This Planet is Yellow

I catered to the “childhood” challenge which was about making a journal entry with a quote about my childhood. I thought of something positive for once… Sort of…

I mean, it’s actually kind of wistful if you think about it. “Remember when making friends meant simply asking?” I have few friends, but the ones I still have I’ve had for years and years. Jhez, I met you at your house because one of the other neighbour kids said “oh let’s meet the new people!”. As adults, we don’t do this. They do in small towns, but sometimes we end up calling it “weird”. This is how me and Linds became friends. First day at school she said “want to be my best friend?” and that was pretty much it.

I think that’s probably why I don’t make new friends because now it takes actual work. I hate small talk and feeling awkward so it generally goes the opposite of how I want it to be. I kind of wish it was just as easy now. Maybe it could be. We’re all so afraid of offending people that I don’t think adults have ever simply asked a stranger “want to be best friends?” Kids don’t care about offending people. Sounds ass-backwards, but maybe the world would move a lot smoother if we did the opposite of what we are trained to do.

And we played a lot of sailor moon.

I was feeling really awful that day so the “real” journal entry is hidden inside… I just took a photo because I think the page just looks nicer without the colour saturation of the cards.

So yesterday, between class-related sorrows, between anguishing over UPS and why anyone anywhere would ever ever ever want to send anything through them if the package isn’t going to a business, between stressing about work, stressing about upcoming family events, between getting overdue bills from a government that doesn’t seem to know what’s going on… we had a little fun!

I went on a date (I call it) at the PNE because John got a BOGO coupon for fair admission which is awesome because I really didn’t want to pay $40 just to get in. Call it strange, but I’d never really been to the PNE before. I mean, I think my mum took us to see the lumberjacks once, but that’s just what happens at fairs; we go in, look at one thing, and then leave. I don’t remember anything else.

I ate some seriously overpriced food, had those little donuts people keep gushing over and you know they were pretty darn good! I also had poutine for the first time in my life yesterday and I can’t believe I never tried it before! MY LIFE IS A WASTE… I could have eaten hundreds of poutines by now. :D

We opted to watch the talent show instead of the superdogs, just because it was closer. I pet a bunch of barn animals, watched pig races, and visited candy mountain where we got free Jelly Beans for risking our tongues to try flavours. We’d get a secret flavour and not know if it was going to be good or really bad. John had to taste one to find out if it was coconut or baby wipes. I got lucky, it was either berry or toothpaste. I don’t think toothpaste would have been so horrible. Luckily, it wasn’t skunk spray.

It was only a little sad watching people on rides because it’s just too expensive to go. But the truly sad part of yesterday was that, because of UPS lying to me and making me go straight home on tuesday for no reason, I didn’t buy any film for the camera I wanted to use at the park. The toy camera that takes wide angle photos and makes lovely colours. Would have been perfect. But no… thanks downtown vancouver for endless streets of junk stores, dried food stores, and antique furniture stores… none of which sell useful things. Like film. Or necessities. So I was denied that.

But it was fun anyway. It will give me something nice to think about while I puzzle over government financial threats (I’m already only earning like, $8000 this year… how poor do they want me to be??) and the likelihood of never getting a package I bought and paid for b/c people keep using UPS (it boggles the mind!).

It’ll work out in the end.

I’m a total jackass whenever I feel frustrated that no one ever posts on weekends (except kelly) because I figure, lots of people’s lives don’t stop on weekends, why not post something? Anything? Probably just the bitterness showing: the bitterness of missing every weekend for the last four years. But I’m tired and lazy and never have the computer after work so I’m a total hypocrite! Let’s do something about that. I’ll show you some pics of our class cake!

It’s the 100th anniversary of the Fair in Vancouver TODAY! LIKE, RIGHT NOW! WOO! Wow… 100 years. Weird to think of what things were like back in 1910. Just blows my mind.

Anyway, our little class of twelve got to make the cake for the opening day of the Fair! They wanted an 8 foot long cake with a graphic plaque and some kind of roller coaster worked in. This is what we all managed to get done this week:

It’s bigger than me! It’s actually a bunch of really large 24″ cakes side by side.

Little cars made of fondant, rollercoaster hills made from extra cake rounds, tracks made of modeling chocolate and dusted with bronze lustre dust (I have to get me some of that! it’s nifty!), “beams” cut from coating chocolate…

This is all made of fondant that’s been spraypainted with edible paint…

I love the little doughnuts! So clever!

So when the cake was wheeled away back to the cold room, we had some leftovers. One large assembled cake we cut, decorated and sold… but there were many 24″ individual layers free for the taking! So I took half of one, sliced it into three pieces and still got a regular sized (though irregularly shaped) cake out of it. Damn that’s a lot of cake!

Only reason I’m bringing it up is because, me being lazy (again), I didn’t feel like going out to buy icing. Yeah I know, I should know how to make icing by now, but I don’t have a stand mixer and it’s key for italian buttercream. So is butter, and I didn’t have much of that. So I tried something kind of unconventional and made swiss meringue.

If I remember clearly, it involved 4 egg whites and a cup of sugar, mixed and heated to maybe …. well I forget. And then it’s whipped to desired peak. Usually it’s used to make meringue cookies or pavlova and baked at a very low heat for a very long time… the result is magical. Kind of reminds me of cotton candy the way the dry sugar melts on the tongue. Such wonderful stuff. People make cartoony kind of roses out of it to dry and place on cakes. I… I mistakenly thought people sometimes used it as a cake frosting.

So there I went and covered this thing with meringue.

It was actually an awesome experience. It is sticky for sure (I hate sticky!), and the humidity made it difficult to keep it stiff, but the consistency was amazing! It was like soft serve ice cream that never melts. It was perfectly smooth… if the cake wasn’t so crumb-y (the meringue doesn’t “dry” in the refrigerator so crumb coat wasn’t an option) it would look like glass. So perfect and shiny. But wonderfully unlike buttercream, it was very soft yet it held together so well that even at its softest consistency it wouldn’t sink or melt or slide down the side of the cake.

So I’m guessing the reason why meringue roses are so adorably cartoon-like, is because it’s not as easy to make a typical buttercream rose with this stuff. It sticks. A lot. But if you’re patient and you’re willing to wipe the tip between every petal, it can be done.

Despite the fact that royal icing often has egg whites and is still pretty popular on cakes, I became quickly paranoid about the whole thing. I’m not afraid to eat raw cookie dough, but I am afraid to serve people something that might possibly make them sick. We use pasteurized eggs at school (because it’s a business) and apparently some people are switching to powders instead of egg whites in their royal icing. That, and the heat of the swiss meringue was not quite at “food safe” status.

Since I was already experimenting, and the cake was free, and four eggs are cheap enough, I shoved the whole finished cake in a cool oven for a while. I didn’t know what would happen in the end… but baked meringues are wonderful so it couldn’t be all that bad right? It didn’t bake evenly so some sides were still soft, but the rest of it had dried out to not-quite-crispy. Probably still at “risk” but we were getting impatient to eat this thing.

It was a successful experiment! In the future I think I would bake it until it was fully crisped and safe for “everyone”, but wow! I love meringues and it protected the cake just enough that the inside was warm and moist, but didn’t dry out in the oven. It was awesome and now I am shocked that this isn’t the most popular thing on the planet. So much lighter than buttercream, so much less toothachingly sweet than rolled fondant. And it is probably just as possible as the both of them to flavour with extracts and such. Recommended!

Why is it, that after planning for seven years to someday have yellow walls again…
after all that time dealing with “rental white” and everything that comes with it…
That every design blog on the entire internet is announcing yellow as the colour of 2010?

Some people might think of it as a lucky coincidence, but it kind of cheapens the whole awful experience of wall painting in the heat of summer. Thanx gais. I can has trendy badge nao? I look forward to being “out of style” next year. :(

maggie has been really sleepy today because of all of the heat. I caught her stretching out so adorably on the balcony:

But of course I was caught red handed:

To which she STUBBORNLY came into the house and refused to go back out on the balcony again. sheesh.

I’m sorry I haven’t posted for so long. This week I’m going to try harder in all things.

available here.

I painted this while catching up on Kira’s videoblog. Which, by the way, sure lost a lot of spark since I don’t really get to see it live anymore. Without the active chat, it seems really disjointed somehow. A lot of erm’s and ah’s. But I dragged over some supplies and got down to this paint-sketch because I hadn’t done anything in a week. I hadn’t done any real paintings in who knows how long.

I thought it would be tedious, actually, filling the space with little forget-me-nots (even though the format is quite small, I still have serious impatience issues :P ) but it was actually not tedious at all. I enjoyed every minute of it. Maybe because it meant something to me.

I painted this with dearest thoughts for my (paternal) grandmother who has struggled with Alzheimer’s for so long. So long. The fact that it’s been so long is worrying for reasons that will be made clear in a moment. I know how “classy” it is to refer to the wiki, but I don’t find much wrong with that so I’m going to share a few details that many people, including me, wouldn’t readily know about this disease:

- There are four stages of Alzheimer’s:
1. Predementia (memory loss, struggles with learning new info, with attentiveness, with planning, apathy)
2. Early dementia (increased difficulty with memory, with learning, with fine motor function, with language)
3. Moderate dementia (speech difficulties incl. vocabulary misuse, loss of coordination, loss of long term memories, irritability, aggression, delusions, no longer realize they are ill, require daily care)
4. Advanced dementia (Nearly complete loss of speech, extreme apathy, exhaustion, bedridden)

- No theory on the cause. So far, it is not a hereditary disease but a sporadic one. It is just thought to be general breakdown of neurons in the brain, causing shrinkage. It’s very complicated.

- So far, there are no preventative measures that have been proven to do anything.

- There is no treatment for the disease, only the symptoms.

- Life expectancy after diagnosis is seven years, with less than 3% exceeding beyond 14 years.

- Alzheimer’s isn’t considered to be the direct cause of death, but rather other diseases that usually sweep in during the later stages of it. This includes pneumonia, dehydration, infection and cancer.

I mostly just feel AMAZINGLY guilty because our family is not… well we don’t act like a family. Everybody more or less hates each other for whatever stupid reason they came up with decades ago, so our family values aren’t up to par. My brother and I are afraid of phones, so I feel terrible that I’ve only actually called my grandparents once this year, and even that is unusual. I feel terrible that we didn’t even know she was in the hospital for abdominal cancer. And I had no idea that she had gotten this bad.

Our visit was the worst I’ve ever really experience, I think because there was no one there to explain everything. I don’t know if she even recognized us, and I hope she was put on some kind of drug to explain the extent of the confusion. She kept calling my brother by our dad’s name, which must have been awful for him… to be mistaken for the one man on this earth he hates with a fiery passion. She got angry at me for asking for cigarettes, even though I didn’t actually say anything (which I thought was kind of spooky). It was awful when her dinner came and she thought she was in a restaurant and would pack up her leftovers for “the cat”.

Well she was under the impression that she was going to get better (I mean, she just had surgery to remove the cancer and had a really bad, crippling reaction to the medication) so we can’t help but hope that she will, indeed, recover somewhat. I can’t trust the judgment of someone with extremely impaired judgment, but there was no one else to ask. She is not in the palliative section and that’s good enough for me. :)

As horrible as it is to say, as my brother said: “Well at least they can’t say we didn’t visit…” I will have to selfishly agree that I don’t think I could go through that again, despite the fact that my grandfather has had to go through that every day for the past… who knows how long. At least ten years.

We used to get Forget me not seeds in the mail from the Alzheimer’s society every year, and I would spread them wherever I could but nothing ever grew. I love the gorgeous colour of them, even if they are fierce, invasive weeds that will grow and spread everywhere. Strangely I can’t get them to bloom, let alone spread a canvas of blue over the earth. I’ve tried. I usually get about as far as a few leaves and then nothing happens. Not a single blossom. IT’S A WEED. I CAN’T EVEN GROW A WEED.

Now I’m not the type to believe in fate, or divine forces or secret universal messages or anything like that, but I thought it was a clever coincidence that my potted forget-me-nots decided to choose that exact day to finally begin blooming…

Been feeling down and unbalanced lately but an update:

Cat has the head cone right now to keep her away from her spay wound. At first it was unbelievably depressing because we couldn’t figure out how to keep it on her head (she kept pulling it off) so john rigged it around her shoulders. Unfortunately, this caused her to walk funny and she just gave up and lay around all day. The first day she was stuck in a corner for ten minutes because she couldn’t figure out forward walking. It was pretty funny, but then it was depressing. Then she was stuck sleeping all of the time because functioning was too much work.

And in the end we discovered that the cone was too small for her and she could reach her belly anyway.

She has a grown-up cone now and it’s tighter (I was afraid of strangling her, really. I don’t like things around my neck) so she can’t pull it off. And so now she can function. I mean, she can’t groom herself which actually reveals how pathetic we are. We scratch her head because she can’t. :D Stepping around walls and things and people is still a challenge, but she’s more or less back to normal.

Except she’s looking a little rough around the edges so back to the vet today!

This is another dummy cake we had to do in class. Not a real cake, just fondant on some styrofoam. I don’t know what to think about this fondant. Usually it’s squishy or foamy or whatever, but this stuff dries rock hard. It looks a bit busy because I had to fit all of the requirements on there somehow… this school gets a lot of its inspiration from the 70s, I think. ;)

This year is killing me! Hopefully a friend can correct me but I think there’s only really been one or two social engagements this entire year. My mate is going camping this weekend without me (because I have go to my suicide job) which is tttthiiiiisss close to being a deal breaker for me, LOL. It’s not fair! Nothing for a whole year!

Well… I guess two years really since there’s going to be another year before the next sunny season. If I had a driver’s license I’d be at cultus already.

hmm I wish the end of school could be a comfort but it only brings anxiety!

One cool thing though is that the apartment is now yellow. All of the yellow is done. Now the trim needs a desperate touch up but who cares! The hard part is ovrrr!