Wal-Mart Adventure

"Well hey you guys, my name is Katie and i'm going to be sharing a toilet with you for the next several months." —This is the first message I ever received from one of my freshman roommates in college. She had decided to take the initiative and e-mail me and the one other girl she would be rooming with.  We e-mailed back and forth several times before we got more domestic and got each others numbers so we could text.  Each email was dripping with exuberance as we both tried to make the most positive impression we could on our soon-to-be apartment-mate.

Katie e-mailed me something cute and up-beat like, "I'm on a scholorship for drama this year but don't get too freaked out i don't take myself very seriously. I got a chance to look at our appartment.  Its one of the closest to the bus stop and we have a nice view out of our room windows. Your room has a normal closite and a largish walk in closite with a buch of shelves and there is another closite in the hall." With another e-mail adding, "dang i didn't spell check that.  you guys might as well know that i'm embarrassingly bad at spelling.  sorry i'd had hoped to keep that to myself until you had at least seen me in my pajamas."

Kidnapping

I grew up thinking I was a very boring person—which is to say I never did anything too extremely dangerous.  I have no broken bones from falling out of trees or doing flips on the trampoline (all I've ever had in fact in the way of broken bones is a fractured leg).  I've had the normal speeding ticket and parking ticket . . . and that just about sums up my dangerous and unlawful practices.  That is, until I went to Disney Land this summer . . .

I have to admit I am a bit self-righteous, I have never attempted stealing anything—let it be as small as a pack of gum from a convenience store or hot-wiring a car—let alone actually stolen it (that I can remember). In fact the story I am going to relate to you was an accident. Yes, it was.  I accidentally tried to kidnap a child, and the story goes like this:

Once upon a time in a land that was full of princesses and princes (sort of) . . . and theme rides and expensive popcorn.

The Stove

Throughout my life I have had many strange incidents with fire—which is a beautiful way to start any blog post. I have not died, or burned down a house though, so I feel relatively confident sharing some of these experiences.

I went through a phase of my life where someone who didn't know me well would have thought I was suicidal.  I had burns up and down my arms because I would forget sheet pans out of the oven were hot or I'd accidentally slide cookie sheets into my arms.  It almost become a source of pride to have at least two or three burn scars on my arms.  I have four brothers, scars are cool.

Beginings

When I was a young eighteen-year-old going to college for the first time I had a complex—this complex was something like being bi-polar.  I took turns being very overly confident in my maturity and capability as a newly independent adult, and being completely terrified out of my mind at being away from home.

In high school I was one of those dorky, nerdy, quiet kids who studied a lot, had about a total of two friends, and was very uninvolved in popular activities like watching sports games.  To make up for my social awkwardness though, I was very smart.  I graduated from high school at 17 with a high school diploma AND an Associates of Science.  —So of course I felt very secure in my academic prowess.  And, as most teenagers think, if they are good at one thing they will be good at everything.  I was ready to take on the world!

Bad Dates—Read on if you dare

Country Dancing
This is the story of another man I landed in one of my many dance classes.  We danced, we talked.  I left the studio and never thought about it again.  One day we walked out of the dance class together, chatted until it was time to part ways, and then he asked for my number.  It was like having a light-bulb go off in my head.  Oh, hey, wait a minute, he might like me.  I think he's going to ask me on a date.

Cool.

He really liked me.  We went to a country dance club, he held my hand on the way in.  It may not sound too intense to you, but for me hand-holding is serious stuff.  We danced, we went out back to cool down because it was stuffy.  We talked.  It was not altogether an awkward date.  He dropped me off at home.

This relationship I made awkward.  I decided I didn't like him—which for me just means awkwardness is going to happen.  I didn't know what to say, I didn't know how to talk to him, I avoided him for the first few classes after the date.  Um, yeah.  Botched that one.  Oops.

Bad Dates—We've all had them

Part 1:

 First Date in College
First dates are always extremely exciting.  There's something fantastic about first dates, you're all worried and you don't even like the guy, and you're so excited when he comes to pick you up, and you've tried on twenty different outfits and have pants and shirts littered across your bedroom floor.  Yes, dates.  Wow.

This date surprised me as I wasn't expecting to be asked out.  My friend Mitch called me and I missed the phone call.  So later that night I called him back.

Me: Hey Mitch what's up?

Him: Not much, what have you been up to?

Me: School, homework, school, textbooks, classes.  (Yes, most of what I did as a freshman was study and burn food).

Him: That's cool.

Me, after a long pause: So you called me?

Revenge of the Roommate: Cuddling

 My roommate and I are rather strange girls.  You should know that we have been friends for a very long time, we went to high-school together, went to college together as freshmen, and are still roommates now.  People sometimes miss take us for siblings just because of how casual and comfortable we are around each other.  There have been nights where we've huddled down under blankets and fallen asleep on the couch together watching late night movies, and we have so many inside jokes that it's not even funny to anyone but us anymore. 

Needless to say we are close.

This changed a little when I got my first boyfriend.   Actually it was before I got my first boyfriend (we'll call him Gus), I non-dated him for about eight months before we actually started steady dating—aka he was just over at our apartment ALL THE TIME.

Vegtables

One of my mother's goals in life was to convert me to the zealous love of vegetables.  This goal went on unsuccessfully for years, as I stubbornly refused to love vegetables, and she stubbornly continued to feed them to me anyways.

I Hate Peas
The first way I tried to avoid eating my vegetables was to stuff every single pea or cubed carrot she put onto my plate into my mouth all at once.  Then I would sit and chew, and chew, and chew . .  . and chew.  I think all the chewing has something to do with stuffing so many vegetables into a rather small mouth, and my not wanting to swallow them.  After what seemed like hours I would finally turn to my mother and ask if I could use the bathroom.  Then I would go spit out all the mushed up peas and carrots and flush them down the toilet—I would then return to happily devour all the rest of my cold food.

The saddest part of this story is that I did not fool my parents.  They knew exactly what I was doing with the vegetables in my mouth—not really a hard deduction when I left with a mouth brimming with soggy vegetables and returned with it empty.  They let me do it because they felt sorry for me—I really did spend hours chewing those stupid peas and carrots!

De La Sauce of Garlic

I believe we have all made different cooking mistakes before.  Even great chefs like me make a very few mistakes.  I remember once I tried to branch out my baking abilities and decided not to use a recipe to make cookies (I think most of this inspiration came from being too lazy to go look up a recipe, yes, I can be that lazy).  Cookies have a specific texture that is created from a certain amount of butter and eggs and flour—a texture which I did not get right.  My cookies turned out half cookie and half sweet biscuit and when my roommate got home and tried one she couldn't decide what they were supposed to be.  I have since learned to use recipes when I attempt making cookies.

I also once made a batch of brownies (while using a recipe) without putting any flour in them.  How did I do this?  I'm not sure.  I put in what I thought was all the ingredients, mixed up the batter put it in a pan, and cooked it.  I didn't realize anything was wrong until the brownies never cooked into brownies and the toothpick never came out clean.  At this point my mother sat me down and grilled me.

That Girl is on Fire

It is sad, although perhaps not at all strange, that people burn themselves quite frequently when working with ovens and stove ranges and steamers.  For the first few months of my job in a hot kitchen I burned my arms so frequently that I had constant scars all across them.  I never told my manager that I burned myself, rather I'd ignore the burn, pretend it wasn't very bad, and continue working—which may be part of the reason for all the scaring.

I'm not sure why I had such a hard time telling my boss I'd burned myself, I suppose it made me feel vulnerable or stupid, or clumsy.  I remember one particular day I tried picking up a pan that I had just taken out of the oven—tried to pick it up with my bare hand that is.  How do I explain that burn to my kitchen manager?  "I forgot I'd just taken it out of the oven."  "I didn't realize it would burn me."  "I forgot that pans coming right out of the oven could burn you." . . . none of these reasons seemed like very good options, so I went along with my default plan and didn't tell anyone about it.  I got off work shortly afterwards, bought a small cup of ice-cream and drove home holding it between my burnt fingers to keep them from hurting.  By the time I got home the ice-cream was melted and my hand was starting to hurt again—but my boss never knew, which was the entire point of the ordeal.

Fairy Tale

I think when we are children we all believe, to a certain extent, in impossible things.  We think unicorns or dragoons are real, we secretly know that monsters live in our basement, or brownies live beneath the floor boards.  When I was little I decided that I wanted a fairy for a pet.  Although the idea of a fairy sitting in a bird cage seems a little inhumane now, at the time this was my perfect vision of a pet fairy.  I believe it was brought on by watching Peter Pan.  Unfortunately I never found my fairy and I never went so far as to buy a birdcage for it so I wouldn't have known what to do with it if I had caught one.

Some of us are a little more fanciful in our imaginings.  One of my friends would go build small fairy dwellings in the forest for the fairies to live in.  She set up many different rules for herself, the houses had to be made only of natural material (rocks, twigs, grass, leaves), perhaps the most important rule was that once the houses were complete, she could never return to them.  For if a fairy moved into the house and then the human returned . . . it would ruin the illusion that fairies existed?  It would anger them and they would leave?  The magic of the place would be broken and the faeries would disappear?  No one knows why you could never return.

The story I would like to tell today does not involve magic, but a very great deal of imagination.  One of my friend's has six children, all of them girls.  Two of his younger daughters liked to build fairy furniture for a fairy they believed lived in their house.  They would set up clean little tissue paper beds and fancy chairs and cushions made out of cotton balls for the fairies.  A little while after the girls had made the furniture a note would appear next to it, thanking them for the beautiful chairs and beds.  An occasional note from a fairy was all the incentive they needed, they made furniture almost every day.

Cats are not like Dogs

Some animals love to be pampered and loved and man-handled, and some do not.  Dogs are a favorite animal because they love to play around; they love walks, they love chasing balls, they love fetching sticks, they love wagging their tails, and they just love people in general.  Cats are a little different.  Cats have a more sultry way of living, they allow people to pet them,  and feed them, and clean up after them, but cats live more independent of people than most dogs.  —This is why you cannot put a cat on a leash and walk it around the block like you can a dog, at least this is the story of one such instance.

One bright summer day one of my brothers went outside and, to his delight, he found a stray cat.  Now, my family lives on a farm, we know how to treat animals, we know how to work with them—or at least we should.  He carefully coaxed the cat over and then began patting.  The next logical step in his mind was to try and tame it.  Why tying a cat to a metal chair on a cement sidewalk is going to tame it I'm not sure, but my brother was convinced that it would help.

What should have been Cookies

Although I like to pride myself on my fantastic cooking abilities, I have not always been an especially excellent cook—or baker for that matter. For the first twelve years of my life there were only a very select few things I knew how to cook.  I could make oatmeal (boil oats in water), scrambled eggs, toast, and pancakes (from scratch, thank you very much).  I would add cold cereal to the list, but I don't think that even counts as cooking.

The only thing I truly excelled at, or so I thought, was making cookies. I could follow a recipe fairly well and make almost any kind of cookie, but my specialty (yes, unoriginal, I know) was chocolate chip cookies.  I'd make double batches of them and have a huge bowl full of cookie dough.

I would also be very careful to taste my cookies at every stage of their development (which sometimes makes me wonder about myself).  I'd try the cookies when they consisted of sugar and brown sugar and butter (which should have been gross, but really only tasted sweet).  Yes, I tried them after I'd added the egg, the raw egg.  I tried them after I added the flour and baking soda, and then I tried A LOT of them after I added the chocolate chips.  I really didn't even need to eat cookies by the time I got around to putting the cookie dough on the sheet I'd had soooo many calories.

A Metal Spatula and a Microwave

Once upon a time there was a girl who worked for a catering company . . . yes, this girl was me

I worked in the Pastry Room and I would plate up lots of different desserts so that they looked delicious.  One of the desserts we made were called Cheesecake Lollypops, these lollypops of goodness consisted of crustless cheesecake that was siphoned into a chocolate shell and then dipped in dark chocolate.  They were very good.

I’d made these lollypops many times before an unfortunate occurrence happened.  One day I was going about my normal routine, which consisted of sticking lollypop sticks into the cheesecake balls and sticking them into the freezer to harden (otherwise the cheesecake would fall off of the sticks and become a gushy gooey mess in the chocolate when you tried to dip them.)  While the cheesecake froze the next step was to melt the chocolate.

Some high up professional cooks like to get very fancy and complicated and melt their chocolate over the stove, carefully placed in a bowl on top of another pot and melt their chocolate at low temperatures.  We microwaved ours.  Although I do not suggest this for all you aspiring cooks out there, the catering company bought very high quality chocolate so that we could use this rather unusual method of melting it.

Adventures Including Cows

 If you have never lived on a farm you likely do not understand the true excitement of living on one.  You, perhaps, may think that goats and cows and chickens are boring and only add chores to an otherwise blissfully free day—which is partially true.  Sadly, if this is your conception, you have been thoroughly misguided.

Owning cows has made for many, many different adventures throughout my childhood.

The first cows we ever got were Black Angus cattle, four steers, large, rather ugly, and not particularly bright beasts.  As children we immediately went about naming them—for all "pets" must have names.  The first cow we named was the largest of the lot, a large hulking black thing.  Naturally we named him Big Red.  Why we named a black cow Big Red I'm not sure.  When my mother asked me shortly after the cow was named why I picked that name I couldn't tell her—nor could I be talked out of the name—and my answer has not changed since.  The other cows must have had more reasonable names because I do not remember what we called them.

The Crabapple Trees

I grew up on a farm as a wild, very tan girl with tangled hair and calloused feet.  Perhaps the most farm-ish thing I did was to go through a phase of wearing cowboy boots.  The cowboy boot adoration went on all of one summer.  White cowboy boots and overall shorts—I'm not sure quite what kind of an image I made.

One of the many endeavors we had on our farm was to try and raise turkeys.  My father and mother decided that instead of buying turkey for thanksgiving, they would just buy poults (baby turkeys) and raise their own meat.  My brothers and I were not opposed to this idea and welcomed the strange looking baby birds into our family readily—which was not exactly the kind of greeting my parents had planned on.

Turkeys are not really a very beautiful variety of bird, but we did our best to love them despite this flaw. We provided them with water and food, and probably more attention than a turkey has ever wanted.

Turkeys are heavy birds, they aren't meant to fly for long distances, but rather waddle through life rather awkwardly.  Our turkeys grew into their lumbering walk quickly.  At night we kept them inside of a chain-linked fence and then we would let them out during the day to go scavenge for food—turkeys like to eat bugs and grasshoppers and such.

My Life with Tomatoes

I have had quite a large amount of obsessions in my life, some of them were normal-ish obsessions for a child, some of them weren't.  One of the stranger obsessions I had was with tomatoes.  Yes, the strange, round, red food that seem to defy even definition as a fruit or vegetable, and squish out their red guts when you smush them.  Why did I love them so?  I'm not really sure, I think it had something to do with being a very easily entertained child.

Phase 1
Tomatoes first caught my attention as a very young child.  My mother planted cherry tomatoes, and as all cherry tomatoes seem to do, they flourished, and grew, and flourished, and eventually became so prevalent they were almost a weed.  There were so many small spherical red balls I could hardly contain my excitement.  Although, as it would happen, I didn't particularly love eating them myself.  Instead I decided to share the prevalent goodness with everyone I came into contact with.

The first problem, or perhaps largest problem, with this plan was my eagerness.  A basket was too hard to find, or too far away—or perhaps never even entered my mind to begin with. I picked a handful of tomatoes and then realized that I had nowhere to put them — oh, but I did.  

Princess

Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived on a farm with her parents and brothers.  This little girl was rather obsessed with princesses.  I believe at one point or another I managed to act out one scene or another of every single Disney princess show I was privy to.

Cinderella
Cinderella was one of the first princesses that I decided to copy.  As a two or three year old at family parties I would run up to every single relative I could find and assign them a part in the story—they could be the prince.  I would promptly run away and then "lose" my shoe as I went.  They would then have to pick up my shoe, chase after me, and then allow me to direct them to every other person at the party to discover that my shoe did not fit anyone else who was there (convenient and surprising for a two year old's shoe).  Then they would have to fit my shoe on me and declare me the princess.  Then I would go and find my next victim and relive the scenario again.

My second phase of Cinderella obsession was when I decided to clean the fireplace every single day.  My mother was not opposed to this stage of my obsession and even provided rags and cleaner to assist me in my cleaning.  I slaved away for at least three or four days in perfect bliss before I got bored.  After that I decided it was a much better idea to sleep next to the fireplace instead of clean it (thank goodness I did not decide to befriend and sew clothing for mice).  My mother was a little less encoraging with this idea, but still provided me with blankets for my endeavor—which as a very thoughtful child I rejected because they weren't authentic enough.  I also decided that I wanted to make an authentic dress for myself to wear out of real rags—fortunately my mother was able to talk me out of that particular idea before I acted upon it.

First Car

This is the sad and rather long history of my first car—how I obtained it, how I abused it, and finally how it died a rather startling death.

Part 1
The summer I turned seventeen I decided it was time to buy a car.  I had saved and scrimped, and worked, and slowly amassed just enough money to buy a cheep, old, high millage car.  First of all, I hate car shopping.  Possibly the only thing I hate more is job hunting.  I live in a small city—technically I live just outside a very small city in the county—which means I am far away from where most people live—which means that their cars are far away from me also.  Ultimately I end up dragging friends and family around with me for long extended trips when I go car shopping.  It is rather miserable.

On one such excursion out into the very large city of about 190,000 people I found my dream car.  It was old, it had high millage, and it was everything I had ever wanted in a car!  I have this thing about red cars.  I was sold on getting this car right up until I actually sat down in it to take it for a test drive.

Things you should not collect

My family likes to plan vacations once or twice every year.  Usually we'll have one big vacation each year.  One such year my parents decided to take a trip down to Oregon.  They found a beach house there and rented it out for an entire week.

The first thing to do when you prepare for a vacation is to go shopping.  Oregon has beaches.  We should buy sandals and shorts and suntan lotion.  Little did we know that beaches can be cold—very cold.  We spent our days in the one pair each of long pants we had packed and wore jackets constantly.  We did not even bother finding the suntan lotion.

When one is at the beach, they must go collecting randomness on the seashore.  My siblings and I found a plethora of broken shells and starfish.  One of my favorite past times was to collect sand-dollars.  I collected buckets of them and took the treasures home with me—my very own stash of riches!  I put them in the cupboard under the bathroom sink and became a seashell collector.

A Birthday Present

When I was about eight or nine I had a birthday—this usually happens once every year.  For this particular birthday I wanted to have a friend party, which I did, and it was very fun, etc.  However, what I remember most about this particular birthday was a present I received after the actual birthday and party were past.

Two of my closest friends were twin girls just a few weeks younger than me.  They had been unable to attend my birthday party and they dropped by the next day to give me my present.  It was not wrapped and so I immediately got an eye-full of a rather ragged, browning unicorn.

I don't particularly love stuffed animals to begin with—but they do, so I suppose it was a nice thought.

They both smiled and proceeded to hand me my new unicorn.  I took it and wondered where they had gotten such an old, worn animal from.

Still smiling one of them answered my unvoiced question:

When I was an endearing child . . .

I think I have slowly grown into my strangeness, it didn't suddenly come upon me.  My mind has always thought just a little bit differently than everyone else's—here are some of my best childhood stories. 

Ladybugs:
To me Ladybugs were one of the world's greatest tragedies.  How unfair that every single one of them were "ladies" and none "gentlemen."  As a child I felt sorry for them.  However, I did not become horrified for them until the day I realized that such an injustice was also the plight of the "daddy-long-legs."
Ladybugs are bright red and polka-dotted and darling . . . daddy-long-legs look like spiders—need I say more.  What a strange couple.


Dandylions:
When I was a little girl my mother told me that dandelions were good for me.  Being rather oblivious to the fact that people eat dandelion greens, the first thing I thought of when she said this was the bright yellow flowers I called dandelions.  As well as being oblivious I was also curious.  I decided I would try this healthy food one day when I was playing outside and bored.  I discovered that dandelion flowers are edible (and later found that they aren't poisonous), they taste rather like nothing and feel like fluff in your mouth.  I have not delighted my taste-buds with another dandelion flower since.