Woman in the Middle

I know that the rest of the United States (and the world, for that matter) thinks Southern California is a magical place because of  the weather, the beaches, and Hollywood. But what they don’t realize is that the real reason So Cal is magical is because we have access to See’s Candy year round. And that makes So Cal one of the luckiest places on earth!

Based on my previous statement, you can probably guess that I popped into a See’s Candy store yesterday, can’t you? See’s candy was stacked to the rafters, it smelled like chocolate, and they handed me a free piece, because everyone who walks in the door gets a free piece of See’s candy! Heaven! I purchased a couple of pieces of my absolute favorite, the butterscotch square, and I also picked up a cranberry orange truffle. I had never had that truffle before and let me tell you, it was yummy! If you like cranberry and orange, you will love that little nugget of dark chocolate covered happiness!

Having grown up in So Cal, I also grew up with See’s candy. My mother would buy a two-pound box of the assorted milk chocolate candy every year at Christmas and for that short period of time heaven in a box resided in our house! Because of that tradition I thought everyone had access to such yummy deliciousness. Imagine my surprise when I found out that 1) Sees Candy is only in the western United States; and 2) other candy is not nearly as good, even if it is sold in stores and is in a pretty box.

Yes, we are truly blessed in Southern California to have unlimited access to Sees Candy. Nobody put me up to this by the way. It was the chocolate that made me do it! You can got to this link to read a little history of See’s Candy:  http://www.sees.com/index.cfm/about_us

I was just reading something that mentioned the “coveted 18-49 demographic.” Sigh. A few days ago I forever left that coveted demographic. Nothing makes me feel older than knowing that an entire world of retailers and marketers now thinks that I will never spend a dime of money on anything other than laxatives and Viagra ever again! I seriously don’t understand it at all.

I googled “coveted demographic” to try to understand why I am no longer considered a desirable consumer. The only reason I could find is that older people are thought to be “brand loyal” and not willing to change to a new product. Really. Wow. They really don’t know me then. I am not brand loyal at all. I am price loyal, however. There isn’t a Tide commercial on this earth that will make me spend the many extra dollars required to buy that laundry detergent, for example. And that was a decision I made many years ago when I was smack dab in the middle of the “coveted demographic!” Go figure!

Meanwhile, I will continue to spend my hard-earned dollars without the benefit of any marketing directed at me and my not so coveted age group. Humm….maybe that isn’t so bad after all?

The day after Thanksgiving my Hubby and I headed out to Las Vegas where were met up with Barb and Jim, our friends from Seattle. By the numbers, our weekend was something like this:

2 Shows – We went to the Brad Garrett Comedy Club at the Tropicana (soon to move to the MGM Grand). We bought the tickets at one of those discount ticket places. When we bought the tickets we had a whole conversation with our sales person about not wanting the VIP tickets as we didn’t want to sit close enough to the comedians to get heckled. So, imagine our surprise when we turned in our voucher at the box office and they told us we had VIP tickets. Sigh! So I joked with Barb that with our luck they would upgrade us and put us in the front row… Oh, ha ha! I am so witty! When we arrived at the show that is exactly what they did, put us in the front row. Oh no! I am happy to report that the comedians we saw were not that sort and we just got to be REALLY close, but no heckling was involved.

The second show was “Defending the Caveman” at Harrah’s. It is a one man show about the differences between the sexes.  All four of us laughed our way through the show and had a great time. While not a show for children, I definitely could have taken my adult daughters or my parents and felt comfortable.  This link takes you to a page that has good information on  this show: http://www.vegas.com/shows/comedy/defending-the-caveman/

2 Rum and Cokes – one per show. Yummy!

2 Buffets – We ate at the Monte Carlo and Harrah’s. Both were yummy, but the extreme carnivores in the crowd said the prime rib at the Monte Carlo was better than at Harrah’s. Tip for the day: The ticket discounter (we used Tickets 4 Tonight) also had discounts on the buffets. With the purchase of a $2 voucher (per person) I think we got $6 off each meal. Worth it since we were in line to buy other tickets any way.

1 Museum – We visited the Clark County Museum on Saturday. I highly recommend it! The museum includes a street with various historical houses that have been moved to the museum from other areas. Some have been furnished in a period appropriate manner and you can walk through them. Even better, at this time of year the houses were decorated for Christmas or Hanukah!   You can find the museum on the web at http://www.clarkcountynv.gov/Depts/parks/Pages/clark-county-museum.aspx

1 Walgreens Clinic visit – In spite of taking my antibiotics like a good girl, my little problem came roaring back on Saturday. This is the second vacation in a row someone in the family has had to go to urgent care. I joked that we are starting a new family vacation tradition!

4 Hours – If you leave Las Vegas at 7:45 in the morning the Sunday after Thanksgiving you can, with a little luck, get home in a reasonable amount of time. Leave later and you can double or even triple your travel time.

I will never forget the year we had two Thanksgivings. Pain tends to cement memories into your brain….

Some friends of ours had moved to Flagstaff Arizona, about an eight our drive from our home in Southern California. The year I was 13 or so my parents decided that we were going to visit them, leaving the day after Thanksgiving and returning Sunday.  Because we were leaving the day after Turkey Day my mom didn’t want to cook the big meal and have all those leftovers moldering in the fridge while we were gone.  My grandmother fixed the meal that year and we ate at the usual time, 2 p.m., at her mobile home, just the four of us.  It was a wonderful meal because Nanny was a great cook. We did what all self-respecting Americans do on Thanksgiving – We pigged out.

The only problem with that was that my mother, for some unknown reason, also accepted an invitation to have Thanksgiving dinner with our friends the Millers later that evening.  The three of us agreed that we weren’t going to eat much at the Millers because we were already stuffed. Yeah, right. If nothing else, we Americans know how to do a Thanksgiving meal right! I could not believe the food my dad put on his plate! But, my mom and I ate up too, just not quite with the same gusto as he did. My dad loved good food!

I have never been so full in my life, before or since. I have got to tell you, it cut down on the stops the next day because none of us was hungry! I think I had one apple on the whole eight hour trip. My parents didn’t eat at all until we had dinner in Flagstaff. To this day I can not believe we did that. And I don’t recommend it as a strategy before a long car trip either. Just step away from the table….

I wish all of you a very Happy and Yummy Thanksgiving!

One of my all time favorite foods is sweet potatoes, especially candied sweet potatoes. I really really really love them, but I only got them once a year when I was a child, on that day of days, Thanksgiving. One of my least favorite foods are marshmallows. I don’t hate them, as I will eat them, especially when they are associated with s’mores. But it is a rare occasion when I let a marshmallow cross my lips.

Both my mother and my grandmother (who was my dad’s mom) were amazing cooks. Really fantastic in a way I never will be. My mother always hosted the big holiday meals because my grandmother lived in a single wide mobile home and there just wasn’t enough room. But my grandmother, who we called Nanny, always brought something yummy to the holiday dinner.  I always looked forward to Thanksgiving and those candied sweet potatoes, southern style, with no yucky marshmallows on top.

Then, one year, when I was about seven or eight years old, the sweet potatos, I realized in horror, had been placed in a casserole dish, covered with marshmallows, and run under a broiler! Yuck! So I said, in a very upset and petulant voice, “Mom, why do these sweet potatoes have marshmallows on them????!!!!????” My mother replied, in a very sweet voice, “Your grandmother made them.” Whoa! In spite of my youth I realized that I had just made a faux pas of the highest order! And I needed to correct it fast! So, changing my attitude on a dime, I said in my sweetest voice,  “The sweet potatoes are  good, Nanny.”   Nothing else was said. I ate the marshmallows with gusto. And neither my mother nor my grandmother ever put marshmallows on the sweet potatoes again.

Today I am going to give you my Pumpkin Pie recipe. Over the last few years I have tweaked the standard recipe found on the back of the Libby’s pumpkin can to suit my tastes more. It all started with a mistake I made several years ago. The standard recipe calls for two cans of evaporated milk to make the two-pie recipe. Well, I messed up and put only one can of milk in that particular batch. Oops! But I liked the result as it was just more pumpkiny. Then it evolved even more because of  the pumpkin pie my mother’s best friend Emma Jane makes. She uses less sugar in her pie and I liked that as well as it made it less overwhelmingly sweet and made the pie and whipped cream work so well together, as opposed to fighting it out for the title of which is the sweetest. The last thing I did, which I just started last year, it to put all the ingredients in the blender and blend the heck out of it. That makes up for any creaminess lost due to cutting down on the milk. I like my pumpkin pie to be really creamy! So here it is!

Kim’s Pumpkin Pie

1 cup brown sugar

1 tsp salt

2 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp ground ginger

1/2 tsp ground cloves

4 large eggs

1 -29 oz can pumpkin (not pie filling!!!)

1 -12 oz can evaporated milk

2 unbaked deep dish frozen pie crusts

Put everything (but the pie crust) in a blender and blend until well mixed. I recommend putting the wet ingredients in first and then the spices so they don’t get stuck in the bottom of the blender. Pour into the two pie shells and bake in a preheated 425 degree oven for 15 minutes. Reduce heat and bake for 40-50 minutes more until knife inserted near center comes out clean.  Serve with whipped cream, lots of whipped cream!

In my efforts to turn every moment of my life into a possible blog post (or at least that is what my family says) I give you the pluses and minuses of going to the Emergency Room:

Minuses:

1. Feel bad enough you actually want to go to the ER.

2. Realizing I need medical attention just as the Urgent Care closes for the night.

3. Group of frat boys there with a “brother” that is laughing, joking, doesn’t seem sick or injured at all and is ahead of you in line.

4. Man who got comfortable, and, since it is the middle of the night, falls asleep and starts to snore.

5. Getting asked, “On a scale of one to 10 how bad is your pain?” when pain wasn’t the issue.

6. Other patients, some not in their right mind, wearing hospital gowns.  Avert the eyes, avert the eyes!

Pluses:

1. Caring medical staff. Ok,that puts a little too much lipstick on that pig. More like professional staff doing their job who have the legal right to prescribe the drugs I so wanted to have.

2. Clean bathrooms. They sparkled. Since I was in there A LOT I had every opportunity to see and appreciate this.

3. The aforementioned drugs.

4. The occasional staff member who smiled at my black humor. “Why are you here tonight?” “So you can knock me in the head with a hammer and put me out of my misery.”

5. Prescriptions get filled fast in the middle of the night.

6. Having a husband who, after a long day at work, sat at the ER with me until one am, took me home, and then went to the only 24 hour pharmacy in greater Hooterville to get my medicine so I could start taking it sooner rather than later.

7. It was probably the last time I will see the number “49″ in print before my birthday. Don’t discount the goodness and joy of that.

8. I have never been to an emergency room for myself before. Oh so glad I could cross that off my bucket list before I turn 50. Yeah, that was sarcasm.

I am feeling better and my husband has requested that if I am contemplating a relapse to do it before 9 p.m. tonight so I can go to urgent care. I felt that was a reasonable request.

I went for a coffee run this morning and as I was coming home I passed by a high school bus stop. They must have been having a late start day as normally they aren’t out and about at 8:45 a.m. There were eight kids at the bus stop. Two girls were talking together, then ten feet later there was a boy and then ten feet later there was another girl and then 10 feet later there was another boy and then 10 feet later there was another boy. Oh, I could feel their teenage angst! They couldn’t talk to one another, they couldn’t even be NEAR one another. They all stared straight ahead, waiting for that bus! Their discomfort was visible in their faces and their body language. It was giving me flashbacks!

I felt like gathering them all together and explaining that they would be waiting for that bus together until May and it wasn’t going to hurt anything if they got within shouting distance of one another and chatted a bit before the bus came. It might even make the wait a little bit more interesting. Here is hoping that they figure all this out themselves before the school year is over.

I don’t think I will ever forget being a teenager and that feeling of not belonging, of being uncomfortable in my own skin….I am happy to report that I got over that. I now regularly chat with total strangers. If I was stuck at a bus stop I would be talking away with everyone around me.  Meanwhile, I am glad I am no longer in high school!

We were watching the sitcom “New Girl” Friday night. It is a new show this season. A character on the show had been out of the country for two years and felt a need to do a crash course in recent pop culture. He had himself hooked up to two different lap tops, watching two movies simultaneously. He said “I am watching ‘The King’s Speech’ and ’Precious’ and then I am going to watch “David After Dentist.” I had no idea what that last one was so I paused the show and  asked my Hubby and my Eldest Daughter, who were watching TV with me.  My dear Hubby didn’t know either but my Eldest did! She had her lap top in her lap (how appropriate!) and proceeded to pull up one of the most popular videos ever on UTube, called, you guessed it, “David After Dentist.” It is the video of a little boy still high on pain killers, after he had a dental procedure.  So it seems that my husband and I had missed that modern pop culture phenomenon!

Then the character on the show mentioned something about a double rain bow and once again, the old fogies in the room had no clue what he was  talking about. So once again we paused the TV show (isn’t Tivo wonderful?) and Eldest  showed us that video. At that point she was getting a little offended by our total lack of UTube video knowledge and showed us a couple more big UTube hits.

I am happy to report, that, at this very moment anyway, Hubby and I are caught up with pop culture, at least as presented on UTube.  We are also feeling very old and out of touch, but I think that is our job now. It gives our children something else to laugh at and we want our children to be happy!

Imagine my surprise when I checked this blog this morning and found the post from last Friday right there at the top of the page. What? I know I wrote a post yesterday!!!!  So, I logged onto to “blog management” area and sure enough, there, in the “drafts” is yesterday’s blog post, never posted. Sigh!

While I was there I decided to check my stats, those interesting little statistics that tell me how many people have visited my blog and where that traffic is coming from, etc… Imagine my surprise when I found out that yesterday, the one day I didn’t post anything, was my all time highest traffic day yet with 30 hits! Maybe I should not post more often!

My heart is still racing from a little incident that just happened while I was trying to compose the six or so sentences you just read. We seem to have acquired a neighborhood cat that likes to wander through our yard. It just strolled past our sliding glass door which upset Blackie all to heck and he started making those funny cat growling noises. That got Honey’s attention and she trotted over to see what was going on. Halfway there she also spotted the intruder and rushed to the door and began barking her fool head off. This surprised or otherwise upset Blackie and he turned on Honey and started attacking her. Honey attacked back…I screamed so loud my throat still hurts and clapped my hands so hard they hurt too. I could just see my planned minor redo of the front bathroom going up in a poof of vet bills! These two have NEVER fought like that. I have to assume that Blackie was startled by Honey at the same time he was getting all upset at the strange cat. Whew! That was better at getting my heart pumping than a double espresso at a bull riding competition!

I am happy to report that everyone, except me, has recovered. Both animals are sitting on the floor with my Eldest, trying to get the most love. It is a competition, you know. I think I will go watch a bit of mindless television ansd try to calm down.