Now who's going to help me eat all these cookies?

Two weeks ago I spent a Saturday morning baking two kinds of Christmas cookies and shooing the resident cookie-eaters away from the results: Don't touch! They're for a campus event! Finally I promised that I'd bake some more as we got closer to Christmas.

Both kinds of cookies earned praise at our campus cookie event, but I brought home a lot of the Russian Teacakes. They're well loved by many different names but no one ever asks for the recipe.

However, several people wanted the recipe for the other cookies I baked: Chocolate-Covered Cherry Cookies. I know exactly how long I've owned the recipe because it came inside a holiday recipe box we received as a wedding gift 43 years ago. Since then it's been a regular part of my holiday repertoire, along with Santa's Whiskers, Nick-0f-Time Cranberry White Chocolate Drops, cut-out cookies, and Jam Thumbprints. But I've never shared this recipe here--until now.

These cookies are rich and chocolatey, with a burst of yummy cherry in the middle. I always make a horrible mess assembling them, but you won't lack for volunteers to lick the spoon. 

Chocolate-Covered Cherry Cookies

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
10 oz. maraschino cherries, drained (but save the liquid)
6 oz. semisweet chocolate pieces
1/2 cup sweetened condensed milk

Stir together flour, cocoa powder, salt, baking powder, and baking soda; set aside. In mixer bowl cream butter and sugar. Add egg and vanilla; beat until well blended. Gradually add dry ingredients; beat until well blended. 

Shape dough into one-inch balls; place on ungreased cookie sheet. Press down center of each ball with thumb. Place a cherry in the center of each cookie.

In a small saucepan, combine chocolate pieces and sweetened condensed milk; heat, stirring, until chocolate is melted. Add 4 tsp. of reserved cherry juice. (If it's too thick to spread, add a little more.) Spoon frosting over each cookie, spreading to cover cherry. 

Bake at 350 degrees about 10 minutes or until done. Let cool before removing from pan.

 

Because that's how we roll

For our 43rd anniversary, my husband gave me a massive book on the history of Maori art, a gorgeous compendium I've been wish-listing for ages. I gave him a tomahawk steak the size of his head at the Bears Den restaurant in Cambridge, Ohio, part of our annual holiday trek to visit with the taxidermy, view the courthouse light show, and eat the best beef on the planet--or at least our part of the planet.

The book weighs 8.9 pounds. The steak weighed significantly less. A good time was had by all, except maybe the elk that appeared to be looking for the rest rooms.

Not photoshopped. That bone is at least a foot long.

Fingers to show scale. The pages are thick and glossy and covered with beautiful things.

Doing my small part to make the world a better place

I staggered like a drunkard while walking into Wal-Mart would be a great line in a country song, but for me it's just another Wednesday. Plagued with vertigo connected to an inner-ear problem, I nevertheless headed out to do some holiday errands but found myself reeling through the parking lot and reaching out to strangers' cars to maintain balance. Kind of embarrassing, especially since the entire population of Washington County had apparently decided to shop at Wal-Mart yesterday. I saw a woman trying to push a shopping cart crammed full of all manner of stuff topped with a huge wide-screen TV box while eleventy-seven small children trailed behind not very calmly. She's the one who should have been staggering, but there I was holding on to the battery display so I wouldn't fall over. I needed to buy five small items--why did I have to wait behind a half-dozen people in the self-checkout lane while suffering from a vertigo attack? Sure, I could have stayed home, but where's the fun in that? 

Every day this week I've had to do some dumb errand on campus, and every day I've vowed that that's the last time I'm visiting campus until January. But stuff comes up. I needed to do some prep work for the workshop I'm leading on January 13, which seems a long time off but if we don't order lunch now, there won't be anyone on campus to take the order for weeks. And someone has to buy door prizes, so someone has to check out a college credit card, which can't be done after the business office closes for the holidays. And then someone else wanted to meet me on campus to give me a gift (very nice!) and I was on the way to deliver some freshly laid eggs after my annual glaucoma test (no change--all good!) and I knew the person I was meeting has been ill and can eat a very limited diet that happens to include eggs, so I let her take half of the very beautiful blue and green eggs and took the other half up the hill to my retired colleague, who had admired the eggs when I'd posted a pic online and wondered where she could get some green eggs (unaccompanied by ham). No wonder I'm dizzy! 

It's probably the weather change, which can set off a vertigo attack, or it might herald an impending migraine. In a masterpiece of poor timing, I've been reading Mary Roach's excellent book Packing for Mars and I happened yesterday to read the chapter on the problem of motion sickness among astronauts. Just reading about the Vomit Comet made me want to puke. It was interesting to learn, though, that I'm not the only person in the world who can suffer debilitating vertigo as a result of (takes a deep breath) sitting on a rocking chair, sitting on a swing, getting a glimpse of a rotating fan, spinning in anything resembling the Mad Teacup Ride, reading in the car, looking in the wrong direction while riding on a boat, turning my head to the side quickly when my head is stuffed up, or any number of other ordinary experiences.

Which is yet another reason why we're once again not going on a cruise for our anniversary. My husband used to lobby pretty heavily for going on a cruise, but he has seen me seasick enough times to have given it a rest. The closest I've ever come to suicide was on a three-hour whale-watching boat out of Monterey Bay. Even our little canoe can sometimes set me off if we're sitting still and bobbing. Yesterday, though, I didn't need a boat or a swing or a fan or any mad teacups: something shifted in my inner ear and boom, I was making a spectacle of myself in front of the entire county in the Wal-Mart parking lot.

Well if my antics made a few people laugh, if I lightened the load for just one overburdened shopper, if I provided an object lesson to a parent encouraging a teen not to drink and drive, then maybe my vertigo attack made the world just a teeny bit better for someone. It's literally the least I can do, short of actually puking.

43 years ago today

Our chickens are little artists

Angelic voices, eclectic spaces

Two holiday concerts one week apart:

Last week I enjoyed Handel's Messiah sung by a heavenly host of singers, including my husband, accompanied by orchestra and harpsichord in the historic Basilica of St. Mary of the Assumption, an ornately decorated worship space where hundreds of listeners sat on rows of pews surrounded by statuary, stained glass, imported marble, and angels, lots of angels, including cherubs hovering around the ascending Mary up front and, above our heads, a phalanx of carved angels holding torches on their heads.

Yesterday we watched five women (including our daughter) singing Christmas music in close harmony, without accompaniment, in Cuyahoga Falls at the historic Jenks Building, in a converted garage where a spattering of observers who had braved the horrible weather sat on mismatched chairs surrounded by decor I can only describe as eclectic: an industrial-size coffee roaster on one side of the performance space and a canoe hanging from the ceiling on the other, plus piles of used books and vinyl records, unusual light fixtures and barking dogs sculpted from scrap metal and fish trophies and framed covers of Time magazine featuring Kennedys and a drill bit the size of my oldest grandkid and an anvil and a small statue of a man playing saxophone and, above our heads, a bust of a man wearing on his head not torches but what looked like a small satellite dish.

During the final leg of our two-hour drive to yesterday's concert, the weather was awful enough to prompt me to ask out loud, "Is it worth killing ourselves in a snowstorm just to get to this concert?"

Reader: it was. Spending a couple of hours surrounded by music so lovely it makes me smile clear down to the soles of my feet is worth any effort, whether it's Handel in the basilica or "The Holly and the Ivy" in the garage.

I rarely carry much cash but, thanks to an unusual series of events, last week I ended up with a fifty-dollar bill and a twenty in my wallet, and after the Messiah performance I decided I would put my hand in my purse and pull out a bill blindly to put it into the plate, and then yesterday the other bill went into the tip jar. I'd do it again in a heartbeat. You can't buy holiday cheer, but those experiences were worth every penny.

Voices of angels.

Coffee roaster the size of a locomotive

The singers in the family

Not a clue. Seriously, I've got nothing.

Snoopy in his Sopwith Camel?

Sn

Junkyard dogs

Deck the halls with bogus sources

So I'm sitting in the waiting room while my car undergoes routine maintenance and I'm feeling rather virtuous. Why? Because instead of watching the television tuned to the Sky Is Falling Channel, and instead of doomscrolling on my phone, and instead of playing the vintage PacMan game in the corner, I'm writing Christmas cards. So much to do in the holiday season and here I am providing a shining example of efficiency! But really it's just another way to put off grading research papers.

How do I procrastinate? Let me count the ways: I grade all the little things that don't take much thought, respond to a million not-so-urgent emails, bake cookies, write cards, shop for gifts, attend concerts, visit the holiday tree display at the park, mail packages--but I still haven't started grading research papers.

On Tuesday in our Center for Teaching Excellence I spent five hours hanging out with colleagues while eating cookies and laughing my head off (at this link, among other things), which was very therapeutic--but I really needed to be grading research papers.

I could have postponed mailing packages until the weather cleared up but instead I drove to the horrible downtown post office, made a futile circuit of the overstuffed parking lot, drove around the block in the pouring rain, and finally parked at the only available spot down the street--but that was just the first half of my Adventures in Package-Mailing. Then I had to toddle up the hill in the rain while juggling an umbrella and two bulky packages that blocked my view, and I didn't have enough hands free to manage the umbrella and the packages AND open the door so I got thoroughly wet in the struggle while an older guy in a gentleman's cap stood nearby laughing at me. Not the highlight of my holiday season--but it was better than grading research papers.

To be clear, these are not traditional research papers at all. My Nature Writing students wrote a persuasive essay that required a minimum of five sources, but some of those sources could be interviews with experts. Only nine papers--maybe I can finish them today (if I ever stop blogging and start grading).

The first-year seminar papers are more challenging. I'm down to sixteen students (from a high of 19 at the start) and I believe one of them never turned in a paper, so there's one down and 15 to go. They had to write something I call a researched persuasive memo, trying to persuade a specific person or group to take a specific action in order to improve education (however the students want to interpret that). They were required to use at least three sources, which ideally would all be academic sources drawn from our research databases but I'm not holding my breath. I had a dickens of a time trying to get students to understand that quoting from the online abstract is not the same as citing the article itself, but even those abstract-dependent essays are easier to grade than the ones that provide only vague references without actual citations. 

Because I'm going to have to check sources. Maybe not all of them, but at least one per paper and more if things don't add up. Some students won't provide sufficient bibliographic info so I'll have to try to find the sources myself. Some students will misunderstand or misrepresent sources, through either sloppiness or intent (though it's hard to tell at this stage). And some sources will be entirely imaginary, invented by an anonymous AI. 

Here I am enjoying the heck out of the holiday season; I'm wearing a holiday sweater and festive socks and I'm fully equipped to spread holiday cheer at a moment's notice, but instead I have to force myself to read a whole bunch of research papers.

So I'm giving myself a stern talking-to: no more holiday cheer until the papers are graded. No more cookies or cards or packages or errands. It's time to turn aside from fa-la-la-la-la and pick up the research papers. 

If you don't hear from me by this time next week, send in the Saint Bernards. (Extra credit if they're carrying eggnog and cookies.)

 

 

 

TMI alert! (Seriously, go read something less icky)

I'd been sitting half-naked on an examination table for about 20 minutes with nothing but a flimsy paper blanket to cover my nether parts when a bright young thing in surgical scrubs poked her head through the door and asked, "Are you ready to get your IUD inserted?" Which would be a neat trick considering I haven't had a uterus since 2009. I don't know where you'd insert an IUD in someone lacking a uterus--or, for that matter, why.

My experience at the gynecologist's office this morning may look like a comedy of errors in retrospect, but it didn't feel particularly funny at the time. I've been suffering from a serious case of IPNBLRSTTBS Syndrome (It's Probably Nothing But Let's Run Some Tests To Be Sure), and this is where you'll want to close your eyes and cover your ears if you're allergic to ick. 

There's a bit of scar tissue, see, where my most private regions had endured massive amounts of radiation 16 years ago, and my new gynecologist wanted to do a biopsy on a polyp located there, which looked like a cervical polyp, but no insurance company is going to approve a biopsy on a cervical polyp for a person who lacks a cervix. So when I arrived today I signed a release form allowing removal of an endometrial polyp, but then someone in the chain of command noted that a person lacking a uterus probably doesn't have endometrial tissue either. In the end they had to tear up the signed release form and get me to sign a new one allowing removal of a vaginal polyp, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be two vaginal polyps, which were eventually removed. 

But first I had to spend a full 30 minutes waiting (and sweating and breathing deeply to try to keep my blood pressure under control), wondering what kind of wild party was taking place out at the nurses' station and why all the new medical staffers look like they just got out of the seventh grade and why I always carefully fold my clothes at the gynecologist's office so that the person poking around in my most intimate regions won't be exposed to my ratty old granny panties. What else was there to do but think, and fret, and sweat? 

I'm not proud of it, but eventually I got tired of waiting (and sweating, and fretting) so I used my cell phone to call the front desk and ask whether I'd been forgotten. What did they want me to do, walk out there in front of everyone and demand satisfaction while wrapped in a flimsy paper blanket? I had sweated so much that the paper was starting to disintegrate anyway, so I made the call.

"Don't worry, she's on the way," they said, and indeed she was, and within moments I was on my back enduring a procedure that was less painful than I'd expected but also more bloody. My longtime gynecologist--the one who did my hysterectomy and found the cancer and got me through all the horrors of treatment--was a dapper gentleman with the kindly gravitas of a modern Marcus Welby, and the new one who replaced him is on maternity leave, so I was dealing with someone I'd only just met who seemed caring and competent despite looking about twelve years old. She spoke like an intimacy coordinator, asking repeatedly, "All right if I touch you here?" Not sure what would have happened if I'd said no. I suspect it would be difficult to remove a vaginal polyp without touching some sensitive parts--er, tissues. Why does the word tissues make everything ickier?

But now it's all over but the waiting. Three to five days for biopsy results, 72 hours with no sex. (During my birthday week! Ah, the humanity!) I wondered about the propriety of writing about all this ick, but the advantage of having entered my Crone Era is that I'm allowed to write about whatever I want, and what I want right now is to wonder what happened to the woman who was expecting to get an IUD. Did some bright young thing poke her head in the door and ask, "Are you ready to get your polyps biopsied?" 

 

Errant u's, invisible emus, and other news

I have reached the point in the semester when little annoyances evoke outsize responses; for instance, yesterday I may have publicly threatened to employ a flamethrower against students who spell my name incorrectly. (Fourteen weeks into the semester and they can't figure out how many u's are in my last name?) 

PowerPoint slides with very small white text on a black background! Students who insist that they've "fixed" everything I marked on their drafts when they've corrected small errors but ignored the big stuff! A classroom thermostat that hisses, loudly, throughout a two-hour event! A new light fixture in the library that makes me want to distribute green visors to everyone forced to work under those harsh conditions! All these things have earned my ire in the past couple of days.

But probably my time would be better spent on a wild-emu chase. Actually I don't know whether the emus in question are wild or domesticated, and in fact I'm not entirely sure that emus respond to domestication, but I do know that people I know and trust, people who inherited a big chunk of my DNA, claim to have spotted emus in a fenced enclosure along a particular stretch of my daily commute. Every day since Thanksgiving I have looked for emus along that stretch of highway but I have not seen so much as a feather.

Well, I have seen some feathers, but they weren't on any emus. Yesterday a Carolina wren got into my house--who knows how?--and kept fluttering from room to room trying to find its way out. At one point it flew into our bedroom and hid behind a framed photograph of a ruby-crowned kinglet. Nice choice, but hiding in my bedroom is not a viable lifestyle for a wren.

So despite the cold weather we opened the back door wide, but the bird wouldn't come close while we were nearby. My husband left for an early meeting so I sat quietly, as far from the cold as I could get while still maintaining a clear view of the door, because otherwise I'd never know whether the bird got out of the house. (Once, years ago, we found a dead bird in a large plant pot downstairs. Who knows how long it had been in the house without our knowledge?) In the dead quiet I could hear the bird flittering here and there until finally it flew right out the back door, which made me happy because I'd had enough of letting the winter freeze invade my space. 

Meanwhile, deer hunting season has started, prompting one of my students to comment on what a great sacrifice he was making just to be in class on Monday. Others didn't bother trying. I hope they'll bag their deer, but local bag limits were severely reduced after a disease ravaged the local deer population this fall. I told a colleague that some of my students seem to have deer flu and she asked, "What are the symptoms?" Look for massive outbreaks of camouflage and hunter orange.

Finally, my adorable daughter, who shares my interest in holiday music and punctuation, sent me a link to a charming YouTube video attempting to answer a burning question: Where does the comma go in "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen"? Who can maintain an air of annoyance with such silliness about? Forget about the spelling errors, errant students, and emus; let's play with punctuation!