July 30, 2008

Hodge Podge

This utter blog quietness is starting to freak me out because I realize that my brain is just slowly zoning out. Some of that is the tediousness of having a broken right leg which means that I'm getting less stimulation from the outside world than normal. Some of it is being worn out from freelancing instead of having a regular 9 to 5.

Some of it is because I spend much of the day in quiet contemplation - and forget to write it down. I "write" in my head for a few hours, purportedly to get my thoughts in order ... and when they're in order, well, I'm not so interested in writing them down any more.

In addition to that, several of my best online buddies have more or less disappeared over the last few months and I miss them. It makes my being online a little harder - like when your best friend moves to a new town and you kind of avoid the place you used to hang out together. I suppose it's a form of mourning and I suppose that's a big part of why I've avoided some of my favourite online hang-outs (like Cre8Buzz).

Today I'm going to attempt to clear out my work area again - it keeps getting clogged up since my mobility is so reduced. Then I've got a comic to draw for GeekMomMashup, a tattoo design to finish for Real World Mom and, of course, finally complete the baby book para mi sobrino. Preferably before my sister kills me. Which she can't do until she gets back from Colombia. I have time. Photoshop work is something I always dive straight into. Hand drawing - as for GeekMom and my sister? It intimidates me still and I have to spend a few days gearing myself up - get over the stage fright, as it were.

What will make today incredibly long and stressful, though, is my li'l baby girl is sick. We took her to the vet Monday - she's got a stomach bug. Unfortunately, that is the tip of the iceberg. Last night I thought she was moving her back half oddly. So I stood her up and made her walk a few steps. Her rear left leg is just not functioning correctly - she's kind of dragging it. I'm hoping it's just a muscular strain, but I fear it's probably a hip issue. Still, I'd rather it be a hip issue than a back issue - and since she's a dachshund we bought at a freaking pet store we knew there would likely be problems. (No, I don't think buying pets at a pet store is a good thing. Trust me, she has an amazing mojo and she called me to the pet store and informed me I was bringing her home. I have been wrapped around her little paws since the first time I saw her. And I go to utter pieces when she doesn't feel good. She is beyond pitiful.)

Meanwhile, I'm going to attempt to do my thinking with my fingers this week and post more frequently. If nothing else, I need the distraction from poor Scoutie and her bad leg. Dammit, the dog was not supposed to emulate me in THAT!

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:17 AM | Comments (3) | Blog | Stumble

July 6, 2008

Flickering Glimpse

So, I hate memes. But I saw this one on If Mom Says OK and promptly swiped it.

What you do:

1. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
2. Using only the first page, pick an image.
3. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into this mosaic maker.

My Answers:

1. What is your first name? Robin
2. What is your favorite food? buffalo chicken
3. What high school did you go to? lamar
4. What is your favorite color? green
5. Who is your celebrity crush? gina gershon
6. Favorite drink? diet vanilla pepsi
7. Dream vacation? Ireland
8. Favorite dessert? pixie stix
9. What you want to be when you grow up? graphic designer
10. What do you love most in life? skateboarding
11. One Word to describe you. me
12. Your (blog) name. Red Monkey

Oh. The interesting thing? Some of these bear no resemblance to the word I originally searched for (particularly, #2!!), but I picked the the image that most matched up to me rather than the specific word picked.

Click to bigify:

1. The Long Arm of the Law, 2. Love changes everything----SCMP, 3. Lamar High School Cheerleaders, July 4 Parade, Arlington, 4. ♫ YO Yo yo, 5. Gina Gershon 6, 6. SirMimseyPepsi, 7. Rossbeigh Long Exposure, 8. Addicted, 9. if you're on fire..., 10. Me Then (1978) and Now (2008), 11. That's, uh, some lightning you've got there., 12. Douc Langur

Posted by Red Monkey at 3:12 PM | Comments (2) | Blog | Stumble

July 4, 2008

Homes

We lived in Albuquerque for all of about 3 months when I was 3 years old and I've never been quite able to shake the New Mexico dust off of me since. Don't get me wrong, I will always, always be drawn to the Austin area ... it always gives me a feeling of home and safety. But New Mexico - more specifically the Dinetah - touches me on a level too deep for words to explain, even to myself.

This last month has been something of a blur with the "sprained" leg that turned out to be badly broken, surgery and then just a couple of days later, I spent three days in a mini-van being driven first to Terre Haute, Indiana ... Oklahoma City ... and finally Dzilth-na-o-dith-hle in northwestern New Mexico.

As we left South Bend, we wound up traveling through four of seven towns I lived in growing up. First, we drove through Carmel, Indiana; then Oklahoma City; Amarillo, Texas; and finally through Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Out of all of those places I lived, only two have really grabbed me and said Home. And even with as glad as I was to finally reach our house and sleep in my own futon (since I can't really elevate my leg in the bed), the places that I have most felt a connection have been in Austin, Texas ... and the Dinetah.

Austin is easy for me to understand. Rolling, green hills ... creeks, rivers, swimming holes. Despite some rotten events that happened to me there, it always felt safe to me.

The Dinetah, on the other hand, is harder for me to understand. When we first began traveling through the mesas last week, I instantly wondered what it would have been like ... to be the first Europeans coming through this area on horseback. No maps, no roads, paved or otherwise. How to find water? Did they notice the elevation (even before climbing to one of the mesas) or was it gradual enough that they simply wondered why they needed to drink more water and felt less endurance than normal? Or was it gradual enough that they adjusted as they went?

And can you imagine riding a horse through the mesas and having the Navajo ... or the Pueblo ... or the Apaches ... after you?

At first blush, the area seems desolate. But as I sat out on the "porch" off the dorm kitchenette one evening, I realized that the area was all green. Pale sage greens, but green and teeming with life, nonetheless. Very different from the brilliant greens of Austin - or the cornstalk greens of Indiana.

Was it just an overwhelming sense of history (with a large dash of childish romanticism) that made me connect to the mesas so long ago? Was it the fact that it was so different from everything else I knew? Or was it, perhaps, simply the fact that the mesas themselves looked like such fun and such a challenge for me to climb? Or was it something else altogether?

I have no idea.

The strangest thing for me on the trip was realizing just how many "homes" I have. Austin will always feel like home to me. And there were certainly times whilst on the trip - particularly when I was too hot to sleep with my blasted leg elevated properly - when I wished to be "home" in Indiana, despite the fact that I shudder to ever think of this state as "home."

Strangest of all was the feeling of being "almost home" whilst at the school on the rez. I was there ... but "home" was just out of reach, complicated by my current situation which made it more difficult for me to socialize - between the altitude and the broken leg, I was mostly stuck in the dorm for the week. I couldn't explore the landscape and could barely make my way to the cafeteria in the next building (and I couldn't do that without someone to help me up the stairs). And then, there was my shyness as well. It's hard to connect with the community which makes a place a home if you're so afraid you'll "bother" them or annoy or offend, that you can't hardly speak. And, of course, I have such a garbled historical knowledge of the people and the area - but history is not today and cultures are fluid and mercurial.

I suppose, really, this trip to the Dinetah was much like a trip my mom and sister and I made to Austin the summer after I graduated from high school. I was ecstatic to be "going home" if only for a few days. I demanded that we drive by the old house ... and we saw it from the street. So very close to being "home," only unable to walk inside to the place that had been home for us in the 70s. Like that time in Austin, this past week in New Mexico, I was there and not there

Of course, I still don't know what calls me to the Dinetah ... just that I had a brush with another one of my chosen homes ... that I'll need to return again one day when my body is healed and I'm better able to set aside my doubts and fears and fully step into that feeling of home, less afraid of making mistakes, less afraid of being thought of as overly earnest and one of "those" biligaana.

I'm afraid this post is still a bit of a garbled mess despite the fact that I've been working on it for days. But I've decided that it simply represents the garbled mess in my mind when I think about last week - or when I think about the concept of "home." And, really, what better post is there for the U.S.'s Independence Day except ruminating about home, ethnicity, culture and landscape?

Posted by Red Monkey at 4:53 AM | Comments (3) | Blog | Stumble

May 27, 2008

Circle of Discussions

For just a moment, forget the circle of life and beautifully scored Lion King music. Let's talk about something more immediate for the rest of us netizens.

The circle of discussion board topics.

Seriously, have you ever noticed how some topics keep coming up no matter how little interest or how much division/derision they stir up?

• religion (primarily Christianity)
• politics (primarily U.S. with a smattering of U.K. or Canada)
• life after death (usually a subset of religion)
• make money on your blog (which some elevate to a subset of religion)
• user name or blog name origin
• surviving/getting Love
• whining about a technical service (might be from that particular site, might be about another site)
• insomnia questions
• RTFM questions (sprinkled with legitimate user questions which aren't in "the manual" or found easily thru search)
• Adsense (ought to be part of making money - but it's darn near it's own category anymore)

What's interesting is watching the community react to historical conversations. Those conversations might get ignored, causing newer people to either dominate that discussion or to feel slighted at being ignored. If one of those historical conversations has been contentious (particularly in the recent past), a lot of "oldster" may react with seemingly out of place frustration or even hostility - causing newbies to wonder WTH is wrong with this particular discussion board.

It's interesting to watch as cycles of new "immigrants" "invade" an online community. I hadn't thought about it quite this way before, but it suddenly hearkens back to the waves of immigrants coming through New York (for those of you familiar with U.S. history). I very much see knots of users on most forums which more or less correspond to when they started participating on that forum - OR who were all involved in a pivotal conversation on that forum and so became a kind of "ethnicity" for that particular board. "We are the people who participated in the ThreadName debacle." And when newer folks start up a thread or make a comment which somehow touches on a part of that particular incident, that "ethnicity" of forum participants suddenly comes out guns blazing.

Of course, it's more fluid than that example, but if you've been online long, you probably get what I mean.

I've seen many an established member of an online community "move out" of the community when a wave of new "immigrants" changed the tenor of the community into something other than what it had been. It's not so much, I think, a moving away from the new as it is finding a place which suits your interests better.

Then again, if you only "live" where your interests are, how do you discover new interests?

I often wonder if we're too fast to leave when things change ....

Posted by Red Monkey at 11:47 AM | Comments (7) | Blog | Stumble

May 20, 2008

Changing Styles

Depending on how your browser caches images, you may have noticed a few small tweaks around here. The red monkey logo is now wearing jeans. (A nod to all the crazy people who want the damn red monkey jeans.) The sidebar colours have changed a bit, and most startling (at least to me), is that I've changed the look of the old paper background here in the middle of the blog design.

As much as I loved that look, it was difficult for people with vision issues to read the blog easily - and I do prefer that the blog is easy to read (at least in terms of looks).

Over the next few days, I will probably also change the head banner ... and perhaps then I'll address a complete revamping of the blog. My stylesheet has gotten a little glutted and with some of MT's changes, I can build the site much more efficiently than when I first opened things up in '05.

I've enjoyed the disparity of the circuit board with the old-looking paper - connecting the traditional diary and letter and manuscript formats ... with a nod to the new-fangled ways of living. There have been plenty of people who really didn't like that juxtaposition - but hey, ya can't please everyone so you gotta please yourself. (I'm apparently thinking in song lyrics again this week ....)

Red Monkey blog is a disparate kind of a blog. I've talked about personal issues, written commentary on current events, talked about design, talked about art, shown photography. So it's a bit of a challenge to come up with a unifying visual theme for Red Monkey - beyond, of course, the red monkey himself.

First, though, I have a contracted website to finish up (on the home stretch now) and a baby book to finish up. I might do a new banner here in between those other projects ...

... but don't be surprised if you drop in sometime soon only to discover a whole new look.

Posted by Red Monkey at 12:36 AM | Comments (6) | Blog | Stumble

April 30, 2008

Ye Olde Family Recipe

We interrupt this program to bring you ...

... a cooking show. I know, I know.

I have never been a big one for cooking. It's usually long, involved and tedious (at least when your attention span for such things is about that of a hyperactive gnat). However, there are a few recipes that I'll suck it up for.

Koogali, is our one "old family recipe." I used to think that we also had a pecan pie "old family recipe" and a chocolate cake "old family recipe." The pecan pie recipe is apparently the standard Karo syrup recipe, and my grandmother's SCRUMPTIOUS chocolate cake recipe (coming from someone who doesn't really like cake) is really just Texas Sheetcake made in a 9x13 pan instead of a sheetcake pan. (No nuts in the icing, please. I like nuts, just not in this recipe. Besides, they tend to make the roof of my mouth itch. Wha? I keep telling you my body is NOT wired like normal people's bodies ... oops, I've digressed again, haven't I?)

My grandmother's family came to the U.S. from Lithuania. I cannot for the life of me remember if Grandma Rosie was born in Lithuania or the U.S., however. The Americanized form of the surname became Kalasky (and if you've watched Rugrats, you can probably guess that I enjoy pretending that I'm related to Arlene Klasky), but no one seems to recall what the original last name was. Makes it kinda hard to trace our roots back to the old country. The one really big thing that was passed down was our Koogali recipe.

We had this every year at Thanksgiving and Christmas and it was usually a family production to get it made. I usually proposed that we didn't need a ham or turkey or whatever, that we should just make a meal of the Koogali. Sadly, I was always shot down.

What is it? Well, the short form is that it's a Lithuanian potato dish. Serious Old Country cooking, mind you. Bacon and potatoes and an onion. Then, my other half discovered a few years ago, that it's actually spelled Kugelis ... the link goes to Wikipedia's recipe. Turns out, it's the national dish of Lithuania. Eh, who knew? The name means "flat potato dish" and that about sums it up.

Here's our recipe, complete with photos of the process. Keep in mind, you have to process the potatoes VERY quickly once you've peeled them or they begin to turn brown. It's not that they go bad that fast, but it doesn't look as appetizing and it can affect the flavour.

Ingredients:

• 1 pound of bacon (I used low salt this time around - didn't notice a difference, really)


• 4 eggs


• some starch (old world recipe, remember? this equals a palmful to me


• 1/2 of a large onion


• 1 T sugar


• handful of white flour (your guess is as good as mine)


• 6-8 large potatoes


• 1 1/2 cups of milk


• 1 teaspoon of baking powder (NOT baking soda, Chelle)

Fry up all the bacon and then save the grease. I told you this was an old world recipe, right? You should cook the bacon until it's pretty darn crispy rather than chewy. You're going to be breaking the bacon up and it's easier to do if it's crispy. It's gonna wind up soft when it's baked inside the mixture anyway, so you might as well make the shredding part easy on yourself.

Cut up the onion and fry it in some of the bacon grease. I used a shortcut of pre-cut red onion this time. We usually use the white onions, but I like the stronger flavour of the reds, myself.

Next, beat the eggs until they're foaming, then add the sugar, milk, starch, flour and baking powder. Mix this really well.

Now comes the tricky part. You need great timing here and that's why we usually had a slew of family members in the kitchen working on this.

Peel the potatoes and then grate them. You have to do this quickly so they don't turn brown, but if you have about 3 or 4 people doing the grating, it goes fast enough - this is definitely the best way to do it. If you don't have enough people to do it this way, you can use a Cuisineart to "grate" the potatoes, but the texture of the finished product is not as good. Look, I'm not one for the finer details like texture, but even I can tell the difference between the cheat method and the grating method. Grating rocks.

Since I was making this alone, I had to use my bitty tiny Cuisineart. Which is fine, because as you can see, we have a bitty, tiny kitchen as well.

Gotta stop here for a funny story. One of my mom's cousins was making Koogali one year. He was doing it mostly from memory and he SWORE up and down that they had to boil the potatoes first and then grate them. His wife looked at him like he had lost his fricking mind. He insisted, "That's how we've always done it." So they boiled the potatoes and then burned their damn hands trying to grate the things.

There, that bit of family history is now preserved for the ages. Grate boiled potatoes! LMFAO

Oh, you should probably flip the oven on now. Preheat to 350 degrees (Fahrenheit).

Anyhow, I had either five or six of the biggest damn potatoes I have ever seen. I'm telling you these were frigging TEXAS sized potatoes. Normally it's 6-8 large potatoes. I peeled them, cut them up into pieces the teeny tiny Cuisineart thing could handle and put those pieces in water to keep them from turning brown. As you do this, you'll notice the water turning murky-white. This is normal, it's starch leeching out of the potatoes (which is why you put starch in the liquid mixture earlier). Here's the shredded potatoes:

And you can see just in the time it took to take that picture, it was starting to go brown.

Now, quickly, mix that liquid mixture up some more, to make sure the semi-solids didn't fall to the bottom. (This is the milk, egg, flour, baking powder, sugar, and starch concoction from earlier.) Pour the onions and bacon in with the potatoes. Mix with your hands. Using a big-ass spoon does not cut it. Use your clean hands.

When that's nicely mixed, pour in the liquid concoction as well and mix with your hands. Then, take some Pam and spray the heck out of a non-stick 9x13 pan. I mean spray like you've never sprayed before. The original recipe calls for greasing the pan with the leftover bacon grease. Umm, in an attempt to not completely and totally clog arteries, use Pam. It works. After you've Pam'd the pan, pour in your concoction.

Now comes the bacon grease. I have tried multiple ways of using Pam instead, but it's just no good. The recipe completely dries out on top and does not taste very good. So, you need to use the leftover bacon grease and pour some of that on top of the Koogali. Spread it out over the entire top, a nice thin layer like so:

Now put it in the preheated oven at 350 ... for about an hour. When is it done? Well, you'll need to cut into the center to check it. It should be moist, but not runny. The top should look something like this:

Thought we were done? No way! While the Koogali is baking, we have to make the topping, but this is an easy-peasy deal. Take a tub of large curd cottage cheese and an equal amount of sour cream. Mix together. There ya go. The topping is ready. (We usually pour it back into the sour cream and cottage cheese containers and mark them with a big K.)

Now, just let me take a moment to tell you this: my dad HATES sour cream and DESPISES cottage cheese. HATES them. They are nasty spoiled uckiness to him. But even he swears by this mixture on top of the Koogali.

And now, I present to you ... the finished product:

But, we're STILL not done. I know, this is like an old Ronco commercial, isn't it? But wait! There's MORE!

Anyhow, every year there is an argument over whether or not Koogali is better the first day, fresh out of the oven ... or the second day.

Prepping for the second day is simple: cut a rectangular slab of Koogali out of the pan, Pam the heck out of a frying pan and make sure to fry the Koogali on all four long sides. After you've done that, you can attempt to fry the short ends, too, if you're silly like I am. The fried Koogali is generally solid enough that you can at least get a touch of browning on those sides before it falls over or your relatives tell you the damn thing is cooked and get the hell outta the way so that they can cook theirs.

I probably shouldn't have put the fried version on my favourite green plate ... but you get the idea:

And there you have it. My family's one claim to ever-lasting fame: Koogali.

(Unless it turns out that we really are related to Arlene Klasky and then she pretty much outshines anything else we've done. Well, unless you take into account that my aunt gets interviewed on NPR and has been quoted in USAToday and ... oh heck, so SHE's famous. The rest of us are schmucks.)

P.S. Want to try the recipe and you don't wanna wade through this long-ass post? Click here for the PDF recipe, text only, no side commentary. :)

Posted by Red Monkey at 2:56 AM | Comments (5) | Blog | Stumble