When the cat bites, when the bee stings

 Howard, the guy I married, has been doing daily vlogs. He does not call them vlogs, or video logs as I would. You know me, I cannot say blog. I must say Web lot!

Anyway, Howard calls his daily video logs just by their opus numbers. He is now up to Opus 5.

Opus 5 does not interest me too much. It is about pizza. Men will always chow down their pizza and there is nothing that anyone can do about that. Well, I have an Amish chicken in the oven tonight so if Howard filled up on his pizza, that's fine, I will eat this chicken all on my own over the next few days.

However back to Howard and his opus numbers.

My favorite is Opus 2!

I linked to it up above. I think it should go viral.

That moment when Jeoffry just lunges at him and bites him! I cannot stop laughing.

Jeoffry really does not hurt you when he bites you. It just looks so dramatic and that Howard caught it on film is amazing.

It bodes well for Howard's video log, I will say that.

I have subscribed!

Candles for Candlemas

It is Candlemas Day tomorrow and we are invited to bring candles to Mass to get them blessed. Get it? Candle + Mass = Candlemas.

It is amazing how many descriptions of Candlemas you find on the 'Net claiming it as an ancient pagan holiday. They call it Candlemas, Candle Mass, and tell you with a straight face it is pagan. Fie!

Oh well. Their ignorance is of no moment. That is a phrase I loved as a kid from "The Three Musketeers." "It is of no moment."

My only worry is that I will run out the door tomorrow preoccupied with picking up Dorothy and forget the candles I have to get blessed. I was thinking of bringing my supermarket St. Anthony candle that a friend gave me when the braces came off my teeth. One thing that has struck me, St. Anthony's was kind vague when it said what kind of candles we could bring.

Could I bring some of my Candle-Lite ...

... Cinnamon Pecan Swirl candles? One of them sits in front of my Our Lady of Victory statue. I wanted to give Our Lady the best candle I had and that was Cinnamon Pecan Swirl.

Could I bring the Pumpkin Pie candles I got the other day at Kmart?

Can I bring a 20-pack of tea lights?

Could my friend Ryan bring the Glade scented oil candles that are his favorite and are, alas, being discontinued?

What about the citronella candles for my back porch?

Or would that all that be disrespectful? Do we need to bring pious regulation white tapers? But I am not allowed to burn tapers. Howard will not let me. I can only burn candles in jars. Or tea lights set in jars. I have tried that and gotten away with it.

As long as I burn candles in glass jars Howard is all right with it.

"Mary is Catholic," he has said. "She lights candles."

True.  I light candles in church for Leonard. And I light candles at home for the heck of it.

At last, a feast day made for me. Candlemas! I love hearing it in conversation. It is like Back to the 14th Century. Last week I was on the phone with our monsignor coordinating Candlemas plans and I loved how he said, "Last year I was out of town on Candlemas day." I am going to have to drop Candlemas into conversation like that.

Candlemas is part of the Christmas cycle which is relevant to me.

Needless to say, my tree is still up!

The birthday cake baker

This is me presenting Howard with his birthday cake at his birthday party.

It got me thinking about other birthday cakes I have made that I love. There is something special about making a birthday cake. I am not an expert at it! I am no good at cake decorating and never will be. Fussy things and I never agree. For instance I have never worked well outlining my projects which is one reason my Leonard Pennario book still has a little ways to go. Not much but a little.

What I am good at though, is that when I make a birthday cake I really love it.

The cake in the picture above, it is a sheet cake off of AllRecipes.com. Whenever you want to make something fattening AllRecipes is your friend!

A few other birthday cakes stand out in my mind. Once back when I was holding Monday night jam sessions at my house, my friend Peggy Farrell the jazz singer was celebrating her birthday. I made the Oatmeal Cake out of one of the Moosewood Cookbooks, I think "The Enchanted Broccoli Forest."

It baked in an 8 1/2 by 11 pan, definitely nothing fancy. But that was the whole charm. I still love remembering this cake. You made it with yogurt and oatmeal and it was dense and country-ish. I frosted it with a caramel frosting I got out of "The Joy of Cooking." Then I just stuck a bunch of candles in it and I loved carrying it out. It went, too. Everyone ate it.

Here it is! Oatmeal Yogurt Cake from "The Enchanted Broccoli Forest." I found it! If you have never made this cake before, try it. Make it for someone's birthday. Trust me.

More recently, a couple of years ago, my friend Michelle from work was celebrating a birthday and we did a little dinner at my house for a bunch of people from the office. I asked Michelle what kind of cake she wanted. That is a wonderful question to ask. I love asking it.

She asked for Red Velvet Cake!

Which I had never made. But that never stops me. I researched recipes and made Red Velvet Cake. It was in style during the 1920s. I learned that while I was reading up on it.

You had to use red food coloring which disappointed me a little. I had thought it had beets in it or something. Plus, I am warning you if you try this at home, a little red food coloring goes a long way. I saw recipes that called for a whole bottle! Luckily I chose one that needed just a teaspoon or something. Even with that, the kitchen looked like a car wreck. There was red everywhere.

But the cake turned out glorious. I mean, I loved it. It was a layer cake which I am not used to making so that gave me a thrill, trying to make one. I have a picture somewhere of me serving it to Michelle.

Oh, look, I wrote about it! Just now I started getting the sneaking suspicion that I had. Here is the picture.

Oops! That is not the picture! I do not think I ever made that cake. I am not talented enough. I do not know how it ended up in my files. Here is the picture.

So, enough about the red velvet cake, seeing that we have explored that before. There is one more cake.

That is the cake I made for Howard last night. It was his actual birthday so, another cake opportunity, not to be wasted. I had already made the cake pictured at the top of the post, which was a chocolate cake as he had requested. So now I made Blueberry Pudding Cake out of the Mark Bittman cookbook, "How To Cook Everything," that I scored for a buck at a garage sale I went to with my friend Lynn earlier this summer.

Howard loves blueberries, ergo this cake. It baked in a water bath -- weird, because I had made Mollie Katzen's Peach Pudding Cake and I do not remember it needing that. You also had to separate a bunch of eggs and beat up the egg whites, another thing I do not remember from that peach pudding cake.

The Blueberry Pudding Cake turned out great. There really was pudding in it! I had no birthday candles on hand so I used tea lights. Howard took pictures. I am going to have to wring them out of him and post them.

The moral of the story is, you do not have to be a professional cake decorator to turn out a birthday cake.

It is the thought that counts!

Hmmmm... I was just going to end with that, but all of a sudden I realized: Isn't it funny, I just noticed that the post I linked to was exactly a year ago today. That is a coincidence. I was writing about a garage sale where I bought a cake carrier. And my mother was there with me, giving advice on the cake carrier I was buying.

That was just a year ago! It makes me happy that my mom was out with me at garage sales that recently.

Celebrate the time you have with people. Celebrate with cakes.

They do not have to be perfect!

Play it again, Howard

Howard played the piano at the holiday shopping evening at Denton, Cottier and Daniels. It was "An Artful and Elegant Evening of Shopping." And Howard was artful and elegant!

There he is up above.

I had to go tell him to take his foot off the soft pedal because he was good and the world should hear him.

What if Leonard Pennario had kept his foot on the soft pedal? No one would have heard him.

The evening at Denton's was fun. I bought two scarves from the Amherst Symphony and wore one to work today. It is fun and comforting to have a scarf to wrap around you while you are at work.

This always happens to me, I go places thinking I will buy presents for other people.

And I wind up buying them for myself!

Brick by brick

Yesterday Howard played a gig at the Statler. It was the first payoff he got from his successful efforts to find the old hotel a buyer. He got to play a cocktail party for Business First.

That was Howard's hope when he saved the Statler, that he would be able to play there!

Business First is a business newspaper and they were giving out the Brick By Brick Awards. People were walking out carrying bricks.

That is Howard up above playing his gig. He is the Leonard Pennario of the Statler! What I like about the picture is how it makes him look like a cardboard cutout. As if he is just faking playing the Statler. But he was not. He was there! But I was not. I was at Parings Wine Bar with my mom. The picture was taken by his friend Zbigniew Bielinski.

The good side of that is, I get to mention someone named Zbigniew on my Web log. That makes me feel cool.

Play it again, Howard!

Space cadets

Howard has his fingers in a lot of pies and what he is doing right now is tracking WGRZ's weather balloon. Our TV station WGRZ, better known as Channel 2, is sending a weather balloon half way to space and Howard is lending them the technology to track it. There he is above teaching schoolchildren about the technology. I took the picture from WGRZ's Web site.

What if the balloon vanishes into space and is lost? That is something to consider.

What if it just keeps going?

Here is another question. You know how everyone is always wondering if we will find intelligent life in space? We are humble here on Earth and we always assume these beings will be smarter than we are.

Here is something I heard on Catholic Radio. "What if we find other beings in outer space and they are really stupid?"

Ha, ha! What do you want to bet?

They will embrace our earthly culture of backwards baseball caps and pants halfway down their butts. And then we will have twice as many of those people as we have now!

No one out there on that distant planet will be interested in Mozart or Leonard Pennario or Art Tatum or ... here is a name we have not mentioned in a while ... Camille Pissaro.

No, they will be stupid!

They will want to do what I did all day today and sit around and play Pac-Man. Has anyone else been taking advantage of Google's free Pac-Man? Howard is sitting here trying to work on his weather balloon technology and I just made him sit through me playing the game twice, complete with arcade music and those crazy sirens. I had forgotten all those noises!

Back to Howard and his space balloon. You can get in on the fun by going to his Web site where you will see the countdown to liftoff. Then you click on "Click to View Live."

It is dizzying what Howard can accomplish.

With me sitting here playing Pac-Man.