House Butch
Life with Mrs. deWinter

Warning, if you haven't seen the final episode of Season Two's The L-Word, you should click away now!

Mrs. deWinter and I did poorly on our predictions: We were 1 for 3.

1. Bette and Tina will be back together by the end of the season. We got that one right. Though there's something of a cliffhanger about Tina, isn't there? Is she really ok, as Bette said? Odd to have her in the ICU and not in the beautiful baby-passing ritual in the hospital. (And if you're into it enough to confirm the word-on-the-streets that she will definitely be back next season, read TV Guide's Interview with her.)

2. Shane and Carmen won't be together. Well, we got that wrong. What can I say? Interesting character development, for sure. And they do make a convincing match.

3. The housemate (Mark) won't be around by the end of the season. Wrong-o!

And I have to say, I'm glad we did so poorly. It means that Ilene Chaiken et al are doing anything but predictable work.

It's a good thing it's spring and outdoor life is wonderful. Women's Basketball season is over, the Figure Skating season is over, the L-Word season is over. Not much reason for TV watching. Well, that's probably not true. Mrs. deWinter and I love watching movies together, and for the sake of companionability, I sit through Trading Spaces and Designer Guys, and she tries really hard to sit through Venom ER and strange surgery shows (I missed the 160 pound tumor removal show, but I'll be looking for a rerun).

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"Now that was an amazing find," said Mrs. deWinter. "It made my day!"

We started the day of the amazing find at our County's Hazardous Waste Program "clean sweep," one of several days a year when residents take specific household (and farm and ag business) products that shouldn't go in a landfill to a special dropoff. We got rid of paint thinner, shellac, varnish, some oil-based paints and stains, some antique aerosols, bathroom cleaners, and, tah-dah, Mrs. deWinter's ancient computer from a former lifetime, one I've been trying to convince her to let go of for eight years (But I want to recover some stuff from the hard drive....)

Next stop, the outlet mall. Destination: the Kitchen Store. A month ago (just before tax season took me away from the blogosphere, alas), we had bought one piece of Circulon Cookware. It was a test-drive of sorts: Mrs. deWinter's extensive online research and several in-store fondlings had resulted in inconclusive data about which cookware was right for us. She wanted lightweight and nonstick (I'm not crazy about coated cookware, but cleanup is a breeze), I wanted even heat. Our compromise on the nonstick was to find a good but (relatively) inexpensive brand, buy it cheap, treat it with kid gloves (i.e. use non-scratching runcible spoons, spatulas, ladles and whisks, and keep the cookware out of the dishwasher), and be willing to replace it the minute the coating gets scratched. Her methodology, given the inconclusive findings, was to buy one piece of the most likely candidate and see how we liked it.

After a month's use of Circulon's large saute pan, we had decided to commit to this line of cookware and planned to buy several more pieces. Yesterday, though, we were out of luck. The outlet store had none of our brand in stock!

Oh well.... We drove to the nearby restaurant and lunched with our good friend Sam who then joined us on one of Mrs. deWinter's favorite weekend activities: the garage sale blitz. I don't usually go along on these, but today was an exception. It was the community-wide garage sale weekend for the town with the outlet mall, and watching two smart-shopping femmes enjoy the thrill of the hunt is a treat. Sam's haul consisted of gorgeous fabric for a gown, Mrs. deWinter bought candles, a beautiful hand-made oak box (some day I'll have to write about her box collection), and the Amazing Find: a $60 Circulon Griddle, never-used, marked at $5, which Mrs. deWinter walked away with for $2. What fun. We probably wouldn't have bought the griddle, but for her occasional pancakes and my highly praised bacon, it's perfect.

What I walked away with?

1. Two antique plough/tiller/tractor parts I'm going to spray with Rustoleum and hang somewhere. They're gorgeous and look like Neolithic/New Age sun signs (my crude sketch does not do them justice).

2. The memory of the mother duck leading her 8 or 9 tiny ducklings from their nest to water, a one-time event in the life of ducklings, an event which, in this case, I got to witness first-hand, an event for which I stopped four lanes of traffic to allow them safe passage. Those ducklings were so small and moving so fast, relatively speaking, that it was impossible to get an accurate count of them. Their mother was both staunch and vulnerable, as all mothers are.

Happy Mothers Day to all of us!

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Well, I'm thinking it would be Teapot, our beautiful little short-and-stout girl kitty, who might be the one to follow Tyson the Skateboarding Dog into the life of animals-on-wheels.

Huh? Has she lost her mind? Reasonable questions, but have a look at what Tyson can do:

Tyson's Nice Turn — 360 All Around

That's Quicktime player format. For stills and more movies:

Pictures & Movies of Tyson

It's Friday. Celebrate!

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Had such a wonderful weekend with Mrs. deWinter.

8:00 am, Saturday
Tiger Lily, Tourmaline and Teapot arrive at the vet, two in individual cat carriers, one in a picnic basket bungied up to prevent escape. $360 later all cats have rabies and feline leukemia and distemper shots updated, and Tiger Lily has a prescription for Buspirone, the feline version of Buspar, a human-tested medication to treat anxiety, depression, and obsessive compulsive disorder. Pharmaceuticals were a last resort. We had tried everything known to feline lovers to dissuade the beautiful orange boy from his increasingly insane and irritating need to mark everything and everyone. Four days into his medication, he's quit marking, at least inside. Brain chemistry is an interesting thing, isn't it? Medications to treat it — delightful.

Now Tiger Lily was supposed to be named Tiger, according to House Butch, because he's a beautifully orange and white long-haired tabby with a few black whiskers, and because House Butch loves tigers in the wild and in her imagination, but Mrs. deWinter was afraid that naming him Tiger would encourage wild behaviors in him. So the compromise. He cares not what he's named. He is a big pussy cat, but he does like to bite, for love or orneriness, though he never draws blood. It's part of his dominance behavior. I wonder if Mrs. deWinter has noticed that he never smells sweet, as his name might suggest.

10:00 am, Saturday
Home from the vet and pharmacy. Cats are free. We're exhausted. We have a late breakfast, read books, canoodle.

3:00 pm, Saturday
Mrs. deWinter and I clean the kitchen and boil and devil eggs for the potluck.

7:00 pm, Saturday
Small, intimate gathering of old friends and new in ***'s new house, an "It's spring, I have a new house, Just because" party. *** is a not-so-old old radical lesbian feminist, former organizer and small press publisher now doing other kinds of work that are professional and pay well and still manage to change the world. Others present include two former members of the National Feminist Writers Guild, a former youngest member (aka baby dyke) of the Lincoln Legion of Lesbians, the parade leader of the largest-to-date March on the Capitol and the first Gay Rights March in a major city in the Southwest, and a couple of younger women who held their own in such a crusty crowd. Good food, a cozy fire in the wood stove, dogs, dykes, and a fun trip down lesbian-feminist-memory lane. We got home late and slept in on Sunday morning.

3:00 pm, Sunday
After a lazy morning, brunch, and an old movie, Mrs. deWinter and I sat down for our almost-weekly Feng Shui session. Mrs. deWinter has been working as an IT consultant to a major local employer (which also happens to be the headquarters of a major national company) for several years, and several months ago one of her IT colleagues, who had just finished a certification program in Feng Shui (can anyone say high tech-high touch?), came over and did a Feng Shui consult with us as part of her practicum. It was fun! We had tried to Feng Shui our house several years ago, but gave up after reading many books and making many charts. In this three-hour session we learned how to read and treat the Feng Shui of our property, the house itself, the rooms in the house, and even specific objects within rooms. We've been having near-weekly Feng Shui sessions since then, a time to focus on our household and how our domestic environment supports (or not) our relationship and our individual goals. We choose a gua each week and apply some Feng Shui (or other magical treatment) to it. We also do a little clear your clutter with feng shui stint in a gua-related part of the house. This week it was time for some attention to the Love & Marriage gua, and since the Love & Marriage part of our house actually exists outside, we went to that part of the yard and did some spring cleaning. Yes, but does Feng Shui work? you might ask. Well, it works for us.

7:30 pm, Sunday
I make dinner while Mrs. deWinter does some laundry. We have Orange Roughy and Brussels Sprouts. Mrs. deWinter taught me how to cook fish (and brussels sprouts, come to think of it). Would you believe the microwave is the secret for excellent fish? She says fish cooks unevenly in the oven and parts of it get too dry, and microwave cooking solves these problems. She's right.

Mrs. deWinter's Orange Roughy
orange roughy filets
crushed garlic
lemon
butter

Put your filets in a small baking dish. Spoon some crushed garlic (crush your own or buy it in a jar, like we do) on each filet, add a pat of butter to each, and squeeze lemon juice liberally over the entire thing. Cover with waxed paper and cook on high in the microwave for 10 minutes if the fish is fresh, 20 if frozen.

Mrs. deWinter's Brussels Sprouts
brussels sprouts
butter
Ume Plum Vinegar

Bring water to boil in a stock pot. Boil the brussels sprouts until just soft when you stick one with a fork (maybe 8 minutes?). Serve with some butter from the fish dish and a slight splash of Ume Plum Vinegar. Yum.

9:00 pm, Sunday
The L-Word, Season Two, Episode 7, Luminous
Can it really be Episode 7 already? Aren't there just 13 episodes this season? Is there anyone who's not attracted to Bette? Isn't Tina looking great? Shane, oh Shane.

Mrs. deWinter asks: So will Bette and Tina get back together again? I say yes, and she agrees. And will Shane and Carmen get together? I say no, and she agrees. I ask: Will the housemate still be in residence by the end of the season? She says no, and I agree.

10:00 pm, Sunday
The L-Word, Season Two, Episode 7, Luminous
This happens too often. We watch it again. I don't know if it's because we like it or because Mrs. deWinter just doesn't want to face what going to bed on Sunday night means (you know, work begins the next morning).

At the end of round two I asked Mrs. deWinter why we watch these a second time on Sunday nights. Her characteristically clever reply: It's no cigar, but it's close.

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Too Busy to blog is Too Busy!

It's been such a whirlwind I'm not even sure what I've done for fun in the last week! Lots of work, which is a good thing. Twisted my knee, which is a bad thing. Made a peanut-butter glazed ham which is an interesting thing. I don't think I'll ever make one again, and perhaps I should post the recipe here for herstorical purposes, but if I did I've have to add a Do Not Try This At Home warning!

Mrs. deWinter takes care of me in so many ways, and one of the ways I make this care-taking a mutual thing is by making her breakfast every work morning, along with a pot of coffee for her thermos. She loves having those little thermos-top cups of coffee throughout her work day, and she says my coffee is the best. Breakfast is usually a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on oatmeal bread. Peanut butter for protein, jelly for sweet, oatmeal for cholesterol control.

Mrs. deWinter buys natural peanut butter in a jar and loves it, and I don't mind stirring the oil into the peanut butter with each new jar, though I hate the inevitable blob of oil on the counter, on my tee-shirt, on my shorts or pants. They need to make those jars bigger, I swear, 'cause there's just not enough room to mix oil and peanut butter without minor household accidents. (Shout is a staple product around here.)

She must have been thinking about that very thing when she came home a few weeks ago with a self-ground variety from the co-op that didn't require the stirring. Isn't that sweet? Unfortunately, the first morning I opened it I discovered it was too hard to spread. Hmmm. When I reported the situation to Mrs. deWinter, she said "You'll think of something. And no, I don't want cashew butter instead." You know, I just don't understand this. I think cashew butter is scrumptious. She got a ham and cheese sandwich that morning, that evening she came home with a reliable jar of peanut butter, and I started thinking about what to do with the unspreadable variety.

When she brought home a half-ham the next time she went grocery shopping, a light went off in my head, and so was born the concept of the peanut-butter glazed ham. Intriguing. Novel. The best "something" I had thought of for that hard lump of peanut butter.

So, I looked through my considerable library of cookbooks and found nothing. That should have given me a clue, but I can be so stubborn when it comes to my creative ideas. Next, I went online to see if anyone had ever made a ham with peanut butter and found these recipes:

peanut butter ham loaf
(wouldn't work for me, required beef and too little ham)
ham salad with hot peanut dressing
(wouldn't work for me for several reasons, though it sounded interesting)
Mrs. Jenkins crunchy ham slice
(wouldn't work for me, I had a half-ham, not a ham steak)
ham with peanut butter gravy
(wouldn't work for me, I had a pre-cooked ham)
ham loaf
(wouldn't work for me, it required pork and beef and used too little peanut butter)

Hmmm. OK, I thought, I'm just going to create my own recipe. Now I did have fun, and Mrs. deWinter graciously ate her peanut-butter glazed ham with carrots and leeks, and she even had a second serving a couple of nights later. It's not that it was bad, it was just, well, too much peanut butter and just too weird, even for gals with a culinary sense of adventure. So we put the rest of the ham in a colander, rinsed off all the rest of the peanut butter glaze, sliced the ham into steaks and froze them for future meals. A very messy task.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Next fall I'm going to try the pumpkin-peanut butter soup recipe I came across.

And maybe I should consider taking up the practice of baking. Lots of tried-and-true recipes for peanut butter in baked goods. Hmmm....

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... so I was thinking about L-Word sex, and noticing the absence of several kinds of sex, despite the amount and variety we viewers are treated to ...

... and then, on this most recent episode ...

falling-in-love sex!

So playful. It was delightful.

Quotable Alice — "More fingers."

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Soooo lesbian. Soooo dyke.

So queer.

At least around here.

It was a three-star potluck weekend for us. Sugar cookies with color-and-flavor coordinated toppings to the Sunday gig, and for our two Saturday potluck offerings, my:

House Butch Leftover-Brisket Soup

olive oil
onions
celery
garlic (several whole cloves)
peppercorns
anise seeds
thyme
pepper
a wee pinch of salt

Saute slowly in olive oil until those onions are translucent. If you use a really low heat you can stir intermittently while washing and cutting into bite-sized bits:

parsnips
carrots
potatoes
mushrooms
the leftover brisket....

Last Thursday, Mrs. deWinter's body screamed "beef" as it does at a certain time of the month (or so she reports — I must admit I've never heard it). That evening, she walked in the door with a beautiful piece of free-range, organic beef and that look in her eyes, and I moved the enchiladas onto the cooling rack, donned my Miracle Worker muscle shirt, put some water on for rice pilaf, pulled out the new Hamilton Beach indoor grill, and got to it.

As usually happens, her need-beef-now! eyes were bigger than her stomach, so when dinner was done, we had an ample piece of brisket left over.

Now, while Mrs. deWinter likes the idea of leftovers, and while she's a great post-meal put-it-in-a-ziplock-or-tupperware and stash-it-in-the-fridge sous chef, she's all out-of-sight, out-of-mind, bored-with-it when it comes to leftovers.

She can be force-fed leftovers, but I rarely have the heart for such tough love. Leftovers transformed into something entirely new have a certain appeal for Mrs. d, Dieu merci.

So, back to that why-would-you-put-brisket-in-a-soup recipe....

When your onions have taken on the colors of peppercorn and thyme, pour an ounce or two of Merlot or other red wine into the skillet and let the alcohol burn off as you deglaze the pan.

chopped veggies & brisket (from above)
beef broth
4-5 oz. Merlot or red wine
water
2 cans chopped/crushed/stewed tomatoes (whatever you have on hand)
bay leaves (at least 3)
pepper

Pour your deglazed saute into a stock pot and add the above ingredients to it. Cook slowly for hours. Refrigerate. Cook slowly again for awhile on the day your soup is to be served. Crock pots are so 70s, but they so rock for potlucks.

Thursday's intended enchiladas? We had those on Friday night and didn't save a bite for our potlucking friends.

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Well, Mopsie, I guess that was just too cryptic!


So ... Zebras Like Wanton People Traveling Light ... a sentence to help me remember which clients needed work, with the first letter of each word standing for a client. So much more fun than a to-do-list!

That work took much more time than I had hoped — days! — but clients are happpy, my work for the week is done, and Mrs. deWinter is on her way home for a 3.5 day weekend. Yay!

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Zebras Like Wanton People Traveling Light.

Six clients need work (some just need attention, is that work?) today. This acrostic should amuse me through my task list, and if I'm lucky there'll be more time for hanging out in the blogosphere before the day is done.

See you later!

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Been thinking about my favorite scene-to-date from Season 2, The L-Word:

Episode 2; Tina in that sexy gown/slip, crying when the memory of Bette's loving laughter floats through her bodymind while she's pleasuring herself after the Lap Dance.

That was so real. Grief and desire, pleasure and pain, memory and the present all braided together in fiction as they are in reality.

Real.... The L-Word's portrayal of West Hollywood Gay Town Lesbiana is delectable to this viewer — all of it — but some of it is so not real. Like, where are the butches? Lotsa kikis and that's cool. Quite a few femmes and that's well, delectable. But hey! Where are my buds? I mean, gorgeous-lanky-hip as she is, is Shane butch? She's definitely attracted to femmes, which might be a clue, but everybody in The L-Word is attracted to femmes, right? OK, maybe not Kit. Love her flirtation with Ivan, how it's developing, the issues at play. And OMG, Season 1's last episode with that flirt song in the parking lot. Seduction is seduction is seduction ... is hot!!! But where I come from, Drag King does not equal butch — not that anyone's pretending it does, L-Word wise. And Bette a butch? Not on your life.

I dunno, Is Shane butch?

In any case, wanna play Dyke Media Friday? Post something on your blog (subject DMF/Real?) and either trackback to this post or leave a comment, whether you blog or not.

I know it's audacious of me to start a meme when I'm only two weeks into this blog. Oh well. A woman's gotta do what a woman's gotta do....

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