The agony and the ecstasy

It's been an interesting week and weekend. The agony: I had a severe, stabbing sideache start at 10:30 p.m. last Friday (2 days ago). By 12:30 a.m., I thought we should head to the ER to find out for sure if it was what I suspected: a ruptured cyst, as I had never had that happen before. Sure enough, after 4 hours at the ER, which included the most thorough ultrasound of my entire life, it was discovered that indeed, I had a ruptured cyst. They sent us home, with me walking like an old lady out the hospital door, and that was that. So we got home from our medical adventure at 5:30 a.m.

But the ecstasy was intermingled with the agony:  During the course of last week, I had pre-baked a couple cakes for my friend Cristeen's baby shower, which was yesterday (Saturday). I had spent an entire month planning and ordering tools and supplies for this cake, which was pushing the boundaries of what I'd learned in the cake decorating classes past the limits. But I was determined to "make it so." While I usually do my own designs, I'd found a baby shower cake online that I had immediately fell in love with. So after I'd basically spent all day decorating this full-tilt 3D bear cake on Friday, the ER event described occurred. So I got about an hour and a half of sleep and forced myself out to the dining area to finish the cake on Saturday morning. I still had 2 or 3 more hours of work to put in, and I was determined the pain wasn't going to stop me. If you've known someone who has had a cyst burst, sharp, stabbing pain can be severe, and for me was worst when I was standing up or walking -- or lying down. So at least I could sit down while finishing the cake. To make a long story short, a couple more hours and the cake was fait accompli! Jon drove me to the baby shower so that I could cradle the cake as it was transported. I didn't want the bear to roll off the cake or any other damage to ensue. I'm sure it was indeed a tender mercy from diety that I was able to feel relatively well on Saturday -- at least while I finished decorating the cake and while I was at the baby shower and really felt like I reconnected with several people there. Those things were sooo important to me.

But today, back to the pain.

Thus, I'm not feeling very quippy or like using too many writing conventions in this entry. Anyway, here are a couple photos. The bear cake is chocolate, and the mattress cake is strawberry. Fondant was used on the mobile, crib junctures, flowers, and blanket. The rest of the decorating was done using vanilla buttercream.

Crap happens (literally, in this case)

Sometimes life gets so habitual that when people ask us how we’re doing, Jon and I always answer: “Same old same old,” or the classic “nothing too dramatic going on right now.” But here’s an event that proves out of the ordinary … :

Last Tuesday was an unseasonably nice, cool morning and Jon was driving to work after the previous evening of relatively short-lived (25 minutes) yet exhilarating and inspirational fireworks we’d watched in nearby Tubac, AZ. As he calmly drove on to work, all of a sudden, something caught his attention in his peripheral vision, as its furry little body ran along his driver’s-side window sill from back to front. Startled, Jon shrieked, undoubtedly terrorizing the mouse, who immediately dropped to the floor by Jon’s leg.

Jon stopped the car and collected all the trash from the floor (we are the original water-bottles-anywhere-and-everywhere couple) and didn’t see any sign of his newfound furry friend. The mouse had completely disappeared.

After work, Jon went back to the car, worried about smelling the odor of death. (Hey, we live in Arizona, after all. It gets “stinking hot” here, as Jon describes it.) But this mouse was lucky: Last week was unseasonably cool, only in the 90s rather than around 110 as usual. So no rancid smell after work. Maybe the mouse had left?

On the way home, Jon looked back and out of the corner of his eye, who should make another appearance but Mr. Rat, right on the back seat.

On his way home that night, Jon purchased two black, old-fashioned death machines (snap traps), loaded them with peanut butter, and armed the car. The next morning it seemed the mouse was uber-appreciative because the traps were licked clean – but the mouse was nowhere to be seen!

So Jon drove the car to work again, figuring again that he might find (or at least smell) roasted mouse at the end of the workday. But instead, he was greeted by several deposits. Seems the mouse had begun digesting the peanut butter.

Turns out there’s something called “live traps,” which capture the mouse rather than kill it. So once Jon mentioned those, this animal lover encouraged him to buy those instead. So thank goodness, the next day, Jon picked up two live traps and peanut buttered them and put them in the car when he got home that night. Before going to bed, Jon thought he would check the traps. Both live traps were sprung but empty. Being frustrated but not having much to lose, Jon merely resprung the two live traps and went to bed.

In the morning, the front-seat live trap remained unsprung. However, the live trap in the back was sprung. Jon thought, “Aha, now I've got him!” And that’s exactly what happened. That morning when Jon drove down our street to work, about a mile away from our house, he stopped by the side of the road and opened the live trap to fully view the culprit. A tiny 2” gray mouse jumped about a foot out of the trap, then walked calmy into the bushes, he said. Afterwards, Jon commented that he was amazed at the amount of “rat rocks” in the now-empty trap!

The icing on the cake ... or not

As alluded to in a previous entry, here is...drumroll...the photographic evidence of my cake decorating classes...well, actually only the most recent of the three classes I took. Unfortunately, my cell phone -- which stored the compelling (I'm sure) photographic evidence of my first two classes -- decided to take a time out. Thus, all the photos from my first two classes were erased when the phone crashed. So you won't see any frosting here (per the first two classes). This third class pictured is all gum paste and fondant, neither of which I had used prior to these recent classes. It was kinda cool because I felt like a sculptor with the gum paste and fondant (seriously).

At first I was leary of gum paste and fondant because you really build your biceps while blending them together (a la Play Doh on steroids), but the results are so much easier to produce than with frosting. The only drawback to working with gum paste and fondant, in my estimation, are that they crack and dry out quickly. (You have to keep them constantly covered except at the exact moment you're molding them into...something.) And the remedy to the dryness dilemma is not for the faint of heart: Get ready to douse those hands into your nearest bucket of Crisco to ensure smooth, seamless, cooperative gum paste and fondant. I fought this unfortunate requirement for a couple classes, then accepted it as reality and dug into the full-on grease, no holds barred. Fun times. Here are some of the results:

Here is the bow I made in the first gum paste and fondant class session. Notice how it's got a few cracks. That was before I had embraced the whole Crisco-hand-dipping requirement...

And...still fighting the Crisco gig here on this purple rose (above)...

No, it's not a pink artichoke...It's a mum!

And here's my final cake. I made the calla lilies and the leaves. As you can see by their smooth texture, I had embraced the whole Crisco gig by the time I made them. Regarding the design of my final cake, I strongly wanted to be different and make a cake with striking colors. Thus, I found out black fondant existed and immediately wanted to use it. I only found two cakes online that used black fondant as a base (hard to believe, but true). I also found online only one store in Phoenix and one store in Tucson that sold it. So the rarer the better, and black fondant it was.

My original vision for my final cake was a black fondant cake with white lace fondant cutout overlays on the sides of the bottom layer, with deep red roses and calla lilies on top. But the night I had to make the flowers, I tried to mix Americolor red dye into the gum paste and ended up with something that looked like a huge bloody mess. It seriously looked like I was holding a bloody heart or other bodily organ in my hand. Now I know what surgeons feel like, and I literally almost vomited. Not a pretty picture. So I freaked out and threw the whole bloody mess away, so to speak... The lace cutout idea didn't pan out either because I had ordered the lace fondant cutters via online/mail order and they didn't arrive before the final class... So I switched gears quite a lot here both in design and color for my final cake:

Now I just have to get some real-world practice one of these days! My dad's birthday is coming up. Dad...? Of course, I'd nix the calla lilies for his cake!

A hush fell over the land …

Honestly, I was in a cranky mood (internally) most of January. It was rough going back to the regular routine after having partied down the entire latter half of December. And then in early January, two of our vehicles decided they wanted to take a vacation too – a vacation from working right, that is.

Alas, my trusty 1998 black Corolla, which looks like it’s fought in three battles, was spewing smoke from under its hood. Jon took the car into the mechanic on his sojourn to work, only to pick up the “fixed” car from the repair shop the next day, drive home, and notice an even thicker black cloud billowing out from underneath the hood upon being parked in our garage.

Jon said maybe the mechanics (and I use the term “mechanics” loosely) hadn’t totally screwed it up – maybe they had just been klutzes and jarred something loose under the hood when they “repaired” it. He suggested that a quick spark-plug presto change-o might be just what the doctor ordered (this time around).

Now you know they say if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is? That had happened a couple times before with other repairs, which appeared to have a one-step quick fix but later digressed into multi-day, multi-level surgeries on said mechanical wares. However, this time we were lucky, and the spark plugs restored the Corolla’s reliable (smokeless) purr. We were thrilled. A bonus: the headlights - which had decided they wanted to always be on, even when the keys weren’t in the ignition - decided to settle down and behave of their own volition, once Jon fixed the spark plugs (though they have nothing to do with the spark plugs). I think we were blessed on that one.

But our poor Nissan Frontier pickup remains mid-surgery in the garage to this day, where it’s stood with its innards partially dismantled for quite a while now. The project, which Jon volunteered to do to save us thousands of dollars, was bigger than we realized going in, and has taken several multi-level repairs. Since we are in Tucson about every other weekend and Jon normally works late-ish during the week, the repair has taken many weeks so far but is moving forward.

Luckily, we still have Jon’s 1996 Isuzu Rodeo, which roars like a lion, smells like an exhaust pipe, and makes you sweat (literally – its A/C hasn’t worked in years). Yet it still provides a stylish (and necessary) ride.

So amidst our mechanical travails of January that lingered into February and beyond, I was shocked to look outside one Sunday in late February and see some snow on the ground. Of course, a text from Jon, who was already at the church building for early bishopric meetings, prompting me to look outside the window helped too. I didn’t realize the sheer grandeur of it all, though, until I backed the Corolla out of the garage, passing the garage door’s snowdrifts. As I rolled out of the garage and down the driveway, I realized I was entering a winter wonderland. I drove tentatively, not wanting to disrupt or mar the scene that lay before me in any way. Everything was perfectly still, and the atmosphere was hushed with nature’s quiet white blanket laid down upon every tree and cactus. For the first time, this 30-year desert resident could truly say the desert was beautiful and downright awe inspiring. The incredible peace of the snow, which was probably about 1.5 to 2 inches deep, completely enveloped me. All my problems seemed to melt away as I drove to church through my now-totally-white surroundings.

Jon always says the sunsets remind him of Heavenly Father’s power and love for His children, but I had never experienced that feeling - until I saw the snow that day. As I gazed out at the beautiful result of some force of nature, I thought surely this snow had to be a gift from God; it absolutely reminded me of His power and mercies toward His children. Of course, right about now, those of you who have snow all the time wonder what the big deal is. But for us desert dwellers, the snow truly is nothing short of divine magic.