Regina Noctis

Happy Turkey Day, folks!

There will be few strange and wonderful things at our Thanksgiving feast this year. My grandmother dislikes all the little innovations that my mom and I love to do for Thanksgiving. No cornbread, sausage, scallion, and hazelnut stuffing for us this year. No brandied pumpkin pie with chocolate cookie crust and ginger whipped cream. But we did force through a couple of different things in spite of that, and here is one of them:

cocoa powder for dusting
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 pound fine-quality bittersweet chocolate (not unsweetened,) chopped
3 sticks (1 1/2 cups) unsalted butter, cut into pieces
1/3 cup dark rum
2 cups strong brewed coffee
2 1/4 cups granulated sugar
3 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
confectioners’ sugar for dusting
lightly sweetened whipped cream

Preheat oven to 300 degrees F. Butter a 4 1/2-inch-deep (12 cup) Kugelhupf or bundt pan and dust with cocoa powder, knocking out excess.

In a bowl whisk together flour, baking soda, and salt. In a large metal bowl set over a saucepan of barely simmering water melt chocolate and butter, stirring until smooth. Remove chocolate from heat and stir in rum, coffee, and granulated sugar. With an electric mixer beat in flour, 1/2 cup at a time, scraping down sides, and beat in eggs and vanilla until batter is combined well. Pour batter into prepared pan.

Bake cake in middle of oven until a tester comes out clean, about 1 hour and 50 minutes. Let cake cool completely in pan on a rack and turn it out onto rack. Cake may be made up to 3 days in advance and kept wrapped well and chilled.

Dust cake with confectioners’ sugar and serve with whipped cream.

For anyone who’s ever received a rejection form letter when applying for a job…

http://www.jkador.com/letter.htm

You are: POISON IVY!

Which Batman Villain Are You?
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Urquhart deleted his journal. I’m not entirely surprised, since he hasn’t written much of anything in it in quite some time.

Well, sorry it didn’t turn out to be your kind of thing, Commander. I guess I’ll just have to wait for the 2143 Project (*AHEM* *looks in ’s general direction*) to get my dose of Urquhart. :D

My jailbird father has been in contact with me, off and on, since I moved back here. He wants me to help him try to retain his green card after he gets out next year, so he can still be eligible for his Social Security income. He does need it. The medication he needs in order to live runs $300/month. The $700/month he’d get from So-So Security would give him that, with some left over to live on. If he’s living in Mexico, that will be enough. But in order to be eligible for SSI, he still has to be able to come into the US. No green card, no access to his SSI.

So, I told him I’d try to help him, as long as it meant that I didn’t have to claim responsibility for him, have him live with me, or have him as a permanent fixture back in my life. He’s done enough in the past. I don’t need more rounds with him.

He seems to have decided that this means he can go back to trying to make an arranged marriage for me. He’s been doing this for many years. I haven’t forgotten the day, when we were living in Mexico, that he met me after school and told me that he was negotiating how much money he was selling me for to some guy he’d met in an ice cream store. I was in 8th grade, old enough as far as he was concerned to be sold to some 40-year-old man he’d met once, to be the guy’s wife. I went ballistic.

He’s tried off and on since then to marry me off to someone he’s chosen. Usually someone I’ve never met.

The latest round of that arrived today. Without asking me, he gave my name and address to the guy in the next cell in the prison he’s in in Texas. Some Cuban man who’s in for cocaine. Whether dealing, doing, or both, I don’t know. A card arrived from his inmate friend today. The guy obviously took some trouble in making the thing. There are drawings all over it, clouds and with flying birds, and not badly done, especially considering that it’s all done in ball-point pen. He sent a picture of himself. It’s not one that inspires a lot of confidence in me. There’s some kind of vibe that comes through that says, “Do or say something I don’t like once or twice, and I might laugh it off. But if you don’t submit to what I think that you should be, the beatings will start.” The part of me that began the cycle of one abusive relationship after another recognizes something there. I can’t put my finger on it, it’s not that obvious. But there’s something in the look, in the way he’s standing, in the body language of the picture, that says this to me. And after years of abuse followed by years of recovery, I trust my instincts on this.

At the same time, the letter is friendly without being pushy, well-written, and requests only that I be a pen pal. I don’t want to, and am horrible at every writing letters. I complete and send one to someone maybe once every five years. I am not, and have never been, a letter writer. I don’t have the patience for it. But that’s now at war with the side of me that says that it’s impolite to not say anything back, even if it’s only sending something saying that I appreciate the time he took on it, but that I’m not interested. I’ve been advised not to make any response at all, even a negative one, since that may encourage. And I don’t want to make a response. And feel that it’s wrong to be that impolite.

I’ve had the whole “being polite” thing drilled into my head for so long that it’s hard to not be so. I’ve said, and had people tell me that my self-perception on this is correct, that I’m often too polite for my own good.

Thanks, o jailbird father, for yet another go-round of inner turmoil.

*sigh*

The month meme that’s making the rounds right now got me thinking. I’m often argumentative by nature. I’ve been known to prolong an argument simply for the sake of argument. It’s one of the things that made my mother decide that I should have been a lawyer.

When reading the month meme on various journals, I’ve been tempted to argue, but I haven’t. At some point, I came to a realization. This month meme is less about reality than about self-perception. While I, looking in from the outside, may think that friends should put back some of the things that they’ve struck out, it’s not about what I think about the people in question. It’s about what they think of themselves. In some ways, it could almost be a tool to point out those areas that people need to work on. When I see people I know damn well are fun to be with strike that out, or someone attractive who crosses out that they are, it’s either false modesty (which, knowing my friends, I doubt) or it’s areas where low self-esteem is an issue. A marker on an area to try and work on, to improve how they see themselves.

I’ve read through the one for October. I know what I would mark out if I were to put it in my journal. I know that some of the things that I would mark out would mean comments from friends arguing that I’m wrong. I’m currently still debating on whether or not I am going to bother putting the meme in this journal. But I am taking it as a tool, with the mental checklist I made when I looked at it, to try and improve myself and my view of myself.

An example would be “inner and physical beauty.” I see neither. I have always seen neither in myself. My friends have spent years arguing with me on this, some more than others. And most of my life, when they’ve argued, I’ve discounted what they said. Either because I considered them blindered by friendship (since I know that how I feel about someone can affect how I see them) or else lying to avoid hurting the feelings of a friend.

I’ve come far enough now that, though I still think that it doesn’t apply to me, I also realize that there’s a strong possibility that my image of myself is skewed. It connects to reality in some ways, but doesn’t in others. The conviction that I’m right and everyone else is wrong is not so set in stone. The fact that it doesn’t feel true, but doesn’t necessarily feel like it absolutely has to be false, gives me some hope that someday, I won’t have a desire to sneer at my own reflection and wonder why there couldn’t be something pretty looking back instead of what’s there. Or, in sleep-deprived moments, to hang an “out of order” sign on the mirror.

I got your gift a couple days ago, but was sick and sleeping fourteen hours at a time because of it. I didn’t get the chance to say anything until now.

Thank you. You’re such a sweet, thoughtful friend.

Love you lots and miss you. We’ll have to see about hanging out after you’re back in the area, even though I don’t live up in the Bay Area anymore.

*hugs*

I started fooling around with Creaturecology several years ago. But it wasn’t actually running yet. The critters you created didn’t go out into the virtual world to play.

After all this time… at least four years… they finally got around to the “Genesis” phase, where the world is active. In the meantime, I’ve forgotten what username I used. None of my “standard” ones is all I know for sure.

So, I’ve started over with this beasty. Pity the only way for me to get the population up to something resembling a viable population is to send e-cards with a link to view the creature. Everyone who I send one to increases the population. But I’m not willing to spam everyone I know just to get the population up. That part of the whole thing sucks.

The other good news of the day was the discovery of a couple really amazing dishes. , I seem to recall that you don’t like fish, so I won’t point you at the shrimp recipe. But look up Shanghai vegetable rice in that Chinese cookbook I talked you into buying. Try it. It’s incredibly yummy.