Driver's ED

Aren't we all the best driving instructors?

We all do this.  Talk to other drivers while we're in the car.  You know you do.  I do.  I try not to say too much when I have kids in the car, but sometimes it can't be helped, although I do avoid the more colorful stuff, or I try to put a spin on it like it's some sort of learning lesson.  See that, kids? That idiot right there? That would normally make me want to scream and honk while making various gestures, but instead, I'm just driving calmly along, frowning...Mom learned a little more "patience" today! 

Still, I sometimes end up having these dialogues, usually out loud:

1.  What the---??? (hands in the air)  WHAT are you doing? Oh, you're turning… Thanks for using a BLINKER! I always love a chance to suddenly brush up on my reflexes and remind myself to never EVER look away from the road.

2.  Nice. You're PASSING me. And 4 other cars.  In a blizzard. Are you kidding me right now?? Must be great to have a 4x4 so you can drive 55 in a 40 mph zone on solid ice while passing 4 cars in a double yellow zone.  This one gets an index finger head-tap, as in "Wow. Use your HEAD, dumb-a$$".  (sorry but yes, it slips out).

3.  Two thumbs way, way up for the drivers who come flying up at the end of a double lane to squeeze past you while almost pushing you off the road, and then immediately they slow down to l e s s t h a n t h e s p e e d l i m i t.  As if time has suddenly stopped, or they forgot that 3 seconds ago, they were in a HUGE flipping hurry to get here.  Yes, you.  I have a special bumper/plow/ram assembly that I'd love to see developed, just for you.  Then I could use it to just calmly push you out of the way and off to the side, while maintaining the speed I was safely already at. 

do this NOW

    3a.  Mouthing the word "no".  This is for the drivers who come flying up past the signs that have said, clearly, for the last 2 miles "RIGHT LANE ENDS", but they will stubbornly pass everyone who already merged on over (I know, we're sheep) until they come literally up to the actual closed lane and can not drive another car length, before deciding they need to squeeze in, RIGHT-HERE, RIGHT-NOW.  I love the sense of solidarity you see when total strangers on the road will team up to not let them in while pretending to innocently be minding our own business, over here in our clearly-marked, single lane.  Nice try, though, dude.  Hope you weren't in a hurry or anything.  (wink) 

4.  "I'M DRIVING HERE".  When I'm driving, like any NORMAL person would, up a lane in a parking lot, and this guy's driving cross-ways through the whole entire parking lot.  At 35 mph.  If you cross in front of me, I will pretend I didn't see you, so you better either make it quick or get with the program.  This is another time a bumper ram/plow-type device would be great--then you could just catch their car and keep pushing them out of the way like a pile of snow until you've reach a good drop-off spot. 

   4a. This one has the added caveat of making me wonder, do you realize people also WALK in parking lots? And they have small children on the ground? Really.  Slow. The. Heck. DOWN.  In every direction.

5.  "Up. What are you doing?? The arrow points UP! UP, PEOPLE! Aaaahhh! Really??!?  No, wait, let ME get out of YOUR WAY."  For the folks who drive down the wrong direction in a parking lot lane marked with one-way directional arrows.  The arrows are there for a reason.  Mainly to point out that there isn't room for two cars to pass in this lane. But no.  Let ME squeeze to a stop to avoid running over some pedestrian while you drive down the middle of the lane with your Hummer.  (Hands up like, "wow" helps here, but not much).  Also sometimes I realize, too late, that *I'm* the one going the wrong way…duh.  So I keep the gestures to a minimum, just in case.

6.  Fog lights, or driving lights, or whatever they call them, at night, when there's no fog, or rain, or hazard whatsoever.  You know those two extra-large, extra-bright white lights BELOW your regular head lights? Those are for seeing in FOG, PEOPLE. Fog. Not for driving around on regular crystal clear evenings when us normal people might be trying to drive past you, until we are blinded by the full set of four lights in our face like an oncoming TRAIN.  I can't even tell you how annoying this is.  Please, have mercy.  Leave them OFF.  They are not cool.  They are blinding.  They make me want to put an actual train headlight on my hood and turn it on right in your face as you approach.  (Sorry…I'm usually so nice).

7.  Tailgaiting.  Even in dry conditions, this is just indefensible, but amazingly enough, I also get these on solid ice, which makes them especially enjoyable (sarcasm).  If you're willing to get so close to me that I can't see your hood ornament, you are TOOFREAKINGCLOSE, and I will use my brakes at will.  I always wish there was a bumper sticker or vanity plate that could impart this sentiment in just a few words, but it's no use.  I'm not a slow driver, so I'm always amazed at these people.  I'm willing to push the limit to 5 or even sometimes (yes) 10 mph over the posted limit, usually for the simple reason that this is the only way to keep up with traffic.  But if I'm already doing THAT, and you're willing to inch closer and closer and closer and closerandcloserandcloser, then you have earned the right to slam into the back of my car anytime I chose to STAND ON MY BRAKES. 

Fair warning.  I may also decide to turn, without signaling, into that lane clearly marked "Down".

I'm sure there are more, but for now, this will have to do.

For my own amusement, here are some others I'd love to post on our road...

could  happen...

stunt area, watch for motorcycles

followed by a bucket of roofing nails tossed across the road...

watch for yoga students in the roadway

You know you're in Idaho when...

You see this.  Parked at, yes, Walmart.

Oh. My. Gosh. 

I actually SAW this on my way out of a Walmart parking lot a couple of years ago.  I drove past like, wow, but then I had to stop and back up and actually take a picture, because, you know, some things you have to have proof of. 

It's appararently a school bus that has been converted into a motor home or RV or whatever.  Ok, I'm with them so far.  But, then there's a Kenworth SLEEPER, attached to the back of the bus!?!!?  

What?!?  I don't even--  Words fail.

I wish I'd gotten closer to see if there was actual duct tape involved, but it was kind of a drive-by photo op, since I didn't want someone to open the door to this super-cool unit and see a lady in a BMW laughing and taking pictures of their home.  Um... rude.  But, what's funny is that the people who drove this are probably actually "my people", in the sense that I grew up all hippied out in the 70s, and I knew actual people who totally lived in a school bus.  For real.  I even slept there sometimes with my friend (so, was it her parents who lived in it? I can't remember).  I remember lying on the bed (or whatever we were on, planks...who knows), and seeing the sky through those really difficult-to-open bus windows.  Remember those?  You had to like stick your fingertips in these tabs and pull both sides towards the middle (hard) and then simultaneously wiggle the whole thing down to open it.  If you got it wrong or were stronger on one side, you'd get a 45-degree angle, and then the whole thing's jammed and the super crabby bus driver would scream at you with her cigarette/whiskey voice to "LEAVE THE DAMN WINDOWS UP.  Do not make me stop this bus! Man, I hate kids!..." etc. 

(sorry...time warp there)

ANYway, the point is, I was laughing, but I totally get this.  The Kenworth sleeper thing is hilarious in this day and age, but I bet if you asked the guy who built this, he'd be all:  "Dude, this is the coolest thing EVER.  Check it out, man--we carpeted the whole thing."  And he'd show you all through it, and it'd have all these funky little tricky things that he made, like how the sleeper door opens in to the bus, so you have more storage room behind it inside the sleeper.  Or maybe how the sleeper is a "mother-in-law's" quarters or a solar hot tub area or something.

So, I sort of love this picture--It's fun to remember where you came from, and this picture totally reminds me.

I Met a Princess Once...

This is from a long post that I had published in bits and pieces on a cake forum a long time ago at the height of my Bakery Life.  Every word is true; again, you can't make up stuff this crazy.

If it seems pieced together, it is, but it was so funny and bizarre that I had to include it here.
____

One day my bakery phone rings and it's this woman, who sounds very...normal.  No foreign accent, articulate, friendly, personable, slightly chatty, etc.  She tells me she's calling me from Africa (eyebrow up), and that they are going to be moving 'home' soon to a local mansion that they have bought. They are "renewing their vows" (at this point I'm still with her) before flying off to Hawaii and Disneyland, in that order (other eyebrow starting to go up).

She asks if I can do a pillow cake with a crown on it. I say sure. She says, "Because my husband's actually a prince." I'm thinking, "Okay, your husband's a great guy." But she's trying to say he's actual royalty, and she mentions it several more times. I'm unimpressed (sorry). But yes, I can do a crown-on-a-pillow cake.

Her next request is that she wants a 4-foot-tall Faberge design cake, and can I do this? I say that I can, but first I need to know her wedding date. She says, "Oh...you know...soon." We talk about design for a minute. She's obviously ON my website while we're talking, and she compliments me on various cakes.   All throughout her chitchat, she keeps mentioning that her husband "works at the embassy," and that they are "financially comfortable," (starting to lose me here, why does this matter?). She also needs to tell me that her husband, who's a prince, remember, is half-Australian and half-South African, but that her daughter is: White (me: "Huh? So?"). Both eyebrows starting to frown.

She asks about cake tastings and flavors, and we have a somewhat normal conversation about that--what he likes, what she likes, etc.  She still sounds pretty sane.  I tell them they can come in if they want (when they're in the States, that is). She tells me again, "That would be nice, but my husband's...black.  (long pause) But he USED to be white." At this point, I'm like, WTF??

I tell her to send me a web order online and that I will check my calender and see if I'm available (I'm booked thru June heavily, so that's true.). She says she "only" wants to work with me.  Whatever.

I figure I'm not going to hear from her again. Ten minutes later I get an online order with her info (with her name, I kid you not, as "Princess *name withheld*") and that she will take whatever date I want and give me instructions "when they're in the States". The order has no capitalization (even for the name of the mansion), and the design info is...odd and very random (exactly like those Nigerian email scam orders).

I decided to look up her phone number (duh, Poynt, people), and it's a LEWISTON, IDAHO phone number. Okayyyy. So she took her Idaho cell phone to Africa to live? And the name of the "mansion" they're "buying" to live in, in two weeks, is a major wedding venue I dealt with in Spokane all the time, so I called them and said, "Hey, this is Stef--are you guys for sale right now?" Of course we had a bit of a laugh about it, because of course they're not. But really. What's the POINT of all this???

I emailed the, uh, Princess back and said I'd gotten to my desk and that I did not, in fact, have any dates open in June, best luck in the future, etc.

The same day, I got a TEXT from her Idaho cell phone number, with an incredible photo of a Faberge egg vase filled with gorgeous flowers, like this:

 This should be the inspiration for the 4' tall cake she's wanting. 

What. the. heck?  What happened to the crown on a pillow?

She did sound very rational, but yes, she did keep bringing up her husband's skin color, and yes, I swear she said he's black,...but he used to be white... (I let that one go).  I did tell her I don't care what color he is; bring him in.

I decided to call her and tell her I didn't see any June dates open (and I really didn't have time for a 4' cake that month unless I worked 24-hour shifts, even if she WAS for real).   And, NO sending me extra money.  I'm not that gullible.

She also asked me for a local referral to a caterer's number for her upcoming party, and I gave her one.  Afterwards, I started wondering about the whole thing, so I then called THEM and left a message that if an African princess calls to book you for a party, please let me know.

Also I'd love to know what time is it at the South African embassy, when it's 2 pm PST here? Just a thought...

Assuming I'm willing to go along with the fact that, okay, sure, they're royalty and they don't know their next address, then (possibly) I could be looking at a very expensive cake.  The sugar flowers alone would cost a fortune.

Am I supposed to call her Your Majesty next time? What's the protocol for talking with royalty by phone in Idaho? The whole conversation was very pleasant and chatty, albeit surreal and with way too much odd personal info from her ("Did I mention we're rich?" WHO announces that??), and I was driving in heavy traffic at the time, which makes me a little ADD anyway. But maybe she's just an eccentric princess with party-planning time on her hands, who really just loves red velvet cake and wants a 4' Faberge egg made of sugar.  I've seen odder cakes...

Assuming all of that--she also still reminded me very much of a woman we knew when I was a kid, who actually lived with us in the 1970s, who was very schizophrenic and on heavy meds, and when she would go off her meds, she would call me from Seattle when I was 13 and be like, "Hiiii Stef...I'm having a tea party. Do you want to come to my tea party?" And I'd be on the phone looking at my mom, like, "Isn't Diane still in SEATTLE?!? Seven hours away??" Then, "Sure, Diane, I'd love that. Yeah, okay, well, here's my mom." She was very odd when off meds, but in a sweet believable way.

Here's the next chapter.  I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

She called me the next day. I knew it was her, because I saved her in my cell as "Princess XX from Africa LOL." My kids are like, "Answer it!! Do it!"

So, she had now picked a date in July and a venue (the nicest one in the area, and no, she's not living in it this time), and also an alternate venue idea.

Now she has picked a cake design from my website, said she wants exactly that design. Except...She did mention she wants it 6' tall.  I stopped her here and said: "OKAY. First I need to know how many guests are we feeding?" She's like, "About 40." I said, "You realize that, for a cake to be 6' tall, it is going to need a LOT of styrofoam dummies, or you're going to have a ton of leftover cake". She's like, that's okay, I love cake. I said, "No I mean, thousands of dollars worth, of extra cake".

So, she completely switches gears and says that it doesn't matter and to please just copy this 4-tiered round cake on my website, but add some pearls and sugar diamonds to "dress it up".

She picked flavors and fillings for all four tiers, although at one point she said she wants ME to pick all the flavors (huh??? um, no). I reminded her that the cake she's ordering will only be like 18"-20" tall. She said that's fine, it doesn't have to be huge (?). This is all starting to REALLY NOT MAKE SENSE. 

At least she didn't mention anyone's skin color this time, which was a plus.

She did mention that it was 4 a.m. where she is, and that she was "kind of tired, but she that has to get up and deal with all this planning at wierd hours because that's the time difference to get vendors over there during regular hours." (oooohh-kay).

Now she went on to say she still wanted a pillow cake with a crown and gold tassles (because that's a royal color), with a frog inside the crown, because she had to kiss a lot of frogs to get her prince (believable? sure).

I asked her if she's already booked the venue for this event.  She said it's one or the other but hasn't booked yet. (I have calls in to both to check this). She didn't mention moving INto a venue this time, but did say that by that time "their house should be finished".  So apparently, she's still moving here?

The whole time, I'm thinking, she is so rational to visit with and very appreciative of my taking the time to help her with this, etc., etc., that (aside from the original wacky details) that she could be any customer I've talked to, who's planning a cake.

So I wrapped it up with telling her that I will get all her details into a quote and email it to her. If she wants to book it, there's a $100 deposit to hold the date. The balance is due a month before the event. She said that's fine and that her daughter is here in Idaho and can get that to me. (very normal, no offering of extra funds or whatever). She's like, "Oh thank you so much; I know it will be perfect."

Ok, I do have to interject that she did mention some of the cake is being taken BACK to Africa, at which point I said italian meringue icing isn't a good idea for long travel, and she said they'd be using dry ice. (what EVER)

The whole time, I'm thinking what's the POINT of all of this?

I called my bank and totally enthralled the lovely girl there with the story. She now wants to be on the list of updates when this all does/doesn't happen. ("Call me. I mean it.") She said a cashier's check is okay but can be a fraud, and frauds can go for 7 years out, in terms of them being able to suck the funds BACK out of my account if it turns out to be fraudulent.  She said cash of course is best, or a credit card from the daughter and give everything lots of time to clear, etc. Of course my cake contracts state that nothing is refundable after certain dates, etc. And of course I wouldn't let her 'over'pay me (whoops) and ask for a refund on the overage, so I'm covered there.  Basically by now I was just thinking...yep; I'm booked, lady. er, Your Highness... (muffled laughter)

I also took the time to do another reverse lookup of the phone number she'd been calling from-- remember I said it appeared to be a Lewiston number?

Well. It said it's a...(ready?) LANDLINE in Lewiston.

Ok, so how. IN. THE. HECK is she calling me from AFRICA?

I decided I have no idea what is up with this, but she's got to be lying about everything or, as a friend suggested, making her "one phone call from the asylum today" to yank my chain.

So much for rational, sane-sounding lunatics.

"Yes, hello, Room Service? I'd like a glass of water and some Valium. Thanks." --Stef


Late, late post-script:  I never did hear back from her.  Whatever.

Cooking with My Mom

I have been cooking with my mom, well, for pretty much EVER.  She taught me, from the time I had to stand on a kitchen chair at the counter, up to my first cake entry at a little county fair (which won Best in Fair and got me a HUGE purple rosette), and we still cook together when she visits.  She is an amazing cook who has "been there and done that" in terms of the restaurant/food business.  She has run a lunch and sweet shop that became locally famous for her bagels and hand-dipped truffles; a restaurant that became famous for her scratch pizza and sourdough pancakes (seriously, ONE is enough, sir; they're 10" in diameter), and supplied homemade desserts for a New Jersey restaurant in the early 70's. 

At the Jersey shore with my mom; one of my favorite pics ever.

On one of her last visits, Mom reminded me about how she used to keep me occupied by turning on 'Sesame Street', back when it was a "new" show on TV, while she baked pies at home for the restaurant in New Jersey, so I guess I've been with her in the kitchen for a longer time than I remember.

When she's here, we still spend a lot of our time in the kitchen. In fact, usually we run out of days to make *all* the things we wanted to bake, and the conversations sound like this:

Her:  So, what should we do for dinner tonight?

Me:  Let's do homemade potato pierogi.  We haven't made those yet!  With Polish sausage and saurkraut.

Her:  What about borscht?

Me: That too. And flat bread. And babka! We forgot the chocolate babka!

Her:  There wasn't time. We were too busy making the butter cookies and gingerbread. Enough with the carbs, already.

Me:  We also totally haven't made homemade marshmallows yet.

Her:  I leave tomorrow, remember?

And so on...

This summer she's coming for a longer stay than her last holiday visit, and since I've started putting everything we love into ONEcookbook for our family, I can already tell we're going to be having variations of this conversation a lot.

You Should Write a Cookbook, They Said...

This past week I finally started putting together a project that has been in the concept stage forever. 

I've always baked and cooked, and my mom has always baked and cooked.  It seems like between the two of us, we are always baking or cooking, for ourselves or others.  In my case, this got way way out of hand after someone said: you could totally sell cakes, but that's another story.  The project I have been thinking about forever, though, is a cookbook.  I'm finally not spending everywakingmoment meeting with brides, their moms, their fiancés, their best friends, their children and their bridal parties (Hi, we're here for the wedding cake tasting.  Yes, there are 9 of us). I'm also not constantly at a bakery or up late at night designing, sketching, baking, and creating edible works of art, like turning this sketch...

Into this cake:

When I have free time like this, my mind turns to projects; hence, the idea of a cookbook.

I'm not saying I'm going to whip up a bunch of NEW recipes and call a publisher or anything, but with the combined total of like a thousand years of cooking experience in our family, I thought it'd be a wonderful gift to my two girls as future graduates, wives and mothers, to compile a book with all of our family's favorite recipes in one place.

This will also be a great gift to myself, so I can skip the endless flipping through book after book, muttering, "Criminy! WHICH book has our favorite gingerbread recipe?!?"  This will be a one-stop collection drawn from my many cookbooks, 4x6 note cards,  my Polish grandmother, my mom, my years in the wedding cake industry, magazine tear-outs, etc.  If you've ever eaten at our house or attended a wedding with one of my cakes, you have an idea what it will contain.  So far everyone who's heard about this project, wants a copy, which is sweet but is so not what I had in mind.  (No pressure there; now it has to be Really Perfect).

Not that you won't be able to maybe snag a copy someday, for a price, but I am nowhere near that point yet, so don't get all excited. 

After talking about it as an idea for probably 2 years now, I finally started working on it this past week.  I actually downloaded what seemed like a very cool self-publishing book program from online, (which shall remain nameless) chose the book size and general chapter titles, and wrote a brief introduction (which will, no doubt, go Long).  I started  with their automatically formatted 'recipe' pages, which seemed AWEsome at first.  Right away I ran into a glitch with their automatic, nonoptional text "bleed" feature, where you can be typing blithely along in a text box on a 2-column page, reach the bottom of the column, and you assume (why not?) that the bleed of the text will carry into the next column. On the same page. 

For some reason, however, this is NOT where your overflow text ends up.  At first, it's not apparent where it ends up, only that there is an "Issue" and that it has been "Fixed".  If you've typed enough of the overflow text or aren't paying attention, you will suddenly realize that you are typing on a whole new page, somewhere Out There in the book, but you are definitely no longer on the same page.

After most of a day spent doing a lot of cut-and-pasting, deleting, undoing, and some major cursing, plus a near all-out I am SO not doing this, I figured out the text bleed thing.  Somehow it bleeds, not onto the same page, (where it belongs) but into the next available blank text box, *usually* the next page.  Wth??  I can only assume that, if the next page were already full, then this random bleed function could also technically put your continuation of "Aunt Lillian's Coconut Easter Eggs" on a page in the Meat chapter, and then Easter's screwed and the BBQ has a funny 'tropical' flare.  But I digress…

Long story not much shorter, I turned it all off for awhile and considered my options (quit, find another program, or figure this out), and decided that I DO want to have this book done in my children's lifetime, so I took a break, turned it back on, and dove in.

So far, I'm pretty happy with the progress I'm making.  It's been a surprisingly slow process, trying to figure out the best way to add recipes:  book by book, and jump around all through my chapters, adding recipes? Or chapter by chapter, sorting through 30 different books for ALL my favorite chicken recipes at once?  I've settled on book by book, mostly because having ALL the cookbooks I own sitting on the coffee table is making the living room look like a major hoarder lives here.  See? 

Not cool…Now there's nowhere to put your feet.

I'm prepared for this whole book-writing thing to take a long time, because there's also still the whole issue of adding photos.  Occasionally I've taken pictures of cool things I've cooked at home, which ususally turn out like this:

(I know, pretty awesome composition, huh?)

Since snapping pro-quality pictures of food at home is not an everyday thing for me, there's an obvious problem here.  Almost every photo I've tried to add have returned an "Issue" with resolution, which the program wants to "fix" by resizing the image to like a 1 x 1" square.  That's totally not what I have in mind, since most really awesome cookbooks usually have glossy full-page photos and could double as a coffee-table book.   I tested it using some of the pro cake pictures I have from wedding photo shoots that were published in print and online, to see if they would work in this program, but even THOSE seem to be not good enough (really??).   Plus, I can't just put wedding cake pictures on every page of a cookbook.

(This says nothing about Marsala Chicken, to me. Even my kids would see through that. Cake chapter photo, though? yes, maybe.)

I haven't figured out how to solve this problem yet, so for now I'm going to focus on just getting the recipes added to the book, leave the formatted spots for photos along the way, and hope to figure it out before it's all done.  Then I will sell it to everyone on the planet and become a billionaire with my own TV show, radio show, cable show, books, magazines, and product line in every major box store, muahahahahaha.

If it's worth doing, it's worth flying by the seat of your pants, is what I always say...or was that Martha? 

Sorta Organic Gardening

It's raining again today, which means all my lovely roses in the height of their June flush of blooms are drooping and sad and wet.  The vegetable garden is, well, plenty wet, and the luscious peonies and perennials are splayed almost flat on the ground from the pounding rain we had all day yesterday too.


Sad Golden Celebration, hanging its head

Centifolia Fantin-Latour, pounded flat

Carefree Beauty, waterlogged

So…I sit inside and I wait.  And write :D

But it makes me mad because I know, I just know, that when I go back out, the rose problems that I fight all year, my Big Three of rose problems (powdery mildew, black spot, and aphids) will be fully back in the saddle and taking off without me.

If you've read my background, you know that I took about a 12-year detour out of my Real Life to start up a wedding cake bakery, which amped up my schedule and my stress level for the last 5 years and caused me to absolutely not be home to garden or maintain anything here, so the diseases have been let go.  I grew up in the hippied-out 70s, (a long story for another time), so I GET the whole "organic" thing.  I grew UP organic.  I AM organic.  Which is great, and I'm so thankful to my mom for raising us that way.  I have an abhorrence of chemicals in my food or on my plants, but (here's where the Modern Times girl kicks in), I'm not above using chemicals if I must. 

Sometimes I call the years of not going in the rose garden…an "experiment (polite euphemism) in letting things just do what they do" and see what happens.  Well, I let them "do what they do" and I was sort of pleasantly surprised to find that, sometimes without any pruning, mulching, fertilizing, spraying, thinning, deadheading, babying or special treatment of any kind, they were more or less fine.  They grew and bloomed and spread (some really, really spread…suckers everywhere on the gallicas), and the diseases were present but not debilitating, and everything's still alive.  Keep in mind, though, that most of my roses are old garden/antique roses, which are a shock to the modern rose gardener who's never raised them, because they do not NEED all the mollycoddling that today's hybrid teas need.  Don't get me wrong, I have hybrid teas, too, and I love them.  'Pascali and Love' are blooming right now, albeit soaking wet.

This year I'm *back*, so to speak.  I'm not going overboard with any special treatment, though I have deadheaded, pruned, and weeded some, and I do want to get the problems in check and clean up the mildew, aphids, and black spot.  I haven't had time yet to fertilize, and we're in the first flush of blooms, which, for antiques, means the only flush, but they are (again) fine with it. 

I remembered there was an old homemade rose spray I used years ago that consisted of water, Murphy's oil soap, baking soda (and milk? I thought there was milk in there, but maybe not…I'm too lazy to look it up, so whatever).  I mixed up a spray bottle with this (I use the 'eyeball it' method of measuring) and used it on the roses two weeks ago and again a week later, and I watched and waited. 

I'm thinking I'd like to say that everything looks better.  It…might, but the mildew and black spot have a couple of main favorite roses, and so far it is really hard to stop.  My gallica Charles de Mills seems to be the harbinger of mildew out there; that plant is covered from inside to out usually, though it blooms its head off, so I started there.  As of today, it still looks fairly clean, even with the rain.  The hybrid tea Sonia and a mini red (which sxtubsequently turned itself from a minuscule tabletop potted mini into a long-stemmed red that is about thigh high--wth?), have black spot pretty aggressively spreading, even with the "spray" I mixed up.  Maybe it needs milk, or maybe I should look up the actual recipe (duh). 

Meanwhile, I DO have a cabinet full of Ortho rose chemicals for various things, with pleasant-enough non-scary names like Rose Pride, because, you know, Daconil just does sounds…dangerous.  I'm happy to try my all-natural methods of spraying the Recipe (whatever it is; I'm calling it that from now on), and waiting, but I keep the Big Guns in that cabinet, just in case. 

As for aphids…meh,*shrug*…they've never been as big a problem, even though I hate them, too.  I do see them here and there, and sometimes  ("Oh, eww…that's a lot of aphids") I'll hit them with a stream of water or the Recipe (does the soap smother them? I don't know), or sometimes just take my chances and give the bud they're on a good *flick* with my finger so they all go flying off (aiyeeee).  Sometimes the whole bud breaks off and goes with them, so that's sort of, uh, less than desirable. 

It seems like the books always say if you flick or wash them off, they won't come back, which I don't get, because…there they are, at the bottom of the plant, or on the lower leaves, and they're all wth? Did she seriously just flick us?? Well, let's just climb back UP and start over, so I'm not convinced that flicking and rinsing does anything more than give me momentary satisfaction of feeling like Uh-huh, I win.  What they do not know, as I'm rinsing or flicking them, is that I'm thinking (and sometimes I'm saying out loud, but no one's around so you have no proof of this), Yeah, go ahead, suckers.  Climb back UP and try again.  But don't think I won't get the Ortho products out, because, oh yes, I will totally go there.

So I guess I'm just saying, I'm sitting here watching it be like 100% humidity and 50 degrees outside, and I know that I hate spraying with chemicals, but I also know that when I go back outside, once I can go out without seeing my breath (in JUNE--not that I'm bitter), I will not be surprised to see black spot and powdery mildew flourishing with wild abandon, and I will probably give up and go get the Daconil out.  It even has its own scary spray bottle that I creatively drew a skull and crossbones on, just in case anyone is mistaken.  See?  I know, nice, right?

(Gah…I can taste  this stuff in my mouth, just when I hold the bottle.  SO nasty!)

It's supposed to warm up again next week, so I have gloves and spray bottles of both organic and non-organics ready, and I've promised myself, this year, I got this.  In the meantime, I should go look up the *actual recipe* for the Recipe…

Happy gardening!

Facebook Should Have a "Punch" Button

Dear Mark: This is just NOT enough.

I'm not the biggest fan of Facebook, so I'll just throw that out there.  I know I'm not alone, but I felt like I had to Add My Voice.

I get that you can 'Like' someone's post or update or whatever, and I only click 'Like' if I really, actually DO like them.  If you post random song lyrics, happy kittens/rainbows/butterflies with sisterly inspirational poems, or how much you love your husband, I will probably not respond, even though that's nice and all.

What I do wish, is that they gave you other options (besides just 'Like'-- 'Like' is so limiting) for all the random did-I have-to-see-that posts, that I try to weed OUT.  I know, you can select to have someone not "show in your feeds", but if they're family or whatever, then I'm stuck with the almost-as-annoying task of looking them up individually every once in awhile, to see if they have any real news that I might need to see, and then ahhhhhhhhhhHHH noooooo, there are all their daily/hourly profile photo changes and status updates about what the kids had for breakfast/snack/dinner, or the 'how cute is this?' post with the kids hugging/sleeping/dressed as pumpkins/covered in dirt or whatever.

Really, all I would LIKE to receive is just news that, once upon a time, you might have, say, CALLED someone on the phone about (remember back when we used to CALL each other on the phone??  Not text…d-i-a-l  their number and actually say words to each other in real time?)  Stuff you might include in the Christmas newsletter (which I also don't do), or photos you'd send to various family/friends to keep us up to date.  Wow, their kids are sure getting tall! I thought he/she was still about 4 years old.  Has it really been this long?? We should get together more. 

When's the last time you called an acquaintance, who you've possibly never met in person, just to say, "My cats are asleep." See?  TMI.  There should be a filter there.

So, what I do NOT need is hourly updates on everysinglefreakingfacet of your day-to-day life, your marriage, your kids, their potty-training (or lack of), everything they ever say, what you're cooking for every meal, or how your Starbuck's looks today.  It's like total flippin' update overload.  If I wanted to know this much about anyone, I'd have MARRIED them.  Oh wait, I did…  But really, that's a very small group, so for the ones outside the circle of me and Shane…I don't need that kind of constant input.  I don't even ask him for hourly photo updates of what he looks like behind the wheel of his truck, so why would I need them from anyone else?

There are (possibly) five main types of FB posts:

1.  The TMI posts.  ("OMG y'all I just had the best turkey sandwich.  Check it out!") there's a minute I'll never get back…

2.  The check out my kickass life posts.  ("Chilling by the inground pool out back while the spa is being built, after a long day driving the Escalade 100 miles round trip for the best mani-pedi EVER!  J")

3.  The vague status updates.  ("I've never been so offended.")

4.  The wannabe gangsta posts.  ("feelz gr8 chilaxn wid mah boiz tonyt yo.")

5.  The selfie photo upload.  With or without meaningless text, face it, it's just a reason to put your face on here, again, today.  And I'm like, oh look…you look, just like you did in the last picture, what was it…four hours ago?   Oh, wait, this one's from the LEFT side.   Cute.

As a reference, If you have more than two photos of your face, up close, with no one else equally in the picture, on your FB page, unless you've had surgery to add or remove something; or you've had an inspirational amount of weight loss or changed your hair color (even then, that one's on the fence), then you are GUILTY of too many selfies!!   Fifty lashes!!!  Stop, please!

And really, do you seriously have 755 ACTUAL FRIENDS??  No, silly.  You have, like, 4.  Just like everyone else on the planet.  I can't imagine having that many people privy to my everyday life.  It's freaky.  What if suddenly one of your 'friends' shows up at your house?  Knock knock.  'Hello?' 'Hi, I'm Bob.  From Facebook.  We've never met, so I searched you online, Google mapped your house, Googled your social feeds and family info, and just thought I'd stop by.  We have the same birthdate."

So, in the interests of everyone having a better understanding of how their FB friends really feel, I think we should have more than ONE way to respond to the people we choose to stay connected to.  Maybe if we were allowed to show our immediate reaction to posts, FB would sort of self-correct.  Here's a start…feel free to add on from here.

1.  Thumbs down = "Dislike" 

2.  Two thumbs down = "Dislike and a warning not to post like this again."

3.  Three thumbs down = "DISLIKE and turning off your feed."

4.  Fist = "Punch" (for idiot posts)

5.  Mouth with X over it = "Shut.UP."

6.  TMI = TMI, dude, seriously.  No one needs to know what song you're listening to.

7.  Rubber ducky = Selfie and/or ducklips limit reached.  Stop, please.

8.  Clock = Tick tock. Why are you still awake, posting? Don't you have a life?

9.  Bar of soap = Too much profanity.  Puh-leez.

10. Blurry stick figure = Too vague.  I don't want to try and figure out whatever it is that you do 'not want to talk about', in public.

11.  Candycane = Too sweet.  You've reached your quota for inspirational quotes.

12.  Foghorn = Too many updates in one day.  We're friends, not Siamese twins.

13.  :P = Eww, gross.

14.  >:(  = Rude.   

15.  X  = Political ranting limit reached.  STOP with the outspoken, in-your-face posts and links to rants about religion, politics, gay rights, gun rights, fair trade, left/right wing stuff, etc.  You aren't going to change my mind in any category, but your constant yelling about these topics makes YOU seem intolerant and arrogant, and is making me reconsider why we're friends in the first place.  Huge problem.

16. UF = Unfriending you -- peace out dude.

Whoa.  That was supposed to be a list of maybe 10 things…Well, you get the picture.  I'll be over here, NOT on FB.  Feel free to send a Christmas newsletter.