Introducing MK Gale

MK Gale's first book -- The Burning Barrel -- launched in February 2016.
This is Katie's story. She fell in love with a boy she had known all her life. In one moment her entire life changes. She held that love in her heart her whole life, squeezing out any love that might grow for her husband. Pregnant, her parents deal with it -- but she pays the price.
And when her body convulses with pain, blood saturating the sheets, she becomes a woman.
MK Gale explores the circle of aging -- vivid young memories crowding the present. She also plays with the idea of memory and the power of one life-changing experience to colour the future.
Available on Amazon.

The Burning Barrel

Meet MK Gale...
She self-published her first book today, just 5 minutes ago.
Title: The Burning Barrel
The book will be available in 72 hours. You can purchase it for $3.79US.... it is a huge step for me. I am out there.  The book that has been stagnating on my hard drive for more than 15 years is not readable in e-format.
Katie grew up on a farm in southern Manitoba. Naive and foolishly innocent she follows instinct on a cold night with a boy she loves. They are children. And then they are parents.
He leaves without knowing that he is a father.
She has nowhere to go. Nor does she have the imagination to leave. She doesn't know what is happening. The church judges. And she is taken from her home into the home of a man she hardly knows.
The book begins in the nursing home... where long hallways of tawny oak railing line shiny linoleum floors. Where women slump in a wheelchair, exhausted by life. Her memory is confused. As she ages, she remembers and forgets.
For her entire life she held the memory of that frozen moment keeping the man she married at an arms length with her frigid obedience. The child she made in love burned in the rusted barrel in the backyard. The ten children she birthed fought her pious perfection and her stilted spirituality. They prefered their father's irreverent laughter.
The story unravels -- coming of age and aging. Loving and losing. Living and hanging on to vapid memories.
Read it....
It's in the Kindle e-book library.

The Tower of Babel?

First of all.... pathetic blogger that I am... it took me 20 minutes just to find my own blog. So it you are reading this.... wow, I'm impressed.
Because I use this format to natter ideas few people have the patience to listen to... again, I applaud you.
But here goes.... The Biblical account of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 -- but the general gist is: all people spoke the same language (I think it was English -- to perpetuate global unity and marketing advantage). The United Committee on Unification met and thought -- you know, we need to build something that shows just how powerful we are and truly stand for our united front. And so they did. They put a lot of energy into mixing mud and straw, forming bricks and baking them. The technical challenges of making the tallest tower in the world -- before they had the CN Tower to learn from -- was invigorated compliance of hands on mortar men.
You can read a modern account in Yertle the Turtle -- "oh marvelous he -- was king of the pond, it was all he could see." Of course, the little guy at the bottom saw nothing and carried the weight of the marvelous plan.... but that's for another time.
I wonder if the "Internet of Things" isn't an identical quest.
Forbes tells us that the Internet of Things is at the top of the "hype" cycle for marketers and product development.
While I apologize for insane reductivism -- basically the internet of things (Sometimes referred to as the "cloud" of things) is interconnectivity at its height. Simple people like me can hardly imagine the impact of embedded systems (from agriculture to pharmaceuticals to home systems). By embedded, we mean that connectivity (or the Internet of Things) is basically planted into something or someone. Things, buildings, plants, humans... anything/one.
Because you and me are having trouble keeping track of all our connected stuff (I've modelled it already by losing my blog momentarily)... the world of connected things will do it for me -- automatically.
It seems to me that to count on world control and human dominance by building the Internet of Things is pretty much the same agenda as that United Committee on Unification (yeah, yeah -- I made that up) and Yertle.
While trite.... I wonder if the world has changed very much. While brilliant women and men are designing algorithms to power the Internet of Things, a Missouri teen is buried because the police shot before talking, Ebola is spreading like wild fire in West Africa, power antics are playing out between Russia and the Ukraine and in the Middle East deathly lines are being drawn in the sand.
Power is a dangerous task master.
Believing that we have the control to rule the world can only have a very bad ending.

Salt

I owe this thought to Mike Krause.... I almost always owe my thoughts to someone else, but this thought can be clearly and directly traced to his message at The Meeting House. One line of Jesus' metaphor has the power to inspire a novel....
In the days of Jesus much of the regular, day to day salt was from the Dead Sea. It was impure, laced with gypsum. The people kept the salt in a pile in their backyards. Salt dissolved in the rain -- not so much the gypsum. As the pile of salt grew old and, if no new salt was added, the pile was a worthless pile of gypsum. The people then took the mineral and spread it on their walkways and roads -- as it was an excellent hardening substance.
The perfect metaphor.
The metaphor of people losing their salt is a poignant reminder. Unused, without being replenished, that which makes us filled with flavour, becomes tasteless and flat.
I read the stories in the Gospels and remember that the people who challenged Jesus were the men and women who had the most education, training and leadership experience in the church. They were men who had been given authority to teach. These men also made judgements on people's day to day lives. Yet they had been left out in the rain too long and the saltiness of their relationship with God and their love for God had been washed out, leaving behind the rules and regulations they so loved. And the rules and regulations were powerless to change hearts and lives.

Pavlova: and my kitchen nightmare

I like to cook -- the reward is amazing. In my real job I get critiqued and analyzed and evaluated and argued with. It's fun.
But when I set food in front of friends, they are silent. In awe. Saliva pooling under their tongue.
This week we had a little baby shower at our house. I'm not really a dessert person. I'm about rich barbecue sauce and flavours layered into soups and sauces. I'm into grilling rubs and salts and convection tricks for increased flavour. Dessert -- well, it seems that it's less of an art and more of a science. Because precision requires attention, my little creative adhd brain rebels.
But I offered (for some weird reason) to bake.
So, on Tuesday night I got home and pulled out the stand mixer. Just because I don't like to bake doesn't mean I don't like the gadgets.
My overall goal was to create a Pavlova.
Basically, Pavlova is a meringue -- except it's not on the top of a lemon pie.
The recipe is simple.... 1/2 cup of egg whites (about 4); 1 cup sugar, teaspoon of vinegar, tablespoon of cornstarch, a schlucks of vanilla.
One would think I had all those ingredients in the house. Well, I knew I didn't have cornstarch, but I had lept over that hurdle successfully the week before.
I know that all of you have been taught that you should set all the ingredients you need on the counter before you start baking. That would make sense -- and it's likely that I wouldn't have had the egg whites already reaching soft peaks before I discovered I didn't have any white sugar. I'm smart enough to understand that white sugar and brown sugar, while both sweet, in baking have different textures and mess with the final product. But I have little fear of messing with final products. So I dumped in (One tablespoon at a time, as recommended) brown sugar. I was not at all surprised that the meringue did not have the lovely soft white colour of the picture in the recipe book.
Then I realized I didn't have any cornstarch.
That's a little harder. Flour seemed an unlikely candidate. Then, brainwave, pudding mix is pretty much cornstarch -- so I threw in a tablespoon of custard powder. I had everything else. So I slipped it into the oven and let it do its thing.
The next evening, I layered it with a rich custard, raspberries and blueberries and topped it with whipping cream. I noticed when I cut it, it seemed a little stickier than I thought, but, seriously, who in that crowd was a Pavlova expert?
It was amazing. The brown sugar transported it to a slightly toffee taste and texture.
I brought the dessert out. Served my guests. I had made lots --enough for everyone to have a generous piece.... OK, I probably made two times as much as reasonable. That night, even the skinny ladies who only eat sunflower seeds and cantaloupe were licking the platter with the rest of us.

An Ode to the Past

The call is to unplug.... stop the tweets, resist Facebook, shut out email, turn off your smart phone, close your eyes to Pintrest and (shudder) suspend Google. 

"When I was young..." How often have your heard that? 

Well, when I was young (because I'm old), my teachers were horrified at the lose of penmanship. In fact, I had to stay in over lunch hour to perfect my lopsided Q. They were terrified that we would lose the talent for complex multi-claused sentences. My grandfather often spoke with fondness about the tri-colonate sentence (I know -- my children laugh at me too). 

But I write today with all of my technology charged and running. With Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, email and an online game of Scrabble running in the background. You see, each generation fears for the next -- which is confusing, as if we would cease to be human. 

A well formed poem, a scintillating story crafted in the finest language, dinner conversation between friends and lovers..... all of those things will continue to exist because we are human. 

Yes, we will have momentary lapses where we overlook our lover to scan our eMail. Of course, the thrill of a new piece of technology will capture our imagination.  OK, perhaps Canada Post will be forced to build more creative strategies to be sustainable.... but imagination, creativity, communication, relationships.... they will never fade because.

This little cartoon may amuse you..... 

Aging

An ode to my mother-in-law...
89 is an awe-inspiring accomplishment. Walking 30 minutes at a brisk, 89 year old pace. Each step bringing a minute of sunshine to erode the sense of doom she feels at the state of the world.
Two months ago her doctor stole her independence by reporting her to the provincial licensing company as having growing cognative impairment. One wonders why the doctor lacked the respect to share his findings with her and one day she recieved a letter from the government telling her that she could no longer drive.
So now she walks.
To Dairy Queen.
To Copper Kettle.
To her favourite shops.
Our society struggles to care for our mothers and grandmothers, fathers and grandfathers.
Their minds work overtime to understand the changes in, what Tevia called "tradition."  Access to hours of news and real time information, the world is a frightening place, discounting their values and replacing them with selfish convenience. Fast pace technology has changed the face of the world. Children and grandchildren with their attention focused on smart phones and tablets, relationships built on sound waves. The cloud makes no sense to them, wven when we tell them they can change the font with the touch of their fingertips, making reading a breeze. Touch screens and intuitive interfaces are foreign languages. Why can't we just answer our phones?
The eldest son wants her to move to a senior's complex where her meals will be supplied. Grandma likes Copper Kettle and Dairy Queen. The youngest son created a nutrition savvy menue. She likes hamburgers and cheese infused Alfredo. The doctor tells her that her aches and pains are normal -- after all, she's old. She remembers the days where she could prune the apple trees, paint the garage floor and wash out every kitchen cupboard on a fall Saturday.
She looks at the 900 square foot apartment and wonders where her daughters will stay when they come to visit. And how she can fit her piano in such a small place -- she hasn't played the piano in several decades, but it was a significant purchase and it's a lovely place to display family photos. She looks at the cost and wonders how they can rationalize $1500 for food for an under 5 foot grandmother.
I watch as her world shrinks from a 5 bed room farmhouse to one bed and one chair, a bar fridge and lunch with the other residents in the main dining room. I know that she struggles to understand the changes that have been made all around her.
I beat her at Scrabble -- barely -- and I wish that I could play with her more often.