Frecklicious

Friday, November 19, 2021

Endearingly Sassy

You've probably heard of Occam's Razor: (in brief) Of two competing theories, the simpler explanation is to be preferred.

You've probably heard of Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

But I'll bet a shiny nickel you've never heard of Folden's Razor - on account of I made it up.

Folden's Razor is something along the lines of: Welp, I'm sure they're doing their best.

That's it. Super simple. Except you actually believe it, and not just in a thinly-veiled Hanlon's Razor sort of way. Like, you roll your eyes while saying Folden's Razor? Still Hanlon's Razor. "I'm sURe They'Re DoiNg tHEiR bEsT" - Hanlon 100%, obv. Say it in genuine sincerity yet mentally punctuate it with a /s so quiet that it wouldn't even wake the precious baby jeebus? Yeah, sorry to break it to you - still Hanlon.

Since I'm the one writing this it may seem like I'm gatekeeping, but honestly it's not me, it's Folden. And she would happily let you in on it, but it's simply a level of goodness and decency I suspect most people just can't ever hope for in themselves. At the end of the day you're the one with the Hanlon problem and there's nothing you can do about it - trust me, I've tried.

I have found that, with practice, you can damp your Hanlon down to a barely noticeable tinge around the edges of your otherwise pure and generous soul. At least some of the time, anyway. When people aren't being dicks about stuff too much.

In typical fashion, though, Folden assumes you're doing your best and finds you endearingly sassy rather than in possession of a generally poor attitude. And really, what else can a person do with that kind of grace but keep trying to live up to it?

When people aren't being dicks about stuff too much, anyway.

Friday, July 2, 2021

Fully Fledged

Medium Fry has been moved out for less than two weeks, and she already claims to miss our cooking.

Naturally, I took that to mean our delicious cooking, because I am a sucker for flattery and this dovetailed neatly with my idea of myself being a good cook. But when I woke up this morning I discovered an alternate interpretation had crept into my mind overnight: she misses our cooking, in the gerund sense. Implicit in that sense of it are also our planning the menu; our buying, transporting and organising the groceries; our doing the cooking... and her dining well every day for the low, low cost of occasionally washing some dishes.

Hmm.

I expect she does genuinely miss "our cooking," but it also wouldn't take long - perhaps less than two weeks, even - to start to get an inkling of how much work actually goes in to "our cooking." Knowing she was going to move out soon, I've been trying to back-lead her into some ideas by forcing DH to engage in fun dinner table discussions like, "What did you cook for yourself back when you were a student on a budget? No, really, I am suddenly extremely interested in this topic and we should discuss it in great detail. Right now. I insist."

Also: "Wow, this simple, healthy dinner with plenty of leftovers only cost seven dollars to make! That's less than a dollar per serving - what an amazing meal idea it could be for a student on a budget!"

Also: "Beans sure are an economical yet nutritious choice, for instance for a student on a budget!"

To which Medium Fry would smile politely yet vacantly, as if my mouth sounds were washing pleasantly over her but were in no way consequential to her life. And thus died my educational campaign on the merits of meal planning and beans.

On the bright side, DH and I ended up having quite a bit of fun talking about what we used to cook for ourselves back in the day. 89¢ Swanson meat pies featured heavily - but that was before, when they were way better, and did we mention eighty-nine cents?

Ugh. I'd tune us out, too. We sound like Reader's Digest and Woman's World had a profoundly stupid love child.

Anyway, I sent her off with a little rolly-cart to tote her groceries home in and nearly 21 years of exposure to my organisational mastery, so now she gets to figure it all out however she likes. Maybe one day we'll get to try her cooking and find that she has moved past the "+ side salad" days of yore without any back-leading needed on my part at all. I can hardly wait to wash those dishes up afterward.

Sunday, May 23, 2021

Gardening Gods

I rarely feel the need to shoot anything. It's just not my jam. But there is nothing to put me in a murderous rage quite like squirrels digging in my flower pots. I have waited eight months for some greenery to reappear in this garbage climate, and those little a-holes killing my precious flower babies to bury their stupid peanuts - why, it's enough to make me fantasize about cutting a hole in my kitchen window screen and spending my days obsessively shooting them with a BB gun, just like my Dad used to do* with the magpies that ate the cat food** at the farm***.

* After the divorce. (Or possibly contributing to it? Timeline unclear.)

** Barn cats. Also raccoons.

*** I've come a long way, baby.

In my imaginings I then roast the squirrels over a bonfire and gnaw their stupid peanut-digging bones while making prolonged crazy person eye contact with my stupid peanut-feeding neighbours. Broad daylight. Gunfight slide whistle sounds float on the breeze. Squirrel grease (?) drips down my chin and I don't even wipe it away.

In my mind's eye, it is beautiful, although my mind's eye does occasionally move on to wondering what my life will be like once dementia begins to strip away the civilised veneer I've so carefully crafted in the years since I last shot a magpie through a kitchen window.

Anyway, instead of all that, what I actually do is this: Head to the "global" aisle of the grocery store (or whatever questionable term they've decided to roll with at your local store) and buy the biggest, reddest, hottest-looking sack of ground chilies I can find, which I sprinkle liberally over the soil in my planters. And then I pray to the gods of angiosperms and vengeance that the squirrels be plagued by the spicy shits of a thousand burritos if they ever dare to enter my flower pots again.

Reapply after heavy rains, and feel free to alter your prayer to suit whichever gods you prefer for these sorts of applications. Works real good, at least as far as the squirrel problem goes. I'll let you know when I figure out how to get the peanut-feeding neighbours to lay off.

Thursday, April 29, 2021

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Monday, March 29, 2021

Pantry Paradox

Years ago, when Small Fry was a baby, a visiting friend of mine complained that my kitchen cupboards had "no food, only ingredients!" I LOL'd then, and I still have a good chuckle over it now and again. Sometimes, however, I have a bit of a grumble instead, usually when I'm feeling snacky and all there is in the pantry are containers of quinoa and flour and so forth - ingredients but not food, you might even say. As paradoxical as it may seem, my friend's assessment was hilariously accurate.

Here's a secret, or maybe a not-so-secret since I say it all the time: if [delicious item] is around, I am liable to eat it. You can put whatever tasty treat you want in those brackets and it probably still holds true, so my solution is basically to not keep snacks or treats around and trust that laziness usually wins out over snackiness. (Usually.) Speaking of, please remind me to delete the Skip the Dishes app from my phone when I'm done writing this.

That same friend calls it Skip the Bitches, by the way. She really is a master of the apt observation. Maybe I'll keep it around after all - there is simply no way to predict when you might need to defuse a bitchy day with a food delivery. *checks period tracker app* Like maybe Thursday this week, for instance. Who can guess.

Small Fry opened the pantry the other day then promptly slammed it shut again, with an exasperated, "Oh my gawd, our snack cupboard sucks!" Despite never having lived in a house with this feature and having been told roughly every single day of his life to eat a piece of fruit if he's hungry, he has somehow come to believe that a snack cupboard is a thing that we have - it's just that the one we have really sucks. (Unless you're super into dried beans, in which case you are well and truly covered for snacks at my house.) I corrected his misconception and pointed him yet again toward the fruit bowl, much to his disapproval.

Small Fry leads a charmed life. So charmed, in fact, that our shitty/nonexistent snack cupboard may well be The Thing. You know what I mean: THE Thing. The Thing that he has to go to therapy for and pins everything wrong in his life upon. The Thing his parents did to him that made it so he, I dunno, can never trust people fully and fears commitment. Or, y'know, whatever, just a totally random example there.

Every parent worries about The Thing, right? By this age he's surely already experienced The First Memory so that ship has sailed for me, fingers crossed it was a good one, or at the very least fairly benign, or at the very very least not one of the three to five potentially traumatic moments I have in mind. But I might still be able to control The Thing. I just really don't know when The Thing is solidified for a kid, so I've been walking on eggshells here for years. Will it be that all we ever had for snacks was g-d fruit in a fricking bowl and not even a cupboard like civilised folk? The cruel Halloween tax I charge every year, payable in tiny, hard-won KitKats? That I am The Boss of Christmas so the tree gets decorated the way I want? That time I found the stick person porn he had drawn?

... Ooooohhhh.

Yeah.

That was probably The Thing.

Okay, never mind. Seems unlikely I'll be able to do anything that outshines that little vignette in his mind. Parenting spiral over, carry on.

And if you're hungry, I have zero guilt about saying this: just eat an orange, dammit.

Sunday, February 28, 2021

Butter Cabin

My dad died this week. It was sudden, but also not completely surprising after all his health issues the past couple of years. It felt for a while now like his doctors were playing whack-a-mole with symptoms - as soon as one thing would improve, something else seemed to go wrong. And then it was just... over.

He was 66.

Saskatchewan's Covid guidelines allow for funerals, with a maximum of 30 attendees if safe distancing can be maintained and everyone wears a mask and doesn't socialise afterward. Honestly, it was the least "Saskatchewan" event I've ever attended in Saskatchewan. Short about 200 people I didn't know but who somehow knew me. Everyone standing awkwardly 2 metres apart, giving the occasional fist-bump of condolences (if you were lucky to get even that much human contact). No one went out for coffee afterward. Was it even really in Saskatchewan without those things, or did we jump briefly into some parallel plane?

It's a little-known fact that precisely zero comfort or closure can come from a service where there are no egg salad sandwiches and you do not ugly-cry at dozens of elderly strangers; I was yesterday years old when I found that out.

Someone got up to speak a bit about Dad, and they talked about what a good cook he was. In the middle of everything, it actually gave me a little chuckle - he definitely was a good cook, but he wasn't always, and I flashed back to the concoctions he would make for my brother and I when we visited him on weekends after our parents divorced. We ate a lot of squeeze cheeze on crackers, scorched shop coffee heaped with sugar and powdered creamer (which I still have a taste for), and cheap/weird/gross/all-of-the-above things between ultra-thinly-sliced-for-economy white bread (which I do not). But in my mind, the food item most emblemic of those times before Dad figured out how to cook was the butter cabin.

It wasn't called a butter cabin then. I don't think it had a name. It doesn't even have a recipe, exactly, because it's not really made of things you would tend to think of as ingredients for food. Food that you would eat, anyway, and especially feed to children as a meal. But right now it feels important that I share it with you, so here goes.

Butter Cabins

~~Ingredients~~
~~UNgredients?~~
You will need:
a sleeve of saltine crackers
a pound of butter (fridge cold)
ketchup
HP sauce
a small, sharp knife

Method:
Sit down at the kitchen table with your... materials. Peel the foil wrapper from the butter. Use the sharp knife to cut medium-thick slices of butter - if it curls up it's too thin, we're building a cabin here so this is not the time to be thinking of heart health. Upon cutting each individual slice, carefully prop it up along one of the edges of a saltine; continue slicing and propping until you have crafted a four-walled, open-ceilinged enclosure out of butter around the perimeter of the cracker. This structure comprises your butter cabin.

This is where the cabin analogy falls apart, but we shall press on.

Fill the butter cabin with ketchup. Place a small dollop of HP sauce on top of the ketchup. Whole thing immediately down the hatch in one go because it's impossible to bite a quarter cup of ketchup and if you wait too long the walls will melt.

Repeat until your crackers are gone.

Due to attendance restrictions, I think I was the only person at the funeral who knew Dad from before he could cook. I suppose we all feel we know a special, secret side of people in our lives - likely everyone there was thinking about their own unique moments. But our relationship was strained for a long time - don't worry, nothing to do with the weird food, your kids probably won't hold your cooking against you - and maybe I was clinging a bit to the feeling of being an historian specialising in a certain span of his years that no one else there had experienced. Which I suppose is why I wanted to share butter cabins with you: I just needed to work my authority on the subject into the conversation somehow. (Ugh, experts, amirite?)

By the way, I don't recommend trying butter cabins. They're not very good. But if you'd like to borrow the recipe I guess there are worse things to be remembered for.

My takeaway from this experience is that I hope everyone in my life will have some perfectly weird memories of me on file for when I'm no longer around. Each friend and family member can be an expert in some silly, obscure part of my history that no one else knows, and share it (or not) as they see fit. And vice versa - basically, whoever goes first, their survivors should be equipped with things that make them smile, or even more ideally, choke down an inappropriate laugh at the funeral. Exactly the kind of life goal I can get behind.

Friday, February 19, 2021

RIP, HCFM

Do you ever start out on the internet with good intentions, but later find yourself having been led astray? I don't just mean going down a rabbit hole, but a close cousin of rabbit holing where you start out with lofty intellectual reasons for going online but later find yourself having been lured into an opinion piece from 2018 about Henry Cavill's moustache. Similar to a rabbit hole, except you can literally feel yourself growing stupider: "Wait a second, didn't I come here to find out more about Denisovan DNA? What does that have to do with Henry Cavill's moustache?"

Probably something to do with interbreeding, because that man is clearly of a different species, moustache or no. He he.

Note that it is not Henry Cavill's moustache per se that makes you stupider, but rather this ridiculous supplemental thought is what finally pushes that one clever little neuron that inspired you to go online at 8 o'clock this morning completely over the edge and it just smashes the ol' apoptosis button out of sheer frustration and *poof* - you're a little bit dumber now than you were when you started, and also somehow missing two hours of your life? But by golly you are now armed with an opinion about Henry Cavill's former moustache, RIP, so I guess there's that.

After this example you may want to label this phenomenon a simple horny tax, but please note that it isn't necessarily about Henry Cavill's moustache - that was just the first thing that popped to mind. For, um, no particular reason. It could really be anything, as there is a great deal of stupid shit on the internet that I have been sucked in to. Neither horny taxing nor rabbit holing quite capture it. I'm actually thinking it's more along the lines of... devolution. Which of course isn't really a "thing", evolution-ari-ly speaking (honestly, I'm too dumb now to know whether that's actually a word), but I think it could be a thing if you're talking about delving into the intertubes and coming out the other end legitimately stupider. I'm just gonna go ahead and call it a thing.

When Small Fry was just wee he once said to me, "Sometimes I say to myself, Myself, sometimes you're a little bit darnit." I think of that a lot, because sometimes I'm a little bit darnit, too. Since reading some articles about toxoplasmosis a few years ago I've been pinning a goodly quantity of my own darnit-ness on that. I mean, I've always been a cat person, and it's so much nicer to blame one's peccadilloes on a potentially brain-altering parasite than imagining oneself as having poor impulse control or foresight, right? But if my proposed internet-engendered devolution is a thing, which it definitely is now (see prev. parag.), I can take the heat off of cats and point to the internet as the source of all my darnit. Win-win!

So I guess what I'm trying to say is, thanks, Henry Cavill's Former Moustache, not only for improving the reputation of our feline friends, but also for enlightening me to... well, to several things I did not know about myself before this morning.

(Or was it the Toxoplasma gondii driving my brain that made me say all this? Mwuhahaha!)