Remember that old rhyme? “Cross my heart and hope to die.  Stick a needle in my eye.”  How about sticking a wooden meat skewer into your eye?  It’s kind of a hard thing to do normally, but this is how I did it.  After I put on mascara I like to separate any eyelashes that are stuck together.  I use a wooden meat skewer to perform this delicate operation because it has a nice fine point.

If this point is applied to the eyeball rather than the eyelash, however, things change in an instant.  What has started out as a beauty routine ends in a medical emergency.  Luckily, after an hour of tears streaming out of the eye whenever I opened it, it seemed to recover and I was okay.  I was relieved that an eye patch wasn’t going to become part of my daily attire.

Last week I converted another fruitcake hater, so am another inch closer to Fruitcake Heaven.  Wendy McLellan of the Province interviewed me a few weeks ago for the Minding your own Business column in which I’ll be featured on March 30th.  In passing, she said that she was actually a fruitcake hater.  Of course I told her I was sending her a fruitcake, and she said, “Please don’t.  I will not eat it.”

Imagine how thrilled I was to receive her e mail last week saying that she had been forced to open the fruitcake when she had guests and no other dessert.  She wrote, “It was DELICIOUS” and said I had made another convert.  These types of e mails always seem to come in the nick of time, as I’m daily on the verge of packing it in.

Seriously, every five minutes I’m deciding that this is a hare-brained idea and that I should just stop it.  Then I’ll send out a few e mails to stores, feeling sure they’ll reply that they hate my product, and sure enough, either an order is placed or kind words are conveyed.  The nice owner of a new store in Courtenay called Brambles said she adored my fruitcakes and will be ordering them again.

Oh fine.  I’ll keep at it, but marketing is a daily struggle.  If you look at my home page, you’ll see that Steve, the brilliant web designer, has put up a nice ad for Mother’s Day.  Google Ad Words always sends out very good advice and I’d received an e mail regarding Mother’s Day marketing.  What better for a mom who has everything than one of my fruitcakes?

In case you think I’ve totally forgotten that Easter is yet to come, I can assure you that thanks to Martha’s mag, I have not.  I studied the section on how to decoupage blown-out eggs, and seriously considered purchasing the recommended ostrich and emu eggs.  Then I imagined cutting out the teensy tiny shapes, applying glue to them, then painting the entire finished product with glue, and suddenly felt all motivation drain from my body.  It’s probably much better to use that time to search out beauty treatments that do not maim the recipient.

Sunday was unfolding like an ordinary day.  Little did I know what the fates had in store.  I was merrily reading away, when the phone rang, and it was Luke.  He started out casually, saying he and his girlfriend had decided to part ways.  He then reminded me that he was waiting to be re-called to his job, and said that he was paying a lot of rent in Calgary while waiting.

This was the lead-up to what we’d feared, but expected.  Yes, Luke is moving back home again!  My adorable baby boy is coming back into his sainted mother’s arms.  However, the baby’s grown large, and the mother less saintly over time.  Fortunately, we’re all quite philosophical about it, and really, Luke is feeling bad to have to do it.

Kids these days seem much younger for their years compared to us.  I got my first apartment when I was 19.  It was at the corner of Hemlock Street and 10th Avenue in Vancouver.  I lived there for five years, and though I’d visit my parents and grandparents a lot, I didn’t return home to live.

The old apartment building’s still there, and I love to see it when I’m visiting Vancouver.  I enjoy thinking back to the days when I learned how to cook.  It started with the ability to bake frozen chicken pies and then progressed slowly from there.  I literally didn’t know how to make a damn thing.

I certainly wouldn’t have been able to learn how to cook from my mom, as she didn’t cook at all while I was growing up.  My dad cooked, but he was a very sensitive person.  Hence, if one asked, “What is it?” of his food, he would reply snarkily, “It’s a what-is-it.”

You can probably guess that my dad was the type of person who enjoyed being alone.  He admired the actress Greta Garbo, who’d expound in her Swedish accent, “I vant to be alone.”  My dad, being of a very succinct nature, would just say, “Garbo” and this would be the signal that he wanted to be by himself.

Around here, with Denis and Nicky, and now Luke added, I can say, “Garbo” all I like.  In response I will hear, “Gumbo?  Sure, I’d like to try that.  When is it ready?”  Meanwhile someone will ask me where the mayonnaise is while looking right at it, while another person will tell me one of the animals has vomited.

However, it’s hard to keep a euphoric person down, and Friday is the first day of spring!  Today I’m off to stock up on groceries in anticipation of Luke’s arrival.  Room will have to be made in the yard for yet another vehicle, and with any luck we’ll soon have one of them back up on blocks.

Imagine how wonderful it was for me to get positive feedback from a stranger who had stumbled onto my blog!  Dawn is a really nice woman who lives in Edmonton, and who was searching for fruitcake when she came upon my site.  She read my latest blog entry, and took the time to e mail me.  She also placed an order for her daughter’s wedding, which was really fantastic.

In my last blog I’d maligned the drivers of PT Cruisers, VW vans, those with veterans’ plates and anyone with a plate from Alberta.  Dawn e mailed me a witty reply to let me know that Albertans thinks it’s actually the British Columbians who are in her words, “the worst.”  Who knew?

You know how loathe I am to contribute to the recession by behaving conservatively.  However, I do think my cookie mania has showed me that homemade gifts really can be appreciated.  So far I’ve sent out peanut butter/chocolate chunk, double chocolate, white chocolate chunk and oatmeal with chocolate chunks and pecans, and no-one has protested.

And when you think of it, no-one is interested in some mass-produced ‘objet’ from China.  Not that there’s anything wrong with their stuff, it’s just that people no longer have the room for yet another fairy statue.

Have you ever received a new item, only to carry it from room to room, desperate to find a small space for it?  Inevitably I’ve had to start to treat my stuff just as a museum does.  I now rotate things.  I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but God help me when my mother finally dies.

I say finally, as my mom just turned 84 and is still in better shape than people twenty years her junior.  This Friday I’m going to Osoyoos as it will be Gerry’s 94th birthday.  I asked mom if he’d swum in the pool during their two-month sojourn to Nicaragua these past two months.  She said, “Oh yeah!”  ie what do you expect from this spry gentleman?

To prevent the trailer truckload of articles coming my way in twenty years or so, I decided that from now on I’m going to give mom and Gerry only stuff that they can actually use.  So this week I’m going to make several gourmet meals and then label and freeze them.

Mom said she wouldn’t even make toast for Gerry while they were in Nicaragua, as she said she refused to ‘cook’ while there.  They ordered in breakfast, then went out for lunch and dinner.  So to prevent absolute culture shock for Gerry, I do think the best remedy is for mom to be able to go out to the freezer and bring in a nice bouillabaisse or else some coquilles St. Jacques for their dinner.

I don’t know what’s gotten into me, but lately I’ve been busier than the Pillsbury Dough Boy with cookie production.  I have a wonderful cookbook called Home Baking, published by the Robin Hood company.  It’s filled with the most fantastic cookie, cake and bar recipes.  Why someone who’s always on a diet owns something like that I’ll never know.  Maybe it has something to do with my sneaky and evil subconscious.

Last week I got a phone call from a reporter at The Province.  I’d totally forgotten that last October I’d submitted my company profile to a regular business column called On the Move.  The reporter interviewed me about the business (which will appear in the March 30th edition) and asked if I’ve ever thought of making anything else.  I told her that I make killer cookies, and that customers have asked me if I make anything other than fruitcake.  I said that I always lie and say no.

So this is where the sneaky and evil subconscious comes in.  Now I’m thinking, “hmmmm, I wonder if I should make cookies?”  I mean really, now that I have two commercial-quality cookie sheets which I recently bought at Home Sense, the number of burned cookies has gone down dramatically.  Maybe I could stand the tension of cookie making.

I guess first of all I’ll have to see what The Province column brings in terms of orders.  Besides that, the Kelowna Wine Museum is going to feature my Okanagan Harvest Cakes at their Neighbourhood Nosh event this Thursday.  Hopefully locals are not falling for this new “the sky is falling” philosophy and therefore not buying unnecessary things.

Even Oprah is touting a new-found penchant for modest and conservative consumption.  Yesterday’s Oprah show was inspirational, as it was all about simplifying one’s life.  She had people on who were shopaholics and who were vowing to stop because they just had too much stuff.  They had a woman on who has more pairs of shoes than me!

As much as I agree with it all, the lure of spring fashion proved to be too damned strong.  Do you remember how many pairs of pants I have?  Me neither, but now I have three more.  Why??  I don’t know what happened.  One minute I was carefully browsing the clearance items at Winners and the next thing I knew I was at the till with pants and shoes!

I think a lot of my problems could be solved if clothing stores would barter.  For example, I would happily trade them two fruitcakes or four dozen cookies for a pair of pants.  In general, the world would probably be a much happier place if we got rid of filthy money and replaced it with maniacally decadent baked goods.