Tag Archive | rum-cake

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.

You’ll Probably Find This Hard To Believe

Feb28

As you know, I’m the Laziest Human on Earth, so to think I’m at 21,000 words on my memoir is quite astounding. But when you’ve written a blog since 2009 it’s not all that difficult to go back in time. I force myself to write 1000 words a day as that’s very manageable. Then I’m allowed to waste the rest of my time on YouTube videos.

Re-reading those blogs I see pets, food prep, adult children who won’t move away, and gardening projects were huge topics. Another subtopic was the fruitcake business, which was the point of the blog, and then to a minor degree every few blogs saying yep, for sure, I’m ready to write a book, though it never happened. Now that I’m doing it, I find it astonishing, but I guess it’s true, for everything there is a season. Or decade.

And speaking of many decades, mom turned 99 on Sunday, so now she’s in her 100th year, hence the party this summer to celebrate that. As I said to her, if dead, we’ll use the party as a memorial. If alive, more fun for mom, plus she’ll have seen all the people who will be invited to her eventual memorial. Mom’ll appreciate that given she wants to know everything about everyone all the time.

I made mom’s favourite Bacardi rum cake for her birthday dinner with Luke and me. I’m able to get an entire 26-ounce bottle of rum into a Bundt cake, and it’s so moist, pungent and delicious mom will wolf the entire thing in a few days. In her younger years she could eat an entire cake, but now maybe one quarter per day is her limit.

Nick and family came to visit at mom’s to say goodbye as they’re shoving off to start a new life in Japan. I’m so proud of him for having such an adventurous spirit but I think he comes by it honestly given my dad left Germany at age 23 to start a new life in Canada. It seems to be what the family does, move all over the world, embracing new cultures. Maybe we’re part Viking or something, though they beat up cultures, so who knows.

I used to be all snooty about the Kelowna Actors Studio, then I went to New York, and now I like the Actors Studio. Forty years ago, shows on Broadway were huge complete with an orchestra, but now there’s not all that and the tickets are around two or three hundred dollars. Here I paid $65 to see an excellent production of Tootsie and loved it.

As you may know we’ve had two huge fires, one in 2003 and the other last year, destroying hundreds of homes. I have a lot of ponderosa pine trees and so a lot of needles and I wondered what the best way is to get rid of them. In the past I always had them hauled away, but then people said you can compose them so I wondered if I should do that.

I contacted the City and a person from the landfill replied, “I don’t know. Ask a consulting company.” I thought wow, I pay $350 a month and though I do have garbage collection, and I suppose the police, fire or ambulance might come if I call them, but other than that, I’m unsure what else I get other than rabid high-rise development. The City of Kelowna is a curious place.

I should’ve done this right from the beginning, as I know if I have a question, I can go to the Hall Road Neighbourhood Facebook page, and I’ll get all the free advice I need. The consensus was to remove the needles, and this makes sense given to compost takes a lot of water and time, and I have neither as we’ve been told a summer of drought lies ahead.