Serene of the Oakland Serenes

I have cried a lot today, but there are joyful things, so that's what I'll focus on.

In no particular order:

• Dodge Poetry Festival is online this year


• Work paid for me to go to Compounded Oppression: Sister’s Circle today


• Takeout Chinese food (we don't eat out much; joy is joy)


• We signed mortgage papers this week. Okay, I signed, but we own the house. Almost*. I am still in shock that I'm a person people will lend six figures to. Of course, I have an inherited house, so this is not purely because my credit, which used to be abysmal, is now what the mortgage person called "a solid B+/A-." It's also because the amount they're lending me is less than half what the house is worth.


• Tomorrow, I'm planning to go pick up the dim sum that we were going to have for my birthday (my mom went into the hospital that day so we postponed it until she could join us and she never came home), take it over to the outside mall near the kid's house, and eat it with her outside. It will be suboptimal, but it will be as great as things can be right now, and that's okay.


• I wrote some poetry and short fiction that I really like this week and last week, and that makes me happy.

* My mom left me the house in trust. I have the option to not include it in community property in my state, but my mom made it as easy as possible for me to deal with the house when she died; I want to do the same for James and the kid. My brother (the trustee/executor) has been really busy, so he hasn't done the paperwork on the property transfer yet, but the mortgage guy is going to help, so that should happen fairly quickly now. We hope.

1) Probably sick. Fortunately, also off work for a few days.

2) maevele speaks for me.

3) Listening to an album start to finish. I don't do that much. Really enjoying it.

4) The boyfiend and the kid cleaned the house yesterday, so when I got home from a late and frustrating day at work, there was clean and peace to come home to. I love them a very huge lot.

5) I keep looking at my financial aid offer letter and shaking my head with disbelief. It's a lot of money, and a lot of help in making my long-awaited dream come true. I am in awe.

6) That said, I really really really am feeling impatient for April 29th to come, so that I can know where I'll be going to school!

4-day weekend!

Things I plan/hope/want to do, now that I'm on the getting-well track and have 4 days off:

1) Make sure I've got all my college-admissions stuff in order (note to self; really need to see what the SIR deadline is for Hayward CSUEB)
2) See if I have the oomph to make a chapbook to sell (or give away) at wtfpotatoes's FOGcon booth
3) Play lots and lots of Rise of Atlantis on the iPad
4) See wild_irises and stonebender, not necessarily in that order
5) Read poetry; write poetry.
6) Bake a key lime pie with the kid
7) Help the kid make buttons to sell at her booth
8) If I have the energy, do some tidying up here; if not, fuck it. :-)

I was feeling veggie-poor, as a result of days of being in too much pain to deal with much food-wise (shopping, cooking, etc.). Had a decent afternoon yesterday, though, so I went and bought $20 worth of produce. At our store, that's a LOT of produce. I got:

Two big heads of cauliflower (2.7 lbs)
A head of romaine
A big bell pepper (2/3 lb)
A stalk of celery
2 lbs onions
A big bunch of scallions
Half a pound of shiitakes
Two big knobs (almost a pound) of lotus root
1.29 lbs roma tomatoes
4 big navel oranges for 70 cents!
Two heads of garlic
A small (.75 lb) head of cabbage
2 lbs carrots
2 medium oro blancos (kind of like a sweet grapefruit)
2 lbs comice pears
2+ lbs fuji apples
3+ lbs yukon gold potatoes

I came home from the store sore but happy. Made a big stir-fry of a little pork and a ton of veggies. Had an apple and an orange with breakfast. Ate the leftover lotus root just now (I'm the only one who likes it). And I'm about to take a massive tray of roasted cauliflower out of the oven.

I'm RICH, I tell ya!

My kid is home.

My landlady is going to replace the pump.

There's a corned beef in my oven.

I'm going to take a nap.

The thread through all these things is, of course, joy.

1) Last night, my ankle popped. For less than a second, it hurt so badly I wanted to throw up, and then it was fine. And it's been fine since. I can walk! Hallelujah. I'm still taking it easy, but the difference is huge, and I'm so relieved.

2) Still having fun building the blog. LOTS of fun. http://www.momfoodproject.com (mom doesn't read DW/LJ, and it's almost ready to launch anyway). The kid is working on a logo/banner theme.

3) And even having a little fun on Twitter (@momfood). I never wanted one for personal stuff (still don't), but it's fun connecting with other food bloggers and with famous chefs and geeks.

4) Got a letter from the IRS today. The short take is they said no to seven of the documents I sent. There's a chance I could get new documents together in the ten days they've given me to appeal this, but I'm not sure I can, and I'm not going to decide about it tonight; it's not worth crying over right now.

5) The kid has been making real money doing commissions for people on DeviantArt. She is a professional artist! She's amused and a bit turned off by the themes of some of the drawings, but she takes the work seriously and spends a lot of time and effort on them. You can see some of them at http://wetpaperbag.deviantart.com/gallery/

6) Things have been REALLY rough in stonebender's side of the family. Seems like there's never a time when all three of them are well at the same time. I wish I had a magic health wand, you know?

Not ready to talk too much about my new blog project yet, but it's combining some of my lifelong passions: Food, hospitality, writing, family, and embarrassingly amateurish photography. (No, wait, that last one is a lifelong apathy; I may have to work on that.)



(In order to work on this, I have to push through some shame about not working on reviving the magazine, but I'll just have to sit with that for a while. I'm not ready to pick that back up, but I want to do SOMETHING creative, so this is what I've settled on for now.)

[posted here and at serenecooking]

There were broccoli and zucchini in the farm box this week, so I was gonna just make spaghetti (with a jar of store-bought sauce) and steam the veggies and be done with it, but then I got to feeling like something a little nicer, and I was at Whole Foods picking up spaghetti sauce anyway, so this is what we had for dinner:

Salad of watercress, shaved pear, a tiny bit of fancy goat cheese, and avocado, with olive oil and balsamic vinegar
Whole-wheat spaghetti with the aforementioned sauce (Whole Foods' roasted-veggie sauce was on sale, and it's pretty good)
Garlic ciabatta
Pan-fried zucchini coins and broccoli florets
Stuffed mushrooms

I'm so stuffed. It was SO good.

Take one week. Add driving rain and hail. Stir in the first week of college, a mom in the hospital, chest pains, lack of sleep, a death in my community at work, tragedies in Haiti, and a street closed off because of a shootout, and you get a really stressed Serene.

However.

Mix in the love and support of a big family, the Best Job Ever, and the potential for a substantial tax refund, and things don't look quite as gloomy.

( That's the short-and-sweet version; this is the detailed version, which you're forgiven if you don't feel like reading. The important parts first: Mom is fine. I am fine. The kid likes school. )

1) My adorable and crazy neighbor, worthyadvisor, is swimming the Tiburon Mile THIS SUNDAY (!) for Hospice. Even if you can't donate -- or can only donate a tiny bit -- you have to see her donation page. The adorableness is massive. She's also auctioning off some awesome stuff to raise more donations.

2) I keep trying to say stuff about my increasing withdrawal into myself, and this hermitage of mine, but all that keeps coming out is "Yes, I still love you all. I wish I had it in me to see you. I just don't. Sorry."

3) The Best Job Ever continues to be fabulous. My mom continues to be sick. stonebender's dad continues to be very sick with leukemia. dbubley continues to have cancer. Basically, what was good before is still good, and what sucked still sucks. I wish I could wave my magic wand and make it all better, I truly do.

4) This weekend was a tonic for me. Except to go for walks and shop for food, I didn't leave the house. I made vegan carrot cake and cooked dinners and cleaned and paid magazine bills and clipped coupons and zoned out in front of the computer and read The Graveyard Book and got some peace. It was really wonderful, and it reinforced for me that this whole hermitage thing is, for now, really working for me. I have a book club commitment this week, but no commitments otherwise, and that's a good thing.

5) On Monday, the kid starts her figure drawing class at Cal. I'm very excited about it. I think she is, too, when she's not mad at me.

6) A few weeks ago, I started eating a different way in order to be proactive about the side effects of my medication, and WOW! Hermitage or no hermitage, I have So. Much. Energy. I'm cooking and cleaning and going for walks. I'm getting maybe 5-6 hours of sleep, on average, and feeling great. And I almost never have joint pain or heart palpitations now. This may all be a coincidence, but I'll take it.