Author Archives: Mrs Marvel

The never ending saga of the water leak

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So, last Thursday as I came home, I heard a strange noise in the house. I couldn’t quite decide what it was, and since it’s rather chaotic when I get home, what with the dogs barking and the child laughing & yelling, I didn’t investigate immediately as I would have if I was alone. About 5 minutes later, I went back to the washer/dryer area, and there was that sound again. I turned on the light, and the globe was full of water. Uh oh. With great dread, I realized we had a burst water pipe in the ceiling. We had experienced one sometime in ’09, so I recognized the signs immediately.

Panic! I’ve got water inside an electrical light fixture! I’ve got water leaking somewhere in my ceiling! Holy moly! Called John, he wasn’t available. Called my dad, he was in the shower! My mom was shouting to him “what does she do?” We decided I would shut off the electric to the house and the water main. Thankfully, when our water pipe burst last year, John had a quick shut-off lever installed. Something good came out of it, I suppose.

Then, I got hold of the plumber and begged them to come (of course at the emergency rate) right away. Spoke to John, he was headed home. Melody had no idea what was happening, but was excited we were going to have pizza. Sigh.

Hundreds of dollars later, the pipe was fixed and the plumber left.

The next day, two of our three toilets didn’t work. I had to have the plumber back out to fix them. As it turns out, when galvanized pipe gets old, it rusts from the inside out, and that rust travels down the line and clogs everything in its way. Just like a blood clot in an artery. With all the banging on the water pipes to fix them, that is exactly what happened.

By Monday, we had the musty smell of damp wallboard. Oh great. Numerous people suggested we find out if it would be covered under our homeowners insurance (it is) and they sent an adjustor out to review the damage. Hey, guess what? That water that we thought had dried up never really did!

My wood floors have been ripped up – there were puddles of standing water underneath – and I now have 10 blowers and 2 gigantic dehumidifiers in my house. The damage went everywhere. If you’ve been in my home, picture the entire back hallway, the bathroom, the closet of my guest room, the powder room in the front and my living room – which shares the wall with the bathroom. Oh, and I have huge holes cut into my ceilings where they fixed the pipe.

Tomorrow, more water clean up, some other person coming to check for asbestos since they will have to cut the drywall to repair/replace it.

The good news? Right at this moment I can’t think of any, but at least we don’t have the hideous 70s era faux wood vinyl flooring that was under my wood floors, right?

And you thought modern baking was time consuming?

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This is a fun little piece my mother passed on to me. First is an excerpt from Martha Washington’s letters to her grandmother. Note, I have written these exactly as they are printed, with the exception of using the modern “s” in place of the Georgian f shaped s to make it easier to read.

To make a great Cake

“Take 40 eggs and divide the whites from the yolks and beat them to a froth then work 4 pounds of butter to a cream & put the whites of eggs to it a Spoon full at a time till it is well work’d then put 4 pounds of sugar finely powdered to it in the same manner then put in the youlks of eggs & 5 pounds of flower & 5 pounds of fruit. 2 hours will bake it add to it half an ounce of mace & nutmeg half a pint of wine & some frensh brandy.”

Now, if you can find a pan big enough to bake this cake, you may want to ice it, right? Below is an excerpt from The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse.

To Ice a great Cake another Way

“Take two pounds of double refin’d Sugar, beat and sift it very fine, and likewise beat and sift a little Starch and mix with it, then beat six White of Eggs to a froth, and put to it some Gum-water, the Gum must be steep’d in the Orange-flower-water, then mix and beat all these together two Hours, and put it on your Cake; when it is bake, set it in the oven again to harden a quarter of an Hour, take great Care it is not discolour’d. When it is drawn, ice it over the top and sides, take two Pounds of double refin’d Sugar beat and sifted, and the Whites of three Eggs beat to a Froth, with three or four Sponfuls of Orange-flower-water, and three Grains of Musk and Amber-grease together; put all these on a Stone Mortear, and beat these till it is as white as snow, and with a Brush or Bundle of Feathers, spread it all over the Cake and put it in the oven to dry, but take Care the oven does ot discolor it. When it is cold, paper it, and it will keep good five or six weeks.”

Next time on the The Colonial Baking Show, we will share a modernized version of Martha Washington’s Great Cake, be sure to tune in to see us try to wrangle a 20″ cake pan into a wood fire oven, only on The Food Nutwork…

The strange competition for recipe cards

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Since I started my other blog, Gram’s Recipe Box, back in March, I haven’t had to worry too much about source material, because I was working my way through the old recipe box. Now that I’m reaching the end of the cards, I’m seeking new source material. My friend loaned me some cards from her family and my sister is working on some others that she has. In the meantime I figured I’d look on eBay, the great garage sale of the internet.

It’s amazing what people will put on eBay, and it’s even more amazing that there are lots of people out there bidding on that stuff. I did a quick search on vintage recipe cards and there were numerous auctions for old boxes of recipe cards. Many were handwritten notecards, much like Gram’s. Many were big collections of clippings, handwritten cards, and those funny Betty Crocker cards from the 70s.

What is more amazing is that there is a strange competition for these cards, with a few buyers paying up to $75 for a collection of old recipe cards. I find that very weird! I bid on six auctions and on three of them, I was outbid in the last few seconds of the sale! Now, that’s not unusual, but the fact that it’s on something that I think of as somewhat low on the “hot item” list is what throws me.

But, this tells me something much more important. All of these auctions said “great estate sale find!” noted in them. Meaning they were left as junk by the relatives of some deceased lady who collected recipes her entire life. It seems there are enough people who either don’t have their own family recipe books, or they just love old recipes, that these old recipes, almost lost to the ages, are now a “hot item” for collectors.

The moral of the story is to pass on the recipes from your family. Even if you don’t cook, please pass them on to someone who will appreciate them. As I’ve learned through my recipe project, recipe cards hold a lot more than ingredients and instructions on them.

What is with baby names these days?

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As parents, you spend so much time considering the name(s) of your children. You want the name to be something that inspires confidence, happiness, respect, and more. It has to sound good with your last name, endure as a good business name for the future, and not upset any family members. We agonized over what to name our child, ultimately settling on Melody. We considered family names, but with 14 cousins on Dad’s side there weren’t a lot of family names that hadn’t been taken and Borghild was definitely out. Then we looked on my side, and well, we pretty much have a monopoly on names like Harriet, Henrietta, and Mary. Plus, I have five cousins who have children, so a lot of the family names were taken here as well.

While joking about the crazy ways people spell names these days, we came up with KeLliE, Kassan’dra, and then Mel o’Dee. Melody. Yes, suddenly the quest was over and we selected Melody, not a family name, not an unusual name, but an uncommon name. Of course, there are lots of parents who come up with trendy or unusual names for their children, like ESPN (pronounced Espen) and Talulah, and that doesn’t even consider American “ethnic” names. Unusual names can be difficult to grow up with these days.

But, if you thought some of these trendy names were the original made-up sounding names that make you shake your head in confusion, let me just give you a sampling of names from my family tree, which goes back hundreds of years, but the greatest offenders are the Puritans.

On the male list, we’ve got Ebenezer and Elisha at least ten times; Ichabod, Barzillai and Bethul; Darius, Zeno, and Zophar; Balthazar, Elihu, Jabez and even Gustav, which suddenly sounds pretty normal; Ozias, Obed, Asahel, and oh my god, Nutter; rounding this out we have Pownall, Lyman, Elphias, Arashur and Azariah.

Two long lost relatives whose gender has been lost to the ages are named Freegift and Freeman.

Female names are equally unusual: Huldah, Love, and Experience; Hepzibah, Tamar, and Submit; Charity and Mercy are so common sounding now, next to Zerviah, Desire, Wealthy and Mehitable. We have a Hopestill, and we even have a Jemima.

Hmm, Dakota, Cullen and Piper are all sounding pretty usual, aren’t they?

 

I thought I’d lost you!

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When I was a child, I had a brass baby bank. It was basically a cylindar, with a small base and a nut that held the whole thing together. I also had a plastic egg, but that wasn’t as fun or interesting to take apart. For years I held onto that brass baby bank. For a while I used it to keep coins and then I’d empty it out and go buy an ice cream or some other treat. I had another special box that I put my wheat pennies into – it was a “silver” treasure chest shaped trinket box which I used until the hinges broke, and then I transferred the coins over to the brass bank.

At some point I started using the brass baby bank to hold my old money – old coins and bills – and foreign money. I filled it with $2 bills, and I even had a silver certificate (for $1) and pennies and dimes dating back into the ’40’s. I kept it around and whenever I’d find a “new” coin I’d slide it in through the little opening, which was mostly obscured by the bills wrapped up inside the bank.

Well, when Melody was born, I started thinking about that bank again. I thought it might be fun to share it with her, or even give it to her at some point. So I started looking in the obvious places for the bank. And I looked. And looked. This year, after looking for two years, I figured it was gone. Maybe it had been accidentally donated to Goodwill (I did that once with a piece of jewelry), or even picked up by one of the numerous workers we have had to the house for repairs and improvements.

It wasn’t! John found it this past weekend in a box with a variety of other unrelated things. I can only assume that it was put in the wrong place during packing for a move, or rearranging after a move. I was delighted to open it up and show Melody the interesting coins I have in there – Greek, Canadian, Mexican, English – and the old wheat pennies, a buffalo nickle, a silver quarter. Something tells me I’m not completely ready to pass the torch, so to speak, but I’ll continue collecting these little treasures for her until the day that she is interested.

I thought I’d lost you, little brass baby bank, and I so thankful to have found you again!

Growing Up OC – The OP Pro, My Cousin and a Cop

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Over the last weekend here in Orange County the annual pro surfing competition took place in Huntington Beach. It’s a great big event now, covered by local news and newspapers, but the one and only time I went to the OP Pro, it was covered by the news for a very different reason.

Back in 1986, my cousin George was either living out here in California or planning on living out here. He had joined the Navy and was planning on flying F-14s out of Miramar in San Diego. For that glorious summer in 1986, he stayed with us in Fountain Valley. My sister and I adored George like the brother we never had. He was about 10 years older than me and so grown up!

So, Geo and I decided one weekend that we would go down to Huntington to see what there was to see. We didn’t know the OP Pro was happening, but we were a little interested in it once we got there. We parked below 1st Street and eventually walked up to 8th Street before heading back to the car. Geo wanted to walk around town – which we did – and do a little sightseeing. This was all before the big “Main Street renovation” project, so the little shops and bars were packed with people, everything felt really charming and authentic. (Unlike now)

On our walk up the street, we wandered through the beach area, watching some of the crowds at the OP Pro. I was still a young teen, about 16 at the time, so George probably didn’t want me to be exposed to the rowdy crowds. This was the era of shocking day glow bikinis, plus lots of surfers and skateboarders who had been drinking all day. We saw some guys harassing a girl, trying to provoke her to take her top off, and so we left.

We had walked all the way to 8th street and bought some sodas at the little liquor store on the corner when we decided it was time to turn around and go home. It was pretty hot that day, as Labor Day weekend can be. Well, as we headed back downtown, we saw the smoke. Thick, black smoke. George knew in an instant that it was more than a trash can fire and he was carefully protective of me. As we got closer though, we had to walk through the parking lot in order to get to our car. It had taken about 20 minutes to walk that far and the crowds were rioting by that point.

This is pretty much what we saw as we got closer. I thought Maxwell’s was on fire, but in fact it was police cars, the mobil command center for the police, and an ATV. Those guys we had seen harassing the girl to take off her top? Well, they had moved on to other girls, and they had found some takers, but of course it got out of hand when the girls wanted to put their tops back on. It was drunken and depraved, and I was scared.

By the time we were in the parking area on the other side of the pier, the cops were out in riot gear. We were carefully and calmly trying to move away from them, and somehow the crowd swelled in such a way that Geo and I were suddenly right in front of those cops. I can clearly remember the guys’ face – completely pumped on adrenaline I’m sure – it was full of as much intensity as the rioters probaby were. He was shouting at everyone to get back, and reached out and shoved George out of his way with enough force that he knocked over the 6′ 1″ muscled Navy airman former football player. George rolled over but his glasses flew off, and he had to scramble to find them again. I was terrified that the cops would start beating him and I didn’t know what to do if that happened.

Fortunately, George was able to recover and jog over to me. We basically ran out of that place and down to our car. Our hearts were racing with fear and adrenaline. We got in the car (the ever popular Ford LTD station wagon) and took off. Within a block, we were making up a song about it and laughing in that release of fear and adrenaline that can only come after a moment like that. And that was a wonderful thing about George – he was able to turn that frightening experience in such a way that I can remember the laughing and singing in the car better than I can remember the fear and danger.

Our brush with the OP Pro of ’86 was brief, but enough. I will never go back. I still like to watch surfing. On TV.

I remember while we were wading through that crowd, something else that was more serious than the riot, which at the time seemed ridiculous – we were in the middle of a riot after all! It was someone on top of the camera tower, shouting down that two planes had crashed into each other in Cerritos. George and I didn’t know what to think, but when we got home, our excursion seemed so minor in comparison.

Growing Up OC – My first concert

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The year was 1981.

I was 13 years old.

My Girl Scout leader organized a field trip and I surely begged my parents to let me go. It was going to be my first concert. I was a devoted fan of this band for easily 25 years and I was known in my troop to verge on obsessed with them. Who could this band be? Popular bands in 1981 were Hall & Oats, Journey, The Go-Gos, The Tubes and Squeeze. Now, don’t get me wrong, I loved all these bands, and The Tubes would have been a strong contender for my first concert, but alas, they weren’t THE band that held my fascination.

You’ve got to understand, until I heard of this band, I listened to the Beatles and Elvis. I was voluntarily cloistered in terms of popular music, and Billy Squier was downright shocking to me! But I was taken, not with Squeeze, not with Journey.

I loved Oingo Boingo.

It could have had something to do with the enormous crush I had on a boy who also liked Oingo Boingo, but this band really changed my concept of the boundaries of music. I saw them for the first time on Halloween night at Universal Amphitheater in Hollywood. Typical of an Oingo Boingo show on Halloween, people in the audience were dressed up in costume. One guy came as the Pope – and continued to do so for another 10 years or more – and another person was dressed as a big Tylenol capsule with a cyanide warning on the side. My friends and I wore Boy Scout shirts. I was in heaven. Many years later I went to their final Halloween show down at Irvine Meadow’s Amphitheater and my friend and I had procured back stage passes. How times had progressed for us!

What was your first concert?