29 and counting

So the day Jesse turned 29, this happened:

1.  Jesse mopes around the house. I promise him I’ll celebrate his birthday next week because it’s the first day of classes at URI on Monday and I haven’t finished writing my syllabus.

2.  He gets a call from Josh at 6:00 p.m. on Sunday night. Josh is the Relief Society president’s son. Josh says, “Hi brother Rich, I need your help. I have an economics paper I have to write and I was wondering if you have any economics books. And the paper is due tomorrow.”   

3.  Big surprise. Josh procrastinates everything; he’s in 8^th grade and his prefontal cortex won’t allow him to plan ahead, make decisions, express emotions and control impulses in a way that makes any sense whatsoever for at least another eight years. Jesse scans the bookshelf and selects A Brief History of Economics: Artful Approaches to the Dismal Science (only 530 pages!), More Money than God (a good Sunday read), and Winnie the Pooh on Management (just for fun), plus five other books.

4.  As soon as Jesse leaves I do a little happy dance in the kitchen. Jesse totally fell for it. By the time he gets back, all the guests will have arrived and the lights will be turned off so we can all jump out from our hiding places and surprise him. 

5.  It’s 6:30. I have half an hour before people are supposed to start showing up. I have to make fancy red slushy punch, set the table, rearrange the furniture, clean the house, find all the presents I wrapped because I forgot where I put them all… According to our calculations—meaning, my and Jenni’s (Josh’s mom, who was in on the plan from the beginning)—Jesse is supposed to be on his way home after 7 pm. 

6.  It’s 6:45 and everything is ready when the door opens. It’s Jesse. Crap. Luckily, when you walk into our apartment, you’re downstairs and can’t see the living room/dining area, where in his wildest dreams Jesse cannot imagine the marvelous surprises that await him.

7.   Me: WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?!

      Jesse: Um, I live here?

      Me: YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HOME YET. GET OUT!

      Jesse: Where am I going to go?

      Me: I DON’T KNOW! GO CALL YOUR MOM! GO TO THE LIBRARY!

      Jesse: What? The library is closed.

      Me: DON’T CARE. LEAVE. NOW. AND NEVER COME BACK. AT LEAST NOT FOR ANOTHER HALF HOUR. I’LL CALL YOU.

Jesse’s suspicions are confirmed: he married someone who’s a few pecans short of a fruitcake. But he leaves anyway.

Right after he leaves, everyone starts trickling in and wants to know where Jesse is. I have no idea where he is. Everyone just entertains themselves in the meantime. Our two-person space is suddenly filled with the buzzing conversations and laughter of twenty people—including two four-year-old boys who have discovered the giant exercise ball and are bouncing it up and down the hall, and an almost-two-year-old who has found my box of crayons and is eating the tips off the orange ones. 

Jesse opens the door around 7:15 and probably feels really awkward. But happy. 

This is indisputable evidence of Murphy's Law. I made three cakes. None of them turned out. Not sure why. They all had a big humps in the middle with caved in sides. I salvaged the least humpy of the cakes and tried frosting it. My decorator tip jammed every two seconds. This all happened on Sunday between 3 pm-5 pm. The cake tasted like potting soil, but people were nice and ate it anyway. And we didn't have any "9" candles, so Jesse was 27. Or 72.

This gift is from Josh, who by the way, now aspires to making a living as a con artist.

Artwork by Lucas and Samuel, my new best friends.

The big pot. For lobsters. Or naughty children.

Thanks Joey and Katie! Jesse won't let me touch this toy.

I think I'm going to steal this and use it myself.

I would have taken more pictures, but I was busy making balloon animals for the kids.  

Much ado about nothing

New Engluhndas are so curious about Alaska and what we did there during Christmas break. I wish I had something interesting to say in Skippyjon Jones’s accent, like:

a.  “Holy Hot Tamales! We sighted a polar bear roving near the famous John Baker’s poochito yard and it was the first time a polar bear had wandered into town from Barrow since 1978!”

b.  “Holy Green Gorillas! All three of my neighbor’s pet ravenitos got run over by a drunk snow machine driver on New Year’s Eve. Good riddance, they always pecked at our garbage and scattered it all down the street anyway…”

c.  “Holy heartburn! We shot sixteen caribou-itos and ate them in soup for two weeks straight.”      

d.  “Holy frozen frijoles! We stood outside too long on New Year’s Eve and I froze my dedo pequeno so it had to be amputated because of severe frostbite and now I keep it in a Mason jar by my bed like Ninny’s friend Mrs. Otis does with her gallstones in Fried Green Tomatoes and I’ll show it to you if you come over to visit.

But no. Everything went according to plan. It was too cold to do anything, as Paul Young’s The Shack aptly explains: “[Cold weather] releases you from expectations, performance demands, and the tyranny of appointments and schedules.” All three of my dad’s cars and the four snow machines even took a holiday and refused to start in -47 temperatures. So we stayed inside and when we went to bed at 3 a.m. it was just as dark and cold as it was when we woke up at noon the next day, so we were doubly unmotivated—I was even too unmotivated to wax poetic about anything, unlike I did about last year’s red rubber boots.

But we did eat a lot of purple pancake-itos with the tundra blueberries my mom has stored in the freezer since August, and she cooked five course breakfasts, lunches, and dinners for us every day. And my dad constructed new cat toys from dental floss and dried ptarmigan heads so we could entertain ourselves by driving the acrobatic kitty to summersaulty attempts to catch the feathered clumps with her teeth. And Landon played Killer Bunnies with us, and Merella and Dario made us homemade soap for Christmas, and Willaby ran off to hang out with her boyfriend and play fake bowling on their Wii every night, but that’s okay.

Two weeks of doing nothing in a cold, dark, icky town in the middle of nowhere goes fast when you’re with people you love.

More pictures here, if you haven't seen these yet.

The family picture. Last year I had hair. This year I look bald.

We're at the beach! This is what it looks like in winter. In -56.

My house. All the houses in Kotzebue kind of look like this: plywood boxes with ugly paint.

Robot boys.

We flew here on these planes. I jokes.

Hello Mr. Bear.

This is what my dad uses to heat our house. Everything is shipped to Kotzebue on pallets. My dad drives around town on his snow machine and piles them in his sled and stacks them as high as the roof. He has the most enviable pallet collection in town.

My butt's not cold, not at all!

This barricade of boots does not keep the fat cat from eating.

The acrobatic kitty.

Domo-kun!

Christmas in Alaska was a blast! One of the best parts was the presents. Not that because we got a bunch of stuff or anything, but because we had so much fun opening them. We started out with a white elephant gift exchange between everyone. The gifts were splendid and ranged from Pelican Poop and an over-sized pencil to a wig (real hair!) and a Howdy Doody dvd, etc. Afterwards we opened the regular presents. All of the presents were great, but there were three in particular that were especially awesome: a ChillBots robot ice tray (made in Cumberland, RI of all places), a Domo calendar (which is hanging up at work), and a t-shirt of a mustachioed Domo.

The CHILLBOTS! Perfect for making tasty frozen treats!

January displays an homage to classic films such as The Never Ending Story and Howard the Duck.

Mustachioed Domo running.

The ChillBots are very cool and I get a kick out of all things Domo. Domo is a cute little monster that hatched from an egg and is raised by a wise old rabbit that lives underground. Domo is relatively naïve about most things and stars as the main character in a series of stop-motion vignettes that document his adventures in the world. Domo is short for Domo-kun. As stated online: “Domo” in this case appears to mean more of something (usually to stress “thank you,” “excuse me,” etc), implying increased politeness. “kun” is used as “Mr.” or “Ms.” for “younger people or colleagues.” Domo gets nervous/excited a lot and tends to sweat and break wind when he does.

I suppose that it takes a certain sense of humor to appreciate Domo, but I find the shows thoroughly entertaining—more so than Sarita. One of my favorite episodes is when Domo is out wandering and comes across a group of sibling foxes. He doesn’t have any siblings so isn’t quite sure how to interact. At one point in the show, the foxes start arguing until the little sister jump kicks her brother and everything turns out okay. No wonder then that when things start to go wrong later in the episode, Domo thinks he can make things better by jump kicking one of the foxes, except this time the fox goes flying across the screen since Domo is much larger than the little sister. For some reason I find this hilarious.

Another one of my favorite episodes is when Domo gets his hands on some headphones and goes around sticking them into things trying to see what they sound like.

Make it Ugly and they will come

It was the Canadians. Hard to believe, I know. Because in Canada, there are lots of things you CAN’T do: you can’t pay for fifty-cent items with only pennies, you can’t peel off your band-aids in public, or paint wooden logs, or water your lawn when it’s raining, or use dice to play craps, and if you have a water trough in your front yard, it must be filled by 5 a.m.

However, since 2001, it has been OK for people to wear hideous sweaters without impunity in Canada. Ugly Christmas Sweater Parties originated in Vancouver, according to the authors of the Ugly Christmas Sweater Party Book: The Definitive Guide to Getting Your Ugly On (Nov. 2011):

In 2001, while Americans were trying to figure out what to do with the surplus of food they stockpiled for the Y2K crisis that never was, our neighbors to the north were trying to figure out what to do with the surplus of Ugly Christmas Sweaters that they had amassed since Canada was founded in 1867.

That’s about all the scholarship there is on this aspect of the tradition. After Cool Runnings, Canada is once more accidentally fabulous.

Furthermore, sites like this are “bringing sexy back” and fueling an Ugly Sweater Renaissance. Ugly Christmas Sweater Parties in mainstream America have since come to serve two main purposes: 1) they offer an excuse to make mixed drinks with titles like, “Everybody Gets Blitzened!” and 2) they symbolize “both a celebration and mockery of holiday excess and Christmas aesthetics.”

For RIFco, the ugly sweater party—USP 2011—was mainly an excuse to patronize local thrift stores and de-clutter our houses after moving to Rhode Island.

So preparations ensued: 

1. We bought our first ever, real, live Christmas tree. A little balsam that drops a pile of needles every time we breathe. We drove up the street, picked it out at a tree lot, and stuffed it in the trunk. And then we had to buy stuff to put on it. Round one at the store: we bought a box of lights. We got home and discovered, once the lights were strung up on the tree, that we didn’t have enough lights. Round two at the store: Jesse went back to buy another box of lights. He got home and strung the second box of lights on the tree, only to discover, when the tree had been plugged in, that the “new” box of lights did not work. Round three at the store: Jesse exchanged the broken lights for new ones that worked. Round four at various stores: we looked at ornaments. They were all ugly. Round five at the store: we went to Target and found frosted glass ornaments we liked. Then the tree lost more needles. 

2. We stressed about White Elephant gifts—with good reason. Last year, we went to a WE party in Kotzebue. It was hosted by the one, the only court judge in town; my mom worked in his office. We had to make a good impression. So, we found the perfect gift, just sitting around the house: two jars of anchovies (expiration date 2008). Apparently, as soon as the exchange started and people unwrapped the first few gifts, we realized we were the only ones who understood the meaning of WE. Everyone else went out and bought candle warmers and champagne (where do you get champagne in Kotzebue?!) gift baskets. The last person to choose a gift had already had her champagne stolen, so she only had one other option, anchovies. The shock on her face at the sight of anchovies was like the kind of shock you get when you stick a paperclip in an electrical socket. How’s that for bad figurative language? 

Our USP WE gift exchange would be a test of RIFco’s social finesse. Would everyone choose worthy gifts?

3. We searched for sweaters. Salvation Army is sure to fulfill all your Ugly Sweater needs, even in July. But they have ridiculous hours, so Jesse could never go when they’re open. Three days before USP, we ran around the house, in a minor panic, because we still didn’t have sweaters. But on Friday night, Savers is a cool place to hang out. And they’re open until 9 pm. And their sweaters are just as ugly as those at Salvation Army.

4. We made way too much cinnamon caramel dip and Oreo cheesecake and tested the prepackaged, lighter-fluid soaked fake wood in the fireplace on Sunday, so that everything would be just right on Monday night.

The party was kind of a blur for me, because the tinseled pompoms on my sweater monopolized Roxali’s attention and she followed me around the whole evening and we colored all over the food table and played 10 rounds of Candy Land. But I did hear bits and pieces of the evening’s conversation, which centered on discussions of parental dysfunction in our nation’s schools, Adam’s mad Tai-kwon-do skills, a debate about whether or not Jet Li is real, and the psychologically damaging effects of teaching children that Santa is a mythological creature.   

I do remember that everyone looked ugly and bright, and that we gorged on salsa, cookies, chocolate sculptures and Venezuelan cake to the sounds of Jesse’s Christmas Rocks! mix, featuring tunes like these: “Fruitcake” (The Superions), “Don’t Shoot Me Santa” (The Killers), and “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!” (Sufjan Stevens). I recall that Roxali didn’t burn her eyebrows off while shooting wrapping paper into the fireplace, and that everyone made it into the Ugly Sweater Hall of Fame. And that there were many coveted WE gifts that were stolen numerous times: the 12-pack of toilet paper (there’s no Costco in RI, nearest one is in Boston), the plastic dragon statue, the clown, and the ceramic butt pot that someone probably made in high school art class. Personally, I think I got the best gift, but I can't even tell you what it is. It's that good. We'll just call it "The Gift That Shall Not Be Named."

Good food, good friends, ugly sweaters. The perfect way to end 2011—besides the fact that the not-so-mythological-Santa came to Rhode Island early to bring us chicken statues, refrigerator magnets, Bendaroos, and a Nikon D5100 (I think because he’s tired of seeing blurry pictures of us). So, next time you see us in 2012, we’ll be in sharp focus.

Happy Ugly Holidays!

Adam's hand-crafted chocolate sculpture, his final exam from "Chocolates & Confections" class.

Roxali drawing people wearing ugly sweaters on our ugly table cloth.

Adam and Julie sporting Salvation Army Bill Cosby Sweaters. Julie's shoulder pads were poked and envied by all. Only the Taylors can make such paragons of ugliness look so good! The Taylors made off with the dragon and a self-help book. When Julie read the title, 75 Ways to Get Organized for Christmas, Jesse said, "Hey, that's 75 more ways than I know!"

NicKim's clown. In this porcelain interpretation, the Clown disposes of Santa and gets to hold all the kids on his lap. The clown ended up going home with the Corcorans though, and NicKim took home a week's supply of toilet paper; the old-school version of Pit (with an orange call bell!) with the cover that features grandpa complete with sweater vest, tortoise shell glasses, and a pipe; and a box of Checkers.

Ugly Sweater Top Models. Jennifer in Wal-Mart: cotton sweater with snowman decals. Kaitie in Savers: wool blend with flower-print embroidery and vomit-green colored turtleneck. Sarita in Savers: Jones New York jaundice-yellow knit sweater with felt, buttons, pompoms, giant chickens kissing under mistletoe, and cow jumping into the moon.

Jesse in Savers: old 70s cable-knit grandpa sweater in maroon. Kittens and puppies singing Christmas carols for the Humane Society. The whole outfit was purchased for under $10. This is how econ majors do ugly.

Chris and Cassie in Wal-Mart's ugliest turtlenecks. Chris won the "Ugliest Sweater Award" for obvious reasons. And for not so obvious reasons: he purchased his attire from the women's department. His prize was the roadkill possum pictured on his lap.

Blurry group shot! For once, the ugly curtains bequeathed to us from our apartment's previous tenants were not frowned upon. Mike on the far right got caught up in the ugliness of it all and momentarily forgot that this was not a GQ cover shoot.

I'm not sure what to do with my sweater. I could try to sell it to uglychristmasweaterparty.com. Or, I could keep it and never wash it and let posterity fight over who gets to inherit it.

The Happy Kampers

Also a part of Rhode Island Friends and Co. are the Kampers.Travis is from California and also works at CVS. Jennifer is from Venezuela, and in her former lives, has been a runway model and a paraglider. In her current life, she is an expert cake decorator, and a wicked good volleyball player, and doesn’t cook anything out of a box. Roxali is four. She likes eating lobsters and playing with the heads that broke off our Chinamen statues (but not at the same time). Her favorite movie is Cars. I’m not sure why. We're like, best friends. It's a good thing she's coming to our Ugly Sweater Christmas Party tomorrow. She makes me feel less Scroogey. Maybe she'll bring "Teddy," who also wears sweaters from the Build-A-Bear store.

 

Yesterday we all went to Newport in the hopes of finding lobsters. We found armadillos instead. I dipped mine in a lot of my favorite food, butter. Dinner resulted in a small mountain of lobster cephalothoraxes, mandibles, and maxillipeds and discussion of vitally important lobster trivia, including: the fact that before the 20^th century lobster was the equivalent of our modern cup-o-noodles, and affluent New Englanders snubbed them and fed them only to servants (who refused to eat them no more than twice per week); and that otherwise, lobster was only good for fertilizer or fish bait; and that if you are caught boiling lobsters in Reggio Emilia, Italy you pay a fine of up to €495; and that the largest lobster ever caught weighed 44.4 pounds; and that lobsters have livers, but are not significant sources of thiamine.

Stuck in November

My brain is stuck in November. Specifically, November 23, when Jesse and I drove to UNH to pick up Jason. There was a heavy storm warning the night before/day of our scheduled departure, but the Granite State (unlike the Beehive State) is much more conscientious about plowing major thoroughfares, so we made it to Bethlehem just fine.  

and our feline friends awaited us and our shoes,

and we cooked 90% of the food ourselves (unlike last year’s Thanksgiving in a Box)—apple pies, pumpkin cobbler, honey ham, French onion green beans, roasted yams, mashed potatoes, etc., etc. and I got to be in charge, instead of just showing up and sitting around, and I didn’t burn anything, or set the smoke alarm off, AND, a challah appeared in the mailbox on Thanksgiving morning, so I didn’t have to make bread, because I don’t make bread,  

and we watched old movies,

and Poe—the cat—didn’t steal all the toilet paper out of the bathroom,

and everyone critiqued my crappy first draft of No More Ugly Pajamas! and said nice things that made me think I could finish the book, which is probably the main reason I’m still stuck in November,

and everything was perfect,

because we were in a place where people love us best,

and are happy just to hear our voices and the sounds of our laughter floating to the top of the vaulted ceilings in the house at 247 Hazen Rd.

Cinder is really EXCITED to see us. But it's hard to tell because he's 13 in human years. That's 75 in cat years.

But he still acts like a 6-month-old cat.

And he likes Jesse. Or maybe just the texture of his pants.

Real food! As opposed to fake food!

After dinner game of Citadels. I just got robbed and assassinated!

I don't know what's going on here. This is just here to make Jesse feel better about losing at checkers.

I'm trying not to feel Scroogey now that it's December, and I still haven't done my Christmas shopping, and all I want to do is eat fake food that will kill me--like Ramen Noodles. 

Oplatka dát

This November cannot pass without the obligatory reflection on things for which we are thankful. And this year, among other things, like the Twilight saga and toilet paper, we are thankful for waffles.

A preface to the waffle discussion: RI Friends and Co. There was a large influx of “younger” couples that moved to Rhode Island this summer, all within a few months apart: Hawkers, Taylors, Nickim Edwards, Corcorans, Jesse/moi. 

Mike ("Strategic Service Consultant" at DealerSocket, Inc.) and Kaitie Hawker (sales associate at Anthropologie, this chic store where you can get $500 scarves!) have been in the ward F-O-R-E-V-E-R. Almost two years. According to Mike, the arrival of all us childless couples that recently converged upon the Warwick Ward are signs of irrefutable divine intervention; they've been dying for social interaction with cool Mormon people their own age.

Julie and Adam Taylor live in a cool house with Portugese landlords who brew moonshine in their basement (I think). Julie is an LCSW in the state of RI and spends a good deal of her time at work demonstrating that Mormons are neither members of cults nor polygamists. Adam is in culinary school at Johnson and Wales and gets to take labs with titles such as "Chocolates and Confections" and will be famous one day for founding Muscle Man Bakery, a bakeshop where chefs can do lateral raises and work the high incline bench press while they wait for their bread dough to rise.

Nick and Kim Edwards have baby Colette, but the baby doesn't mind hanging out with us. Nick is a neuroscience PhD student at Brown (you know that game Minesweeper, he's really good at it) and at one point worked in a lab at BYU supervising the growth of diarrhea cultures (I think). Kim does good accents. Chinese and Irish are her specialties.

Chris Corcoran (air traffic control operator/man/person at T.F. Green International Airport) and Cassie (elementary school teacher) have 54-pound baby Jak. Jak eats grapes and peanut butter and dog food.

Anyway, RI Friends and Co. invented a new holiday: Oplatka dát, which is my Czech translation for "Wafflegiving." It takes place sometime in November before Thanksgiving. It's kind of a rip off of National Waffle Day, which honors 8/24/1968, the date of the first U.S. waffle iron patent. Wafflegiving also commemorates the waffle’s illustrious history (take a deep breath and read really fast): waffles were first dreamed up in ancient Greece as obelios (flat cakes heated between two metal plates and cooked over the fire) OR in China where flour/eggs/milk were substituted for soy beans/rice/cottage cheese (allow me to say, “gross!”), THEN evolved into delicacies during the Middle Ages when waffle irons were carved with coats of arms/religious emblems, AFTER WHICH they migrated with the Pilgrims to Holland and later to America in 1620, WHEREUPON Thomas Jefferson instituted waffle parties in the White House with a waffle iron he brought back from France sometime in the 1800s, BUT it wasn’t until the 1964 World’s Fair that Belgian waffles (with yeast and egg whites) came to town, AND not until 1972 that those mass-produced cardboard patties riddled with Tartrazine (a.k.a. yellow no. 5) became famous from Kellogg’s coining of the phrase “Leggo My Eggo.”

Wafflegiving also celebrates other random ideas, including these: the word “waffle” comes from the Celtic “Wiff tille,” which may be translated as, “Alas! The mountain goat has my sandwich!” AND the fact/myth that part of L. Ron Hubbard’s theories of Scientology initially posited that mankind emerged when “a giant space waffle passed by the earth and sprinkled the ground with life-spores, from which human being sprang up."

Our first Wafflegiving was pretty casual: white chocolate waffles and vanilla-cinnamon waffles topped with apples, strawberries, bananas, whipped cream, homemade coconut syrup, and chocolate and caramel sauce and served with chicken-apple sausage and Galvanina Blood Orange soda.  

We are already gearing up for next year. By November 2012, chef Adam will have discovered how to make waffles out of gold leafed chocolate and then we’ll all be done for. 

This is the only picture we took at Wafflegiving. Jak thought my lap was comfy. See this for more details about this picture.