Author: shainorton

Somewhere between 'once upon a time' and 'they killed it with fire'.

Understanding the Assignment

Daily writing prompt
Share a story about someone who had a positive impact on your life.
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A little post-Mother’s Day story about one of the other mothers I’ve had in my life.

Mrs. Gelena Carter Fisk, my fourth grade teacher, gave me a pair of knives at the bridal shower my childhood church held to celebrate my first wedding.

She didn’t want a penny in exchange. Mom was concerned that I didn’t offer her one anyway, never mind that we were standing in a church fellowship hall, and if there was going to be an Old World superstition that could get into the building after me past my grandfather’s ghost (he had died across the street five years prior), we really would need the Good Lord to step in and break it up.

I wasn’t the target. Mrs. Fisk was side-eyeing my ex when she handed me the box and announced what it contained.

Not long after, he decided to use the paring knife as a screwdriver. The tip slipped and snapped: I don’t know if he got cut when it broke, because he didn’t let me see him do it.

I took the carving knife with me when I left. Even after thirty-two years, it’s still super-sharp, though I haven’t done anything to it but make sure I handwash it instead of throwing it into the dishwasher.

I should say we, because my husband now also uses it routinely. Oh, he did wait until after we had our son, and when he uses it, it’s usually to slice something he’s baked from scratch.

Thanks, Mrs. Fisk. Happy Belated Mother’s Day!

The butchered cake behind the knife is my Mother's Day cake, a chocolate raspberry with dark chocolate ganache. It's the second round of my husband's experimentation with amping the protein and reducing the sugar in our baked goods.

The Continued Renegotiation of Ordinary Processes

It hasn’t been exciting here, which is frankly, awesome. I’ve had a few chats with recruiters; I’m still not actively looking, but I do take calls, and if I have a good conversation about one I can’t do, I pass it along to the folks I know who are looking. I still haven’t been able to make myself work on the refresher training I need for my professional certifications, but … I’ll get to it. I will. Really.

The writing’s going great, though! The rest of everything else is also getting there, one step, one wondering why something was put where I found it, one trip over the dog, one lily bulb in the dirt at a time.

I took Metro in to meet the NFCW for lunch last Friday. We didn’t know where we would eat or wander around, I didn’t think I could use my husband’s car1, and if I’m driving my truck, I don’t go anywhere near the Beltway without a pre-established plan to park. While my truck is not obscenely large, I’m not the most confident about how it should occupy space, even though I do have most of the fancy bells and whistles (not auto-parking because I don’t trust it). I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 23 for … many reasons, but let’s go with being verifiably inept at parallel parking. My beloved Mazda CX-9 also taught me some embarrassing lessons about needing a lot more space between cars than what’s afforded by just being at rest fully inside painted parking lines.

(Hey, automakers? Vehicles aimed at parents who don’t like to drive mini-vans need doors that will not slam into neighboring parked cars even if they are opened carefully by children who have earned the right to open their doors themselves. Or, y’know, by those parents trying to model civilized parking lot behavior.2)

It had been a while since I’ve eaten out in a restaurant; quite literally, the last week of December, when I met the NFCW for lunch after turning my work gear in.

Fortunately, I did not forget how, and the usual disaster associated with the cuisine we picked didn’t happen during the meal3. I thought this might have been a fluke, so, I tested it yesterday: I persuaded the husband to go out with me to grab lunch at a local Thai place before going to the grocery store (also together, which is something else we haven’t done for a lot longer than just the last week of December).

One stumble at a time, y’all. One stumble at a time.

  1. It was in the shop for almost two weeks due to deferred warranty/recall repairs. ↩︎
  2. Shout out to the mother who was yelling at someone on your cell phone while screaming at your kids and flooring your Lincoln Navigator in reverse until you smashed into the cart corral of the Target in Manalapan, NJ, WHERE. I. WAS. PUTTING. UP. MY. CART. WHILE. CARRYING. MY. TODDLER. ON. MY. HIP. YOU. OBLIVIOUS. PIECE. OF. SHIT.

    It’s been almost eighteen years since that incident, and I am happy to report that my son didn’t develop a trauma response to returning shopping carts when he’s done with them!

    Please continue to enjoy your stay in the pits of Hell. ↩︎
  3. We had Chinese food. It’s been my experience that sauces in Asian restaurants have traditionally had a slightly different relationship with gravity than they do at home, or they’re more attracted to the clothes I wear outside the house. ↩︎

Spring Cleaning, Excava-intentionally

Monday would have been my mother’s 76th birthday.

I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t automatically remember her birthday. I have a new OB/GYN, and the realization dawned on me while she and I were reviewing my family history during my first visit. My doctors are generally horrified when they notice that Mom died when she was 66, and yeah, I routinely add to that horror by pointing out that her sister didn’t even make it to 60.1

I’ve just started the late fifties to sixties gauntlet.

I am in much better health than my aunt was when she was my age, though the kidney stone I got last year did scare the crap out of me for a while2 since she did pass due to renal failure. I am also healthier than my mother was; I’ve never smoked, and I added ‘cardiac health’ to my routine of regular checkups years ago because I would really rather have some warning of a potential heart problem in advance than having to deal with the aftermath of having experienced one. The regular checkups have also helped me get a handle on some issues that I could do something about before they became things that required medications to manage.

Not that I’m opposed to medications if they’re necessary. I’d just prefer it if they weren’t, for as long as possible. Like antihistamines, augh. Two weekends ago, I promised myself that I’ll make a habit of taking the damn things every day that I plan to go dig in the dirt this year instead of suffering for weeks or, worse, winding up in my dermatologist’s office because I have a histamine reaction I can’t get under control without help.

So far, I’ve kept that promise! The side effect of keeping that promise, however, is that it deprives me of a ready-made excuse to lounge on the couch and doomscroll instead of gardening. Eh, making myself do things I enjoy is for my own good, right?

  1. On the bright side, I’ve had blood relatives who lived deep into their nineties and even a little beyond. Many of these allegedly had most of their marbles up until the end. However, the truth of this might have been obscured by their pre-existing mental aberrations and/or their storytellers’ magical thinking. ↩︎
  2. …until the cause was pinned to excessive dehydration triggered by mono and COVID. ↩︎

Spring Cleaning, Dementedly

There’s nothing wrong with your eyes: I did change the blog format. Actually, I messed around with it so much last week that I got disgusted and walked away without even writing a blog post. Trust me, you didn’t miss anything exciting. Chaotic? Unexpected? Not great? Also surprisingly good? Yep, all of these things did happen last week.

This week, I talked myself into attending a writers’ social. There were writers. They were social. Nobody ran away screaming, and I didn’t slip out the nearest exit at the first opportunity … okay, I didn’t actually get an opportunity to do that, but it was fine. Completely fine! Everything will be okay, except for the things that aren’t and won’t be.

The spring cleaning continues. I stumbled across a cache of old micro and flash fiction that I used to have posted here and various other places, and decided to put some of it back online. I’ll be doing that gradually over the next few weeks, as I continue to procrastinate about things to blog about my spring cleaning.

Spring Cleaning, Ontologicaldociousnessly

I didn’t hear from the potential employer this week, either. It’s fine. Everything’s crazed right now, so I honestly wasn’t expecting to. I spent most of the week spring cleaning. Correction, I spent part of the week planning how I was going to tackle spring cleaning, and the rest of the week accumulating schedule-cruft that’ll need to be factored into executing the spring cleaning plan.

Yes, I may put the ‘er … hi’ into overthinking.

Speaking of cleaning, I … augh. I should explain. I was one of those annoying teenagers who wrote poetry, but worse: I started when I was in my tweens.

I didn’t willingly call it poetry; grownups did, and I just quickly agreed with them so they felt right enough to change the subject before they could notice my discomfort, or worse, want to talk about what I was actually doing. I was lining up words and gleefully sharing them with the universe because I wanted to boot them and their gluey mood-baggage out of my skull. Out, git, scram, leave me alone, go find someone else to bother.

Since I wasn’t a poet and would never be one, I didn’t feel I had to follow any poetry rules, such as paying attention to syllables.1

In some ways, I have never grown up. Now and again, I accumulate stacks of words that need to be chucked onto the curb for bagged waste pickup.

Here’s the latest one:

To hide
I undress
To dissemble
I disassemble
To repent
I rebuild
To reveal
I redress

I’m sorry, and I would promise never to do it again, but I’m pretty sure I can’t. I did make a new page to stick all this stuff on, so at least it’ll be out of the way from here on out.

  1. Ms. Samford, if you ever stumble across this blog, please accept my apology for resisting learning haiku and cinquain. I did eventually make a begrudging peace with sonnets. ↩︎

Unpredicted Predicable Explosions

Last week’s prediction was off by a day:  the loaf of basic white sandwich bread didn’t last until Friday. I said “No problem! I’ve got this! I now know what I was doing wrong,” followed all the same steps, and wound up with a mixing bowl full of raw dough that stubbornly refused to rise after 180 minutes.

Correction:  I followed all the same steps but one. Instead of using a random packet of active dry yeast that I found hanging out at the back of the spice drawer, I used active dry yeast from the bulk lot I’ve had stashed in a jar in the freezer since 2020. The yeast bloomed like it was supposed to (but no more than that) and gave up the ghost while rising.

I gave up hope for that yeast’s still being good or at least inconsistent on the side of evil and found another packet of yeast in the spice drawer. This batch bloomed vigorously. I had a very puffy first rise, and during the second rise, the dough spilled out of the pan. The loaf that resulted was very short, because the rise was so vigorous it ejected a lot of the volume. It looked like a bomb hit it.

Speaking of explosions, I finally lost it at my in-laws.

Continue reading “Unpredicted Predicable Explosions” →

Penguins III: Snow Day

Happy post-Super Bowl week, if you’re on the Philly side of Pennsylvania. We are not, and are celebrating about as much as we intend to celebrate Valentine’s Day, which is … not really. I think I have chili mac planned for dinner that night1. We have zero incentive to go out, even if we are no longer snowed in that day, unless that’s the only decent window for getting to a grocery store before we are snowed in again.

The most romantic gift I can think of right now2 would be a new snowblower to replace the one that died during the last snowstorm or a new vacuum cleaner to replace the one I killed last week.

Speaking of a total lack of ambition, not that I was, but I decided to update the old page about the penguins and put it back up on this blog. I have gotten questions about them lately from folks who aren’t already in on that inside joke, so yeah, it was time? Maybe? Anyway, it’s here if you don’t want to click the link at the top of the blog.

And speaking of ongoing inside jokes about my being the last to join new social media platforms, I’m finally on Bluesky. You can find me there at shainorton.bsky.social.

  1. I suspect either my husband or I (or both of us) will want to bake something, though, even if I just wind up making more bread instead of waiting for the weekend. My last loaf of basic sandwich bread, unlike all of the others I baked in 2024 and January 2025, was not cursed! It came out great! It will probably be gone before Friday! ↩︎
  2. Within reason, with minimum planning required. Unreasonable things that require planning are way too much of a stretch for February. Ask me how I know … or better yet, don’t. We also have our wedding anniversary this month, which we’ll probably hold off on celebrating until summer, or maybe early fall. ↩︎

Move Slow, Carry a Broom

Happy not-Monday, February, or pre-Super Bowl week, whichever you celebrate. If you’re celebrating, that is. If you’re not, that’s completely understandable, because…

Dang, I’m in this weird mental space1 of feeling like I dodged a bullet by leaving my last role and guilty that I didn’t stick it out to face the mess alongside the people I was working with, never mind how unreasonable doing that would have been. All the reasons I needed to walk are still just as valid as they were in December and as unrelated to the current Great Collapsing Hrung Dis … I mean kerfluffle.

Other than that, I don’t have a lot of things to say, interesting or otherwise2. I did succeed in killing another vacuum, a picture of which is on Instagram3. That’s been the third vacuum since we’ve gotten the dog. We should probably stick to using a broom on the carpet.

  1. Yeah, it’s equipped with inner Musak. I’ve had “Fortnight,” the chorus of “I Had Some Help” (most noticeably when I’m cleaning), and “Nosedive” stuck in an earworm loop for a few days now. I’m sure this will clear up once we’re out of endless February and I’ve clawed my way up past the rubble. ↩︎
  2. Writing’s happening. Professional Education … isn’t yet. My home office plants have perked up enough to stare at the back of my head and plot vengeance. I think. I’m a little afraid to turn around to look at them. ↩︎
  3. Oh, yes, I also succeeded in joining Instagram! It only took, uhm, a while. My username there (nine.penguins) is a throwback to my old LiveJournal, which I swear I took down a long time ago, but it’s still apparently online. At least the earlier posts of Modus Dementi have had the decency to stay in their box, seriously, y’all … I just can’t even. ↩︎