Tales from the Shark Tank

Next Saturday a few of us are hosting a bridal shower for a very close friend. The event and 90% of the guests (including the bride) are in Indianapolis, so I took charge of the baking. That can easily be done at a distance, and even more importantly, it’s what I’m really, really good at. So, having finally managed to clear sufficient space in the freezer, I got started on the preparations yesterday.

I’ve made brownies. That sounds very simple, and it is, except that I made mini-cupcake-sized individual bites out of them. I’ve made a batch of flourless peanut butter cookies. (At least one of the guests is gluten-intolerant.) I went and acquired the necessary ingredients for the rest of the baking – a lemon yeast bread that is amazing with cream cheese and toffee bars with almond meal instead of flour as the binder in the crust, and the best extra-dark chocolate I could find for the top. That will leave me only the cake to make, and I still haven’t decided what it should be. I can make either my grandmother’s Sunshine Cake (a citrus sponge cake) or a chocolate angel food cake.

Hmm. Decisions, decisions. I have to make this one by Thursday.

J. “Am I going to be ring-bearer for (friend’s) wedding?

W. “I tend to doubt it. Not everyone has a ring-bearer, and even if they do, (bride) probably won’t want a ring-bearer who’s taller than she is.”

Friday morning, bright and much too early, I betook myself over to Chicago to take care of my Indiana professional continuing education requirement.  I expected the weather to be cold and spit rain, and it was pretty obliging through the day.  Then, on the “I’m half way there” theory, I headed west to have dinner with my friend K. before heading home.

Oh. my. $Deity.  What should have been a drive of an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half took me four.  I’d no trouble personally, but it was evident that the same could not be said of many other drivers.  The reason?  Not did it turn into a cold thunderstorm, but sometime after that development it began sleeting.  By that point I was far closer to my destination than to home, so I went on, with intent to dine and head home after the weather settled down.

Only it didn’t.  Around 7:00, I spoke to my beloved husband.  Doing much the same over where we lived, he told me.  We agreed that I should proceed to K’s home instead of trying to return to ours, and stay the night.  That was fairly easy, too; I’d packed an overnight bag on a hunch, complete with all my assorted medications.  Some control asthma, some migraine – don’t want to do without those, really.  So on I went, finally arriving at K’s.  She’s the sort of friend to whom when I say “I need to crash, the weather’s too wild for driving home” says “Great – I just got a couple of DVDs in from the UK; we can watch them together!”  So we did that, and talked, and each worked on our respective needlework/ sewing projects, and sat by the fire as it finished burning down, and generally enjoyed ourselves quite thoroughly.

Unfortunately, the journey home was as fraught as the drive out had been.  My car’s been misbehaving intermittently for about three weeks now.  I took it into two different mechanics (one in Indy, one here), and neither could find a problem.  But today it made the nature of the problem abundantly clear, as the transmission suddenly began to slip and surge worse than a storm tide.  On the interstate.  In Chicago, where if you signal to get over, they hurry to pass you.  I finally forced my way not only over to the right, but off an exit and into a mall parking lot, and there the car remains.  I called my husband, who immediately left to rescue me, then K., because I know she has family in the area and I’m betting they will know good mechanics.  Then I tracked mall security and told them the car was out there, with description, and got assurances it wouldn’t be towed until I could find a repair facility and deal with getting it in on Monday.  That’s gonna be its own kind of interesting, as Sears wouldn’t let me leave the key with them so I could get it towed once I knew where it was going.  I’m not surprised they couldn’t do that, but it sure would have made life easier!  What it means is that I’m going to have to find my way back to the northwest side of Chicago on Monday somehow.  Like Paul McCartney, I suspect I’ll get by with a little help from my friends.

So it was a wonderful evening and a most frustrating day, but it really could have been much worse.  I got off safely.  It wasn’t 10:30 at night, which is not an unreasonable hour to be driving home but likewise when most things are closed and when our boy is asleep and rescue correspondingly complicated.  The car’s not going anywhere further without the aid of a tow truck, but it did get into a parking lot and even into a parking space.  It’s a very logical space, too, outside Sears Auto Center.  And I am home, safe and in one piece, no matter how much later it is than I ever intended.  The adventure will continue on Monday, but I can live with that.

I haven’t disappeared off the face of the earth here.  I’m in Indianapolis this whole week, as helping my parents out with a day here and a day there was becoming frustrating for the things that had to be re-done each time before more could be accomplished.

And of course, now I’m away from home, my laptop has developed a serious problem with it’s AC adaptor port…like it doesn’t speak to the rest of the computer, which means it can’t recharge its battery or anything else.  It’s under warranty, but I can’t do anything about it until I get home.  So I’m on a borrowed computer for tonight, telling the reading public not to worry if there is an extended silence here.

And the conversation with the tech from tech support, I think, rather says it all.  She asked what I would do without a computer to work on.  “Go back to old technology.  Pen, paper, and my brain” I told her.  There was a pause, then “You must be older than you sound.”  Probably so, dear, probably so.

The Sophia-cat has herself contorted into a position even a human with a slinky-like spine would have difficulty attaining in the middle of the living room.  She’s taking advantage of a brief respite from her offspring’s continual nursing.  The kittens are growing so quickly that I can see a perceptible difference in their size between morning and evening on the same day.

And like all young mammals, they grow in their sleep.  The end result is that they sleep pretty much all the time.  I can see where this would be a survival characteristic; sleeping kittens are silent kittens, and they are certainly defenseless at this stage.  Their eyes are closed, their claws soft and their teeth as yet absent.  They are tiny balls of digesting, growing fluff.

I’m taking advantage of that to get them accustomed to my scent.  Sophia won’t let the big noisy kitten touch them, but if I reach a hand down to stroke, she just purrs.  Of course it probably doesn’t hurt that I pet her first, nor that the kittens make no protest when I touch them or put a finger where they can sniff and lick at it.  I do these things while the boychick is at school, so that he doesn’t see mom permitted liberties that Sophia denies him.

She should be bringing them out pretty soon; if I don’t miss my guess their eyes should open next week sometime, and at that point they’ll start to stagger about and explore a bit.  But meanwhile, they’re doing their newborn kitten thing.  When they aren’t eating, they sleep – and they grow.

I have it on good authority that matzo balls can be divided into two classes: floaters and sinkers.  I have had plenty of the latter, but I must say that I prefer that my soup adornments not outweigh me.  So in the interest of assisting others to attain matzo ball nirvana, I present my mother’s recipe for them.

Mama’s Matzo Balls

1 cup water

1/3 cup fat (she uses schmaltz, I use olive oil)

1 tsp boullion of your choice

1 cup matzo meal

3 eggs, beaten

Boil water, fat and boullion together.  Remove from heat.  Beat in matzo meal until thoroughly incorporated.  Beat in eggs, stirring until the dough is smooth.  Cover and refrigerate at least an hour.

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil; reduce to simmering.  Drop in heaping spoonsful of the dough, just the way you would dip and plop drop cookies.  Cover the pot and simmer without peeking for 15 minutes.  Remove carefully with a slotted spoon.  These are very tender and fragile and yes, they do indeed float.

The weather forecast for today was glorious. Clear, high in the mid 70′s, with clouds blowing in and wind picking up later in the day, but nothing to keep one inside. A perfect gardening day, and I would use it so.

Or not.

I went out a bought a rake last week, since ours had died and been disposed of last fall. The head was supposed to be attached to the handle with a screw. Unfortunately, the operative phrase here is “supposed to be”. So I snagged a good bunch of old stems and leaves out of the bed in front of the house…and left the rake head behind in it, as I drew the rake handle firmly toward myself. I tried again with identical results, then examined the implement and figured out what happened. Ok, I gathered up rake and receipt and headed for the hardware store. And since I was going anyway, I figured I’d return a garden cart and hanging lamp I’d gotten from another store not too far away. The lamp looked horrible once put in place, and a friend had offered me his garden cart, which he no longer needs.

I got to the first establishment, where the staff was very helpful indeed. Seems that those rakes were shipped without screws, so they just fished a screw off their shelves and drove it in for me. I walked out with my rake fully functional and headed for the car.

Which reached the end of the parking lot and suddenly began to rattle like a movie medicine man’s incantations. I thought the garden cart had tipped over and begun to rattle, but then halfway across the road – a state highway no less – the whole car began to shake. I drove it perhaps another 50 feet, just far enough to get it into the parking lot of the gas station across the road.

So I got out of the car and looked at the offending corner, and there sure enough was a large, soft rubber ring, no longer discernably attached to anything. Not only was that tire flat, it was off its rim entirely. So I did what any self respecting middle aged Jewish princess does. I called my husband. He said he would come, and so he did. Meanwhile, I decided to try and at least get things ready for him.

I am here to tell you that while minivans are wonderful things and do indeed come with a full-sized spare tire, their tire-changing equipment was designed by Rube Goldberg for use by Arnold S. The spare is up under the van, to be released by unscrewing a nut accessible at the back…if you have three hands. You need one to hold the carpet folded back, one to hold the lug-wrench on the nut, and one to turn the wrench. But wait, there’s more! First you have to get to the wrench and jack. Those are fastened to the frame at the front, up under the hood, with a large round thing that requires an avatar of Hercules to unscrew. Unfortunately I am not an avatar of anyone mythically strong, and could not unfasten the jack and wrench. That meant I couldn’t get the spare off the bottom of the car or anything else. I finally gave it up as a bad bet, settled myself in a comfortable spot with a book, and waited.

In due course my husband arrived, and after a fair amount of wrestling with the equipment (and no doubt mental cursing), he got the wrench and jack detached, and unscrewed the spare until it dropped to the ground under the back bumper. Then we found that instead of a solid platform to hold the car up, the jack had a hole that fit over a nut on the frame. Right. John Q. Ordinary is supposed to locate a nut on the underside of a van by feel, fit a jack over it, and hold it in place while cranking up the jack. My husband did it somehow, with me holding the blasted jack in place by standing on the base (big feet are occasionally useful)

The tire ultimately got changed, and as the flat was being put in the back of the van I caught sight of the steel spike it had picked up. Yup, that would indeed flatten a tire promptly. So I drove the few blocks to the mechanic, deposited the problem in their lap, and went back to a decent restaurant a block away to have lunch. I have to give the waitress all kinds of credit. She treated me like visiting royalty, and there I was dressed for gardening in worn out jeans and a paint spattered t-shirt. I was impressed. (I also tipped accordingly.)

By the time all was said and done, it was too late to work in the garden, go to the gym or return the lamp and cart before the arrival of the school bus and the consequent eruptive advent of small-boyishness. So I let the cat in and cuddled her for awhile, and just relaxed. Perhaps I can work on the garden tomorrow.

I had not realized the extent to which even a (mostly) outdoor cat would become Queen of the House, but she has trained me to a routine. Every evening at about 8:30, she presents herself at one of the sliding glass doors and mews for admission. Should we fail to heed her summons, she goes to the other door, and should that fail she will begin to climb the screen so that she can address us at our eye level. You know those posters of the cat with all four legs spread out, clinging to a screen door? That’s Sophia, except that she bends around so that her head is around the edge of the door so she can stare us in the eye. It does make it difficult to ignore her, which I daresay is her purpose. Actually her ultimate purpose and greatest ambition is to become a housecat, but I digress.

Once inside, she heads directly for the recliner from which I usually use my computer and jumps up. She doesn’t jump on any of the other furniture, mind you. That’s my cue to shut the bedroom doors so that she can’t vanish into the dark and hide (and nothing hides in shadows better than a dark grey cat), gather up my fleece shawl so she can’t claw me through my pants inadvertently, pick her up and sit down with her. She promptly stands on my left leg while I pick my computer back up and put it to the right. Then she rubs her face affectionately against the computer for a minute or so before settling down to share the lap with it. I know what she’s doing is scent marking, but it looks for all the world like she’s greeting the creature who shares Mom’s evening affections. It’s hilarious.

We’ll sit here awhile – usually an hour or so – until I have to go do something or she decides it’s time for a stroll outside. That’s a matter of dignity; often what makes her decide it’s time for a stroll is that she relaxed so thoroughly that she fell off my lap. Since she can’t admit it was an error, she has to go for a walk.

So right now, Queen Sophia is ensconced in her usual place, snoring peacefully with a belly full of kittens draped comfortably on my leg. And I hope cat-hair doesn’t mess up a laptop.

I was talking to my girlfriend, telling her about the difficulty in finding Passover supplies in this neck of the woods, and worrying because the holiday starts Wednesday.  It does…next Wednesday, April 12.  Oh, well.  At least that gives me the weekend to track down what I need and clean the house.

If there is someone who makes your world a better place just because they exist and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the internet, then post this same sentence in your blog.