Tag Archive | memoir

When Bots are Stupid

Oct30

Imagine my surprise to see that Amazon’s bots decided to write this about my book: “Customers find the content of the book wonderful and great for kids. They describe the writing style as delicious and unique. Generated from the text of customer reviews.” One reviewer had said they thought it was a kids’ book, then wrote NOT, as she read it and discovered it was for adults.

Though now I hope parents buy it for their kids because they need to learn the importance of cannabis and alcohol early in life. It’d be fun to give it to a twelve-year-old who then says to their mom, “Can we make cannabis cookies, too?” Or give it to a ten-year-old who can expand their vocabulary with four-letter words that mean ka ka.

As usual I panicked, and because the liquor stores were closed and it appeared no end was in sight, I stocked up on a lot of vodka, and some tequila. Of course, soon after the hoarding was complete, the strike was over and now I’m left with the most interesting assortment of brands. The small independent stores soon ran out of the normal stuff I buy (nice cheap Smirnoff) and so I had to take whatever was available. Fear not, it’ll get drunk. Or I will.

Great joy as I remembered my old pal Steve MacNaull from the Kelowna Daily Courier and decided to google him to see where he was. It turns out he’s now working for Now Media, and so I met him there today in their absolutely gorgeous office space on the 16th floor overlooking the lake and the autumn trees now changing colour within the neighbourhoods below.

We reminisced about the old days when he’d write articles about the government contracting business, Rucastle and Schiller Workskills. Then we talked about the fruitcake madness and how all of that went over the years. I gave him my memoir and told him to read it as I said, “you’re in it.” He immediately tried to look in the back and I said, “there’s no index, so you’ll have to read to find it.” Cagey, right?

I also baked fruitcakes a few days ago and brought him one of those. He very kindly got a knife and plate, and cut a piece then took a few photos of me holding my memoir in one hand and the cake in the other. When I saw the pictures, I was quite dismayed and said why oh why is my right eye so much smaller than my left? It’s not normal.

When I left, I asked about Now Media, and he said this story about my book will appear not just in Kelowna Now, but Prince George Now, Kamloops Now, and many other Nows. I don’t mind telling you I’m very excited about this as perhaps as we come up to fruitcake season, the article will arrive just in time to give people the nudge to buy the book as a gift for someone.

I’m off to Toronto tomorrow for a week of fun and am all packed and ready to go. Will just take a carryon for that amount of time. Actually, I took a carryon for my two weeks in Europe and when my male cousin arrived to drive me to the airport he looked at what I had and said “that’s it? For two weeks?”

Trevor and I are hoping today’s the final day of re-taping certain areas of the book that didn’t come out right. I’m willing to ignore all of the annoying swallowing just to get it over with, but there are some words that are just plain wrong and it has to be fixed.

Dog Germs

Oct17

I went to Osoyoos for the Thanksgiving weekend, and our friends Jim and Federico came from Vancouver. Having people at mom’s along with me makes the time there a lot more bearable. As much fun as it is to hang with a morose, cranky 100.5 year-old, it’s still way better with friends there.

We decided to have the big dinner on Saturday so that we could eat leftovers for Sunday night. Since we were all leaving on Monday it made no sense to leave all of that delicious food behind. I’d made the usual turkey and stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, broccoli, yam casserole (the one with marshmallows on top) and Jim and Fede made stuffed acorn squash.

The next day I didn’t want to eat turkey leftovers for both lunch and dinner, so decided to keep the noon meal kind of light. I had a bunch of carrots that I hadn’t cooked for the dinner given the glut of vegetables so thought a carrot salad would be a nice accompaniment. I grated a few and added a dressing made of mayo, sour cream, a finely diced clove of garlic and a squeeze of lemon.

The new food was then placed on top of the night before leftovers and suddenly the whole pyramid of bowls started to tumble. I grabbed at some of them and was busy peering into the fridge for new places to put all of this, when I realized the bowl of carrot salad was on the ground, right side up, minus its saran wrap. I heard slorping sounds and looked to see Louie scarfing back as much as he could.

Undeterred, I simply put the remaining salad into a smaller bowl and put it on the table when it was time for lunch. There was a green salad, and I’d heated some pork tenderloin from Friday night’s meal, and so no one noticed nor cared that I didn’t want any of the carrot salad. Happily, it all got eaten, and I restrained myself from telling them about it afterward. It’s our secret.

Nicky’s always said “Mom’s hobby is food tampering,” but this time it was an honest mistake. But then I was raised never to waste food, so what a dilemma, right? Anyway, if any of them report worms I’ll act completely shocked.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how well my wee memoir’s being doing on Amazon. I’m also shocked at people telling me “I couldn’t put it down.” However, the unfortunate part of marketing a book requires the use of Instagram, and I’m a mentally fragile Boomer who dislikes technology. However, I now have a handle, Moni Schiller Writes, so I hope to God I get the hang of it very quickly.

I’ve discovered I’m not a candidate for intermittent fasting, as it can trigger a migraine. I know what you’re thinking, but I’ve tested it out, and all signs point to me eating like a horse from the moment I wake up until I fall into bed. Fortunately I go to bed early.

I had last eaten at 7:00 PM on Sunday and then waited until 11:00 AM on Monday to eat, and wham! Migraine aura followed by feeling very bad for the remainder of the day. Why would I want to do that to myself when my fridge and cupboards are calling? Oh well, another weight loss method to add to the list of those tried, including Scarsdale, Atkins, Pritikin, and Keto.

Elsa and I went to thrift yesterday and I sent her a message after I’d tried everything on saying I wasted $10 but still had fun. She replied, “Still cheaper than the movies!” It’s a sickness.

Centenarian Tests Nerves

Oct3

Mom’s caregiver Karen who used to come for an hour a day, five days a week, has taken time off, likely with no hope of her returning. So now I have to find someone in a terrible hurry, and decided to just go with Interior Health, which we’d wanted to do originally. However when mom found out she’d get a different person each day she balked, and that’s why we went with Karen.

But now at 100.5 years of age, and with a very diminished mental capacity and zero physical stamina, I think she’ll just have to accept the revolving caregivers, right? It’ll be a lot of fun actually, because with just Karen and Jan mom couldn’t tell them apart or know which one was which. So add five care aides per week, and throw Jan in for fun in the afternoons, and look out.

I’m busy trying to market my memoir and am going to have to learn Instagram and use it. At first I thought I’d have to do it all on the teensy weensy cell phone, but luckily it can be done on my sainted laptop, where all creative things are made. Margaret set Instagram up for me on my phone, and the icons that came up were so small I needed not just glasses but a magnifying glass to see them. I realized this wasn’t going to work at all.

So now I’ll have to consult with my friend ChatGPT to figure out how to post on Instagram. I imagine myself as minor film director skulking around my house and yard for fitting reels. Then sneaking up on pets with my camera capturing them doing adorable things. Given my memoir is about food, I suppose the odd baking demo might be fun.

I’ve sold a dozen copies of my book, and am hoping this continues, reaching a crescendo in November when people shop for Christmas presents. The book is about fruitcake after all, so what could fit in better than that? I plan to make some of my Totally Decadent fruitcakes and pair those with a copy of the memoir for marketing purposes.

It’s still sunny and warm, blue sky without a hint of clouds and the garden is beautiful. I have to get outside and rake as living within a ponderosa pine forest one has a lot of needles to contend with. Nicky planted a chestnut 30 years ago and this tree’s now huge and sheds approximately one ton of chestnuts per year. All onto the driveway which has to be raked and swept for hours.

I spent $75 on very chi chi cheese at the Grate Cheesery here in Kelowna, as Margaret was coming and we were headed to Osoyoos for lunch with Denis, Luke and Mom. I made chicken souvlaki, Greek salad and roasted potatoes, so for dessert had the cheeses and grapes. I’ve never spent that much money on cheese in my life but it felt really good to do it. Freeing.

Yesterday I had some of this fancy cheese around, so I made a gourmet macaroni and cheese dish with them. I’ve never done this before, but you put the uncooked macaroni, cheese and whipping cream plus milk into the oven for 45 minutes and voila, very creamy baked mac and cheese. And then made with the decadent cheeses it was mighty good.

Trevor’s coming today to complete the re-recordings for the audiobook, and I’ll give him the leftovers because at around 1000 calories per serving a dish like that isn’t really good for me. It’s good for him, though, as he’s normal sized, actually quite thin.

Mom continues to eat at least three Ritter Sport chocolate bars a day and has no desire whatsoever to rein that in. And really, why would she when she’s in her 101st year?

A Very Bad Hen

Sep19

I had three black Araucana hens, two of which died, one by a predator, one from unknown causes. The one remaining hen, who I named Condoleezza, lays the beautiful blue eggs for which the breed is renowned. However in April she went broody for about four months recently snapping out of it and now again this stupid damn hen is at it again. She sits on useless eggs that’ll never hatch and of course then doesn’t bother to lay her own.

I’d just been proudly handing out blue eggs to people like Trevor and Elsa, but now we’ll have to wait months for more of them. I know, I could get another Araucana or two, but then if they also like sitting on the nest all day it wouldn’t be worth the gamble. I’ll just eat the other hens’ more normal coloured eggs and put up with this idiot of a chicken.

I need to renew my passport as Margaret and I are off to our beloved Yucatan in February, and I said to Calvin I decided to just get the paper copy and do it the old-fashioned way. He said he had to do it that way himself, given despite having a Bachelor of Computer Science, he couldn’t bust the Government of Canada website to do it online. So if he can’t do it, no one can.

And speaking of technology that could cripple a Boomer, I’m now waiting for Trevor to format my memoir, Nuttier than a Fruitcake, in preparation for its launch on the Amazon book site. Then we still have to meet to fool around with pricing, and I’ll have to write some preamble or other, and hopefully with God’s good grace, we can have an ISBN by September 30.

Why September 30 you ask? Because the Canadian Book Club awards require a submission by that date, and they have memoir as one of their categories. Vain and impossible, I know, but I’m doin’ it anyway. I’m going to enter my book and see what happens. Stranger things have occurred, right?

Mom remains a handful and mainly because she still believes she’s the queen. I was there a couple of days ago, and Luke and Jan came for dinner as usual. No one but mom wanted dessert, and at that point Luke stood up and said his back hurt and he wanted to go home. Jan was surprised he was leaving but then left with him.

As mom was chowing down on the prune cake with whip I’d made, she decided to get pissy, and just as Jan was going down the stairs she called her back. I waved Jan on. Then I came in and said what did you want to tell Jan? Mom said I want to tell her never to leave the table when someone is still eating. I said well from now on, unfortunately, things like that will occur and you won’t be able to control them.

Mom’s still scared shitless of dying, too, so that kind of hard control of everything makes life very difficult. She worries about so many useless things that at 100.5 years of age, one would have hoped she would have come to terms with them. She’s no Buddhist, I can tell you that for sure.

Meanwhile I revel in simple joys, such as learning how to make a nice yeast dough for the aforementioned prune cake. I’ve been frightened of yeast in the past but just decided to take the bull by the horns and give it a try, and then what happened was a lovely, fluffy bottom crust. As I said if you don’t try you’ll never win. Fingers crossed for my book.

The contest won’t announce anything until November, so I’ll have to try to be Zen.

Shopping Marathon

Jun13

My friend Beverly, who I met 47 years ago when we were both teachers of the deaf in Prince George, came for a few days, and she wanted to go to thrift every single day. I certainly wasn’t opposed to it, so we began with the Women’s Shelter and the Mission thrift stores and ended the day in Rutland at the Rutland Hospital Auxiliary.

The next day we visited Value Village which overwhelmed Bev with the volume of stuff. Luckily Dairy Queen is right next door, so we went over for medium-sized chocolate dipped cones to calm our nerves. You know how a glass of milk before bed is supposed to be soothing.

On Monday we went to the SHARE society store downtown and then rewarded ourselves with delicious crispy chicken burgers and fries at the Railway Station Pub. When I think of it, our time together was spent either eating or shopping. Both excellent pursuits.

It likely won’t surprise you to know that I didn’t leave a single store empty-handed, though Bev often did. It’s funny how that works.

Then Elsa wanted to go treasure hunting which we did yesterday, so we hit the Mennonite, iThrift (everything is $2), Gospel Mission and Salvation Army stores. Because it occurred so recently, I can actually recall a couple of items that I purchased. One was a Villeroy and Boch ceramic tile trivet for $3 but $25 on Etsy, and a hand-beaded evening clutch made in Hong Kong for $3, but $40 on Etsy. Not that I ever sell anything, but I could if I wasn’t so damned lazy.

This was something that I was so hopeful I would do this year, but it doesn’t appear to be happening yet. I want to sell my grandparents’ old typewriter, mom’s old Singer sewing machine and other items like that to collectors who may like them, because as Luke has already explained when I die, “All this mom, right into a dumpster.” So ya know, I gotta get at it.

Denis used to describe my thrift store shopping as “bringing home other people’s garbage.” How wrong can you be? You remember the old saying, “one man’s meat is another man’s poison.”  Those of us who shop at thrift are so very grateful to the hockey wives bored of their $500 bag after one season of use.

Fifty percent of my hens are still acting like a. holes. Three of them, Kate, Condoleezza and Rhonda, insist on sitting in the nest box all day long and have to be forcibly removed several times a day. I go into the coop at least three times a day, scolding the hens for wasting their days inside, pick them up and toss them through the opening into their pen.

They seem grateful to have the spell broken as they dust bathe, and peck around happily. However, a few hours later, bam! Right back into the coop and sitting on eggs from the other hens, the “good” chickens, that will never hatch. I do hope to God the whole brooding episode ends soon as they don’t lay while it’s going on so it’s quite the annoyance.

Being able to waste enormous amounts of time in a lazy stupor, I’ve set myself the goal of mid-September to have my memoir of the fruitcake biz completed and ready for Amazon. Trevor, who illustrated Okay I’ll Bite, has all the equipment I’ll need to make an audio version as well, so that’s what I plan to do. But as we all know, “everyone has a plan ‘til they get punched in the mouth.”

The World Is Too Much with Us

Mar4

Do you know that poem by Wordsworth, one of my favourite poets? It seems appropriate now to say the world IS too much with us given we’re all addicted to YouTube suddenly and any bits of news from the maniac south of us. As a result, I woke up at 3:45 and decided at 5:00 AM to just get up as it became obvious, I wouldn’t be doing anymore sleeping. I wonder if billions of us are feeling the disruption.

I look southwest from my dining room window, so I guess I’ll have an excellent view of any mushroom clouds. It’s awful to think of that but with a dangerous moron leading the country that’s trying to take us over, all kinds of dark things come to mind. Thankfully I’m able to distract myself with practicalities such as dying my hair, which I’m doing as I type.

Mom’s 100th birthday went well, and she enjoyed all of the attention. I made her favourite rum cake into which I was able to get the entire 26er of booze this time. Sometimes I simply cannot get the cake to drink the entire bottle but this time, working slowly, I was able to coax it in. We like to eat it with lashings of whipped cream.

I picked our pal Jim up at the airport and he immediately had two dachshunds plopped on his lap. As I say to people if you don’t like that, just sit in the back seat. But he was fine with it, and we then stayed at mom’s for three nights and had a lot of fun with Luke and Jan.

Jim was on and on about how he needs to lose weight, despite being the size of a stick, and I said to him I weigh the same as I did when I was 18 and actually am five pounds lighter than when I got married. He said wow. I said yeah, wow, nothing. The secret is being quite heavy at 18 and even heavier when you marry, and then if you lose weight, you can parrot that line and make people mad.

I’m now enjoying the hell of trying to vote for the new Liberal leader. I say enjoy as I imagine other Liberal Boomers with no tenant in their basement who have a bachelor’s degree in computer science. I had to call Calvin up here just to do the very first step, and even our friend Jim who’s very computer savvy was freaking out as he wasn’t able to do it but then figured it out. Can’t wait to see of the 400,000 Liberals, how many were able to crack the code and managed to vote.

I completed the draft of my memoir and sent the 49,700 word document to my beleaguered editor, Judith. It’s quite a lazy thing to do, which is to pay the poor woman to read this and then I’ll work on the edits she suggests. I could’ve done much more of that prior to sending it but trust me when I say one can only re-read a fruitcake memoir so many times, and no one is paying me to do that.

Bored? Watch the Honeymoon Crasher on Netflix, it’s very funny. Just 90 minutes and so easy to watch and doesn’t require a lot of thought. As you know I’m not normal when it comes to Love is Blind, so am now waiting for the wedding show which is on Friday. Who will say I do? Who will have their little heart broken?

And speaking of which, I guess instead of being heartsick over the world going to hell in a handbasket, one should probably try to find the silver lining in all of it. To whit: Canadians have never been more patriotic, and I certainly have no intentions of travelling south any time soon.