Take 2

Let's try this again.

In an attempt to blog more often, I'm going to try for shorter blog posts. This one I will submit in list form:

Thing's I've done since moving to Arlington:

1. Missed my family, friends and job in Utah

2. Fallen in love with northern Virginia and my new ward

3. Seen two movies in theaters

4. Eaten in 5 new restaurants

5. Endured 6 days of Powerpoint slides

6. Made my commute in 30 minutes

7. Made my commute in 1 hr. 45 minutes

8. Played volleyball, soccer and football

9. Baked 4 batches chocolate chip cookies

10. Played rockband

11. Fallen in love with my gps

12. Danced the mambo

13. Sang in ward choir

14. Babysat my fake nephew

15. Blogged again, finally

Duly Noted

I have been informed that blogs generally include pictures. And sometimes recipes. To comply, here is the cake I made for my grandma's 87th birthday and the recipe that made it possible (thank you interwebs).

Chocolate Cake

1 1/2 C Ghirardelli cocoa

1 1/2 tsp salt

3 C flour

1 tsp baking soda

3 C sugar

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

3/4 C oil

1 1/2 C buttermilk

1 1/2 tsp vanilla

3 eggs

1 1/2 C hot water

Combine dry ingredients then add wet ingredients. Grease and flour cake pans. (The batter is extremely runny and the cake will invariable stick to the cake pan, so I recommend using a spring form cake pan or lining the bottom of the pan with wax paper). Bake 350º for 45-55+ minutes or until toothpick comes clean. Yields two 9" cakes layers.

Chocolate Mousse Frosting

2 C butter

16 oz Ghirardelli 60% bittersweet chocolate

2 1/2 tbs milk

2 tsp vanilla

5 C confectioners sugar

1 pt. whipping cream

Melt chopped chocolate and add to beaten butter and vanilla. Add confectioners sugar and milk. In another bowl, whip cream until it forms peaks then add it to the chocolate mixture. Generously frosts one 2 layer cake.

Cover with fresh raspberries (3 small cartons) and dust with confectioners sugar.

Running

Watching the Olympics on our living room floor I would roll back with my chin dug into my chest, my feet shot skyward like a steeple and my elbows wedged like an a-brace below my back.  Once in position I would churn my feet on the peddles of an inverted, invisible bike while the carpet made pebbled imprints on my neck.

As images of athletes flashed on the screen, I would map out the daily, air-bike exercise routine that would someday lead to the medal podium.  I could feel the finish tape pull and snap against my chest like the skin of a taut grape and indulge in fantasies of victory. 

Athletes were warriors and sport was a battle.

Now I’m training for the Provo River Trail Marathon on September 12, urged on by the boy with the rug-burned elbows.  Visions of epic struggle swim in my head.

But running is not a battle.  Running is surrender.

It starts as a panic.  I hear my blood like the throbbing sound of water rushing upon and sucking away the shore.  I greedily seize each breathe from the gaps in the cold swell submerging my head.  My thrashing legs and arms jerk unnaturally against an unseen foe.

But eventually, subdued by fatigue, I let myself be lulled by the orchestrated rhythm of the tide, and the desperate thrashing quiets.  What frightened entices and I realize the body that would rattle apart is the vessel to bear me home. 

The evermore urgent struggling within my chest pushes against the four-walled cavern of my rib cage until, finally, my consciousness escapes like a tight bubble expanding upward until it breaks on the churning surface of the water.

Still.

That’s what running is for me.  Stillness.  A chance to be quiet and trust what scares me.  It makes me wonder what I was running from in the first place.

Reading to Cody*

I literally could have killed him.

I smiled at his tongue protruding indignantly from his mouth the first time I asked him a question.  I shrugged off his slumped posture and sullen stare whenever I invited him to participate in the games.  I even kept my cool when he pushed Rachel’s desk halfway across the classroom and when he pinched Noah’s arm. 

But when Cody’s pint-sized Reebok flew through the air and hit me in the head, I knew the spawn must die.

I was hired last minute as a teacher's aid for a two week Chinese immersion summer camp for 1st graders and while I love kids and have what I would consider a high tolerance for noise, I was not prepared for Cody.  After school I commuted to Provo for my second job and continued to fume all night.  It wasn’t until I got home that I flopped down on the side of my bed and asked, “God, please help me love Cody.”

The next day at school I was already in battle mode when Cody came in late and proceeded to knock all the backpacks off the rack finding a spot for his lunch.  For a moment I imagined his little sillouette cut from the brick wall of the classroom and calculated the velocity at which I would have to hurl him to clear the playground.  Instead I asked, “Cody, come read a book with me.”

To my surprise he stood and followed me to the bookshelf.  We picked out a book and took it to the back of the classroom where he quietly rested his head on my shoulder and repeated each word in Chinese as I read it.  When the book was finished, he carefully closed it and put in back on the shelf before returning to his seat and listening quietly to the lesson.  This is not to say that Cody never threw his shoes again or that a story kept him from spitting water from the drinking fountain all over Hannah’s shirt, but it is to say when he felt love, his behavior changed.  And mine did too.

At the end of the two-week camp, the kids performed a play of the Little Red Hen for their parents and families.  I sat in the far corner hear the sound and noticed a cutoff t-shirt shuffle in and find a spot on the floor near the front next to me.

After the play, Cody ran across the gym and jumped on the man sitting next to me, nearly spilling his energy drink, and buried his face into the small tattoo on the left side of his neck.  Shifting in his lap Cody told the man all about his teacher and how to say “hen” in Chinese and all the numbers 1 through 37 while he smiled back with eyebrows raised, listening intently. 

As Cody excitedly introduced me to his "real" dad, I shook his hand and looked into his kind, tired eyes still blood-shot from working the night shift.  He asked me how Cody was doing in class and before my brain could catch up I just smiled.

Cody's doing just fine.

*(name has been changed)

Spiral Jetty

Grandpa didn’t get it.  He stared intently, touching his hearing aid as we told him where we were going.  Spiral Jetty.  A 1500-foot long and 15-foot wide counterclockwise coil jutting from the shore of the Great Salk Lake, considered to be the masterwork of American sculptor Robert Smithson.  Like texting or wikipedia, I’m sure he filed it the category of things he doesn’t need to understand.

But it was not his hearing aid.

Pulling out of his driveway with a back seat full of Vitamin Water and Pepperidge Farms cookies, essentials for any adventure, I smiled at his confusion and turned on the radio. 

The whole thing was Danielle’s idea.  In need of an adventure and painfully bound in country by work and intenrships, we decided to pay homage to a monument to contemporary art in our own back yard.  After twenty miles of gravel roads, we pulled off to the side of the road and hiked the last mile or two, leaving my black Nissan Altima glinting in the desert.

We ventured off the path onto the dry salt beds surrounding the jetty with the trepidation of early man witnessing fire or Neil Armstrong taking his first tentative step on virgin lunar soil.  My Aesics splintered the caramelized crust of salt deposits, sinking almost imperceptibly into the lake’s gelatinous underbelly.  Trepidation turned to childish fascination at the footsteps blossoming then swelling with water behind me.  Bending at the waist to bring my nose closer, I inspected salt crystals forming where water once lapped against the shallow shore.  Rising to take in the caustic smell of salt and the expanse of the Great Salt Lake disappearing into a rim of mountains in the distance I could have been no more at home on the face of Jupiter.

The jetty sprouts seamlessly from the rocky shore, a contradictory fusion of nature and geometry.  Tufts of green struggle from under the blackened, pockmarked rocks and a lizard flashed beneath my feet.  At the second ring, however, life disappears as arctic winter descends, covering rocks and suffocated weeds with white, salty foam.  Dipping my hand into the peaked foam along the jetty’s outer rim the weightless clouds dissolved to grit in my fingers, to which a quick rinse in the calm water turned amethyst by the setting sun did nothing but coat with a thin, waxy film.

Of course my battery was dead.  Like a rose plucked from the ground or a butterfly pinned and suffocating under glass, capturing it would have only killed it—the spiral floating in its own reflection and the translucent water thick as honey.

This is my photograph.

Caving

It was bound to happen.  Like staying dry in a pool or glum in a candy store, not blogging, as it turns out, is not possible.  I demurred for a while, claiming, "Blogging is a couples' thing" and "I have Facebook," but here I am, in spite of myself, spewing my deepest thoughts and feelings into the blog-o-sphere.

sigh.

There are worse things I suppose.  I guess now I will be able to fill you in on the ins and outs of my everyday (applause) and keep a record of my rock-star existence.  So to all of you who've read Twilight or ever had a bowl-cut, you know what I mean when I say, "Ugh, I caved."