Grandma’s Porcelain Doll Sanctuary

My husband often jokes that I am spooky. Not in a way that make an X Files episode, but  more like a Marilyn Munster. I have a list of favorite cemeteries. Spooky might just run in my family.

If you don’t believe me, let me share of an excerpt from an interview I had with my grandmother. 

Q: How many porcelain dolls do you have?

A: .......

Q: Would you say that you have more than 30 porcelain dolls?

A: Yes. Definitely.

Q: Would you say that you have more than 50 porcelain dolls?

A: Right around there. 

Let me pause right here. I think I might have entered into my sister-in-laws nightmare land. More than 30 but possibly less than 50 porcelain dolls are hidden or on display around the house.  If anyone had a fear of dolls, I can attest that my grandmothers living room would drive someone into the mouth of madness. 

Q: What was your first porcelain doll?

A: I had two dolls from when I was child.  They weren’t porcelains, they were bisque dolls. They crack easily in a hot attic. 

I looked up bisque dolls or biscuit porcelain dolls. And as per Wikipedia “Bisque dolls are characterized by their realistic, skin-like matte finish.”  Now I am trying not to think about dolls with realistic skin and cracked faces. My grandmother has a way of letting your form your own images in your mind. 

Q: What was your first real porcelain doll?

A: The first real porcelain doll was of Trish (my aunt) when she was a child. 

I am not sure if this is where I admit that my first porcelain doll came from my grandmother when I was 8. The doll looked a little like me at the time and lives in my attic.  I am sure my aunt is thrilled about being immortalized in a child form in porcelain. There is zero chance our souls will end up in these dolls. 

Q: Why do you like them?

A: I always like dolls when I was a young girl. I wasn’t able to have them as a child. The first dolls I had were rubber dolls. They melted in the attic. I always wanted a doll with teeth. 

I decided to look up rubber doll on the internet to find out exactly what my grandmother meant by rubber doll.  Do not search for rubber dolls!! Search for Vintage Rubber Dolls.  There is a big results in the search results. 

Also try not to think too hard about a doll with teeth. Every mental image of dolls with teeth confirms that creepy runs in the family.

Home for a Wayward Woman

 Wayward Woman

If a woman walked up to you on the street, asking for help, would you take her home and try and help her? 

The way I see it there are two answers.

A: Take her home and try to find help.

B: Pat her on the head and wish her luck. 

Jon and I took option A  and have discovered that numerous neighbors took option B.  I can’t tell if my neighbors are monsters or if Jon and I are suckers. 

Meet Nami. Short for Nonami.

She walked up to as we were on a stroll around the block.  Literally walked right up to me. She was super friendly and looked similar to a missing cat posters we saw around the neighborhood.  Jon and I could not leave her on the street, so we took her home and tried to find her owners.  I know that if one of my boys went missing I would be frantic with worry and furious if someone some them on the street and didn’t try to bring them home.

Despite the number of missing cat posters in the neighborhood, she was not the cat in question. No one wanted to claim this wayward kitty. Posting on social media and several pet finding site, we were able to discover the sad truth of her story. It seems that someone moved into an apartment that didn’t allow for cats, so they let her free. 

It wasn’t my plan to get a third cat. In fact anything over two cats can seem like the beginning of a crazy cat lady; however if video games have taught me anything is that if a cat walks up to you and gives you a quest, you take the quest. 

This quest involves giving Nami a happy life. Welcome to the to the family.

Butt in the Mail

 Butt in the Mail 

I received butt in the mail.

....

It wasn’t just a butt, it was cat butt. I don’t know if a friend mailed it to me or if I kickstarted it and forgot about it.  I do know that this might be the strangest unexpected item I have ever received in the mail.  I feel like if a friend did send it, I need to bump of my mail game. 

Of course my brain goes not overdrive with this mystery. Is this cat butt a coded message?  Is really saying “my  dear, you’re a rear” or  “enjoy this piece of tail in the mail?” I can name at least half a dozen people that could be the culprit.  Some of them being family and coworkers. For all I know this could be an invite to bake cookies.

 I don’t know the cat butt origin and maybe it is best that way. No culprits for the kitty cutter have been forthcoming, but I know that if I was to send one in the future I would be cackling to myself the entire time it was in the mail. So, if you are the person that is responsible, I salute you.  You have literally made my day and confused my husband.  Thank you! 

Cat Hobby

 It is nice when you can share a hobby with someone. It gives you something to bond over and a feeling of companionship.  Dib and I share the same hobby of sewing. He is might not get all the technical aspects down, but he is excellent at holding the fabric down and inspecting the work.  (And if you want me to be completely honest, he can be a complete menace.)

Here are a couple of sewing projects that have the special Dib touch to them. 

Ice Cream Failure

 

This is a little bit of a convoluted story about ice cream and failure.

This story starts with my mother in law giving me a recipe. She had acquired this recipe from a friend and is raved as a no fail bread recipe with only two ingredients. I thought it would be a great recipe to try and a wonderful excuse to buy a half gallon of ice cream. My thought process would be that I would make the ice cream bread and tell my dad about the wonderful uses for ice cream other than just eating it.  That was my plan.  Eat ice cream, try a new recipe for bread and pick on my father and report back to my mother in law on my success.

I really want to say that I executed the plan flawlessly. If I bragged on this as a success and smirked over my kitchen prowess, then know that I was utterly lying. I totally bombed on this.  I think  the fault lie with the ice cream. I thought it would sounded wonderful to have chocolate peanut butter bread. That it would be great to make into French Toast.  There is one thing that I failed to consider with Chocolate Peanut Butter Ripple, is that there is literally ribbons of peanut butter in the ice cream.  Cold peanut butter is stubborn. It does not like to mix and will not unclench its might grip in even melted ice cream.  Trying to get the chilled peanut butter to relax and mix with flour is a  nightmare that I would not wish on my worse enemy.  Once I had everything incorporated I popped it in the oven in a loaf like shape.

In all honesty it looked like I giant brown turd.  It did not look appealing and sadly it did not change into any sort of shape while it baked. It wen tin the oven looking like a turd, and it came out of the oven looking like turd. This was not the easy kitchen victory that I had anticipated. It was the anthesis of that.  My husband, the supportive champ that he is, shave me is best Paul Hollywood impression and let me know it was under proved. 

I had thoughts that perhaps I could salvage this experiment and then write I heart warming tale about over coming adversity and try to tie it into a moral or child hood lesson I learned from my father.

My glorious idea to salvage it, was to first slice it up, so it no longer looked like a turd. The second part was to bake/toast it to be like a biscotti and maybe put a little bit of fudge icing on it. Everything is better with fudge icing on it. Except it isn’t. It still tasted like stale ice cream, except now it was dry and the fudge icing made it really obvious that the bread was lackluster.  It was not what I was trying to accomplish and was a rather embarrassing kitchen failure. 

Sometimes things just suck. There is no way to make it not suck. Sometimes you just have to accept that and keep moving. On the bright side, I had still had ice cream. 

Random Thoughts

 It has been a while since I last wrote anything.  Most of the time the words won’t come out of my head or I am distracted by random thoughts.  

One of the most soothing things that I do is sew. My fabric addiction is becoming well known and my Pinterest board of inspiration is a little out of control. Sewing lets me think and not think at the same time. 

Here are some of the random thoughts that have come to pass:

• The Room of Requirement in Harry Potter is the wizard equivalent of the Holodeck in Star Trek.
• There should be a pizza donut for people that want something savory as an option in the donut box. 
• My cats stripper name would be Eviscerator
• Why don’t more people use the metric system
• In zombie movies they use wooden planks and plywood boards to block the windows and doors. Is part of being and adult mean keeping extra wood and plywood in the event of a zombie outbreak?

What are some of the random thoughts that you have?

May Movie List

I keep thinking that I will discover a theme an underlying theme when reviewing the list of the previous movie viewing pleasure; however a theme seems to escape me.  The genre is all over the place. There isn’t an particular decade we stuck to, and certainly not an actor or actress.  I suppose a  loose theme would be  Repeats. Not necessarily a repeat on the list, but more of movies I have seen at least once prior to this year.

May Movie List

• Capitan Kronos Vampire Hunter
• Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance
•  The Protector
•  Cast a Deadly Spell
•  The Abominable Dr. Phibes
•  Mr. Sardonicus
•  Lethal Weapon 3
• RoboVampire 
• Aliens
•  Straitjacket
•  Dogora The Space Monster
•  I Was a Teenage Wereskunk

 How many of theses movies have you seen?

 

Calico Ghost Town

Sit right back and you will hear a tale. A tale of a fateful trip. It started...  Okay, that may be the beginning of Gilligan’s Island and my trip wasn’t fateful, but like most of the episodes of Gilligan’s Island it was at the very least interesting.  

In fact the adventure that I am thinking about is no where near boating or water and take place in Calico Ghost Town.  When I was a young lass, my mother took me camping at Calico Ghost Town and I distinctly remember the Camp Ground Keeper warning us to never wander into any of the mines, because our bodies might not be found and to always dump your shoes before putting them on, because scorpions liked to hide in them.  Needless to say, we only camped there once and the place left a lasting impression on me, because anytime I am in the desert, I constantly think about scorpions and death by scorpions sting.

 

Now, lets fast forward at least a decade and the urge to go back to Calico Ghost Town strikes me.  I have a love for caves, and what is a mine but a man made cave?  Or at least that is the thought running through my head when I cajole my dear father into a drive to the desert.  When we get there, the town is nothing like I remembered.  Which was wonderful. It was one of my favorite things ever, a roadside attraction with a historical flair. Yes, there were mines, but there was so much more.  The town catered to tourists of a family nature, and there were enough activities to keep young children entertained while receiving a brief history of mining and life on a new frontier.  Pretty much everything my dad could roll his eyes at and humor me on was there, whether that was to dress up in old times clothes for pictures or to ride a train that pointed out the history of mining and the area or walk through the Mystery Shack.  

While most would say that it doesn’t do any good to go down memory lane, sometimes it is just what is needed.  I appreciate the time I went as a small child and the fear of scorpions it provided, but I also appreciate go back and seeing how things can change in a positive way an created new memories.

Opossum Lake

It is Mother’s Day, so it would only make sense to talk about a time my mother may have tried to murder me. Or this is a story about me exaggerating the events of a Sunday morning. 

My mother loves to read murder mystery and detective novels.  When I was a surely teenager I remember us both burning through Sue Grafton  and Mary Higgins Clark novels. After reading so many novels there becomes a check list of things that look suspicious when they happen in real life.

It was a beautiful Sunday morning. The birds were chirping and there a was that relaxed feeling in the air. This in itself should be suspicious, because only cliched mysteries start with, “It was a dark and stormy night...”.  On that beautiful Sunday morn, my mother drove me out to a remote spot in the woods by a lake.  Yes, this is where all the warning bells should be going off. There is a reason why there are so many horror movies with grisly murders that happen near lakes and in the woods.  It is really easy to “lose” a body in the woods and is not exactly easy to comb a lake.  Check off another box on the murder list.

Arriving at the destination my mother casually mentioned that the lake was recently refilled and stocked with fish.  Is there a more menacing name for a lake than Opossum Lake?  Literally, opossums play dead.  If we were in a murder mystery, the killer would play dead and then strike.  The refilled lake in some of the off shoots there are at least a dozen or more feet deep there are trees that have poke out of the water like grave markers.  It isn’t a stretch of the imagination to picture a body tied to at the base of the tree.  I am sure this is at least three more check boxes on the murder list. 

Mentioning of the concern for bodies under the water and I am reminded that fish have just been stocked.  Fish eat everything.  Any evidence of my presence would be quickly remove by nature if worse came to worse.  More items for the murder list.  How does our hero escape this dastardly plot of  mayhem?  Easy I talk my way out of it. With careful consideration and the knowledge that I was in charge of putting her in a home when she becomes old and infirm, she let me live another day.  It was a close call, or at lease it was by this account of the story.

By now, my mother is reading this and rolling her eyes.  The non murder themed sequence of events, is that it was a beautiful day and we went kayaking in the newly refilled lake, where I spent half the time worrying about tipping the kayak and drowning by being tree that was poking out of the water and her laughing at me for being ridiculous.   So, it wouldn’t have been a murder, but more of an accidental death that didn’t happen.  I am sure my mother is now wondering if she dropped me too many times as a child if a simple day of kayaking turned into an attempted murder.  

Happy Mother’s Day!

April Movie List

I think I might be the only person that did not binge watch movies for the month of April while the world shut down.  My husband had frequent movie nights with his friends, while I worked on a few sewing projects and building furniture for my new and improved lady lair.  One of themes that April seemed to have in movie themes was Bigfoot, the other theme being Cult.  In the very rare instance the two themes combined.  I always have high hopes for a Bigfoot movie, but vary rarely do they pan out.

April List

• Shriek of the Mutilated 

•  Dr. Phibes Rises Again 

•  The Capture of Bigfoot 

•  Night of the Demons 

•  Robowar 

•  MST3K Starcrash 

•  Night of the Demon

Any guesses on which movies could be considered Bigfoot movies and which ones could be considered cult movies?   While April may have been lax in my movie watching pleasure, it seems that May is starting out a bang.

Ugly Quilt

I had the brilliant idea to make quilts for my brother and his family. The quilt for my brother looks like pop culture vomited. Of course my brother loves it. 

His kids have described it as “manly” and “beer” and “warm”.   I think they are being kind. 

In case you were wondering this master piece of madness has fabric containing the following:

• Jaws
• Star Wars
• Beer
• Tacos
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
• Skeletons 
• Walking Dead
• E.T.
• Fighting Robots
• Tattoos
• Blood Splatters
• Silver Screen Monsters

My least favorite fabric is still E.T. He looks like a deformed potato and incredibly hard to match fabric to.  The longer you look at the fabric with his face on it, the weirder and uglier he looks.  By far my favorite fabric is Silver Screen Monsters.  I love old movies and so does my brother, so when I saw the fabric I immediately thought of him.  Despite the fact that some of the fabric used was just plain ugly, I had a lot of fun hunting for fabric and coming up with a pattern.

The To-Do List

It isn’t a surprise to most people that I like to travel.  The  reason I like to travel is that I am normally spending time with people that are important to me.  With the current climate of unease, it is not healthy to travel and it is recommended to avoid people to slow the spread of infection. Physical distancing does not mean social isolation, even though it can feel like it.  Just like when I was a kid and we would tell stories around the camp fire to make the darkness of the woods less scary, I think that sharing stories might make this time of darkness a little lighter. 

The To-Do List

Several years back I was cat watching for my grandparents while they were on vacation.  When I watch the cat (Stella- who hates me), I try to spend a couple hours in the house, so that Stella doesn’t feel abandoned.  Normally I putz around the house or sit and read so that she can have some company for a bit. 

The one time I was there I noticed a to do list on the fridge. It was clearly written by my grandmother.  I had to laugh, because it looked like my grandfather may have added something to the top of the list in black.

It looks like to me that on the top of my Grandfathers to-do list was eat the tomatoes. This made me laugh, because I could picture in my head my grandmother getting on my grandfathers case about not doing the gardening and he is sitting there eating tomatoes, telling her that he is following the list. It is one of those things that after 50 years of being married, they still find creative ways to annoy each other.  My grandparents are an inspiration. I can only hope to annoy my husband for as long as they have annoyed each other. 

Be a Calm Iggins

These are interesting times that we live in. I was listening the public radio on the way to work before I became part of the work from home force, and the radio host talked about the importance of being calm. The abbreviated version was that keeping a calm head will keep you safer. Then my brain leapt immediately to “Fear is the mind killer” and then jumped to the time that Iggins was startled and ran directly into a wall.  I do not want to be an Iggins running into walls.  However, I know that it is not easy to keeps a calm out look.  Some people go for distractions, such as binge watching movies until it is over and others are using this time to learn new skills.  I am a list person, so my distraction tends to come in lists and completing them.  Good things come in multiples of threes.

Things that I have learned:

1. I still hate grape juice
2. Trying something on Pinterest does not equate automatic success
3. Date Bread does not taste the way you think it would.  

Things that I am grateful for:

1. Postage Stamps
2. Fabric Hoarding
3. Fluffy Socks

Things that distract me:

    1.  Things We Do in the Shadows (television show)

    2.  My husband and his need for new records

    3.  Family 

What are some things that you have learned, you are grateful for and distract you?  

March Movie List

In the crazy world that we live in that feels more like the beginning to several sci-fi movies, it is a good thing that my husband has various sources for visual entertainment.  The March Movie list feels like I should have earned a badge.  If I had a creative talented I would make a badge for some that has seen at least half of these movies, that isn’t married to me.  It is an eclectic mix.

How many of these movies have you seen?

March movies

• Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla
• Godzilla Tokyo SOS
• Godzilla 2000
• The Mad Mission
• Guns Akimbo 
• Alien Trespass
• Christine
• Rifftrax: The Girl from Rio
• Rifftrax: The Last Shark
• Lethal weapon 
• Lethal weapon 2
• MST3k Zombie Nightmare 
• Red Son
• The Monster Club
• Dr.  Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine 
• Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs
• American Movie
• Jodorowsky’s Dune

Thoughts on some of these movies:

• I think that Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine might have the catchiest song ever. I still find myself humming and singing it days later.  It is one of those Vincent Price movies that doesn’t seem like it was a hardship for him to film.  
• Guns Akimbo is one of those movies that is a fun action movie that made me laugh more then I expected and will mostly likely get a copy for my brother for the next holiday/birthday/just because gifting.
•  Jodorowsky’s Dune made me realize that you don’t always have to read the book to find inspiration. 

Comfort Food: Twisted Chicken Noodle Soup

Comfort Food: Twisted Chicken Noodle Soup

I should probably call this Thai Chicken Noodle Soup or Not My Mother’s Chicken Noodle Soup, but both of those seemed like really long titles for a recipe this delicious.  (Mom- If you are reading this, your Chicken Corn Soup is awesome and also great comfort food.)

This recipe originated from my husbands work.  They have a healthy eating section to encourage positive life choices and this recipe sounded good to him, so he forwarded it to me. I took what I liked out of the recipe and molded it into something heartier that makes a good meal by itself or an excellent part of a soup and sandwich meal.

Ingredients:

1 large sweet potato

1 tablespoon of olive oil

2 tablespoons water

1 Onion diced

1 tablespoon dried ginger or 2 inches  of fresh ginger rood thinly sliced

2 tablespoon curry powder or 1 tablespoon red curry paste

1 (15 ounce) can unsweetened coconut milk

3 cups of vegetable broth

2 tablespoons lemon juice

1 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon sesame oil

1/2 cup fresh chopped cilantro

1 cup edamame 

3/4 cup riced cauliflower & sweet potato mix 

2 cooked chicken breasts chunked in bite size pieces(I use rotisserie to save time)

1 small packet of Thai vermicelli rice noodles

Directions:

1. Wrap sweet potato in cling form wrap and microwave for 7 minutes.  This should cook the potato all the way through.  Put the potato in the freezer to bring down temperature for handling later.
2. In a pot for noodles, fill will water and put on the heat to boil noodles.  A watched pot never boils, so move on to step 3 as the water heats. 
3. In a large soup pot, heat olive oil over medium heat.  Add the onion and ginger; cook until onions are tender and translucent. This should take about 5 minutes. Add the curry and water and stir together with onion ginger mix for about a minute.  Once everything is blended, add the unsweetened coconut milk and vegetable broth to make the soup broth.  It should smell amazing.  Bring soup broth to a boil and then let it simmer while you work on step 4.
4. Take the potato out of the freezer. It should be cool to the touch but not frozen. Remove the skin from the potato and dice into small pieces and put in the broth. If the potato is not cool, it will mush when you attempt this step.  IF the potato is still super warm, put it back in the freezer and work on other steps. 
5. Add the chunked cooked chicken into the broth along with the edamame and riced cauliflower/sweet potato mix.  Stir the the pot every now and then to verify that it nothing has settled to the bottom of the pot.  
6. The water for the noodles should be boiling.  Add noodles to the the pot and stir.  You want to make sure that nothing sticks together. Rice noodles cook quickly.  Once they are done cooking, you will want to rinse the noodles in cold water to stop the cooking process.  Once the noodles are cooked and cool to the touch, refrain from eating them from the bowl and put them in the soup broth. IF the sweet potato is still in the freezer cooling down, take it out of the freezer and it should be fine to dice and put in the soup. 
7. Stir all the ingredients together and let simmer for at least five minutes. You want the potato to gain some of the curry flavor.  IF the noodles seem to overwhelm the soup, it is okay to add half a cup of water. 
8. Add salt, lemon juice, cilantro and sesame oil to the soup.  Stir to the tune of Ring Around the Rosie letting the ingredients incorporate in to the broth and then serve.

This is a hearty chicken noodle soup that is full of flavor and sneaks in a couple of vegetables while providing comfort that only a chicken soup can provide.  

February Movie List

It is weird keeping track of all the movies that I watch in a month. Especially since I have the attention span of a gnat. I am hoping that by the end of the year when I look at all the movies I have watched I can identify a couple of trends in my husbands viewing pleasure and therefore able to better predict movies he would be interested in as future gifts.  That is the hope.  

February Movie List

1. Come Drink with Me
2. City Hunter
3. The Magnificent Butcher
4. Crank 2
5. The Tingler
6. The Devil’s Nightmare
7. The Strange Door
8. Yo-Yo Girl Cop
9. Tears of the Black Tiger
10. Doctor Bloods Coffin
11. The Abominable Dr. Phibes
12. Knives Out

While February was less intense in volume, the variety was up kept.  Other than Knives Out (which was a birthday gift and I loved it when I saw it in the theater), my favorite movie was The Abominable Dr. Phibes.  My husband discovered this movie based on a tour of Silver Screen monsters we did on our anniversary in Connecticut. It is one of the strangest Vincent Price movies I have ever seen.