Elise Sereni Patkotak

And with all love and respect, Phil, I do want to emphasize the older.  Happy Birthday! May you be older than me for the rest of our lives.

If I want to be optimistic, I think that new life forms lurking in the muck of an Alaskan breakup could potentially hold the cure for multiple currently incurable diseases. If I’m being pessimistic, I thik that the muck of breakup contains life forms that will overwhelm us and take over the world. On some days, I don’t view that as a bad thing.

Alaskan winters are like childbirth. This came to me as I slogged through the mud and muck of breakup. By the end of each winter, Alaskans are wondering how they will ever face another and begin to think about moving out. It’s just like a mother giving birth who wonders why she ever thought it was a good idea and swears she’ll never do it again. But then she sees her baby, has that fog of amnesia fill her brain and voila! she has another baby. And so we Alaskans, after a summer of rainy, cold and foggy weather, develop

I’m afraid I’ll have the cataract surgery and finally be able to see without gauzy clouds in front of my eyes and the first time I look in the bathroom mirror after the surgery, I’ll run screaming from the room in horror at the old face I can finally see looking back at me.

My mom’s mom died when I was only about nine years old. All my memories of her and her home involve opera on the radio in the background. I guess for an Italian immigrant at that time, opera was the popular music of the day on the radio. Certainly my grandmother would not have ever gotten into rock and roll. Even Sinatra probably came across as a bit unseemly to her.

So now I am trying to learn to appreciate opera by putting the TV on to the all-opera-all-the-time channel for my birds during the day. I don’t know if

You would think at some point my dog Blue would be embarrassed to be walking around with bird poop on her head. But she isn’t. I try to tell Abdul it’s not nice to lure Blue under her cage by dropping food and then takling aim and pooping once Blue is occupied sucking up all the loose seeds. But Abdul is obviously amused by the whole process. And Blue walks around shaking her head because there always seems to be sticky stuff on it that’s dripping on to her face.  And that, in turn, makes me very careful to check

I drank iced tea at dinner last night without remembering the caffeine content.  At three this morning I was trying to convince my dogs to wake up and play with me. They were not amused. Blue got up from my bed in a very disgruntled manner and moved downstairs. (Shades of my marriage!) Blondie refused to even lift her head off the couch and pretend that she heard me. So I was forced to lie in bed and wonder when I lost control of the pets in my life. And then the answer came to me.  I never had it.

I took our family’s Easter ricotta pie recipe and tried to make it diabetic friendly by taking out the rice, not using a crust and substituting fake sugar.  And I’m here to tell you, it’s just not the same.  Not even if I close my eyes and wish really, really hard. Pie without crust, it turns out, is not really a pie and not really a cake and not really something that holds together outside of the pan. But it makes great ricotta pudding.