Chaos By Choice: Polenta Fruit and Jam Cake

-Tasty cakes for when things are literally being torn down around you.-

My bare feet are currently covered dust. Ceiling dust, mind you. Let's be very specific. It is dust from the ceiling as opposed to common floor dust. This fact alone is alarming because it's very difficult to get ceiling on your feet.

Then again, so it is with home repair. The odd often becomes quite unsurprising, if not altogether lackluster and common. Wires reaching out from gaping holes in the wall. Water pooling about in the living room. The fridge is also screaming at me in a shrill tone. Something to do with the wiring in the wall that my contractor was working on set another something off. Now it sounds like a warning alarm, as if the condiments and produce are preparing to storm the kitchen and I should bastion myself in the bedroom before their revolution begins. (Can you hear the pea shoots sing?)

We're finally getting around to a bit of home repair - some necessary electrical work in the walls and a few minor upgrades while we're crawling about the attic. There's reggae music and conversations in Oaxacan dialect serenading me from above and it's all rather surreal if not also somewhat entertaining. If you've never heard Bob Marley's, "Jamming," in Spanish while people saw apart your home it's quite the auditory mindfuck.

The Cons: Vanilla Bean & Ghost Pepper Kumquat Marmalade

The kitchen is close to done. Not quite, but almost. That's another story, which at the moment I am unable to tell because if I do I'll suffer a conniption fueled from pure rage. So apologies if I need a week or two in order keep my blood inside my head on not spritzed upon my newly painted teal walls.

"And aren't they a beautiful shade of teal?!" is what I howl to the poor Mormon missionaries and UPS delivery men who by bad luck or unfortunate karma are forced to come to my door. Some are smart enough to run before I begin to detail how I installed the Cotton Valley Oak flooring. 

Instead, I'll bitch about something else today. First world problems. Who else has got 'em, right? How terrible it is that I am spending the Pride weekend in my brand new house putting together brand new Ikea furniture? How I suffer eating in my new dining room. What is that, husband? You picked up the wrong wine for the roast chicken with apricots? We can't drink Chardonnay! WHAT ARE WE, SAVAGES?!

So it hasn't been that bad, but let's talk fruit trees again. I know I was overjoyed at the prospect of now having them and how I was going to plant more, but I have quickly familiarized myself with the "con" side of the list.

Allow me to elaborate a few of these items:

HUD: Asparagus & Ricotta Tart

-Swearing and political incorrectness ahead. So business as usual. Deal with it as I delete bitchy comments and emails.-

So yeah, this post has nothing to do with food except that - once again - I turn to it in order to sort of calm myself down because I'm screaming across the room like a cat with a dangly toy strapped to its neck.

We're in escrow for a home right now. At least we are on the date that I write this. We still have yet to undergo appraisals and inspections of all kinds so by the time this goes up in two weeks (yes, I write posts that far in advance so I have enough time to proof and edit... in theory) we may not be in escrow due to actually getting a set of keys, or because the inspector finds something like severe roof damage or the bodies of numerous missing hitchhikers dating back to the early nineties and therefore the place is not given the go-ahead by the loan people.

And yes, this is actually reason to not be granted the loan. I asked. Because I ask these sorts of things.

So let me tell you the epic tale of dealing with a HUD home (a home owned by the government) and how shit is perpetually flying fan-ward. Actually, not flying, but perhaps nervously humming around like a kamikaze shit-helicopter waiting to obliterate itself upon the blades and explode its stinky bits just oh-my-god everywhere.