In Which We Ignore Armchair Psychology and Go For the Frosting

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall……does this horse make my butt look small…?

Our relative sizes fuels my denial, so I can continue to use frosting for comfort. Who wouldn’t look small next to that engine? I’m not sure if I am sabotaging my desire to fatten up, or sabotaging my desire to slim down: I’m hitting the gym, as well as the frosting.

Now, we will bore you with a simile or an allegory. I can’t remember which is which:

A number of years ago, Shaun wandered out into our verdant backyard with a glass of iced tea, where she found me kneeling  next to a flower border, trowel in hand, smeared with dirt, and laughing like a lunatic.

For most people, this would be a signal it’s time to hear their mother calling. But Shaun is braver than most people.

“Do I want to know why you’re laughing?”, she says, sipping her tea.

“Yup”, I say, trying to contain giggles, absolutely convinced I’m SO FUNNY.

Shaun makes a rolling motion with her hand: continue.

“I just planted Ajuga next to Lambs Ears, in front of the Japanese anemones!!”  I double over in a new fit of laughter.

Shaun considers this.  ”And this is funny, because…?”

Frosting, The Force Field T-Shirt, and Why Jane Has So Few Pictures of her Friends

I confess.  I go to a party, take a few pictures of humans, and a hundred pictures of anything with butter cream.  It kind of makes you wonder who I consider my real friends.

Daisy didn’t know it, but for my birthday last October, she gave me an article of clothing that possesses Super Hero powers.  It wards off cake attacks of all kinds.  I have no idea why this is true.  But if an overflow of butter cream threatens the world order, I don my I Heart Cupcakes t-shirt, and I’m transformed into someone who isn’t remotely tempted to eat the frosting to death.  It makes me super human: I can throw frosting away.  Like in the trash. Shocking.

I use it sparingly. What will I do if it wears out?

I had it on all day today.  Worked.  There was an attempted mugging by a donut AND a slice of lemon cake: both were unable to penetrate the t-shirt force field.

Something very mysterious is at work here.  I know the t-shirt came from a bakery. What kind of bakery makes an anti-sugar force field?  It’s a front.  I think the government is experimenting on us again.  Maybe it’s a Bakery version of Area 51.

Or a beta version battle-field body armor, should we ever decide to invade France’s bakery arrondissement?

~

In other news, TLH now has an Archive page.  You can go read posts alllll the way back to 2008, if you are brave enough to dig into the rusting Unicode of history.

 

It is Possible to Blog Wrong. Who Knew? Oh. You Did?

I signed up for the postaday2011 challenge.

I’ve received lots of informative, fun, and inspiring emails from WordPress, both general blogging tips, and specific topic prompts.  The suggested prompts don’t always work for TLH. But I’ve discovered a hidden talent for creative rearrangement of the prompts.

I don’t think the prompt “photograph a truth” was intended to generate a PSA to tell readers we have rocks in the sky at night.

I’m seriously stubborn.  There will be a post every day unless aliens arrive and demand we fork over all cake on the planet, I end up fighting to save the planet from a global cake crisis, crash my car, chase them with my dry cleaning, and come home to find out the fridge has been blown up.  (Not daunted: should above scenario occur, we’ll just have two posts the next day.)

In my attempt to write about something besides butter cream frosting, I have dutifully read all the blogging tips on how to create, keep up, and do…bloggy stuff.

I thought I liked learning things, until I learned this:

I am blogging wrong.

• My posts are too long, you won’t read them.
• My topics too variable. (Writing about frosting AND horses is non-sensical.)
• My tags are too specific and goofy.  (Understanding the difference between tags and categories sent me to the funny farm for a weekend.  I’m still not sure I understand.  But I got a nice basket out of it.)
• My categories would drive a librarian to tears.
• Stream of consciousness blogging is…yawn…what was I saying?  Oh. Yeah. Bad.
• My blog lacks a single focus (unless we count shared horse-snot, bonding experiences as the focus?)

We Visit The God of Cake, Discover Hyperbole and a Half, and Jane Feels Better About Her Childhood Induced Sugar Traumas

In the nobel cause of providing humor to fight the common cold, we’re cross posting again today, going to the hilarious blog, Hyperbole and a Half, to read about:

The God of Cake

My mom baked the most fantastic cake for my grandfather’s 73rd birthday party. The cake was slathered in impossibly thick frosting and topped with an assortment of delightful creatures which my mom crafted out of mini-marshmallows and toothpicks.  To a four-year-old child, it was a thing of wonder – half toy, half cake and all glorious possibility.

But my mom knew that it was extremely important to keep the cake away from me because she knew that if I was allowed even a tiny amount of sugar, not only would I become intensely hyperactive, but the entire scope of my existence would funnel down to the singular goal of obtaining and ingesting more sugar.  My need for sugar would become so massive, that it would collapse in upon itself and create a vacuum into which even more sugar would be drawn until all the world had been stripped of sweetness.

Finish reading here, so you can laugh and laugh and laugh

Cake: especially for you Aarene!

Going Blank

It’s usually a bad thing.  I go blank when someone is yelling at me. Not a thought in my head.  Zippo. My brain is on some tropical beach, sipping an umbrella drink, leaving me in the lurch.

If my 83-year-old mother is chastising me, I can’t defend my decision to not become a concert pianist, dental assistant, or  hair stylist.  Her goals for me.  Good goals, but not even remotely me.  I stand there with a completely blank mind, and can’t think of one solidly useful thing with which to defend myself.  This is sad, given I’ve had 40 years to come up with something good.

“I’m incredible with frosting”, I say, defiantly.

This is my mom. Frosting doesn’t qualify.  Frosting is not  useful.

A moment of silence please, for the frosting-impaired.

Happy Birthday to…Uh-Oh

Skunk Karma: Part Three

I try to stick with my friends, even when they do what seems ridiculous. I figure it’s a deposit in the Friendship Bank, since I’ll have my share of ridiculous.

A friend decided to go into psychotherapy. This was good-ish.  Therapy was a great idea. We all have our weaknesses, glitches, and places we’d like to deep-six, never to be seen by others.  In my completely non-judgmental and supportive opinion, Louise would benefit enormously by growing up.

(Remember the stuff we might want to deep six? That’s mine, right there.)

I try to look supportive. I am dismayed as she describes her pending Regression Therapy. I’m thinking therapists should get to choose our therapy…an extreme concept, but perhaps a slightly more useful one?  I know I’m blind as a bat to my own glaring flaws.

Exiting the womb was enough for me the first time around.  The idea of stuffing myself back in as an adult (sorry mom) so I could come out again, only in a nicer, more incense and chanting, Goddess-y sort of way, was not appealing.  But hey, I’m being a judgmental jerk, so I may as well own that, and own, while I’m at it, that I don’t know everything.

(I knew you’d be shocked by that one.)

I hoped my Not-Onboard-ness didn’t show. I’d heard about this form of therapy, and knew parts of it were a group process.  I prayed she would not ask me to be there for the labor and birth.  I was SO going to be busy that day.

Sooner or later I would have to cave and show up.  I needed to pick a therapeutic event I could tolerate without unconscious eye-rolling. I did not want to risk devastating her delicate, reborn psyche.

The phone rings. “I’m eight now!”, Louise says in an excited, happy voice, sounding just like an 8-year-old. “That’s wonderful!”, I say, with genuine sincerity.  I can do eight.  I repeat internally: do not judge, do not judge. She’s happy. What is my problem?

“I’m sorry, what?” I say, to cover up the fact that I (the higher evolved being) am totally self-absorbed.

“I’m having a birthday party!  I’ll be ten by next Saturday!  Will you come?”, she asks.

I can do a couple of hours of ten.  Hey.  Cake!

“Of course!”, I say.  ”I don’t have anything on Saturday.”

“Oh good.  I was starting to worry you thought this was stupid”, Louise says, hitting my nail of shame on the head.

“It’s a camping party!  Saturday, Lake Park, 9 a.m. Go-home time is Sunday at 4 o’clock.  Bring presents, lots of presents!  You know, age-specific ones.”

A two-day, overnight birthday party?  I need damage control.

“I’ll be there”, I say, forgetting to ask the number of the campsite.   “Is Saturday afternoon okay, or is that too late?”

“Oh it’s fine”, she squeals. “This is going to be the best birthday EV-er.”

A trained professional should definitely choose our therapy.  I think a lot of problems could be avoided.  Like gift shopping.  And making paper mache placenta.

The Outside of a Horse…

…is good for the inside of a man.  Yadda yadda. Whatever.

Murphy’s hidden corollary:

The Outside of a Horse is Bad for the Outside of a Woman in La-La Land

I caught a shod rear hoof full-on, luckily on the large muscle mass on the outside of my thigh. It was a full force kick: if it had hit a bone I would have a broken leg.

Here’s something I never thought I’d say: THANK YOU thighs, for having saddle bags I can’t get rid of, no matter how hard I work out.  I ate a piece of cake in to support them in their protective efforts!

Normal barn feeding was late, the boys were cranky and restless. I walked right into the middle of the scuffle, in an enclosure, to get a bucket.  I KNOW better than this.  I saw all the signs, and didn’t put them together (getting over migraine).  Lesson learned: a horse can go without grain when you are unable to think clearly, for whatever reason.

These are two good hearted, well-trained, safe horses.  No one can believe it.

On the flip side, it’s yet another eating accident.  Which seems to be my accident of choice.  How ridiculous is that?  Alice came running with a frozen dinner, having grabbed the first thing out of her freezer.  My first thought?  Ooooooo…Chinese stir fry! Yum.

Sigh.  My relationship with food is hopeless.  My second thought was “thank you!”

Greta was riding, I yelled for help, she galloped up the road, Paul Revere style, to catch Lily, who was leaving. Lily checked my leg (she’s a doc), looked up, and said, “You are so lucky” and “It’s going to hurt really really bad, when your adrenaline drops.”

I learned this from Lily a long time ago: no matter what doctors say about ice on, ice off, pack the dang thing in ice for 24 hours, minimum.  I did 48 hours, with only a few minutes between.  It saved me.  Hematoma the size and shape of a half a basketball sticking out of my thigh Sunday night.  Today: totally flat, spreading out nicely, preeeeeetty colors.

Naturally I had to send Daisy 3 separate photographs, so she could see it from all angles. Please feel free to console her.  I’m disappointed I didn’t think to get Shaun to photograph it when it was still in a perfect horseshoe shape.

My trainer sent me a 1941 reminder video on horsemanship:

Fat Jeans, Elderly Personal Trainers, and Why Tiny Likes You

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A week after breaking my rib, I was struggling to get into my fat jeans.  Apparently broken bone = Eat Anything Remotely Edible.  Preferably sugared fat in heavy carbohydrate form.   Even with minimal exposure to SFinHCF, I managed to find stuff to inhale.  I did what any self-respecting woman would do.  I lied to myself and said, “Oh I’ll be fine.”

You know you’re a really bad liar when your own lie stands up and taps you on the shoulder.  I sat down with a calculator to come up with a projection that proved I would be fine: recovery period x amount of weight gained per week (so far).

Um.  At the end of my 6 week recovery period, if I cut down to what I was currently eating, I would only be 60 lbs heavier.

The Girl Scout Motto: Part 1

Be Prepared.

I was a Girl Scout.   We earned badges in different subjects, to be well-rounded in our preparedness.

For those of you outside the US, the Girl Scouts is a kind of girls adventure club where you learn useful stuff  like how to make footstools out of tomato juice cans.

We were prepared for any extreme footstool emergency.

The Cold War was on.  If the Russians pushed the big red button first, you could count on US Girl Scouts to rush into a massive civilian relief effort to replace all the annihilated footstools.

For those of you who are instantly up in arms at my mildly sarcastic tone, please realize I’m speaking only from my personal experience as a G.S. in the 1960′s.  I had to learn the proper way to cut a sandwich, so the bread didn’t condense at the point of impact.  For the benefit of (cough cough) my future husband.

The Girl Scouts have come a long way into modernization, and I seriously doubt there is still an award for making a good white sauce.   Or that you can earn points for vacuuming the Scout Leader’s home.  I think you have to know CPR now.  Much more useful for nuclear emergencies.

That motto though, it sticks with you.

A case in point:

Bella, Daisy and I got all dressed up and went out to dinner to celebrate our birthdays, which are reasonably close together.  Makeup, dresses, glitz and glamour.  (We love not recognizing each other.)  There were beautifully wrapped gifts topped with that lovely chiffon wire ribbon.  Mine was knotted, with a bow over it.  I couldn’t get the dang ribbon off to save my life.  There was a pause, then we all simultaneously start rummaging in our elegant handbags.

Why?

For our knives, of course.

The Confession

There’s nothing more disheartening than torturing yourself on an elliptical machine for 30 minutes (read: wheezing, gasping for air, purple faced and burning)  than getting the read out afterward:   280 CALORIES BURNED.  What?! I’m dripping with sweat, can’t feel my legs (let alone get off the machine), and I only burned off the equivalent of a donut?  In one way, it’s like having cash in the hand.  You are less likely to spend calories when you know what the HazMat removal process is, exactly.

It was easy to pass up the donuts in the bakery section when I went to buy bagels.  I wouldn’t let myself even look near the cake.  My body had total control: enough is enough, it said, no way are we going to gain MORE weight and have to do more of THAT miserable !@#$%^.

Then something odd happened.