Day in the Life of an Idiot

Image: Classice Yule Log with three white candles, bedecked with boughs and ornaments (surrounded by silver reindeer).

HAPPY SOLSTICE to all who celebrate. And those who don't? I hope you had a lovely Sunday all the same. 

Our Solstice was much as it is most years--a quiet, family affair. We have some traditions, the first of which is making rosettes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosette_(cookie)). I have attached the Wikipedia article if you have no idea what a rosette is--it is, in fact, a deep fried cookie. Personally, if done well, I think they taste amazing, like sugar and AIR. Because, basically, the batter is ultra, ultra thin and you use a cookie iron to to crisp up a lot of vanilla and sugar-flavored nothing. Our recipe actually comes from a class I took on Christmas cookie making several years ago, but very likely (this being Minnesota) comes by way of Norway, though possibly Sweden or Finland. 

The cookie making class is memorable because I was the youngest person in the room. I really figured that probably I'd be the oldest, since I presumed things like rosette, pizelles, krumkaka, etc., were the sorts of things that grandma would pass on and, maybe, it skipped a generation. Nope. It was me an all older ladies and on older guy who kept telling everyone that he took the class hoping to pick up a lady. (Yep, he was that old.) Anyway, me and all the older folks all had a lovely time and I was really only there for the hidden rosette knowledge because everyone agrees there is "a trick to it." 

And, there is.

The trick is making sure the irons are hot first--but also not too coated in oil. But that little layer of hot oil will, in fact, help them come off. In fact, ours often just fall off the iron into the bubbling hot oil. So, we always have to have tongs to hand.


Image: me patiently waiting for the bubbles to slow down the appropriate amount. Mason in the forground. Our kitchen all around and a few exampes of the cookies drying on the paper towels. The irons come in a lot of shapes--star and flower/rosette shown. Not pictured is the Christmas tree. 

We never want the rosette process to be arduous so we only make as many was we feel up to, call it good enough, and then I usually make a fun lunch like deep-fried shrimp.  We have charcuterie for our Solstice dinner meal, light our Yule log (pictured above), open presents, and then take a bit of the Yule light upstairs in a safe, insulated container and keep the light  burning for the longest night. 

I like to joke: if the sun came up on December 22, thank a pagan!



Our Solstice gifts are always books. There is a version of the Icelandic Yule Cat where the present you must recieve is not new clothing, but a book. We decided to adopt that tradition. Mason got a Terry Prachett book (and a gift certificate for Uncle Hugos) because he's been on a Pratchett kick lately; Shawn got the last and final Phil Rickman novel The Echo of Crows; and I got Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Hew Lemmy and Ben Miller. My gift is one I asked for because I've really enjoyed their podcast by the same name. 

Also as is traditional, someone's present must include the Solstice wrench. It has been Mason for many years, now, in part, I think because we started using it to baffle a child who could very distinctly tell the shake of LEGOs. 


You can keep your King's Cakes, we have the Solstice Wrench!!  


By chance our friend John J. sent along a bunch of other book-related presents and so we opened those at Solstice as well.



Image: Shawn inspecting a surprise gift (one of many!) from our friend.

A lovely time all around. 

So, again, I hope you all had a lovely Solstice. If not, we can all enjoy the return of longer days. More sunshine! Hooray!

 For those of you who don't know, my family is Pagan. We're not always the most observant of pagans and we do also do some Christmas-y things around this time of year.  But we do make an effort on Yule/Winter Solstice, the shortest day/longest night of the year.  

We've had a Yule Log for years.  Shawn and a friend of hers "liberated" (aka stole) a perfect-sized birch log from Eloise Butler Wildflower Preserve.  Another friend of ours drilled three holes in it for candles.  Every year, we pull it out of storage and I decorate it from pine boughs either scavenged from our tree or from the leftovers at the Y's Men's tree sale (they usually have a bundle we can take for free.)  

On Yule, once the sun goes down, we do a very simple ritual of singing a few songs (including Fa-la-la-la-la because it mentions Yuletide) and a lighting of the candles. We normally open a few presents on Solstice under this light--and that of the tree. Traditionally, we try to give the more meaningful, less expensive, non-commercial gifts on Yule, but that doesn't always work out either. This year I gave Shawn her SUPER expensive hair product, for instance, which is neither non-commercial, nor cheap.  :-)

Then, once the excitement of all that dies down, Mason and I brave the cold and take one of the candles outside and light a fire in the chiminea.  We have a cast iron chiminea in the back yard, and I collect firewood all year for Yule. Last year, we stayed out so long, I actually RAN OUT of kindling.  This year our toes got chilly, but we hung out watching the flames and thinking about life, the universe, and everything for an hour--maybe a little longer.  Once we felt sufficiently "bonfired," we relit the candle from the chiminea, banked the flames, and came back inside.

We then transfer the flame to a fire-safe glass that we can leave unattended (though we keep it where we can keep an eye on it, in our bedroom) for it to burn all night, symbolically keeping the light going in the darkness. We have this really lovely stained-glass chalice type thing that, when light shines through it, looks a bit like a multi-faceted sun in yellows and light greens. I often use it whenever we do Solar rituals, in fact. 

Sometimes, one of us (usually Mason, since he's such a night owl) volunteers to keep vigil for the return of the sun by staying up all night and officially greeting the sun.  This year, Mason passed out watching Haikyu! (a volleyball anime) with me in the TV room.  So, I tucked him in, shut off the lights, and went to bed.  I'd put a 10-hour votive in the little stained-glass thingy so I wasn't surprised it was still going when I went to bed around midnight.

It was still going in the morning.

In fact, somehow, it stayed lit until the next nightfall, almost 24 hours.

My theory is that somehow, I placed the votive exactly on top of an old wick. There was old wax in the chalice thingie, but I thought that the previous candle was completely spent.  I'm guessing not.   What was especially neat to me was how STRONG the sunlight was the day after the day after Solstice.  It was almost like the sun really did absorb all of our Yule energy.  :-)  Of course we didn't really do that, but it was magical, none-the less.

But... spiritually and metaphorically, I think the world needed more light after give how dark and... awful (politically) 2017 has been. I hope that our small ritual gave the world what it needs to get through, and, in fact, it is my hope that our Yuletide miracle extends to you and your family.  If you have been in darkness, let our light shine through. 

So yesterday, I was quite convinced that my printer was going to defeat my plans for Mason's Solstice gift. For those of you just tuning in, on Solstice, this pagan family attempts to give gifts that are 'from the heart'--which has come to mean, homemade rather than store bought or of SOME DEEP SIGNIFICANCE. For instance, I once spent quite a bit of money on a pair of earrings for Shawn for Solstice, but they were perfect replicas of a children's story about Raven that we read to Mason when he was quite young. It's the story of Raven stealing the sun and the earrings were Native made and actually included a sun in the raven's beak.

But, so I started out thinking that to make Mason's tee-shirt, I would need to use our printer and heat-transfer paper that I bought at Michael's (a craft store.) This assumed that what I had at home was an InkJet printer... which I thought I had, but it turns out not so much. In fact, the heat-transfer paper nicely went in.... AND PROMPTLY MELTED COMPLETELY, like didn't even come out the other side AT ALL. Very smelly. Very impressive. I do believe, however, that my printer may actually survive this mistreatment. BUT, I had to give up on the printer option. My friends on the Interwebs suggested trying Kinko's, the lady at Kinko's said they had no InkJet printers so, nope, try Office Max. The Office Max helper also said, "No, sorry!"

I thought, perhaps, I was defeated. Because, while I can draw, I normally am baffled by straight lines (which this design would require.) But, I gave it a go anyway:



I think it turned out pretty well. You may be wondering why I am gifting my son with the number 11 in kanji. The answer is, of course, Bleach related. The 11th Division kicks butt and, since Mason might be wearing this to kuk sool (which requires black tees under the gi) this will give him extra kickiness to his buttness, I'm sure. We already swear in Japanese as part of our key-yop. Luckily, these folks are Korean, so shouting the s-word equivelant really doesn't make much of an impression. Plus, our Japanese is crappy enough I'm SURE no one notices.

I guess we needed more snow, eh? I'll bet we got another four inches.



And I woke up this morning to freezing rain. Sigh-ai-ai. As Shawn said this morning, "Minnesota, Land of 10,000 hassles."

On the flip side, because it's Winter Solstice the days will be growing longer from now on. Whoot!



Mason and I are at the coffee shop for a while this morning. Then, we're going to pick up Shawn and see about getting her to her hair appointment all the way in Edina at 2:00. We're going to leave at least an hour before we're due there. I hope we can make it in time.

I've got a notebook in the car that contains a bunch of scribbled notes for the next Ana book (#3). I got really excited about a scene the other day and had to quit to go get Mason. Alas, I haven't had much time to transcribe it yet. I hope it will still make sense when I sit down with it.

Anyway, I promised to post a picture of my awesome Yule present:



Jesus is knocking. Do you answer? Huh? Do you???

I just wanted to drop a quick note to let y'all know that I'm still above ground. I took a break from writing/working on my revisions for _Almost to Die For_ to celebrate the holidays. What, already? Yep. Our family exchanges some gifts at Christmas time, but, for us, the big deal day is Winter Solstice/Yule (which was yesterday.) My folks (who are secular humanist/Unitarians) came up on Sunday to exchange some gifts and whatnot, and we had a great time. Mason got some great winter loot -- a new sled, a snow ball maker, a snow fort maker (like those sand castle molds, except for snow), a scooter, and ton of other stuff. I got a couple of Captain America shirts and money for my coffee card. Hooray! Shawn got this cool stain glass/plate thing she'd admired last time we were in LaCrosse and some "folding money" as her father would have put it, which she intends to use on some fun, frivolous shoes.

Last night, we lit the Yule log and exchanged more personal gifts. I gave Shawn a cloth/bling covered box she admired at Pier 1 as well as some silver earrings that depict Raven stealing the box of the sun. Shawn and I used to read the story of Raven to Mason when he was quite little, so the earrings have a lot of special meaning. Mason gave us a calendar he made at school. We gave him some family puzzles (we love those mystery puzzles, so I got him some of those) and games we could all play together. Shawn gave me a subscription to InTouch, my absolutely favoritest trashy celebrity magazine.

Life is good.

We took light from the Yule log and lit a couple of votive candles, which we let burn all night. Mason got one for his room, and Shawn and I had one in ours. The sun accepted our gift of light, as the candles were all burned out by morning.

Alas, I still have this deep chested cough. I _do_ think I'm getting better, but, man, recovery has been seriously slow going. I feel just rotten enough that getting back to work on revisions has been hard today. I look at all the good suggestions my editor has made on the text and I think, "Nah." Although, I have been doing them, I've just been hard pressed to be motivated to, you know?

I had a little panic this morning because a friend thought that she'd heard that _Tall, Dark & Dead_ was out of print. A friend of hers had tried to perchase it and couldn't. So I quick sent off an email to my editor, who assured me that it's still listed in print and they have over a thousand copies still in the warehouse. I guess there's a distributor who doesn't deal directly with Penguin that sometimes can cause this sort of thing to happen. I'm just glad I didn't miss an opportunity to buy copies of the remaindered book, though it does remind me that I should probably plan ahead and budget for that eventuality. I can't imagine the series is going to stay in print too much longer after the last in the series comes out next May.

Speaking of the last in the series things, Shawn and I watched the Christian Bale Terminator movie last night. There was *some* cool in that film, but the most interesting part of the story (the character of Marcus, a terminator who doesn't know he's a machine,) could have been explored more, IMHO. I kind of liked that the audience was in on Marcus' secret from the beginning, and so you had a chance to watch all clues build up to his big "oh crap!" moment, when he can see the machine bits poking out of his ruined body. Also, the whole theme of "what does it mean to be human?" is a noble one. I'm fairly convinced that Marcus was, in the end, a better human being than John Connor --our supposed hero -- who, ironically, ends up with a machine's heart. The implication THERE was never much explored, either. I mean, here's a guy who has, in many ways, stripped himself of his humanity to effectively fight the machines ending up with a HEART of a terminator -- a cold, mechanical (if efficient) heart. I mean, DUDE. It was very tin man all over again, you know? Which one of them had the bigger heart, as it were? The machine. Clearly.

But it wasn't presented as nearly that deep, alas.

The movie kind of suffered from having to be an action film. There were some nifty chase/fight scenes (I rather loved the driver-less motorcycles, and I liked the "harvesters"), but if I had been the director, I'd have removed a lot of the John Connor storyline and focused on Marcus. I'd have left just enough Connor in, so you could have the comparison (cold efficient killer = human; decent, caring protector = terminator), but the whole subplot of needing to destroy Skynet's San Francisco base could have been mostly sidelined to explore Marcus' delemia more, IMHO.

But they didn't ask me.

What's up with Hollywood, anyway? They should have called. My number is listed, after all. :-)