Pete’s a DIY guy. Yesterday, he sanded half the porch and re-stained it a lighter, warmer color. He’d carefully planned it so an upstairs tenant would get home after 10 p.m., well after the stain would have a chance to dry. We went out briefly to look in where we’re housesitting, and to pick up a bottle of wine. When we got back, Pete noticed a familiar car and ran to look at the steps. A tenant we haven’t seen in two weeks had left footprints in the stain. We went in through the back door and found him in the kitchen.

Dude, we said, Did you notice the stain on the porch was wet?
Yeah, he said, I noticed my shoes stuck to the porch. Don’t worry about it.

You will be pleasantly surprised to learn neither of us shellacked him.

On Sunday, Pete and I found a couple of food-related questions answered on one shelf in the Goya section of the Milltown, NJ Acme. They’re proud of their double coupons everyday! policy, but better for my purposes was a whole shelf of cornmeals ground differently. On the left, fine. On the right, coarse. In between, degrees of fine and coarse. The bags cost $1.39 apiece. We bought one of each – for SCIENCE!

Tonight, I made polenta with the coarsest grind. Every first attempt is fraught with tasty peril! I started with water. Next time, I’ll start with chicken stock, but I wanted to get at the flavor of the corn. I like the texture, which is more like minced, dried corn than the fine cornmeal I’ve always used to make polenta. This is also a completely different beastie than the instant polenta my grandmother used, because why not?

A fine thing to do is make more polenta than strictly necessary for dinner because – you know – you’re going to eat breakfast. You have two options: fried or toasted. We had fried for dinner. The polenta had a buttery texture but lost its significant corniness. Clearly, more SCIENCE! is in our future, and by that I mean in the toaster for breakfast.

This weekend, Pete plans to sand the other half of the porch and re-stain that. A quick glance at the long-term weather report hints that rain will never stop falling. We should ditch the porch and build an ark. I doubt the cats will be amused when we fit them with tasteful booties and floatation devices.

To say that our backyard is the size of a postage stamp is to insult stamps. If it were up to me, I’d rototill the whole tiny thing and plant vegetables, but it isn’t up to me. Recently, a new tenant started putting her cat in the backyard on a tether every day, much to our chagrin and the dismay of stray cats we’ve been feeding. It never occurred to me someone would fight us for our yard space utilizing an unstoppably adorable rescued tabby cat. The cat is called Chase. He sits under the white lilac tree or the picnic table or wrestles with the pretty stray we call Woim, and so far, Chase leaves my spinach, arugula and squash alone.

Because we’ve had so much rain, Pete and I could not regularly feed our plants. In fact, it was a regular struggle to keep some of them from drowning. This year we chose to grow most things in containers we could move around the yard to fend off varmints and adapt to changing light conditions. We’ve found that window box size containers for lettuce and herbs work beautifully, but most plants need more root space. These squash plants are in a wooden box we found in the basement. Perhaps it should only contain one plant, but these thrive in this odd, small space. Once the flowers turn into little squashes I’ll rig them little hammocks to keep them out of the dirt. This, I believe, is the only reason a sane person buys pantyhose.

No, really. This is a small container, sitting on a small picnic table Pete made, sitting in a small grassy spot in a tiny backyard. I rather like the mysterious rustic box. Pete’s decided to elevate it for better drainage and to prevent the picnic table from shrinking. You can also see, lower and to the right, a large planter filled with vibrant spinach. Last year, we couldn’t grow enough spinach to feed the groundhogs, let alone steal a leaf here and there ourselves.

We don’t have a lot of time to work on the gardens. The gardening classes we signed up for have not panned out. I’d like to learn more about what makes some things grow like gangbusters while others grow sort of as an afterthought. Monkeyfister offers good ideas and resources, though I feel like a poor student. Despite our efforts, these squash blossoms feel like luck, not knowledge. I may pout!

My brother Todd, who sent this cartoon, is quite a card.

For the most part, the men in my father’s family either live well into their irascible nineties or they turned 43 and keeled over. I reminded Todd of this during an exchange of pizza recipes recently because mine – and this seemed significant in this context – wouldn’t stop your heart, what with Todd being 43 and all. He says times have changed. He runs all the time, eats lots of seafood and vegetables and knows his cholesterol numbers. He’s highly motivated by his two little children to stay active and vigilant. I don’t really worry about him.

Meanwhile, last week, I upped the resistance on both the rowing machine and the stationary bike, which predictably affected my appetite. I went from Hormonally Hungry to Glamorously Ravenous. This morning, I had not one but two small grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches on whole grain toast rounds, and my biceps feel beefy! Which I love! But I sure would like to get a handle on this worrisome hunger thing. This is not the kind of bad example I like to set.

We had all the weather today. The broccoli plants enjoyed it.

In February, my co-worker and friend contracted an infection and two weeks later an EEG showed no brain activity. The family clung to hope that activity would appear on subsequent tests. For me, it was all over when brain death had occurred, so it was painful to watch her husband and grown children talk about how she was just resting and would be fine, and so much prayer. My head swam. I think it was the backstroke. Every day, I think about her. Our last conversation still brings tears to my eyes.

We walked out of the library in two lady-size huffs.

Tata: – He didn’t have to do that. I mean, nobody has to be that big of a douchebag –

Diane stopped in her tracks to howl.

Diane: I haven’t heard that word in ages!
Tata: I say it all the time – just not in the library.
Diane: Oooh, that’s funny! I’m going to say it all evening.
Tata: I feel we’ve both profited by this conversation. See you tomorrow!

But the next time I saw her she was in a coma and her daughter was reading to her from the Bible. Of course, I wish I’d started swearing sooner. We all have regrets.

One thing I didn’t notice until weeks after her death was that all along she’d given me little presents. In the foyer of my house sits a candle she gave me as a housewarming gift. On my desk is a work-safe photocopy of a prayer I don’t actually believe but loved because it was just so funny. In my desk, I found a magnifying glass she gave me when she decided my job was all detective work. She gave me a music box harlequin topped with feathers and decorated with sequins she said reminded her of me. I wondered if that meant I was a shiny clown on a portable box, but who can argue that? Even the portable part? She gave me mint plants pulled from her mother’s yard and I fully expected them to take over a section of the front lawn. Strangely, this is the gift with an unexpected outcome: the mint died, too. I am absolutely sure Diane would find that hilarious.

As far as I can tell, I’ve been in physical therapy twice a week since before Christ roamed the earth with his trusty dinosaurs. Mr. DBK asked last week what my complaint was, since apparently I complain with great enthusiasm but few specifics. My bad. Back when the sports doctor stared at my X-rays and turned pale, he saw three separate problems: an S-I joint wildly out of alignment, arthritis in the hip joint he’d expect to see in a person approaching retirement and the whole hip was twisted to the left. The X-ray didn’t show two angry muscle groups staging their own protests. On the one hand: it was a tremendous relief when contact with the medical profession didn’t leave me frustrated and the professional scratching her/his head. On the other hand: FUCK! It sounded like I was looking at hip replacement. Let me tell you something about replacement hips: they dislocate with flexion greater than 90 degrees. That would certainly leave a mark on my illustrious career as a dirty whore.

It would have been hypocritical to write about greener living when I was driving everywhere. I came very close to buying a cane and I probably will in the next year or so, but with a lot of therapeutic work, a few adaptations and a stream of obscenities in my wake that’d make a sailor proud, I can now walk to and from work most days. Hooray and all, but I’m not prepared to get back on my carbon footprint soapbox yet until I work out why one muscle group won’t fall in and the therapist is frustrated. So: twice a week, the therapist sticks her elbow into knotted spots near my rump that would elicit screams if I were a normal person, but I laugh. Someday, this will be a rip-roaring story. Why wait?

Pete and I are shopping for an umbrella clothesline like Pete’s mother had. It was second base when we played kickball in his backyard. That was a great thing: hitting your head – clang! – on second base. Drying clothes outdoors is good for us because it’ll save gas and electricity. One of the tenants hang-dries her clothes inside her apartment, which is just silly. We can benefit, she too. Clotheslines run between $50-$100. Soon, I think!

Another thing we’re working on is a leaf shredder. We live under huge old trees and in the fall, Pete counts on raking up at least a dozen of those municipally distributed bags of leaves, while I thank Kali there’s a halfway decent chocolatier in town so I’m nibbling so-so bonbons while he’s working that hard. So anyway, it dawned on me that if we shredded leaves we could stop buying mulch at Lowe’s. Hooray and all, I bet I could get a mowing attachment on a Segway, if I put my mind to it, but I might need my mind later. It would be silly to lose it now.

I look but sometimes can’t see.

Everest, from NASA’s Image of the Day Gallery. No matter how I squint, my eye doesn’t make this into a mountain.

Two weeks from today, NYC Swim hosts the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim. My cousins are coming from Guatemala to participate. It’s very exciting: the woman who’s my age fought a tough battle with breast cancer a few years back and decided to get revenge on her body by becoming a triathlete. This is worth mentioning because so few of us get up off our deathbeds to run marathons, let alone take a dip in the East River, which has to be at least as toxic as chemotherapy. I don’t know how she’s finding the strength to do this swim but it’s made me examine seriously what I think is possible and of what I might be capable. I mean, seriously. This morning I took a container gardening class, which caused me a major attack of stage fright.

“Waaah!” I waaahed, “What if I’m stupid?” Pete burst out laughing.
“You’re not stupid. Your brain is clogged with smart.”
“What if someone asks me a simple question and I answer with things I learned before my brain short-circuited?”*
“Like times tables?”
“Just like the times tables!”
“If you studied in third grade you’ll actually be right.”

I was so frazzled I left the house without my usual IV drip of coffee, but it turned out I had nothing to worry about because my friends Siobhan and Mary, plus the Fabulous Ex-Husband’s current wife Karen all met me there, and the teacher was fully crazy. The class focused on aesthetics and decorative plants, which don’t interest me. As Siobhan said, “Turns out that unless I’m going to eat it I can’t demonstrate the commitment to watering.” After about 45 minutes of basics, the whole class got up to get squishy with dirt. I’d brought gloves and plant pots but developed a shocking case of ennui when it became apparent that only a person with an in-depth knowledge of what plants need what conditions could set up one of these planters, and I’m already growing mesclun mix in window boxes.

“I accidentally took a class on fertilizer once,” Siobhan said.
“For your minor in art history?”
“I forgot the K stood for potash, not potassium.”
“I’ve lost a lot of shirts to potash,” Mary lamented.
“Where did they go?” I asked innocently.

Karen was having a grand old time, but the rest of us thanked the teacher and went on ways merrier than we imagined. The trick to doing it is – apparently – just doing it. I’m back at square one, where I belong.

*Yep. To this day, I blame it on a tragic feather boa accident.

“That’s a nice looking rain barrel ya got there,” he says from his side of the fence. Our neighbor, laying out a garden and looking befuddled, is the local Green Living Poobah here at the unnamed university. He’s also really young and somehow looks different each time I see him. If he weren’t wandering around the property adjacent to Pete’s wearing t-shirts I’d seen before, I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. Let’s call him Davey because I wouldn’t be surprised to see him ignoring the advice of a Claymation talking dog.

Tata: Yeah yeah yeah. Remember you told Pete you bought your rain barrels at Lowe’s? The one in East Brunswick said Lowe’s didn’t sell them. I threw a giant hissyfit.
Davey: You what?
Tata: All I have to hear is the word no –

Seriously, last weekend, I stood at the customer service counter the Lowe’s on Route 18 in East Brunswick, NJ and explained to five different employees, with various titles on their Hi, I’m ____ name tags, that I would like to be able to walk into their embarrassingly huge garden section and walk out with rain barrels. I need at least four of them, I explained, and to have them shipped to my house would cost as much as a fifth rain barrel. I would prefer, I repeated and repeated, to pay Lowe’s for rain barrels and leave. Not one of them saw there might be some profit to Lowe’s to carry the very specific thing a customer was asking to buy four of. No, really.

Manager: At corporate, they don’t think it’s a good idea to carry something we might sell only once a year.
Tata: Water is expensive. This is a good guard against drought, and you have a lot of small farms around here.
Manager: Maybe you could try our website.
Tata: Did you not hear me explain about the shipping charges? I want to be able to come here, pick out the kind I want, pay you and leave. I want to be able to look at them and see them before they are at my house.
Manager: Some things are just decided at corporate.
Tata: Well, they decided wrongly.

Pete: Lowe’s said they didn’t sell rain barrels. Today, we were in the Piscataway store.
Tata: I got all frustrated. They had a whole aisle full of decorative lawn shit nobody needs but we couldn’t find rain barrels. I gave up and stuck to the swearing because I’m really good at it but Pete’s patient. He found them stuck in a dusty corner of shame.
Pete: We couldn’t get it into the car but I could tell by the look on her face that thing was coming home with us if she had to hold it out the window.
Tata: If I had to run alongside the car, that was coming to our house.
Davey: How’d you get it home?
Pete: A bungee cord and string. The trunk wide open. We violated local traffic ordinances in two towns. How do you like yours?
Davey: I have to raise it up. Gravity’s all wrong for watering the garden.
Pete: Want some cinder blocks? There’re some behind your garage from a wall that fell down.
Tata: You “found” cinder blocks?
Pete: No, I found cinder blocks.

The space between Pete’s garage and Davey’s may be about four feet deep and ten feet long. From this space, I have seen Pete produce glass building blocks, 36″ planters, fencing material, whole logs and used tires. I’m fully expecting the DIY version of rabbits and a lovely assistant, but cinder blocks are funny, too. It’s kind of a miracle Davey speaks to us. His wife always takes one horrified look and crabwalks back to her kitchen, perhaps because in a stiff wind like yesterday’s my coif resembles Grandmama Addams’. Pete produces two cinder blocks, Davey’s rain barrel gets a gravity-assist from blocks that could have come from – for all I know – the Planet of Lost Socks and Bic Pens.

It was a very good day for recycling.

This morning, Pete and I slept in. This is code for “we kicked the cats out of our bedroom and played naked Parchesi,” but don’t tell anyone because having a secret language makes us cool. We are cool! So Pete and I slept in, then made breakfast, then fed the varmints, then we went grocery shopping. Stop & Shop recently opened another store in our 49 square mile hometown so the yuppies could have their own market, and good for them, since they can bite me. This means the Stop & Shop near our house, which is full of nothing, and the Stop & Shop where there used to be woods, which is full of yuppies – neither of those is full of us. We went to the one where the movie theater was when we were teenagers and oh thank Vishnu bad kids didn’t burn that down.

All of which reminds me of sausage. I can’t explain that.

Anyway, we bought some bottles of Terracycle Worm Poop besides the groceries and drove home on two wheels in time to get ready for work at the family stores. While I was waiting for Pete to find a shirt he wanted to wear to sell toys I skipped outside with a container of compost and found my neighbor contemplating a shovel and a relocated tree without a clear crime scene. You have not lived until you’ve dressed for work and spinning the composter, I’ll just tell you that now. It’s just a good thing I look great in minced orange rinds.

Somehow, I found a minute to pour Worm Poop on the blueberry bush, and, pardon you, I am not speaking in code. You didn’t suppose I’d sink to fertilizer jokes, did you?

She stands in the doorway of my cubicle, beaming. Her diabetic husband, who’s had his second heart attack in three weeks, is out of the hospital.

Kim: Chocolate?
Tata: Love it.
Kim: Lava cake?
Tata: Food of the Gods, man,
Kim: Want a recipe?
Tata: Fiercely.

Sometimes we learn a little more about our friends than about food in an office email.

Chocolate Lava Cake (Hungry Girl style)

Breaking Ooze!
We’ve whipped up a cake SO chocolatey and decadent, your head may ACTUALLY explode. (Consider yourself warned – we’re not going to be responsible for sweeping up the mess.) You’ll need four baking ramekins (about 4 inches in diameter) for this recipe. Enjoy!

Ingredients:

For Cake
1 cup moist-style chocolate cake mix (1/4 of an 18.25-oz. box)
One 25-calorie packet diet hot cocoa mix
1/4 cup fat-free liquid egg substitute (like Egg Beaters Original)
1 tbsp. mini semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/2 tsp. Splenda No Calorie Sweetener (granulated)
2 dashes salt (omitted)

For Filling
One-half Jell-O Sugar Free Chocolate Pudding Snack (about 1/4 cup)
1/2 tbsp. mini semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 tsp. fat-free liquid creamer (like Coffee-mate Fat Free Original)
1/2 tsp. light whipped butter or light buttery spread (like Brummel & Brown)

Directions:
Place the chocolate chips for the filling in a glass and set aside. Pour the creamer in a microwave-safe bowl with the butter, and heat in the microwave for about 15 seconds, until butter has melted and mixture is very hot. Pour the mixture over the chocolate chips and stir until they have dissolved. Allow to cool for several minutes. Add the pudding to the mixture and stir well. Spoon the chocolate mixture into four evenly spaced mounds on a plate. Place in the freezer for 25 minutes. (Don’t over-freeze — the mounds could stick to the plate.)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Start making the cake when the 25 minutes are up for freezing the middles.

Place chocolate chips for the cake in a tall glass (a measuring cup will do) along with the contents of the cocoa packet. Add 1/4 cup boiling water and stir until chips and cocoa have dissolved. Add 1/2 cup cold water and stir well. Pour the contents of the glass into a mixing bowl. Add all of the remaining ingredients for the cake (cake mix, egg substitute, Splenda) to the mixing bowl, and whip batter with a whisk or fork for 2 minutes.

Once the chocolate mounds in the freezer are a little firm, spray four baking ramekins (each about 4 inches in diameter) with nonstick spray. Evenly spoon the cake batter (which will be a little thin, but don’t worry!) into the ramekins. Remove chocolate mounds from the freezer, and place one in the center of each batter-filled ramekin. Push the mounds down so the batter goes over top of them. Put the ramekins in the oven and bake for 15 minutes. Cakes will look shiny when done.

Carefully remove each ramekin from the oven. You can eat the cake right out of the ramekin (while the center is still gooey!), but make sure to let it cool a little bit, because the ramekin will be hot. Or you can wait until it has cooled completely and plate the cake by running a knife along the edges and flipping it upside down. (Then just pop it in the microwave for about 15 seconds to heat it back up.) Enjoy!

MAKES 4 SERVINGS

Serving Size: 1 individual lava cake
Calories: 182
Fat: 4.5g
Sodium: 433mg – 82 = 351
Carbs: 32g
Fiber: 1.5g
Sugars: 18g
Protein: 4g
WW points = 4

Are you kidding me? Other than the salt, there isn’t a single ingredient in there that doesn’t have its own highly questionable ingredient list. I can’t make this recipe. I’d have to picket my own kitchen!

If you can believe it, I kept my mouth shut and thought long and hard about sending fruit baskets.