Category: Mom

The More You Know

So there I am this morning, sitting in the harsh florescent light of the hospital white doctors office, with a paper not-really-functional garment wrapped around my mostly nekkid body waiting for the dr to show up.

I won’t go into too many details, suffice to say, this appointment was what I like to call the Lube, Oil and Filter change variety. The kind only girls have to attend. Is that descriptive enough?

So as I sat there a’waiting the inevitable prodding from a stranger, I tried to remain calm. A few deep breaths were at hand. Maybe some humming.

Then as I relaxed, my eyes began to wander to the décor of the room. I mean, there’s nothing else to do, right?

There on one wall was a BMI chart and a flyer about flu shots. Over there, a startlingly graphic chart of the female reproductive system. That’s always worth a few minutes of “well that’s just…weird….”

And then my eyes traveled to another wall and landed on this little piece of art:




My paper gown crinkled loudly as I shrunk back in horror.

Oh. My. God.

Ok, ok, look. I realize I’ve not had the opportunity to give birth in this little life of mine, but I am over 40 and fairly familiar with how all the parts work. I’m not naïve about the female body…….

But let me tell you this: that little candy mold looking thing is NOT encouraging any desire for birthin’ no babies inside of me at all.

That circle in the lower left corner? That thing is as big as a bread plate. I don’t want no watermelon coming though my bread plate! Hell, I don’t even want something in that part of my body to become as big as a bread plate!

And you know that the progression from the top left all the way to the right then down and back to the bottom left is going to hurt. You can’t take an orifice the size of dime and make it a bread plate without some massive amount of pain.

Personally, I think that when each little girl reaches that milestone in her life where she “becomes a woman” that she should be issued one of these little silicone baking dishes.

Just pin that to your wall, sweetheart, and take a gooooood look. If yer feeling frisky around those boys, just remember: BREAD PLATE!

I wonder if I can order two for my goddaughters? There’s still time to get ahead of this thing.

Meanwhile……

I appreciate that it is December and no where near Mom’s Day, but I’m just saying, if you still have a mom that walks this earth, take a moment to thank that nice lady for pushing your huge cabeza through her bread plate. That’s an act of love if there ever was one.

Note to my own dear, sweet Mom: I was your third watermelon. Whatever were you thinking? Both me and my huge pumpkin head thank you.


What Black Friday Means to You….

…means something else entirely to me.

November 25th isn’t just the day after Thanksgiving, at least not in my family.

Today isn’t shopping in my world. What this day means to me trends more toward apple pie. No, not pumpkin. Apple.

That’s because today would have been my father’s 80th birthday. He was a rather cantankerous fella, and he didn’t like celebrating holidays or birthdays much. He didn’t like cake either.

Ice cream worked just fine. And occasionally an apple pie. That was his favorite. A simple apple pie and vanilla ice cream.

Dad always got a bit of short shrift by having a birthday that was either the day of Thanksgiving, or right nearby. Since he wasn’t much of a holiday kind of guy, I guess that didn’t matter.

Never one to be deterred by crankiness, mom would whip up an apple pie. Then after we ate dinner but before bedtime, we’d each get a slice of pie with some vanilla ice cream. If we were lucky, the pie was still hot from the oven and the ice cream would melt and we’d eat and have something like a nice family moment together.

Not long after I moved to the Bay Area, my mom, dad and sister came to visit me in my tiny apartment. I made Thanksgiving dinner, the full spread, in my ancient kitchen. And of course, I made an apple pie for dad.

It’s at the holidays when tradition seems to matter the most. So even though it was sometimes a little rocky living in the house with the incredibly strong personality that defined my dad, having pie on his birthday is still tradition.

Today, while the world shops and fights over deals on big screen TVs, I’m a little quieter. A little more thoughtful.

I asked The Good Man if he wanted me to make another pie (we already finished the pumpkin pie from yesterday). He said “maybe cherry?”

Yes. Cherry. Perhaps our new tradition begins today.






Photo by Crystal Woroniuk and used royalty free from stock.xchng.


Just Like Evil Large Corporation Used To Make

While in the course of every adult’s life, whether male or female, there inevitably comes a time when you simply think to yourself, “I want my mommy.”

As we’ve become a mobile society, moving around to where opportunity is best, we often find ourselves in a geographical location far removed from mommy. Or for some unfortunate few, mommy has passed along and so there is no mommy to be had.

So in the absence of mommy, we must turn to the food that mommy used to make to help us feel comfort. By eating something familiar, there is a molecular “there, there” and a pet on the fevered head to make it all seem not so bad.

For many of us raised through the seventies, “food like mom used to make” may not have been the fabulous made from scratch homemade stuff of the Pleasantville moms of the fifties.

No, our moms had jobs and so they put on a blouse with the floppy bow at the neck and went to work to earn not only a paycheck but self respect.

And so our moms served us food no less comforting but bit more pre-processed.

As adults we find ourselves craving “mom’s” food that comes from a conglomeration like, say, KRAFT.

Which is not to say that KRAFT equals mom, but sometimes something that KRAFT makes does equal comfort.

I fell into such a KRAFT hole recently when I found myself lost and confused. I became overworked and overtired, low on a variety of essential nutrients and, most concerning, rather dehydrated. I found, in that moment, that all I wanted, needed, craved like the dickens was cheese slices. Good old-fashioned KRAFT cheese food that is neither cheese nor food, and wrapped in thin pieces of plastic.

This is frankenfood, to be sure. But damn it…KRAFT cheese slices make a darn nice grilled cheese sammich. Those fake orange plastic slices melt so nice under the heat of my toaster oven. Pair this with tomato soup and I feel, for a moment, mom’s hug and everything is just simply going to be all right.

Like Pavlov’s dog, I salivate at the sound of the crinkling wrapper, ready to take the first one out of the covering and shove the perfect square whole and intact into my waiting maw. While the toaster oven warms up, another slice goes down the hatch and my comfort-o-meter begins to register that something good is happening.

I feel a moment’s regret. A slight remorse. What IS this crap I’m eating? Then the plastic wrapper rustles again and I’m loading slices up on bread in gleeful anticipation.

My dearest mom would likely shake her head to think that I could possibly equate this crap food with her comfort. It’s a complicated association, and one I’m not proud of. But there is no denying the simple addictive magic of the sugar/fat/salt combination of ingredients that KRAFT loves to peddle to us unsuspecting rubes.

Look, the only KRAFT item I love more than American cheese slices is a nice big brick of Velveeta. Oh yes. Oh so very yes.

There’s a sucker born every minute and I’m standing in that line.





Even Gourmet Magazine understands.


Photo from user name Lazarus-long, used under a Creative Commons license, and found on Wikipedia.

Today’s Theme Thursday is: brick. See how I slipped that one in there? I’m a sly dog.


Oh…That’s Not A Good Sound

Last evening, I sat curled up in the corner of my comfy couch, sleeping feline nearby, laptop lid up, idly surfing about, catching up on the news of the day. The Good Man did something similar in the next room. Giants baseball on the radio, the sounds of Duane Kuiper calling the game.

From out of nowhere, the lights flickered, and then went out. The instant it went dark, a loud whining sound could be heard outside. The unmistakable sound of a power transformer under extreme strain. It went on for a long time. Stopped, then started again.

And I slipped back into memory. It was the early 1990’s. My folks were living in Carlsbad and I was home for a few weeks between summer school and the start of the regular school year at NMSU.

It was a beautiful, clear summer day. I decided to take a long walk and get some exercise in before my folks came home from work. I left the house about 3:30 in the afternoon and walked down long country roads. My folks were living on the outskirts of Carlsbad at that time (if you’re from there, it was out on Cherry Lane near the CARC farm).

The first half of the walk was great. It was a gorgeous New Mexico day. On my return trip, things started to get ominous. In August in the southeastern part of the state, storms come in fast and furious. Emphasis on furious. Carlsbad is at the tail end of tornado alley, but being at the tail end doesn’t mean the tornados are any less frequent.

As I walked a little faster, the sky turned deep black, and then green. The clouds started to boil. This was bad. Very, very bad.

The rain came quickly and the temperature dropped twenty degrees. The powerful winds whipped raindrops into my bare legs and arms. Then the hail started. Small icy bits at first, then growing larger.

My whole body shuddered when I heard the sirens I’d come to both fear and hate. Tornado sirens. That meant a tornado had been spotted and all we could do was wait.

I was still about a mile from home, on foot, and in the center of the storm.

I picked up the pace a lot more. I ran off and on, but as I’m not a runner, I had to slow down so I could catch my breath.

Already drenched, I groaned when the rain picked up intensity. Thunder shook the ground, the trees, the terrified girl by the side of the road.

Lightning cracked out of the sky and hit a power pole across the street and ahead a bit.

That’s when I heard that sound. A power transformer under strain.

The power transformer exploded, sending flames and sparks into the sky.

I dove headfirst into a now very soaked alfalfa field, remembering my early training on “get low when lightning is around,” and lay as flat as possible, hugging mother earth while lightning struck all around.

Soon the heart of the storm moved on and I could hear the thunder a couple miles away, counting “one Mississippi, two Mississippi” between lightning strikes and thunderclaps.

When it seemed I was safe, I leapt up and ran for my folk’s home as fast as I could. I got home safely. I called my mom (a no-no in the storm, but I needed my mommy!) and since we had no tornado shelter, she recommended that I stay to the center of the house and if a tornado was coming to get into the bathtub and hunker down.

“Get ready to leave the house!” The Good Man commanded sharply, snapping me from my reverie. I was back in Northern California and that transformer sound had stopped.

I jumped to action, running to get the cat carrier out of the closet and once The Feline was secure (she loves the cat carrier and walks right in with no complaint) I ran room to room and unplugged every device that was attached to a socket. The Good Man was on the phone with PG&E advising them of the situation.

We dashed outside to see what was going on and the neighbors were all outside too, talking over what they saw and heard. Soon the sirens of a fire engine came racing toward us and the firemen let us know a powerline was down two streets over but no explanation as to why the powerline came down on a quiet evening. PG&E were on their way and we should go back inside.

We lit candles and got out flashlights and settled back into the couch. Safe. On that summer day back when in Carlsbad, I was also safe. Tornados did touch down, but several miles away.

This past April when an earthquake came along and the house and ground shook, The Good Man, a longtime veteran of the Bay Area, commanded “Get in a doorway!” and I did.

I’m grateful to have a partner who is the epitome of grace under fire, and I’m grateful for my Mom’s wise support from two decades ago, too. Mostly, I’m just grateful when there is someone strong and wise to guide me through a crisis.

That makes me feel safe.




Image from Ring Electric’s blog.


Going Four for Four

Today, after I get home from work and grab a little snack, I will reach into my special cabinet and remove the 1970’s era KitchenAid mixer waiting there. The mixer will go on the counter next to my battle worn Cocinas de New Mexico cookbook.

It’s time to make biscochitos.

This is my fourth and final entry for my local county fair, which starts this weekend. I decided to enter my biscochitos in the “culinary arts” event under the “ethnic desserts – cookie” category.

I first learned how to make the New Mexico State Cookie on the very same avocado green mixer that I will use tonight. It’s been a part of my life as long as I can remember, churning out bread, tortillas, grinding meat and makes endless batches of cookies. My mom oversaw my first forays into baking, helping make sure I got the measurements right and followed the recipe to the letter.

Baking biscochitos is like a meditation. Mix the dough, an extra pinch of anise seed for luck, roll out the heavy dough on the counter, cut out circles and bake to golden perfection.

This process, these cookies and that green mixer are all a part of my DNA.

I have no idea what sort of competition my cookies will go up against, but I know this: win or lose, The Good Man and I will have a fresh batch of homemade bicochitos to get us through the day.

A little bit of New Mexico in the middle of a very busy work week. That’s a winner!




Note to El Viejo: I will make them both with and without cinnamon sugar on top and then decide which I think the judges would prefer. I tend to think I should go gringo style and turn in the sugared tops to try to curry the favor of the judges.