Category Archives: Random Thoughts and Musings

December 17, 2016

Easy Potato Soup – The Ultimate Comfort Food

By Kat Myrman

Every year, when the weather chills I get a litany of calls from grocery store aisles. The conversations go something like this:

“Hi mom, I’m at the store. Tell me what I need to make potato soup.”

And I smile and happily recount the list of simple ingredients as memories swirl in my head from days gone by when my four daughters were little and my pocketbook was lean. There is nothing like this simple staple to warm hearts and fill hungry bellies. It’s the ultimate comfort food. 

This year, as my brood gathers for the holidays, soups and chewy ciabatta bread is on the menu. One of my son-in-laws will be replicating the Olive Garden’s Zuppa Toscana (it’s his specialty!) and me? You guessed it! Potato soup!

Now you will find all sorts of fancy and elaborate recipes online and in cook books. Some require broths and other ingredients like chicken or ham, broccoli, carrots or cheese. My recipe is all about paying homage to an amazing nightshade edible tuber, the esteemed pomme de terre, the magnificent potato!

So just as I would tell my daughters from memory each winter, I’m sharing my recipe with you. 


Ingredients for a Crowd

5 lbs of Red Potatoes, peeled and quartered

1-2 sweet onions, chopped

2 12-oz cans of evaporated milk

1 cup of butter (2 sticks or 1/2 pound)

1 TBS salt (plus more to taste)

2 tsp fresh ground pepper

Optional: cornstarch to thicken

Place onions, potatoes and salt in a large stockpot. Add enough water to completely cover the potatoes. Boil, uncovered until the potatoes are soft.


Remove from the heat. Don’t drain the water. Using a potato masher break up the potatoes, leaving several small lumps. (If your pot is too deep you can transfer the potatoes into a bowl to mash.)


Blend in the evaporated milk and butter. If your soup is too soupy, you can use a tablespoon or so of cornstarch to thicken. Have a taste and season to your liking, adding the pepper and additional salt.


And if you must, you can always add the extras I mentioned above. My kids like to add shredded cheese and bacon bits. Me? I like it simple. Warm, smooth, filling. The perfect dish on a cold sleety day! Yummy in my tummy! Stay warm everyone! 

8 Comments   |  tags: , | posted in Essays, Random Thoughts and Musings, Stone Soup and Other Delicacies

December 16, 2016

Hotsy-Totsy – Friday’s Word of the Day Haiku – 16 December 2016

By Kat Myrman
roaring-20s

Channeling my inner Flapper at my granddaughter’s Roaring 20’s Sweet 16 Party 🙂

Happy Friday!  Today’s dictionary.com Word of the Day is hotsy-totsy. It is described as Older Slang. – about as right as can be; perfect: He always thinks everything is just hotsy-totsy.

Hotsy-totsy originated in the Roaring 20’s. There are many parallels between the 1920’s and modern times. The U.S. and the world was just coming out of a World War I. Science was amidst a great debate over the size of the universe (aka the “Great Debate” of 1920). Today we have a great debate of our own: climate change proponents and deniers. And speaking of science, the famous Scopes trial in 1925 was an attempt by creationists to vilify and abolish the teaching of evolution in schools. We’re still seeing this battle play out in school boards today.

In the 1920’s we saw a rise in radical political movements worldwide. Today, there are many references and parallels to those radical movements: Fascism, Nazism, Nationalism, Fundamentalism, Communism and National Socialism. Political agendas focused on moral issues in the 1920’s, as they continue to do today. In the 20’s the 18th Amendment was ratified prohibiting alcohol, only to be repealed in its entirety 13 years later by the 21st Amendment. Today it is marijuana that is flip-flopping between legal and illegal in our courts, with the states taking the lead in decriminalizing it.  The 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote in the US was ratified in the 1920’s. Ironically, even though the door opened in 192o, women have a long way to go. Today women still suffer from workplace discrimination and wage discrepancies and continue to be objectified and denied the right to make their own  health decisions. We have not come very far from the days when women were considered the property of her husband.

The Immigration Act of 1924 placed restrictions and quotas on the number of immigrants allowed to come into the U.S. Today, we are seeking to do the same and more, by building walls, registering immigrants of a particular religion and threatening to send immigrants back to where they came from. Also in the 1920’s we saw enrollment in the KKK peak after its resurgence in 1915. Sadly we are seeing a this trend again in today’s volatile and polarized society.

In the 1920’s if someone was hotsy-totsy he likely thought quite highly of himself. I can think of a few people who shall remain nameless that fit that description! 🙂 I love the other terms that were mentioned in the “Origin of the Word” segment in dictionary.com: heebie-jeebies and horsefeathers:

Origin of hotsy-totsy – The term hotsy-totsy first appeared in the 1920’s in William (Billy) De Beck’s hugely popular comic strip Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. De Beck, in addition to coining “hotsy-totsy”, also coined the terms “heebie-jeebies” and “horsefeathers”.

Such fun words! Of course I had to figure out a way to use them in a haiku. And so here it is. I often hear the warning that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. We never learn do we?

It’s hotsy-totsy
at least some think so…others?
It’s just horsefeathers!

kat ~ 16 December 2016

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Haiku, Humor, Random Thoughts and Musings, Word of the Day Haiku

December 11, 2016

…can I be honest? Shi Sai Sunday Part 2

By Kat Myrman

Okay, so I just had an opportunity to test my resolve, my belief in the power of love. It has left me exhausted and questioning everything. If there is one thing I have held myself to with this blog, it is my determination to be honest, even when it hurts. So this is about me…and my flaws.

I got in a spat with a facebook “friend” over another one of those viral diatribes that seeks to guilt those of us who didn’t vote for Trump to stop the hate, to respect their decision, to get over it and to admit that just because they voted the way that they did does not mean they are deplorable racist, misogynistic, nationalistic, fanatic evangelicals. You know the drill. We have all been bombarded with this stuff; the call to come together, to hold hands and sing kumbaya while our country implodes.

Normally I just scroll past, consider the source and enjoy a few cat videos. But this time was different because this person singled me out, tagging my name. I suppose I should have scrolled past but I didn’t. To their baited question, “do you really think I am deplorable?” with a clear accusation in the printed text that if I do, I am the problem, I admitted the truth. Yes. Yes I do believe that, despite all the ugly evidence presented during the campaign, a whole group of people held their noses and voted for a monster, their support of him is deplorable.

I didn’t make nice. I didn’t reassure this person that I thought it was perfectly okay that they did what they did. And I was honest as I could be. Their vote and their determination to have me justify them with my approval was not something I could give.

Of course I had just written about love. This morning I boasted that love is everything and that I am called to love. I started to feel guilty. I started to feel like a hypocrite. I was not loving. Love is hard.

But then my intuition, my heart started whispering to me. I remembered who I am. And I also started to see the vicious cycle I have allowed myself to endure again and again. I realized that I have given up on and refused love to the most important person in my life. That person is me.

Two weeks ago I studied the types of love. I learned that loving oneself is an important prerequisite to our ability to love others.

I’m terrible at it. I am really good at being the selfless martyr, of not being able to say no, of avoiding confrontation by smiling when others ridicule me and my bleeding heart for caring. But it is time for that to change.

Being loving does not require that I compromise myself or my convictions and beliefs. Love does not demand that I turn a blind eye to injustice, hatred and threats to the freedom and safety of myself or others. Love does not force me to respect your decisions if I believe they are wrong, though I certainly respect your right to make your own decisions. Love does not call me to endure abuse from others. Love encourages me to care for myself.

And so I chose to unfriend yet another Facebook “friend”. Not because I am hateful or unkind, but because I am trying to be better at taking care of myself. It’s the first step, after all, in loving others. Frankly, I need a break from the vicious gloating and veiled threats from those who “won”. I am still here if they want to talk respectfully about the issues that face us all. I am still open to a two-way dialog. But I do not bear the burden of proving or justifying someone else’s choice. Right or wrong it is their decision to live with.

So here I am. This is me, for better or for worst, working at being a better human. It’s hard. And I still believe love is all. I’ve just added myself to the dance card.

Remember to love yourself my friends. It’s important and you are so worthy of love. ❤️

~kat

6 Comments | posted in Random Thoughts and Musings

December 11, 2016

Shi Sai Sunday’s Week in ReVerse – 11 December 2016

By Kat Myrman

This week’s Shi Sai is growing on me. For several weeks now, many of us have reeled from the incomprehensible aftermath of our failed Democracy. Yes failed. There are no winners. We are all losers. And with each passing day the lunacy of it all spirals faster and faster, boggling our minds. To think that an angry, easily duped minority put us where we are is just plain crazy!

And yet this is our reality now. A parallel universe where rewards are presented to the highest bidder, where those who object are vilified, where truth does not matter, where opinion is the only thing that drives our conscience, where facts are inconveniences to be twittered away, where lies are embraced and repeated until they become mantras for the deplorables among us…the racists, misogynists, nationalists, white supremists and evangelicals, where the incoming leader of the free world is less interested in governing and more concerned with how his newfound title will affect the bottom line of his brand, where laws and the constitution don’t matter, where privilege has finally reaped its ultimate goal…world domination.

Sounds like a nightmare doesn’t it? For a majority of us, it is. It’s like some bad dream we can’t wake up from. And yet…and yet…for those of us who are most definitely awake, this is no time to curl into fetal positions, hide under blankets and hope for the best. We’ve been here before after all, and our forbearers fought for those of us who would come after. They believed in us and the future, saw that glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel, dreamed beautiful dreams and marched through their collective valleys of shadows united, not in misery, but in love and unity of purpose, dressed in a peace that confounds understanding…yes, in peace.

How can we aspire to anything less than? When the dust settles and we are faced with the reality of what we have inflicted upon ourselves, yes all of us, for none are innocent, what will our response be?

In a perfect world faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges, our response must be to remember who we are, to do justice, to have compassion and mercy, to love, to forgive, to walk humbly, to be the change.

This is why this week’s Shi Sai is growing on me. It’s a clarion call rising from the depth of my soul, nudging me out of hiding, into the light. I know what I must do, I’ve always known. And even if I can’t trust anything around me, even if I can’t believe what I am seeing in the present, I can hope in the future and trust my intuition. I know what I need to do and be. It’s simple. It’s four letters that mean everything…L…O…V…E.

Peace and love to you. Remember who YOU are and listen to your heart. It knows the way forward. ❤️

Shi Sai Sunday’s Week in ReVerse – 11 December 2016

A woman’s heart remembers things
should I tell them I know?
when someone plays on my trust
proof they’re not well (b)read
behind our locked doors and walls
memories in shades of gray
a great victory the unraveling,
she is everywhere
it’s the cock’s clarion call
and crying babies
to rouse those who sleep
following
my intuition
always gives
me peace.

~kat

The Shi Sai (formerly known as a ReVerse) is a new form I came up with during Poetry Month in April 2016. I’ve actually been writing shu sai for years but was inspired to give it a proper name. It is a poem created by taking one line of verse from several poems of an author’s own collection. The shi sai is done as a review of a series or collection of poems and therefore, each line should flow in chronological order of the dates the poems were written (from oldest to new). The lines chosen should be the author’s favorite from each poem. This form works best if the author resists the temptation to read the full new poem before all the verses have been added. (It helps one to resist the impulse to change a line to make it “fit”.

8 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Digital Art & Photos, Essays, Life Lessons, Poetry, Random Thoughts and Musings, Shi Sai, Social Issues, Spirituality, Week in Review

December 9, 2016

Clarion – Friday’s Word Of The Day Haiku – 9 December 2016

By Kat Myrman


Happy Friday! Today’s word of the day on Dictionary.com is Clarion. It is defined as a1. Clear and shrill: the clarion call of a battle trumpet, and 2. An ancient trumpet with a curved shape.

It is when the one gets into the origin of the word that things get interesting…

Origin of clarion

The etymology of clarion is clear and simple. Spellings of the equivalent term in Old French include clarain,clarin, claron, clairon, clarine. The diminutive noun in French formed from clarine is clarinette, meaning“clarinet.” Clarion entered English in the late 1300s,clarinette in the late 1700s.

But I think my favorite reference to the word is in its application in a quote by Jane Goodall:

“This book is a clarion call to rouse such people fromspineless acceptance of the status quo. I cannotstress strongly enough that every individual makes a difference.”
Jane Goodall, with Gary McAvoy and Gail Hudson, Harvest for Hope, 2005

Inspired by Ms. Goodall’s words, I give you a few Haiku. Have a great weekend! 😊

Clarion – A Haiku Study

those who are awake
shriek a clarion warning
to rouse those who sleep

clarion crooners
sooth the rage of common beasts
and crying babies

it’s not the sunrise
it’s the cock’s clarion call 
that rallies the dawn

kat ~ 9 December 2016

6 Comments   |  tags: , , | posted in Essays, Haiku, Poetry, Random Thoughts and Musings, Word of the Day Haiku