use real butter

Recipe: chocolate raspberry cake

I live in a snowglobe! It’s snowing beautiful, white flakes outside right now and for once – for once it’s falling vertically instead of flying past on its way to Kansas. Lovely. Really lovely.

looking up valley this morning

Folks may be sick of seeing pictures of the weather around here, but for me, weather is an integral part of nature and I love it – love to read it, study it, feel it. Weather is beautiful to me. If you don’t understand and respect the weather, you really have no business climbing in the mountains.

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Recipe: chinese cold noodles

At the start of my hapless journey into Cancerland, I received an enormous influx of packages from mostly friends and some family. There were so many that we filled half of a room with cardboard boxes and all of the associated packing material that would make me apeshit on an ordinary day. The packages were awesome – stuffed with food, books, hats, DVDs, cards, handmade crafts, knitting… One of the best things I got was a pair of flannel pajama bottoms from Sam. As soon as they were washed, I put them on and felt the warm fuzzies of being loved, being thought of. Then I felt like complete crap because it was the start of chemo #1. I wore those pj bottoms throughout each miserable start of my chemo rounds because they took away that little bit of suckage for me. I lived in them for about 5 days at a time until I could resume being upright, stand up long enough to shower, and put some pants on. That’s when I knew I was coming out of the Feeling Like Utter Shit Phase.

Well… I got pants on! I can’t say I’m quite over the hump because my condition vs. time resembles a fourth degree polynomial, but the most debilitating symptoms have passed and I only have an infection or two to get through now. It feels good to not feel bad. Which brings me to Barbara’s LiveSTRONG with a Taste of Yellow Event, today – May 13, LiveSTRONG day. I even got off my lazy bum and submitted lemon petits fours last month, so you can certainly hop over to Winos and Foodies for a looksee. There were nearly 200 entries that Barbara rounded up from food bloggers around the world in support of LiveSTRONG day. It’s quite remarkable, as is Barbara. Please do check it out: Part 1, Part 2.

I am actually wearing pants, not shorts, because this is what the Atmosphere delivered to our doorstep this morning:

nothing surprises me anymore

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Recipe: potato salad

I have a small 8-hour window where two of my three anti-nausea meds from yesterday’s chemo are still doing their good things (along with those awesome steroids which end today) and I don’t take the bad delirium-inducing, drugged out of my mind, anti-nausea med until this afternoon… So I am managing to squeeze in another post before all systems go down.

We sent our Mother’s Day packages earlier this week because Jeremy is bad at those things and I tend to plan ahead. I actually dislike just about any holiday that Hallmark shoves down our throats, because my preference is to send random tokens of love on any day, not on some designated Day of Guilt. And tokens they are because both of our mothers can pretty much afford whatever they want (and we generally cannot afford what they want). It would be just as silly for me to endeavor to shop for high-end jewelry for my mother as it would be for her to shop for an avalanche beacon or ice axe for me. I’m not a “I spent this much money on your present” type of person anyway. Gift-giving ought to be personal, from the heart.

This was really brought home to me after Kris passed away, leaving a 4.5 year-old son and a 10-day old baby girl. You can just imagine the presents that poured into that house on every possible occasion from family, friends, and even mere acquaintances. It made us both cringe: all of the extravagant, over-the-top, minimal-attention-span, Wall-Mart toys piling up as if a dump truck had just paid a visit. Ben literally ran from one toy to the next in such a frenzy that he developed little to no personal attachment or value to any of it. I started out making presents for the kids, but my talents are limited and how many hats, blankets, quilts, space-ship and flower pillows can you make before they get old? Eventually in the interest of time and sanity, we started to shop around for gifts – especially after my diagnosis. We wanted to select fun and educational toys to promote creative engineering juices, curiosity about nature, ties to their mother’s Chinese culture, problem solving skills. And of course, each of them has their very own plush black lab toy… a Kaweah. I must admit that we are tempted every time we pass the Mars Rover Lego set – not for the kids, but for us! Obviously, the best gift I could give those kids is the gift of time and attention, but that’s not really possible for a myriad of reasons.

**Jump for more butter**