are represented on the wall.

I like that these people preside over every meal, surrounding us with a sense of family history.

I change some of the photos around occasionally, choosing different pictures to remind us of recent or long past events, birthdays, family reunions, vacations, and the like. Some are comical or even slightly absurd. Every photo triggers another memory which needs to be shared.

For a very long time I also had a tray with loose photos on my coffee table. When my eldest grand- daughter was two or three she’d come to visit and the first thing she would head for was that tray of photos to look at pictures of herself and the family . She would go through every one identifying those she knew and and asking me about the others she didn’t know. It was a great game we both enjoyed.

I’ve often wondered about my G-G-G grandparents Mary Jane and Hiram, and I wish I knew more about them. It’s interesting to look at them and speculate about what their life might have been like in New England in the early 1800’s. Their names, birth dates, birth places, marriage dates and their 8 childrens’ names are listed in the family Bible; and I have been able to put together some vague information through internet genealogy searches, but there is little else.

I wonder about other relatives whose only legacy left behind is a photograph, which may or may not have a name attached. A picture is not always worth a thousand words. The old images stare out, people squashed flat and colorless, hiding dimension and nuance, never revealing their full stories.To leave behind only photographs is not enough. Words are needed to tell the full story.

When I am long gone, and when my G-G-G grandchildren look at their own wall, or tray of pictures I’d like to try to leave them another legacy–a little bit of my history to go along with them. That is one reason why I started my online journal 7 years ago. With a little luck, these little bits of my story may survive, so my future generations may have a much better picture of the strange looking old lady whose photo is on the wall.

Most days we try to eat in at the studio at lunch and at home for dinner if we possibly can. But things were getting out of control. We were working long hours and we had fallen into a the default pattern of eating out in restaurants, not only for lunch, but also for dinner, many times–more times than we could really afford, actually. This was really sucking away the hard earned dough.

So we had to get real, and make the serious effort to cook at home again. Besides, we needed to eat out of the freezer in order to consume the homemade broth, leftover soup, chili, spaghetti sauce and the mountains of chicken breasts, stacks of hamburger patties and excesses of Amy’s sausages all of which seem to multiply if left alone in the dark for too long. Also, we had to make room for the new tenants…all the holiday leftovers soon to arrive.

By supplementing the overstock with a few trips to the grocery store to pick up a few basics and some veggies and fruits, we managed to eat every meal at home for over two weeks, no problem. Besides saving money, a welcome unexpected and added bonus was that I lost 6 pounds in 8 days by doing nothing different at all other than just eating at home. I know that there can be a lot of extra fat in restaurant food, and we all know that portions are larger, but I never expected it to make that much of a difference.

It’s always a challenge to look in the freezer and search the cupboards for interesting ingredients to throw into soup or add to stew or use for making creative side dishes. One of the soups I made using miscellaneous ingredients from my kitchen turned out pretty well, so I wanted to write it down so I don’t forget it.

This concoction was prompted by two of Trader Joe’s boxed soups, Carrot Ginger and Squash Apple, which had been languishing in my cupboard because, let’s face it, while they sound yummy, they really are not all that great, as is. I thought I’d see if I could fix them up.

I came up with what I call my Vitamin A Soup, or, Squash, Carrot, Pumpkin and Pear Soup

This isn’t going to be a recipe with exact measurements, but it’s more of a description of what I did by using up a lot of leftover bits of stuff. With soups, it pretty much doesn’t matter how much stuff you put in as long as it satisfies your taste buds. At least that’s how I approach it.

I sauted a diced, large sweet onion in a little olive oil along with a couple cloves of garlic and a diced shallot. A chopped leek would have probably been better than the shallot.

When the onion was transparent, I added the boxed soups and brought them to a simmer. I had two previously cooked sweet potatoes which I squashed up and threw in. I added 5 or 6 carrots which I had peeled chopped and cooked in the microwave until they were soft. I threw in a small can of pumpkin, not the seasoned kind.

I always stir and taste and check for consistency, etc. as I go along. This soup was getting a little thick and it was a little bitter from the canned pumpkin, so it was time for serious work.

To thin it out, I added about two cups of homemade chicken stock.

To season it, I added cumin, curry powder, a little tumeric, a tiny bit of cinnamon, a little ground up rosemary, a little powdered ginger. Given the choice, I would always use fresh ginger or spices, of course.

It still needed sweetening up, and I would have used applesauce, but I didn’t have any on hand. I remembered that I had 5 Bosc pears in the fridge about to go over to the dark side. So I peeled and chopped them and poached them in the microwave. I used the hand held blender to puree them and threw them in the soup. It was just what the soup needed to add some sweetness, and the undertones of pear were very nice.

I let it simmer for about an hour so the flavors could mingle.

I corrected the seasonings and decided that it could use a touch of heat to perk it up, so I threw in a dash of cayenne.

Then I used the immersion blender to puree it. Before I served it I added a little half and half. You could use milk, or you could do nothing, depends on your taste. We topped it with toasted pumpkin seeds.

It was yummy. Only problem is, I now have three new containers of soup in my freezer.

Memories of snow got me thinking about the first time I ever saw snow.

I was born in Denton, Texas during WWII. My father, an army officer from upstate NY, and my mother, from central Louisiana, met on the army base where he was assigned and where she worked. They were transferred from Louisiana to Denton, and then to Brownsville, TX. From there, he went on to serve in Europe until the end of the war. My mother then moved back to Louisiana to stay with her family for the duration, where we lived until I was almost three.

Needless to say, there was not a snowflake to be found in my life during those early years.

When my Dad returned, he was discharged from the army, and they decided to move to a small town in upstate NY where he opened his own private practice.

When winter came, snow it did.

I woke up one morning and looked out the window and when I saw snow, I was amazed, and immediately turned to my mother and exclaimed, “Mama! mama! Look! There’s grits all over the ground!”

Yes, Papaya, there can be too much of a good thing.

Ummmm…finger-smacking good!

Ugh…too much!

Driving down the expressway, I found some art on the back door of a truck in front of me.

It’s been a month filled with moment after moment of little problems just about every single week.

It took two tries to get the thermocoupler installed in the heater so we could finally get heat at the studio. Hoped to get back to business as usual. But the down time meant that we got behind of course.

Then, although we got the new DSL installed at home, we have yet to get the router working correctly. On top of that, something happened while I was downloading pics from the camera to screw up my old Netscape program, making it impossible for me to access my email at home or use the Netscape browser. Computers at home won’t run OSX, so that left me struggling with the horror of an old Microsoft Explorer browser, which doesn’t seem to enable Blogger at all. How do you people who use it tolerate it? And. in addition, I could only access my email via the web server.

So,I lost incentive to do things internet,and just concentrated on taking care of my granddaughter, who successfully wrapped me around her little finger, thus requiring more attention than usual. Ah well, life is short, might as well enjoy her and love her every minute I get a chance, right?

Meantime, I decided it was time to bite the bullet and buy new computers for work so we could bring home the ones we have there to replace our old iMacs and hopefully get up to speed and a be little more current. I’m hoping that will make things more efficient everywhere. So I dug into the savings and popped for “refreshed” new iMacs.

Finally, things being back in order, more or less. I was ready to go. Then my knee locked up on Sunday night. So I had to stay at home in bed all day Monday waiting and hoping that it would unlock by Tuesday. After more than 24 hours it finally did. So I ran in to work and tried to catch up there before the next two days of Maia.(I have to make hundreds of earrings again.)Got some done, but I have a lot more to go. So today, Friday, I am finally back and hope to catch up.

The computers are supposed to arrive today, or so they say. Hooray!!!! Well, that’s good and bad, because I will want to get my new toy up and running right away, thus neglecting the real work. Maybe not though, since I know I have to replace my savings as fast as possible.

I just wanted to drop in an entry here so that my two regular readers will not give up hope entirely. Hah!