Homemaker Action Figure

If they ever design a homemaker action doll, can I be the designer? This would be her super suit: a Vespa helmet, goggles*, a cheerful apron, comfy black clothes, flip flops, and lipstick**...

She's ready for anything!

Such as flying to a farm on the back roads letting the warm air rush past her; picking forty pounds of tomatoes and an apronful of ancho chilies in less than an hour; making one big batch of salsa even though the peppers were left behind*** in her super rush to make hay while the sun still shines; after hours she whipped up six batches of pesto for the freezer, filed all the papers that were threatening to kill her in a great big paper strangle, and though it was a struggle...she managed to write out a bunch of checks for bills all on just under 2,000 calories. Which included some modest amounts of beer.

That's right. You don't need to clean out your ears. I said MODEST amounts of beer. See, I'm very vain and it's finally getting to me that being as porky as I am prevents me from wearing my super-chic aprons without looking like myrtle the giant pig. (I would link to a picture of her majesty if I could access them on the old computer, but I can't. You'll have to use that fertile imagination of yours.) Myrtle is the biggest hog I have ever seen. Absolutely queenly proportions and some serious teeth with which to nosh on ears of corn with all the grace of a...of a...well, she's got no grace at all, actually. Anyway, the beer was modest, the hour of sleep not ridiculous.

Oh yes, and she managed to go to the gym and do the cardiovascular portion of her work out. Is that not all worthy of an action figure? Tell me Arnold can do better. You can't.

*Sunglasses are way cooler looking but I broke mine while picking tomatoes and if you don't wear some sort of protective eye-wear while scootering your eyeballs become a mini-windscreen against which bugs will die. I had these goggles at home waiting to be worn for rainy conditions or night time driving when sunglasses would be dangerous. But I think they have a serious dork factor to them.

**About the lack of lipstick...I admit that my ensemble wasn't complete and there's no excuse not to wear lipstick to go tomato picking. Something I will rectify today.

***In her girl scout-like preparedness she had a bag full of jalapeno peppers picked just two days previously waiting to be used and in a dexterous switching of recipes, she made do.

In Spite Of Weeds

(Plus late nights watching hospital dramas)

In spite of weeds having completely taken over my yard in seven foot tall patches of blinding arrogance, things are ripening and growing in the vegetable garden. This is cathartic as I am certainly not going through the best of times at the moment. A little nasty deja vu is difficult to shake. So I focus my vision down to the micro details so that I may ignore everything else. So look at these pretty little carrots! And the Romano beans are coming in now too. They are difficult to find in my densely tangled bean tee-pee, but I managed to gather enough for a dinner side of carrots and beans slathered in butter, honey, and mustard.

My bee balm is already almost finished with it's first round of blossoms. They are so fantastically weird, like air anemones from another planet. I'm wondering if I'll get another flush if I pinch the flowers?

This is one hell of an eggplant. It's called Rosa Bianca and I've grown it before. I tend to only get one eggplant per plant on this one but I enjoy the colors and the exquisite flavor of it so much it's worth it.

The dill is doing great. The flowers have all bloomed so it shouldn't be long before they're ready to use for pickling. The ladybugs are busy licking the heads clean of any aphids. I have to say they look pretty pest free, unlike the monster weeds growing right next to them.

This is my squash mound. I have learned some things about a big pile of squash plants:

• Pink banana winter squash plants get huge, are aggressive, and prolific.

• I'm happy they're prolific because maybe I'll get enough winter squash to get me all the way through the winter, but it's busy choking the life out of my summer squashes.
  

• Spacing really is important for summer squash. I should have thinned the summer squash and then stood over the mound night and day to direct the winter squash traffic.

To get through this stressful time of not knowing if I get to keep everything I have and love, and being afraid to appreciate it too much for fear that I am just about to lose it all- (why invest the love?)- I am staying up late watching old episodes of ER. Not only does Noah Wylie have a fantastic nose which I enjoy watching while chugging beer, but I really wish Eriq La Salle had been allowed to smile every once in a while. It must have been hard to play such a tightly wound serious individual.

I've come to a few conclusions about doctors and medicine that I'm going to share:

• People expect doctors to be miracle workers but rarely appreciate the miracles they work.

• Doctors make mistakes like everyone else, the reason they get paid so much is because they have a high risk job. When they make a mistake lives are at stake and people are not all that prepared to forgive them for it.

• Without doctors the population of people on this earth would be greatly reduced. Which wouldn't be a bad thing for the earth. Yet for all the lives they prolong and save, we generally only remember the ones they couldn't save. People are so crappy.

• I am deeply happy not to be a doctor. I'm not terribly squeamish about blood, but I prefer not to see people's organs exposed. Or their bones. I'm very squeamish about seeing exposed bone. I saw my own once and almost passed out. I cut my knuckle when a glass broke that I was washing and I saw the knuckle bone. It's incredibly creepy.

• Doctors aren't the enemy in the health care system, insurance companies are.

• Nurses deserve as much respect, OR MORE, than doctors because they do a lot of dirty work with less pay and recognition than the doctors get. I've met a couple nurse Ratchets in my time who I secretly suspected were trained S.E.A.L.s because of their ability to not feel any pain or recognize that other people do, but mostly I've just met a lot of compassionate nurses who remove gross medical implements and papered beds with smiles.

• If ever I am unfortunate enough to have to get surgery, I am going to listen to the undercurrent amongst the doctors and nurses and see if I can guess who is sleeping with whom, who is the most viciously ambitious, and who everyone secretly despises. Hospitals are clearly places ripe with intrigue.

The Very First Pickle

Want to freak out the Master Canners of America? All you have to do is whisper in their ears:

"Ingredient Substitution"

and they will flutter around in paroxysms and will require smelling salts to revive them at which point all you have to do is say:

"Botulism"

to send them into a catatonic state. You must not cross the line though and suggest you're thinking of selling your home made jam to the neighbors because it's entirely possible they will send your entire state on a man-hunt for your wicked ass.

There is an oppressive attitude persisting out there that home canning is a dangerous activity that only USDA officials should attempt. The first time I wanted to make some jam I consulted the book "Putting Food By" which almost put the fear of God in me it was so filled with warnings and precautions and the assumption that the average person is incapable of preserving food safely or paying attention to such details as WASHING YOUR HANDS. I almost didn't try canning after that.

Which would have been a shame because it is one of the most soul satisfying things I do in my life. Canning was "discovered" and developed by non-USDA officials; by people trying to figure out how to eat things once they'd begun to rot; by people who needed to save the food they had in abundant times against those lean months when their babies were hungry. Ordinary men and women experimented over centuries to learn how to dry tomatoes in the sun, how to bury disgusting fish in the ground to dig up later and eat like wild dogs*, and how to ferment cabbage to make the world's most repulsive condiment**.

Preserving food revolutionized human existence. It enabled people to be able to stay in one place during the winter and survive. Although scientists have made quite a lot of advances in home preserving and it's overall safety, they are hardly responsible for the very developed knowledge humans have of what kind of mold is safe to eat and what is not. Scientists have unlocked a lot of answers as to WHY certain methods of preserving aren't as healthy as others, but it was people like you and me who have been developing this craft for thousands of years now.

So when I hear people get all twittery about messing with the USDA's safe recipes I get a little itchy for a fight. I practice safe canning methods. I am clean. My utensils are clean. My kitchen is clean. I follow the recipes, I understand what elements of recipes can be altered and which should not be messed with. However, I refuse to believe that my food will not be safe unless I bleach every jar and pot and counter. I refuse to bow down to the deep fear that has taken hold of many modern people concerning home canned goods. You are NOT safer eating foods from commercial canning facilities. You can get botulism in all kinds of interesting ways and home canned goods are merely one small way. And all you need to do is be reasonably careful and understand the importance of acidity in foods to make safe food.

You have a way better chance of dying in a car crash than you do of dying of botulism from some one's home canned goods. The odds are staggering. Yet almost everyone is perfectly willing to look in the maw of death every day to get somewhere else.

But here's the deal: there aren't very many recipe books for canning. Not really. There are hundreds of minute variations of the same old piccalilli that your grandma used to make. There are a million reprints of the exact same recipes that are approved by the USDA. I think it's time that we all invested some money and expertise into coming up with new safe recipes that better reflect our modern tastes and needs in the kitchen. What about more pickles that aren't sweet? Or how about salsas without any green bell peppers and sugar? How about an apricot glaze for meat? Or what about a mustard that we can safely process and keep in the pantry for a year? How about a ratatouille for pressure canning?

I mentioned this need for new recipes to the master canner from the OSU I spoke with this morning and I'm pretty sure I sent her into an instant panic attack:

"New recipes? New recipes are UNSAFE! You must NEVER EVER change anything. There are PLENTY of recipes already. Why can't you just be satisfied with bread and butter pickles like everyone else? Who are you anyway- AN ANARCHIST?!!!"



*Burying food really connects us to our wild animal roots. My dog has refined the art of fermenting rawhide. I'm actually quite impressed with her ability to get it just black and stinky enough to please her very singular palate. She also manages to leave these tasty flaccid moist morsels on the carpet by my chair when I'm least expecting to step on them.
**I'm not a fan of sauerkraut or kim chi.

The First Carrot

(And all kinds of talk about faith and karma and other heavy topics.)

This morning I came in with more beets (all small in size), one carrot, one tomato, two impossibly small yellow crookneck squashes, and a few more pickling cucumbers.

I also managed to pick this modest vase of flowers. If I want more flowers I'm going to have to go out there and pull up a truckload of weeds which are choking everything out. I'm going to have to deadhead the roses and pinch off the dead flowers from the daisies and zinnias.

Where I will find time for this while caring for my child who refuses to go outside unless I fight him tooth and nail, while Philip sends in resumes and looks for work which he needs to have if we are going to avoid having to sell our house, I really don't know. If I were to manage to squeeze out even a few moments to accomplish any fraction of the above chores...I have to pray my sore back doesn't turn into a broken back. I wake up every morning unrefreshed with that nasty ache in my shoulders, neck, and back. I think it's my bed trying to kill me in my sleep, but I can't seem to catch it in the act. It would never stand up in a court of law.

A low grade insistent insidious depression has been gracing me with an annoying inertia. I have no energy to do anything even when I have the time. Partly that's because having the store made my household come in last place for a year. Things are so out of order (and I have all the furniture and my whole studio from the store packed in my garage) that to do any small thing here requires a huge chain of events to precede it. Like, if you want to put away the emptied out canning jars as we use them, you must first make room for them somewhere which requires shifting everything in the kitchen just a little.

There's also this colossal anxiety. Always. Every day. Panic in my chest. Dread. Which mounts to an untenable cacophony every single day I listen to my boy complaining about pretty much everything in his life and how he may as well have not been born. Philip does a great deal to add to that cacophony with his own anxiety and the fact that he is always saying the right things to piss our boy off just a little more. How does a six year old access so much negativity? How does he come to see a spat with the neighbor kid as conclusive proof that he will never find any boys his own age who like to do the exact same things as him and he shouldn't even bother because there aren't any in our WHOLE TOWN?!

I guess the apple didn't even bother falling off the tree.

On a lighter note, if I just push everything aside for a few hours by using my superpowers to freeze the whole world in it's tracks, I could do my first batch of pickles of the season today. Maybe. If I can muster up the energy while I put Max in his closet with his game boy, just maybe I could do it. I've got enough from my own garden for a small batch. I love dill pickles.

One thing that feels really good and is a tremendous relief to me is the clean wood floors in my kitchen and dining room. AAAAAhh. No more repulsive animal and people stained oatmeal colored area rug. It's wonderful to walk on that smooth clean mopped surface. Cool to the toes, not harboring diseases or nasty little what-have-yous. The kitchen floor was just scary. I am not crazy about having wood floors in there, I mean to say that while hardwood is my all time favorite flooring, I'm hard on everything I own and use and the kitchen is a room in my house that gets tremendous wear. It just seems like that finish on the wood is going to wear out super fast.

Maybe not, though, it actually still looks pretty good when I mop it.

I don't have a lot of spiritual faith. Most of what I believe in I believe because I can see that it's true. Like karma. The concept of karma is even in the bible. It isn't called karma, but it's there. The whole concept that there are consequences for behavior, whether good or bad, that will lower on our shoulders. When we live thoughtfully with compassion for others we tend to have better relationships and people will reach out to you in times of need. If you live selfishly and meanly then you will find yourself shut off from all help in times of misfortune. This is a concept you can verify in your life. Try it and see. It's true that you will reap what you sow, though perhaps not immediately. That's not something I have faith in, it's something I believe because I've seen it born out my whole life.

I also believe that everything happens for a reason and that everything that happens is supposed to happen. I came to this sometimes uncomfortable conclusion in my early twenties when I found it couldn't be refuted by a reasonable mind. I don't think there's a person on earth who hasn't wished to refute it at some point in their life. But if something has happened, you can't reasonably say it wasn't meant to happen. Maybe YOU didn't mean it to happen, but it was meant to happen because it did. You can reasonably say that YOU didn't mean something to happen, but if you unload your own intentions and back off a little, you will see that the Universe, or God did mean it to happen, because it happened. Humans do not control the universe. Nature, facts, life cycles, maybe even God does, but we don't. So ultimately, what we mean to have happen in our lives is only a small part of our life. We have only control over the choices we make, not on the outcomes of our actions.

Somehow I think I may not have spoken as clearly as I had hoped.

It has always bothered me when people say "He/She wasn't meant to die so young!" But how can that be true if He/She is, in fact, dead? We are surprised when people die young, we are devastated, we are sorrowful, but how can we know what is meant to happen except by seeing what is happening and what has happened?

I take comfort in these beliefs. I have never been able to believe in the idea that God will take care of your needs if only you have faith in him. Oh yeah? I don't know about that. That's not something born out by proof in my opinion. I guess it depends on how you think God interprets our needs. I know that there are a lot of people out there who desperately need food and are dying because no food is available to them. Does this mean that what they really need is to starve to death? Or that they don't have enough faith?

It's entirely possible that when the bible mentions God always taking care of his children that it means only in a spiritual sense. Not in a literal corporeal sense. But if that's so, then I think it's unconscionable to tell people that God will take care of their needs as a form of comforting the poor, or the sick, or the lost and letting them think that if they pray enough and give the church money or whatever it is having enough faith means, that their sickness will be cured, their poverty lifted, or that they'll find their way back to themselves.

The idea of faith bothers me a lot. Faith as in: a belief not based on proof.

I do believe in the other definition of faith: confidence or trust in a person or thing.

They are not the same. Often, religion asks you to have a faith not based on proof.

I guess I'm thinking about all this right now because I believe that whatever the future holds for me and my family, whether we have to sell our house and rent something to get by, or whether we are fortunate and find work and get to stay here in some degree of comfort, I believe everything will unfold just as it's meant to. What we can do for ourselves is keep slogging away at trying to find work, put our best feet forward, try to tame the chaos that having and then closing a store has wreaked in our lives, and if we still end up a wreck, then that's just what we have to go through. As scary as it is to me to face joblessness in this strangling economy, I do not get to decide the ultimate outcome of my life. I steer it as best I can and then the rest is up to nature, luck, the forces that be, and possibly even karma.

The thing that worries me is that getting therapy, chiropractic medicine, massage, and counseling for Max, plus necessary trips to the dentist all cost money we can't afford to spend. Not to mention visits to the vet. I don't feel I'm in a position to take care of these important things until we have an income again. It's a classic American problem. It doesn't matter how important all of these things are, if you don't have the money for them, you don't take care of them.

I think I need to drink more coffee. I just heard from Philip a minute ago that the new pot of coffee I brewed spilled all over the counter because I failed to put the pot in correctly. Damn.

What's weird is that we are exactly where we were a year and a half ago. Exactly. As though we have made no progress at all. It kind of freaks me out. How long can a person go without work? No, don't answer that question, I already know the answer. I'm going to go investigate the coffee situation and put my head in the grounds.

An Honest Meal

(sort of)

Except for the fact that right after taking this photo I heaped on about a cup of Parmesan cheese. A little dusting is so much more photogenic though, don't you agree? I can say about my sauteed squash from the garden that there is nothing on this burning planet that could have improved it even a smidgen, it was that good. The pasta has a walnut sauce on it. One of my favorite recipes from my Debra Madison book "Vegetarian Recipes For Everyone".

Fresh garden squash is so sweet and nutty and just begs to be browned slightly and not cooked to mush, and not burdened with too many fancy flavorings. I used some dried thyme (from the garden), a very small amount of dried marjoram, salt, pepper, two cloves of pressed garlic, and a few tablespoons of olive oil. This is my first squash harvest of the year. Thank god squash is known to be prolific, and may mine be so!

The wine is a Ravenswood Zinfandel from 2005. That's right, you didn't hear wrong. I said WINE not beer. (see picture above for semi-reliable proof.) I like this wine quite a lot.

After waking up with the first-ever-in-my-life migraine headache...oh yeah, you can tell the difference!!...I got exactly nothing done for half the day. A lot of feeling fragile and sweating in this heat. It's not actually all that hot compared to how hot it is elsewhere. I think it was only in the low nineties or upper eighties. But it felt like 150 degrees.

I worked out at the gym. I then made many more jars of jam and a few jars of sauce. I really wish I hadn't bothered with a second batch of the jam because I had a lot less berries left than I thought for sauce. I can always get more, of course.

I am listening to opera. Highlights from Mozart's magic flute. I put it on when I started making dinner because for once there was no one here but me. I love to play opera while I cook. It makes me feel that all is right in the world. It creates a center from which I can keep steady. It lets loose a giddy magic that makes even the most mundane activities seem like a classy event. Not that I think cooking is mundane, but somehow I believe I can make anything when listening to this music. If I just reach inward enough for a moment the skills will come to me. The flavors will do as I bid and blossom in the pan.

I am never fat when I hear this. I am never mean, nor vapid, nor crazy either. I am equalized.

The spell breaks when anyone enters my space. I can only access this magic when I'm alone and not needed by anyone. I am definitely never sweating like a hog standing before the butcher's knife* when I hear these funny, pretty, and note-scaling rich arias.

It's time to go water some valuables in the yard and cool off from all this steamy kitchen work. I have laundry to do too. But I don't want to.

I just want to sit here and day dream the night away. Not drinking beer. Because no one ever says "Hey, check out the wine gut on that bovine lady!" Wine is good. Wine has even been made by the illustrious pious Jesus. Jesus apparently never made any beer. Which just goes to show what he knows, eh? (Before you get your own pious undies in a bunch, go to your room and count to ten, if I'm still here when you get back go ahead and tell me all about Jesus. Then if when you're done, and I'm still here (which I very much doubt I will be), we can knock back a drink of your choice. See? Even if it's some vile Tang. We can totally work this out, it's what Jesus would have wanted.)

Sid and Dennis: my thoughts were with you while making and eating this dinner. I miss you so very much and I wish I had been serving you this meal! Lots of love to you and the kid. If I could I would be heading down to your house right now for some wine/beer and good conversation...and reassurance that you are still there and not vanished into the Bermuda triangle!!



*Blatant self serving lie to make myself feel less like a sweating hog. Oh so pretty.

Smith's Blueberry Flats

Blueberry season is here in earnest and I missed it last year so this year I am not letting it slip past me. I took a ride on highway 240 yesterday morning where all cars are going 70 miles per hour (note to traffic cops: you may want to show up every once in a while.) on a two lane highway whose highest legal speed is 55 miles per hour. It's a beautiful road and even though I was fully able to keep up with the speeding traffic, the cars kept insisting on passing me.

It made me angry. What the hell is everyone is such a goddamn hurry for? And why do they feel they need to be ahead of me just because I'm on a scooter? It actually brought out the testosterone in me and made me want to show them what a bad-ass my little scooter is. But this is the kind of behavior on roads that makes road-kill out of people. So the next time I'm on that pretty road I'm going to go the speed limit and let everyone pass me dangerously. (There's no shoulder to pull over on to let people pass).

People are annoying.

There were some people picking blueberries when I arrived. One couple was just finishing up picking forty pounds of them to freeze. There was one other person picking who engaged in some awed conversation with the couple and their forty pounds.

Man "Wow, that's a lot of blueberries."
couple "Yep. Forty pounds."
Man "What are you going to do with them?"
Couple "Mostly we freeze them."
Man "Cool. So how do you do that?"
Couple "Freeze 'em on cookie sheets in the freezer and then bag 'em."
Man "But you wash them first, right?"
Couple "Nope. The water will make them all stick together."

Thoughtful pause.

Man "So you wash them when you're ready to use them?"
Couple "Nope."
Man "So you never wash them?"

After the people left I was alone out there with the crickets and the hot sun for about an hour and a half. I can't say my thoughts were restful or pleasant, but still, there's something delicious about time spent industriously by one's self in the middle of nowhere.

Hell, it wasn't the middle of nowhere, it was the middle of the Blueberry Flats! I picked twenty pounds.

That's a lot of blueberries. My kitchen kind of smells smurfy now.

I always eat a lot less jam than I think I will. When Max was under two and still eating peanut butter and jam sandwiches we went through at least a jar of jam a week. I was eating a lot more jam toast back then too. I always thought that it would be great to make all the jam I could possibly use in a year which I calculated at around 52 jars. I wanted to never buy jam again. Unfortunately I haven't bothered to reassess that goal since neither Max nor I are eating much jam these days. So I still have lots of blackberry jam left from last year.

I certainly want some blueberry jam because I've never made any, but I finally realized that I need to make less jam. I'm more likely to use a sauce that I can put over yogurt. In spite of this new goal, I managed to make nine half pints of blueberry lime jam (very good!), and six and a half pints of plain blueberry jam which was supposed to be sauce because I didn't cook it to the jelling point, yet somehow, it is thick enough to be called jam.

I also prepared a batch of blueberry lime jam to make Chelsea's way: you cook your jam only for ten minutes then let it sit over night, or over many nights in the fridge, until you have enough energy to heat it up again and process it. Not boiling it to death before processing really helps to preserve a fresher flavor. Letting it sit for a day helps to develop the pectin or something, because this process tends to help the jam be a little thicker.

So I'm going to end up with over twenty jars of blueberry jam. Shit.

That was just using about twelve pounds of blueberries. So with the rest of them I'm really going to make sauce. Which means being careful not to boil for more than a couple of minutes. Sauce is great for pancakes, ice cream, yogurt, or to pour over something exotic like cheese cake.

I'd love to freeze a bunch of them but I still don't have an extra fridge or freezer. So no freezer space. Which is too bad because blueberries freeze very well and are great for using in smoothies or for tossing frozen into muffins or coffee cake batter.

Anyone else taking advantage of blueberry season? Tell me how!!

Quilting In The Wee Hours

These are the first beets I've gotten from my garden in six years! And not for want of trying either. There's something about this area that has worked magic for me. All the things I had trouble growing in Santa Rosa are exuberant here: sunflowers (I know, don't they grow EVERYWHERE?!), Cosmos (ditto!), beets, and blueberries (they take a lot of nurturing to prosper in Sonoma). Those are my first zucchinis too.

Would you look at that? Oh lordy lou, were they delicious too! Although the six bushes I planted last year didn't flower this year (these berries came from the five new ones I planted) they are growing new branches and filling out. So next year perhaps I'll get a lot more fruit.

Writing instructions for sewing patterns is not as easy as you'd think. I've been using them since I was a kid but when I need to describe something on paper I can't seem to conjure up a way of describing the actions so that the reader can form an accurate mental picture. So I tried photographing the steps and now I see how come the instructions usually use illustrations. Although, I suppose I could get better pictures if I wasn't taking them myself. This is all exponentially more difficult when you're doing it all in triple digit heat. I think I drank ten pints of water yesterday.

At around ten pm I finally sat down to relax and watch some episodes of Little House On The Prairie. It was still insufferable hot and sticky inside the house so I had every door and window open to let in the somewhat pleasant breeze going on outside. My back door doesn't have a screen so lots of flies get in, which is annoying. But when it's that hot- who cares?

I went to get my bag of quilting supplies to finally start hand stitching my first full size quilt (which I haven't got all planned out, by the way. No, please don't have a heart attack Aunt Lin! I have no idea what I'm doing with it. Just stitching rectangles together...) and I noticed a whole lot of movement on my ugly-ass dining room light. That's not something you want to see. There were probably a hundred hopping bugs all clinging to the light and occasionally dropping to the floor. You know those bugs that live in lawns? The ones that hop like they have springs for feet? That's what they were.

Gross.

So I turned out the light and shut the door and figured I'd deal with it in the morning. A few minutes later I went to the kitchen to get another beer and stepped on a thousand hopping bugs which were lounging around all over my kitchen floor. So I started sweeping them up, but you know what? These buggers hop, so keeping them on a dustpan is a nightmare. This is all at one in the morning not too long after Chick threw up on the bed, by the way. These guys have never invaded my house before, what the hell happened? Why were they swarming my house like locusts on a field of corn?

Ah, good times, eh?

Oh yeah, did I mention the heat rash on my neck? No? That's because I'm stoic and strong and I don't care if my entire body is covered in stinging rashes, I still won't complain. You won't find me whining on and on about how uncomfortable it is to sweat in skin creases I didn't know I had or to look like a leper. That's because I'm a positive person who makes the best of everything. I'm just not into complaining about how I can get burnt with just two minutes of exposure to the sun while wearing sunscreen. That's not my way. Instead I'll just smile and not tell you that I'm sweating like a pig* and it isn't even twelve yet. Cause I'm just good that way.


*For you smart asses out there, I happen to be aware that pigs don't sweat.