I've been sick

But the camera is fixed and I have Christmas lights up everywhere (including on my bike) so rest assured, your overdue post is on its way and it’s full of visuals.

Religious Views

The past few years have been ones of great personal growth for me in the area of my spirituality and relationship with God. Many of you who are close to me know that I have often struggled with the role that religion, especially organized religion, should play in my life and in the way I understand my spiritual needs.
I consider this struggle to be one of the most intensely personal undertakings of ones life but it is also extremely social; impacting the way you relate to not only your family and friends, but also to your culture at large. In fact, much of what informs the choices I make today about the way I approach religion in my life is based, in large part, on my understanding of the interplay of culture and society in my personal life.
This perspective is not a conclusion. I believe that I will continue to adjust and change my ideas about religion and my relationship with God as long as I live. I believe that is a good thing; a necessary thing even. The changes I have made in this respect over the course of my life have often been at the influence of an event (getting married sparked a huge quest for answers) or a new perspective offered by a friend (or my mother who is one of my best friends) but never before have I been so moved to change my life by a single image.

I mean, that is f-ing priceless. I want all my children to grow up to be her.

Clean Teeth

Every few year my Mother-in-law’s extended family has a massive thanksgiving. Her parents (DH’s Grandparents) get together will all of their siblings. And all of them invite their children (my Mother-in-law’s generation), and their children’s children (our generation) and even their children’s children’s children (DH has one cousin with a little girl.) I had been to one of these celebrations before so this year (my second) I was better prepared. I was prepared for close to 100 people singing children’s songs rewritten with Thanksgiving themed lyrics. I was prepared for the very competitive board game playing. I was prepared to handle all this without a drop of alcohol.
I was so prepared that I even made a double recipe of cranberry sauce. Of which a recipe and a half is still in my fridge. Now this could be because it was one of 4 types of cranberry sauce and people were only taking a bit of each. It could be because it clearly did not include Jell-O and therefore was passed over by a certain type of person. Or it may be because it “tasted like toothpaste” to quote a certain cousin who was unaware that the cook was in the room when he announced his opinion of the dish. I have to admit that after he said that, it did start to kinda taste like toothpaste but honestly what was I supposed to do?
You see, I get Domino magazine. This makes me fancy and sophisticated without being stuffy. In general it has no practical application in my life because all the spaces they decorate have soaring ceilings and truckloads of inherent charm. Plus all of their recipes are stupidly simple to make but call for expensive and hard to find ingredients. So you think to yourself “I could make that and I will just substitute shitake mushrooms for that black ear cloud fungus stuff” and then you realize that now all you have is stir fry with shitake mushrooms. Sigh.
So I took a look at their thanksgiving menu and decided that I could make their stupidly simple cranberry sauce which sounded good because it included crystallized ginger. Except that unless you are Starbucks or perhaps you are the type of person who plans your cooking of things enough in advance to go to more than one store, crystallized ginger hard to find. The store by my house did not even have fresh ginger because apparently all of Safeway and all of China are in some sort of disagreement that prohibits ginger from being exchanged. Starbucks (which is in this particular Safeway) has it. They put it in their Gingersnap lattes and it sinks to the bottom if you forego the whip cream and it sits there shedding it crystallized-ness becoming a mushy ball of stringy ginger goo just small enough to fit through the drink hole in a cup so you can choke on it after otherwise enjoying your calorically and financially costly treat. Remembering this distasteful experience I offered the barista 20 bucks for a shaker bottle of it but she laughed like I was joking and told be that everyone seemed to be looking for that this year.
So I bought cranberries, ginger in a jar, and fresh mint. Somehow the crystallized ginger could be replaced by fresh ginger but not simply by ginger puree in a jar so I thought that adding the fresh mint would, you know, add that something special. And it did, because really have you ever heard of toothpaste cranberries? Me neither but I have leftovers so if you decide to visit this week, be prepared to try some.