A California Yankee in King Cake's Court

David came downstairs for dinner on Friday, he's going slow and has to use a cane but he's recovering even better than I expected. Not that I expected him to do worse than Mom after her knee replacement (refusing to do PT or even get out of bed and winding up hospitalized twice from blood clots). That bar was on the floor.

Saturday I made eggs and toast, finished winding the loose embroidery floss skeins, and made a patchouli/pine/neroli diffuser blend. I went to the pharmacy and the grocery store. Rian helped me put the groceries away, then I baked a batch of dog treats and made some more pumpkin ice cubes for Penny's food.

I dusted the bureau using glass cleaner on the top, then spent about an hour fiddling with the Hulu app on my projector. I cannot get the damn thing to work, it always freezes halfway through the commercial and then dumps me back to the home screen. (I wonder if it would work if I had the commercial-free version.) I tried clearing the cache, I tried uninstalling and reinstalling, I tried setting it up to mirrorcast from my phone. Nothing worked, which is a bummer because Legion is on Hulu and I'd love to see it on a bigger screen. (Well technically there's no "screen" with a projector but you know what I mean.) Netflix and HBO work just fine, so it's definitely a problem with that specific app.

I put on the first episode of Monster: The Ed Gein Story while I finished sorting the loose floss bobbins by color. It's weird, which is not exactly a shock. It's not just about Gein, it's also about all the media he influenced over the years (Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs, etc.). Gein cast a long shadow, but I always have to roll my eyes at media about true crime that seems to want to get accusatory with the audience. You're also exploiting tragedy to turn it into for-profit entertainment! You don't have a leg to stand on!! (See also Don't Fuck With Cats.) Ryan Murphy especially can STFU about that, since he will change things about real events just to make it a better story.

Rian made black bean enchiladas that were incredible. I know he cooks most nights back in Chicago, because he's always complaining about how his boyfriend's parents will drown everything he makes in Tabasco or Heinz 57 sauce or *shudder* Miracle Whip. But except for the sweet potatoes he makes at Christmas, he's never really cooked for us before, and he's really fucking good at it. I don't know why I'm surprised at that; Mom did a lot of things wrong but at least all of her kids know their way around a kitchen. I think he doesn't actually like to cook though, whenever he's in the kitchen it's a non-stop stream of exasperated sighing and under-the-breath muttering.

After supper David and I stayed downstairs and we hung out. Rian is 7 years older than me, which means he's turning 58 the day after I turn 51 next month. So I can't figure out why he seems so old all of a sudden. I mean like every day he will say something about his bowels. You know my secret to seeming younger than I am? It isn't makeup or skincare or supplements, it's not groaning when I sit or bend over, not making excessive noise when I yawn or sneeze, not constantly moving phlegm around my sinuses, and above all never discussing my poop with anyone but a healthcare provider. (Okay, one exception is when my gallbladder was dying and my poop was practically white, that seemed weird/alarming enough to mention. But I don't make it a topic of everyday conversation.)

I think that's another way in which David and I are like our father, we're more reserved, and Rian is like Mom, they will both just blab whatever comes into their heads without stopping to think if the other person really needs or wants to hear it.

Sunday I made the peanut butter cup doughnuts from the baked doughnut cookbook.

Hell yeah.

I put on Dateline, changed the bed sheets and washed the dirty ones, sorted the yellow floss into boxes, and finished the Saint Dymphna mini cross stitch.


After showering I baked a sock-it-to-me cake, which is a semi-homemade cake (I wanted something easy after baking doughnuts) where you start with a boxed yellow cake mix but add sour cream and a bunch of eggs, and put in a layer of chopped pecans mixed with cinnamon and brown sugar. For a "glaze" you nuke half a cup of canned vanilla frosting until it's runny and drizzle it over the top.

I made Spam, egg, and cheese onigirazu for my work lunches (wrapped tight in plastic wrap they'll keep for a few days), made ice, emptied the trash, folded a load of towels, and had some wine and read. There wasn't much dinner prep, I did an easy sheet pan dish of roasted vegetables (potatoes, carrots, onions, zucchini, green apples, and mirlitons) with cheddar smoked sausages. I made a simple sauce of equal parts mustard and mayonnaise, a splash of apple cider vinegar, and a little brown sugar. Very autumnal.

After supper I started another page in my Spooky Lakes coloring book (Geamăna, Romania) and watched a couple more episodes of Monster, then the new episode of Task. How are there still 2 episodes of this show left??

I was never much for celebrating Independence Day, even in an era that didn't feel like democracy in this country is actively dying as the entire world watches. The neighbors seemed to feel the same, or maybe it was just too hot to be blowing stuff up. There were a few minutes of desultory fireworks between 9:00 and 10:00, but it seemed like less than past years.

Friday I was mostly just a bum. There was nothing I really felt like doing and it was too hot to be outside for longer than the time Penny needs to pee. (Penny is too small to just be turned loose in the yard, so someone always has to take her outside.) I made us breakfast, and I baked a batch of dog treats, and did a couple loads of towels, and I made cacio e pepe mushroom ravioli for supper.

But I spent a large part of the afternoon on the living room couch, drinking wine and eating goldfish crackers and reading Anne Rivers Siddons' The House Next Door. I hadn't read that since I was a teenager, and in spite of some dated talk about homosexuality--honestly nothing bad--and some classist attitudes that I found unpleasant, it holds up pretty well. Both Stephen King (in Danse Macabre) and Grady Hendrix (in Paperbacks From Hell) said they thought it was one of the best genre novels of the 20th century.

After supper I watched Jaws--the closest I come to a July 4th tradition--and painted.



Saturday I went out to get kolaches and apple fritters for breakfast. I went to Miniso because I'd gotten an email saying they were having a back-to-school sale that included "desktop storage" and I wanted to get a new desktop trash bin (the lid on my old one had started to stick) and a couple of those little 3-drawer chest/pen holder things. I got a few pens and a mechanical pencil topped with a capybara that had an orange on its head, because why wouldn't I buy that, but they didn't have any good stationery sets or pencil boxes, two things I would have never left a an old school Sanrio store without getting. I'm starting to think they just don't make the kinds of pencil boxes I remember, like I can't even find them online (uness maybe eBay).

I went to Rouses, and after putting away the groceries I realized i'd forgotten to get pineapple juice, so I ran over to Super One. I sorted through an Amazon delivery (new pillow slides, a case for my label maker, bergamot essential oil, watercolor sponges, erasers, razor blades, and more pens). I stripped my bed, even though that's normally a Sunday chore, because I wanted to wash all my bedding and I knew I had other laundry to do on Sunday.

I made sweet and sour meatballs for supper, just frozen meatballs but the sauce was made from scratch. Afterwards I completed my re-watch of The Pitt and finished a couple more paintings I made from photos I'd taken years before.





The first one is an old fishing camp near Grand Chenier, and the second one is the Baptist church in the ghost town of Rodney, MS during one of the periodic floods. Rodney used to be a busy river port, but in the 1880s a sandbar formed in the Mississippi, moving the bank 2 miles west and leaving behind an oxbow lake prone to inundating large areas of the town. Floodwaters of course are rarely blue, but who wants to paint ugly shit-brown floodwater?

Sunday I made Irish coffee baked doughnuts for breakfast. Coffee in the batter, whiskey in the glaze, which someone on social media said sounded like an unreleased Pogues track. I watched Dateline and started a new painting. I did a load of laundry, trimmed Penny's back nails, made more pureed pumpkin ice cubes (Penny gets one--defrosted--in her food every day for her gut health), made strawberry pretzel salad, and did some dinner prep.

"Strawberry pretzel salad" is actually a Jello dessert from the era where all kinds of horrifying shit was called "salad" if it had a single fruit or vegetable in it, but this one is pretty normal and has lasted into the modern era. You bake a bottom crust of crushed pretzels, brown sugar, and melted butter; add a layer of cream cheese whipped with heavy cream and powdered sugar; then top it with a layer of strawberry Jello and sliced strawberries. No Miracle Whip or green olives or celery or hotdogs. It's a good hot weather dessert.

I finished The House Next Door and started C. Pam Zhang's The Land of Milk and Honey. So far I'm finding it sort of pretentious and almost unbearably Millennial--like dog bless those kids but some of them really act like everything that's happened to their generation has never happened to anyone before ever in history--and it touches on a lot of interesting themes without ever totally developing any of them. But it's not like, terrible, and it's not very long, so I will most likely just finish it.

I made chicken cordon bleu casserole and green beans for supper, and afterward I started the new (and last) season of Sandman. Man, I guess they chose to adapt "Calliope" before the allegations against Neil Gaiman surfaced? Yikes. I debated whether I should even watch it, but Netflix's checks to Gainman cleared well before the shit hit the fan, and they've been pretty clear they won't be doing another season. Hilariously, they're being very coy about why that is, insisting it's because although the graphic novel went on for years, Dream wasn't always the main character and Sandman the series was always just going to be the material where he is. Sure, Jan.

I finished another painting based on an old photo, taken inside an abandoned Episcopal church near St. Francisville:



More idealization: the view outside isn't nearly the colorful springtime displayed (in fact I'm pretty sure the photo was taken in November). Did I fuck up the geometry of the bricks? Something looks off to my brain. Oh well, let's just call it an homage to Lovecraft or whatever.

All weekend my TikTok feed has been OPP prison break and Nottoway Plantation burning down. There's always people who are glad when a plantation burns down, and I get it, but just as a building it was impressive. I'm glad I got to see it and I'm sad it's gone.

People who have weddings at plantations are out of their fucking minds, though. I have no ambivalence about that.

Saturday Ashely dropped off some eggs early in the morning, so I made Ina Garten's herb-baked eggs for breakfast. I think it's in the Barefoot Contessa in Paris cookbook, but I've been making them for so long I don't even have to look at the recipe any more. Jamie and Mom both love her and have all her cookbooks, but I mostly find her a bit too fussy. Too much chopping and peeling and pre-cooking ingredients. But she does have a few recipes that I like enough to have been making for years; generally I like her breakfast and dessert recipes, and she has several soup recipes I use. And her roasted chicken with croutons, onions, and lemon is an old family favorite.

After breakfast I read for a while; I had been re-reading the Incest: From "A Journal of Love" volume of Anaïs Nin's diary, but decided to put that aside to read Michael McDowell's The Elementals for the hundredth time. It's a comfort read for me, although I don't know why because it's a scary book. Scary and like, unsettling, because the "ghosts" in the book don't really follow ghost rules.

In the afternoon I went to a couple used bookstores and then to Rouses. Jamie was out when I got home so I vacuumed the rugs, Mom said she went to a classic car show at Jefferson Island. I think she just wanted to get out of the house for a bit; when she came back she said the car show was like 5 people in the parking lot, so she walked around the gardens for a while.

Mom wasn't doing so great, staying in bed and crying for most of the day. I expect by then the initial numbness was starting to wear off. She said she was "having a bad day", I told her to come have a bad day in the living room with us and she eventually did. Jamie made a salad and there was still plenty of pasta. We wound up freezing half of it but that still left us with a giant catering tray each of chicken alfredo and eggplant parmigiana, one with a variety of desserts, and one of Caesar's salad that we had to toss most of after the first day because it came dressed. I think maybe they thought we were going to have a lot of guests for a funeral.

One of them also sent a huge jar of chicken soup with matzo balls, but that was already frozen so we just stuck it in the freezer.

Jamie decided she wanted to finally start Severance, so we watched a couple episodes of that. I've already seen the first season twice, so I concentrated on getting started on sorting my collage material, deciding on categories and making labels. I got through all the National Geographic images; the images from Life are going to take more time because those pages are larger than the accordion file, so for a lot of them I'm going to have to actually cut out the image I want to use before storing it. I better buy a fresh pack of X-Acto blades.

Sunday Jamie had requested I make doughnuts, so I made the red velvet doughnuts with buttermilk glaze from the baked doughnuts cookbook. Dateline was about the Diddy trial and celebrity shit bores me to tears, so I watched another episode of Vice Principals and a couple more of Reservation Dogs while I changed the bed sheets and sorted another pile of collage material. (Not the Life images yet, this was a bunch of the stuff that was already in the file when I decided to re-organize it.)

In the afternoon I washed the sheets and made a lemon refrigerator pie; then made Mom and I bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches on green onion pancakes, since we hadn't had any bacon with breakfast. Jamie decided to go to Avery Island, and I had some wine and read in between doing some dinner prep. I thought we could use a break from leftover pasta, so I made mushroom wellington with pecans and goat cheese, and after rummaging through the crisper and pantry came up with a spinach salad with green apple, red onion, gruyere, and sliced almonds.

I went upstairs to watch The Last of Us and was so tired that I went to bed not long after it ended. I expect the last few days are catching up with me.

I woke up an hour early to thunder that kept getting louder and louder until it sounded like it was in our backyard. The power flickered a few times but was still on when I left for work. The fleeting gentle early spring, my favorite part of the year in south Louisiana, with warm sun, cool breezes, and low humidity, is beginning to give way to the violent thunderstorms and ever-increasing heat and humidity that will become full-fledged summer in another month.

Saturday I used my breakfast sandwich maker again, making toaster waffle sandwiches with goat cheese, the last of the Canadian bacon, and egg. Four minutes seems to be the sweet spot between scorching the bread and undercooking the egg.

Not long afterwards Penny started making her ALERT! INTRUDERS! bark; it was a couple of religious kooks who wanted to give me a flier for a "Jesus' Death Anniversary" event at their church. I took it to get rid of them and immediately threw it away. We don't get a lot of that out here, it's still a majority Catholic part of the country, and of course Catholics don't do that. They used to, back when they had state power to murder people if they didn't convert, but nowadays their stance on conversion is "Look, you know what we're about and where we are if you're interested". Lot of things wrong with the RCC but at least they're not bothering people on their day off while they just try to have a second cup of coffee and read a book.

After getting back from the grocery store I swept the stairs and the front hall. I made a diffuser blend of lemongrass, pine, and cedar. I wrote in my journal and posted here. David made open-faced meatball sandwiches on garlic toast with roasted sweet peppers and onions for supper. I watched the new episode of Yellowjackets. Kind of a lazy day.

Sunday I made the coffeecake doughnuts from the baked doughnuts cookbook. They had sour cream and buttermilk and really not a lot of sugar, they were delicious (if somewhat messy, that crumb topping). I took a shower first for once, then watched Dateline while I changed and washed the bedsheets and did some collage work.

In the afternoon I made a batch of dog treats, then cut Penny's back toenails so she could have a fresh cookie afterwards. Like all small dogs, she despises having her nails cut and I usually only do 2 feet at a time.

I did some bento and dinner prep but there wasn't a lot, and Mom was visiting Phil so I didn't have to make her lunch. So I poured myself some wine, heated up a leftover meatball toast, and read several chapters of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which I started re-reading on Friday. I have several unread books on my Kindle, but when my anxiety is high I tend to go back to old favorites--I re-read Rebecca a couple weeks ago.

Two tears in a bucket, motherfuck it.

Dinner was a skillet cheeseburger pasta dish (one of the Budget Bytes recipes, I froze half of it) and a salad, and since I knew I was gonna be baking doughnuts for breakfast and dog treats in the afternoon I had gotten some marble poundcake at the Rouses bakery.

I think I need to get on some kind of anti-anxiety meds. My nervous system was already fried from the past decade of *waves hands around* and I feel like I've been in constant fight-or-flight mode for the past month. I keep breaking out in stress rashes, especially under my eyes, which has always been a sensitive area. That feels great and looks even better, as you can probably imagine. Weird time to contemplate it, but I really feel like I need help, and since at least 90% of my current anxiety is coming from external sources I have zero control over I'm pretty sure talk therapy ain't gonna do shit, even if I could afford it right now.

Honestly, I probably should have been on anti-anxiety meds years ago. I manage with a cobbled-together system of ritual behaviors, exercises like "name 10 things you can see, 5 you can touch, and 1 you can smell", essential oil, and gummies, but like, I have health insurance.

Saturday I made eggs and toast, then read for a while. I had my monthly-ish Taco Bell craving, so after showering and dressing, and picking up some prescriptions at Thrifty Way, I got a Crunchwrap Supreme. I went to Rouses, and after coming home and putting away the groceries I vacuumed the downstairs rugs, then my bedroom. I made a diffuser blend of lavender, cedar, chamomile, lime, and jasmine.

I did some dusting, then went back into the closet to clean another section. I cleaned maybe a 3rd of the floor; I tossed a couple trash bags of stuff, which made room against the back and side for the stuff I actually needed to keep (my sewing box, a couple of vintage train cases I use for short trips, my huge London Fog bag, some shoeboxes full of negatives and photo CDs). That was the section where the back clothes rod is, and I can now actually walk into my walk-in closet and reach my dresses and skirts without having to bend over a pile of junk.

A lot of what I threw out was shoes--they were too beat-up to donate. Around the time I moved to Louisiana was when I realized I just couldn't wear heels anymore, my feet and calves always hurt too much by the end of the day. So I went through a period where I bought tons of cute flat shoes, thinking if I couldn't wear heels at least I would go out of my way to have a variety of attractive flats. But the climate in Louisiana is really hard on shoes, they wear out much faster here than they did in California. And then flats also started hurting my feet, because they have no support. So I started wearing Converse low tops and Hey Dude shoes, but I never got around to throwing out the flats.

I had them in a couple of those hanging canvas shoe rack things that each held a dozen pairs, and I almost threw them out when I threw out the shoes. Then I realized, I don't need to use these for shoes. So now I have toiletries (deodorant, talcum powder, etc.) in the cubbyholes that aren't holding my boring comfy shoes (I only have 3 pair right now).

I did my junk journal page for the day and did some hanzi practice, and after supper I couldn't find anything I wanted to watch so I just started season 3 of For All Mnkind.

Sunday I made the pumpkin doughnuts from the baked doughnuts cookbook. They were really good; in addition to the usual spice blend they also had pureed pumpkin in the batter.

Yes I also made bacon, because I love bacon and Sunday breakfast is usually the only time I get to have it.

I watched Dateline and changed the bedsheets and started my junk journal page, and worked on a few simple collages. The bug is starting to bite again and I have those Life magazines; I also want to get some from the 1980s from the same eBay seller. Weirdly, they're more expensive (8 magazines instead of 10 for the same price) than the older ones from the 1960s and 1970s. Maybe circulation had started going down and they just didn't print as many of them? Or maybe there's more demand since Gen Z seems obsessed with the decade (it was their parent's childhood and young adulthood; I remember a lot of teenagers being obsessed with the 1950s and 1960s when I was that age so that tracks).

After showering I washed the sheets, then washed some old knitted ponchos I found when I was cleaning the closet. They were made for my grandmother by one of the other residents in her assisted living place, and I took them after she died because they reminded me of the afghans we had when I was a kid. One of them is a chevron pattern in different shades of brown and cream, and I swear we had a blanket just like it.

I baked a batch of dog treats, made grilled cheese for lunch, made tuna salad and hardboiled some eggs for my work lunches this week, and made some onigiri, also for work lunch. I mix flavored cream cheese (garden vegetable this time) into the rice while it's still hot, which in addition to adding flavor also keeps them from drying out. I use nori on the bottom, front, and back, using kitchen shears to cut the excess off, then roll the sides in toasted sesame seeds. They came out perfect and I'd forgotten how satisfying it is to make them.

I opened one of the packs of seaweed snacks to see how many were in each one, because sometimes there's not very many. But these have 8, which is the right size for eating them with tuna for lunch. Then I decided to just eat the package I'd opened, and that's how I discovered that Penny apparently loves roasted seaweed.

I held out the first piece as a joke, and I wound up having to give her a few more.

I made cabbage rolls for supper, something I've never made before. I was thinking of Eastern European dishes I could use my Vegeta with--not that you can't use that on almost any kind of food. It was kind of a labor-intensive, you have to parboil the cabbage, then make the meat stuffing (which also has rice, so I made a lot of rice yesterday), then make the rolls, then gently simmer them in some kind of stock or broth on top of and covered with a layer of cabbage leaves for nearly an hour. It was good, though. Phil even said it was good; I told him "It's the food of your people!" Phil's family came from Poland in the 1890s and they'd completely lost touch with the Polish branch of the family 50 years later, so while it seems likely Phil lost relatives to the Holocaust he doesn't really know who they were.

We're getting into the home stretch of Carnival (Mardi Gras is a week from tomorrow) and frankly I'm getting a little tired of king cake--people keep bringing it to work, too--so I bought a honey bun cake from the Rouses bakery. After supper I watched some more of For All Mankind, finished my junk journal page, and finished a couple of simple collages.


I think I'm going to trim the glitter page off the edges, because using it as a frame sort of ruins the illusion that the trunk is full of seawater, which is the effect I'm going for.


Soup ads make the best collage set-up, I swear.

I'm reading Things They Lost, which is this weird magical realism-ish novel by a Kenyan writer about a girl whose mother is always going off and leaving her alone in their crumbling old sort of haunted house. It's good, but for some reason yesterday I decided to re-read Rebecca for the millionth time. I'll go back and finish it, though.