In which I discuss cancer paranoia and brownie battles

I know, I know. It's been a while. In my defense, I have had a pretty intense few weeks... including a nearly spontaneous trip to St. Louis, yesterday. (that we are hoping we do not have to repeat next week at some point...) You see, Nathan was in a wedding... was it just last week? He'd hurt his back on Wed of that week and then at the wedding he did something to his hip and then to top that all off because his platelets have finally started coming back up his "gut" GVH has decided to flare back up. So basically I've been totally stressin' for nearly 2 weeks. I'm trying to keep it under control, but post-cancer any little health thing (of his) brings with it a load of anxiety.

Sometimes I get paranoid. It's a special kind of paranoia- cancer paranoia. I think that people are sick of hearing about cancer... obviously not close friends and family, but the rest of the world... you know the people whose lives are only alongside and not intertwined with ours? They don't live with it... they don't see it, and I think that sometimes in their head they say, "Seriously? You guys are still milking that?"  I just get so afraid that people will think that we are trying to abuse the "cancer card." It probably sounds silly to ya'll, and I can hear Kara in my head right now saying, "Forget them! If they think that they are jerks." ... only she'd probably be a lot wittier about it. Maybe I'm too wrapped up in what other people think... ok I probably am. But it bothers me to think that after everything we've been through in the past year that people might think we are using it to our advantage...Maybe no one is thinking it... maybe it is true paranoia. There is no way to tell, cause it's not like people are just gonna up and tell you when they think something like that.

Recently a girl in heels complained about her feet hurting to Nathan when I was standing nearby. He grimaced and said, "Yeah, I know. Mine are killing me, too." She then threw her up her hand and turned away while saying, "Don't even complain about it to me." I was seething (at this point both his back and hip were injured and he was not in shoes that are good for his diabetes feet issues). I just barely held in some really mean remarks including, "Did you get to choose your footwear? Because he's recovering from cancer and a bone marrow transplant. You don't choose that, so how bout you not complain to him?"  I know I'm protective, but I was so livid. Then a few days later I started thinking about it. This girl doesn't know Nathan. She has no idea what has happened to us in the past year, and would probably be mortified if we told her. She was just reacting the way that most girls react when guys aren't sympathetic about heels. Granted, maybe she should have been nicer as Nathan was trying to be sympathetic, but here's the thing. Nathan doesn't look obviously sick anymore. He looks like he's on steroids, but only health professionals and those intimately acquainted with a body's reaction to steroids would know that. He has hair enough to be cut these days, and he still has his ready smile. If people just look at him without knowing the day to day he looks normal... and it breaks my heart to think that people who do know our story might just see that outer layer and think that he's just working any sort of sympathy angle. It's better. *So much better* than it used to be... but it's still a struggle. There are still nights when he only sleeps a few hours, there are still days when just getting to and from the apt is about all he can do. He's still a brave brave soldier slogging through the everyday. The world doesn't have a frame of reference for slow recovery. You can't even have a temporary handicap parking pass in MO for more than 1 year. We are getting back in sync with the dance but we are still a quarter step out of rhythm, and I keep feeling like I'm getting dirty looks from other people on the dance floor when I'm trying as hard as I possibly can to be kind and gracious and assume the best. I can't help but wonder if I'm the only one who feels like this after living through cancer.... surely not.

And this ladies and gents is what happens when an extrovert gets stressed out and becomes an introvert. Paranoia and massive amounts of emo-ness. I need to go see a movie or something.

Let's move on, shall we? I have decided that I want to learn what brownie mix is the best. This may come as a shock to most people but growing up we never made brownies from a mix. We have a family recipe discovered by my Aunt Debbie (and possibly on a box of Little Debbie cakes??). Regardless we call them "Debbie's Brownies" and I grew up making them and thus nearly have the recipe memorized. It's only been in the past few years that I've made any box mixes but the convenience cannot be denied, and so I have decided to embark on a quest to decide which is the best. I have no brand loyalties or subconscious leanings from my childhood to rely on, so the only way I can tell is to just make them. The problems with this are two fold. 1) I have no tastebud memory bank to store subtle brownie intonations in and so cannot give a decent comparison unless I have two brownies side by side. 1.5) the lack of a tastebud memory bank has caused me to seriously use the word "intonations" when discussing brownies,  and 2) I do *NOT* need to eat two full pans of brownies, ever. Thus I have come up with a plan- for every potlucky event I attend, I'm going to attempt to make 2 batches of brownies.  (You see you can pile brownies on 2 paper plates and people never know that you ate the first row in a brownie experiment!) Slowly and surely I will make my way through the brownie catalog until I come up with a winner and then I will compare it to Debbie's Brownies. I fully expect Debbie's Brownies to win, but at least then I will know exactly how much taste I am trading for time. I will only use "straight" brownies for this competition. Caramel or peanut butter or (heaven forbid!) cheesecake would only wildly skew the results and cause disagreement among the voting judges (aka Nathan and myself.) Sides, that would need to be a whole other brownie battle. Also I need to buy a second cake pan because while I enjoyed the ease of removing the parchment paper from my pan and being able to immediately reuse it (Thanks Alton Brown!) it would be a heck of a lot easier to bake the brownies at the same time... helps control the variables.

Also, God Bless, parchment paper. It is possibly one of the greatest cooking luxuries of the 21st century!

... are we in the 22nd century now? No, it's not the 22nd until 2100, right?

Millenniums/centuries are weird.

... and a pain to spell. Thanks spell check!

"Kurt! That's the one I left out. God bless Kurt!" - Name that movie!

Anywho, thus far I've made Duncan Hines and Betty Crocker. Betty is the winner by a good deal... which is interesting considering I'm pretty sure that she was also cheaper.

Today I tried (and was shocked by) Starbucks Via Iced Coffee. All I needed was a Starbucks glass and some actual ice and I wouldn't have known it wasn't the real thing. I had to add some milk, as I can't handle my coffee black, but it was very impressive... and cheap, comparatively- 5.95 for 5 packets which each make 16 oz (aka a bottle of water's worth). That is a lot, you might say, but when you take into account that I willingly spend 3.50 per frappuccino (sp? spell check can't help me now!), suddenly it seems like an awesome deal! 5 for the price of not quite 2! I'm a believer.

I think I'll end there... but I have one last question for you... is it pathetic or just weird that 5 of my 45 "labels" are edible?