Mishalak

I sometimes have to give in to a small temptation to do wrong to avoid a bigger one. The result of this is slowly fading on my right arm. I had a nice big scar from where I picked at a sore when infected with the chickenpox at about age 7 (maybe 8, the dates are fuzzy). I was told that I could not itch because I would get horrible scars, but if there is something uncomfortable with my body it is incredibly hard to for me to just ignore it. Too much of the ape body grooming genes or whatever. So, since this one spot was the first one I itched, I allowed myself to scratch just the one. So I got a fairly serious round scar there, but nowhere else. Organized surrender to temptation to avoid a total collapse. My point? None. There is nothing to learn here. I was just reminded of this since idiots not giving their children vaccines have put chickenpox in the news.

A Pointless Story

When I was young(er) I was very enthusiastic about counting, tracking, and categorizing. Partially it was a way of keeping myself entertained while riding in a car. If I didn't have a book to enthrall me I might even just start counting out loud out of boredom and, no doubt, annoy all the adults in the vehicle. I seem to remember counting to one thousand while riding with Grandma M out in San Diego. But as days turned colder as Christmas time drew nearer I would start to watch for lights upon houses during the long drives between Denver and our home in the country. I would judge them, I would sort them into good and bad categories, and I would try to count the strings of lights that were being used on every display.

I remembered this this as I was driving home the other night. Where once there were few houses and very few lights now they seem to cover every hillside. No longer would I go long minutes searching the darkness for the next isolated development. It is December and we are pushing back against the darkness with tiny points of light.

Firmer than Brie and softer than Gouda this is a cheese with a nice texture. It has a mild fruity sort of flavor with a touch of a sharp taste. I suspect that is from the thin line of charcoal in the center. I read about that part of its making later, when I bought it I had not idea what that line was, I just assumed it was supposed to be there. This isn't a cheese where one is supposed to eat the rind I think. It has an unpleasant fine sand like texture. (That's me learn by doing.) I do think this will become a regular cheese for me. I love the taste of this one and the price is not too bad, just about $8.29 at Sunflower market.

I tried it for the first time last night after I shut off my computer. The rain was coming down hard and the sky lit up with blue flashes. After I'd been outside with my crackers and cheese for just a little while all the streetlights went out and took a minute to come back on. It was a lovely experience to be watching the storm and eating a fine cheese.
 

When I was a child I was terrified by the book The Gnomes. In it there was this horrible version of a troll that I became convinced was waiting under my bed to grab my leg. And then of course drag me off to feed my arm through a meat grinder.

On occasion I have wondered if this is why I react badly to being awakened in other than a nice way. Perhaps some not so rational part of my brain assumes that anyone cruel enough to tickle me while I'm asleep must be the 'orrible Snotgurgle and that's why I have on occasion taken swings at people without really being awake because they tickled me while I was sleeping on a table or whatever. One time I was hosed down with a water gun while in a sleeping bad and I leapt upon my attacker without even thinking about it and started pummeling him weakly.

So important safety tip around me. Do not awaken me by tickling, putting my hand in water, or otherwise. I'm likely to be in a bad enough mood to try and kill you in a very ineffective way if you try it.

A Pointless Story
About a dream rather like one Angel had. I dreamed...

I see a mist ahead of me. As I get closer I can see a forest through the thin tendrils of moisture and I realize that I am falling. Before I got to this point it was calm and peaceful but now I realize I am moving very fast. The clouds fall behind me and I see the forest coming up. There is a dark grey cliff towards my feet, I'm falling spread eagle trying to slow down. But this isn't that sort of dream, it is brutally realistic. I know I'm not going much faster, but as I get closer my speed becomes ever more apparent and suddenly I am into the trees. I'm impaled upon the branches. I can feel them through my legs arms and torso. I can see my blood dripping onto the dark green tropical leaves.

I had this dream several times when I was young. And contrary to what I'd been told it really hurt. I frequently feel intense pain in my dreams and have quite a few nightmarish ones.
 

A Short Pointless Story
There is a spot on my right knee where I have no sensation of touch on the skin. It is like the spot has been permanently numbed without the half prickly sensation of novocain. This happened because of me being truly stupid on day back when I was 13. There was this ice cream place in town that I wanted to try out. So I rode into town on my bicycle and got an ice cream cone. Here's the part where I did bone headed stuff. I then tried to ride my bicycle while eating my ice cream.

I must have looked quite a sight riding on my yellow bike eating pistachio ice cream. Definitely a geek even though I didn't wear glasses yet. At the bottom I nearly dropped the cone and in trying to prevent that I drove off the curb. Then I lost control and ended up spayed out on the ground. So that's how I ended up in my worse bike wreak ever, purely my fault.

I did learn a good lesson from this. If it seems boneheaded, don't do it. Nothing terribly stunning there. Oh and never try to bicycle with less than two hands on the handle bars. It just doesn't work. Cost of the lesson? One destroyed pair of grey pants and some scars that have taken about a decade to fade on my knee and the joints of my right hand.

Tonight Sirius, the brightest star visible from earth reaches its zenith. I made it. Sometimes I didn't think I would. But by just sort of putting my head down into the wind and slogging on here I am at the end of a year that's been both wonderful and atrocious. I hope I shall not have to do that so much in the coming year and I plan on getting my life another small increment towards something that I want. No big resolutions, just going to try to do better in the coming year at all my projects than I have in the year past.

Today it storms in the mountains, but it is calm down here on the flat. In a way I wish I was going to some blow out year end party, but no one to go with. Plus the people who have blow out parties seem to be boring personally. At least I've not met any here in Denver that are interesting.

So my star is rising and I'm going to go exchange a gift before it gets dark and then I'm going to go hang out with the geeks. They might not drink much, but they are a lot more fun to talk with.

A Pointless Story

My family’s Christmas traditions seem to be one part practicality and one part "We’ve always done things this way and we don’t know why". For example we have almost always opened our gifts to one another on Christmas Eve rather than on Christmas Day. I’m told this is actually the standard in many parts of Europe like Sweden, where some of my ancestors came from. The practical part was that my father often had to work around Christmas being an airline pilot, though he could often finagle having at least part of either one day off. That often was Christmas Eve. Travel is heaviest around the holidays so often airline families have to make compromises in the way they celebrate them.

First came dinner and the ritual I probably loved best. Getting out the good silver, the fine china, and the crystal glasses. How I celebrated in my heart when I was finally allowed to have one of these at about age seven. I loved to perfectly arrange every dish and utensil on the table. A Victorian Butler would have had trouble faulting my careful place settings. Dinner was almost a repeat of Thanksgiving with the occasional substitution of a ham for a turkey, and in one notable instance a goose, which I really enjoyed and so did the rest of the family.

After cleaning up we would all have a slice of our Christmas Bread and often a glass of eggnog with brandy. The Christmas Bread is something halfway between cake and bread with sultanas and a sugary cinnamon topping. It is lovely reheated with a little butter and making it is one of the big traditions in our household. It isn’t easy; it has a tendency to fall especially at our high altitude. When I was a kid we always were admonished not to run around so much when the bread was baking lest we disturb it.

Finally we would light up our tree, usually the tallest tree my father could find and fit into the house. He has a thing for doing thing big and many of us suspect that his new house was built with vaulted ceilings in the main area of the house just so he could have a 12-foot Christmas tree. It would have been decorated as much as a month before, on the reasoning that the trees on the lots were already cut and wouldn’t get any fresher by sitting out. My sister and I, and later on my younger brother, were often the most enthusiastic decorators. We weighed the tree down with lots of ornament, competing to find the most perfect place for particular favorites.

So with our tree lit up we would each take a present and open in turn. Often with my father snapping pictures of us as we did so. My sister tried to avoid having her picture taken, I have never totally understood why. The taking of photographs was really important to my father; he has several books of our family history through his very professional snapshots. A lot of our gifts were of clothes or other practical things, but there would be the one big gift that we’d throw up our hands in surprise at. A huge thing of legos, a beautiful doll, a book I really wanted.

Slowly things would wind down to either going to midnight mass or to bed. If we didn’t go to mass at midnight we would try to hit one of the early ones the next day trying (often in vain) to avoid one packed with one and twice a year Catholics. In the morning we would awake to find the red flannel stockings made and decorated by my mother filled with three things and an additional smaller gift. Inside we would find an orange, a bag of nuts, and a bag of hard candy. I loved the hard candy, it was usually the sort made into ribbons or with pictures like a crystalline button of sugar. The other present would often be something like an inexpensive watch or maybe a small toy. The rest of the day would be about relaxing and cleaning up any rubbish that had not been taken care of the night before and carefully repacking any ribbons, bows, or wrapping paper that could be used another year. We’re a thrifty bunch, our family.

So that’s Christmas in my mind.

A Pointless Story

When I was growing up my favorite book in all the world was The Lord of the Rings. The very first time I heard the tale of what happened to Bilbo's funny magic ring was when I was six. My mother read the whole tale to me over several months, a chapter each evening. My fondest memories are of my mother reading some of the greatest stories ever written to my sister and me. She read us Alice in Wonderland, with explanations of things like treacle, The Wind in the Willows with wonderful voice for Toad, Badger, Mole, and Ratty, and earlier she brought Winnie the Pooh to life.

But best of all were the fantastic tales by J.R.R. Tolkein. I loved the animated version of The Hobbit. I even have fond memories of animated travesty called The Lord of the Rings. But when she read it to me, ah. That was joy.

I read it on my own when I was nine or ten. I found a paperback edition of The Two Towers and jumped right in to the great river. I was overjoyed when I found the house copy of The Fellowship of the Ring and I even read the appendices when I got to The Return of the King. I read them all again a little over a year later. And I fell in love with the story.

One fine October day I was out with my grandmother at a used bookstore on Colfax Avenue (I loved that named too, it always reminds me of Shadowfax) when I spied a big red edition of all three books in one volume. Yes, the one bound in leatherette with the slipcover. I wanted this book the moment I saw it, but I didn't have enough money with me since the price was something close to $50. A small fortune for a child of twelve. But I gathered my resources and returned in two weeks with enough money to buy my prize... only to find it had been sold.

Christmas Eve two months later. We were opening our presents because we always open them on Christmas Eve, family tradition since my father is so often out of town on Christmas day. There is a picture of me with this lit up expression on my face because my grandmother had bought the book, the very same book, she was the one who purchased it before I could, and now it was mine the very best Christmas gift I have ever received. I don't love the tale of Frodo as much as I once did, but it is still one of my prize possessions.

Before our main feature I'm going to mention that I do feel better as long as I don't try to talk today. Though unless this totally clears up in the next few hours I think it would be a poor idea for me to inflict myself upon my friends at Freehold Thanksgiving.

The following is rated PG for blood and parts of animals that gross many people out. Don't read it right before you're going to sit down and have pot roast if you have a weak stomach.

A Pointless Story (Mostly)
A conversation sort of thing about meat and ethics has got me thinking about my own experience of adding and subtracting things from my diet. Like all kids I had things I didn't like to eat, e.g. Brussels sprouts. And on occasion, because my dad had a number of allergies as a kid, I would complain of an ailment and something my parents would try would be taking something out of usual fare. For example I went a week on rice milk when they suspected I might have a reaction to dairy. My sister is mildly allergic to chocolate so we had carob around the house for her and looking back I think I must be lucky to have not developed any noticeable allergies to food or pollens.

But sometimes I would be put off some foods for other reasons. I liked liver and then stopped eating it for a while when I learned what a liver is and saw some raw. I was totally grossed out one time when eating a piece of beef and I found a vein in it and I was forever nervous about eating pork after I learned of trichinosis.

I was really put off my feed by the first time I had to gut and clean a fish I caught up at Steamboat Reservoir. I got all grossed out by having to reach in with my hands and pull out the internal organs, though scaling it was not so bad. I really hated the whole slimy feeling and for whatever reason I felt horribly unclean reaching inside an animal where all those bodily functions happen. As I recall I could only manage to eat a little fish that day for lunch at my mom's insistence.

Another time my dad shot a deer in our yard with an arrow. Seeing at first I was doing okay but when I saw that mass of intestines and smelled it, that had me running into the trees to get away for a minute. I don't think I was that much help to my dad in the project.

But in the end doing things like this made me much less squeamish. I still get freaked out by bad things happening to eyes, but other than that I'm usually fairly blasé about things like cutting up a whole chicken.

But though it is no big deal I don't joke about it or throw away anything I can use. My feeling is that when a person goes about killing something living or destroying something inanimate it should be for a good reason. And the act should be done with respect for the life or the work that had to go into it. I don't demand it of everyone, since I’m hardly in a position to demand things. But I always try to encourage putting things to good use if possible.

Gah, that reminds me. I've got to figure out a better system to deal with aluminum cans. I don't produce enough, even at parties, to make it worth my while to recycle them. But I feel like I should figure out something to do with them.