Black Friday evening. Caulking the windows in the “greenhouse” office, as one does.

It’s not really a greenhouse. It kinda was when we bought the place, if a dark, filthy awkward add-on room filled with dying plants, electrically dubious grow lights and heat lamps, and every bit of accumulated stuff that wouldn’t fit in the house itself counts as a greenhouse. It’s now light and airy, a little too airy, hence the caulking project.

I baked for the first time in months today. I intended to bake sooner, more often, and didn’t. Reasons/excuses…

But the prune plums finally arrived in the stores here about two weeks ago, and they demand that I bake. I bought probably close to ten pounds of them over the last weeks and watched some of them rot before my eyes because there simply wasn’t the stretch of time needed to actually bake. I have around four pounds in the freezer, cut up and sugared, waiting to be turned into freezer jam because that’s all I had time to do.

We are semi-homeschooling this year for the first time, and the adjustment is rough. There have been glimmers of the sublime, but mostly it’s been a hard slog for everyone. The boundary between school and not-school, the role of teacher vs mom, the inherent issues with online-only curriculum are all still “challenging”. Scare quotes, woohoo. By the end of this week, my daughter was just over it, all of it, and that included me.

This morning everything was ready to bake, because I had intended to to bake with my daughter yesterday afternoon to celebrate making it through the week, but, no. A botched lesson and matching mother/daughter meltdowns threw that idea out the window. My daughter and I gingerly explored each other’s mood and prickliness over breakfast, and I ventured the suggestion of going ahead.

I watched my daughter relax into the magic of mixing and kneading. Handling the dough, holding the smooth, barely sticky dough ball before she plopped it into the bowl to rise were full body pleasures for her. Later, I scraped the risen dough out of the bowl into her hands, and she caught it with delight. She sniffed the buttery yeasty scent of the raw dough like perfume. By the time we had placed the plums in our respective cakes and slid them into the oven, our sharp edges had blunted enough for her to declare with equal parts hope and conviction that she and I were a good team after all.

Salvation by yeast.

I’m communing with ghosts this weekend, have been all week.

My mother died a year ago, and the reality of that has been becoming sharper with time. I’m almost used to not seeing her show up in my email inbox. She was an intermittent physical presence in my adult life, in that her itinerant lifestyle meant that she passed through on her way north or south, never staying long. This was partly by inclination, partly by necessity, but consequently her physical absence has become more acute now that a longer time has passed without any “I’m headed your way” visits.

On the exact anniversary day of her death, I received an email from the specter who haunted her last year of life. Not a true ghost, but rather the person my mother believed, quite accurately, was going to attempt to replace and erase her. I believe this person chose to contact me on this particular day with intent, to let me know that she is indeed doing so, at least in certain places and aspects. Living ghosts are worse than true ones.

Much of my childhood and teen years were spent either wholly or in part in in a fairly remote place.  I fell down an internet rabbit hole one night this past week when I found a Facebook page about this place, one particular part of it. Scrolling through posts of old photos and reminiscences by people who were there around the same time my family was odd. On one hand, so much was familiar – names, sights, some faces – yet we, my family, were completely absent, even though I recall us, specifically my parents, being very involved within that small expat community. Normally not figuring in a social media world isn’t something that bothers me, but this does. It was such a small intimate world, and among other things my mother and father were instrumental in setting up the school there, so their absence of even a mention is unsettling. When looking at the photos it seems like they are hovering just out of frame or have been erased from the picture like disgraced or purged party members in old USSR days. Either way, ghosts.

A rainy day, and two little girls who need something warm and chocolate-y REALLY SOON. This never-fail recipe tastes better than cake mix and takes no more time to soothe those rainy day munchies.

1 1/2 cup all purpose flour
1 cup sugar
3/4 teaspoon Diamond kosher salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa
6 tablespoons butter, melted
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup cold water

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
In an ungreased 8×8 inch baking dish, mix the dry ingredients together.
Makes three shallow depressions in the dry ingredients. Pour the oil in one, the apple cider vinegar in another, and the melted butter in the third. Pour the cold water over everything, and mix, scraping the edges and corners to get all the dry ingredients.  Don’t over-mix.
Bake 35-40 minutes until a toothpick inserted in the cake comes out clean.

This is a slightly modified version of a recipe called Garlic-Optional Chocolate Cake. I clipped it from the Christian Science Monitor sometime in the early 1990s, I think.

Bonus Cat’s idea of hell: when my daughter has a friend over. Particularly this friend who is a BOY. He is an ACTIVE boy.

When the kids moved their play outside, he thought the coast was clear, but no. They came back inside just as Bonus Cat ventured out from hiding. He and the BOY came face to face – they both ran, one toward, the other away. They both wiped out on the hardwood floor.

Poor Bonus Cat wouldn’t even come out for dinner; the trauma of an afternoon of BOY was too great.

Winter is finally delivering the fluffy stuff here for the first time in three or four years. Crazy Cat has never seen this before.

It’s starting to stick, and reports are that the roads are getting slick. We’ll be staying put. I baked a loaf of bread.

… since I last picked up my knitting needles, until today. Yesterday I wound the skein into a center pull cake on the nostepinne and skipped using the umbrella swift, draping it around a chair back, a decision I regretted almost immediately. The yarn (Schaefer Yarn “Anne” in the “Michelle” colorway) is very sticky for lack of a better word, and it clung to itself lovingly as I wound it. The cat didn’t help. I finally had to ask my husband to fulfill his spousal obligation of holding the skein. Fair enough – I act as a clamp, a brace or an extra set of hands on his woodworking or building projects.

She doesn’t listen.

Neither does he.

My human kitten (i.e. my cat-crazed daughter) loves her routine, especially when it comes to food. Monday in the Crazy Cat Kitchen is almost always fish day, hers in the form of fish sticks because I do not have the energy for that particular battle anymore.  For us adults, I sauté filets of something mild and white because the kid got her un-adventurous palate from my husband and there are just so many fish sticks an adult can eat during their kid’s childhood.

The actual cats love fish night, obviously. Sometimes they get a taste.

A day of work at the townhouse. The new paint colors in the living room and kitchen/baths look good, surprisingly so. Dinner is Mr. Ben’s pizza.