A good alternative career for me would be car sales.  Just now I sold our grey van without breaking a sweat.  I sealed the deal with a nice man, then phoned Denis at work.  I asked him for how much he thought we should list the van.  He said, “I dunno, maybe $5,000, but we’d never get that for it.”

He then added gloomily, “On a lot, you’d only get $2,000 for it on a trade-in.”  I said, “Would you take $4300 cash?”  When he said he would, I said, “Well, I’ve already sold it!”

Ain’t life grand for Denis?  It’s his van, and I listed, showed and sold it, and all he had to do was clean it out.  I think it’s wonderful that his life is filled with surprises like that.

We had a 1966 Chev Impala that I smartly sold a few years ago for $6900.  Same scenario.  Denis, long-faced, said some co-worker had offered him $5000 for it.  I laughed and said, “Watch this.”  I listed it on a classic car site and a nice man from Tacoma flew up, bought it, and drove it home.  Unfortunately, it was winter, and when he e mailed me later he said the Snohomish Pass with summer tires was quite the experience.

Now I’m on the look-out for an older Honda of any make.  I had a 1982 Honda Prelude from when it was new until 2005.  I still see it being driven around by the people who bought it.  You simply cannot kill a Honda.

Wild unpredictability is what it’s always like here at 3321 Hall Road.  Two weeks ago I thought I was going to try and live within my means, and here I am, shopping for a car!  Not that I need more shopping after the weekend I just had.  It wasn’t my fault, though, as I needed it as a sedative for my nerves.

On Friday morning Luke woke up and said he had a terrible pain in his lower right abdomen.  I told him it was probably appendicitis, and when the pain continued to get worse I drove him to emergency.  It’s funny, but our car practically steers itself there.  Kelowna General Hospital Emergency ward, here we come again!

Sure enough, it was appendicitis, and Luke had an appendectomy on Friday evening.  I guess because that caused some sort of nervous prostration I found myself cruising the aisles of my favourite clothing stores all weekend.

I ended up with two pairs of pants, three tops and a pair of sandals.  Tomorrow Nicky and I leave on our two-week trip to Germany, so I decided that I simply needed some new clothes.  While packing, I’ve hidden my suitcase from the dogs by putting it out in the sunroom and running back and forth.  They get really upset when they see it so I try to protect them from all that stress.

Nicky and I are flying from Kelowna to Vancouver, Vancouver to Amsterdam, and finally Amsterdam to Stuttgart.  The whole sojourn begins tomorrow afternoon around 3:00 PM and ends at 5:00 PM their time on Saturday!  I will be feeling very, very sick by then, I can assure you.  However, as I want the schnitzel, spaetzle, strudel and riesling, I have to be willing to suffer.

Once again, I was bitten in the buttocks by those foil-covered chocolate Easter eggs.  I’d made the mistake of buying a gigantic two kg bag at Costco, as I wanted to have enough to make a decent-looking basket.  I bought a bag of purple coloured grass and a matching purple and pink basket.  I then added the chocolate eggs and of course it looked adorable.

Sadly, though, one by one those eggs started to call me.  The worst of it is that the chocolate is of the cheapest quality, largely comprised of wax, sugar and flavouring.  As a rational person I understood that, but every evening around 7:30 lunacy would take hold and then the eating would begin.

Sigh. And so it goes in the dieting world.  One step forward and three steps back.  I finally threw the last few chocolates out, and am now back on the plain yogurt and apple for breakfast.  Tuna packed in water and mixed with low-fat mayo on lettuce will be lunch.  A piece of chicken and some veggies with no butter will follow for dinner.  Is it any wonder that diets fail??

Besides being phobic of diet food, I have claustrophobia, so was particularly disturbed by the story Nicky told me of being stuck in an elevator.  He was out on Saturday with his girlfriend and a bunch of other people.  They got into the elevator at her apartment building, and at the fifth floor it suddenly dropped half a floor, then stalled completely!

He said there were 11 of them in the elevator, and apparently it said, ‘maximum 12 persons.”  As soon as the elevator stalled, he said the fan stopped working so they all started to feel mighty hot.  At this point I would’ve been screaming and acting like a maniac, so I can only admire them for remaining calm.

The so-called emergency phone turned out to be a prop, and didn’t work at all.  The resident manager didn’t answer his phone.  So, they phoned 911 and the police and fire department came!  They couldn’t do anything either so they had to call out the elevator mechanic.  Finally, after 45 minutes they got out of there.

In that instance I suppose I could’ve practiced visualizing myself down in the garden.  Recently I did some research into bee keeping, as wouldn’t bees be fun?  It turns out that it’s fairly complicated, and you absolutely have to accept getting stung.  Also, if the hive grows too large the bees can swarm, and I imagine the neighbours would frown on that.

To work off the recently-acquired stomach, I had quite a bit of fun in the garden.  I planted asparagus as well as radishes and garlic.  I bought raspberry, blueberry and black currant bushes.  Now if I would just stick to eating that stuff I wouldn’t need to search stores for items of clothing that say, ‘stretchable.’

I don’t think anything makes me madder or want to cry harder than technology.  The only thing that even comes close is the reflection of my haunches when I’m sitting on the bed, putting on or taking off pants.  I guess it’s the powerlessness in both instances that causes so much frustration.

My sister-in-law Margaret is a marketing maven, so she’s always suggesting better ways for me to use my site.  She said I simply have to get onto Twitter, which scares the bejesus out of me, and she also said that I should be doing a monthly newsletter.  Bravely, I decided to try and start with a bulk mail-out as a first step.

It just sounds so simple, doesn’t it?  Follow the instructions of Outlook Express and then go ahead and send to everyone in your address book.  Sadly, this is just a cruel joke and doesn’t work at all.  After trying a few times I had to e mail the web hosting company, which caused its own set of difficulties.  ie, who is the web hosting company??

Once I’d found them, they sent a complicated set of instructions on how to set up a newsletter.  Step One: Enter your User Name and Password.  I just sat there, incredulous at the level of difficulty of the question.  I don’t know about you, but I have dozens of User Names and Passwords, and certainly haven’t committed any of them to memory.

I wisely decided that I’m completely incapable of doing any of the setting up of the newsletter and conveyed this to the genius web designer.  Unfortunately, he has sent me a list of questions that almost pushed me over the edge.  I read them over, swallowed hard, and e mailed back, “Look, I need a stiff drink and then I’ll work my way through them and get back to you.”

The only reason I’m putting myself through all of this hell is that a newsletter will be another chance to communicate with the world.  I’m even more ga ga about writing now that I’ve finished first-year creative writing at UBC Okanagan.  Plus, it really helps to write to some kind of a deadline.

Without a deadline I find that days can go by and I haven’t written a single word.  I had hoped that motivation would magically descend upon me and allow me to write a page a day.  How I thought this would happen, I don’t know.  I’m currently working on this idea: now that creative writing has ended, why not use that time to write?

Instead, however, I’m sure you’ll find me barefoot out in the yard, willing some plant or other to grow.  Or, maybe you’ll see me browsing the aisles of a grocery store, begging for inspiration for the day’s dinner.  As tough as this sort of thing is psychologically, it’s a picnic compared to what technology does to me.

It’s Mojo’s ninth birthday today!  We got her when she was eleven weeks old and she was the cutest puppy ever.  Unfortunately, she turned out to have the IQ of a small soap dish, so we endured a thousand dollars worth of damage in her first year.

I still think fondly of the designer jeans she chewed.  Actually, now that I think of all the carpets that were replaced it was probably a few thousand dollars’ worth of damage.  Oh well.  I try to think of all the joy she’s brought us.

I’m also trying to put a positive spin on the almost daily visits to the grocery store.  For example, I’m telling myself that daily shopping is very cosmopolitan.  Unfortunately, hauling Chinese-grown vegetables home from the Superstore doesn’t quite have the cache of browsing a farmers’ market in Paris.

But shop I must.  I have two people living at home who use mixing bowls for their cereal.  Even the regular toaster is too small – the four slicer must be employed.  They nicknamed it ‘the quad’ several years ago.  Nicky will decide to make sandwiches, and turns to Luke, “I think this calls for the quad.”  He should have his hands on hips and be wearing a cape when he says it.

The other day Nicky put five eggs into a bowl, added a heap of creamo, then poured this into a frying pan that held a quarter of a pound of butter.  He accompanied his scrambled eggs with toast thickly spread with butter.  Although I raised my eyebrows a smidge, I’ve learned that if I say anything it leads to no good, so I keep my comments to myself.

In any case, I prefer to concentrate on the nice bit of business generated by the Minding your own Business column in the March 30th Province newspaper.  I hope you saw it.  If not, here it is: http://www.theprovince.com/Life/Turning+fruitcake+haters+into+lovers/1443414/story.html

I received both telephone and on-line orders, and hopefully these people will become regular customers.  As a result of the heightened adrenalin that day, I sent assertive e mails to the local winery store managers.  I pointed out that I know there’s a ‘buy local’ push on everywhere, I am local, hence…..

Thankfully it remains sub-arctic out, so I haven’t done a thing in the yard.  See how this ‘make lemons out of lemonade’ attitude is working?  No, really, I’m happy not to be able to garden because it gives me so much more time to buy groceries and make dinner.

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.

An interesting thing that I forgot to mention about Kauai is that it’s overrun with wild chickens.  Many of the roosters and even some of the hens are very beautiful.  We asked some of the locals where all the chickens came from, and heard two very distinct stories.  One was that in 1992 they were blown in by a typhoon.  The other story involved Philipino immigrants who brought them in for cock fighting.

Another adorable thing that one sees all over the island is the PT Cruisers.  Why they’re the vehicle of choice there, I don’t know, but as the highway speeds are mostly 25 – 35 Mph I believe that has something to do with it.  Here in BC I treat the PT Cruiser like any of these other dreaded signs of inane driving: the V.W. bus, anyone with license plates that say Veteran, or any plate from Alberta.

The trip to Kauai is by now a distant memory and I’m wondering if I actually went.  If I tell people I’m just back from a trip to Hawaii they search my face and arms for a tan, and I can see their disappointment.  I feel like I’ve let them down by not being as brown as a nut.  Couldn’t they just be happy that I meet half of their expectations, ie I am a nut?

An interesting concept occurred to me this week as I was doing some baking for a loyal customer in Toronto.  She’d asked me to make her some Totally Decadent Fruitcakes in the style of my early years.  At that time, the cakes were mixed by hand, and I made them in smaller batches.

When I returned to that very artisan method of baking, I realized that most of my creative joy comes from being very small and hands-on.  It’s great to have the capacity to make 200 fruitcakes in a day, but I’m re-thinking my original goal.  If I make and sell only three thousand fruitcakes a year, and if they’re all made in this way, I think it’ll be a win-win situation.

We know home-made products, or those that taste home-made, are hard to find.  Therefore, I think over time I’ll find those loyal customers who want a gourmet product that’s been lovingly made.  Maybe I’ll be one of the last fruitcake artisans.  How sad to imagine a Christmas season filled with only Mrs. Willman’s crappy fruitcakes!

Oh well, I can’t worry about that now.  I bought super huge and gnarly pig’s ears for the dogs, and they’re too massive to be cut by garden snippers.  I found the axe and am going to head out and cut them into manageable pieces.

After that I have dinner to prepare, and as we know, after 24 years at 365 dinners a year, it does become a bit of a challenge to think of something new and interesting to make.  But hey, that’s what we food artisans do!

You know how it’s a sign of insanity to keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result?  Tonight is probably the third time in my life that I decided I wanted to make Hungarian goulash.  Every time I’m sure paprika tastes different than it actually does.  Although it looks gorgeous, I just tasted the goulash, and went “oh-oh”.  I obviously don’t like paprika.

For Valentine’s I made a beautiful dinner, which was greatly appreciated by Nicky and Denis.  I made Swiss cheese and crabmeat-stuffed chicken breasts.  These were accompanied by roasted potatoes and broccoli topped with sliced almonds sauteed in garlic and butter.  I’d asked Denis if he wanted a chocolate souffle or a chocolate mousse for dessert, and he chose the latter.

In the afternoon I decided I should make a batch of brownies for Margaret and Brendan.  Denis was on his way to Victoria for his course at Royal Roads University, so I had him deliver them.  Sadly, three brownies didn’t fit into the tin, but somehow found their way down my gullet.

Needless to say the diet has been totally shelved.  As wouldn’t you know it, there was still quite a large amount of mousse sitting in the fridge, calling me.  Because my gluttony knows no bounds, and because I’ve been off chocolate for several weeks, I appear to be what could be described as “dangerously out of control.”

To take my mind off it I strolled through the mall.  Conspiring against me was the nice hearing impaired woman who works at Shoppers Drug Mart.  She’s the kindest human, but for some reason had a whole stack of boxes of Lowney’s maraschino cherries on a trolley.  This panicked me, as I thought they must be destined for the garbage bin.

I quickly grabbed a box and raced to the till.  That night, after having eaten both rows of the box of Lowney’s maraschino cherries, I decided that I need to get some kind of a grip on myself.

I think boredom might be rearing its ugly head, and that can’t lead to anything good.  This week I simply have to get busy and phone the stores that carried my product to see how their sales went.  I must also try to figure out how to bust into the winery gift stores in a big way with either the Okanagan Harvest Cake or the Okanagan Fruit and Rum bars.

If I would just do what I have to do, I wouldn’t be bored.  However, I prefer to fritter away my time, then act surprised when nothing’s happening.  It’s that insanity thing I alluded to at the beginning.