So much

There is so much going on I have no idea where to start. I've been keeping a list of blog topics in my iPhone for future use as they pop into my head.

These past few weeks have been very overwhelming - full of anxiety, triumphs, successes, a set-back or two, good news, bad news, much thought and planning. Thankfully, my head has been level and I'm moving forward.

My thoughts are getting in order and they will soon make their appearance here... promise.

A shining accomplishment

With everything negative that has been strolling through my brain and life in the past few weeks, somehow this amazingly positive experience slipped through the cracks. I mentioned in an earlier post that I was going to teach myself how to bake. I gathered up my tools and ingredients and gave it a shot. The results were amazing: warm, sticky, golden brown caramel apple sticky rolls. Holy crap. My house smelled heavenly for days.

I got to use yeast and sugar and cinnamon and everything. I made such a mess. There was flour and butter everywhere.



The thing that makes these rolls so special is that there are diced apples laced through the gooey caramel sauce. The recipe says that you can add apple liqueur to the caramel. I think I may try that next time for a more intense flavor.

Letting them rise a second time before baking. What you don't see is the huge, beaming smile on my face.

These rolls are fabulous. I'm going to make a variation of them for Christmas gifts for friends and family. Minus the apples but with a crazy yummy coffee maple glaze instead.

This recipe came from Ree Drummond of Pioneer Woman fame. Her link is in my sidebar. Big thanks to Tony (again) for the amazing photos and help with the clean-up. He was well rewarded!

Getting my brain in order

Holy moly, it's been in interesting few weeks. Just trying to wrap my brain around a sliver of it is too much to bear some days. In some ways, I see exactly how far I have come, but in others, I see exactly how far it is I have to go.

There are many difficult things that people have to do in their lives. There are many lessons to learn and changes to make. Some are considerably harder than others. Yesterday, I did the absolutely most difficult thing I have ever done in my life. Above and beyond getting out of an abusive relationship. Harder than having plans for a healthy child blow up in my face and dealing with the fallout. Harder than getting my center back. Harder than being confident in myself.

I took a stand against my abuser. I filed paperwork to change a wrong into a right. Nobody has ever told the truth to his face, including me. And there it is on paper for the world to see now. He will be served tomorrow.

I am terrified, but I am sick of being bullied and belittled. I am done walking on eggshells and keeping my mouth shut. I'm finished with letting him walk all over me. I will not let this person become the blueprint that my child will study as he becomes a man. No way.

There are so many reasons why.

Seaside walk

Yesterday morning, I asked Tony to show me how to use his camera. It's not just the little cutesy metallic green point-and-shoot cameras that most of us mamas have. Oh no. It's one of those big black ones with all the buttons and knobs and it has all kinds of attachments like lenses and lights and things. And a big black bag that he carries it all around in and God help him if it ever got stolen or damaged. I have never seen my Zen Master of a husband angry, but I'm definitely sure that steam would pour out of his ears and quite possibly lightening would stream down from the sky and zap an innocent grandma in the wazoo.

In my quest for learning how to do new things, I asked him a whole bunch of questions about what makes a good photographer. I mean, two people could take a picture of the same thing and the image by the everyday tourist would look just OK and the other by the trained photographer would capture the pure essence of what that object is inside and out. What makes the difference? We spoke about angles and lighting and lens types and composition and editing. I get the lingo because I have taken many a college art course and studied Art History more than most people would care to admit. I've dabbled a bit in photography, but that was many many years ago. I never really took to it because I didn't like turning into a bat and bumping about blindly in the darkroom. No thank you. Since then the whole digital revolution has come about and that is something entirely foreign to me. USB cables and Photoshop and who knows what else.

So we hoofed it down to the Oceanside Pier and Harbor. The pelican is Tony's shot, but the other three are mine. He tinkered with Picassa and here are the results. Hooray me.

This pelican was showing off for a little crowd of squealing children. He had it pretty good, seeing as it was the end of the day and there was little to no luck in the fish-catching department. He got the spoils of the left-over bait. Lucky duck... I mean lucky pelican.

This is a shot from under the Oceanside Pier. The waves were still rather large from the remnants of the Samoan earthquake. It was really something to see them crashing through the posts. Tony added a sepia tone and adjusted the sharpness and contrast. There was a small tweak on the angle as well.

There was a bike rental shop just below the pier. This image was cropped just a bit to focus on just the lines of the bike frames.

This shot was taken over by the Oceanside Harbor. I like the two blues with the sharp white trim. Just a small crop on this one.

The nature of things

The last few days have been a cluster of great successes, feats of strength, hearing difficult truths and in-my-face tests of my year of PTSD counseling. I would have to say that my therapist would be so very proud of me. Maybe I should give her a call. I have to say that I am giving myself a whole-hearted pat on the back for not losing my resolve or falling back into that dark place that I was dragging about with me for the better part of a decade. I am stunned that I am able to look back to those days without emotion. If I feel anything, it is sorrow. Not for myself - I cannot change the past and only look upon it as a source of lessons in moral character - but for others who have yet to witness the full wrath of what I experienced. If anything, the past week has proven to me that I am strong enough to take a stand for what is right and that I will be OK. Maybe scratched up a little bit, but for the most part come out on the back end a better person for it and thereby stronger as a final result after the wounds heal.

Several nights ago, I met with someone who needed me to tell her the truth. She had a list of questions and wanted brutally honest answers. I gave them to her. Not to be malicious or hateful to the person we were speaking of - I really and truly have no energy for that anymore - but to paint a very vivid picture of what the sad reality of the situation is. We talked at length over Niçoise salads and Merlot about the fact that the question of "why" cannot be answered, that we can only move forward and make ourselves whole again. There was a great desire on both our parts for the person in question to get help and to get that help quickly. However, the issue remains that the pride and ego that is present will not allow him to do so. It was concluded that he is embarrassed and ashamed of who he is down somewhere deep in the recesses of what he experienced as a child and that he feels the need to paint some sort of surreal picture of who he thinks he should be. It makes us both so incredibly sad as we both see that the potential in this person is immeasurable. Truly it is. He just refuses to see it and actually live it. Over the years, it has gotten covered with a very thin facade that is now crumbling about his shoulders.

What I had to say was very hard for her to hear, but it confirmed her suspicions of what she had thought all along. The most difficult thing for me wasn't talking about the past, it was watching her experience the same things I had. I could read it all over her face. No words needed to be spoken.

She is such a beautiful woman. So opposite from me in the physical, yet I know that if the circumstances were different, we would have been great friends. She is a strong, opinionated, athletic, savvy, smart, sharp and witty woman. She is successful, financially responsible and can wield the iron fist if necessary. The thing I like best about her is that she is brutally honest and is not afraid to call a spade a spade. She has the desire to know the truth and heaven help you if she finds out you are lying.

It has taken me the better part of a week to pull this post together. Since I have started it, I have been through another cycle of my black cloud moods. I had some time alone and was able to process everything that has occurred and work myself into a lather over it all. Yesterday I had a much needed chat with my amazing husband and we worked through the knotted up emotions that were clogging up my brain. A few tears, a small pity-party, a plan for action on my part to help relieve some of my anxiety and three wonderful hours walking the seaside cured most of the crud. I feel pretty much back to normal today.

I am a strong believer that everything happens because we need it to and that there is a lesson to learn so that we might be able to grow and thrive in our lives. I am seeing very clearly that I have made the right choices and that in and of itself is amazingly comforting.

Completely giddy

So along with my new Building the Muse blog project, there are a few other things that I am mentally ready to start tucking into my bag of tricks. The main one that I am completely over the moon about is learning how to bake. Baking is something that I have always envied in other people. To be able to turn out tender pie crusts and gooey perfectly balanced chocolate chip cookies is a skill that I thought possible only of the white-coated professionally trained gods and goddesses of the kitchen. And then I few months ago, I got to thinking. My MOM baked when I was a kid. I remember baking bread, sweet rolls, soft pretzels and sugar cookies. I remember licking the mixer beaters when my mom made cakes from scratch. The double boiler came out at Christmas when we made chocolate candies for our teachers. I'm skilled with my hands as an artist, why the heck can't I do this myself? Then to take it a step further - have you actually taken the time to READ the labels on the ready-baked goods in the grocery stores? They are longer than the inventory list at the San Diego Museum of Art. There are words in those lists that are not pronounceable without a degree in phonetics. And I have been eating that junk out of convenience for how long? Yuck. My intestines are sticking together just thinking about it. Shouldn't there be just flour, sugar, milk, butter, chocolate, vanilla beans? Simple ingredients, not chemically preserved sugar bombs meant to survive longer than radiated cockroaches.


So I started slowly with the obligatory banana bread. Then I pulled out the chocolate chip cookie recipe from my childhood. Now I'm ready to tackle sticky buns. Next, my grandma's chocolate cake with a possible detour to those amazing soft pretzels we made when I has a kid. Two Christmases ago, I was extremely successful at making caramel sauce. Sugar, cream, and butter - the real deal. I was so incredibly impressed with myself; I think I shed a tear. Really. I did it, and did it well! And it was good. Amen. A warm golden brown with a great consistency - not too sweet - just right.

So I have my list ready to go to prepare my kitchen with the tools necessary to succeed. My mom caught wind of my endeavor and got me started by bringing over my great-grandmother's ceramic mixing bowl last night. I can't believe this amazing piece of family history is in my home. It’s well over 100 years old. I remember my mother letting bread dough rise in it on the stove top. She had special tea towels to put over the top that were reserved for baking only. Heaven help the child who used them to mop up spilled milk!

Today I'm ready to purchase a rolling pin, long oven mitts to spare my arms from my clumsiness, parchment paper, a candy thermometer, a small cast-iron skillet and my own special tea towels. I'm going to splurge on Vietnamese cinnamon and European butter. And the most frightening item on the list is yeast. Yeast. Little tiny temperamental sugar-eating, warm-water swimming organisms. And they scare the heck out of me.

It's time to tackle the fears and hope that the weathered old bowl will bring me the wisdom of generations past. A little luck wouldn't hurt, either.

The new project

So that legendary bird sat on my shoulder a few months back and whispered, hey lady, you have quite a story to tell. Why yes, I do, says I to my fluttering avian friend. Recent events have prompted me to look into the publishing world and I found that not only is it very difficult to get a book published, the subject matter on which I was planning to focus on is a very tough sell to all the various publishing houses. I thought I would try anyway and quickly discovered that my brain does not function in such a linear fashion. What was pouring out of my pen and onto my crisp and crunchy new notebook was cathartic, but would there be interest in the way I was telling it? Maybe, maybe not. Not to be self-depreciating and if I was really really telling myself the truth, probably not. I don't have an English degree, or pure journalism experience, or a sharp pen with which to capture everything in such a succinct way that it would be a smooth read from start to finish.

So I thought, well then, how the heck will I be able to do this? To put everything down in words that form stories with injections of images and other inspirational thoughts can be rather fractal. I also tend to lean to the randomness of my world and to organize myself to the degree required to write a novel just ain't gonna happen. No way, no how. Not for all the hippos in the world, though my four year old gem of a child will be very disappointed, to say the least.

OK.

And there it was, looking me square in the face. Not only do I keep a quasi blog of sorts, but I read about four "mommy blogs" and three other thought collection blogs every single day. Duh. I very much enjoy the candid nature of them and I like the way that they can make you feel like you are in that person's living room with them through the power of wit and word. Every morning, I get all kinds of excited to open up my web browser to see what new and wonderful stories I can absorb about my favorite persons on the Internet. Hey!!! I can have one of those, too!

Eventually, this blog will move to it's own website. And wow! Lookie there! I have the great and wonderful privilege of being recently married to the most amazing computer dork in the world. He builds amazing websites for people for a JOB. Wow. JACKPOT! (Thank you baby doll and love of my life, even though you have no idea what you are getting into yet.) And I have nothing but time on my hands to bombard my little spot on the web with all my ramblings and musings.

The story I have to tell will be revealed in juicy little nuggets as I am reminded of them and have the need to share. It's one of pain and death - of others and of mine, of re-building and new growth, of healing and happiness, of food and inspirations and most importantly the love I have for those I choose to surround myself including my kick-ass husband, children and most importantly, the new-found respect I have for myself. I have been through many months of painful therapy and have come out on the other side with the ability to look back without all the black thunder clouds of emotion that were plaguing me for the better part of a decade. If I am able to help just one person by writing down my experiences and solutions, then my work will be even that much more complete. Just one person to say - oh my, I thought I was the only one going through this and holy crap you survived and I can do it too. That would mean the absolute world to me. Hippos and all.

Thanks, little bird.