Love will Tear Us Apart: Almond Cardamom Pull-Apart Bread

Ah, it’s so nice to listen to music with lyrics again.  “Love will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division fits with today’s recipe and sermon.

I remade Columba di Pasqua as bubble bread or monkey bread or pull-apart bread because I am now steward of Lady Neona’s Bundt pan. Besides, I wanted to shape the CDP this year, but I also wanted pull-apart bread. Rather than risk a flat dove, I went for a different shape (and recipe) option.

Chocolate Macaroon Bundt Cake and the Importance of Water

It’s almost time. By the time I finish writing this post, Lent will be over in EST and I will be able to listen to music with lyrics again.

Checking in; Spaghetti and GLAMs

A presumption: you know how people ask you if you’re OK and you just say, without thinking, yes? For me, my relatives and other people to whom I report (willingly and unwillingly) ask me, “How’s [work] going?” and “How’s IIN going?” Sometimes my coworkers will ask me if I’m OK when I think I am OK. I really am OK. But it's a good question to ask sometimes to get below the surface. What am I missing about me? What do others see that I don’t see about me? </insecurity>

The Goddess of the Heavens...eats a very earthy stew and gets pissed off by pancakes

The sky goddess has her days, too. You know those days, when nothing seems to work the way you’d like?

Objects and Objections: Irish Soda Bread Revenants

Sing with me, to the tune of Greensleeves:

What slime is this, quite chauvinist,

into my lap is creeping?

Whom cannot bear what is not square

nor suffer sable clothing?

This, this is vileness

no tolerance for difference.

Haste, haste to breed them out

this slime, this fear of others.

--After “What Child is This,” by William C. Dix,1865

Pi Day: Pumpkin Pecan Coconut Pie

What else is circular? Syncrhonicity. Synchronicity, as explained by Carl Jung, is “the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, yet are experienced as occurring together in a meaningful manner."(Wikipedia).

In simpler terms, stuff happens and it seems to be related to previous stuff.

In the House of Dreams

For the past three weeks, I have dreamt about the inside of a house. It is not just any house, it is a mansion, a schloss in Bavaria, I decided. Outside the floor-length windows in the main hall, it s always purplish, cloudy dusk over snow-covered, black, rocky mountains. I see the northeastern view. A gallery runs around the inside of the hall, separating first from second floors, but I haven't seen the stairs. Curiously, the walls are either plain dark wood paneling or whitewashed plaster. Different people I know from my current life have appeared in my dreams there. I don't know what it means, other than it's some sort of mashup of the pirate feast and SCA events and Nosferatu and Carmilla.

Practicing Presence: Baignan Bharta

I bought some lotion the other day.

Kiss My Face’s “Super-Hydrating Moisturizer” in coconut variety.

I had a coupon and my hands are cracking from all the hand-washing I do and from working in a cold environment (yeah, nobody wants to work those registers by the door). In hindsight, I reflected, as I rubbed the thick cream on my hands before putting on my Halloween sock-gloves before bed, I could’ve saved myself a couple bucks and put coconut oil on my hands. Granted, my sheets would’ve become uber-greasy but my chapped hands might knit back together, thus, uh, lubricated.

Confronting the Cupcake

“Don’t hang out down there.”

I heard or “heard” it in a yoga practice. Either the instructor said it or that little voice to which it would behoove me to pay more attention said it in my head. Don’t hang out for longer than necessary in a position. Otherwise we risk injury and our energy becomes stagnant.