The Cook Escapes

Ingrid and I took a little trip to the Dixon Gallery and Gardens. This was one of my favorite museums when I lived in Memphis, and it's still a small yet wonderful place to spend a couple of hours, even with a two year old. We made it just in time to hear the last few minutes of Mary LeCompte from Lake Charles, Louisiana tell stories about growing up in Cajun country. Then we walked through the gallery at a toddler's pace to view The Blue Dog: The Art of George Rodrigue exhibit. Ingrid loved it. I did, too. Those blue dogs are joyful and uplifting. Then we walked around the gardens and took pictures. That was Ingrid's favorite part. She got to run up and down a wooded path, talk to sculptures, pick up rocks, socialize with people captivated by her cuteness, throw pennies in a fountain, walk over bridges, and pick more stuff up.

It was just what we needed after spending the past three days cooking and planning meals for my parents. I had not left the house since Friday night. I was hoping to be able to address some of the food issues in the house, and how to avoid caregiver fatigue, but no one wants to hear me preach the gospel. So I just cook and hang out with Ingrid and my dad, and my mom when she's not working. Every once in a while, I retreat to my old room and read. Unfortunately Ingrid's not getting much quality grand parent time. My folks are stressed out. They talk to her through me, avoid hanging out with her even when I beg for just some time to take a shower. (The house isn't childproofed at all.) I think Ingrid's having a moderately suck ass time, but at least there's cable, a friendly dog, and frozen yogurt.

I have recused myself from giving injections, but tomorrow and Tuesday I'll be doing it again. I'm really good at giving injections. I'm rusty on being a nurse, and the drama that surrounds injection time grates my nerves. I sound like a bad daughter. Really, I'm just a impatient nurse. I'm glad to be able to help out, family drama and dynamics notwithstanding. The alternative is much, much worse, and my dad looks better every day.

Adolescence in Boxes

I'm in Memphis visiting my parents, helping to take care my of dad who just returned home from a two week hospital stay following a diagnosis of congestive heart failure following a heart attack. Physically he is very weak, and it hasn't quite set in (to him) just how seriously he is. It is difficult to see him in this state. He has a three page list of meds to take, he must follow a strict low sodium diabetic diet with serious portion control. He's so weak he has trouble walking from the chair to the kitchen or to the bathroom, and he's sleeping in the mother-in-law-suite downstairs on a rented adjustable hospital bed until he is able to go upstairs. If you read back far enough on this blog, you can guess that his heart attack was inevitable. In December I figured he'd have one within 2 years given how poorly he managed his diabetes and took care of himself. It is what it is. It happened, maybe it will be a wakeup call, maybe not. And here I am with Ingrid until Wednesday.

My parents don't throw away anything, and their house is so big, it hasn't yet hit critical mass with all the stuff. They've never had a tag sale in the 38 years they've been together. The last time I was here the (walk in) closets practically burst with clothes and junk. So my mom recently boxed up some of the junk and sent it to the attic. This means she boxed up 24 years of my crap. So much crap. I went through some of it looking for scary dolls. I found a couple, but not the one I had in mind. I did come across oodles of books and other strange things from my adolescence and early college. Some of the highlights: my skate board, clothes from my thrift store phase, an awesomely hot black lace corset, notebooks, sketchbooks, and one handmade book of poems and photographs that is so raw and painful to read it makes my stomach ache just thinking about the night I created it. And the poetry is bloody awful! I've only been able to read a few lines here and there. Talk about dark night of the soul. I must have been drunk or high or something that night, even though I remember it like it was last week. It was 15 years ago. I want to bring it home so I can burn it and give it a proper burial.

My mom and I are bookworms. You find books in every single room of this house, including the bathrooms and kitchen. There are even books in the garage. My mom actually has a library. This is one of the things I love about snooping though my parents' house. If I'm not careful I could replace the clothes in my suitcase with books. I have several titles that I'm bringing home to use to finish the revisions of the next edition of Steal Away Jordan (which I'm working on while I'm here when I'm not helping out with my dad's care). I also have a bunch of beloved books from decades gone by. Here are some of the gems I'm packing up in a box to send back with me. Some of these I'm bringing back for their 1950-60's pulp covers:
Black Women for Beginners, Saundra Sharp (for more books on antebellum life check the Stone Baby Games website in the next few days.
A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Iris Murdoch.
Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges.
The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, retold by Joseph Bedier. (with cool cover, not like the one in the link)
The Dream Merchants, Harold Roberts.
The Mesh, Lucie Marchal.
Missing Time, Budd Hopkins.
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (wicked cool tawdry cover! Not the one in the link.)
The Problem of the Wire Cage, John Dickson Carr. (another tawdry pulp cover)
Missing Time, Budd Hopkins.
Skin and Bones, Thorne Smith (yet another awesome cover, same as the one in the link!)
Sin Doll, Orrie Hitt ("The only way Cherry could get places was by going bad...and cherry wanted to get places! A novel which focuses in on the hot picture racket--boldly revealing how girls are recruited--and why!" And then there's the cover!)
Primitive Orgy, Bob Tralins ("'There is only one way to get the evil spirit out of my body!' she moaned...." see the awesome pulp cover in the link.)
The Big Sky, A.B. Guthrie, jr.
A Story of Deep Delight, Thomas McNamee (autographed even!)
A Victorian era three volume collection of the works of William Shakespeare.
The 1887 edition of Cyclopaedia of Obstetrics and Gynecology, volume III (Obstetrics : The Pathology of Labor)
The complete score of A. Maillart's, Les Dragons de Villars (from around the mid-late 1800's as far as I can tell)

I'm Morgan LeFay, I beguiled Merlin, and all I got was this blond child

Chris brought Ingrid up to the farmer's market. My boothmate Crystal had her 3 year old daughter there, too. Fun was had by all. Asha and Ingrid are both cherubic blond little imps, and they get along very well. Crystal and I watched Asha and Ingrid do cute things, ate free food, and didn't sell much of anything. I sold one bottle of edible massage oil. Slow day, end of season. Anyway, so this woman came up to our booth to ask if we were interested in having a booth at a local charity event in December. After she gave us the details (I thought about it), she asked if Asha and Ingrid were sisters. "Nope," we said. We pointed out who was whose baby. Then the woman looked at me with total disbelief and said, "How on earth did you get a blond daughter?"

Let me just stop here and describe what's going through my head at this moment. I want to be rude. I want to point out to her how obnoxious her question is. I want to say equally obnoxious and flip things, like "I had sex with a blond elf or fairy or some freakishly blond unhuman creature. Doesn't matter what he was, he was so blond I was blinded by the light in his hair. Nine months later I felt ill, I leaned up against a tree and pushed and pushed and out came this little blond thing. I think she might be a changeling, or a halfling. It's amazing when you think about it. They've written songs about this sort of thing, and I never believed them until I gave birth to a blonde baby." Unfortunately I didn't say any of this, because I might want in on her little charity event. So I say, "Her father's blond."

And she just doesn't stop. "Well he must be really blond." Now what am I to say to this? "Why yes, you nosy and annoying wench, he's freakishly blond. The doctors thought he was an albino until they ran tests on him. He's so blond he was given automatic citizenship by Denmark and Norway, on top of his Swedish citizenship." I don't say any of this. I'm trying to be polite and I'm horribly insulted. Instead, I say, "yeah. He's pretty blond. But my older daughter looks just like me."

At this point I have no interest in participating in the charity event. I don't really like having to justify the genetic makeup of my children. I thought the "are you babysitting" comment I've received was insulting, but this one takes the cake. It wasn't so much what she said, as much as it was her attitude. How could I possibly create such a thing? I must be part of some kind of freak family to have such a freakishly blond child.

Why do people say stupid shit and get away with it? Why did I hold my tongue?

How do you like your tea?

Well, of course things got better. I stand on the sun sunny side of the street, and once again everything is right with the world, and what's not right will be so eventually, with a little work and love. My dad is still in intensive care. I'm going to visit him next week. Let's talk about something else.

This afternoon I walked to town with Meg. It is a gorgeous day and I had to ask myself what in tarnation possessed me to wear jeans. My legs yearned for a skirt. I've fixed that now.

After Meg and I parted ways I went to the Co-op and got some tea. Sometimes I'm a little self conscious about fixing tea in public, because I generally use two tea bags of the strongest black tea, a good deal of soy milk, and a big gob of honey. I'm not a tea purist in the sense I think some health food store frequenters are. I like it sweet and milky, organic or not, and never just plain, except for when I'm drinking really good Japanese green tea, which I only buy at the Asian food market. Green tea is for special occasions. Give me black tea, and lots of it every day, at any time of the day, as long as there's milk and honey. Today I used something called "Choice Black Tea", but Pu-erh, Irish Breakfast, Yorkshire Gold, and PG Tips are my favorites. I like Twinnings in a bind. It reminds me of the Ellingboe Norigarn (family cottage) in New Harbor, Maine.

So I like my tea strong, dark, sweet, and milky. As I said, I don't generally do with this high quality Japanese green tea, but I even put milk and honey in the Chinese green tea that comes in the cool tins from the Asian food market. While I like my tea sweet, I don't like to mask the natural bitterness. At home I'm very particular about how long I steep my tea. I steep pu-erh for at least 10 minutes (until it's murky and black), PG Tips, Yorkshire Gold, and other English black teas sit for no more than 5. If I'm at a restaurant, I'd rather drink something else if they have crappy tea. This doesn't mean I drink something else. I'm a little addicted to tea, and I'm too hooked to be a tea snob. I can make bad tea taste good to me. Okay, I'm really addicted to tea. There are worse things to be hooked on. I like my addictions to be life-sustaining.

I don't drink coffee any more. I had my first cup at age six and gave it up for good when I was pregnant with Ingrid. I don't really miss it at this point. But I was the same way about preparing a cup in public. I liked my cream and honey in my coffee. You don't find this mentality with tea drinkers so much, but I had on more than one occasion, felt a scornful eye as I filled my cup with cream and counted to 5 or 10 while the honey flowed. I could almost hear people say, "Why didn't you just order a latte?" I ordered plenty of them. I ordered coffee and doctored it appropriately when I was short on cash.

But my coffee drinking days are long gone. Back to tea. I'll take it strong, dark, sweet, milky, a little bitter, always hot, nearly black, sometimes green, sometimes spicy, in a cup, from a pot, with a friend, caffeinated, often fermented, rarely herbal (but then mostly medicinally). And naturally I ask, what does this say about me? Draw your own conclusions, and I'll reveal later what I think.

But let's talk about you, gentle reader. Tell me how you like your tea. Don't like tea? Tell me how you like your coffee. Don't like coffee? Tell me how you like your favorite beverage which requires thoughtful preparation.

Off topic, I don't talk about Steal Away Jordan here anymore, but I had to share this great review with the lacquer box readers.

David Lanham Art

Smack Down the Optimist Day

It comes shortly after Talk Like a Pirate Day. Without going into too many details, I was the Optimist in question, and the smacking was severe, continuous, and came out of nowhere. Much of the morning (and the night before) I spent reeling from the smack down, listening to Alice in Chains and exclaiming "I don't understand!", and exhibiting other physical manifestations of acute trauma and stress. Yeah, it was that bad. No, I can't go into details, but I'll say to the two people I talked to about what was going on, thank you a million times over, my friends. And to the two people I talked to (not about it), thank you, too. It was helpful not to focus on the drama for a while.

This morning, while the worst transpired, my mom called. I called her back an hour later. My dad had a heart attack, and was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. He'll be in the hospital until Tuesday. Lots of tests, still trying to assess the damage, the heart attack may not have been "mild". Unfortunately, regular readers here can surmise it wasn't a huge surprise.

The afternoon improved. I managed to recover from the original smack down, and we're well on our way to working things out. Yeah, the optimist is back! The day is over and I can reflect and say "I just had one of the shittiest days of my life, and now it's over." One good thing was the person who shared the shitty day and I came to a new understanding of each other and can move forward more positively.

I had forgotten how much I like Alice in Chains.

Loving the Monster

We had a mini playtest of Malice the other day, and the mechanics that I tested did what I wanted them to do. This game will be GM-less. Players take turns telling the story from their character's point of view. You will always have a doll, a child who has a relationship with the doll, and the family, friends, and maybe the pets of the child. The first scene sets up a conflict between the child (and I use that term loosely. It's anyone under 21) and her family. The next scene establishes through a dice roll the relationship between the doll and the child. The child always loves the doll, but dice roll determines if the child trusts or fears the doll. And that's where I left it. That's where I got stuck.

Malice is supposed to be like those ghost and horror stories you tell while you sit around a camp fire. In the story, the ghost, the monster, the evil doll is, well, evil. You're not supposed to empathize with it. You're supposed to be afraid of it. You feel it staring at you, and you see it lurking in the brush, ready to do horrible things to you. By making the doll a PC, I think I changed that. The doll in Malice is the protagonist.

Where I thought I was doing campfire story, I'm actually doing Disneyfied fairy tales. It is the alleged villain who is the most dynamic character. And I say alleged, because I always believed that Maleficent had every right to be pissed at Sleeping Beauty's parents. And how can one possible feel like part of the family if she's always referred to as "The Wicked Queen"? Snow White was a brat, and she was not the fairest of them all. Her step-mother had brains, beauty, and power. She was the real hottie in the kingdom.

I'm not stuck anymore. Malice will explore pediophobia by making the object of fear the protagonist. I didn't say good guy, I said protagonist. Where Steal Away Jordan has gobs of dice, Malice is all about bluffing. You never know if the doll is acting with benevolence or malice.

I might run Acts of Evil at JiffyCon in November. I played a little of it at GenCon, and I'm very curious. If I understand it correctly, the PC's are the antagonists. I didn't realize that until we wrapped up our scene and talked a little about it. How cool is that? I can't wait to see how it works.


The Project Gutenberg Ebook of Household Stories, by Grimm

The Villain
And oh crap, I just discovered someone is working on a game called Malice. It has nothing to do with dolls, but still. I need a new title. Crap.

Alice

Based on a true story, and only slightly embellished. The names have not been changed.

The moment she saw the baby doll, Ingrid fell in love with her. She loved her musty old house smell, the crazing and cracking on her composition finish, her frayed red cotton dress, and even the voice box that sounded more like a death rattle. The doll was older than her grandmother. Mama wouldn't tell her where she got it. It didn't matter. Ingrid named her Alice and she loved her dearly. She swaddled Alice in a fabric scrap that mama gave her and supported her neck so her head wouldn't fall off.

Her big sister, Bea, on the other hand, would not go near Alice. She smelled like the creepy basement, she looked dead, possibly evil. Where Ingrid saw a loving gaze in Alice's hand painted eyes, Bea saw malice--towards her. "Keep that thing away from me!" cried Bea when Ingrid held Alice up to her to adore. "She's scary!"

At last, Ingrid had something that Bea didn't want. She had something that kept Bea away from her. Ingrid loved Alice, and Alice loved Ingrid. She didn't even notice that the cats hissed at the baby doll. Alice was special. By the end of the day, Ingrid and Alice were inseparable. Mama tucked both Ingrid and Alice into Ingrid's toddler bed. Ingrid snuggled up to her old new friend, and whispered secrets in her ear.

That night, something startled Bea awake. Something lurked in her room, and it wasn't a cat. Something crept up on to her bed. Something hard and cold touched her foot. She turned on the light. There sat Alice at the foot of her bed staring at Bea with those dead painted eyes.