Having Nice Things

I'm cheap. I blame it on the way I was brought up. We didn't have much money and we often didn't get to have things like fashionable clothes, new furniture, or nice dinners out. I don't lament this aspect of my upbringing- it actually made me very frugal, which is handy. Even now, no one can get more at the grocery store for less money than I can. (Except for those crazy 'extreme couponing' fanatics, who I think are crazy.)

I love the red suede and dark wood.

 I just ordered this pair of Dr. Scholl's Original Exercise Sandals. They cost $65, and I can count on one hand the number of times I've spent that much on a pair of shoes. I had a pair of these sandals back in the day, which I had purchased at a thrift store, and which were a size too small but were still the most comfy pair of shoes I ever had. I don't know why I don't have them anymore. Chances are, I either threw them away in a fit of pique, or Scout peed on them and I had to get rid of them. Or it is always possible that they were stolen by a roomate. But at any rate, I don't have them anymore and every time I get the Vermont Country Store catalog I wish I still did. So I finally decided to buy another pair.

I love wooden-soled shoes. For some reason, I find them to be supremely comfortable. This particular shoe style also has contours behind the toes that force the muscles in your calves to work, and gives you nice legs. A secondary concern, to be sure, but a nice side effect nonetheless. Plus, they're cute. I bought them in red because that's the kind of person I am, but I think I can wear them with just about anything I own.
I had a really hard time making myself order the shoes because they cost as much as three normal pairs of shoes I buy. Of course, I'll have these shoes for at least 10 years. It's the same thing as when I bought my Dr. Martens and my Roper cowboy boots- you pay a little extra up front, and they pay you back for years to come. But it was really difficult to click "Place Order," and now that I've done so, I am beside myself with excitement for my cute new shoes to arrive.

I am the 19%

81%
Percentage of women who had become mothers by age 40 to 44 as of 2010. In 1976, 90 percent of women in that age group had given birth.
Source: Fertility of American Women: 2010

I am never going to be a mother. I'm happy about this.

Some women try to get pregnant and cannot. I am pretty sure I would have fertility obstacles, because I have PCOS, plus I am on medication that would cause birth defects if I were to get pregnant. So it's not going to happen to me, and even if I did want to have kids I probably couldn't. But it doesn't bother me at all.

I was 21 or 22 when I realized that I didn't want to have kids. I had just watched a friend of mine give birth (it was in a birthing center in the hospital in Durango), and while all of the family were oohing and aahing and spouting off about how wonderful and beautiful it was, I was quietly standing there, somewhat pale, and wondering to myself if I was the only one in the room who was witnessing what was actually happening.

The mother (I'll call her Stephanie) was my age. She had gotten pregnant by accident by a guy that she hated by the time she realized that his rogue sperm had impregnated her. She considered having an abortion, and she had gone down to Planned Parenthood and made an appointment and everything, but when the time came she changed her mind and decided to have the baby instead. She also eventually decided to drop out of college and get a job waitressing at Denny's for $2.13 an hour and marry a dishwasher. But none of that had happened yet.

But I digress. Everyone in the room was acting as though this was such a beautiful thing, when what I had just witnessed was a young woman crying and screaming in pain, being half strangled by an ill-fitting hospital gown, then tearing off her gown so she was completely naked in a room full of people, some of whom were strangers, and a video camera. Then came a vast gushing of blood, a baby, and placenta (in that order). After all of this madness a nurse actually had to go in and stitch her vagina up, right there in front of everybody.

I will admit that afterwards, when the baby had been wiped clean and the screaming was over and Stephanie sat there, naked, cradling the baby in her arms with her long hair cascading down her shoulders and over her breasts, she was the most beautiful I had ever seen her. The baby was beautiful, too. But the birthing process wasn't beautiful, and if you've actually witnessed it and you think it is beautiful, you're crazy. It has a beautiful outcome, but the process is straight out of hell. Why on Earth anyone would want to tape it and watch it again later is beyond me.

So I knew that I didn't want to give birth, but I somehow managed to put all of that out of my mind for the time being.  When Marcos and I got together we assumed we would have kids. It's what straight people do after they get married, after all. They procreate. There's a lot of pressure to do so and I think that most people do it somewhat thoughtlessly, without planning too much or thinking about their own needs or desires. But we are not those people.

Once we made the decision not to have kids, a weight was lifted from me. I no longer felt like I was a fraud. We just don't want kids! So now when people ask me if we are going to have children I just say no. I don't feel the need to make things up about, "It's not time yet," or ,"We want to wait a while." No, we've been married for 8 years, been together for 11, and I'm rapidly approaching the age where it's not really a good idea to start having kids, which is just as well because we didn't want any in the first place.







  

Goose, Goose, Goose

Fact: When a goose gets sick, wounded, or shot down, two geese drop out of formation and follow it down to help and protect it. They stay with it until it dies or is able to fly again. Then, they launch out with another formation or catch up with the flock.
Lesson: If we have as much sense as geese, we will stand by each other in difficult times as well as when we are strong.

Today, while running errands on my lunch, I saw a single goose sitting in a grassy field. I suddenly realized that I’ve only seen a goose by himself one or two other times in my life. Generally, they are quite social animals, always traveling in groups.

I started to worry about that goose. Why is he alone? Is he about to die? Or, did he fly down to the field to accompany a friend who was dying, and now has to wait for another flock to fly over so he can join them?

I didn’t see any other geese in the field but it is quite possible that they were on the other side of the hill, or down at the creek getting a drink. Or maybe, somehow, this one lone goose got ahead of or behind his friends and is just waiting for another group to come along so he can join them.

I think I’ve been a lone goose at some points in my life.

Then, me being me, I started to wonder: do geese ever die in mid-flight? Suffer some sort of seizure or heart attack or something and just drop out of the air? And then, of course, I started thinking about migration patterns. Flying from Canada to Mexico (and back) every year, they spend a lot of their time flying over populated areas. Has anyone ever been hit by a goose that died and fell from the sky? Did the person die? Did it cause a massive pileup on the freeway?

These are the questions that keep me up at night.

Make Me One with Everything

I just baked the most beautiful little muffins.

Yum!

They are everything muffins, as in an everything bagel in cake form. I got the idea from this breakfast place nearby, Wild Eggs, which has several locations in Kentucky and then one, inexplicably, in Denver. They make an everything muffin, but of course they don't give out the recipe for that sort of thing- It's "proprietary." Like that infamous Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe.

They taste as good as they look.

I used a recipe that I have for blueberry muffins, but I used only a little bit of sugar and replaced the berries with everything mix. I also made them as mini muffins, so they are a little crispy around the edges and took zero time to bake. It made 24 mini muffins, or I would guess it'd make 12 regular size muffins or about 6 huge muffins (like the ones in coffee shops).

I also just ate two of the little buggers and they're delicious. I'm going to take some to Holly today and am going to save the rest to have with our salad for dinner tonight, but if those weren't considerations I could probably sit down and eat half the recipe in one go.

I'm including the recipe below, because I love it when things work out the way I wanted them to!

Everything Muffins
Everything mix:
1 T sesame seeds
1 T poppy seeds
1 T dehydrated minced onion
1 T dehydrated minced garlic
2 t course kosher salt

Mix everything in a small bowl. Reserve about 1 tablespoon for topping.

Muffin base:
1 1/2 c flour
1/3 c sugar
2 t baking powder
1/3 c vegetable oil
1 egg
about 1/3 c milk
everything mix (minus 1 T set aside for topping)

Preheat your oven to 375 and spray a mini muffin tin liberally with cooking spray.
Mix the flour, sugar, baking power and everything mix in a mixing bowl. Measure the oil out and put it in a 1 cup measuring cup. Crack the egg in with the oil and then add milk to the 1 cup line. Pour this mixture into the dry ingredients and mix until well combined. It will be a thick batter.
Spoon the muffin batter into the muffin tins (it should divide equally among 24 muffins) and then sprinkle with the reserved everything mix. Bake in the preheated oven for about 15 minutes or until golden brown and delicious looking.
Take the muffins out of the oven and let stand in the pan for about 5 minutes, then transfer them to cooling racks.

Oversaturated

It's nearly impossible for me to be blissfully ignorant anymore. Between Twitter and Facebook, I get updates on news that matters to my friends all the time.  I listen to NPR during the day, so I get a lot of in-depth national and international news as well. Sometimes it's all a bit too much. I kind of miss the days of coming home from work and having no idea of anything that happened in the world until I got around to watching the news, which may have not even happened that same day. I'd come home, do my after-work routine, and then maybe watch the news or call Holly or something and hear some shit.

 I remember on September 11, 2001, there were people I knew who actually didn't know what had happened until they got home from work. That's impossible for me to imagine today. I don't know if it's because I work in an office job now, with quick and easy access to the internet and radio, but rumors and real news spread so rapidly that it's pretty much impossible to avoid, now matter how hard you're working.

I think I'd like to take a weekend, or even one day, not to "follow" anything. Just go out in the middle of nowhere, with no internet and no radio, and reacquaint myself with what it's like to be on my own schedule. Thinking only my own thoughts, with only my surroundings for sensory input. Even if I had someone with me to talk to, it would be nice to be in our own world for a day, don't you think?

As long as it doesn't involve camping. I don't need to go that far.

A Hound Named Earl

On Saturday evening, I was driving to the grocery store to grab dinner. I was driving down our alley, and off in the distance I saw a black thing swinging back and forth. I assumed it was a trash bag being blown about by the wind, but as I got closer, I realized that the black thing was actually the long, pendulous ear of a basset hound. He was adorable! He was large for a basset hound, with the aforementioned black ears, brown and black patches on his back, a black tail, and the rest of him was white with black polka dots.
When the dog saw me driving up, he wagged his tail and walked up to the side of my car. He was very friendly. I was going about 3 miles an hour so he was in no danger. I stopped, rolled down my window, and said, "Hi, buddy! What are you doing out here by yourself?" I noticed that he was wearing a collar, so I was about to lure him into the car and look at his tags to give his owner a call.
At just that moment, a guy about my age walked by and glanced down the alley at us. He did a classic double-take and then shouted, "Earl!" Earl (the hound) turned his head and saw his dad, and began wagging even more.
The guy walked up and said, "I think he broke out. We didn't even realize he was out." (I laughed a bit at this, because I couldn't imagine this slow dog breaking out of anything.) I told the guy that I was about to call him, and he thanked me for stopping and took Earl's collar and walked back home.

I am a little sad that I didn't get to take Earl into the car and give him a ride. He was very cute.

Controlled Burn

I think that the biggest oxymoron in the English language is "controlled burn."

There is currently a "controlled burn" which is consuming a large swath of Colorado about 25 miles from Denver. It's been burning since Monday, when it- surprise- got out of control and started consuming the forest at an alarming rate. The wind was also insanely strong that day, which complicated matters even further.
This morning when I left our apartment, the air was thick and hazy, and smelled like a campfire. Which is true in a really sad way, I guess. And as I said before, this fire is 25 miles away from us.
The last thing I heard was that they had evacuated close to 1000 homes and and two people were confirmed dead, with another one missing. Also, Governor Hickenlooper has decided that Colorado isn't going to do "controlled burns" anymore. That's the best idea I've heard in a while.
Here's a link to an article about the fire:
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/wildfires/story/2012-03-28/colorado-wildfires/53825940/1?csp=34news