by Kathy Brasby | Nov 11, 2019 | Family, Humor, Stories
I’m all for trying new things, and so, when my daughter gave me a bottle of vanilla extract that she had made, I figured I’d check into the recipe.
I’m not cheap: I’m curious. I keep telling myself that, so hush.
I’m suspicious of the recipe blogs which promise, “It’s effortless,” but they were right this time. It was easy!
I had to locate some vanilla beans (probably the hardest part of the project) and then put a few vanilla beans in a bottle and cover the beans with cheap vodka. Let sit for a few months, and you have the best smelling vanilla extract around.
But this isn’t a recipe blog. You can Google the recipe if you want.
I made a batch a few months ago and pulled out the first bottle to use on my famous chocolate chip cookie recipe. You know, my everybody-snitches-the-dough chocolate chip cookie recipe. Google the recipe.
I mixed up the ingredients, and the snitchers wandered by. Each one took a sample and said, “Weird. This has an odd aftertaste.”
So I tasted, too. And it did. Blech.
I had already put the first batch in the oven, and I’m averse to throwing away a batch of cookie dough. I mean, it has butter and eggs in there. That’s like liquid gold. So I waited out the baking process.
When the cookies came out of the oven, and I tasted one, they were fine. No aftertaste. Pretty much like normal.
What in the world? Where had the aftertaste gone? Curious minds like mine need to know.
Some who have a scientific mind would formulate experiments. They’d try the recipe in different ways until they uncovered the cause. They’d waste a lot of time, in other words.
Not me. It was faster to do some thinking. What was different? New?
Aha, the new batch of vanilla.
I unscrewed the lid and took a sniff.
This was not a lovely vanilla scent. This smelled of pure alcohol. I had not added the vanilla beans four months ago.
No vanilla beans giving up their sweet aroma. No vanilla beans adding flavor to the cookies.
The odd aftertaste was the vodka, which burned off when I baked the cookies.
My daughter, one of the snitchers, put it best: “You served us vodka cookies?”
Well, only to the snitchers, I guess. Glad my grandsons weren’t around that day.
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by Kathy Brasby | Nov 4, 2019 | Family
I am on vacation this week but my stories will return next week. With new adventures undoubtedly.
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by Kathy Brasby | Oct 28, 2019 | Country life, Family, Humor, Stories
I don’t like to go fishing. I respect those that do and am sure that I am missing out on a ton of fun. I am saying this so none of my love-to-fish friends mail me a catfish in a padded envelope.
Several years ago, some of our kids were invited to a special party at the local fishing pond. They couldn’t drive yet, so guess who had to go? 
I thought I could set up a seat at the water’s edge, get out a book and a cold drink, and enjoy the late summer afternoon while all the children flung hook and bobber into the murky depths. That didn’t sound so bad.
I settled into a comfy lawn chair and had read a couple of chapters when I heard my daughter shout. She stood on the dock, pole held high in the air, fish squirming at the end of the line.
Great. She’d caught a fish. Notice: no exclamation mark in these comments.
She wanted me to bring the tackle box. I jammed the bookmark in place and marched through the thick grass to the dock.
“Look at my fish! We gotta get the hook out before it gets hurt.”
What could get hurt? The fish? The hook? My reading time?
I set the tackle box on the rough wood of the dock and gazed into the tangle of hooks, bobbers, weights. How did one get a hook out of a fish?
She sensed my confusion. Or just got impatient. I’m never sure which. “Grab those pliers, Mom.”
OK, I knew pliers. I lifted the metal tool and held it out to her.
“I can’t do that,” she said with a voice that sounded like the whine of a jet engine starting up.
Like I could? “I don’t fish,” I said. Clearly, a boundary was in order here.
“I’ll hold the fish, and you get the hook out,” she said, gripping the squirmy fish in her nine-year-old hands.
Um, I don’t get hooks out. I stared at the fish, which gaped back. This was no time for a “who blinks first” contest. Do fish blink?
I drew a deep breath. Parenting involves more courage than you’d think. Extricating a hook from a fish’s mouth ranks pretty high on my “don’t want to do this” list, but it had to be done. I stepped closer.
My daughter squeezed the fish’s mouth open, and I raised the pliers, trying to find the right grip. Stalling.
And I got hit in the face with a blast of green pond water.
I looked up to see my five-year-old son standing a few feet away from me, holding a stained and wrinkled paper cup.
He gazed at the fish while I glared at him.
Then he saw me staring, and he shifted his weight. “I grabbed the cup from the edge of the pond,” he said. “And I scooped up some water.”
Why?
“I didn’t want the fish to die before you got the hook out, and I thought it might take a while,” he said.
“So, you scooped up the water and threw it in my face?”
He shrugged and tossed the cup down. “I missed.”
I still don’t like fishing. Don’t mail me catfish.
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by Kathy Brasby | Oct 21, 2019 | Family, Humor, Stories
I had just finished rinsing the shampoo out of my hair in the shower when my cell phone rang.
This was before all those scam calls that we all ignore. I actually thought I should answer the phone.
Photo by Tyler Lastovich on Unsplash
So I grabbed a towel and picked up the phone with a dripping hand. Who was calling?
My sister.
“Cover your eyes,” I said, draping myself with the towel. Water ran down my face and my hair hung in my eyes.
She hung up.
What was up with that? She knew I sometimes joke around.
Should I call her back? Should I dry myself off first?
The phone rang again. My sister’s face lit up the phone screen. So she’d accidentally hung up. She has a unique way with phones, and hanging up inadvertently is one of those ways.
As I pushed the accept button, I noticed that she had used FaceTime this time.
Um, Facetime is a video phone call, and I was standing sopping wet in front of the shower dressed only in a damp towel. I’d have hung up if I’d noticed all that in time.
Well, it was my sister, and she only had to see my dripping hair. I aimed the phone camera carefully.
“Why are you FaceTiming me?” I have a knack for insightful questions.
“I wanted you to see my new tooth.” She’d just gotten an implant at the dentist’s office, and so she stretched her mouth to reveal the tooth.
Sure enough. My screen filled with the inside of her mouth, including a sparkling new tooth.
“Cool,” I said. I was trying to remember how to switch the phone out of Facetime before she looked.
And then she started giggling. “Where are you?” She’d looked.
“Guess.”
“Yeah, whatever.” She tried to be polite. “I just got this new implant…..haha….and….snort….I wanted…haha….to show somebody.” She couldn’t hold it in. The laughter rose up from her toenails and gushed out.
Something about shower water running down my nose was funny to her.
So here we were, me getting water all over the bathroom floor and her filling my phone screen with her new tooth.
When the techies worked on the chips and circuits that would allow us to combine phone calls with video, I think they had images of salesmen using charts to illustrate quarterly earnings. Or giggling babies reaching out to touch grandmothers who lived across the country. Or a soldier connecting with his wife and kids from a foreign country.
And I’ll bet all those things happen.
But I wonder if their vision ever included two sisters calling to share new teeth and dripping hair.
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by Kathy Brasby | Oct 14, 2019 | Cats, Country life, Family, Humor
We have adopted a tiger.
By tiger, I mean a 3-week-old abandoned barn kitten, of course. We’re not big cat people, but we couldn’t let the little thing starve to death. So we took her in.
Aw, isn’t she cute? Calm? But get ready…..
I scooted to the pet store for a small animal bottle. When the clerk said, ‘uh, oh,” I should have realized that was an early alert.
She took to the bottle right away. The kitten, not the clerk. Hang with me here.
We named her Panda because she was black and white. And it sounded like a cute, calm name.
The first week, after rescuing the kitten from starvation and the elements, I fed her several times a day, and she’d purr as I held her. Well, she’d purr as she stared deeply into my eyes before biting the end of my nose. So cute.
I’m trying to learn kitten psychology and have since discovered that kittens are really micro-lions. They hunt. They attack anything that moves. They have teeth like needles. Cute.
But I have questions. Panda is now 9 weeks old, meaning she’s big enough to run up my leg, over my shoulder, and on to the top of my head where she sits down and bites my skull. I guess I look like prey.
Panda lurks behind a half-closed door, body pressed low to the ground, and leaps onto my ankle, which probably looks like a giraffe leg to her, sinking her teeth deep into my bone. Brave little hunter.
Apparently, an empty toilet paper roll resembles a T-bone steak based on how she prowls around it. I’m not sure what that says about my ankle.
And there was that dangerous shallow box on the floor by the trash can. She leaped into the box, and it moved, so she kept batting it and biting the edge. Better that box than my head, I thought, so I settled in to watch. After the batting and biting stopped, she laid down in the box and started purring. Is that box prey or a bed? I’m trying to learn.
Panda can spring onto our bed with a single bound, which must be necessary for a professional hunter. I want to understand why hunters need to hurdle onto a bed, but, for now, I’m staying with the mountain-climber explanation: because it is there.
From calm to this… in an instant. Look out, earlobes! There may be tooth marks there soon.
She kinda miscalculated one of her bed leaps, though, running into the side of the mattress and ricocheting back to the floor. She got up and looked as nonchalant as I did that time I nearly fell on the ice. Nobody was looking, right?
I’ve made the mistake of wearing shorts in my own home, which means my legs now have micro-slashes thanks to our tiger who knows the best way to the top of my head is up my leg, whether I’m wearing jeans or not.
Friends want to stroke her head. “Ah, isn’t she sweet?” they coo.
Well, not always. They’ve left our house with apologies and a fingertip missing. It’s tough to pet a hunter.
We named her Panda but, watching her in action the last few weeks, I’m wondering if she’d be better off named Panther.
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by Kathy Brasby | Oct 7, 2019 | Family, Humor, Stories
This all started because I wanted to find a simple parking spot before the baseball game.
My son had invited me to attend a Colorado Rockies game.
Panorama by Timothy Brasby
With the baseball field in downtown Denver, parking can be a challenge. So I got online and found a deal so that we weren’t hassled by parking drama. He’d found great seats so surely I could find great parking.
We wound our way through the narrow streets in the downtown area and, finally, thanks to Apple Maps, found the spot. We parked in a relatively empty parking garage. That was a clue.
“Is this a residential area?” my son asked. Well, yeah, maybe so. Where was Coors Field anyway? Neither of us knew.
The online site had offered a 9-minute walk to the stadium for only $4. Since track and field has conquered the 4-minute mile, obviously a parking spot a mile away would take only 9 minutes to travel.
The online ad claimed a short .3 mile stroll. Apple Maps insisted it was a mile. Apple Maps knew.
My son was a good sport. We had strong legs, and the weather was beautiful. Away we went.
We crossed the street near a bar blasting music that would incite riots or serial killings. Yep, residential neighborhood for sure.
And then we saw a banner across an alley, warning “No Alchohol Past This Point.” Why would you keep alcohol out of the alley?
We found out shortly. First, we noticed that a Budweiser semi and a Busch semi were parked head to head on the street. The Busch truck had an open stage at the back end with some guys in delivery uniforms hammering on electric guitars and head-banging the lyrics. The Busch band?
Then a gaggle of guys wearing lederhosen and toting tankard filled the street before us. Being a polite baseball fan, I came to a complete halt before I ran into the groups heading for a booth.
There was a line of booths. I did not know there were so many kinds of beer. Booths for the well-knowns and booths for craft beers. And, of course, stalls for Wienerschnitzel and pretzels.
We had stumbled onto Oktoberfest in downtown Denver.
The Rockies’ mascot, Digger, came by.
Baseball memories were being made in the stadium and we were not there.
I wondered if Apple Maps had miscalculated. Maybe she sent us to Austria.
We had kept a 12-minute-mile pace before, but now we were sidestepping whole packs of people. We could see Coors Field in the distance now, like a mountain peak rising out of the mist.
This wasn’t the first time I was glad my son was 6’1” and lifted weights. Not to protect me but to plow a path through the crowd. People weren’t rowdy, but there were a lot of them. An ocean of people milled between Coors Field and us.
Three blocks later, we broke free, hustling into the open street where Coors Field rose majestically before us. It was almost as good as topping a 14,000-footer in the Rocky Mountains. Well, better since it’s really, really hard to conquer a 14-er, and we had accomplished this.
We could hear cheering. We were a little late, but we had made it. We stretched out our walk toward the main gate, ready to cheer on our baseball team.
“Did you notice?” my son said as we left the Oktoberfest crowd behind.
I glanced back at the Wiener schnitzel swarm. “What?”
“The Rockies are playing the Brewers tonight.”
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