Suzy Says

I tend to do my cooking for the week on Saturday, making dishes I can heat up after work during the week. About the last thing I want to do after driving, working, and arriving home to take care of cats and removing faux adult armor so painstakingly applied that morning is slicing and dicing. I have a limited supply of patience and niceness, and it’s running on empty by the end of the work day. Basically, I just want to heat something up, watch a little TV, and go to bed and read.

Sometimes I do special projects on the weekends, like making Montreal-style bagels. I have actually gotten pretty good at making these, though they are a time consuming and messy process. I live 3,000 miles from the nearest commercially available Montreal bagels, so if I want them (and I do), I have to make them myself.

Recently, I tried my hand at strawberry granola, from a recipe in the New York Times. It came out perfect the first time, and I wouldn’t change a thing:

While I was combining the dried strawberries with the cooled granola mixture, I noticed several deer wandering down the driveway, outside the kitchen window. They were completely unafraid, nibbling here and there. They had a couple of young ones with them, at the stage where they were shedding their spots. the biggest deer peeked in the window at me, and for a moment, my little green eyes met his huge, liquid brown ones. Then he and his family headed off into the woods. A little moment of magic.

Another success was a first-time attempt at making Carolina-style ribs. I like the tangy style of barbecue sauce rather than the thick, sweet, sticky one. I made a rub and applied it the night before, letting it marinate overnight, and then baking the ribs for a few hours the next night. They turned out great, and I will not change a thing the next time I make them, and there will be a next time. It’s fun to try new recipes along with the tried and true.

FIVE YEARS AGO: Farewell to Marco, the gentle giant. We still miss you, sweet boy.

TEN YEARS AGO: Well, this is still true. Between a writing project and writing social media posts fro work, my blog has been neglected lately. Seems two posts a week is about all I can do these days.

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO: Again, all these things are still true. A girl can dream…

During the week, I get up in the early morning darkness. Most days, I wake up before the alarm goes off, and I am almost invariably disappointed that it’s already time to get up. Sometimes I lie there for a few minutes, wondering why it’s always time to get up, but mostly I just get up, turn off the alarm, put away my sleep mask and earplugs, and get on with it.

The first order of business is always cat care, and I have the invaluable Clyde to remind me of this very important fact. Even though my record of giving the cats food and water twice a day is unblemished, Clyde, like his Staff, tends to fear the worst and feels that it doesn’t hurt for me to get a reminder. Unfortunately, he can’t seem to understand that his getting under my feet and yowling makes it take longer to achieve the desired result. All this before coffee, my friends.

I’m usually out of the house within an hour of getting up, and that includes the application of faux adult armor, including make-up and hair styling.

On the weekends, it’s a different story, though.

I wake up when it’s light out. Cat care still comes first, but then I make coffee, bring it back upstairs, and get back into bed. On Saturdays, I read Savage Love and on Sundays I read PostSecret before attending to my fan mail. These are long-standing traditions.

It’s nice to sit in bed and enjoy the serene views from the windows and the sounds of silence:

I can (and do) spend hours in bed, reading book reviews and recipes, writing, and hanging out with the cats, who are clearly glad that I’m home for a change just encourage this kind of slothitude. People who think cats are aloof and distant have never met my cats.

Audrey generally curls up right next me, somewhat surprising for a cat of her general grumpitude. She even purrs, though she also growls when Dodge is anywhere near. Despite that, there is sometimes a temporary truce, though only when the bed is messy:

Usually, the boys are curled up together, with Audrey growling softly beside me just to remind them that she can barely tolerate their existence.

Eventually, I get up and do some cooking for the week – I like to make things I can heat up after work – but I really enjoy my weekend ritual.

A YEAR AGO: An amazing outing with the girls, learning about female lighthouse keepers – at a lighthouse.

FIVE YEARS AGO: A delightful celebration of Jessica’s birthday, with zebras, giraffes, surfers, and patisserie. What more could a girl want?

TEN YEARS AGO: I can’t believe it’s been ten years since we rescued Star! I’m pretty sure she knew that day that she was home. She was a mama’s girl from Day One! Some things never change.

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO: An emotional recipe. And a charmimg memory.

My blog turns 19 today, on 420. Despite the fact that I live in Weed Central, I only noticed recently that my blog’s birthday is the same day as the pot-tastic celebration of 420. There are many tales and theories about how it happened and how it got its name, so take your pick and smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em, especially now it’s legal*.

Sadly for me, I have no interest in the County’s most famous product. It has never agreed with me, making me paranoid and nervous instead of mellow and relaxed. I recently tried CBD oil on John’s recommendation – he finds it calms his panic attacks – but, you guessed it, same result. Give me a glass of wine or a fancy cocktail any evening. No one can be uncheered with a glass of champagne in her hand.

Here’s to your 19th birthday, little blog! Keep on sparkling!

*My father the research scientist always thought it should be legal, and despite the fact that he was an enthusiastic consumer of adult beverages, he also felt that alcohol contributed to far more crimes than weed ever did.

A YEAR AGO: My blog’s birthday.

FIVE YEARS AGO:Comparing the past and the present on my blog’s birthday. Guess who won?

TEN YEARS AGO: Marking the blog birthday, of course!

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO: You’ll never guess!

I’m not tracking them the way I did a few years ago, but lately, I have been trying to notice the perfect moments in each day.

When I lived in San Francisco, I never stopped noticing its beauty, and I am the same way here. Every day when I reach the ocean, or as I think of it, the intersection between home and work*:

I am delighted by its beauty. The ocean is ever-changing, and is as beautiful to me when it’s wild and stormy as when it’s blue and serene. It’s just a different kind of beautiful.

I love seeing a wide swath of silver when my friend the moon beams over the dark sea. Even though the moon and I go way back, she has been surprising me with her versatile beauty these days.

One morning – most of the year, it’s dark as night when I get up at 5 am – I was charmed by the sight of silvery moonbeams falling through the slats on my window blinds onto the bed, like I was the heroine of a film noir. Later that week, when I got to the ocean, I wondered what the blaze of orange was in the sky. It turned out to be the copper moon, coming in and out of misty slate blue clouds and making it really hard for me to focus on the road. I kept sneaking peeks to my left as I drove to work that morning.

There is something about driving across the Big River bridge:

that always fills me with a certain bien-être. Maybe it’s something about the ocean meeting the river there, or the curve of the bridge, but I usually find myself relaxing into the beauty when I cross it. On my way home from work one day, I was struck by the perfect sight of ravens, gracefully and slowly surfing the thermals together, hovering above the bridge with the afternoon sun glistening from their iridescent wings.

I am lucky to live somewhere so beautiful.

*On my way home, I always feel I have successfully left the world behind when I turn onto the Ridge from the highway.

A YEAR AGO: A creepy visitor.

FIVE YEARS AGO: Learning about Hooterville’s storied past.

TEN YEARS AGO: An adventure with my sister and the late, great Schatzi. We will never stop missing her.

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO: Some random notes.

The grandfather clock in my house is probably older than this country, depending on whether it was made by John Jullion Senior (born 1701) or Junior (born 1734). Mr. Jullion was a famous clockmaker from Brentford, England, who also made the oldest clock still on public display in Australia. That one was made in 1770. Even if it’s Junior, the clock is around 250 years old. And very well-travelled.

I first met this grand old timepiece at my grandparents’ home in Surrey. They moved into the house when they were married in the 1920s and lived there for the rest of their long lives. The clock had been in Grammie’s family since it was first built, coming down through Grammie’s mother’s family, the Smiths.

At my grandparents’ house, the clock lived in the dining room, which was used for every meal, but was also sacred to the game of cricket. When there was a match – especially a Surrey match – on the wireless (radio), no one could make a sound in the house while Daddy’s Daddy listened to the game in the solitary splendor of the dining room.

The Clock

When my grandparents died, the clock was shipped to us, and when Dad retired back to his native England, the heirloom timepiece made its majestic journey with him. Unlike Dad’s 9 year old mutt Jesse, it did not have to be quarantined, and ended up living, like Jesse, in my stepmother Margaret’s lovely house in Wimbledon. About a dozen miles from where Dad grew up. Indeed, Dad used to walk Jesse on the same downs where he walked with own father as a boy.

Dad wound the clock twice a week, and it kept good time in Margaret’s pretty sitting room overlooking the big garden.

When we lost Dad, I gained a clock, and it once again made its way across the ocean, this time to San Francisco, which was a mere wilderness when it was first built. Very long-time readers may recall the battle with Customs and the hassle of getting it set up and running again in my San Francisco apartment, where it lived in the hallway.

At that point in the clock’s long life, I learned that my great grandfather, the splendidly named Sydney Joseph Beaumont Smith (all of his children had only one first name), had cut the clock down from its original height in order to fit it into the flat where he and his family lived, above his butcher shop in Chiswick.

It was something of an Antiques Roadshow moment, where a person learns that if they only hadn’t cleaned that painting, it would be worth a million dollars, and now it’s only worth $20. But the value for me is not the financial one. It is knowing that generations of my family have cared for this timepiece, lovingly made by hand by a craftsman centuries ago, and now I am the guardian of the family legacy. It’s knowing that my grandparents used to listen to its measured tick, as did my great grandparents and earlier generations of my family, and that we are all bound together by the shared experience of caring for and marking our lives and our time together by this ancient timepiece.

A YEAR AGO: I was crowned. And not in a good way.

FIVE YEARS AGO: A lovely evening at the theater with the girls.

TEN YEARS AGO: The story of Henry, the stray cat who found her way into my heart. Our time together wasn’t long enough, but it was sweet.

Mom, 1942

I was yanked out of one of my weird dreams (is there any other kind? My two brain cells seem to go on a riotous rampage when I’m asleep. It’s like David Lynch’s Funhouse in there most nights) at 3:00 am. I knew the answering machine would pick up before I could find my glasses and stumble to the phone, so I didn’t try to dislodge Clyde and get up.

When the phone rang again not three minutes later, I did get up and answer it, and there was no one there, at least no one who wanted to admit they were there. My feeling is that if someone makes you answer the phone, they should talk to you. They should at least apologize for getting you out of bed at 3:00 am.

A friend of mine said it must be one of those robo calls, but what do they get out of it if they don’t even try to scam you?

I went back to bed, though not to sleep. We are a family of bad sleepers, and in my case, if I get woken up, it’s difficult verging on impossible to get back to sleep. I lay there in the dark with Clyde once again cuddled up to me, and I thought how when the phone rang in the depths of the night, I instinctively thought it was about Mom, even though I know that’s impossible and even though she’s been gone for 15 years. I guess her long and terrible decline has left permanent scars behind. Also, it happened to be the day after my mother’s birthday. Not a milestone birthday – 88 years – but a birthday nonetheless, and I always think of her more often around those days.

The next day, I turned on the radio and they were playing a song from the Moody Blues’ “Seventh Sojourn”. That was one of Mom’s favorite records and she played it a lot when I was a girl. It was amazing how listening to that song brought me right back to that time, when Megan was just a baby. I seem to remember it was playing the first time Megan laughed. I remember her lying in the playpen in the sun, looking at the flowers on the syringa bush waving in the wind outside the window, kicking her little feet and laughing joyously.

As I remembered that long-ago day, listened to the music, and thought about that early morning phone call, I wondered if it was all Mom. After all, I thought, if anyone could do it, she could.

A YEAR AGO: An update on Dodge. I’m happy to say that none of these things have changed. He is a joy.

FIVE YEARS AGO: Getting used to the new job. I am pleased to say that my office is much improved these days, at least in appearance.

TEN YEARS AGO: Back home after a trip to the City, missing little Henry Etta.

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO: Mom celebrated her last birthday in the hospital, her spirit unbowed despite everything. I miss you, Mom.

Despite the horror of the lamb* and the milder ick of the cauliflower soup, I had not totally given up on the lure of the Michelin starred food right here in Nowhere. After the shocking unappetizingness of the last meal, I gently suggested that they might want to post the menu before taking orders for the meal. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one, since they did just that and it sounded pretty good:

This time, the dessert cost extra. It was “Japanese cheesecake”, and since I do not like cheesecake and Asian desserts tend to be on the overly sweet and weird side for me, I passed on that in favor of a loaf of their excellent sourdough bread instead.

Instead of going home that Friday, I kept going down to the South Coast. It was a beautiful day for a drive:

As I paused to take some photos, I saw a whale flip his tail out of the water and another spouting as he made his majestic way through the blue waters of the Pacific. Arriving at the restaurant, I was handed a plain brown paper bag, and I retraced my steps back home, where I unpacked it:

Apparently, the foragers were not successful, since there was slaw instead of foraged salad. I called the restaurant to ask how to assemble it. It turned out there was orange-ginger slaw on the side, and the rest of it (toasted sesame and hemp seeds; fresh cilantro and basil; and preserved lime) all got mixed together with the pork and rice noodles.

The soup was pretty heavy, though velvety, and rather dull. Same goes for the slaw. The noodles were ordinaire other than the preserved lime, a new ingredient to me which was delightful and which I would like to try making at home. Secretly (or perhaps not so secretly, since I just told you), I prefer the pork noodles I make, which seems astonishingly conceited, especially for someone who will never have a Michelin star or even half of one. At least it was only $18 per person instead of $180. Maybe it doesn’t translate well to take out or perhaps I can’t appreciate the subtlety of haute cuisine. At least I tried.

*Am amazed that they haven’t come up with a euphemism for it, like “beef” for “cow” and “veal” for “tortured baby cow”. They aren’t even pretending it’s something else.

A YEAR AGO: An unexpected, and unexpectedly moving funeral.

FIVE YEARS AGO: My past selves. I wish I had appreciated being young and cute when I was young and cute.

TEN YEARS AGO: The peaceful death of my beloved Henry Etta, the little stray cat who found a permanent place in my heart. I still miss that scrappy little thing.