Monday Amusements

The (young) woman next to me on the train is putting on make up and watching "I Love Lucy".

Meanwhile, I am reading the New York Times, cover to cover, as I am wont to do. Actually that's not quite true; the sports section rarely makes it past the recycling bin on the way into the house.

I love reading Margalit Fox's obituaries in the Times. A couple of days ago brought a lovely one for cruciverbalist Bernice Gordon. It was illustrated by a delicious photo of Mrs. Gordon, in front of a sea of colorful dictionaries, wearing a red shirt, vermilion nail polish, and fuchsia lipstick. Best might be the reveal that Gordon once did a set of commissioned puzzles for Xaviera Hollander, blue clues and all. Today's gem: Fox calls "Harry The Dirty Dog" a "cautionary ablutionary tale".

Elsewhere in the Times, I gasped at a heretofore new to me plural of a compound noun: culs-de-sac. That was in an article about merchandising tie-ins for the coming movie release of Fifty Shades of Grey. I was not one of "the female readers who passed the book around their suburban culs-de-sac" but I did read the article, bemused at the idea of Target selling vibrating love rings. Where would you look for such a thing? Next to the book? Near the condoms? Alongside the toothpaste?

Back to that plural: is culs-de-sac really the right plural? Cul-de-sac translates as bottom of the sack - which is the more important part? When you make a whole bunch of that certain summery drink, you make gins and tonic - gin being the important substance. In a group of Attorneys General, they are lawyers first, "generals" second. Isn't the sack the more important part, the head? After all, the "sack" is the whole of the dead-end road, and the "bottom" is the end where you have to turn around. I dunno. I was intrigued to find it in the first place.

It's been a rich full day, and it's not even noon.

Miscreants in Flowered Shoes

Oh hi.

Every day, I write posts in my head. Long involved complicated chatty erudite posts. But then I never find the time to apply fingers to keyboard. Oy. But here are some delightful or whimsical or heart-catching things that have happened recently:

Yesterday morning, the ten year old girl used 'miscreant' in a sentence, properly (regarding the cats), and correctly pronounced.

The same child also has been on a campaign to get another mammal in residence in our house. She started by trying to talk us into adopting a four year old. Not an infant, no, a four year old.

After we beat that one back - we're too old, our house is too small, we like having one child, you don't want to have to share your room - she moved on, telling me she'd accept a rodent. The rodent lago-morphed into a rabbit, the argument moved onto Powerpoint.

This conversation is far from over. It's shifted gears yet again, to either a new kitten (which would be a third cat) or a plastic horse (Breyer, what you covet when you outgrow American Girl dolls). Or both. Part of the problems is that our cats are faulty. They are not lap cats, they do not purr. They do not care if you are home, they barely deign to be in the same room with you. Oh well. It's not like we're going to drop them off the town dock*, which is what my mother threatened to do to the cat that peed on her toaster once upon a time.

We continue to try to teach the girl to cook. Last week, she made Petits Pains Au Chocolat out of Rozanne Gold's Kids Cook 1-2-3, which, by the way, is a great book for your learning-to-cook kids. Okay, they used frozen puff pastry, and Daddy had to help her whack the chocolate up into the right sized pieces, but they were mighty tasty and she was awfully pleased with herself.

She can also scramble an egg, make hot chocolate, and drop the batter into the boiling water for the spaetzle.

Not too shabby for ten, I think.

In an effort to get her to be a better human being, I took her to help out at a soup kitchen. She, naturally, grumbled about being torn away from her plastic horses and electronic devices, but I won, because I am bigger than she is, not to mention the whole thing of being her mother. It was eye-opening, for both of us. For her, because she'd never seen 50 men (and one woman) eating free food in a church basement because they had nowhere else to eat. For me, because I got to watch her rise to the occasion, don some latex gloves, spoon peas and carrots onto plates, and haul full trays of food out into the dining room, cheerfully. When we left, there was a bicycle chained to a sign post, out front. It was pretty beat up, but rather joyfully so - decked out in red and yellow and green tape. "Mommy, do you think one of the men in there rode his bicycle here, in the snow?" Yup. I think so.

Over our own dinner, later that day, we talked about what we'd done. She hunched her shoulders and leaned over her plate. "One of the men was sitting like this. What was he doing?" "Well, what do you think?" "He could be afraid that someone might want to take his food from him, so he's protecting it. Or maybe he's shy and doesn't want to talk to anyone."

Music lessons, and practicing the viola, have been a constant struggle. We'd signed her up for private lessons last summer, at her request. But it's devolved into "I hate the viola" and "I want to be in chorus" and I think the problem was compounded by the fact that the viola teacher was something of a wet blanket. Finally, after lots of tears, I agreed to let her stop the private lessons, on the condition that she continue to be in the school orchestra, and that she do the mid-winter recital. I also told her she could wear whatever she wanted to wear to the recital, and made the mistake of showing her Mark Wood's website. [Mark Wood plays the electric violin; he was kind of the black sheep outlier of a very musical family in my hometown. His aunt was my flute teacher.] A little product to spike up her hair, and she cleans up fierce.

The skirt's rather too short, but the shoes kill me. They're a pair of shoes, from the fifties or sixties, that lived in the dress-up box when I was a kid. My sister thinks they weren't our mother's, but that they'd come from a friend of hers. They're pointy, black fabric with big pink roses, and spiky not too high heels. And right this very minute, they fit my ten year old perfectly. Oh, she can't walk more than fifty feet in them, but she played her viola recital in them and looked swell.

I thought she sounded great too, but she still says she hates the viola.

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*We don't even have a town dock.

Moky's Black Book

One of the things I did for Christmas was make scanned-printed-bound copies of my mother's cookbook, her well-loved, oft-repaired black book, as gifts for my brother and sister. It was her repository of recipes, tried and true, and perhaps never tried at all. Some are edited, or annotated: “good w/ peas instead of carrots”. Some were cut out of magazines or newspapers, glued into the black book, tried, and ripped off the very page - no good, bland, awful, never make this again! And some are part of the family history - Butterflied Leg of Lamb followed by Fruit Ice Cream? Yup, that sounds like dinner.

For me, reading it is a huge nostalgia trip. The Seven Layer Dinner is, I think, the meal that got served to Aunt Gertrude once - it didn’t cook long enough and the potatoes were raw. Then again, maybe it was the Lamb-Potato Casserole - that too has raw potato layered with the meat. That lamb-potato casserole also has the note “add 1 c. garlic”. I have to think that’s one clove, not one cup. The Duck with Lentils has this uncharacteristic note from the woman who didn’t generally cotton to fruit or other sweet notes in savory dishes: “more apple would be good”.

Lots of friends and relatives supplied recipes which made it into the book. There's a hand-written recipe for Shish Kebabs in my grandmother's hand, which Moky edited to “omit” the ground chili. Gigi - my grandmother - also appears with a recipe for Brownie's written out my handwriting, complete with that errant apostrophe.

Possibly the simplest recipe is Elizabeth’s Pork Chops:

Close together in
pan - cover
w/ milk
350 °F for an
hour or more

A couple of the printed recipes include pricing - a nod to the economizing housewife. The punch recipes are said to cost $15-$25 for fifty servings. And Lydie Marshall’s Poulet a la Grecque says that a 2 1/2 pound chicken will cost $1.42. Um, right. But the recipe sounds tasty - chicken and onions and tomato sauce and feta, baked and served on orzo.

Making the book was a labor of love - I scanned about 150 pages, made a half-assed (idiosyncratic and incomplete) index, wrote an essay of sorts, and uploaded the whole shebang to Blurb. But it was about my favorite gift that I gave anyone this year, and I had a third copy printed just for me - and for my daughter, one day.

Why I'm Voting For Obama

See this picture?

What's missing? That's right, our Obama sign. For the past few weeks, we've had five signs marching up our curbstrip, exercising our right to free speech, sharing our support for the President, our congressperson, our senator, and a couple of local guys.

This morning, the Obama sign was in the middle of the road, and the wire frame that held it up was nowhere to be found. Now maybe, just maybe, someone had a need for sturdy wire in the middle of the night and thus liberated the frame for important purposes, but somehow, I don't think so. I think someone doesn't like the President and was offended by my yard sign.

No matter. I'm still voting for Mr. Obama. I think he's the best hope for our country, and I think Mr. Romney would be a mean-spirited, nasty-minded, destructive force should he be elected.

There are a lot of issues on the table right now. For me, I am horrified by the degree of inhumanity evidenced by Mr. Romney vis a vis women and gay people. I am dismayed at his lack of concern for the "47%". I am shocked by his poor grasp of foreign affairs, and the way he's put his foot in it over and over again. But one of the most important things to me is our domestic policy as regards health care. I wrote about this not too long ago, when I talked about how much it cost for us to have our daughter's broken arm attended to.

One of the issues for my family is that my insurance is a "high deductible" plan, which is supposed to make the patient be a better consumer. In point of fact, that is nearly impossible. James Surowiecki wrote about "Romneycare" in the New Yorker recently, and he explains far better than I did why patients don't make good consumers:

But the free market, though it may be the best way of allocating new TVs and cars, falters when it comes to paying for bypass surgery or chemotherapy. The reasons for this were established nearly fifty years ago, by the economist Kenneth Arrow, in a classic article entitled “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care.” Arrow showed that health care is distinctive in ways that limit the power of the market. Because people don’t have the expertise to evaluate doctors, hospitals, or treatments, it’s hard for them to comparison-shop. Because they can’t pay for major care out of pocket, they must rely on insurance, thereby often losing the final say in what to buy or how much to spend. More fundamentally, markets work only when consumers have the power to say no if the price isn’t right. Yet it’s very hard for people to say no in the case of things like end-of-life care or brain surgery.

For me, the health care issue crystalizes why I will vote for Mr. Obama again. I want the United States government to help people. Health care is a necessity for the collective good, for the whole of the country, just as national defense is something done for all of us, not just a lucky few.

And after Hurricane Sandy flies by, and assuming she doesn't take out the oak in front of my house, I'm nailing my Obama sign to the tree.

Madness

You know what's crazy? A couple of years ago, I had to buy a couple of cap guns for work, you know, props. I found just what we needed someplace online; they looked like something you'd see in an old Western, and did nothing more than go snap! and pop! when you shot them. Toys, you know. But because New York City, where I work, has strict rules about guns, I had to have the toy guns mailed to my house, outside the city (so I could hand carry them to work with me on the train). [Should I be admitting that?]

Last week, as you know, unless you live under that proverbial rock, someone shot a whole mess of people at a movie theater in Colorado, and killed twelve of them. Twelve innocent people, shot by a madman (a "fiend" in a New York Post headline I read over someone's shoulder).

And that madman bought all of his ammunition on the internet:

In the four months before the shootings, he also bought 3,000 rounds of handgun ammunition, 3,000 rounds for a semiautomatic rifle and 350 shells for a 12-guage shotgun, all over the Internet.

Six Thousand, Three Hundred and Fifty. That's a big number. That's a lot of ammo. It's mind-bogglingly crazy that anyone can buy any ammunition on the internet, and you can't even buy a toy gun to be shipped to Manhattan. And that's not even addressing the weaponry issue.

Jason Alexander wrote a rant about the weapons. In case you missed it, here, here's a quote:

These weapons are military weapons. They belong in accountable hands, controlled hands and trained hands. They should not be in the hands of private citizens to be used against police, neighborhood intruders or people who don’t agree with you. These are the weapons that maniacs acquire to wreak murder and mayhem on innocents. They are not the same as handguns to help homeowners protect themselves from intruders. They are not the same as hunting rifles or sporting rifles. These weapons are designed for harm and death on big scales.

I actually do understand that some people want to own guns for the purposes of deer hunting or target shooting. Hell, there are shooting sports in the Olympics. But assault weapons in the hands of ordinary folk? No, no, no.

What in hell are we going to do about this?

50% of the Fifty

I kind of hate all those Facebook plug-ins and apps and what have you. I hardly ever use Spotify because I don’t like broadcasting what I’ve been listening to. I block all sorts of other things. But some tinch of OCD in me made me want to count up which of the 50 states I’ve actually been to – just to satisfy my own curiosity. It turns out that I’ve been to twenty-five states, as long as you count flying in for lunch, or changing planes. It’s not like I’ve slept in all 25.

• California
• Connecticut (I lived in New Haven as a toddler.)
• Delaware
• Florida (We spent a long weekend in a swank hotel in Palm Beach. It was lovely, and kind of like visiting a foreign country. Also, see Georgia.)
• Georgia (I went to a wedding in Albany, GA a long time ago. We flew People Express to Jacksonville, FL and drove from there.)
• Illinois (BlogHer was in Chicago a few years ago. Also, I've changed planes at O'Hare. Hasn’t everyone?)
• Maine (Their license plates say Vacationland for a reason.)
• Maryland
• Massachusetts (Four years of college.)
• Minnesota (I've changed planes in Minneapolis. That doesn't really count, right? Too bad, Minnesota makes the list.)
• Nevada (We spent the night in Reno, and dropped one quarter in one slot machine on the way out of town.)
• New Hampshire
• New Jersey
• New Mexico (My brother lived in Albuquerque for a while, in an adobe house.)
• New York
• North Carolina (I lived in North Carolina when I was a baby, and my father was stationed at Camp Lejeune.)
• Oregon
• Pennsylvania
• Rhode Island
• Texas (Austin. I've been to Austin. Also to Lockhart, for barbecue at Kreuz's. And to the Salt Lick. And to Güero's. It's all about the food.)
• Vermont
• Virginia (Another place lived, as a baby, also while my father was in the Marine Corps.)
• Washington
• West Virginia (We drove through the very end of West Virginia on the way home from Washington DC in February. It wasn't strictly necessary, but it was sort of amusing.)
• Wyoming (I had lunch in Jackson once. If you carefully review the other states I've been to, you'll note that I've been to none of the states that border Wyoming. Yes, we flew there. And back. For lunch. Insanity. I can't remember what we ate.)

Here’s the other half of the country:

Alabama • Alaska • Arizona • Arkansas • Colorado • Hawaii • Idaho • Indiana • Iowa • Kansas • Kentucky • Louisiana • Michigan • Mississippi • Missouri • Montana • Nebraska • North Dakota • Ohio • Oklahoma • South Carolina • South Dakota • Tennessee • Utah • Wisconsin

If we drive across the country one day, we could cross a bunch off the list.

Where have you been?

Impossible Things Before Breakfast

My college reunion is later this year. For the "record book", we were asked for a 500 word essay. I thought I'd share mine with you.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

All of these things are true:

Cauliflower drizzled with olive oil and roasted in a hot oven until crispy around the edges is a wonderful thing to eat.

My boss once called me a horrible Mensa bitch. I told him I was going to put it on my business cards.

I still read the newspaper, the printed inky broadsheet newspaper. Sometimes I even rip things out of it, like recipes which I will never make, or typos that make me cringe.

My eight year old falls asleep best when snuggled up close to me. Consequently, I tend to go to bed earlier than I might otherwise, but I get a lot of reading done.

I love belonging to a CSA. Having no choice in the produce we get each week is curiously freeing; we're forced to cook and eat things we'd probably never buy otherwise. I still hate butternut squash, but I can now make a great dinner out of eggplant or sweet potatoes.

As much as I sometimes wish I were the stay at home parent, I love my full-time job, and we're oddly lucky that a perverse circumstance has led to my husband being home to take care of our daughter. He makes her lunch, puts her on the bus, drives her to swimming, and manages her social calendar. I come home and drill her on the times tables.

My cats hate me, probably because I'm not home as often as the other two humans in the household. I'm trying to seduce them with a private stash of freeze dried tuna flakes.

Buying jeans is a thankless proposition, akin to shopping for bras and bathing suits.

There is a difference between believing something to be impossible, and believing in impossible things. The latter is preferable.

If you give me the choice of a lemon dessert or a chocolate one, I will take lemon.

My daughter thinks I am the most annoying mother in the world. She also thinks I'm the best mother she's ever had - but is clever enough to point out that I'm the only mother she's ever had.

I've never had a manicure. I think I'll keep it that way.

I can't imagine what it's going to cost in 2021 when my kid is ready for college.

One gift of a liberal arts education is "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function" (F. Scott Fitzgerald).

The summer before I went to college, my mother and I made a quilt for me to use on my dorm bed. It's now on my daughter's bed, fraying a bit, needing repairs from time to time. I keep fixing it though, because it's our quilt, and my mother's too, and it wraps us in memory and thrift.

On the far side of fifty, I revel in idiosyncrasy.

Seventeen Times Three

When I was seventeen, I was a freshman in college. When I was thirty four, I was working at a small museum in NYC, living with but not engaged to my now husband. Now I'm fifty one, and according to my eight year old, the oldest mother of a third grader in history.

While having a between-Christmas-and-New-Years birthday is sometimes not all it should be, what with the "here's your Christmas/birthday present", I've done a pretty good job of training my nearest and dearest, and my mother always did right by me. In fact, given that her due date was 12/25, the best present ever might have been that she waited a few days so I wasn’t a Christmas baby. There are other good things: the time of year being what it is, I never had school on my birthday, and I think I've had to work it only once or twice. Generally, it's like today - nothing to do, no work, no school, no obligations - just a mid-winter holiday all my own.

Right now, I'm sitting at my dining room table, feeling surrounded by love - love from family and friends, near and far, real and virtual. My husband bought me a little pile of things off of my Amazon wish list, which I didn't even know he knew about. I usually use it as an aide-mémoire: things I might need one day, books I might want to get from the library. But I was enormously tickled to open up a box containing the Kuhn Rikon "4th Burner" pot - an odd little contraption that I'd book marked last June thinking I'd buy it for him for Christmas. I was thrilled to find that he'd gotten me the geeky box of 100 Pantone postcards - each a different color chip. He also got me Nigel Slater's Tender - which prompted me to announce at the breakfast table that I might run off to London to marry Slater, thereby thoroughly confusing my daughter which meant I had to explain that he wouldn't have me anyway because he's a poofta, and then I had to define that. So many entanglements on not enough coffee...

I have rules about my birthday. If you give me a present on Christmas Day, I will put it aside until today. The book of Edward Gorey's letters - a book I did not know existed, but was a perfect gift for more reasons than I can enumerate - came from my sister-in-law, and has been waiting on a shelf since the week before Christmas. My in-laws brought presents on Christmas Day; they went on the same shelf. My brother and his wife mailed the presents I accidentally left behind after our Christmas Eve celebration - and now that I think about it, the leaving behind may have been a subconscious move, though I didn't mean for them to have had to go to the expense and hassle of posting the box to me.

The internet has made my life richer in many ways, filling my Facebook wall and Twitter stream with birthday wishes. The doorbell rang with a bouquet of flowers from the lovely Brand About Town women, who have made me irrationally fond of all Nintendo products just because they are such stellar cultivators. And UPS just delivered a book, from Sarah, my sister from another mother - whom I'd never have met but for our blogs.

Can I be a little verklempt? I am. I couldn't have wished for a better birthday.

Five Years

Remember my oh-so-irritating list of things I was going to do before I turned fifty?

Well, I finally finished another one of them.



Yup - I got printed books for 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. (Apologies for the awful glare besmirched photo - the books look better in person.)

I started blogging on the 23rd of July in the year 2006, with a post about the inimitable Julia Child and butter, which means that those five books actually represent four full years and about half of another. It's a lot of words, words that I didn't know were going to come pouring out the way they have, words that I wanted to keep in a tangible form. I mean, what's going to happen to my blog when Al Gore invents the thing that comes after the internet?

After futzing around with several different services that would suck all the posts in and print them, I ended up using Blog2Print because it was by far the easiest of the choices. While their service isn't as granularly editable as, say, Blurb, I cranked out the tweaking necessary to get my five books done in under an hour. They offer free shipping, which is supposed to take weeks; I had my books in days. (Yes, you can pay for faster shipping, but I found it unnecessary.) And I'm really happy with how they came out - it was a good ratio of time input to product output.

In fact, I'm so happy with the books that I got in touch with the company and asked if they'd give me a discount code for you all, my readers. And they did. If you feel the need to print out some or all of your blog for posterity and grandchildren, go to Blog2Print and use coupon code b2pmagpie15 - it'll get you 15% off between now and August 23rd. Call it my anniversary present to you.

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Disclosure: Nope, Blog2Print didn't pay me to tell you any of this. There is, however, an affiliate link in that there url - if you click over from here and make a book there, I'll get a little referrer fee. Is that okay with you?

The Sweater

I finally finished the sweater for the girl. Well, I actually finished it about a month ago, but then I did something stupid - something that I managed to fix, but I'll tell you all about that tomorrow*. In the meantime, here - at last - is the sweater on the girl, the girl having put together one of her inimitable outfits.

The reason the stripes look kooky is because the yarn was multi-colored, and it's a top down sweater pattern, pretty much knit all in one piece, and I was basically knitting back and forth from placket to placket. Oh well. Another lesson learned: multi-colored yarn behaves strangely unless you are knitting in the round.

In any case, I am happy to have completed another item off my FIFTY list.




*It's craft week here at the ranch. I'm in a flurry of projects.

Fifty

Happy birthday to me,
Happy birthday to me,
Happy birthday dear Magpie,
Happy birthday to me.

I didn't get everything done.

I stalled a third of the way into Gödel, Escher, Bach. I looked at the patchwork baby quilt, and bought the rotary cutter that I needed, but I've not done anything more. I crumpled halfway through Couch to 5K because it got too hot. The ukulele mocks me. The printed blog books frustrate me. We didn't make it to DC.

However:

The sweater is approaching completion - I've half a sleeve and the plackets to go. I cleaned out my closet. We went to the Canadian Maritimes. We had three potluck parties, and will do more. And the croissants were divine.

But now I am Fifty,
I'm as clever as clever,
So I think I'll be fifty now for ever and ever.

Continuing my charitable giving impulse, I created two projects on Crowdrise - one for my workplace (a non-profit where I've worked for the past 14 and a half years), and one for my daughter's daycare (also a non-profit, and where I'm on the board). I then sent out a long email to a lot of people, which began as follows:

If you’re related to me, or grew up with me, or went to school with me, or have been otherwise paying attention, you probably know that I’m turning fifty next week. Because it’s such a tricky time of the year, what with Christmas and New Year’s and school vacations, I’m not having a real party (and anyway, I don’t need any presents and my birthday falls on a Wednesday). If you, however, were thinking of marking this auspicious event somehow, perhaps you’d like to make a charitable donation to one of two charities that are near and dear to me.

I'm pleased that, thus far, there have been more than $1,000 worth of contributions to the two organizations (and that's not counting any checks that may have been mailed directly to either charity).

Thank you all for cheering me along this year, for being a part of my first half century, and for celebrating with me today.

Eleven Into Fifty Minus Ten Equals ONE

ACK! I have only a month left to:

1. Finish Gödel, Escher, Bach, which means reading about two-thirds since I'm stuck at about a third of the way in.

2. Finish the damned baby quilt.

4. Run more - I got hung up on about week 5 of Couch to 5K in 9 weeks.

5. Pick up the damned ukulele.

6. Order the damned blog books from Blog2Print.

7. Finish the sweater! This might actually happen: the body is done, and I'm about halfway down the first sleeve. The buttonholes will probably be my undoing, unless I back the placket with grosgrain and put the buttonholes in by machine.

10. The likelihood of getting to Washington, DC before the year is out is extremely slim; but it's not going anywhere.

11. Have one more potluck party - either something Christmas-y, or maybe a 50th birthday party. You'll come, right?

Eleven Into Fifty Minus Nine Equals TWO

Two months left.

2. I pulled out the baby quilt, and realized that I still needed to make border strips. But to make the border strips, I needed a rotary cutter and mat and ruler, so I had to buy them. Then the fabrication of chaps for the girl's Halloween costume took over the sewing area. But I'm ready now! The quilt might could get finished.

3. I made the croissants!

6. I really do want to get my blog printed as bound books, but Blurb requires a huge amount of fussing. Blog2Print is much much easier - but there is no way to get rid of the little line that says "POSTED BY MAGPIE AT XX:00 PM" on every single post. And since I'm the only author, and I don't care what time I posted, it's annoying me. I should just get over it, because I could have all four books (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009) delivered before the end of the year, if I just get over it.

7. I started the sweater! It's a top down cardigan, meaning that I started at the neck. I'm about 2/3 done with the body. It's not a short-sleeved sweater: the sleeves are on hiatus until after I finish the body. I still have to decide it I'm brave enough for buttonholes, which I've never made before. I could punt and put in a zipper instead.

11. So far this year, we've had three potluck parties at the house. Two were for friends and neighbors, the third was a mini-reunion of my college class. I'll have another party in December - hey, maybe I'll have a potluck birthday party! I really like doing a potluck - the food is varied and interesting, and there's a low-key gestalt about it. And it doesn't matter how many people show up - as long as they all bring food, there'll be enough for everyone.

Croissants

So, you'll recall that on my list of things to do by the time I turn fifty was "Teach myself how to make croissants - probably with Julia's help."

That "teach myself" thing was a little disingenuous. I have attempted croissants before, a long time ago. By now, I can't remember what recipe I used that first time out - but it was probably Julia Child's (from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, volume 2).  She was, after all, one of the kitchen gods in my childhood household. What I do remember was that that first batch was disappointing - they were too hard, too crispy, not nearly flaky and airy enough. They probably tasted fine, but the texture was wrong.

So, by challenging myself to "teach myself", I was really meaning try them over and over and over until I get them right - figuring that it was my lack of technique, not a flaw in the recipe.

I think I was wrong. Because the batch of croissants that I made, using the recipe in Baking with Julia, and following it to the letter? Hands down awesome. I mean, the best. I mean, equivalent to anything I've ever bought in a store, bakery, pastry shop, Payard, you name it. My husband concurred. He can't stop talking about them. They were that good.

Do you know how to make croissants? You make a yeast dough, with a little milk in it. You roll out the dough, spread butter on it, and fold and roll and fold and roll. The goal is to make many layers of dough and fat. After the last crumb had been sucked down, I went back and checked the older recipe. Julia in Mastering calls for 1 3/4 cups of flour in the bread dough, with one stick of butter layered into it. Julia in later life calls for 3 3/4 cups of flour and 4 1/2 sticks of butter. In other words, old Julia requires a lot more butter. That has to be a big part of why these were so so very good.

Incidentally, they are kind of a lot of work, but it's the kind of work that doesn't have to be done all at once. There's a lot of resting time - and there's no good reason why the rests can't be longer. I made the dough, and did almost all of the rolling and folding, over two days last weekend. I then bundled it up and left it in the fridge for a week. I cut the dough in half, and formed and baked 12 croissants, and packaged up the remaining half of the dough. It's in the freezer now, 'til we need another croissant feed.

Not that we need any more butter any time soon.

Eleven Into Fifty Minus Seven Equals FOUR

Four months to go.

1. I did read some more of Gödel, Escher, Bach - and it traveled all the way to Canada and back in the glovebox of the car - taunting me every time I looked for something in there.

7. I took the knitting bag to Canada and picked the brains of two different people as to thus and such. I'm read to start the sweater for the girl; now to knit a swatch for gauge.

9. O Canada! We did leave the country temporarily, and did meet two Maritime bloggers: we had lunch with Bon at an oyster bar/pub and lunch with Sue at her house. I wish they both lived down the street from me. Or vice versa. It was great to hang out with each of them.

More about the journey soonish, after decompression and laundry and, oh yeah, I have to go back to work.

Eleven Into Fifty Minus Six Equals FIVE

The last time I took the six year old in to the office, it was right before the end of school and there was, consequently, nearly nothing going on at work. So I promised her that sometime during the summer session, she could skip camp and come to work with me. Today was the day, and we had a rich full day:

• The commuter train to NYC
• A tour of Grand Central courtesy of my sister-in-law
• The subway to my office
• Ballet classes to watch
• Office supplies to play with
• A quick trip to Old Navy for cheap flip flops because wearing sneakers without socks gave her blisters
• Macaroni and cheese (for her) and gazpacho (for me) at City Bakery for lunch
• A hula class to watch
• A detour through Barnes and Noble to cash in her reading log for a free book (and some other books)
• The subway back uptown
• New socks from Little Miss Matched
• Sorbet from Ciao Bella
• And the commuter train home.

And all the while, she wore a black and white dress that I'd found in my closet, realized I was never going to wear again and took it in (and up) to fit her.

[If you're following along, I've done very little on my list.]

Eleven Into Fifty Minus Three Equals EIGHT

Crap. I'm not accomplishing very much. Or, not very much on my list anyway.

I have actually started item #4: running. I started on Easter Sunday, and have been out there two weekday mornings (at 6:30 thank you very much) and one weekend day (accompanied by small child thank you very much) each week since then - until Monday, that is. On Monday, I had failure:



The track, which has one of those synthetic surfaces, was COVERED with worms. Alive and moving, happy to be out in the drizzle. I went once around, and decided that I really didn't need to be out there avoiding worms in the rain, so I bailed. The high school track team probably squished them all later, but I haven't been back yet to see. Maybe tomorrow.

Rebirth

On Easter Sunday, faced with a beautiful day and nothing to do, the six year old and I put on our sneakers and headed to the high school track. It was my version of rebirth – the kick-off to my Couch to 5K - which, you may recall, is on my list of things to do before I turn fifty.

I didn’t really want to take the girl, but she really wanted to come, and as soon as we got there, she took off, iPod and all (she has a hand-me-down Shuffle, the tiny one, which I populated with songs of my choosing, as it is my prerogative to shape her musical education). Meanwhile, I cued up my C25K app, and set off at a brisk walk, half an oval behind the girl. To her credit, she went around and around - frontwards, backwards, dancing, skipping, singing – for the first 25 minutes of my 30 minute workout. And then she climbed up the bleachers to watch the tennis players doing their thwomp, thwomp, thwomp.

I walked and jogged and walked and jogged and danced a little while walking and jogged and made it through Week 1 Day 1 without falling over. And I did it again Tuesday, and Saturday, and again yesterday. With luck, I’ll be running that whole five kilometers sometime in June.

Eleven Into Fifty Minus Two Equals NINE

Oh, the failings of me. I can only report on three of the ten things left on my list of things to do before I turn fifty.

1. Every week or so, I read another few pages of Gödel, Escher, Bach - at this rate, I am never going to finish it. Note to self: Stop reading everything else.

4. I bought sneakers! And then I got pneumonia! So I've accomplished nothing! Unless the sneakers count. They count, right? Note to self: get off your ass.

11. The first quarterly potluck party was at the beginning of the month, and it was a whole lot of fun. In some miracle, no brownies were ground into the carpet! However, the various children in attendance ate every last piece of the gooey butter cake. I'm thinking the next one is going to be a potluck 15th wedding anniversary. Note to self: set the date.

And onwards.

Eleven Into Fifty Minus One Equals TEN

Of course, there's no 29th of February (this year), so my first "Eleven Into Fifty" update has to be today, the 28th.

1. I started Gödel, Escher, Bach. I didn't get much past the introduction, but I started it. I also edited my Library Thing widget so that it's the only book listed, and the cover is huge, so that it haunts me every time I look at my own blog.

3. I haven't tried the croissants yet, but I did find a recipe for chocolate croissants in "small steps over the course of a few days", which I will attempt sooner than later.

5. I can play a scale on the ukulele, if I'm looking at the instructions and chewing on my bottom lip.

8. Mission accomplished! Over the course of a couple of weekends, I went through pretty much every article of clothing that I own, save socks and underwear. There were things in there that hadn't been worn in so long that they needed to be dusted. The thrift shop got several large boxes of clothes, I got rid of every single wire hanger, and I can find things in my closet again.

11. The first of the quarterly potluck dinners is next weekend - if you're around, tell me and I'll invite you.