Happy Easter!  I’ve had a busy weekend, and I’m getting this out later than I’d like, but, still, mission accomplished. Hope you all got to spend some time with people you love, and enjoyed the beautiful weather.

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What Really Happens the Night Before the Office Potluck

When you are a single female, office potlucks are met with a mix of anticipation and dread.

The dread part comes first. It’s the moment you realize that you must go to the store, buy a week’s worth of groceries, and make a dish for your closest coworkers, knowing you’ll only get a spoonful.

Did you just think I should’ve just bought some prepared potato salad at the deli, slapped a spoon in it, and called it good? Yeah, I heard you. I have my ways. I can only waggle my finger at you, and, in my best stern voice say “Shame! That’s cheating!”

Because, for us single females, despite the cost which blows our monthly budget out of the water, potlucks are *really* about showing off.

Our Betty Crocker genes don’t get out much. With no regular “audience,” we have no one to impress with our culinary acumen. We tend to go home, shove our deli meat into some maybe,  possibly,  good bread and call it dinner.

This is where the anticipation comes in.

See, as much as there is dread and anxiety over the cost, there is the excited planning that goes into high gear.  It’s not enough to bring a dish people will like. It’s time to impress them with exotic ingredients or techniques. They can’t be too exotic or no one will touch them, and no one is impressed with having the only untouched dish at the party.

The ideal potluck dish has got to look excellent, taste fantastic, and be sufficiently complicated or mysterious (how’d she do that??) to become the chief topic of conversation for the meal.

“Gosh, I haven’t used my melon baller in years, maybe I could use it to scoop out servings of salmon mousse, serve it on tiny homemade crackers with a touch of that caviar and serve it with some sparkling wine I made from last year’s grape harvest. I’ll just whip up the crackers from the hand-milled flower right after I put away the deli meat. ”

When you start sounding like a contestant on Iron Chef explaining their sea bass three ways, with truffle oil foam and poached quail eggs, or twice killed pork rendered planks of maple and cedar, it might be time to dial the whole thing back to eleven.

The minute you decide to make a more reasonable dish, you start to panic and imagine that one of the single guys at the office could taste your masterpiece, fall madly in love with it, and want to be married within the month. It’s worth the hours spent hand-milling flour if it catches a man.

I wake to the smell of a burning batch of crackers, and wipe the drool from my face, and the dream has faded. Maybe store-bought crackers aren’t cheating after all.

Kate Barnes – award-winning writer, blogger and thinker of thoughts – lives in Denver. By day she works for the Colorado Community College System, and by dark she sits in the glow of the computer screen creating websites, words, and grand schemes.  She welcomes your comments and can be reached at flyingsolo@k8space.com, you can visit her website at http://www.k8space.com.

I’m changing strategies some, as I’ve been doing this column for 17 weeks, and not a single newspaper has jumped on board. SO, I’m posting these here, to increase their visibility, and to build my audience. It’s easier for people to share this content from here, and easier to have this as the archive.

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How to Excavate in the Valley of the Appliances

It’s almost time to plan my next excavation.

Of course, it’s not quite what you might think.  Unless you think it’s time to clean out the fridge, which I call an “excavation” because it sounds more fun.

As with any excavation, you start by putting down a grid, so that you can record where each and every artifact removed from the site was originally located.   For reference sake, I also append a depth chart to accurately record which layer in each grid has yielded the objects in question.

At this point, there can be no more procrastination. Sending in a canary to detect noxious emissions is unwise, they never come back, and let’s face it, we all know this is an expensive way to find out what we already knew, and you’ll now have a dead canary to excavate.  Just put the money toward a gas mask. Two to three pairs of latex gloves worn simultaneously would also be a wise plan. In fact, if you can afford it, a full hazmat suit would not be entirely ridiculous.

Now that you can’t smell the site, the work begins. It’s best to think of this as the remains of an ancient civilization, where every remnant is a vital clue to understanding history.  As you carefully sift the debris, place any decaying organic matter into a black waste matter disposal unit.

Items which cannot be sifted are what I call “artifacts.” These should be taken back to camp for proper cleaning, identification and cataloging. I usually just put them by the kitchen sink.

There was a very confusing moment, when I uncovered elements which were clearly dated to the bronze age, in the middle of a level of stone age debris.  How could I explain the contradictions in my analysis?

A further search and careful digging uncovered the key evidence:  the jar of ketchup, which I remembered falling a few weeks ago. In its collapse, it probably drug some of the upper layer bronze age material with it into the stone age.  Hopefully, the bottle didn’t cause too much damage to the fragile artifacts in the bottom layers.  Fortunately, the jar itself was still intact.

The mysteries reveal themselves bit by bit.  The soft, green coloring near the back wall, looked like it could be part of an exquisite painting of Osiris, and I started to suspect that this could be a tomb for more than canaries!  Or, it might just be that bell pepper I bought six months ago for a batch of lentil soup.  I wondered where it had ended up.

My hopes of finding the lost tomb of Tetisheri disappeared with that realization. Also, I discovered the seal on the gas mask had slipped, and I was probably hallucinating. I closed down the dig for the day.

A few more hours, and the site would be cleared to bedrock. It was another thrilling excavation, and would be months before I’d start planning the next one, and for that, everyone was grateful. Especially, the canaries.

Valentine’s Day is my least favorite holiday.

This is probably not a surprise to anyone, it’s practically a cliché. Single female finding the holiday dedicated to romance unappealing. Check.

While the roots of my disdain can be found in all the typical things that you’re thinking about, there are a few other things about the holiday that push it higher on my list of “painful things that must be endured.” It’s currently situated right above commercials with that creepy King, and below dental surgery.

First of all, it’s pink. Okay, there’s red, too. A few minutes after the ball has dropped in Times Square, the holiday aisles at the store slough off their greens and reds, and don the single notes of red in every hue imaginable. This includes “liquid digestive remedy” pink. It’s a crime against the senses. All of those cutesy non-anatomically correct hearts accented with frills? It’s enough to give reformed Scrooge a diabetic coma.

Then there’s the candy. Sure, chocolate is fine, but, those collections of chocolate at the store have been there since just after New Year’s, which means they were mass-produced so long ago that there were only 18 Duggar children. Most of the chocolate sold in this way is tasteless, with a waxy texture. The (one assumes) once creamy and decadent fillings have gone hard and crystallized. Frankly, these “confections” are a crime against the sanctity of chocolate.

In addition to those vile chocolates, there’s those horrifying conversation hearts. It would be kind to say they tasted like medicine. These are chalky blobs of hardened hatred. The obnoxious “adorable” text becomes almost sinister should you decide to put the nasty thing in your mouth. “I luv u” becomes a big fat lie when you have to find a polite way to rid your mouth of the offensive partially dissolved hell-candy.

While I’m not opposed to romance in general, it feels like all the expectations of those rows upon rows of frilly cards, waxy chocolate and stale, crappy candy don’t really foster sincere romantic thoughts. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m too jaded to see it.

In my more cynical moments, I admit that I tend to refer to the holiday only by its initials, aka, “VD*.” Yes, I admit, it’s childish and has an edge of schadenfreude. I’m human, after all.

I like the idea of moving the holiday away from its raging insincerity, and the awkward connection to “couples,” and to a more universal notion of celebrating love, and advocating people take the time to do something thoughtful for another human being on this day. Naturally, I’d like those thoughtful things to be done to me. And I’d like them to involve something other than the things found in the “pink” aisle at the supermarket. You all can do much, much better than that.

*VD – French for “Google it later.”

There are moments when I think everyone in my neighborhood is secretly a serial killer.  To me, this is very good news.

I have learned, thanks to countless mystery writers both in print and on TV, that people living near these crazy killers are rarely the victims. If this is true, I’m hoping that all the homicidal maniacs in the state live within a mile of me.

It is also clear from the proliferation of stories about psycho mass murderers, that, in the worlds of fictional detectives, medical examiners and FBI agents, there are about 1000 times more serial killers than there are in the real one. Some of these detectives are racking up their tenth exceptionally twisted mass murderer, which is about ten more than most real investigators see in an entire career.

While I have no problem with my colleagues in the mystery field making as much money as possible selling stories of murderers, I admit that their efforts to make each one more shocking and horrible than the last makes me wonder about the people living in their neighborhoods.

If one of my neighbors is discovered, and the press, as they inevitably do, comes to interview the residents about the secret monster living down the street I will NOT be the person saying “He was such a quiet man. I had no idea.” Instead, I’ll say “I knew it! Not that I had any proof or saw anything specific, but, he was clearly a killer. I saw him, one winter, as the snow was falling, mowing his lawn. That’s not normal.”

Maybe the “Winter Mower” is too obvious. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Dexter and Ted Bundy, it’s that these charismatic maniacs do a darn good job of blending in with us. Painfully normal and all that. I might need to re-tune my multiple murderer radar, aka killdar. (Yes, I know that needs work. I threw out mur-dar because it sounded like I didn’t know how to actually pronounce “murder,” and sk-dar because I’d have to explain it every time I used the term. SK? Serial Killer? Geesh. Terrible.)

However, despite attempting to re-tune my whatever-dar, the candidates for “friendly neighborhood murderer,” are clear in my head. So clear, in fact, that when I am called upon to walk my sister’s dog, and the dog, “leaves a present” in the yards of these particular neighbors, I spend extra time cleaning it up. I know they are watching me, and I don’t want to give them a reason to expand their list of victims.

If this column ends up being my last, it is because it has inadvertently made me a target of one of my neighbors. You know the one. He mows in the winter. Make sure someone tells the press “I knew it all along.”