A Flip-Flop Sunday, or “The Madness Incident”

For Camille, by request. :)

I spent the earlier portion of the day at 327 with the fabulous Ms. O (a.k.a. Camille). She prepared a delightful breakfast of French toast, “snausages,” and coconut juice. After brekkie, C sorted through photos from her “Kanbodea” trip while I worked on (and finished—yay!) Baby D’s blanket. 327ers the M* ster and the T* ster both made appearances--it was delightful to see them. Then it was time to get out, stretch our legs, breathe some fresh air, and enjoy the bee-yoo-tiful afternoon.

By the time we left 327, it had been a few hours since we’d eaten and I was craving salad, so we pointed our feet towards Saturn. Other than some initial confusion regarding the salad dressing (wouldn’t you expect cilantro-lime dressing to be green? I could swear it was green the last time I ordered it!), things were going along just fine. Fine, that is, until the Chocolate Madness incident.

First off, I was surprised and disappointed to find that they’d changed the flavor of the ice cream used in the Madness from toasted almond to plain old chocolate. Yes, it’s true, it _is_ CHOCOLATE Madness, but the advantage of the toasted almond ice cream was that it added the pleasing crunch of the almonds to the mix. Why mess with the success of a tried and true recipe? Yet they had. C’est la vie. A few more bites into it and I realized something else was missing! I kept poking around with my spoon, diving in through the whipped cream, ice cream and mousse, all the way to the bottom of the bowl to find… nothing.

Now, I’ve lived in this town since 1982, and I’ve been enjoying the delights of Saturn Cafe’s legendary Chocolate Madness since my first year here, so I know what’s supposed to be in it. There’s supposed to be a brownie at the bottom. The Madness just isn’t a Madness without the brownie! The beauty of the brownie, like the almonds, is that it adds another layer of texture. You’ve got all this soft mushy stuff—whipped cream, ice cream, chocolate mousse—and then you get to the bottom and there’s this delicious little brownie soaking up the melted ice cream and surrounded by the chocolate fudge sauce that has sunk to the bottom. You sink your spoon through all of that soft stuff and then into the brownie, breaking off a bit of it so that you get a little taste of everything in that one bite, and let me tell you, there is nothing quite like it.

To say we were disappointed might be considered a bit of an understatement. Needless to say, we weren’t about to stay quiet about this. We flagged down our server and brought the issue to her attention. She disappeared, then re-appeared, explaining that the brownies were just coming out of the oven, and asked if we wanted to wait for them to cut us a warm brownie. (What a ridiculous question!) She came back a moment later to tell us that they couldn’t cut the brownies while they were warm (huh?). Would we like a chocolate chip cookie or cookie dough instead? Sure, OK. So she brings us, I kid you not, _half_ of a portion of cookie dough. (I have photographic evidence, but I haven’t figured out how to get the photo from my cell phone to my blog yet, so that will have to wait.) Talk about adding insult to injury! You can bet the tip we left reflected how we felt about it.

Now, this may have seemed a completely frivolous and pointless post, but wasn’t it better than my complaining about how much my life sucks? ;]

This MUST be a bad dream--why can't I wake up?!

I didn't "tempt fate" by saying, "Things couldn't get any worse" or by asking, "What next?!" or any of that. And yet, today... MORE BAD NEWS. For f*ck’s sake! Enough already!!

Many of you know that my dear friend, the VQ, was diagnosed with stage IV cancer in January 2004. And then in November '04, after months of prayer and alternative therapies, we were told that the cancer was in complete remission. The news came the day before my birthday. It was an answer to many prayers and the best gift I could have received. It was unexpected and wonderfully good news. We sighed a huge sigh of relief and thanked God for this miracle.

A few months ago, on July 20th, the VQ's oncologist died suddenly of a heart attack at the young age of 41. (Another tragedy.) She recently went to see a new oncologist who ordered a whole slew of tests so he could acquaint himself with her case and see where she's at now. She went today to get the test results. None of us expected anything but good news--confirmation that the cancer is still in remission. Unfortunately, our expectations were…well…wrong. She called just after meeting with the doctor to tell us that the news was not good. Not only is the cancer not in remission, it apparently never was. The new doctor found, when he compared the new scans to the old ones, that there was a small tumor in her liver that had, apparently, gone unnoticed, or been mis-read as something other than a tumor.

Even reading this now, it doesn’t seem real to me. I thought the cancer was behind us. I say, “us” because she is much more than a friend. She is my boss, my surrogate Mom, one of my dearest friends and confidants. I am in a state of shock...refusing to believe this is real...wanting desperately to wake up from this bad dream.