Alecto's Ophelia

2010 - Coming Home

The last 90 minutes of 2009 frizzled out while I was sleeping. When my contacts are fogged enough I'm stabbing myself with a needle every third stitch it's time to go to bed. I left the girls in front of the television, gathered up my animals, peeled the contacts off my eyeballs (and I do hope I'm going to find them in solution) and went to bed. I wish I'd brushed my teeth. Sometime in the night a small tribe of Pygmies set up camp and decided to have a rain dance on my tongue. It was dry, dry, dry in there. This morning I staggered to the bathroom,spit them unceremoniously into the sink and proceeded to beat the hell out of my mouth until I looked into the mirror and noticed I was just South of rabid. That's usually a good indicator.

The alarm on the iPod went off at 7:30 like it does every weekday morning. I was dreaming it was something else until I woke up enough to turn it off and then climb back into bed warning the dog that it was technically still the middle of the night. Somewhere. I haven't bothered to turn that alarm off because it makes a good 15 minute warning before Little Girl needs to head out to the bus stop (which is the end of the driveway) and on weekends it doesn't go off at all although Simon will generally put his great slobbery face right up against mine (or the back of my head if I'm lucky) and breathe heavily while moaning pathetically about the fact that he's not going to be able to keep his legs crossed forever. Simon has no trouble getting my attention in the morning. He is 79 inches long snout to tail tip, 31 inches at the whithers and his head is massive. Someday I'll figure out how to weigh it. Maybe I can slide the flat digital kitchen scale under his head while he's sleeping. Remind me to try that. The drop from the top of my mattress to the floor is 36 inches and while that's five inches above his whithers we must consider the length between whithers and snout. Unless I'm sleeping in the middle of the bed there's really no escape and if I don't want St. Bernard slobber ON my sheets I need to respond fairly quickly even if it means telling him to lay the hell back down and go to sleep. If his need is not immanent he will. He's a good boy. 

Little Girl let him out this morning. I was out cold. I have no recollection of the door opening and closing again after my baby boy lumbered across the threshold, made an abrupt 90 degree right turn and galloped down the hall coming to his usual skidding stop at the top of the stairs. When he's got his bearings he tip toes down the six carpeted stairs and stands patiently at the front door followed shortly by the manic Rat Terrier. The only time the Rat Terrier is not manic is when he's overslept and slinks up the stairs from the lower level hoping I won't notice but knowing perfectly well he's been caught sleeping on the couch again. Sometimes he hides until I'm back upstairs. He's sly and has great bladder control.

I nuked a cup of yesterday's coffee and here I sit thinking about what to write while my fingers typed out three paragraphs (which I just read) while I wasn't looking. I was thinking about resolutions.

I have no resolutions. I don't do resolutions. The only time I made a resolution was in the first few minutes of the last year of the twentieth century and that was more of an invocation to the fertility gods (it worked too, I delivered Little Girl on December 11, 2000).

I have nothing to invoke this year except maybe patience, perseverance and the strength to let be the things I have no right to control. I know perfectly well what those are too I just have a really hard time not panicking and grasping a float that has no intention of being grasped. The float does like to be grasped at though. I think it makes him feel wanted and needed. I think that's poison for me.However, invoking a negative does not create a positive. So here they are, my resolutions in spite of not doing resolutions (because God forbid I don't keep them):

1. Bake more bread. We lost that in 2009.
2. Order the seeds and actually start the seedlings.
3. Repair the fence and till the garden hopefully one week after the last hard freeze (sometime in March most years).
4. Compost. Everything that ought to be composted. Lost that in 2009 too.
5. Put the seedlings in just after Mother's Day and protect the tomato plants with plastic bottle hot houses. Pay attention to the weather and don't boil them.
6. This year pull UP all the volunteers from last year. That was fun but unproductive.
7. Cultivate early and often.
8. Order more broiler chicks. Maybe even eggs if I can work out an incubator and commit to turning them every day.
9. Get back on the elliptical in the morning at least until the heavier garden work is in full swing. Bikram is not enough.
10. Walk away from 2009 and don't look back. I can't imagine turning into a pillar of salt particularly pleasant.

That's it. I'm stopping at ten because I'm an over achiever and usually bite off more than I can chew without choking. Those ten are probably a big mouthful but maybe there should be an 11th:

    11. Give myself permission to fall down and get up again. You know, permission to be a bona fide member of he human race. The expectation of perfection is a horrible conceit.

Happy New Year, peoples. I wish you joy, love, passion, strength and surrender.

Peace out - Alecto

 
Borrowed without permission from an artist who's name I can no longer locate.

Adventures in raw food, or, I feel better now, thank you.

I'm feeling much better now, thanks.

In an effort to distract myself from the absolute panic over an impending 5 solo days I ordered up a juice fast. Actually, I think they call it a cleanse, but whatever. This is nothing I've ever done. As a matter of fact it goes against every grain in my belief systems in terms of what we should or should not put in our bodies and how. It also goes against my belief that we should have an intimate relationship with the food we consume. I am also late to Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma but I appear to have drifted in that direction anyway. 

The whole purpose of the cleanse (I thought) was to create enough physical discomfort to mask the emotional drama because I'm well known for creating physical discomfort to mask emotional drama. Or trauma. Take your pick. As it turns out I wonder if it was something else all along.

After a bit of research, and I'll be honest, it wasn't a lot of research, I eliminated all powdered mixes, cooked or processed in any way food (?) and focused on raw food. I found a very local vendor (NYC and Southern CT only and if you really want to know who and what, leave a comment and I'll send you an email and no, they don't ship) placed my order on the internet and then promptly put it out of my mind until Sunday at 3 PM when I had to drive 20 miles to pick it up. Now, if you've been reading this blog for any length of time you probably have a good idea of what goes on in my kitchen on Sundays.  All the cooking for the week. That's right, all of it. Unless Nanny's cooking something in which case I'm off the hook (she's awesome, this one).

I started early Sunday morning with a trip to the farmers market for the stuff my garden doesn't give me enough of these days. I needed to slow roast some tomatoes for paste (thanks, Kitt, worked wonderfully), make a boat load of Sunday sauce to eat and to freeze, braise some frozen (I thawed them first) lamb shanks with a ton of leftover salad turnips (they're really sweet) some potatoes about to get too starchy and a mess of other veggies needing to be consumed (plus an entire bottle of Chianti, to braise in, not to drink) and then also some red beans for rice to sit and stew in hot sauce for three days in the fridge. We had a potato leak pie for Sunday dinner so there was that too.

In the middle of all this I have to pick up my juice. I leave Cletus baby sitting the roasting tomatoes and bubbling sauce and head out to parts generally avoided. Not a bad neighborhood, per see, just a bit snootier than I tolerate easily. I'm still having trouble with the Prada Moms in Escalades. I pick up my juice at a yoga studio. I am happy about this because I keep thinking yoga might be a nice thing for me to do I've just never gotten around to working it out. When I arrive the juice has not been delivered and there are several unhappy women milling about. It is not really that late, just twenty minutes and the poor guy is stuck in traffic.

I sit down to wait. I have found a book to read and the silence of the space is working for me. Until more women show up and the atmosphere turns a bit testy. After awhile the man is still not here and the women are demanding their drinks and the poor girl at the counter is beginning to lose her cool and I bury my nose deeper into my borrowed book. By the time the delivery vehicle arrives there is a swarm on the back of the truck reminiscent of Filene's Basement in the old days. I am not a pusher. I hate confrontation so I sit and wait. After awhile I get nervous because what if they don't have enough? What if a mistake was made or someone took what wasn't hers? What will I do? I wade into the crowd in hopes of grabbing my three green bags. One of the more irate women is blocked in by the truck. She yells at him to get out of her way. He cannot move his vehicle, there are too many women stuck head and torso first inside. I am suddenly one of them; I dive, I scoop, I bolt. I run like hell for my car nearly getting myself run over by one of the hostile ladies screeching past me and out of the parking lot.

I am terrified.

I go home with my juice, unload it into the refrigerator as instructed and promptly (again) forget about it. I finish cooking and baking. I am light headed with the smells in the house. I want to eat all of it immediately if not sooner. I am beside myself in anticipation of coming meals. I sit down to write the last post and I go to bed. 

In the morning I get up and remember that I am fasting. I am not too sorry yet. I pack literally half a gallon of fluid (properly contained) into my backpack along with my computer and all the other garbage I haul back and forth every day. I get on the train and go to work. The fluids were fine, I was not.

Eventually I learned about juice fasting. I learned this because I googled everything I could find to explain the current state of my body, which was in significant upheaval. I went to bed that night and slept very badly. In the morning it was a little better and off I went again with my fluids. At this point I want solid food so bad I'm ready to chew tree bark (city tree bark even)and need I mention the effect of the re-roasting lamb shanks and lingering scent in the morning?

The next evening, which was last night, I went to bed and slept better than I can remember only waking to disturbingly loud music coming from a disturbingly lingering vehicle at five AM. I didn't go back to sleep. Apparently my body was done sleeping. I can't remember the last time this happened either. I laid there for an hour wondering what was wrong with me and then I got up, went downstairs and ran like hell on my machine (which I'd been doing since Monday anyway in an effort to sweat out as much garbage as possible). When I arrived this morning, on day three of my fast, I felt unbelievably good, nearly euphoric. It is now nearly 4 PM and while I'm looking forward to my prescribed raw fruit and lightly steamed veggies tomorrow, I am not in bad shape at all. I miss my husband, he really needs to come home now but you know, I'm OK.

I wonder about balance, I really do. I also wonder how those women feel today. Better, I hope.

And the next time I feel the need to do this I can bloody well make my own.

Greetings from the other side

Well hello there. First of all, I apologize for the current layout. I'm not sure what I did wrong but I can't access or see the comments or internal links. Also, the photos are displaying strangely. I'll fix that.

I have apparently collected a highly diversified viewing audience. This is nice for me but maybe not so nice for you. The food people will come here looking for food, the life bloggers will want to read about life, the periodic corporate cube rats will want to know about the state of my office, the farmers will want to know what I've done with my garden and whether or not I've continued to reduce my carbon footprint and the craft folks will want to know what I've knit up or concocted lately. Sadly, I'm bound to disappoint most of you most of the time and I'm going to have to get over that or stop writing because the truth of the matter is that I am a highly diversified human being and that's just the way it is.

Now pay attention, this next part is kind of important. On February 8, 2008 at 1:15 PM I sat in my primary care physician's examining room with my husband and made it perfectly clear to the man (who has known me for a good ten years) that my time on earth was going to be very short if I didn't do something extreme and immediate. He sent us to Stamford Hospital and I'm not ready to talk about that yet. All you need to know is that at 7:30 PM Friday night the doors closed behind my husband and I found myself in nothing but a hospital gown locked up on 15 minute watch at a place called Hall-Brook.

I spent six days at Hall-Brook. I didn't come off 15 minute watch for three days and when I walked back into the sunlight on Thursday morning I wasn't really sure I was ready. What I do know is that everything is going to change. Not just one thing or two things but everything. My intention is to document the journey. There will be lots of food (just WAIT until I tell you what I ate in that place and the affects it had on my body), lots of gardening, plenty of crafts, a yoga class or two, stories about my kids, life with Nanny, the Intensive Out Patient journey (that starts next week), my job (yup, I'm not giving that up because I FREAKING LIKE IT), my art (yes, I picked up a paintbrush again) and who the heck knows what else. But the bottom line is that my life is not a debate. I'm not here for you, I'm here for me. I appreciate, more than I can tell you, the feedback and the comments but what I don't need is the judgment. Take that elsewhere; I get enough of that as it is.

And ST, I didn't die but coming home and finding out I'd fallen off your blog roll like a dead person shocked the shit out of me.

And lastly, I missed you. A lot.

Love, Alecto

Sunday - or how all that sitting still actually worked out

Yesterday, right after I posted and gave the computer back to NoMans I sat still for precisely three more minutes and then dove head first into the wool stash abandoned some six months ago. As NoMans was pulling me out by my ankles (it's a BIG stash basket) I snagged myself a ball of unlabeled violet Lopi and a pair of size 11 needles and made a small swatch. Just to see if my hands still remembered what to do. They did.

After that I pulled out a sixteen inch size 11 circular and knit a hat that started with 80 cast on stitches because somewhere in this organic knitter's cluttered brain I recalled once casting 80 stitches onto a size 11 circular needle.

If any of you knit, know your needles or have a passing acquaintance with Lopi then you know I made a lovely violet hat for Hagred's brother. If he grows a little. Then I went to bed. In the morning I pulled out my double pointed needles and finished Hagred's brother's hat. I put it on my head. It fell easily to my chin. It was really pretty though. It occurred to me later that those 80 stitches on the size 11 needles were for a child's sweater. Hmm.

I decided to felt the hat. Felting involves washing and I think maybe drying but I don't really remember because I've only actually read about it, the piece of wool trapped in a pillow case. This causes shrinkage and the agitation causes the fibers to alter until it sort of melts together a bit. The felted hat is still too wide but now it doesn't fall to my chin. I think I was supposed to take it out still damp and shape it but it can be wetted again and then formed properly. If I get around to it.

I made another hat after that and almost got it right by decreasing the stitches to 59 and doing a seed stitch for the first eight rows so that it might stick a bit better. It's still too big. I'll felt that one too.

After that I pulled out two skeins of wool I bought in Vermont last year that just scare me senseless, they're so beautiful. They are raw homespun skeins the first died with pokeberry (it's that lovely orange you see in my lap) and the second is an undied, unbleached pale cream that's been spun tight and is still remarkably sticky from the unprocessed lanolin.

I did all this today because during the trip to Whole Foods, NoMans decided he needed to whip up a batch of nine alarm Texas chili. I don't think he meant to make it nine alarm (yes, I made that up) it's just that he doesn't actually cook much (he preps, cans and cleans) and he was experiencing significant chili abundance. I whipped up a pizza from yesterday's leftover dough while he was out allowing Cletus to scare the pants off herself behind the wheel of my car but other than that, it was his kitchen. I did make the mistake of roasting some sweet red peppers while he was cooking and nearly got a fork in the eye when I approached the counter to clean them. And also there was the matter of the baking bread but I suppose I'll be forgiven for that because he's going to need it to help him survive his chili.

So here I sit with these two skeins of lovely raw wool turned into balls and a plethora of needles to choose from. I also have a mess of books on the subject and if I was so inclined I might march myself down the hall and fetch them but I don't think that's how it's going to go.

I haz cookbook problems, let me show you them

I live in a 2200 square foot raised ranch, most of which is taken up by bedrooms because there are a bunch of us living here and we do subscribe to personal space, however small that might be. I used to live in 2700 square feet and before that 700 and before that 1200 so I'm used to expansion and contraction. This makes me a bit sensitive to accumulation. Add to that my inability to throw out anything I've ever been attached to, up to and including shoes I have worn into the ground and couldn't even give away (they leak and smell like, um, feet) and you have a recipe for disaster if you also happen to need to live in a clean space (that would be me, again). I'm perfectly all right with clutter, as RW will attest to given the state of my office, but if I can't clear everything off and scrub it within an inch of it's life, I've got issues. Therefore, I am very, very careful.

So here it is, my first of three (yep, three!) hallway closets:

From this somewhat blurry photograph (I'm still experimenting) you can see my entire life history with regard to food. If you start on the upper shelf you will notice that there are three, count 'em, three publications of The Joy of Cooking. I used an edition purchased by me in 1982 to teach myself to cook. I was simultaneously working at a four star restaurant in the kitchen as a dishwasher and then a prep girl. I did eventually get behind the line. I also should note that at the same time I worked at the four star place I was also a manager at the Westport Burger King (boy can I scrub a broiler and clean out grease traps) and looking at what I think of as the other side of food, as in, maybe we don't really want to put this in our mouths. The Joy of Cooking is still my bible if I don't understand some bit of kitchen chemistry or if I just happen to need a good recipe for possum or squirrel (that would be the older version).

From The Joy of Cooking I moved on to the Silver Palate cookbooks that came out in the 80s and 90s and redefined what the home cook did in tandem with Martha Stewart (never did own one of those books, I might be sorry someday). The Silver Palate is also a bible of some sort, where I return when I just want to get back to the root of savory and simple. I know, they didn't seem so simple at the time, but they do now. After that I moved onto Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck and a bunch of specialty books that peppered the shelves in the last two decades. My second husband is a graphic designer and his first love is books, typesetting specifically. He worked for Book of the Month Club which became Bookspan for years and got to know a lot of the authors and books. He still gives me cookbooks. I love that about him.

Sometime between the 80s and now I began collecting Moosewood cookbooks. The Moosewood cookbooks are vegetarian which is somewhat limiting in my meat eating household but was an absolute life saver during the years I supported weekend group retreats that required mostly vegetarian cooking for large groups of people. What I can do with a mushroom and a little soy...

Peppered about the four primary groups are books that range from cookies, to cheesecakes, to frugal gourmet and probably a couple diet books that I gave up on after a week or two (just eat less and work more, OK?) and then you come to the last category, reference. I have reference for Jewish holidays, soups, breads, stews, canning and grilling. Many of these books exist solely for inspiration or direction (I eat what, specifically, at Passover?) but all of them are necessary. Necessary and completely dispensable. I could let them all go tomorrow and continue to cook the way I do. But I don't want to. They are old and trusted friends. Hell, some of them are brand new friends. But think about this. In twenty years of serious cooking if I've only filled half a closet, then maybe I'm doing all right. (I don't really want to discuss the 2,000 other books in the family room right now but I will at least acknowledge their existence).

Now on to pizza:

Here is pizza ready to go to the oven. These are simple pizzas. The dough recipe comes from Aroma Cucina, the sauce is my marinara (it's got a bit of a kick, I think I might have accidentally dropped a bunch of habaneros in there), fresh mozzarella and some peppers I roasted and marinated last weekend.

   And here they are ready to come out. They might have wanted another three to five minutes but we were mighty hungry.

Here Cletus captures the pizza grin because I've just had my face in a 500 degree oven and I think this is more fun than just about anything.

Here is tonight's very simple tomato soup from the latest Alice Water's cookbook. This has already been through the Cuisinart (which is 23 years old now and I fear for it's very soul and mine if I ever have to replace it because I think they're built to break now) and the strainer to remove the seeds. This is simply, a sliced onion, six sliced garlic cloves simmered in butter and olive oil, added six large (just over four pounds) tomatoes cut in eighths cooked until they fell apart with some salt, thyme and bay leaves and two tablespoons of rice, two cups of water and two tablespoons of butter added at the end (yes, at the end) and then cuisinarted and strained and reheated. It took just over an hour and we ate it with the DO NOT WASTE CHEESE concoction from Food on the Food and fresh bread.

Lastly, here is the mess of me at the end of the weekend because NoMans thought it was hysterical. Covered in food (yes, I do own two aprons and usually wear at least one of them) and damned happy too.  Happy Sunday, and happy eating to all.

Licking the Paint off the Hood

I wrote 6,000 words today. I wrote that many words because I haven't written a NaNo word since, um, erm, Wednesday afternoon and then I only wrote about 400 of them. During NaNo there is no excuse for distraction, you write when you say you'll write no matter what or you pay the price on the back end. I paid it today. No problem except now I officially hate my story. I hate it so much that I'd print out all 75 pages and burn them in the driveway and then delete every back up I've got except for one thing - IT'S A RACE!!!! So I don't quit, that's the way of it. By the way, Ridgewalker hit his 50,000 sometime this week. I'm unbearably proud of him and you should be too. It took a lot to keep going and he did it muse or no muse.

Anyway, that's not what I came here to write about at the end of a 6,000 word day. I came here to write about buying a car. A week before NoMans lost the truck he said he wanted a new car. He said it in one of those slightly whiny petulant voices we use in the sanctity of our bedrooms with a spouse who loves and understands us catching the emotional fallout. Wanting a new car was a metaphor but he put it out there. And then I had that dream and then we were truckless and then, well, and then we were faced with these choices.

For starters, we need either all wheel or four wheel drive or we need to not drive in the snow. It's that simple where we live. We have family in the hills and we live in a very hilly snow belt and that's the way of it. Secondly, unless it's an econobox I don't believe in buying new vehicles, you loose way too much equity when you drive off the lot. I do, by the way, truly believe in the econobox, you can make those buggers go hundreds of thousands of miles if you treat them right and don't let anybody ram you up the butt at a traffic light. And lastly, I did not want another truck. It's not that I didn't love the truck, I adored the truck. It's that the truck got horrendous gas mileage and it was getting worse as it aged.

We looked at hybrids but I'm still not sold. Electricity is still energy and until somebody proves to me that it's actually more efficient overall, I'm not coughing up another 25% of the purchase price to drive one. We googled and researched and read and digested and I looked at my husband and said the word. Subaru. He crawled under the bed and refused to come out.

Now listen, sometimes you've got to let a guy have his stuff. God knows he lets me have more than my share of stuff but the man simply did not want to drive a Subaru. I have nothing against Subarus, but he does. So we researched some more and I came up with a very surprising solution. A solution so stunning it left me reeling because I have something against labels - they piss me off for multiple reasons. The BMW X3 off lease, dealer certified and cleaned up, sells for less than most truck replacements and gets significantly better gas mileage. I think this is so because it doesn't have a lot of cachet. It's too small, it looks like a glorified station wagon, it doesn't roar, it doesn't tower over anything but a VW Bug. It does, however, have tremendous cabin capacity for it's size. Not a lot of storage but we travel light and we do own a Thule box.

So yesterday we went to Ridgefield European Motors and we test drove one. That's the place to test drive, the roads are wide and open and the traffic is minimal. Then we looked at the sticker price and we left. The cute little sales guy just wasn't up to the selling and NoMans comes from South Jersey; apparently he needs a fight before he feels good. We came home, I made bagels and in the mean time talked the man off his ledge. He wanted to go to Bridgeport but I wasn't interested in a large dealer lot; I don't know enough about the car to fight my way through the bullshit. We researched some more and called Greenwich. Now, my experience with buying cars in Greenwich has altered somewhat over the years. It used to be a genteel kind of transaction but has reduced itself to biting, clawing, scratching sleaze. I cannot stand it. Tell me your best price and I will either give you money or I will not. If you stick me in a room with a finance guy who wants to do unspeakable things to my nether regions I will  promptly feed him his tongue. None of us will be happy with the results.

So with some trepidation we went to Greenwich BMW to see the, ah hem, 'certified pre-own veeehicals' gasp giggle choke. We really did. We met Ernie and Ernie was currently busy with an irritable pregnant couple scraping about over an actual BMW station wagon (it was cute as hell too). Ernie made a copy of NoMan's license and sent us out on our own. I've never seen anything like it. Ernie put us in a six speed standard transmission in a state where 95% of the drivers have never seen a stick shift and let us leave the lot. Damn, they must have some killer insurance. We drove through traffic and then took it out on the highway and opened it up. The little beastie performed brilliantly. We brought it back and sat with Ernie and our internet printouts of the current nationwide fair market value, in, um, er, Greenwich, Connecticut where you might as well mark it all up forty percent and be done with it. I was prepared to call my mother in Ohio and have her hunt us down a bargain but NoMans did it. He did it with sulking petulance. It got so bad I actually kicked him under the table. What clinched the deal was simply my attempt to save Ernie from NoMans. I suggested it might be time to go home. Ernie met us half way and NoMans was damn near ecstatic. I was mortified. We went home alternately happy and marginally embarrassed. All night long NoMans dreamed of falling off a cliff.

In the morning we got up and headed off to therapy. We played a game with Little Girl and her shrink and talked about our feelings. I did nothing bad and everybody left in one piece. We drove to Greenwich to get the car. We pulled into the dealership and parked. We got out of the car. We went in the building. We, Cletus and I, left NoMans to deal with the paperwork and went outside. There we did stand in front of something called a BMW M3 Coupe and there I did stand, doing everything in my power not to lick the paint off the hood. It looked like this:

Oh how I do so lust. Oh how I made a complete ass of myself nearly throwing my body prostate across the hood with only Cletus to catch me by my belt loops and avoid accidentally owning it by imprinting the shape of my body into it's metal. Oh how my husband saw me and nearly ditched the reasonable vehicle in exchange for the two seated high performance vehicle that he knows perfectly well he'd have to pry my cold dead body from just to get it out of the drivers seat.

Oh how hard it was to drive off the lot in the rental vehicle and go home until I could get a grip on myself. I'm still twitching. I'm no longer frothing at the mouth but can you feel it too? Can you look at that thing and NOT want to lick the paint off the hood? I wanted to open the hood and snort up the engine. Maybe someday I might. A girl can dream.

Hooking the Muse, or NaNoWriMo Ejaculate

I don't have very many posts left before NaNoWriMo; two, actually, one technically since I've been posting at least one day ahead for about a week and a half (did any of you notice this?), and this post counts. It's hard to think of what to say. Mostly I grasp at what might be brewing in there, festering or otherwise, in the bowels of the Lizard Brain. I grasp at it so as to get it out to keep it from disrupting the Muse. This would be the ADHD-OCD Tourettes Laden Booze Hound (it should be a booze hound, right?) Muse that I'm going to be asking to focus for thirty straight days.  To hell with the Data Trolls, let them eat rancid pizza and fester in their own dens.

I had a brief moment of terror on the way to work today. It lasted precisely 24 seconds and then passed, like gas, I would imagine. I sat behind the wheel of my automobile, ala James Taylor, looking at myself in the rear view mirror... OK, not really.  Really I just thought about NaNoWriMo and what the hell I'm going to do come Thursday... Thuuuurrrssssdaaaayyyy. November 1.

ack. I have expelled yet another hairball directly into my own lap. Gross.

I thought about this for 24 seconds which was enough time to nearly cause four or five major incidents (they aren't accidents if ya don't report 'em) in all of 40 feet that I traveled.

And then it passed. It wasn't wet or anything. Even if it feels like it ought to have been wet. Sopping wet. Like my Lizard Brain is right this second. Maybe I should feed it some alcohol. 

In any event, I will be in and out periodically. I'm not going to allow myself the pleasure (read: psychic outlet) of daily posting. Think of it as ejaculation; if these balls, which are the metaphorical equivalent of my creative hemisphere, get emptied too frequently I won't be able to perform where it counts.

That would suck. That would not be allowed. That would be letting the Muse off the hook all too easily.

It's time to hook the Muse.

Transcendental Blues

In the darkest hour of the longest night
If it was in my power I'd step into the light
Candles on the alter, penny in your shoe
Walk upon the water --- transcendental blues

- Steve Earle - Transcendental Blues

I've been listening to one of my Big Furry Guys (Mr. Earle, the king of the Big Furry Guys, for whom I took my very pregnant body - I was actually due that day - to see with Emmylou and Nancy G in the nosebleed seats at the old Palace Theater in Stamford, prior to any kind of renovation, and have never forgotten it) all day, on and off, interspersed with David Gray and Natalie Merchant and now I've moved onto Mark Knopfler's All the Roadrunning singing Beyond My Wildest Dreams.  It's been that kind of Sunday, my favorite kind, in which much was created, baked and consumed and much laid aside for the coming week.

I don't think the world is going to end as we know it in my lifetime.  I'm not even sure it will occur in my children's lives.  I think it will continue to occur gradually until we are lulled into such complacency that we have entirely forgotten ourselves and can so be consumed by a greater and perhaps more worthy beast. I'm not even sure I mind all that much. I don't really know. I do mind starving to death. I do mind poisoning myself. I do mind being asleep. I do very, very much mind that some of my friends are feeling it today. I also mind that I can't quite wrap my mind around the people I don't know, who aren't my friends, who also suffer terribly. I mind a lot of things. I can process a bit of it.

I read an article yesterday about the human race splitting into two separate species in the next 100,000 years. And we were meant to be alarmed. How can any of us truly be alarmed by something 100,000 years in the future?  We aren't wired to process information that isn't immediate. The article discussed the future of The Beautiful and Bright and the Ugly Caretakers. Huh. As if this isn't happening all around us all the time?  And as if the Hapsburgs weren't any indication of what occurs when the gene pool implodes on itself. Huh. And I remember the film Gattica that was released in a time when I stored literally gallons of breast milk in the freezer and sniffed fragrant (I can't really refer to infants as dirty under any circumstances) infant clothing in the privacy of my office to bring on the let down reflex that would catapult my last girl's meals gushing from my corporate breasts into sterilized receptacles and put on ice for another day. I did this twice a day every day and I cried every time I did it because all I really wanted was to be at home in my rocking chair with my last girl at my breast. The day I stopped crying was the day my milk dried up.  I made it six months and for any of you who nursed your children that's a serious feat, to continue to produce while separated from your infant 10 - 16 hours per day.  It broke my heart and I never did get over it.  I just moved on and found other ways to merge the me who is on fire in the world and the me who needs to pull my children in as close as I can get them. It is all about the need to be.

She is nearly seven. I can still feel her in my breasts; they constrict and ache when she cries with a particular tone or is away too long.  My oldest will turn 21 in two weeks. I have not seen him in two months nor had an intimate conversation in over six months. My breasts still ache for him too. I have not forgotten but I have let go. It is very hard and I try not to think too much or I would come apart and fly off into the ether and then what good would I be to anybody? But you know what, I love you, Mikie, I love you so much I can't catch my breath some days. And I believe in you. I believe that you will find your way and in doing so find your way home, where ever home happens to become.  I believe that deep inside, you know how much I love you too. I cut my arm off and my heart out because it was the only thing I could think to do. And I love you. Always.

So, having revealed all that, maybe Sundays will make a little more sense. Maybe I'll stop being the confusing enigma that is not one thing nor the other and pisses off just about everyone but me at one point or another.

I go to work every day because that is me.  That is me being who I am on fire, every single day. My friend The Consultant asks periodically, Alecto, do you like your job?  He asks this because he thinks my business partners are lunatics.  He's right, they are.  And I tell him every time, Consultant of Mine, I love my job and I do my damn best to tolerate them that has the need of me.  A large part of who I am is defined by the creativity that causes these databases to whir and chirp and push out their own product all day long.

I have Sundays because I need to be here as well. I need it all. Some days I think it might kill me and other days, like today, I think I have mastered the alchemy of what has become my life. Here is cheese bread and pumpkin pie plus the leftovers because I always end up with too much. I have moved on to using spelt instead of wheat and I'm still not sure what I really think of it.  It's a bit drier but it rises better, although you can't tell here by the bread because there are two pounds of cheese in these loaves.  They are asiago and goat gouda, both local and both packed with protein. Cletus and I both have food issues. We need to get the most possible bang for our calories to remain healthy. We need to get so used to this kind of gathering and eating that we no longer have the idea of a food issue. The pie comes from a little sugar pumpkin and he didn't take much to cook up and pie at all. He is, however, taking forever to cook because there is so much of him.

Here is the inside of my refrigerator.  Talk about intimate! On the lower shelf are four meals for the coming week. There are duck breasts marinating in a red wine, garlic, shallot, ginger concoction that will be finished in a plum glaze in less than 20 minutes when it's time to cook them.  There are chicken thighs and legs in a chipotle marinade (yes, I make all my own), a flank steak in balsamic and garlic, and finally veal chops in a white wine and lemon reduction with fingerling potatoes, yellow squash and plum tomatoes. This will get us through the week. Remember, Alecto DOES NOT cook on Fridays. There is a cream of tomato soup on the stove with a red wine infusion to go with the cheese bread and the spelt sour dough (I nurture the starter four days a week,  refrigerate two and wake up and utilize one). I'll let you know how I feel about the spelt in another week or so.

NoMans is making pickles. NoMans has been going through some cathartic stuff this week relating to his childhood and what did and did not happen and the fact that, as the youngest of four, his parents and siblings might just have gotten tired and it might not have been all about him after all.  One of the things I love most about him is that this cathartic stuff shows up in pickle making. He takes his ache and makes something beautiful out of it and he feels good in the process. I'll tell you though, I laughed my ass off when he figured out the pickling process was an actual process as opposed to an event and will take 5 - 6 weeks to complete in this climate. And also, I wished for CG's mother's punch bowl but the other yellow bowl will do just fine.

And finally, if you look up above those frou frou cherry veneer cabinets you will see to the left of my new butcher block, an actual wooden bread bowl.  I let go last week in Vermont. I bought the hand milled bowl and then had a long chat with a baker (who talked me into playing with spelt and made the most incredible sour dough raisin bread I've ever tasted and had the coolest mother f'ing long white beard I've ever seen) about the need to generate yeast in the kitchen and the fact that it would, simply, feel better.  He wasn't kidding.  It felt incredible.  It felt alive. My grandchildren, if they are so inclined, can use it. It doesn't mean I don't love the old yellow bowl. I do love the old yellow bowl and it is still mine.

And lastly, here is my beautiful first girl, my reason for being, my reason for breathing life into anything I can get my hands on. She might not be unschooled but she's remarkably creative and free. Her hair changes color weekly and she consumes books at an alarming rate. She paints and draws things I can barely process, she sings in two choirs, has been immersed in Latin for the last two years (chick seems to dig it, go figure)and is wearing her Thing One Disney T in the warm fuzzy memory of turning sixteen in the park of dreams with her best friend, her sister and her two step-brothers. She sits under one of my goofy wool blankets (I knit like a hyperactive fiend) and keeps her macbook close at all times. She too listens to The Big Furry Guy and smiles her secret smile. 

I cried when I wrote this tonight. And it was good. Thanks for listening.

- kisses and good night - Alecto

Me Me Me Me Me and MY MACHINE!!!!!

Unfortunately I don't think I have any data geek readers out there. One or two I can think of. That makes me less likely to write about data even though it may be the love of my life.  How can that be?  If I'm wrong, please speak up, I'm so lonely... so lonely and sad... (chuckle, snort - it's true though).

I have a confession of sorts.  I already told NoMans but he pretty much knows everything anyway. One of my major objectives for the year, the year being 2007, which is rapidly coming to a close, was to upgrade Essbase. Essbase being my multi-dimensional orgasmatron. And if that makes you scoff and blow steam out your butt, let me be, it's mine, OK?  We are rapidly approaching the end of October. This is not good.

In April I completed the first round of HFM (that's my other database, the one for which I am audited that contains and produces all that summarized SEC type data which I do NOT love, by the way, but I tolerate so long as I am permitted to caress the Essbase things) structural changes that should have left me ready to turn and devote my nearly full attention to the upgrade. At the same time we acquired a massive addition to the company plus another of lesser stature but nothing to be trifled with and I was pulled, yet again, into the HFM world. Also, Hyperion was acquired by Oracle which made a bloody mess of the support and download issues which cost me another two months.

And we come to June. In June I got going and discovered I was in so far over my head I couldn't see bottom and so began the procrastination. This was no simple upgrade.  This was a complete reinstall with components so different from what I knew that I might as well be starting over. And in the unlikely event that there are any Essbase geeks out there reading this: I HAD TO GO FROM 6.1 TO 7.1.6 AND FROM SERVER 2000 TO SERVER 2003 AND THEY CHANGED ALL THE NAMES AND I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHAT THE HELL EAS MEANS. OK, I do now, but I didn't then.

Between June and October I stopped and started and stopped and started and made such a mess of things I thought I needed to reformat my server and start over. At the end of September my boss cleared my schedule and I made a call to support to validate my final system settings. And then the procrastination really got started.  You never saw somebody so good at finding fires to put out. Anywhere. Ever.  It is entirely possible that had this continued I might have found a reason to carry water to the Southeast by the bucket full and bill it back to my company. Maybe this is why I'm suddenly so enamored with my Auditors? Disturbing, isn't it?

I made a career out of avoidance. I read four years of Dooce between avoidance techniques. You never saw somebody get so productive at filing. RW will appreciate this having witnessed seventeen months of my disaster of a desk that looked like a close relation to Hiroshima.  My desk was cleared and sanitized daily. DAILY. I am a slob. I live with stacks of papers on the stacks of papers and one can only hope to clear it with Kerosene and a match. I filed EVERYTHING and then went nuts trying to locate said files (people like me should NEVER file, it's deadly).

The truth of the matter was simple.  I was in over my head and had absolutely no idea how to go about straightening the twisted maze that is a current Essbase install. As it turned out, I'm better at the unraveling than I give myself credit for, I just don't LIKE it much, which is probably what this all comes down to.

At 2 PM today I gave myself a good talking to.  I said 'Alecto, get your shit together. This has gone so far beyond reasonable it's no longer even remotely explainable.' I went to my server and began.

I stopped and started in fits. I read and printed and read some more. I launched and prayed and failed and launched and relaunched and backed up and screamed for help to the system trolls under my desk. They giggled manically and ran to the dusty corners of the server room. I launched again. I worked backwards and forwards through 150 pages - that's 150 pages people! - of NON LINEAR instructions and explanations. I registered services, replaced license files, renamed the bloody machine already, downloaded more components and at 5:15 this evening, 3 hours and 15 minutes after my own personal come to Jesus meeting I had a fully operational and viable system install humming happily away in my test environment.

I don't suck. This time.  Thank the gods, I live tomorrow, to fight another day.

Migration begins...

Personal Choice

A year ago NoMans and I quit smoking. Technically our first smoke free day was October 3 but on October 2 at 10:30 PM we threw out the remaining two half packs of Newport Lights, every lighter and every ashtray in the house; even, and maybe especially, the really old and sentimental ashtrays. And then we went to bed.

We didn't come out of our bedroom for at least six weeks, maybe even longer. We did get up and go to work.  We did come home and make dinner (but we ate it in the bedroom, all five of us up on our teensy queen size bed covered in beach towels). We did go downstairs and do laundry, but we folded downstairs or in the bedroom. We did go into Little Girl's room to put her to bed and wake her up.  Other than that, we stayed in one of the few smoke free spaces in our lives. We had the cars detailed in an effort to get out as much smoke as possible (it never comes all the way out).  We sent everything to the cleaners, including all of the drapes in the house.

On or about December 19 we slipped up and shared a Marlborough Light outside the building where NoMan's Company Christmas party rocked on without us. It was nasty and evil tasting but it drove home a point. I am a smoker.  I will always be a smoker.  I am addict and I will always be an addict. Just because I choose not to smoke does not make a cigarette safe. That's how I always failed in the past. Every single painful God Forsaken time.

I will admit that it's gotten a lot easier to quit and stay quit in terms of social acceptability, or lack thereof. You can't smoke in a bar or a restaurant, you can't smoke in any public building and you can't smoke in a good many outdoor public places. While I find this useful I also find it upsetting. I consider the choice to put whatever you want into your body the ultimate freedom. I know we've got loads of useful information to support eliminating all second hand smoke in the world but I also notice we're still driving around in those big SUVs and polluting the hell out of our towns and cities like there's no tomorrow. So forgive me if I'm not buying the passion; and I'm not.

You want to put a needle in your arm?  Go for it. Can't recommend it, wouldn't suggest it, but wouldn't stop you either if that's what you really had in mind. What I might recommend (wonder what list this is going to put me on?) is regulating it and taxing it and making sure you actually have some level of confidence in the dosage and content.  Just a thought.  I am, after all, a raging capitalist and I don't always make sense even to myself but this is one of those areas that has me want to run for the hills. Except it's getting more difficult to locate the hills every day.

Just a thought on the eve of my it's a very personal choice smoke free life.