Holy Cow. Is That What I Think It Is??

If you read my last post about my childhood horse accident and subsequent lack of an eyebrow, you may have seen this picture...

The "after" picture, with my left eyebrow, cheek and forehead still showing marks from the accident.

Being mostly observant after the fact, and loving to look at the background details of old photos, I was looking closer at this picture on my screen after posting it.  Mostly in awe, like...WHAT IS WITH THE OPEN SHELVES?  What is all that stuff?  Then, OK...I see we're drinking RC and eating pizza (so, it's a special treat, or it's before our vegetarian year).  Then, check out those curtains, and what looks like cheap laminate board over what must have been a bad wall behind us.  I remember most of that.

Then the fridge.  Wait--What is hanging over the fridge?  Is that-- ?   Oh my actual gosh.  Yes.  It is.  A snake skin.  Or, rather, a shedded snake skin, or whatever it's called when they leave that behind.  I remember it now.  Why on earth Dad chose to hang it up, right there by itself, in the dining room...escapes me.  

I totally remember that rattle snakes were a problem there, but what the heck? 

Just--Oh. my. gosh.  Now I can't "un-see" it.... Too funny!

Time Traveler--A Horse Wreck, and why I Have Bangs Now

Time for another stroll down memory lane.

Oh my gosh, you guys.  I found more cool pictures, so of course, here's a story to go with them.

We lived in California (coastal Sonoma County, aka "heaven", if you've ever been there) from 1973 to 1977.  We had migrated there from New Jersey after my dad possibly was overcome by a fit of I DON'T WANT TO GO TO YALE AND BE A DOCTOR, THANK YOU, and decided that we needed more of that hippie/natural thang going on in our lives.  Because, you know, money is overrated (but I digress).  

Plus, why would anyone want to look like this:

Dad, around 1966

 ...when you could look like this?

Dad, at left; my favorite aunt, Mom, uncle, and me at my birthday.  Yeah.  Much better.

Fortunately for me (and my mom), my favorite aunt (her sister Dobi) and uncle also lived there. She was absolutely my favorite person on the planet, aside from Mr. Rogers and Big Bird.  She was the most fun grown-up I knew, silly and wonderful and young at heart--even more fun than our 20-something nomads.  She and my uncle lived on what I assume was a 70s-type commune, and I used to spend weekends there with them, listening to sitar music, eating bulgar out of wooden bowls, and (best of ALL), riding horses!  I was obsessed with horses.  I read about horses, dreamed about horses, and constantly wished for horses.  I used to fantasize that I'd go outside and find...a horse, with a tag around its neck, saying, "please keep me", and then we'd be best friends forever and ride off into the sunset.

When I wasn't with her, riding horses, I would pull our long phone cord (remember those?) around to the living room, straddled the back of our couch, and bounce along, pretending I was riding, to a sound track of James Taylor and Crosby, Stills, and Nash (and sometimes Young).  Yeah...good times.

I spent all my artistic time, drawing horses.  Nothing else.

Here I am...practicing--horses.  Left-handed.  My teachers despaired of me.  "WHY can't you use your RIGHT hand??"

The commune where I got to stay with my aunt was on a huge piece of land with a big house, called Mountain Wolf (uh, no...I don't recall wolves there), and it was inhabited by people who came and went often and were probably generally fascinating, in a 70s kind of way, but I don't really remember any of them.  There was a guy named Rainbow (it was the 70s, remember?) and an older girl who I looked up to (who rode English, for those of you who understand how cool that would be to a western kid), whose name was Eurydice. For some reason, I also remember a little girl, maybe 2 years old, named (I kid you not:) Keja-Ho, who ran around in nothing but a diaper, with a quarter taped over her oddly BIG "outie" bellybutton, I suppose, to help it... *not*...be an outie?  I have no idea why I remember that.

There was also this terrific, super OLD barn, which was in probably scary-dangerous shape, in the sense that the whole building leaned hard to one side.  Like, 45 degrees.  I loved it.

Exactly like this.  Seriously.

We had to yodel (yes, "yodel-LAY-hee HOOOOO") to call the farm's herd of 6-8 horses to come in from their huge grazing pastures, and if you did it loud enough and they heard it, the whole bunch would come thundering up the hill for some oats.  It was exhilarating and scary.

I still remember their names:  Okemo and Mahara were a mother-and-daughter mare and filly, a pair of the most fantasy-inducing palominos you could wish for as a little girl, but too unbroken (and too big) for novices to ride.  Toni was a sleek dark bay who I seem to recall was highly trained and/or high-spirited and temperamental and not to be touched by a small child.  Or maybe she kicked people...I can't remember.  Four Paws was about 400 years old and barely got around...a swaybacked and tired old gelding with white socks. No one rode him that I recall, or maybe I started on him and I don't remember?  Apple Jack was our favorite--well-broke and gentle, not too tall, and super easy to handle.  I have no idea why Festus the donkey was there, but he was fuzzy and white and friendly, so I loved him too.

Dobi would catch Apple Jack, and we'd saddle him, I would scramble up behind her (somehow we both fit inside the saddle!), and we'd take this long, wonderful ride together-- down a hill, across a little stream, up and around through trees and fields, through pasture gates, down old forgotten quiet roads, and back to the property.  I loved those rides as much as you can ever imagine a 5-year-old loving anything on earth.

My Happy Place, c. 1975-6

One day I learned to canter on Apple Jack.  By myself.  HUGE deal.  I was very excited about this, and so, as our ride was coming to an end one day and we were at the upper pasture, heading back for the house, we met my uncle, coming through the gate.  The pasture was wide, and I was so excited to show him my new skill by loping across the top road along the upper fence line.  Unfortunately, 6-year-old me didn't realize that Apple Jack was only thinking of the path we always took, halfway across the pasture, that cut a beeline straight down the hill, through the trees, down a little hairpin turn that took you down the bank to the main gravel road back to the house (and...obviously...the barn.  Where the oats were.)

So.  I was all "Hey, uncle Jerry! Watch me gallop!!"  And Apple Jack was like, "Heck YEAH, time to gallop TO THE BARN."  Wires majorly crossed.  I kicked him to get up to a lope across the pasture, and he immediately wrenched the reins out of my hands and took off at what felt like Seabiscuit speed, straight down the hill towards the house.

I remember hanging on to just the saddle horn, the up and down motion of his neck, and his mane blurring my vision.  I remember seeing, out of the corner of my eye, like a cartoon stick figure, my aunt, running, screaming, behind us.  I remember thinking, "DO NOT LET GO or you will die or at least break your arm in a gopher hole."  For some reason, I was very concerned about breaking my arm in a gopher hole.  It never occurred to me that HE might step in a gopher hole; thank God he didn't.  

I stuck to the saddle like a crazy burr all the way down the field at warp speed, through the trees, right down to the high bank above the gravel road, where I can only assume he made a steeplechase-like leap down onto the gravel road.  It was at this point that my little self could just not hold on any more--the rush of an animal that big jumping off what seemed like a cliff to me, must have loosened my grip.  I tumbled off over his front shoulder as he jumped, breaking my fall nicely on the gravel road with my face.  (Like, "look, no hands").  He managed to jump over me, somehow, without actually stepping on me or falling on me.  

I also found some pictures that show the very field where this happened.  It's a side story, but here it is.  It was known as The Cabin.  As far as I recall, a woman actually lived in this, back then.  Or..well...it was her shelter while clearing her head or whatever.  

This would have been the view over my right shoulder as we hurtled past, heading for the barn. ("Wait.  Was that a house?")...

Dad, outside The Cabin.  Yes--I think it WAS homemade...why do you ask?

Want to see the inside?  

Mom--inside.  The field behind her is where I went by, from left to right....aieeeee

The end of the story is that I had indeed landed on my face, cutting my chin, leaving me with a cheek-ful of gravel, and gashing my eyebrow open in several directions, down to the bone.  My aunt swooped me up, put me on the front seat of her car, where I remember vaguely being sorry I was getting blood everywhere, and raced me to the hospital, where my parents met us.  I woke up hours later with 87 stitches in what was left of my left eyebrow and a scab where my left cheek should have been.  I remember walking through my parents' bedroom and turning my head away from the mirror on their wall, because I was afraid to look at myself.  And that scab.  Oh Lord.  I'm so glad I never peeked...  ew

I do remember, right after the accident, saying, "Well.  I guess I'll have to ride Four Paws now," but I don't know if I did, or even if we rode at all any more.  I imagine so, because my life continued to absolutely revolve around horses, right through my 20s and 30s.

Mom was a huge proponent of natural remedies, so she spent a lot of time after the accident, rubbing vitamin E oil on my scars, after pulling the last of my stitches (I remember exactly how that felt, to this day).  Everything healed very well, only I had a pretty scary and somewhat missing eyebrow until I was about 12, and I can't tell you how old it got, explaining what happened, every time I'd meet someone new.  Like a fun conversation starter, only exactly the same...every time.

Them:  Wow! What happened to your eye?

Me:  It's a long story.  I used to go riding with my aunt.  One day I learned to gallop, and I was going across this hill, and blah blah -- (*see the start of this story...which I told word-for-word, each time) 

Eventually I got so tired of telling the whole story every time, that it boiled down to this:

Them:  Wow! What happened to your eye?

Me:  I fell off a horse.

The last time someone noticed it was years later, after it had healed and I had more or less forgotten about it.  I was sitting in speech class in my junior or senior year of high school, with a teacher who scared me to death because he reminded me a giant bird of prey.  I spent that whole semester silently praying, "Don't call on me, don't call on me, please don't call on me!" He was lecturing along or whatever, and I was totally not listening, because hello--gag me with a spoon, speech class?  And suddenly, in mid-sentence, he ended with "....and WHAT HAPPENED TO STEF'S FACE?" The whole class stared at me.  I freaked out for a minute, because I couldn't imagine what he was talking about, and I guessed that possibly a giant zit had emerged, just in time for the weekend, or I had spinach on my chin or something.  But he just said that the light had caught my face just right, and he'd never noticed all those scars.  Well, yeah.  Thanks for pointing that out, Mr. H.  So I got to tell the story.  Again.  

That may have been the last time I told the whole story, come to think of it.

Anyhoo.  I do have an eyebrow now, but it helps that I have bangs, because if you look, you can see the scar that cuts my brow in half and jags down into my eyelid, and several pieced together scars above my brow.  There also *may* or *may not* be some really freaky brow hairs that grow waaaay outside the line of where they belong and are on Tweezer Watch, 24-7.  The way it happened, I guess I'm lucky the surgeon got all the eyebrow hairs to even grow in the same general direction, though, so--for what it's worth--thanks for that, 1976 surgeon dude.

Ready for more pictures? 

Me with Festus.  This may have been afterwards...my left eyebrow appears to have a scar line through it, as well as my cheek and forehead showing some redness.

Probably the only one of my actual face for sure, afterwards, according to my mom's note on the back.  I remember those OshKosh too, with those funny metal clasps, like it was yesterday.  

So.  Long story short:  I have bangs because--I fell off a horse.  

The End

Wrong Opening Line. Every Time. Yep--That's Me...

Anyone else need to quit trying to make conversation with random strangers?

Don't you love the awkwardness that ensues when you think you're being all hilarious and sharing a joke with a stranger, and the person you're talking to has no idea why you're even speaking to them? Or worse, they appear insulted?  That's me...pretty much most of the time.

Yesterday I thought I actually was being funny (my mistake) when I came out of the grocery store after a giant snowstorm, with wayyyy more than the milk, mayo and toilet paper I'd gone IN for. For some reason, I'd been randomly wandering the store discovering all these lovely organic things I hadn't taken the time to notice before, and ended up buying a lot more than I had planned.  Because, you know, snow.  And apparently my secret shopping rule about snow storms is "BUY ALL THE THINGS."

It wasn't until I walked out that I remembered that there was 3-4" of new snow on top of the ice in the grocery store parking lot.  I guess they plow, but by 9:30 a.m., you're pretty much on your own.

No thanks.  Really, I got it.

             
So--I paused at the exit on the last bit of sidewalk that was clear, holding onto my 300-pound cart, and stared across the parking lot to my car, which I had luckily parked really close to the front entrance, but still...lots of snow separated us.  I stood there pondering for a bit, thinking, "Oh, wow. THIS was probably a really bad a idea".  With that exact *look* on my face.

I was picturing THIS, only with all our food in it...

...so I thought.  Apparently my "this was a bad idea" look, looks just like my "I may say something crazy right now" look, so I guess I need to work on that.

A woman was walking in towards me right at that moment, and we made eye contact.  She saw me hesitating before braving a nearly impossible push to my car, with what I thought was a funny look on my face. I thought it was OBvious that I was standing there staring because I was questioning my own judgement about filling a cart and then assuming I could then also get that cart to my car across a slush wasteland, so I just looked at her and said:

Me:  Ahhh, that moment of regret.

Her:  What??

She apparently didn't see me questioning my own judgement while holding a too-heavy cart that I had no chance of pushing all the way to my car without a dog team.  She thought I was saying something about her, I guess...Maybe she thought I was questioning her judgement in putting on that full-length puffer coat that made her look like a ship in full sail.  She looked like she was actually annoyed with me.

She wasn't rocking this look.  At all.  But I digress...

I mentally apologized to her for trying to make her smile and recovered nicely by saying, "You know.  That moment of regret when you realize your cart's never going to make it to your car." She still looked at me like I had just asked her for some spare change, frowned, and went inside. Or maybe she was making a note to NOT make the same mistake.  (You're welcome, lady!)

It's always kind of a let down when you make a joke with the WRONG PERSON.  I consoled myself with the fact that she just didn't get it, but I still felt like kind of a freak as I dragged my cart (and actually almost spilled it once--yeah, THAT HELPED) to my car...

Exactly this.  Only with a grinch load in the cart, and more snow.  Good times.

I should have asked her to help me.

Note to self:  try shopping at 5:30 a.m. next time, because apparently that is the only time you will see any concrete in the parking lot.  Or, hire a sherpa with a yak team.

I MADE IT!!  WE CAN EAT!!

Life with Cats. A February Recap--

I posted awhile back about the new addition to our cat collection, or "glaring" of cats, and I thought I'd share an pictorial update, for those of you who live with and love your pets.  And if you hate cats, you can read this and be like, see, this is why I will never have cats.

I should also mention that, since we took in Sam, we have had yet another sad discarded soul show up on our back porch, be taken in, and found him a home--because four is too many, you guys.  The fact that anyone would dump what was obviously a house cat off in our front yard, in FEBRUARY, when it's 12 degrees out, just ...I don't even.  Anyway, that one is happily safe and sound and warm with a neighbor of ours who was excited to get him--leaving us room on the porch to await the next dump-off.  Come to think of it, all three of our cats were discards.  I call them our misfit band of orphaned bachelors.

Anyhoo.

Since it's winter, things are kind of boring around here, except for the endless laundry and vacuuming, and I have writer's block and can think of nothing that seems funny or interesting to share with the wholeentireworld, so I thought I'd browse our life-with-cats pictures.  I did start planting garden seeds yesterday, and I woke up with a headache that I'm pretty sure was caused by eating Domino's last night after being off processed foods for awhile now, but neither event is worth, you know, blogging about...so I thought I'd recap some of the ways our pets enrich our lives.  Actually, I think they are pretty sure we're here to enrich theirs... Allow me to ellaborate:

Louis and Jack:  Thanks for opening the drapes--now we can watch the birds from your bed

Jack:  If you'd quit taking pictures...I could sleep

Please don't kick us off.  (they are NOT supposed to be on the bed)

Thanks for keeping the fire going.  We'd do it, but we don't have thumbs...

You.  Get off my couch.

Are you blind?  I said OFF.

After dinner snooze.  Also, no WAY you can sit here...

An hour later.  Still no room for you, sorry.

This seat is taken...

And so is this one... and this one.  They're all taken.

Sam insists on coming outside, no matter the weather.

He's sure he can catch the snow that lands when I toss it over my shoulder.

Sam, back inside.  He can sleep in the oddest positions...

Sam's happy face.  How could we have turned THIS face away?

Much later.  Still sleeping.

About an hour later.  Yeah.  That shoveling really takes it out of you.

Well, he's certainly HAPPY.  So glad we saved him...

Not sure how he sleeps in this position, but he does it a lot...

See?  What the heck, Sam?? 

 We are so glad we added Sam to our family, even though three cats seems like we definitely crossed some sort of line...but he's very sweet and fun to have around.  He gallops everywhere like a puppy and is obsessed with our printer.  Every time he hears it beep and start printing, he will come from anywhere in the house to do this:

This.  Every. Time.  He never figures it out.

I should also point out that I totally did not include any closeups of the damage they have done to all of our leather furniture, or any pictures of them in motion, which is the state they maintain when they are NOT sleeping.  Jack and Sam are about the same age ("dumb teenage ninja" in cat-years), so their idea of a good time is to parkour around the whole entire house, like a game.  "Let's see if we can go from the bedroom to the office to the hallway to the entryway to the living room to the dining room, without touching the floor."  Awesome.  I have seen some amazing stuff, but of course I don't have pictures of it, because you can't GET pictures of that.  It's like taking a picture of ghosts drag-racing.  Mainly, you can't believe what you're seeing, and they're moving too fast to get a shot of it anyway.

Well, that's all I have.  That's my February, in a nutshell.  It's 10 degrees and blowing about 30 mph today, and I'm sick, so I'm going to pull out my grow lights now and get the seed trays under lights, grab some tea and my giant book on the Plantagenets, gargle some more salt water, and hope for my sore throat to go away.  Also, probably should vacuum again, because with three cats, there's no such thing as too much vacuuming...

P.S.  Also I REALLY MISS SWIMMING right now.

carry on

I'm Turning into My Mom. Only With Less Wheat Germ

If you read the prior post, you know that we are trying to incorporate more of a whole foods and plant-based diet approach to our life.  No, we aren't going all full vegetarian or strict vegan or anything.  Which is good, because since writing that, we've still had some form of meat on the table pretty much every.single.night, BUT AT LEAST THERE ARE LOTS OF VEGETABLES on the plates too, right?  And when I say "meat", I mean our own, homegrown, organic pork and beef, raised by us and our family at home, so it's not all processed, store bought stuff.  And I can't not cook it, because 1) that'd be wasteful, and 2) we love meat.

This might be harder than I thought...but any improvement is a step in the right direction.  I will say there's probably no way stroganoff or meatloaf are coming off the menu.  Just sayin'.

Plus, we have this amazing garden, so it's not like it's a stretch to eat tons of fresh, organic produce as often as we can, (sometimes by the wheelbarrow load)...I just need some more creative ways to make vegetables more of a "main dish" rather than a side dish (no offense, Martha, but I'm branching out).

After a point, you just GIVE UP on the weeds...

The other side of the walkway, mid-August

I did actually order the Forks Over Knives cookbook, which should be here tomorrow, but we went to Barnes and Noble the other night in a blizzard because--BOOKS you guys! OMG, booooookkkks!  (My e-reader is awesome, but--I love real books.)  So of course I bought two history books ("The Plantagenets" and "Queens Consorts"--my favorite history-geek topics), and an absolutely visually stunning hardback cookbook called "Vegeterranean" (Italian vegetarian cooking), which is amazing and lovely to look through; I can't wait to cook from it.  And I love that it doesn't require a bunch of hard-to-find ingredients that I will never buy, let alone eat.

The best thing  I found, though, is "Back to Eden".  This is super cool, because just the other day, after writing a whole memory of my childhood where my mom spent a year trying really hard to make us be vegetarians (which didn't work), I remembered that she always had this book called "Back to Eden".  And then...there it was, right there on the shelf at Barnes and Noble.  Of course I grabbed it.  Reading it feels like coming home.  No wonder we never went to a doctor...

My birthday, with my dad, my aunt, mom, and my uncle, mid-70s.  Not sure why there are two cakes?  Or what is hanging from the ceiling...

I may have frowned a lot at her food choices for us as kids (all those lunches of home-made whole wheat sandwiches, cookies full of nuts, and garbanzo beans in the meatloaf), but the older I get, the more I believe:  Moms really do know best.  Especially now that I'm a mom.  (Right, kids??      Kids?)

A New Direction...but not Fanatically

Nothing huge.  We are just deciding to adhere to a more whole foods, plant-based diet, starting now.

I can't quite get my mouth to say the word "vegan", because I'll never be a true vegan in the sense of "I don't consume anysinglethingthatevercame from an animal.  I love a great steak.  I love chicken.  I love bacon.  Cheese.  Butter.  Eggs.  (Not giving up cheese or eggs--and I'm not apologizing for that either.  Fight the fights you can win, people.)

We have always gardened and tried to raise as much of our own food as possible, and we have been gradually phasing out the additive-full, processed products from our pantry and fridge, because we know it's the healthy thing to do...as hard as it is!  Whole wheat bread, raw honey, lots of fresh veggies, etc.  But it's time to commit to it more strongly, for our health.

So.

I just bought a vegetarian/vegan cookbook, and our family is going to take the next step towards greatly limiting our meat and dairy consumption, for our health.  Gradually, though.

I'll never be one of those all militant vegetarians who announces to everyone, everywhere, within the first few minutes of meeting someone, that "I'm a vegetarian.  I don't eat animal products.  Did I mention I'm vegan?" Everyone just wants to slap them (*hint hint* vegans...), but I love my family, and if this will help us live longer and avoid heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and the high cholesterol that runs in our family, then so be it.

Pray for us. We have a freezer full of COW and two pigs, right now...and we are a "meat and taters" kind of family, even if they are organically grown, so even though it's the right health choice, I'm having a hard time convincing myself that oh sure, I can learn to love kale...

Ummm.    Ok

I'll keep you posted.

Throwback Thursday. We Could Be on to Something-

Today I read a blog post that was a nod to it being Throwback Thursday.  First I thought...well, thanks for reminding me, it's Thursday.  I usually don't know for sure what day it is, now that I'm home and every day seems pretty much like every other day.  Like Groundhog Day, only with me, instead of Bill Murray...

I realized that Throwback Thursday could be used for lots of other stuff in everyday life, which got me thinking, maybe we're not using it to its full potential.

On Throwback Thursday, I could:

1.  Tell everyone their laundry WAS done.  Last week.

2.  Wear my favorite style of clothes/nail polish color/shoes from whatever past decade I feel like.  And NO ONE can say a word.

3.  Insist on speaking only in, like, totally Valley Girl lingo.  All day.  And say "Like, gag me with a spoon" to every customer on the phone today who mentions it's snowing again.  Totally.

3.  Post pictures of myself from back when I weighed the RIGHT amount (tah dah!)  Like that picture of me at 110 pounds with my mom, all tan and smooth and slim.  (OK--so it was 1985).

4.  Text my youngest at school and tell her she's late for dance practice.  (psych! We don't do dance lessons any more!)

5.  Spend all day drawing horses, then tell everyone I'm planning to be an artist; please be quiet while I'm working.

6.  Best of all?  Lay on the couch under a blanket by the fire all day with a book and a cup of tea, like an old-fashioned "sick day", watching it snow, because my throat feels like it's trying to get sore, so I'm pretty sure a couch day is in order.

Random association:  I was just saying "throwback" to myself, and then I heard my husband's voice (in my head) saying "throwdown".  Which is a very different term.  For him, that would only apply to someone he didn't respect, as in "That guy is a total throwdown."  We wouldn't want a 'throwdown' Thursday. Sorry; I crack myself up sometimes...

Wait.  It's Thursday?  I need to make sweets for my daughter's play practice group for tomorrow!  Which means, either take a shower and go to the store...or make some brownies.  So, I'm baking today.  See how that happened?

I am, like, totally making these!