by Kathy Brasby | Jun 23, 2015 | Stories
Our family has always dreamed of crafting those extravagant cakes like the Food Network highlights.
Some of the kids invested time on 4-H cake decorating units.
A 4-H project manual builds basic skills so unit one zeroes in a simple icing, a couple of tools, and a one-layer cake with the goal to exhibit the best project at the county fair.
The cake part proved to be a problem for daughter number one, who baked her show cake the afternoon before it had to be entered. When the edges of the cake wouldn’t release from the pan, she solved the problem by cutting away the edges.
Most of the cakes entered were 8” round but hers was more of a 5” lumpy. She slathered on icing but it was like trying to hide Mount Everest under an ice cream cone. No champion ribbon that year.
Daughter number two was the creative sort stifled by the rules for the unit. When she was required to form a mat of frosting stars, she didn’t understand why the cake couldn’t show through. It would be like hiding the tuba in the marching band.
No blue ribbon that year, either.
Our son, at age 10, signed up for cake decorating and even went to a workshop where he and 25 girls learned the fine art of placing stars of frosting on waxed paper. This, of course, made absolutely no sense to him except he licked clean the frosting after the workshop.
We found out later that he signed up so that he could be in charge of the family birthday cakes. He figured if he’d finished cake decorating, I’d let him do the cakes.
And lick the frosting, too.
His show cake came together on a hot summer day with frosting that needed a lot more sugar than he put in the bowl. Imagine a lava flow sliding across his design.
The lava-icing flow continued until he got the cake to the fairgrounds. His frosting border resembled the outline of Texas.
No blue ribbon that time either.
But he didn’t need any cake decorating classes to take over the birthday cake tradition in our family. I had once served crumbs molded like the foothills of Colorado with icing drizzled over the top. I had hoped for a puppy shape but that didn’t work out either.
So I had no cake decorating tradition to enforce.
I let him take care of the birthday cakes.
I was in charge of licking the bowl.
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by Kathy Brasby | Jun 16, 2015 | Stories
I know you know where chocolate milk comes from and that red cows don’t produce strawberry shakes.
But rural people often laugh at the misconceptions that non-rural people have. Some of the simpler wrong notions include the idea that black cows give chocolate milk or that bulls have horns and cows don’t.
And it is frustrating to hear people comment that we don’t need to have all those dairy cows because people can get their milk from Safeway instead.
I once had a college roommate mock me because I didn’t know that buttermilk came from melting butter into milk. The fact that I had seen buttermilk come from the actually making of butter in a churn didn’t impact her at all.
But one of my favorite stories came when a non-rural family came to visit.
“Can we come over this evening and watch you milk your goats?” This phone call came from our neighbor who had weekend guests wanting to experience some rural flavor.
So they came. The neighbor brought a dad with two teenage boys. The dad, Jim, had experienced a slice of farm life from his days visiting his grandparents on their farm. This was warm nostalgia for him.
Not so much for the teenage boys.
They were willing to wander around outside pestering the ducks before Dad ordered them into the milking room.
“This is cool,” he said. “Get in here and watch.”
So I milked and answered questions from Jim while the boys leaned against the far wall with their hands in their pockets. Then they all went home.
My neighbor called me the next morning. “Jim said thanks for letting them come over.” And she laughed. “And the boys came back here to announce that, after seeing where milk came from, they are never drinking milk again.”
“Whew,” I said. “Good thing they don’t know where eggs come from, then. They might never eat again.”
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by Kathy Brasby | Jun 9, 2015 | Stories
The secretary and I were the only two women working in this shop. There’s something about rubbing elbows with a bunch of guys with oil stains on their hands that can give you willies at night.
The secretary was deathly afraid of mice. We’re talking leap-over-chairs-on-your-way-to-the-parking-lot kind of afraid. This was not a good thing to reveal to our crew but there it was.
I wasn’t overly fond of them myself but determined not to admit to it. But they still tested me. I was in charge of checking in shipments – large and small – at our business and so one day found a small plastic bag on my desk. This wasn’t unusual and I flipped the bag to check the shipping tag.
A dead mouse was stapled inside the bag.
I dropped the gift and looked up to see our service manager and parts manager peering around the corner. The service manager threw his hands in the air.
“It wasn’t my idea!”
And the parts manager put his hands up, too. “I didn’t put that bag on your desk.”
I ignored Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
They didn’t harass me again. They were in search of more hysteria. But one day our secretary came back from lunch to find a brown lunch bag on her desk. Stapled shut. Shuddering with mystery.
She ran screaming to the break room, certain they had trapped a live mouse for her.
After shaking her hands and sobbing, she still refused to enter her office. So the service manager retrieved the bag from her office and brought it out, where he sliced off the top and set the trapped frog free.
Tweedledee and Tweedledum spent the afternoon freshening up the secretary’s desk before she’d return to work. Boss’s orders.
Something good did come out of it, though. Whenever the two guys got the idea to go in search of mice, they remembered four hours of scrubbing a desk and sat down until that idea passed.
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by Kathy Brasby | Jun 2, 2015 | Stories
For some people, their car defines their image. For others, their car just reveals it.
We were filling our car at a little gas station when we noticed a young man pushing his car up the driveway of the station. He was a skinny guy but he had the driver’s door open so he could steer while he ran alongside the car, pushing. He was persistent.
His car like a faded tank that gulped gas. It must have run dry somewhere nearby.
All the gas pumps were occupied so he guided his old vehicle to the curb of the convenience store and waited. He leaned against the front fender, his arms folded, ankles crossed. He was patient.
Finally a spot cleared and he walked confidently to the front bumper, bent low, and heaved.
The car rolled like a lumbering ox to the open pump. He skittered to the driver’s door and punched down the brake. He was inventive.
By this time, we had sympathy for this man who obviously collided with a touch of bad luck by running out of gas before he got to the station.
He settled his car near the pump like a mother tucking in her toddler and pulled out his wallet.
Relief was in sight.
Then he pulled out $5 and slid it into the payment slot.
He pumped his gas in less time than it takes to read this paragraph. He tightened the gas cap and drove away.
I knew then why he rolled his car with such confidence. Yes, he was persistent and patient and inventive.
But mostly because he had done it before. Recently.
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by Kathy Brasby | May 26, 2015 | Stories
I knew things were going to get a little sticky when I uncovered an ink refill for a printer that I don’t remember owning.
I had cracked open my archive box to search for a CD (I’ve already dated this story, huh? My latest computer doesn’t even have a CD drive).
But archive box sounds fancy, doesn’t it? Downright organized.
Mine is a plastic box with lid that contains CDs from programs I’ve installed. What a great idea, I thought when I got it. All my programs were safely stored in one place and protected from dust and stuff.
I don’t know why the ink refill was in the box. The printer must not have lasted long enough to even earn a refill.
Opening that box was like a trip down memory lane but without the warm fuzzy emotions. Unless confusion is considered warm and fuzzy.
Diving in was kind of like an archeological dig.
I uncovered a CD with a big black question mark scrawled on the label. What in the world? Who labels their CD with a question mark?
Me, obviously.
Although nobody accuses me of being well-organized (well, someone did once but that was before they saw my desk), I took some pride in my box as a shred of planning. Every program CD went into that box after installation.
I am proud to say that there were no 5 ½ inch floppies in there. Using my system, that’s a miracle.
I found programs that won’t run on anything newer than Windows 98 and I’m on an Apple platform now. I found programs for pre-schoolers. (Our youngest is 19.) I found a CD from our classical music days.
I’d like to blame this on the kids but they never open the box. They just run the programs and don’t mess with the details.
Wonder where they learned that?
I’m sure there’s a major life lesson in all this. But those lessons tend to roll off me like tumbleweeds crossing the prairie.
So here’s what I learned: I’m cleaning out the box.
That leaves more room for archiving.
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by Kathy Brasby | May 19, 2015 | Stories
Grandma would watch the toddlers and our husbands wanted to watch the cars at the race track. So my sister and I decided on one of those free-spirit moments we’re good at.
In our little town, that meant a trip to Walmart.
As we wandered past the fragrance aisle, Sis decided we ought to try out some new scents.
Sample bottles littered the shelves but the fragrance doesn’t smell the same on the spray tip as it does on one’s skin. So we began, spraying a scent on a wrist. Then trying a different fragrance on the other wrist.
When there are over 30 bottles available to try, you run out of body places after awhile.
We had scent on the inside of each arm, with new spots of fragrance from wrist to shoulder. We spritzed the tip of each finger and thought about trying ankles and knees.
Even for us, that was too weird.
So, not finding a scent that really wowed us, we moved on.
Far from the fragrance aisle, I picked up a scent that I liked.
“Smell this one.” I thrust my forearm under her nose and she took a deep draw.
“I do, too,” she said. “I guess it took time to blossom. Let’s go get it.”
We headed back.
Sample bottles of fragrance do not smell the same in the bottle as on the skin.
We sniffed spray tips and spritzed fragrances in the air. But sample bottles of fragrance don’t smell the same in the bottle as on the skin. We couldn’t find our special scent.
We left the fragrance aisle smelling like the flower truck had collided with a fruit stand.
Smart women would have kept a chart of fragrance and location on the arm so it would have been simple to connect the sample fragrance with the label.
I called us free spirits. I never said we were smart.
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