Soft and Chewy Molasses Cookies

As promised.

The only cookie that gets better with age!

Cookies

There are two kinds of cookie makers in this world: those who follow cooking time directions, and those who take the cookies out early. This little variance is the difference between brown crunchy cookies and scrumptious gooey cookies.

My mom taught me to bake the gooey kind. She taught me that when recipes say ten minutes, they really mean seven. We watch them like a hawk and take them out the minute they harden enough not to fall through the cooking rack rungs, and just after the very tippy tops turn golden brown delicious.

Two perfect cookie recipes to come soon! :)

Public Transit Reform

 

Apologies for the long absence. I'm been busy developing my new editing business, among other things. But soon I'll have a new website to announce (probably keep this blogspot, though).

Last weekend my mom visited from Denver for the weekend and we took BART into San Francisco for the first time. We spent the day with my Aunt Donna visiting North Beach (the Italian quarter), the Yerba Buena Gardens for an art gallery walk, and seeing the skyscrapers and TransAmerica building in the Financial District. Fun times, but I feel rather pathetic when I realize that we're only 95 minutes from downtown and it took us a year to get there... By this time in 2008 we had seen 8 countries and visited most of the tourist sites in London.

Just goes to show what you can accomplish when you live with an end in sight. Instead of thinking, "Someday I'll get around to it," you're propelled by a sense of urgency. As my good friend Susie wisely says, there's a difference between making time and having time. We must be deliberate about creating space for the things we want to accomplish, the places we want to see, the people we want to befriend.

Especially because there is an end in sight. Just because we can't see it doesn't mean it isn't there.

Airport

In the security line, some of you hunker into self-protective stances, hoping to minimalize human interaction and focus on the challenge ahead. Bagged liquids. Check. Boarding pass and ID. Check. Laptop out. Check. Undress. Check. Others of you make brazen eye contact, using the collective security-line disdain to your advantage, generating sympathetic head nods and small talk. You almost make it through and then

"I see utensils!" yells the security guard.

You and your line buddy roll your eyes.

"Who's bag is this?" the guard demands, holding up -

your bag.

Wedding present. Check.

"I guess I'll get a gift card next time" - you joke with your line buddy.

In the corridors and bars and cafes, fellow loungers and readers and typers and scratchers and drinkers and loud mobile talkers linger. You're all in it together. At least you have that.

Spontaneity (here and there)

Sometimes it's good to keep a free weekend here and there. This is what I have to remind myself, a planner. I like to do lists and personal goals and am overly cautious about over-scheduling my life. But this weekend was a good reminder to me that anticipation can be overrated. Jonathan makes fun of me because I can wait to open presents, and he can't. My rationale is that the longer I wait, the better it will be. But the events themselves in the present moment they happen should be enough. They shouldn't (always) need the build up of expectation. This weekend wouldn't have been half as good even if we'd tried to plan it.

Friday we had no dinner plans, but it turned into the first time I cooked eggplant. A friend gave us some from her garden, so on a whim I decided to bread it and bake it and it was lovely! Plus, eggplant has this totally unexpected kick to it. It's the only way I've made it, but so far it's my favorite.

Saturday turned into date day in Sacramento. We went to Crate and Barrel to spend the last remaining gift card from our wedding four years ago, for starters. Kudos to C & B for keeping such a long-term policy on their gift cards! Then some wedding gift shopping, BJ's brewery where we ended up with a free pizza to take home, and a spontaneous trip to putt putt off the highway on the way home (life with the Kopecky's gets wild and crazy, I know...)

Sunday-Monday turned into an unplanned trip to a friend's cabin in the Sierras. It was perfect weather, we enjoyed a tasty cheese, wine and steak dinner on a deck overlooking rolling hills and pine trees, and had a great night of conversation (and some ill-will bred from Liar's Dice, but that was only on Jonathan's end). Good times all around.

I think I'm almost ready to get back into the work week...

Finally Prided and Prejudiced

I picked up Pride and Prejudice for the first time a couple of Saturdays ago, when a visiting friend and Jonathan and I strolled by a used book shop in downtown Lodi. Pathetic for an English major, maybe, but I even did a report on Jane Austen in high school and still never read the book. I think I was put off by its popularity. I'm amazed when I go to the bookshop or the Netflix website and see fifty variations on Jane Austen's best-selling title like the Bollywood version "Bride and Prejudice," a movie about a Jane Austen book club, books made up of Elizabeth's imagined correspondence from Pemberley, books about Jane Austen lovers who take Jane Austen tours in England, and sadly even a vampire take on the Lizzy-Darcy saga, and on and on and on (Does Twilight have to take a bite out of everything?)

I'm on page 186 now, but Austen had me at 1. I finally get it.

And I'm so happy to report that the obsessions aren't overrated! Part of me wonders if it's so easy to get caught up in it because I've seen two movie versions. I watched the updated, shorter one with Keira Knightly when it came out, and I watched the 6 hour BBC production with my English friend's mom in her Cambridgeshire living room when the rest of the house had gone to bed. And of course the book is even better. Having seen the movies, it's easier for me to picture the scenery, but I am so loving the understated sarcasm and the intelligent critique of the culture and society of the time... and with the exception of the language that's maybe just a bit more flowery than ours, it's timeless.

Here's a few favorite quotes so far:

"what delight! what felicity! You give me fresh life and vigour. Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are men to rocks and mountains?" - on being invited for an excursion to The Lakes

Upon the whole, therefore, she found, what has been sometimes found before, that an event to which she had looked forward with impatient desire, did not in taking place, bring all the satisfaction she had promised herself. It was consequently necessary to name some other period for the commencement of actual felicity; to have some other point on which her wishes and hopes might be fixed, and by again enjoying the pleasure of anticipation, console herself for the present, and prepare for another disappointment.

"But surely," said she, "I may enter his county with impunity, and rob it of a few petrified spars without his perceiving me." - on visiting Pemberley for the first time

By-The-Sea

This would be my cottage and tea house! That is, if I lived in Carmel-By-The-Sea with a cottage-by-name like Windemere and enjoyed tea and scones everyday at the Tuck Box.

Someone forgot to tell me that California could be a bit English.

(Although I wonder if they knew...)

Him

Who do I live to please?

I've never had to consider this question so seriously before. Or, should I say I've never realized I should consider this question so seriously before.

It's a really important question. It's the springboard for my heartthrobs, tears, successes, failures.

Who do I live to please?

My boss? Coworkers? Hero? Friends? Family? Myself?

Whoever it is, they will be my heaven. When they are disappointed with me, I will cry tears of disappointment. When they laugh with me, I will wear the same smile for days. When they tell me what to eat and where to go and who to love, I will obey with the full velocity of lovers running into each other's arms after a decade of separation.

Because when I've found acceptance, I've found love.

There's only one who never fails to accept me, to hold me, to love me, even when I disappointment Him. If I could just wake up every morning thinking of Him, of only Him, would I be so selfish to fill up my mind with ideas of how to please anyone else? Would I waste my energy fulfilling empty rituals, knowing that the most important thing I could ever do is to be His?

No.

Because being loved by Him means--already loved. Not having to please... getting to please.

1. Pocket Knife 2. Maxi Pads

For all you men out there who hate buying feminine hygiene products for your ladies...

. . . here's a handy tip for you.

Two words.

Survival Kit.

When you walk down the shop aisle, attempting to hide the little pink box somewhere-ANYwhere- (don't lie--you took the blue brand even though your wife said she wanted the pink) and another man walks by with a smirk, go ahead and tell him it's for your survival kit.

Yes, your ultimate manly survival kit that you will take with you on jungle explorations and 007 missions. And you can say the same thing to the cashier who winks at you as she passes the box over the scanner and you swear you smell flowers. Now you can smell sweat and adrenaline and musky pine wilderness air because you will put the Maxi Pads in your survival kit along with your swiss army knife and gauze.

I never would have known about this useful piece of trivia until, out of proper wraps, my husband bandaged up my wound with a piece of a Maxi Pad and told me that the military keep them in their kits. I perused the web to see if what he said was true and found this..

It's always helpful to know a bit about Maxi Pads and their alternative uses.

When you decide to make a banana cake...

... your husband will become sick the same night and not be able to eat it. (Especially because the last time you enjoyed banana cake together was at your wedding and you didn't even get to take home the top tier and eat it a year later because the drummer was shoving it in his goofy grin on his way out of the reception.)

When you've finally recovered from a three month sprain and can run, you will slice the other foot with a steak knife and be reduced to limping again.

These are important life lessons--the talk of bedside tucktime with parents, and visits to the wise old woman on the hill.

"What could they possibly teach me?", you ask.

I will tell you what they can teach you, because they have taught me this:

EAT YOUR CAKE.

Limp to the store, buy fresh saltines to replace the stale, boil a chicken for homemade soup (you hear the fat cures respiratory ailments), bandage your wound, and head to the guestroom for another solitary night of fever-less sleep until your husband recovers.

But before bed, when the trees outside are whispering and the baby next door is crying and the man outside is plucking dissonant guitar strings, eat your cake. Savor it. And imagine that moment four years ago when you smeared it all over your new husband's face (or, at least tried).

Then all the illnesses and fluke injuries from the past few months will melt away like the gooey maple frosting dripping from your nose. And you will be thankful.

*****
Dear Huzzy, here's to sickness and health. I'll be happy to take whatever comes next as long as I have you!

Housesitting...

...this weekend. Invited good friends to share it with (or, "with which to share it" as she would like me to say). Spent Friday and Saturday in and around the pool, hot tub, soaking and swimming under the waterfall, slipping down the slide, playing a game of water volleyball or two, dunking their spunky toddler, kayaking on the lake, walking around the lake, throwing the ball for two good dogs, enjoying late breakfast and grilled dinners, wine in a vineyard, plucking plump berries from the strawberry patch and snipping off basil and thyme for pasta tonight--

this just in: hummingbird spottings in the rose garden!

--and best of all, renewed friendship with good friends. Note to self: you can never be too thankful for good friends.

Feather

Travel--any sort, but especially flying if only because it's one of the extreme forms of transportation (not counting ziplines or bungee jumping) is risky. Stuffed with surprise, shock, suspense. New locations multiply the number of uncontrollable factors.

But it is also a relief. The very fact of kinetic energy destined towards an end is a promise of purpose, the hope of better to come. Exhilaration. Careening down a runway, building speed against the traction of rough gravel, wheels crunching hungrily for lift off and finally, heart jumping into the throat in anticipation, breathless, rising weightlessly into the air, faith placed entirely in the engine, pilot, mechanics we know nothing of.

I can't imagine life without travel, without experiencing new cultures and the people and locales around them. Growing outside myself, expanding my interests, being challenged to think and speak differently, never content with my state of being.

The sense of adventure is heightened by time. Knowing it has to end eventually, in some way, increases my sense of ambition from the start of the trip and I even play unintentional mind games. Every hundred feet ascended into the air I watch a slow-motion movie of failure. A distant popping noise like the firecrackers that sound like guns, scaring me for just a second until I laugh nervously. The pop and then deflating and twisting, the twisting and ragged turning until the engine sputters out its final stale exhale, and we're left hovering in its fumes. . . and then dropping. Dropping. Sinking to the earth for the final time.

To not travel outside oneself is to become too comfortable in a worldview. Its end is my own righteousness. It's breathing without a perceivable meaning, except my own physical life which will eventually disintegrate into dirt again.

How can we live believing that the meaning of life is us, is for us, is circled around us? This life ends too quickly, floating through the air and into the earth as weightlessly as a feather.