12.27.2009

"we can make you feel like everything that's gone wrong happened for a reason..."

All right, so it's been a year and a few days. That's okay.


As you may know, I teach writing to college students. One of the first things I tell them is to get the garbage that is clogging their heads out before attempting to write their essays. Lately, I've had a lot on my mind, so I hope you don't mind me sharing it with you. I promise, it's not really garbage, it's just been cluttering my brain and maybe it can save some of you years of guilt.
As we get close to the new year, I tend to look back at years past. Mostly, I like what I see when I look back, but there is one hiccup - a lost friendship - that often left me feeling sad and guilty.

I lost a friendship eight years ago because I needed to take a step back and take care of myself. The friendship had become too taxing on me and so I did what I needed to do. I'm sure many people have been in that situation, and I hope many friendships can survive; I know that many of my friends right now would have no problem with me needing some space for a while. It's taken until about an hour ago for me to realize that if that lost friend didn't want me to take care of myself, he wasn't really a friend at all. It sounds so simple when placed in the context of a small paragraph, but there has been so much anguish over this friendship in the past eight years.
I thought I was taking a step back from the friendship, and he thought I was walking away. Whatever it was, it was the best thing I could ever have done in my life. I found myself when I stepped away. I'm sure I could have done that and maintained my friendship, but it wasn't meant to be that way. I can now let go of that one last regret - if I hadn't taken those steps, I could not have become the person I am; my experiences since then would be just the littlest bit different, and that littlest bit could have meant a lot.

I hope that friend is happy and I hope he has let go of what came between us, as I am finally able to.

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope only good things come to you in 2010.

12.26.2008

Waiting

Things are changing around here. Check back in a day or so to see what I've come up with ;)

11.14.2008

Busy week!

It was Lily's birthday this week - I can't believe she's one!!!So, of course, I made her a monster:

And what's a birthday without some super duper special cupcakes?


Like the look of those devil's food cupcakes? Send me a message and I'll tell you how to get some.

11.04.2008

Kat's Fabrics and Fiction

(fluff)Friends - create, share and enjoy a world of fluffy fun!

11.02.2008

Open for holiday orders!

Johnnycakes’ Pies and Pastries
Holiday Menu 2008

Using the highest quality organic, fair trade and/or locally grown ingredients.

Pies
Caramel apple crumb
Pumpkin – toasted homemade marshmallow topping
Classic coconut custard
Banoffee pie – banana-toffee custard, biscuit crust
10 inches - $14.00

Cakes
New York style cheesecake
Flourless chocolate cake
Oatmeal spice with coconut-brown sugar glaze
10 inches - $20

Cookies and brownies – variety of brownies, chocolate chip, ginger, and oatmeal cookies.
Breakfast box – variety of muffins, scones and a bag of homemade granola
Small (feeds 6-8) $15
Medium (feeds 10-12) $20
Large (feeds 15-20) $25

Italian neapolitan/rainbow cookies
Biscotti
$10/lb
Special requests always welcome!

Please send a message to place an order! We can ship certain items, but will deliver to Northern NJ and some parts of PA.

10.30.2008

Making Friends, continued

Here is the finished monster! What do you think?




In other news, my husband and I got to carve pumpkins and we decorated one with our daugher for her first Halloween!
Wanna see? OK

10.16.2008

Making Friends!





I bought Craft magazine ages ago - volume 6, with the attention of making monsters. Well, I've finally begun.... here are some pics of my progress.

10.12.2008

Apple Picking!

Last weekend, the Lupo grandkids went to Nonna & Nonno's house and Nonno's apple tree had some yummy ripe apples; here are some photos!





9.26.2008

Baking!

Today, I baked & did laundry. Yes, I spent all day doing this. It was a lot of cookies & a lot of laundry!
I'm not going to write about my laundry, though, I promise. I won't even mention the "l" word again. I decided that my little girl goes through a LOT of those crunchy little finger food cookies that I buy. She loves them. I decided I would make some for her. I found a recipe for "vanilla wafers". They're basically a sugar cookie, but with less sugar and a moister dough so that they are nice and crunchy when you bake them off.

Here are some photos:







Fiction updates

Megan

I was shouting. At a priest. At my priest. I was pissed. Fifteen years old and there was a whole lot about the world that I was learning and fast. Things that fifteen year olds aren’t supposed to think about, never mind deal with. I needed to shout, wondered why my grams wasn’t shouting. I knew, from that moment on, there was no salvation for my soul – that I would go to Hell. But I didn’t care; I wasn’t worried about my soul, I was worried about my father’s. “What do you mean he isn’t going to have a Catholic burial? He was at church every Sunday; he was here last Sunday! You’ll do it, even if I have to write to the Pope myself!” The priest sat there, hands folded while I screamed at him, and looked straight at Grams, who then took my hot sweaty palm with her icy fingers. I sat down and realized that I had been standing, yelling and pointing at the priest. I was going to Hell for sure. I didn’t want to stop yelling, Grams should have joined me, should have stood and left. How could she sit there and a man do this to her son? Excommunicate him when he was so faithful? Clearly he was sick, there was something wrong with him; he never leave me, never leave his little girl. They sat in silence.
The priest threw his hands up. “I can ask the deacon to perform the ceremony. He’s liberal.” He got up and left through the door behind his desk. And that was it. Grams looked at me, nodding her head slightly. I wasn’t sure if she was appreciative or admonishing. I was exhausted; longed to go home, sleep, wake up ten years from now or ten years ago. It would be better.
Two hours later, I woke up in my bedroom; my father let me decorate it any way I liked ten years ago. It was bubble gum pink and “icing blue,” known to the rest of the world as teal. Looking at the room, at the stuffed animals that I hadn’t played with in years but wasn’t ready to part with, I forgot about the events of the days before. He really was gone; that had become the worst part of sleeping, my whole life I was afraid of my dreams and now I was afraid of my reality. I shut my eyes again, didn’t want to face Grams’ well-meaning friends and her stoic face, which was a mystery to me. She seemed to have no reaction to her son’s death. I was only 15, but knew it must be awful for your son to die before you, that’s what it said O magazine; burying your child is the worst thing ever.
I looked in the mirror across from my bed, horrified by the face staring back. I grabbed my Teddy, retreated under my fluffy covers, tried to force the memory from my brain, and failed.


I awoke, head on my desk, neck cramped; the corner of the notebook was imprinted on my forehead and drool smeared my class notes, startled by the noise, waited, listening. I heard it again, stumbled from bed. It was definitely in the house. A minute later, no more bangs, but shouting, pounding footsteps. I was afraid, knew what it was but refused to believe it. Where would he have gotten a gun anyway?
Slowly, clinging to the wall, I hobbled towards the stairs. The sound hadn’t come from upstairs; it was too muffled. My face was frozen; tried to move her mouth, to call out, just to prove it still worked. It didn’t. I managed to breathe, though, and did, without fully catching my breath, gasps of air that made me feel even more breathless. I gripped the railing, stepping carefully on each stair. Voices grew louder. The cleaning woman, the cook we mumbling, shouting, something about an ambulance, police. I couldn’t understand them, even though were only a few feet away. I was still at the base of the stairs when Grams rushed in, escorting the paramedics to the dining room. An eternity later, the stretcher, which had been rolled in empty, was rolled back out, occupied. They hadn’t even tried to bring him back. He was gone.

Three days later, at the foot of the freshly dug hole, covered with a cloth, I stared at the casket, on that special stretcher that is only used funerals, I wanted to wait until they lowered him into the ground. All the people, Grams’ friends. It never seemed odd to me then, but my Dad didn’t seem to have any friends. I was his friend. I couldn’t let go, had no interest in going home and eating food, seeing drinks and appetizers passed around, mourning but celebrating, too. Grams took my arm and led me away. She still hadn’t cried in front of anyone, and said nothing to me. I couldn’t hear anything, anyway.
At the house, I didn’t eat. I didn’t talk to people. People spoke, put there hands on my arm, shook their heads. I nodded, sometimes smiled. The sounds around me were muffled and unintelligible. People spoke to me, I nodded, Grams led me around. Everything around me was a TV left on after you fall asleep: fuzzy picture and white noise.
The weeks after the funeral, I stayed in bed. Bed was nice, it was comforting, familiar. It was pink sheets and white headboard and happy, it was years of nothing bad happening. It was safe from the sadness in the house. So much of the outside world was unfamiliar now. Grams went to work redecorating right after the funeral, and the entire house was foreign. Well, not the entire house, but outside my room, all the pictures of us were now pictures of Grams and me. She took the photos of my dad growing up, which had been all in order – from birth to adulthood – off of the wall going down the stairs. She replaced them with replicas of Renaissance paintings. The large photo of him and I from my fifth Christmas (the one where I got every Cabbage Patch Kid Robert Xavier made) was no longer above the mantle in the living room. After seeing that, I didn’t leave my room. I hated Grams for doing that and couldn’t yell at her, I couldn’t even talk to her.
I didn’t see her most of the day, but I heard her scurrying around the house, making sure things are just right. She had visitors and gave the help their orders. She even watched a little television, something I had never seen her do. She had dinners sent up to me and for the first time in my life, I saw what she liked to eat. Or maybe it was what she thought I’d like. She always had had the cook make dinners that Dad loved, but now, it was her food. And it was awful. Cheese plates that smelled worse than my socks after a long field hockey practice, salads with little bits of strange vegetables in them (I think they were vegetables, they were vegetable colored) and vile looking fish. I didn’t even want to look at them. The cook would smile at me as I shook my head when she tried to set a little table for me at my desk and later, when Grams was in bed, the cook would return with a bowl of cereal or macaroni and cheese.
Grams would sneak into my room every Sunday and put a church outfit on my bed while I was in the shower. We didn’t talk all week, wouldn’t talk on Sunday, but I knew how important it was to her that I keep going to church, so I went. I put on the outfits that were too girly for a teenager, the pink jumpers, the babydoll dresses and tights, and pretended that I was still her little granddaughter and I cared about church. I don’t remember thinking anything, feeling anything, it was all just quiet and emptiness and pretend. I sat through the sermons, the singing, the praying. I made the motions of the cross; I took the Eucharist in my hand and sipped the sour wine. When I got home, I read books, listened to music, but I don’t remember what books, what music. It was a month silence and fog.
One Monday morning, Grams knocked on my door. “The bus will be here in twenty minutes,” she said. It had been enough time, then. Any longer and I would appear strange. I’d hate to appear strange. She would hate for me to appear strange. The school had made many exceptions, under the circumstances. They knew that I would need time, my classmates would need time, to forget I was now an orphan. I found a black tee shirt and a pair of almost clean jeans, got dressed and left my room.

Miranda

"Grandma is such a witch." My daughter, who has just left her Grandmother after a morning of church and bagels, is sitting at the kitchen table, pushing her Oreos around.
"That's not very nice - think of all the good witches out there who you just insulted." We both laugh. At five, she is too bright and quick-witted for her own good. She's still not eating her cookies; Oreos are her favorite. "What's the matter, sweetie?"
"Can I stay home with you next Sunday?" She asks, her head directed at the Oreos, the question directed at me. She knows the answer.
"No, I'm sorry." I wish she could. "Your grandmother is who she is and she loves you." Half of you, anyway, the half that looks like her precious son. She's still staring at her cookies. "Did something happen?" I ask her, kneeling down next to her chair so she can look me directly in the eyes. It's a habit of hers - one that alarms many grown ups. One that I love. I've seen her get on chairs to get at someone's eye level. Of course, she's not "allowed" to do that – her father's rules.
"Well, she tried to say something bad about you." She looks down and asks her Oreos, "Why would she do that?"
Hm. Yes. Why? Because she's a small minded bitch... "What exactly did she say to you?"
"I don't want to tell you." She stares straight into my eyes, into me, searching for something. Her eyes are hungry for whatever knowledge she is looking for. I want her to find it.
"Megs," I say, moving to my seat at the table, keeping our eyes connected, "it's not much of a secret that your grandmother and I don't get along. You shouldn't be carrying whatever burden she's placed on you. It was wrong of her to do that to you. You don't have to tell me about it, but you should tell someone. Maybe Ted." Her bear is her largest confidante. "Then you won't have to think about it anymore."
She thinks hard about it and says, "Grams says you're going to hell." She pouts.
"Did she tell you why she thinks that?" Wouldn't that be interesting?
"No. She just said that you were bad and you are going to hell. But I know it's not true. I think Grams is bad and she will go to hell." She looked down at her Oreos for the last half of the sentence. She didn't mean it; she was trying to make me feel better.
I pause, not really sure what to say to her. I decide on the truth, for the first time in seven years. "I don't think anyone goes to hell."
She looks up, eyebrows furrowed in utter confusion. "You don't? Father Terrence says that when you die you go to heaven or hell. He wouldn't lie."
"I know, but there are a lot of ideas about that - no one really knows what happens after we die. We just believe. Your Grams and Father Terrence really believe people go to hell. I don't."
"Oh," she says, staring into the table in front of her, trying to make sense of it.
"Since I don't believe in hell; neither me nor Grams will have to go there. Isn't that nice?"
"I guess," she says, pokes at her Oreos.
I like being honest with her. I make a decision that I know will change our lives, one way or another. "Can you keep a secret?" She nods, fervently - what little girl doesn't like a secret? "It's a big one." She nods again, says "yes" in a way that leaves the "S" to trail off into the silence, matching the whirr of the ceiling fan.
"I promise," she takes a bite of cookie, sips her milk, and wipes her face.
I get up, say, "come with me," and lead her out of the kitchen and into my bedroom. She's very quiet - I can feel her anticipation, as well as a little fear. I close the door behind us. Bob won't be back from Church for another hour, but I still need to be extra cautious.
"Mom," she now has her miss knowitall face on, "I have snooped - I mean, been, in your room lots of times, there's nothing here that's a secret."
I smile and push my nightstand away from the bed, lift a floor board and pull out a box. "Are you sure?" I ask, smiling as she gasps.
She beams right back at me and comes bounding across the room. There is a shout in the hallway. My mother in law opens the bedroom door, holding Megan's overnight bag - "Miranda," she is saying as she enters the room (without knocking), "Meg is going to n--" She stops, sees the box in my lap and says, dramatically and triumphantly just above a whisper, "I knew it."
My heart sinks. I wonder how I got here; hiding myself from the one person who matters anymore, the one person I gladly gave everything up for, my daughter. Megan is staring at Grams, I can feel the hatred. Grams has ruined our secret. She is about to ruin our lives. I know it. She grabs Megan by the arm, Megan starts to scream. I can't move. I can't talk. I want to. I want to scream and yell and take Megan and run away. I'm paralyzed. The box falls from my lap. There is no point in fighting. I know it is all over when I hear the sirens.

Megan

Sirens make me shiver. My apartment is high enough above the street so I don’t hear them too loudly, but I still hear them when the place is quiet; when I have just gotten home or when I am about to go to bed, before I fall asleep, after I turn the TV off. Growing up, we rarely heard sirens and I only remember the sirens on the day my dad killed himself. I guess that’s why I get chills. Right now, the sirens are going away when the phone rings. I’ve just gotten home and I haven’t even taken my jacket off so it’s natural that I don’t pick it up and let it ring through to voicemail. I go through my usual routine of changing from work clothes to lounge around the house clothes, watering the plants, and am about to cook dinner before I remember to check the voicemail, seeing the red bulb on the phone in the kitchen blinking. Most people call my cell phone, except telemarketers. They don’t usually leave voicemail, though. Prompted by a recording of a British woman, I enter my code. It’s a hospital in Washington, NJ, my hometown. Grams, they say (everyone in the town calls her Grams), has checked in. They don’t expect her to be there long. They don’t expect her to be anywhere long. The phone drops out of my hand. I have no idea what to do. Grams and I talked on the phone every few weeks. She visited me at Christmas; she went to mass at St. Patrick’s, I picked up donuts. We don’t have other family. There will be no one at the hospital when I get there, no one will beat me there. No one will make me feel guilty for not answering the phone immediately. Just me, maybe Grams, if she can speak. I don’t know what’s wrong with her. Did the voice on the phone say? Did I miss it? Did the phone drop from my hand before I could hear? Was I paying attention?
It’s 5:30 and it will take forever to get to New Jersey, but I leave. While stuck in traffic, I think that I probably could have made dinner and watched the 6:00 news before leaving and would have arrived at the same time. My brain shuts off the rest of the way there, and I drive to the hospital automatically, even though I haven’t been to my hometown in six years and I haven’t been to the hospital in eleven years.





This is where I have left off... I'm still brainstorming this last section and it may change a lot in subsequent revisions.
Let me know what you think!!!

8.27.2008

HAT!

I made my friend, Jen, a hat for Christmas. Well, actually, I made her about 3 hats... but none of them actually worked out. UNTIL now (yes, I know , Christmas was a long time ago, but after so many failed attempts, I needed a break!) What's that? You want to see what it looks like? OK!




8.22.2008

Fiction, but from a different POV

So, I decided to change up the POV on my fiction. Here's the first 3 pages. Please comment to let me know what you think about the switch. To see the original, scroll down and look for older posts. Thanks in advance!

----------------


I was shouting. At a priest. At my priest. I was pissed. Fifteen years old and there was a whole lot about the world that I was learning and fast. Things that fifteen year olds aren’t supposed to think about, never mind deal with. I needed to shout, wondered why my grams wasn’t shouting. I knew, from that moment on, there was no salvation for my soul – that I would go to Hell. But I didn’t care; I wasn’t worried about my soul, I was worried about my father’s. “What do you mean he isn’t going to have a Catholic burial? He was at church every Sunday; he was here last Sunday! You’ll do it, even if I have to write to the Pope myself!” The priest sat there, hands folded while I screamed at him, and looked straight at Grams, who then took my hand. I sat down and realized that I had been standing, yelling and pointing at the priest. I was going to Hell for sure. I didn’t want to stop yelling, Grams should have joined me, should have stood and left. How could she sit there and a man do this to her son? Excommunicate him when he was so faithful? Clearly he was sick, there was something wrong with him; he never leave me, never leave his little girl. They sat in silence.
The priest threw his hands up. “I can ask the deacon to perform the ceremony. He’s liberal.” He got up and left through the door behind his desk. And that was it. Grams looked at me, nodding her head slightly. I wasn’t sure if she was appreciative or admonishing. I was exhausted; longed to go home, sleep, wake up ten years from now or ten years ago. It would be better.
Two hours later, I woke up in my bedroom; my father let me decorate it any way I liked ten years ago. It was bubble gum pink and “icing blue,” known to the rest of the world as teal. Looking at the room, at the stuffed animals that I hadn’t played with in years but wasn’t ready to part with, I forgot about the events of the days before. He really was gone; that had become the worst part of sleeping, my whole life I was afraid of my dreams and now I was afraid of my reality. I shut my eyes again, didn’t want to face Grams’ well-meaning friends and her stoic face, which was a mystery to me. She seemed to have no reaction to her son’s death. I was only 15, but knew it must be awful for your son to die before you, that’s what it said O magazine; burying your child is the worst thing ever.
I looked in the mirror across from my bed, horrified by the face staring back. I grabbed my Teddy, retreated under my fluffy covers, tried to force the memory from my brain, and failed.

She awoke, startled by the noise. She heard it again, and stumbled from bed. It was definitely in the house. She waited a minute, listening. No more bangs, but shouting, pounding footsteps. She was afraid, knew what it was but refused to believe it. Where would he have gotten a gun anyway?
Slowly she slinked along the wall in the hallway, towards the stairs. The sound hadn’t come from upstairs; it was too muffled. Her face was frozen; she tried to move her mouth, to call out, just to prove that she could. She couldn’t. She managed to breathe, though, and did, without fully catching her breath. She gripped the railing stepping carefully on each stair. Voices grew louder. The cleaning woman, the cook we mumbling, shouting, something about an ambulance, police. She couldn’t understand them, even if they were only a few feet away. She was still at the base of the stairs when Grams rushed in, escorting the paramedics to the dining room. And eternity later, the stretcher, which had been rolled in empty, was rolled back out, occupied. They hadn’t even tried to bring him back. He was gone.

Three days later, at the foot of the freshly dug hole, covered with a cloth, I stared at the casket, on that special stretcher that is only used funerals, I wanted to wait until they lowered him into the ground. Grams finally grabbed my arm and pulled me away, she still hadn’t cried in front of anyone, and said nothing to me. I couldn’t hear anything, anyway. The sounds around me were muffled and still unintelligible. People spoke to me, I nodded, Grams led me around. I understood nothing.

8.21.2008

Foodie Meme

I saw this at Lyndsey-Jane's site, My Knitting and Me and had to join. Basic rules are bold what you’ve eaten and strikethrough those you wouldn’t eat on a bet.

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp

9. Borscht (beetroot makes me heave)

10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari - Love love love this!
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio Ice Cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese - that's a NO, but I don't know how to strike through
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper - um, no, I don't think I'd ever intentionally eat that
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters - deathly allergic to shellfish
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl - how I found out I'm allergic to clams

33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar - sounds pretty nice
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth $120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips ew
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst - sounds yummy!
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake yum, yum, yum, yum, yum
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill - I don't think I'd eat this.
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict MY FAVORITE
83. Pocky (or something similar).
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef - It's illegal to have Kobe beef in America
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab I SO wish I wasn't suddenly allergic!!
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake


FUN FUN MEME

8.13.2008

When youcan't write, work

Tom E. Kennedy, my mentor, quoted that title many times while we met at my residency at FDU. Of course, I've already forgotten who'd originally said it (Whitman?) Please feel free to leave the answer in a comment and I'll fix this...
But, wow, I always hated revising and I'm so happy to have someone as talented as Tom line edit my work, this time it's incredibly grueling. Good, and I'm sure my prose is benefiting to a GREAT degree. I just hope I get to the end of the revisions and get a little kick of inspiration!
So far, I've added about 3 pages... I hope they're good pages, but we'll see what happens when I move on and resubmit in a few weeks. Wish me luck and lots of interesting verbs!

8.10.2008

Returns and beginnings

I'm back from my first residency at graduate school & there is a lot to do! Not only do I have to get ready for the Fall semester with the classes I'm teaching, but I also have to write a lot of fiction (including revisions) and do two annotations of novels (and read some others that I'm not annotating).
It's crazy!
I'm ready, though, and I'm really excited to get things going. Of course, I'll have to start cleaning and cooking again, too. I have to say, as meager as the accommodations were and as awful as the food was at some times, I really enjoyed not being responsible for the cooking and cleaning!

More writing coming soon! I'm also putting the finishing touches on a hat for my friend Jen; it has a few more inches to be finished and then I'll be knitting some little ears for it!!! Photos coming soon.