Last year I offered to bake, and ended up bringing brownies, fudge, and two or three kinds of cookies. This year, once we received our invitations, I offered to do it again, and was taken up with great enthusiasm. There’s a theme, sort of: Germanic and/ or monster-inspired foods. So I’ve spent the last week or two baking, with no sign of slowing down.

I also bought a freezer. I’ve wanted one for quite awhile, but it took some doing to figure out where we could put it. And since I knew I’d be baking like this, I saw no reason to delay the acquisition. We’ve certainly got a use for it, but its getting its first usage on my goody-making spree. It currently contains several loaves of rye bread, a large challah, 4 dozen brownies, 6 pounds of fudge, 3 pounds of penuche (brown sugar-butterscotch fudge), 4 dozen almond butter cookies, and 7 dozen oatmeal peanut butter cookies. Dough for mohn (poppy seed) wafers is chilling in the fridge. (Yes, I came up with another recipe.) I’ve kind of lost track of how much butter I’ve gone through, but I know I’ve completely used up 1 1/2 bags of sugar, 5 pounds of chocolate and 10 pounds of flour. And I’m not done yet. I’m making an apple-honey cake and a poppy seed sour cream cake. My son has plans to turn them into monster-cakes, with marzipan tentacles coming up at the base and twining round the cake, and I don’t know what all else. Those will get done tomorrow and Tuesday, so that we have time to freeze and then decorate them.

So that’s what I’ve been busy with. And I’m having a fabulous time!

If you want me to fill that bowl, get your furry face out of it.

prrip?

Yes, Cloud, I am talking to you. Kitty food will not go through a kitty head. The bone is solid, even if there is nothing but fluff inside it.

prrrreow?

Yes, of course I still love you. You’re my sweet cuddly calico babygirl. But the fact remains that you have, if anything, more fluff on the inside of your little head than on the outside of it.

Never mind. Enjoy your breakfast.

Love,

The Self Propelled Food Dispenser.

“I don’t know” I told him. “We’ll….” and he finished for me “walk that plank when we come to it.”

And then he asked why I was laughing so hard. Arrrh, matey’s I can’t imagine. Couldn’t be that he’s funny, could it?

“Watcha doin’, Mommy?

“Now what, Mom?”

/end announcement

I’ve been trying for the past several hours to think of something appropriate to say about her, something of what she taught simply by the way she lived her life, but there is too much there. That there is light, even in the deepest darkness. The greatness of spirit that an ordinary person is capable of, when the need arises. That heroism isn’t only in the grand gestures, but in the quiet, day in and day out actions of anyone who tries to do what is right even when it could cost them everything. She insisted that she was not a heroine, because, she said, she did not want children to think that it required someone special to do what was right. “Who is a hero?” she asked. “I was not. I was just an ordinary housewife and secretary.”

She was indeed a housewife and secretary, and a mother. But it was in her very “ordinariness”, in being the sort of person everyone knows, that she was most extraordinary.

In what you did, in what you said, in a girl’s writings carefully preserved, in the stories you told and by the example you set, you changed the world, Miep Gies. And in so doing, you blessed us all.

I had much ado not to giggle at the latest one, though. “Fork-lift! Idiot computer!…..”

The cold does have one very practical benefit, though. I can use my car as an auxiliary freezer. It doesn’t matter if that gallon of stock is still boiling hot; I’m not going to strain a compressor or thaw something else by virtue of proximity. It might raise the temperature inside a car a degree or two temporarily, but when the current outside ambient is significantly below freezing, that’s sort of irrelevant.

So that’s what I’ve done. I have a gallon of stock from the bones of the turkey we had at my in-laws, cheerfully chilling in the back of my minivan where there’s a nice flat surface. In the meantime, I don’t have to stay up until it’s cooled down enough to refrigerate. I’ll bring it in tomorrow, scrape off the frozen fat, and put the rest in the refrigerator. Over the next little while, it will become soup, or stew, or whatever else my imagination can come up with. I still have a quart of turkey meat picked off the bones before I dumped them in water, which is rejoicing in the freezer. I’d say that’s pretty good, overall.

What it made me think of, though, was of an adventure in muzzle-loading weaponry that ended…differently.

A friend of ours who lived in our apartment complex was an aficionado of most types of historic weaponry. Swords, muzzle-loading firearms, long bows, you name it, he thought it was cool and wanted to get his hands on it. So at some point, he acquired a muzzle-loading pistol. When he first told us about it, he was intending to take it out to a firing range and try it out.

Patience was not his distinguishing characteristic. He couldn’t wait. Disassembling, assembling, cleaning and oiling was only satisfactory for so long. He knew he couldn’t shoot it in the city, but he thought he’d just try loading it.

The problem was that he really hadn’t thought it through. Unlike a modern weaporn, a muzzle-loader can’t be unloaded without special equipment once its been loaded. So he loaded it without a problem, to then find himself with a dilemma. He couldn’t transport the thing safely while loaded because flintlocks don’t have a safety as we know it. He couldn’t unload it, and he couldn’t fire it in the city. What to do, what to do?

Finally he concluded that the only safe thing to do was discharge it in a way that would not allow the ball to travel any distance, feasible because musket balls do not fire with the same force and modern rifle bullets. So he put the muzzle up against the sidewall at the foot of a king-sized mattress and fired.

He and his wife continued to use that mattress – with the hole with slightly charred edges at the foot – until it wore out. She was fairly philosophical about the damage to the mattress. The thing that really annoyed her, though, was that he didn’t take off the sheets before he committed mattresscide.