Tag Archives: humor

Ride Like the Wind, Even When Stationary

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Photo: Deep-Seated FearsI’m told that once one learns to ride a bicycle, the innate sense of balance and knowhow to do so is easily reawakened after a long interval, the moment one gets back on the thing. Which, if it proves true, will be a boon to me after all of these years of not even owning such a contraption. Though that’s not entirely true; I merely own one that travels only in my interior world—an exercise bike.

This could be considered a concession to the oft-overheated world of Texas, where I find it hard to get motivated enough to stroll from the front door to the mailbox on a typical summer’s day let alone do something as strenuous as pedaling at speed on a bicycle. It could be considered a mere kindness to all who would rather not see me teetering on the brink of disaster no matter what my speed, let alone have to try to navigate safely around me. It could even be considered a cheapskate solution to the expense of bikes nowadays relative to what I remember paying for my first grownup sort of bike.Photo: A Whole Rack of Bikes

The latter, however, is quickly canceled out when you know how much indoor, stationary bikes for exercising personages really cost. They’re just as outrageous in price as any that can tootle down the roads. At least, this one was. But the big difference in price is in the personal health, safety, and well-being of this particular rider and all who are freed from the dangers of surviving my biking skills should I hit the actual pavement. I am not in danger of heat stroke on this baby, since it sits in the bedroom not far from the convenient ceiling fan, should I go so far as to break a sweat or simply fall into an unwelcome hot flash mid-ride. It stays upright, no matter whether I am properly centered on the seat or pedaling evenly enough or paying reasonable attention to the terrain, or not. In fact, I can lean back on its amply cushioned recumbent seat with my iPad or laptop propped on my midsection, reading articles and watching video and blithely ignoring anything to do with my steadily cycling feet without any fear of riding off a cliff or into a vortex-like pothole.

And nobody will ever have to see me in bicycle shorts. Period. You can thank me now.

Do I miss real bicycle riding? I can’t say that I do. When and if I live in a climate where I feel comfortable mounting up on one of the real-thing bikes again for a genuine outdoor ride, I will likely enjoy the change of scenery enough (barring any strenuous terrain, because I am a lazy cuss) to make it worth my while. Until then, I’m quite content to pedal furiously, or as leisurely and gently as I like, around the confines of a square meter or so of my own bedroom, ogling digital scenery or perhaps, if the bird feeder is freshly filled, a few wrens, cardinals, and chickadees whose chatter is probably about the crazy bicycling lady on the other side of the window who is obviously so feeble that she’ll never catch up with them.Photo: Red Bicycle No. 2

Foodie Tuesday: Birthday Cake for a Peach of a Guy!

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Photo: Birthday Cake for a Peach of a GuyDad, who celebrated his eightieth birthday last week, is a peach of a guy. His uncle was fond of using that phrase to extol the sweetness and excellence of anybody he liked and admired greatly, including his own nephew David, and Uncle Lloyd himself was special, as the only person in the known universe (other than us kids, who imitated him with a certain amount of childish glee when we heard it) who ever called my dad Davy. But he was fond and proud, too, of his nephew—enough to include him in the Peachy category. So to my father David, and to my late great-uncle Lloyd, and to all of the other ‘guys’ (male, female, or other) worthy of the title, I dedicate this birthday treat that I made in honor of their being truly swell human beings.

It’s a gluten-free pound cake recipe, essentially (as long as you check that the individual ingredients meet that requirement in their production, should you be truly gluten sensitive); I only went GF because I happened to find several GF pound cake recipes that piqued my interest and I also happened to have the necessary ingredients for this variant of them on hand. I made it with cardamom both because I think that a grand companion flavor for peaches and because, being of Norwegian descent, I believe there may be at least a hint of cardamom in my bloodstream. In any case, I love the stuff. Almond flavors, too, and what better flour to use in the cake than almond flour, then?

The topping, which of course one can eliminate if it’s too much for the occasion—not that I know any people who absolutely adore sliced, toasted day-old pound cake for breakfast, preferably with yet more butter melted on top—is less Norwegian in its overall flavor profile, perhaps. It is somewhat like a peach sangria, I suppose. But maybe I can pass it off as “Scan-gria,” if pressed for a commitment. No matter; it’s a bit peachy, zippy, happy, has a lot of color and flavor, and is pretty sweet. All kind of like Dad and Uncle Lloyd, come to think of it. PS—no law against using the icing for the breakfast version of this, either.

Cardamom-Almond Cake

Preheat the oven to 350°F/ca. 177°C. In a mixing bowl, whisk together 2-1/4 cups almond flour/meal, 1/4 cup coconut flour (I ground some from toasted coconut flakes), 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp ground cardamom, and 1 tsp baking soda. In another container (I like to use a spouted measuring pitcher for prepping liquids so I can easily pour them up when ready), blend 2/3 cup melted butter or oil (I used clarified browned butter), 2/3 cup raw honey, 1/2 cup + 3 Tablespoons full-fat coconut milk, 2 tsp vanilla and 1/2 tsp almond extract, and beat in 4 large eggs until all is blended thoroughly. Pour the mix into the dry ingredients and gently blend everything together. The batter fits into a standard 9×9″ baking pan or, as I used, a round casserole of about the same capacity, and goes into the oven for about 25-35 minutes.

My famously unreliable oven temperatures make me distrust giving anything other than approximate times and temps, and I just watch every individual dish, as I did this time. It’s a gooey cake, not light and fluffy, but I’d rather err on the moist side than otherwise. Just my thing. Meanwhile, I had prepared and refrigerated the icing earlier.

Tipsy Peaches & Cream Icing

Simmer together 2 ounces sliced freeze-dried peaches, 1/2 tsp rosewater, 1/2 tsp almond extract, 2 tsp vanilla, a pinch of salt, 1/2 tsp cardamom, 3/4 cup red wine, and 1 cup brown sugar until the sugar melts and the peaches are well rehydrated. [I warmed this mix in the evening until it was close to ready and then just left the pot sitting, covered, until the morning, so there was no question everything was well soaked and softened, but that was just because I was too tired after a long day of work to do it all that night.] Then, using a stick blender, puree the mix fully, adding 3/4 cup coconut oil (melted or room temp), 1 cup marshmallow fluff, and 1 cup cream cheese (or labneh). I threw in about 1/4 tsp silver edible glitter, just for fun. Refrigerate until ready to use.

Photomontage: Cake-WreckingI will confess to going a little further over the top this time, since I was in the mood to play with my food and it was for a good person’s cause. So I sliced a “lid” from the cake, carved out its middle, crumbled the interior hunk, blended it with a bunch of the icing stuff (reserving enough icing to drizzle over the exterior), packed the icing/cake crumb mix into the crater of the cake, closed the lid and covered up my tracks with a slathering of the remaining icing before putting peach (canned—it’s winter, y’all) and toasted almond slices on top of it all. I pinned the toppings together before sticking it in the refrigerator to chill out and set without sliding into oblivion. But it’s messy enough that it just might end up being a trifle or a bombe (possibly even a bomb) instead of a cake this way. And that’s okay. If I learned nothing else from my father, I did see in him a fine example of both how to make any situation work as well as possible—and how to play with my food.Photo: Squishy Cake

Hot Flash Fiction 14: I’ll have a Donut to Go with that Miscalculation, Please

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Digital illo + text: Unexpected Return on Investment

Digital illo from photos: Electrifying Surprise

Ménage à Moi

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Digital illo from a photo: Woolly NillyZoo Zooming

I’m off to see the monkeys now,

The ibex, the Tibetan cow,

The tortoise, hippo, kangaroo—

But if you think it’s to the zoo

I’m heading out, you’re incorrect—

I’m off to feed my intellect

Not in the jungle nearby found,

But where the animals are bound

In paper quarters, for you see,

I’m headed for the library.

Slightly Haunted Houses

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Digital illustration: Transmitter

Perpetual Haunts

Children always know where danger lies—the goblin in the corner who’ll surprise

And bite you on the ankles as you pass—grownups forget to fear it, though, alas!

For in the passage of the years they’ve grown to fear only the earthly, and bemoan

Mere politics and taxes, while a child retains the wisdom that the brute and wild

Still hides among the passages of day, waiting to snag unwary young at play.

On Halloween, adults recall but faint and humorous details of ancient taint

And treachery, the light dust, if you will, of ghostly tracks upon the windowsill

Or campfire tales meant less to warn than joke at quaking children by the fires’ smoke,

Forgetting that what was, remains still here: the monster that can swallow all is Fear.

Digital illustration: Receiver

Space Cadet

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Pardon me for mooning you. [If my backside looked this fabulous, I might show you that, too. You are very lucky things are the way they are.] Lacking such stellar assets myself, I look to the sky for my inspiration yet again, because, well: that moon!!! It’s been showing off a lot lately, giving us so much indulgent, up close and personal, viewing of that wildly handsome face that I begin to wonder whether the moon doesn’t have a crush on us. Given the seeming frequency of supermoon approaches these days and this apparent increase of mutual attraction, I begin to wonder if, instead, it would like to crush us.
Photo: Space Cadet

But I prefer to think that I’m living in a time and place where I can enjoy to fuller than usual advantage the beauty that is that big old hunk of reflective rock out there. To me, it’s a candy-coated, opalescent, crazily pretty artwork stuck up in the canopy of the sky just for my pleasure and amusement. It’s big enough, bright enough, and grand enough that we can all share it, so don’t be shy, you can gaze upon it too. And I will enjoy thinking of the silvery light shining on me being the same silvery light that’s shone on you.

Don’t Fear the Beard

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Long, long before beards were either returned to fashionability or considered the topic for memes and manias of any modern sort, there were many cycles of similarly obsessive and extensive motivations for—and against—facial hair. Formidable schoolmistresses, pretend feminine mates for closeted men, and prickly maiden aunts notwithstanding, the majority of these trends applied generally only the male of the human hominids. It’s amazing, no matter what era one would choose to examine in this regard (excepting, perhaps, the days before shaving was discovered), how much political, religious, tactical, emotional, social, and spiritual power facial hair—its shape and size and location—has, for good or ill.
Mixed media artwork: Bearded Brahms

I’m not necessarily fixed in one camp or another about beards, mustaches, or sideburns. Since they have no moral value in my life, my critique of facial hair has to do with strictly logistical matters, like how much of a day is devoted to grooming and admiring one’s own set of whiskers, or possibly to hygienic matters, like how much of a person’s lunch enters into and remains attached to the hair, regardless of where on the head it is located. And I’m definitely prejudiced with regard to matters of my personal taste, if pressed to choose. Unless I know of or can guess at some imperative guiding a man’s choice in the whether, why, and how, like his subscribing to a religious orthodoxy that dictates it, I am inclined to regard facial hair as a fashion statement, and therefore to be liked or disliked on the basis of whether it seems to me to suit the fellow’s appearance.

Johannes Brahms’s luxuriant beard would undoubtedly look odd, if not weirdly wrong, to me on some younger celebrities of the present time, just as Jamie Foxx’s sleekly tailored goatee would hardly have suited a big, wild-haired guy like Herr Brahms, even if it’d been fashionable in his day. I am attracted mostly to people who look thoughtfully and well put-together, from their hairstyles to their dress and deportment, but perhaps even more so to people who look like their ‘look’ really suits them. So while I was not, shall we say, a huge fan of my late great-aunt’s bristling brows or prominent mustache, which though they were not as impressive as, say, Mark Twain’s, did remind me of him at times, I knew that not only did I actually admire those accoutrements on said author, but accepted that, given her life and unselfconsciously plain attitudes, they pretty much suited Tante Anna as well.

Still, I am biased by physiological expectations enough to prefer heavier facial hair to be located on male specimens, and even then, generally to have a certain sense of purpose and care attached to them. My spouse sported a cleanly shaped mustache and goatee when we were first together and for some years thereafter, and since it didn’t in any way affect his handsomeness, let alone his kissing skills, I had no objection either to the days of his sporting that look or to the time when he shaved not only those off but his entire head of hair as well. It turned out, in his case, that his facial hair was already so light-colored that in fact very few people noticed when he shaved it all off, and if they saw any effect they were inclined to comment that he seemed to look younger to them lately, for some reason. Which says to me that if it took any greater effort to maintain the grooming of the facial hair than it did to shave it off daily, he was better served by saving the time and labor. It also happened that I found him just as attractive, if not even more so, when he went for the all-shaven look, so there’s that.

But I didn’t entirely share my little sisters’ horror of beards to the degree that when Dad showed up sporting one after a canoeing trip with colleagues in our youth, one ran crying from the room and wouldn’t come back to greet the returning pater, and the other gravely announced that if Dad died before he shaved the offending item off his face, she wouldn’t attend his funeral. He was amused, but in a very short time reappeared with the beard gone. I think he kept the mustache for some time without incurring such severe filial censure, but most of the rest of his life he’s remained a clean-shaven man. As for others, I can take or leave the beards. I’m not insistent on them being worn, or even necessarily tidily trimmed, as long as they seem right on their respective faces. And I’m not convinced that the wearing of them is necessary, either, for the winning of sporting events, luring of mates, intimidation of un-bearded persons, or any other purpose except perhaps keeping an otherwise not fur-bearing creature from freezing in lieu of borrowing another creature’s pelt in the Arctic. But that’s another day’s post entirely, I suspect.

Metallic Melange

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As a shiny-object addict, I inevitably crave making artworks with shiny parts from time to time. It’s one of the reasons I started making found-object sculptures so many years ago: a way to make use of my stash of sparkly, quirky, and metallic Junk bits that I still spy and pick up on my walks out of that compulsion. No surprise that I would, in turn, be cheered by others’ fascination with the multitudinous curios and clockworks so embedded in the likes of Steampunk and Sci-Fi, Industrial interior styling, Grunge and Goth, and Cabinet of Curiosities interests.
Mixed media artwork: A Sort of a Wreath

So here’s one of my latest concoctions, a wall sculpture that plays on all of those themes. It means nothing at all, or perhaps, everything, depending upon your preferences and whimsies. I like to think of it as evoking a variety of hints and hyperbole, of the histories, mysteries, and fantastical foolishness that both underly and defy nature and invention. In that sense, I suppose it might be considered a reasonable facsimile of the contents of my cranium. All of you amateur psychiatrists out there, have at it. If you dare.

Through the Cracks

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Photo: Gears GrindingI wrote this post a few days back, but stuff like this happens with great frequency in this day and age, I think you’ll agree.

How is it that, in this era of hyper-communication, so little information gets transmitted to the right person at the right time? I’m sitting in the doctor’s waiting room contemplating this, not sure if I’ll get in for a simple annual eye exam that’s a couple of years overdue, because last time I came in this doctor’s office, had supposedly been sent the required referral but it wasn’t in my file. Today, same story. I confirmed my appointment with a person in this office, who assured me that the referral had arrived, over a month ago—yet now it’s “not in my file.”

I got here immediately after listening to my spouse go through an incredibly convoluted and tedious rigamarole on the speaker phone to pay a bill for an account that had long been operating smoothly with automatic payments on the exact same credit card, only to learn that the bank that issued the card (despite owing us on its account at this moment) had refused payment on it. All of the numbers and dates were correct and no reason given for the refusal. So my patient partner had to re-register the very same card for the very same auto-pay system, and because there’s a 30-day wait for such registrations to be confirmed, he also had to make the present payment individually. Even the poor billing department employee walking him through the transaction was so confused by and even embarrassed at the silliness of the mess and how many long pauses on hold it took to unravel it all that he kept trying to make small talk to pass the time before it was resolved.

Meanwhile, at various other points in my quotidian wanderings, I frequently watch bosses make decrees that they would know were impossible to enact or enforce if they only asked the underlings who are expected to perform them. I regularly see parents and children, housemates, siblings, spouses, and others talk at cross (sometimes very cross indeed) purposes, all the while with the deeply held belief that they are offering great wisdom and well-planned solutions, yet never quite hearing each other or considering that the person with whom they should be conversing may have already solved the problem in hand. And I have watched employee-representative committees without number at work when they have neither consulted the employees they supposedly represent for their input, nor told them what is being negotiated, how, why, or with whom.

Anybody else feel like you’re sitting right outside the Cone of Silence from Science Fiction Theater? It’s as though I can see gears turning and mouths moving and messages of obvious importance flying back and forth, but can’t see the text of the communiques, let alone read lips or minds.

I sit and wait. I get agitated and then frustrated. I get so irked and itchy that I have to hunt for clues and try to set things on what I hope will be a clearer and better path. And just when I think I’m getting my pulse back down to a practical pace, the documentation I sent out at yet another company’s request six weeks ago magically disappears into the ether, presumably now sandwiched between the pages of somebody else’s documentation in the middle of their file. I’d ask the company to email or phone me when they locate my materials, but I’m pretty sure that if the message to do so doesn’t also disappear in the meantime, he who took the message will have retired by then and the new guy won’t know what was requested and will pass on the request to yet another trainee, who will in turn bury it in another wrong file for later discovery by a random office cleaner. I’d promise to let you all know how it turns out, but I’ll probably forget, anyhow.

At least I can tell you that after one more phone call today, my doctor’s office did agree to fax the ophthalmologist a repeat of my appointment referral, so I got to visit the eye doctor after all and get my eyeglass prescription updated. Until I get those new lenses, though, I can’t be certain I’ll be able to keep an eye on the prescription slip. So disappears another useful piece of data, drifting through the cracks of the information highway.Photo: Geared Up

Species Unknown

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Regardless of whether you’re of an evolutionary or Creationist or magical or pragmatic sort when it comes to the origins of life and the vast variety of creatures populating the planet—and, for all I know, the universe, though why anyone would want to live more than a single planet away from the wonderfulness that is Moi, I can’t imagine—it’s fascinating and entertaining to try to suss out how so many divergent and astonishing life forms there are all around us. I suppose one of the aspects I find most curious and amazing is the startling mix of sameness and extraordinary differences that seems to occur within what a first glance might have appeared to be nearly identical beings. How can two butterflies that look, even side by side, very little different contain both marked similarities and also such miraculously distinct characteristics and traits?
Digital illustration: A Breed Apart 1

I imagine that if there are other life forces out there, whether they’re supernatural or simply extraterrestrial, they might find the zoology of earth just as entertaining as I do, even if they already know and understand far more about it all that I ever will.
Digital illustration: A Breed Apart 2

It’s all of no great matter to me, to be honest, as my limited imagination will never remotely encompass the full reality of life on this globe or any other, and yet I think it fair to assume that it all predated me by a longshot and will continue long after I’m composted, no matter what I do or don’t understand. But knowing that I can’t ever know much within the greater scheme of things is neither daunting nor preventive; I will always, I suppose, be intrigued and piqued by the sheer magnitude of exotic, colorful, flagrantly felicitous Life. I can’t explain myself any more than I can explain any other living creature, and that is as far from boring an existence as one could wish.

Though I am just the tiniest bit unsettled by that one lady down the street who glows in the dark and has a flying dog.