Country Caulking

On a chilly night the new acrylic indoor storm windows leaked cold, so feeling around the single-pane window frame and catching breezes, I looked carefully and saw all three layers of the window frame needed caulking, right now, in the ever-narrower space in Missouri between hot summer and cold winter, neither of those good for caulking.

In September I spent three days caulking a historic single-pane window real nice (with "antique white"), but this one is 1969 in an aluminum frame and it rained yesterday and it'll rain tomorrow so instead of having fun I got the stepladder and drop cloths, plastic bags, nitrile gloves, wet rags and caulking gun and worked quick and dirty. Nearly every inch of this 85-year-old house needs caulking. Aproned and teetering and reaching overhead and messing up, I do it about every 10 years. This time I noticed caulk technology has changed; now soap and water will get it out of your hair and off your gloves and pants.

Inner critic: Your caulking stinks.
Me: Shut up. It's better than yours.
Inner critic: Should have cut the the tube a narrower tip --
Me: I didn't see you lending a hand.
Inner critic: Slow and steady. Don't smooth beads with your finger; use a craft stick! What a mess! Don't you have a sponge? Don't poke at that, it's almost dry! Now it's worse!
Me: The caulk didn't fill it up the first time.
Inner critic: It would have, if you'd been patient --
Me: Cram it.

The photo is AFTER I caulked and while it's curing. Yes, it's hoosier, but it looks a lot like the art downtown at the Pulitzer. In the right light.

Warmth. Light. Clarity.

Deciding "how I wanted the rest of my life to go," seeing the chances of remarriage receding and deciding to remain here, certain things had to change, like how I burned last winter three 400-gallon tanks of propane by defiantly keeping the cabin's temp at 70 degrees, like normal people. All year I dreaded winter and winterized the single-pane windows with inch-thick foam insulation cut to fit -- a tradeoff between warmth and light, lasting six months: half the year. Neither pleasant nor healthy, and I didn't want company to see my lightless house either.

With old furniture and a ton of books, scrapbooks, yearbooks, etc. hauled or thrown away and by moving a few pieces, I enjoyed the airiness of a non-furnished living room, but it should have, like, seating. What type? Where to put it? I was getting ahead of myself. I listed on my whiteboard my priorities: Warmth. Light. Clarity. Secondarily: Fun (twice over!), welcome/hospitality, wanting to stay here all year, and consciousness -- meaning setting the room up for gladness and ease.

Choosing according to priorities and not budget, style, or whim, I began to change. I sit erect now (forced to, by a new office chair), wear my hair off my face, have pencils and pens nearby.  Bureau-drawer dividers -- $2! -- and a box for gym clothes saved time. Why had such items never crossed my mind? The gorgeous Divine Fireplace has never worked and never will, a daily disappointment. So why in all these years hadn't I sought an alternative? New windows the landlord wouldn't pay for, and I couldn't pay for, but indoor storm windows could offer light and insulation in winter. Did that meet my priorities? Yes. Should I invest in them, given that the house isn't mine? They're custom-made, so not returnable. But how do I want the rest of my life to go? The Divine Cabin needs five. I bought two, and we shall see.

Women's Wear Nightly

JEFFERSON COUNTY, Mo. - The un-insulated bedroom, a 1969 addition to the Divine Cabin, presents a heating challenge typically addressed by a heated mattress pad, flannel sheets, a space heater and inch-thick insulation taped over the single-pane windows, but on harsher nights those are not enough, and one must, in addition, consider one's jammies.

Besides being sleepwear, jammies are often worn all morning, or down to the mailbox, topped with a parka. Stone-washed in well water at least weekly, by April the pair that was new in autumn is rags, or only one-half of the jammie set survives, as with the blue-striped Lanz pajama bottoms pictured here smartly teamed with a coral-colored long-sleeved Calida henley top for up-to-the-minute bedtime fashion flair, both in pure cotton.

Lanz of Salzburg and Calida of Switzerland sell quality Euro-jammies and undies able to survive this lifestyle for several winters. The Lanz jammie pants are four winters old, the coral Calida top, five. One multi-colored striped Calida nightie has shared the wearer's bed for three winters and she looks forward to more. After its annual laundering it smells divine! From the label Joe Boxer, sold at Sears and K-Mart and sewn in Bangladesh, this season's statement jammies feature stylized melon- and cherry-colored hearts, and the buttons on the top are hot pink glitter, and one can only imagine the thoughts of the workers in the sweatshop in Bangladesh.

Observers have responded to the heart-print jammies thus: 1) "That looks like a clown suit" and 2) "Hearts all over, soooo cute!" What people think and say about your leisurewear is so important! Never think it's beneath the fashion radar!

Where Oh Where?

I just came in from tearing open the trash bag and spreading last week's garbage out on newspapers on the lawn, finally sorting through the last place I wanted to look for a pair of glasses I lost last week, and they weren't in there. They aren't in the car either. In fact I know they're in the house, because I remember coming home from the gun range and showering off the lead and changing my clothes, as anyone who shoots for sport ought to do,  telling myself I should also rinse off the frames on the prescription spectacles I wore.

I think I actually did rinse them and dry them. Where the specs went from there is a mystery. I believe I had them near as I worked in the living room and home office that evening. I change specs a lot, because I need computer specs for computer work, and have three pairs of regular specs, all in different rooms at different times, and costly because they're no-line bifocals, a complicated prescription, et cetera, too costly to replace without seriously hunting out where the lost ones went. I have others. I still want the lost pair.

That was last Thursday. The housekeeper came Friday, after I had already begun searching. She did not find any spectacles on the floor, the shelves, or behind anything, and I have double-checked all those spots. Have you seen them? They are very dark brown, nearly black, and squarish with the rims around the lenses bright pink. Nobody else can use them. I think it's time to pledge $10 to St. Anthony, patron of lost things, and he will help (why wouldn't he?).

We Want Chickens

In the meadow is a remnant of some wooden structure and a rusted wire fence. For 15 years I've imagined it was once a chicken coop. I'd love chickens. A coop, a fence, and some chickens--February is buy-your-chicks time--and my neighbor and I would have lovely fresh eggs from beautiful glossy chickens (I want guinea hens, too, and those gorgeous Polish chickens with plumes that cover their eyes so they can't see) and intense, devoted relationships with each chicken, including the rooster, who'd never chase or bite, and whose voice in the morning I love.

Coop: Easy. Buy it. (Worry later about cleaning and heating it.)

Fence: Not so easy. Friend of mine lost chickens every night until he cut a door into an oil drum where they slept, and even so kept a firearm handy and ran outside barefoot and buck-naked to defend his chickens when he had to. Mine would need ample space enclosed on all sides including the top: raccoon-proof, hawk-proof, coyote- and fox-proof, deer-proof, dog-and-cat-proof, and thief-proof. (Demetrius said, "Everything loves to eat chicken.") Somehow fix it so moles, voles, dogs and prairie dogs can't tunnel in. Failure would mean the trauma and gore of a chicken massacre and I could probably survive, emotionally, only one such event.

Chickens: Easy; buy them. Some of each kind. Maybe buy them mail-order, and get chickens in the mail! (Worry later about mites, diseases, hen-pecking, worms, lice, and weather extremes.) But I vow I will have my own chickens someday.

What Would a 17-Year-Old Do?

6:00 a.m.

It's August, perfect weather. Zero chance of rain. Time to put up the tent and sleep outside.

-I like my bed. I'll just open the bedroom windows. That's almost like sleeping outside.

The meadow was just mown, it's perfect.

-Nah. Then I have to put a mat in it, and sleeping bag, and pillow, and there are chiggers in the meadow. . .

Why'd you move here 15 years ago?

-Because I loved the cabin and the land and the woods on sight. I actually slept in the woods, in that cave-like area behind the waterfall; I built fires there; the woodpile is still there.

Don't like those things anymore?

-I love them more than life itself.

Remember when you were 17? You had passion and recklessness, a commitment to art, loved and believed, and dreamed of one day living in what you could call your woods, with a stream, cabin and everything: stargazing, animals, morning mists. . .

-Okay. The tent's up. The pillow and blanket are in it. Having rinsed my chigger-attracting legs with a 5 percent bleach solution and pulled athletic socks halfway to my knees, I bid you good night.

-And a good morning.

What It's Like to Have a Pumphouse

Nobody told me anything about this small odd-shaped wooden structure with a midget door except that in deep lengthy cold I'd better put a heater in it. Nobody said what was inside, or what kind of heater. Soon I learned this structure just outside my kitchen door was a pumphouse. I never opened the small door to see the actual pump because bees by the dozens crawled in and out of cracks in the wood as if the pumphouse were a beehive. Eventually ivy grew and twined it shut.

Bit by bit it taught me. It's an electric pump, so outages mean no water. Therefore I keep a few gallons of bottled water, and when storms threaten, I fill pans. Calcium-rich well water will encrust every faucet and etch every glass, and the dishwasher erodes dishes until one day they crack, just like your skin, and it gives all your clothes, not just jeans, a lovely stonewash; and the fix is to add vinegar or clean with vinegar, and buy new glassware when too embarrassed to explain to guests that the glasses are not dirty, just cloudy; and that if you keep drinking from cloudy glassware it'll abrade and split the corners of your lips; and soon I learned I had to filter the drinking water or else be just as stonewashed on my inside. (To install a water softener is too expensive, and the salt would affect the creek.) Wash the car with this water and it'll dull the surface and leave dry white calcium hickeys.

The water tastes fine and fresh to me, but people do remark that it's different from city tap water. Only once did the pump freeze up, the first winter here, '98-'99, for a short time only; good thing because I had no heater for the pumphouse and no place to plug one in. And while hosing down the garden during long droughts it'd pump for ten minutes, dribble, and then quit, such was the local demand on the water table. It taught me (and sometimes I still remember) that I live on a planet. Water direct from the outdoor spigot is so cold it's painful. When people worry about the world's water supply I don't worry.

That said, the pump has never failed, but the pumphouse roof was rotted, so the handyman came and opened its door and tore off the roof to replace it, and for the first time I saw that the pump is a simple gray cylinder about the size of a propane barbecue cylinder. Why such a sizeable pumphouse then? For insulation. Behold a real "pump house" that is not a bar or restaurant.

The 5 Grossest Things that Ever Happened Here

5. Headless blue jay found floating in the rain barrel.

4. Mouse dies beneath water heater and stinks for six weeks.

3. Handyman (no longer employed here) brings his guitar and asks for a date.

2. Demetrius vomiting his purple cabbage soup into the toilet.

1. The watering can for some reason won't pour. As I tilt it trying to pour more water out, the head of a drowned mouse emerges from the spout.

(Actually, #2 was very funny. To me.)

Runners-up:

-Mouse scrambles across my bed with me in it.

-Clapping a fat tomato hornworm between two bricks sprays green goop all over my face, glasses, and shirt.

-Carpet has not been cleaned in 10 years.

-Removing a length of tape from around the non-working fireplace, I find stuck to it three small dead snakes.

Jaws

Opening a drawer I found a fat mouse who'd shredded my gift wrap and done numbers one and two on a year's worth of greeting and birthday cards. I think only moms-to-be would be so sneaky, persistent, and destructive. They chewed through particle board into a cabinet, left piles of sunflower-seed hulls and dried beans on the mantel and in my shoes, and turds in my apron pockets. I wept. With weather cooler than normal for August I thought to bake a cake, light and not too sweet, and share it like a good Missourian, and opening the oven where pans are kept I saw enthroned in my cake pan a mouse nest clawed out of oven insulation with, fortunately, no mice in it. After my nausea passed (instead of baking, I hosed down all the pans and set the dishwasher on "sanitize"), I sent the landlord a photo and demanded he address in all seriousness the plague of mice I've had since spring. One or two in winter is normal in a country house. But five or ten in late summer, openly running along the baseboards: no. Worst in 14 years. So bad I stopped feeding the birds.

Enter Tim the handyman with the familiar blue Tomcat poison saying, "You just gotta hope they die outside," and when he set eight of these new kind of traps I wailed that these mice were too smart for traps, and he joked, "You just gotta get out the ol' .22." They're baited with a dollop of black gel -- the mice have been so bad I have two peanut butter jars, one for my mousetraps and one for me!! -- and one got caught along a major mouse thruway. With these I needn't touch the dead ones. Outside along the foundation Tim placed larger traps containing immense cakes of poison and said to refill them in two weeks. I said, there must be a hole there, why don't you find it and patch it up? Guess whose job that's gonna be.

Let's Talk Pink Camouflage

Walmart.com

It used to be that you needed only to wear blue denim to be perfectly in step with Jefferson County high fashion. If you didn't wear blue denim, you carried a blue denim handbag. You had to have blue denim on you somewhere, and the senior women pushed that envelope by accessorizing with Indian turquoise jewelry. Then the sleeveless, zip-front vest became a must-have. I own several, much to the dismay of a city friend who could not help but remark on the coral-colored fleece vest I wore to lunch, although out of concern for city feelings I had left my shooting vest and my hunter-orange one at home. Then everyone who was anyone here bought pit bulls, and people middle-class and above bought bulldogs, which sound kind of the same.

These days you'd better wear UnderArmour. This brand of well-made, hard-wearing technical athletic clothing, $50 for a long-sleeved tee-shirt, sells like hotcakes, especially to the poor, who can now buy it from the farm & home stores that once sold only Dickies and Carhartt pants and John Deere logo wear. Even upper-middle-class Jefferson Countians wear UnderArmour caps. The local youth too cool for Under Armour clothing wear UnderArmour cross-training gym shoes.

Even so, don't come out here this autumn expecting acceptance into the highest circles unless you are wearing UnderArmour camouflage gear, specifically the pattern "Real Tree." Real Tree is carried even by Walmart, and, for the ladies, there's a line of pink "Real Tree" camouflage everything, lounge pants to aprons (see photo) to dinnerware.

Pink camouflage clothing bothers some people. Let me explain: It's the gingham of our time. The pink indicates acceptance of the wearer's femininity ("I am not a feminist") and the camouflage, tacit support for hunting and the U.S.military, and by extension, approval of a gun-toting lifestyle, and by further extension, a passion for the Second Amendment, which in turn conveys distaste for all things Obama. Pink camouflage indicates not only a "stand by your man" philosophy but a rightist form of patriotism. My own pink camouflage item is a ballcap emblazoned with "USA" in case its message isn't clear enough; I wear it hoping to be taken for a native. I like President Obama, but no one can tell. That's my camouflage.

Extend Your Router's Range with Cardboard and Foil

This cheap fast DIY idea I saw online. Here's proof that it works:

Here's how:

1. Find a piece of cardboard in the right size and shape to cradle your router on 3 sides.
2. Cover the cardboard with aluminum foil.
3. Set the router down in the  foil-covered cardboard, antennae outward, of course.

The Divine Cabin receives only satellite Internet (there's no cable out here!) for two computers and the phone.The farther from the router, the worse the signal: in the living room, 3 bars and wavering, the bedroom 2 bars or 1. Now I get 4 solid bars in the living room and a solid 2 or sometimes 3 in the bedroom.

Instead of foil-covered cardboard, my other options for boosting my signal were: 1) Buy 50 feet of Cat5e or Cat6 Ethernet cable, drill and thread it through 2 log walls to attach it to the computer. 2) Buy a $70 signal booster, hard to program and slows the download by half, and might not even work. 3) Extend the current double-barreled satellite cable but accept that it might lose speed or get noisy at the splice, and I'd need to hire a geek to do it correctly.

It's not pretty, but it was made in America:

Keeping Down Appearances

On warm mornings I wear my pajamas to walk to the mailbox; if it's cooler I'll sling on my bathrobe. If it's night and I'm throwing a mouse's corpse into the meadow, what's the problem if I do it in my briefs and Maidenform? In winter I work outside wearing ludicrously paint-stained sweatshirts, hunter-orange stocking caps, and holey gloves. If my hiking clothes are possibly poison-ivied or full of ticks or chiggers or mud, I'll strip down on the stoop before entering the house. Can't do that in the city.

In the city I had to comb my hair and put on a bra and clean clothes that matched before I left my  apartment building, or children would point and laugh. And I amused  my fellow urban dwellers with my white T-shirts that somehow almost always turned a faint pink, broadcasting the fact that I did my own laundry and was a moron. Heck, I wasn't throwing away good T-shirts because they turned a little bit pink!

I like living here because it allows for appearance improvisation. There's no sense washing my hair if I'm cramming on a ball cap to clean the garage that day. But then if I must go to the hardware store for something, I'll pretend I don't have greasy hat hair, and  -- I don't feel judged, because most everyone looks just like me. Except middle-class moms, who put on yoga clothes in the morning and wear them everywhere, dawn to dusk, because from any one point it'd be a 15-mile trip to go home and change. See, we have our reasons.

Except on Saturday night and on Sunday. Then, if you're gonna see people, you have to clean up. Paradoxically, those are the times that city people get to be slobs.

The Dump in the Woods

I can't believe I've never written about the dump on the property, but in the woods maybe 200 yards from the dwellings, there it is, and the dumping was done years ago, maybe in the 1980s and early '90s,  and the ton of junk hasn't moved in the 12 years I've lived here except  in 2002 when Demetrius and I made 18 ambitious round trips dragging full and heavy garbage bags out of the woods, and quit after seeing we were not making even the least dent in the pile. The shallow ravine is loaded with jagged glass, rusted metal, plastic, a tire or two, and, to make it worse, 1) nothing old and cool, no artifacts or antiques, and 2) whoever dumped it cleverly left no clue as to his or her identity. Dumping is illegal but surprisingly common in rural areas, especially when weekly trash pickup service costs $90 every three months. I'm always shocked to find, say, abandoned refrigerators, tires, or even rusted-out cars in woods that appear otherwise pristine.

All this spring my neighbor's son Patrick has been sorting these materials, bringing them out of the woods, crushing the aluminum cans, loading them on a truck and hauling them to the recycling station, a heroic effort to unburden our woods of this ugly foreign material. But the dump has an upside, and I will discuss it in the next installment.

A Nectar-Lapping Raccoon, See It Here

I wasn't kidding four days ago when I posted about my disappearing nectar and nectar feeders. There's a young raccoon and an older one, now both so bold as to steal from my feeders in mid-afternoon. They tilt the feeder and lap at the sweet juice that runs out. This of course ruins it for the hummingbirds, and I must now cook up nectar daily so I can keep my hummers. I watch the feeders all day, holler and throw rocks and potsherds at the thieves and if they are too close for that I play the Siren app, which makes them run.

Redneck Culture

The mayor of our fair rural hamlet wants you to know there are absolutely no trailer parks within our city limits. He doesn't have to say--because everyone knows--that the rednecks live in Villa Ridge. Nonetheless, aspects of redneck culture (pictured) do infiltrate our daily lives of working, going home to watch Judge Judy, then sitting at the computer looking at YouTubes or whatnot, and then prayer before bed.

I was recently in Indiana for eight days and liked it, but Missouri redneck culture dissuaded me from bringing home a T-shirt that said "INDIANA" because Indiana is the home of "Hoosiers" and here, "hoosiers" doesn't mean "people from Indiana"; it's an offensive word for the lowest form of redneck culture, which you can find in Villa Ridge. It's a noun, as in "He's a hoosier," or an adjective ("The place looks kind of hoosier") or a verb ("I washed and vaccumed out the truck, so don't you hoosier it up". Supposedly it's a greeting, "Who's your Daddy," corrupted over the years; and nobody knows how it got to be a fightin' word here in Missouri.

The Field of Battle

Sorry if the picture makes you queasy but it's a lot worse in person. I buy mousetraps a bagful at a time. I've stuffed mouse thruways and hideaways in this house with steel wool. I've tried poisons, glue traps, live traps -- nothing works as well as a classic Victor spring-loaded trap, which I haven't been able to find for a whole year. Instead, Victor now sells the "Easy Set" (TM) model with the large yellow plastic bait platform supposedly scented with invisible mouse attractant.

After a year I am qualified to say that the new model does not work well. The "cheeselike" platform, complete with Swiss-like holes, has never worked; I dollop the platform with never-fail peanut butter. The trigger is so stupid-sensitive I have to hook the end with a pliers to set it. Worst of all, it doesn't kill mice outright. Good traps kill mice instantly, snap, by breaking their necks. I hate meeses to pieces, but worse is hearing the trap snap beneath the sink and then hearing struggles within.

These two mice were caught within 20 minutes of each other. The one at the top went first, and writhed and knocked around for 10 minutes while I fought to hold my dinner down --because as much as I hate any mouse, I won't pour bleach on it or hammer-crush its skull to put it out of its misery, nor will I put it to sleep in my freezer, as some humane people do. So I have to listen to it die (meanwhile fearing that it won't die, that it'll get away). The other body shows the problem with the "Easy Set" model. Instead of hitting the mouse on the neck, the large platform permits the mouse to nibble from the edge where the trap hits not the neck but the "craniofacial" region. This is not a quick, humane kill. They wriggle, bleed and convulse. I like the older model which they don't sell in the hardware stores around here any more. They do sell it online, though.

Yes, Your Honor

This local vegetable stand is unattended. Choose and weigh and bag and pay for your choices (mostly tomatoes, but sometimes potatoes, squash, or jars of salsa) and nobody (or at least nobody I ever see) watches you open the cash box to make your own change. It's an honor vegetable stand, open every summer for years now, an amazing sight in the year 2012. I like its assumption that most people are honorable and decent and don't cheat and deceive, and I like proving that its assumption is still correct. Fear the karma if you are ever tempted to steal. It's fast and and tailor-made for the transgression. In my salad days I once got $10 too much in change and told myself, "What the heck, it's not like I robbed somebody; I will keep it." Shortly after that someone stole my $10 in quarters, all I had with me, stranding me at the laundromat I'd walked through a snowstorm to get to, and I had to drag heaps of dirty clothes and linens home again. That learned me.

Welcome to Utopia

Carol invited me to stay with her at the Poet's House, 404 Granary Street, in New Harmony, Indiana, population 800, founded in 1814 by the Harmonists, Germans who came to the then-wilderness on the Wabash River to establish an ideal society. They built cabins the first winter and brick dorms that still stand. These progressives believed in honor, sharing, hard work, friendship, education, and going to heaven -- everything good but sex. Men and women lived in separate dorms. Those already married could live together but chastely. The Harmonists' experiment failed, but they built a fabulous church that their leader saw in a dream, a brewery (try the beer from their recipe, Harmonie Bier), a granary, a workingman's library and a town with prayers and poems posted along the cobbled, tree-lined residential streets and at its famous Inn and gardens and Roofless Church and two labyrinths -- symbol of the city. It's all about beauty and spirit and views of cornfields. Everything there becomes art. Above is the Poet's House living room, showing the simple look that is typical (the flooring is poplar wood; through the doors is an herb garden); a photo taken in a oversized chair sculpture near the Inn. And the more-than-awesome "bier" from the 1816 recipe, available only at one cafe, called Sarah's; I will drive six hours round-trip to get another one. A wonderful and refreshing visit. They need to move this town to Missouri.

How I Got to Live Here

A typed 3"x5" file card tacked up on a bulletin board at the university where I worked said a rural rental property was subletting for a year at $400 a month. I'd been living in a low-rent (bullet holes in my windshield) area of St. Louis for a decade and pined for change. I'd also been visualizing my ideal home: in the woods, near a creek, where night looked like night; I'd even taped up a picture cut from Reader's Digest. Given my situation it was a foolish impossible pipe dream. I phoned. A Dutch physics professor and his artist wife about to tour the world for a year said they sought someone clean and neat who'd occupy the house and care for their cat.
I drove 35 miles from town, increasingly enchanted by the hills and greenery. It was April. Found a little white house with green shutters and door, shaded by old hickory and oak trees (at that time I couldn't tell them apart). I glanced through the kitchen window at the porch and fell in love. The original three rooms of the house was a log cabin. Awkward additions had been tacked on. It came with 100 acres of Ozark foothills. My first night here was in June. I had no bed yet. I lay on the bedroom floor on blankets, the windows open wide to hear everything. The house is on a sandstone cliff, so when I looked out I saw starry sky. The cat was a sweet companion.

After 14 months the couple returned. I asked to be informed if they ever moved away so I could ask to be next to rent it. Moved back to the city and two years and two months later, on Oct. 1, 2001, I moved back into the Divine Cabin and they will take me out feet first. In order to stay here I have refused offers of good jobs and marriage. This old, drafty, complicated house requires hiring people to help me out but I'd rather do that than live somewhere with fewer challenges. The gorgeous stone fireplace doesn't work. The moldy, leaky, ugly, 4x8 bathroom (yes, it's the only bathroom) with the rusted hot-water heater got torn out and updated just this past year. (There's still no bathtub.) Nearly every morning from March through late November I have morning coffee or tea on the stone porch. It is my box seat on the universe. In the city, Summer Solstice meant nothing. Here it means everything.

Happy Summer Solstice June 20 at 6:09 p.m. CDT. Please celebrate anytime that life on earth is a peak experience. This is a meadow celebrating itself, across Highway F, not 50 feet from the LaBarque Creek.

My First Layer Cake Sucks

 

Read about Nikola Tesla's Radiant Energy Capture device, U.S. Patent. No. 685968, and on YouTube saw small ones that work. Just about to go out to Radio Shack for capacitors to build my own Tesla device to generate free electrical power, I decided it was high time I baked a layer cake with my new cake pans, and picked a yella cake recipe out of Betty Crocker's old-old cookbook. You know the one: The ring-binder with all the salt, fat, and sugar that makes everything taste like Mom's.

Step 1. Made the layers all right and even used cake flour. It's true that the eggbeater wouldn't work in the batter and I didn't have a mixer so I used an electric hand blender, very unusual, but after baking, the layers seemed okay.

Step 2: Whipped the icing out of powdered sugar and lemon. Easy, and it looked divine! Daydreamed about the people I'd call to come have some cake and coffee.

Step 3: In fact I should have made a heck of a lot more Frosting, with butter and cream, and not one cup of the much thinner Icing. Until now I did not know the difference. A thick coat of frosting would have hid what I politely call the cake's "irregularities."

Step 4: Tried to tart up the poor cake by putting pineapple rings on it like my Aunt Elsie did. I laughed and laughed.The layering does not look so bad. But the cake was not tender (did I overbeat?) and the icing too sweet and the whole thing not worth eating, even by a sweet fiend. Final Score: Cake 1, Divine 0. Ah, home cooking. I should have built the Tesla device.