I must say, the chainmail discussion is much more courteous than the muffaletta debates.

I was reading a review for a cookbook the other day that said that there were too many recipes with cilantro, and I thought of us.

Jilli, ltc is watching It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown for the first time today.

Awww, yes! I hope she was entranced by it.

She was!

I do not have my retail sales stamina yet and I am tired

I'm smiling thinking of it watching the Great Pumpkin. Although I originally pictured vwbug 's Stitch instead of ltc.

Wow, no posts in Bitches in days!! So I am going to relate an odd event from decades ago because of being in a melancholy mood from today being a year since Mom died, and tomorrow being 30 years since Steve died. I had forgotten the exact date and then looked at his death certificate when Mom died to see if it was the same day because I knew it was close. Also, holding Maria and all of us dealing with grief because it is absurdly hard.

Losing Steve just about killed me. If I could have convinced myself that I would be with him again, I would have killed myself. The grief shattered me. Somehow I kept going forward, graduated college, got married, had kids, kept on keeping on going. But the pain stayed. It was only 3 years he was in my life, and it didn't seem right that the pain would be so pronounced for so much longer than that.

Then some years later I had visited with a past life regression type person, or maybe I dreamed it, it was so long ago I can't be sure. Anyway, I was looking to the universe for an answer of why I had to meet this person and fall so hard so fast, change my whole life, only to be made to suffer so horribly. Why so cruel, life? The answer given to me was that we had met in a previous life. His previous incarnation had been madly in love with me and I treated him callously and dumped him, resulting in his heartbroken suicide. When previous me heard about his death I had zero emotional response. So the present day Karma was that I was supposed to pay for my heartlessness by falling so in love and being crushed by its loss. This "realization" was so real to me at the time I was absolutely furious and angry at a level never before experienced. I knew it was true and I was livid at both Steve and the universe.

In the end, from that day forward it was easier. I still mourn his loss and have both wonderful and sad memories, but having that bout of absolute raw anger over the injustice of it all helped. Whether there are previous lives or karma really doesn't matter. It was apparently required that I get some anger out and that did the job.

So there you have my Mourning Monday Musings!

If I could have convinced myself that I would be with him again, I would have killed myself.

I will admit, in those first few days where I was just figuring out how to live in this new world, there was a quiet voice saying "I don't have to be here, I could go be with him and not have to deal with this." My cold practicality then said, "Yeah, but how?", and the overly-dramatic part went off and sulked and left the rest of us to cope. I actually found the option, however unlikely, comforting.

So smart, Laura, about the role that anger sometimes plays in working through grief. Grieving is just so hard, and we make it harder on ourselves when we insist it's supposed to be done the "right" way.

There are no rules, that is for sure.

Complete tangent: I just found out (rather publicly, because I was trying to find a post) that I have been blocked on Facebook by a local celebrity-ish chef here. I am so confused, I really didn't think we had enough interaction on social media or IRL for him to even think of me at all, let alone block me on Facebook.

Everything's so weird in the New Orleans food world now - the Times-Pic/NOLA.com just published an expose 8 months in the making about 25 women bringing EEOC complaints of harassment against the John Besh Group, and John Besh himself. It's a HUGE scandal down here. One of those Weinstein-ian "open secrets," so, bad.

The chef who blocked me is related to this particular clusterfuck because he co-owns (owned) several of the Besh Group's restaurants and they have a lawsuit, and now there's this harassment thing, and... that's New Orleans food biz drama for you.