Everything's Better with Bacon

I said that I'd post a little bit about the food last weekend. One of the recipes that I tried out on everyone was Parmesan-stuffed dates, wrapped in bacon. It was completely awesome. Sweet, salty, rich and creamy all at the same time. Plus, it was very easy to make. Here's the recipe:

6 oz grated Parmesan
2-3 T cream cheese ( room temp, or softened)
18-30 dates (depending on size)
1 package of bacon, approximately 1/2 slice per date

Preheat the oven to 400. Pit each date, if not pitted, and cut a slice lengthwise along one side. Mix the cheeses together, and then fill each date with the cheese mixture. Finally wrap each date with a piece of the bacon, overlapping the bacon, and allowing the date to sit on the overlapped ends. Place dates on a baking sheet. Bake for 15-20 minutes until the bacon reaches your desired doneness, then remove the dates before the grease cools. You can blot them on a paper towel before arranging them on a plate for serving.

Drops of Silver

just a leaf in the middle of the trail. I walked past it, and then walked backwards until I get a good second look. I loved what the light was doing.

“Hello, this is your uterus – I’m going to make today a living hell.”

This is pretty much what I woke up to this morning. It amazes me how easily I forget from one month to the next how awful being on my period makes me feel. I spent all day snuggled up to a hot pack, and strung out on narcotic painkillers. But – I did it at my desk. At Work. Jakobe tried to tell me to stay home this morning, but I refused, because if I stay home because of the pain, then the endometriosis wins. Fuck that.

In the meanwhile, I have to decide if it’s gotten bad enough for me to consider having another laparoscopy. It would be my fourth, and I have to figure that every time, it just makes things a little bit uglier in there. Please, will someone go inside me and fry my insides with a laser? It will just hurt for a minute, and then I’ll feel better for a while. But, it won’t last. That’s the thing about endo, it grows on you. I’ll never run far enough or fast enough to get away from it. I’ve tried.

When I was 20 my doctor asked me if I could get married and have kids. Right away. I looked at her like she was nuts, and just kind of laughed. Marriage wasn’t going to happen then, you have to meet someone you’d be willing to put up with, FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. Oh, and love would be good. In any case, I’m glad that I held out for the right man. Now we’re working on the kids thing, but my reproductive system is ten years and two surgeries more trashed than it was when she recommended that I not put off starting a family. Oops.

So I still have this angry gnawing beast in my belly searching for different ways of making me wish that I was born with testicles. I think I’d more than happily put up with getting kicked in the stones every so often. It seems like a fair trade.

Twenty-four: with six years experience.

I turned thirty on Friday, and I just had a great weekend celebrating it. We drove out of town to McCall, ID and just relaxed with 2 of my best friends. It was awesome, and I completely recommend playing Cranium while you’re too drunk to see straight. That or just trying to sculpt modeling clay with your eyes closed… There were some moments that were so funny that I laughed until the mixture of bad champagne and cheap pre-made margarita nearly came right back out my nose. And no – not every sculpture was a penis, I think we actually skipped those entirely, although we did have nipples, and Margaritas, and “Piece, Love, and Happiness.” I did stupid bar tricks from when I was twenty, like deep-throating a champagne bottle. I even experimented with my new cookbook to make dinner and it was well worth it, but I think I’ll leave that for later. In general, I did my best to make the most fun I could out of the weekend and for the most part, it worked. My friends Mike and Heidi kept me busy and entertained, and Jakobe happily indulged my photo-taking excursions and stops along the road. Even if he was sure that I was just going to keep hiking “a little farther…” until we went on the hike I wanted to go on in the first place. Note: I didn’t. But I did go hiking later, without him.



In any case, when we woke up Saturday morning, there was a fox posing right outside the door of our condo. I got some great pictures and it let me really close. Heidi was more than enchanted, and we spent a great deal of time seeing if we could find another fox. She did hand feed one we ran across downtown on Friday night, and I think that was the highlight of her weekend. So part of the hiking was to see if we could find any other wildlife, but alas – just lots of very irritated squirrels. It was cold on Saturday night, and we woke to a thin covering of snow this morning. I liked it, but I’m not so sure about everyone else. We stopped for more pictures on the way home, and I did some general playing with the camera in the car when it wasn’t my turn to drive any longer. Must remember – Lewiston smells like ASS, but the view from the highway north of town is incredible..


Unfortunately – even the best weekends have a dark side. In this case, I turned thirty, and at the same time, I’m not pregnant. Again. And it sucks. How do I explain something that I want so badly it feels like I can’t see straight, and at the same time, I want to not care so damn much. Because it hurts. Because every month, I feel like a failure. Like there’s something that I’m doing wrong. Like I don’t deserve to get pregnant because I want it too much. And Jakobe holds on to me, and tells me things he thinks are comforting, like ”It’s just not our time,” and “we did everything right, but maybe this just wasn’t our month.” And I know that he thinks that he’s making me feel better, but I don’t, and I suck it up. Because big girls don’t CRY. Because I don’t want him to feel bad. In a day or two, I’ll be over it, about the same time that cramps and endometriosis stop making me feel not only like poop on a stick, but also hopeless. And we’ll try again.