Jenmenke

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It’s Christmas Eve!

Christmas Card Retrospective 2006 – 2009, aka “the Really-Big-Pictures” years.

OK, well, I lied. But not intentionally. 2006 was not a really big picture. It was a really bad picture. I look like an 80’s rock star. A male one. Dave looks like an ax murderer. But the kids looked OK, I guess.

I’ve never understood the photos of just kids. All you people who just send photos of your kids. You drive me crazy. I want to see YOU! My friends! And compare age lines and gray hairs.

You take all the fun out of Christmas.

Or maybe you are just scared of sending a bad picture. But when you got people like me, willing to send out photos like this, how bad can it be?

It was a really stupid card. Not funny at all. The concept was good. But the delivery lacked clarity.

You probably can’t read the notes, which is probably a good thing. It was just supposed to be my “to do list” starting in November and going into December, all the while trying to find a good family photo. You know, to justify my sending out cards with the photo I used.

Anyway, let’s not belabor it. It was a miss. Let’s move on. Things do get better.

2007 was a great picture. I couldn’t recreate that if I tried. It was just a self timer on a hike in Wyoming. Dumb luck. I think it’s my favorite photo. There’s always a lot of yelling at me as I situate the camera on some wobbly rock or stump and run back to get in the picture. They just don’t realize how talented I am.

I had moved on from writing new lyrics to just picking sort of a “theme song” and wrapping the letter around it somehow. This letter is probably one of my top three personal favorites. As I sit here typing this, I can remember the very conversation I was speaking of. So in case you were wondering, yes, it was alllll true.

2008 was another self-timer, summer vacation, family photo. A true miracle of epic proportions. We were in Glacier Park at the top of a mountain at a tiny lodge that you can only hike to. I had just dunked my entire head into a glacial stream to cool off. And my hair dried like that! If that isn’t a miracle of epic proportions, I don’t know what is.

And now for the letter. My all-time favorite letter ever!

It was brilliant. A work of art. But here’s the sad part: not everyone received it. The Chief Controller, deeming it too sensitive for the general public — and even some of our members — withheld it from select recipients. So reading it here is actually, I don’t know — maybe against the law? It’s like WikiLeaks!

Seriously though. He took the letter out of some people’s cards. …But you’ll read all about that in 2009. I really don’t give the guy a break ever. Poor Dave. And I really mean that. I’m a true trial.

But a fun one.

2009 was a cool picture just by accident. Who knew regular old white lights would look like THIS out of the camera?!

(I love that bit at the bottom of the photo. We do look scarily close, don’t we?)

As you can see, I stole the format from the 2007 card. I figured no one would remember. Of course that was before I ever thought that I’d have them all lined up in a row on a blog post. Oh! The things we can think!

And to think this all started with the Fiesta Movement. The blog, I mean. Not Christmas. 2010’s cards brings that full circle. But you will have to wait until Christmas morning to open that package!

Tonight is a special night for quiet and rest. For snuggles and love. For peace and forgiveness. For unto US a CHILD IS BORN!

Merry Christmas Eve!

Another Christmas Retrospective

Christmas Cards Years 2000 – 2005. AKA, the Psycho Years

Yeah, I was pretty psychotic during those years…

And that was actually before menopause. At least now I have a culturally acceptable reason for it.

We start off with the photo from 2000. It might look like we are having fun in this photo, but actually I think Dave was in the process of tossing Charlie into the swamp.

He wasn’t cooperating. Also not sure about those eyebrows of Dave’s. They look kinda scary…

I believe that this might have been the first year Dave and I had an all-out fight about the Christmas letter.

That, too, was to become an 11 year tradition. When I re-read this particular year I don’t even find anything objectionable. I wonder what he didn’t like… It must have been the sarcasm. He worries incessantly that people will think I’m serious. I don’t know how to tell him that I am being serious…

Strangely, this year there was no argument about our letter. Hmmm. I hadn’t really thought about that until now. Could it be the Holy Spirit is also working on DAVE? To accept that I am more wonderful than he previously realized?

Yeah, no, I don’t really think that’s it. I think it’s that my card must actually be pretty boring this year.

That is sort of upsetting.

Anyway, 2001 is probably my overall ugliest card. Well, except for 2006 when I looked more like Axl Rose than my beautiful self.

As you can imagine, we had some strong words about this letter, as well. But you know what? Everyone. And I mean everyone, can relate on at least some tiny level.

Can’t they?

Please say yes.

2002 brought our private, marital Christmas card battle public.

Things came to an explosive head and after a particularly big fight about the letter. I drafted a new one in anger and haste.

Dave wasn’t much happier about the second one than the first.

If you can’t read it, I basically lay out the fact that we had a big fight about the letter and that instead of sending it I was taking a poll. If the receiver LIKED my sarcastic cards they were to respond, via email, with a “yes” vote. For their efforts, they would receive the originally drafted letter that had been edited to be approved by Dave.

I received over 50 “yeses” and one “no.” The no-voter was a Dave brown-nosing woman (she knows who she is) and I didn’t mind. It made the survey more believable.

The annotated and approved letter was much funnier before the additions required by Dave for public consumption. It was the identical letter without all the stupid (TRUE) and (FALSE) indicators.

I still laugh about that one. So much fun, these stupid letters have given me!

2003 was the start of a short-lived phase where I re-wrote the words to Christmas songs. I also liked this card because it’s a good family picture. Well, except for Dave. And I liked the photo so much of me and the kids and wanted to use it so badly (it’s true, I’m that vain) that I found a good picture of him from the same day and photoshopped his head over the bad one. And I think made it too big.

If I hadn’t told you that, you’d never notice. But now that I have told you, he will start to look freakish. We call this one “Big Head Dave and the Monsters”

It was a good letter though.

2004 was hilariously hideous. I don’t think very many recipients actually realized we took that photo in December in the freezing snow. Note the strategic placement of children to cover Fatty’s rolls…

I was amazed at how many people remembered this card the following year saying they couldn’t wait for the naked card in 2005. I feel they need to seriously get a life.

2005 was the best song ever. It has become a much-loved Christmas carol sung by moms everywhere.

Go ahead, sing it out loud (to Jingle Bells). I just did. It’s catchy!

See you tomorrow! It’s Christmas Eve!

The Five Days of Christmas

Of course, it was supposed to be the TWELVE days of Christmas, but… You know how it goes.

I DIDN’T GET AROUND TO IT, OKAY? I’d love to detail all the goings-on in the Menke house, but

  1. your eyes would roll back into your head and you might never come back here.
  2. you don’t care.
  3. you can probably top my list.
  4. I don’t have time.

So here was the plan:

I would display our Christmas cards from the past twelve years and end with my current card on Christmas day. Brilliant!

Before you tell me you don’t give a rat’s ass about my Christmas cards, and particularly the ones from year’s ago, let me say this:

  1. My cards give a unique perspective into the devolution of a soul. That is to say, Jennie becoming a parent. For better or worse, and often against her will.
  2. Yes, I was just speaking of myself in the third person.
  3. No, I don’t know why. It just sounded better that way. Maybe by disassociating myself with the horrible things I say about my family makes it somehow better.
  4. Anyway, my cards are funny. In some ways, they are my best work. (Which is pretty sad, if you think about it…)
  5. Plus, I’m busy. And I don’t have time to think up anything else to write about this week.

Due to the time constraints — there being only FIVE days until Christmas instead of TWELVE — I will be ganging them up. Such a bummer, but it is what it is. The only real dilemma I face is whether to include the boring ones from before kids.

And since this is about the devolution of a personality, I think I will. It will help to get, you know, the whole picture.

Now remember, the first… oh, eight or nine years are pretty boring. I’m mostly including them so that if I ever lose my hardcopies, there will be a place they exist so that I can poor over them and confirm how witty I am when I’m feeling low.

Consider this stupid blog my off-site back-up of essential memories.

What’s crazy when you look back this far in time, is how far we’ve come. Not as people, but in technology! Back in 1990 we couldn’t even fix red-eyes.

Or photoshop new heads on to our bodies, which I believe I did to Dave in 2003…

So 1990 was the beginning of it all. Marital bliss with my beloved Dave.

Would you just look at those shoulder pads on that dress? (Don’t look at the youthful face inside of it. I’m much prettier now.)

Then we got a puppy. Which I refer to as our “first born” because we fought more about parenting that stupid dog than we ever did our kids… Casey is the middle one.

Look how happy we look in 1992…

…Maybe it was the Red Stripe beer.

…Or the Jamaican sunset.

…Or the fact that we didn’t have kids or volunteer anywhere or have mean roosters yet.

1993 was clearly the year I finally got a laser printer. I remember it well: An Apple Personal LaserWriter NT. My parents bought if for me as a surprise and very generous gift (it cost more than the Mac II I had back then) and I turned a corner. I would make every card from that year on. The beginning of the end.

And yes, it clearly appears I used to spend a lot of time hunting and fishing. Oh, those were the days!

Heh heh heh.

1994 was a multi-paged tome. You might remember that Martha Stewart was a big name during this time and I did my best to keep up.

In this Christmas booklet (what was I THINKING?!) you may notice I was PREGNANT in the first photo. Things were about to change for Jennie…

See you tomorrow!

Must-Have Gift for Teenage Girls

I’m trying to get into the spirit of the season.

We got our tree. We haven’t put it up yet, but we’ve got it. I have the tree tops for the planters. I haven’t put them in yet, but I did haul the soggy pumpkins to the compost, so the steps are an open vessel awaiting my creative touch. I spent the weekend with my mom, like all post-Thanksgiving weekends, making cookies, a gingerbread house and three wreaths (more on that later this week). I’ve thought about gifts, but I haven’t bought any yet. I even started looking through our family photos to start work on Christmas cards. But I was dismayed by our general lack of photogenic genes.

And here is my top gift for a sixteen year old girl. It will work for girls as young as 13 and as old as me, but will be most appreciated for girls right in the middle of the teen years. They can be so hard to buy for!

It is available at Amazon here for $6. You might even find it at Home Depot or your local hardware store. I don’t remember where I picked this one up. I stumbled upon it when I was going through cabinets in the garage. I stuffed it there to hide it, lest my own 15 year old daughter find it and ruin the fun!

Recently, I opened it up for a test drive. To recommend something this highly, I really needed to make sure it was all it promised to be.

And it is! It’s simple to use and cheap to buy.

It will bring hours of entertainment.

It will last for years.

It’s called the Zip It.

And here’s how it works:

You insert the Zip It into any bathroom drain regularly used by a 16 year old girl.

Then twist and pull.

Then repeat a few times.

Your daughter can use the Zip It herself with no help from you.

Or, you can do like I did, and use it for her and simply leave it for her and share the love.

Zip It even works in sinks with no extra hardware!

It’s sure to be at the top of every Mom’s list buying for a teenage girl. Imagine their surprise!

******************

I know what you are thinking:

  1. That I am mean.
  2. That I never clean our drains.

My response to those are:

  1. I cannot deny that it is true.
  2. I do too clean our drains. I believe the last time we routered out Morgan’s shower was a year ago.

In teenage daughter’s defense:

  1. She has beautiful, long, curly hair.
  2. She claims not to allow hair to go down the drain. From the hair I find on the walls of the shower, one might actually believe this to be true. However the Zip It is also a lie detector, because clearly, hair is going down the drain. And it isn’t the boys.

If you can get past the gag factor, Zip It is actually pretty fun to use. No pliers needed to remove the stopper. No fighting with the 12′ long metal snake that is pretty gross since it’s been down so many gross drains already. No reason to put it off.

Buy yours today!

Bury Your Dead

Or at least make compost out of it.

It’s that time of year in the garden. Of doing the final tasks.

What amazes me to no end is that the final tasks never actually seem to end. I’ve been doing these final tasks for what seems likes weeks now and I’m still not done!

  • Harvest the apples
  • Dig the carrots
  • Cut the raspberries
  • Harvest the kale almost done!
  • Dig the beets
  • Finish transplanting the herbs almost done! Just found 2 more…
  • Put the tools away
  • Clean up the pumpkin beds
  • Burn the diseased tomato plants
  • Cook and freeze the kale
  • Make applesauce and apple jelly
  • Make pies didn’t make pies. just froze the apples with sugar to make into pies.

I’m probably missing stuff. But even then, as you can see, I’m not nearly done. Harvesting the kale, it should be noted, is about a six hour job, since I strip the stems out of the leaves before I cook it. I tried leaving the buggers in last year, but they seriously depleted our eating enjoyment. So I listen to my book on tape, hunched over a bucket for hours while my shoulders tense up and I cut the leaves from the center stems. I have one more pile to stem before cooking it all and freezing.

Is it sick to say that I enjoy it? I actually told my friend this very morning that I feel guilty for spending so much time at it, because it seems like I am creating busy work just so I can sit on my big butt in the sunshine of my front step and listen to my audible book. (which is coincidently, “Bury Your Dead” by Louise Penny)

“Do you eat the kale?”

“Yes.”

“Would you miss it if you didn’t have it in your freezer this winter?”

“Yes!”

“Then why in the Hell would you feel guilty about it?”

“Ha ha (nervous laugh). Right. Thanks! Bye.”

Mom? Are you reading this?

No?

Good.

I blame my mom for my guilt. I inherited it from her. It’s genetic. I just don’t want her to know that. I’d feel guilty. And she’d feel guilty for making me feel guilty…

Anyway, I’m feeling crazy-behind. I have so many pretty pictures of harvesting.

So I’m condensing. If you want to see more or hear more about any individual event, leave a comment and I will comply. It’s just hard to know if I should write about apples again, for example, after writing three posts about them last year. Or planting garlic again. You know?

I do these things every year, but should I write about them every year? I subject my friends and family to repetitive litanies I guess. I suppose I could do the same here. But I’m feeling lazy. And so I’m going to do a power-post condensed harvest version.

Here we go.

Today, I planned on finishing the kale leaves, but when I went out to the garden to cut the remaining stems, I got waylaid by other tasks. For example, I strode into the garden and saw my garden fork stuck in the garlic bed and said out loud, “Shit! I forgot to plant the garlic!” And ran inside to get the garlic to plant. That took about an hour. And the following two hours were filled with digging weeds — totally pointless at this time of year I would guess, and dealing with those rabid, disease-riddled tomato vines. Ugh.

Here are the three types of garlic I planted

Aside from the fact that, like my face, my hand looks much better in person, can you see the size of the clove on the right? It is HUGE! It’s also the only variety I know for sure by name. It is called “Music” and is a hardneck variety. I planted it for the first time last fall and harvested my first bulbs in June. Very fun. The others are a smaller-cloved red softneck variety and also a red hardneck variety. I’m just grateful to have gotten them in the ground.

Oh my gosh. I just remembered right this very minute that I should also have planted shallots! Will my list never end?

  • Plant shallots

Last week I worked on my very sad apple crop.

Yes. They really did look like that and yes, I really did use them.

Here is why you can’t always judge books by their covers. Or apples by their skin:

Like with the kale, I got to listen to hours of my audible book. For the apples, it was “The Year of Living Biblically.” I pretty much burned through the last 6 hours of the book. It was a little repetitive, but good. I do recommend!

I separate the “good” apples from the “jelly” apples. The best good apples go into pies. The other good ones get made into applesauce. The borderline apples go into the jelly pot. Not to worry, all you people I have given jelly to: the green bin is NOT the jelly pot. Those went into the compost pile… And yes, Lola did eat her share of apples.

Speaking of Lola, here she is finding some volunteer snap peas that sprouted after my disastrous summer crop. She hunts them like she does phesants:

After sorting, cutting, and peeling the apples, I made the sauce and boiled the peels, cores and borderline gross apples into juice.

Here is something to bear in mind. When a recipe calls for a “heavy bottomed pan?” This is why they do that and what happens when you do and don’t follow directions:

The next day I canned the applesauce and made the jelly. My beloved, beloved apple rosemary jelly:

You can read all about it here, if you like.

Oddly, this year, my final batch did not set up. It made no sense. No sense at all. Same juice from the same batch of apples. Same ratio of sugar to juice. Same everything. The one and only thing that was different was that I actually stood in the kitchen and watched over that batch, making sure it didn’t boil too hard.

Which leads me to the conclusion that it must have to boil hard in order to set up. I knew you needed a rolling boil for added pectin jellies, but I didn’t know that about natural pectin ones. Live and learn, live and learn.

I took a few days off from outside garden work and got back to it this past weekend.

This was sort of fun and unexpected: after-the-frost strawberries! Who knew?

They seriously tasted like candy. Ridiculously sweet. Next year, I’ll have to remember that and be looking for them. Far less bugs to compete with at this time of year, too.

With that, I’m taking my last sip of wine and heading off to bed with visions of sugar-strawberries dancing in my head.

(that almost gets me excited for Christmas!)

Almost.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Happy First Day of Autumn

Happy Boxelder Bug Day

All of the photos here were taken on September 22nd. The first day of Fall for most. Boxelder Bug Day for me.

I hate Boxelder Bugs. They are benign, yes. But their tendency to buzz around and land on anything drives me batty. Their need to cluster into ungodly hordes many layers deep disgusts me. Really. It just totally grosses me out.

They are supposed to be cyclical. As in, “It’s a bad year for Boxelder Bugs.” Presumably then, you might be treated to a few years worth of “they aren’t too bad” years. But no. Not where I live. They are bad every year. The Asian Beetles, too, though they have yet to come out in force.

Every year I say, “It’s a bad year for Boxelder Bugs.” And it’s true. It is.

If having the exterior of the house crawling with live bugs isn’t bad enough, hundreds make it IN to the house every day, with each opening and shutting of the front or back door. There have been days where we have blocked off the front door entirely because it was too covered with bugs to use. But you gotta get in and out of the house somehow. I suspect that many come in all tangled up in my hair. Now there’s a pleasant thought.

As I sat down to write this earlier today, this is what happened: (I apologize for the horrible photos. That bug was moving fast. And, I have a hard time focusing on my stupid black cat)

 

By the end of the flurry and before I could set the camera down, she had shredded the document. It was all very funny until I realized it was the voting ballot I was suppose to submit.

I don’t really have much more to say on the subject. I just wanted the chance to give you the heebie jeebies like I have.