The Suitcase and the Sink

Sometimes I don't know where to begin the tale. Is it with the book I just finished? Is it with the MoMA exhibit I saw in January, the catalog for which is the aforementioned last book I read? Or should I start on a spring day in 1998, at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut, where I first encountered Robert Gober?

I think I'll start there. I can't remember why we drove up to Ridgefield from NYC. The Aldrich isn't much of a destination, but maybe we decided to stop there on the way to visit my cousin? In any case, the Aldrich had a Robert Gober exhibit open, and it was gobsmacking and challenging and exhilarating - an exhibit that I remembered for a long time afterwards.

Gober's a sculptor, the kind of sculptor that likes to remake ordinary objects. He cast a paint can in crystal and painstakingly hand painted it ... to look like a paint can. He took a piece of styrofoam found washed up on the beach ... and cast it in bronze and painted it. He's made wax legs with real leg hair, which then get socks and shoes, and are carefully placed sticking out of the wall, at floor level, shades of the Wicked Witch of the East after someone dropped a house upon her. And the sinks - reproductions of old beat up farmhouse sinks, made of paint and plaster and chicken wire and lath. They're not going to hold any water, ever.

But the piece at the Aldrich that stayed with me was the suitcase. Sitting on the floor in a mostly empty room, from a distance it looked like an old suitcase, lid open, satin lining showing. When you got closer, you realized that set into the bottom of the suitcase was a cast iron sewer drain. Closer, and you could see down through the grate to a tide pool complete with moving water and rocks and swaying seaweed. As you leaned over to peer directly down into the suitcase, there appeared a pair of men's feet. And it wasn't until you were leaning over from the other side, looking over the lid of the suitcase, that you could see that the man was dangling a baby over the tide pool. It had a cinematic aspect to the reveal, the way the suitcase morphed from ordinary object to portal. And I never forgot it.

Last fall, the Museum of Modern Art mounted a big retrospective of Gober. Me, being disorganized, I procrastinated until the very last minute so that we saw the show on the day it closed. Happily for me, there was hardly anyone there - everyone was upstairs at the exhibit of the Matisse cutouts. Those are all well and good, and pretty to look at, but my idea of fun is not a museum show where there are eleventy hundred people between you and the wall so you can't get a good look at anything. The Gober exhibit show was everything I hoped it would be. Mind-bending and thrilling, it was chock full of interesting things to see - including, yes, the suitcase of my memories.

I bought the catalog. I read the catalog from cover to cover, delighting in bits like "Just give me that two-by-four". And you know what? It makes my heart sing that there are such dementedly creative people in this world of ours.

---

When we were in San Francisco in February, we went to Alcatraz. Alcatraz is, of course, a glorious ruin - and is home, right now, to an exhibit of work by contemporary artist Ai Weiwei.

I was struck there by a sink. Long, rust-tinged, porcelain, unplumbed, it could well be one of Gober's sinks. How perfect to find it at Alcatraz. Art meets life meets art.

On Whales and Submarines

Sometimes it's the simple things.

I was seated on the subway this morning, gazing between the standees, and what to my wondering eyes did I spy but a whale?

And the little wheels in my head turned, and I thought "it reminds me of the Peter Sis whale that I have".

And it was! Well, it's Peter Sis, not a whale, it's a submarine, but it has a familial resonance.

The MTA has this program, Arts for Transit, where they do installations in subway stations, and commission posters that get slapped up in unsold ad spaces.

I don't know about you, but I'd far rather look at art and read poetry than have to stare into Dr. Zizmor's rainbow wrapped eyes.

And Peter Sis? In the case of the whale, which debuted in 2001, I liked the art so much that I bought the poster and had it framed - long before I'd heard of him as an author and illustrator.

Sometimes it's the little things that get the day off to a good start.

Capitalism

After a period of quiescence, the 11 year old has rediscovered her American Girl dolls. She has been hell bent on building furniture for them, and making bedding, and slavishly following instructions found on YouTube for the creation of eerily realistic doll-sized chocolate chip cookies, and chattering incessantly about wanting a fourth doll.

I, thinking three of them was already too many, said no, absolutely not, I will not buy you a fourth doll.

She, drawing on some hardwired capitalistic tendencies, I know not from where, decided that she wanted to sell two of the dolls. We talked about eBay, and about a local Facebook "garage sale", and she decided to take her chances on eBay - even after I explained about Paypal fees and postage. She took all of the necessary pictures, and wrote most of the copy. I fluffed up her copy (smoke free household!) and posted the two dolls for sale. She watched the auctions like a hawk and was thrilled with the results. I, frankly, was dumbfounded that one doll went for twice what we had paid in 2011, and the other went for about the original price. [One was a "girl of the year", the other was a now retired historical doll.]

Armed, therefore, with a chunk of money in the bank of mom, we headed into NYC the other day, with a friend of hers, to get that new doll.

First, though, we took the subway downtown and went to Economy Candy. I told her and and the friend that they could have $20 and 20 minutes; they were done in 15.



Then we walked up to Katz's Deli, where we didn't send any salamis, but we did have selzer and pastrami and an indulgent waiter who didn't mind when the girls dumped all the candy out onto the table to fondle it.

After lunch, we walked back to the subway, past the end of Sara D. Roosevelt Park, where there was a big sculpture made out of rubber mats. Dryly, my child remarked If I did that, no one would call it art.



Riding uptown on the subway, the two girls worked hard on staying standing without holding on. This is a life skill, people, and children from the suburbs don't get enough practice.

Finally, we got to the American Girl Doll store, where the two girls perversely decided that they weren't buying anything for themselves, it was for their "cousins". Weirdos.

Of course, on the train home, all of the purchases came out of their packages.



The moral of the story? Capitalism is good, especially when it reduces the number of dolls in your house.

Photo Caption

Standing on
the platform
on a fiercely
cold and brilliantly
sunny February day
with his back to the
track, not watching
for the next train,
the commuter
tilts his chin up
to the sky, eyes
closed, dreaming of
the summer
that will come,
someday.

In Which California Avocados Meet Moroccan Clementines

In two of the excellent meals we had in San Francisco last week, I ordered an avocado/citrus salad.

At Gialina, it was "blood orange & avocado salad with farro, fennel & goat gouda". [Gialina is low key and serves phenomenally fabulous pizza with a magical perfect crust.] A few days later, it was "california avocado salad with fennel, celery, citrus vinaigrette", at the Presidio Social Club. [PSC is a nostalgic throwback, like an upscale yacht club with great food and a daily Manhattan.] I loved both salads. The avocado provided lushness, the citrus made them sparkle.

Then, driving down the Pacific Coast Highway to Santa Cruz, we found a guy selling fruit out of the back of a truck in a bug out overlooking the ocean. He had boxes of tiny, jewel-toned avocados, each about the size of a kiwi and five for a dollar. Twenty cents for an avocado! I bought five even though I wasn't sure what I was going to do with them, and we were flying back to New York at the crack of dawn the next day.

Yes, reader, those avocados came home with me. A few days on the kitchen counter and they ripened up to a nice black. And I diced them, and added celery and clementines (alas, from Morocco, not California), and a splash of oil and vinegar, and yes. It's a great salad.

---

Avocado, Celery, Clementine salad

1 stalk of celery
2 clementines
1 ripe Haas avocado
1 T. olive oil
1 T. mild vinegar (I like the Unió Riesling vinegar, but you could use a champagne vinegar or a cider vinegar)
salt & pepper to taste

Finely slice the celery, less than 1/8" thick. (I know: fussy knife work.) Place in bowl. Peel the clementines. Working over the bowl, do your best to filet them - remove all of the flesh from each segment and drop the flesh in the bowl. (Yes: more fussy knife work. You could just cut each segment in half, if you must.) Peel and pit the avocado, and dice into 1/2" chunks. Add to celery and clementine. Add oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, and toss gently with a big spoon. Serve immediately.

Serves two.

The non-ski, non-beach February break vacation

We just spent the winter break in San Francisco. My sister-in-law lives there, and we hadn't been to visit in a long time - and the girl child had never been. Between the three of us, we took about 1500 pictures - though that includes about 300 that my husband took accidentally while standing still with the shutter going off at his hip, like some kind of weird performance art. Here are the highlights - I think it's 22 photos.

We had lunch at Bacon Bacon. They have a mechanical ride-on pig. Everything has bacon in or on it.

The child went in the sea. Air temperature was great; ocean only good for crazy people and 11 year olds.

We had ice cream for breakfast, Secret Breakfast from Humphry Slocombe, because duh, cornflakes.

We, of course, rode the cable cars and hung off the sides.

I spotted a pair of large beige underpants in a window.

We went to the top of the Coit Tower, where you could see for miles. And the sky was blue.

The citrus available at the farmers markets was astonishingly good and varied.

This little angel lived at the entrance to a Sausalito houseboat.

This pig decorated another Sausalito houseboat. One of the houseboats was for sale, for a mere $799K.

Fort Cronkhite. Another place where we went to the beach. In February in Northern California.

I do like a ruin. This is part of a gun emplacement in the Marin Headlands.

Mandatory photo of iconic International Orange bridge, which we crossed a number of times.

The National Cemetery is - as they all are - moving. At the gates to the rear entrance is engraved Archibald MacLeish's poem The Young Dead Soldiers.

In Golden Gate Park, there are casting pools. And an angler's lodge - complete with a stained glass fly. An elegant older man told us all about the casting pools - and then climbed in and demonstrated, beautifully.

There were flowers blooming every where. In February.

We stumbled upon this astonishing building. It was a warehouse, supplying goods like mops and toilet paper to ships departing the Kaiser Shipyards for WWII.

We took the ferry to Alcatraz, where we took many many pictures of rusted metal, crazed paint, and crumbling cement.

And we got to see (most of) the Ai Weiwei exhibit.

Ai Weiwei rendered Edward Snowden (and 175 other prisoners) in LEGO bricks.

The Exploratorium is amazing. This picture sort of looks like a roiling wine glass - but it's about three feet in diameter and demonstrates fluid dynamics. I took almost no pictures there because we were having way too much fun.

One day, we rented a convertible to drive down to just south of Santa Cruz, to visit one of my aunts. We took the Pacific Coast Highway down, and Skyline Ridge back. It was a glorious day.

And we ate really well, because San Francisco is a great restaurant & farmers market town. The high point was a lovely meal in the cafe at Chez Panisse, with a formerly imaginary friend and her husband. And no, I didn't steal one of the water glasses.

It was an awesomely fun week in the sun.

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.

Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!

Most of time, I riff in the kitchen. I read cookbooks in bed, and I’m all over the Times food section, and I love Smitten Kitchen, but when it comes right down to it, I rarely make a recipe as printed.

Not long ago, a friend posted something on Facebook, wondering if she could substitute farro for barley in a hamburger soup that she was making. I looked at her recipe and thought, eh, not hamburger, how about sausage? But other than using less of a different meat, and adding a piece of parmesan rind, I pretty much followed the recipe, and wow – it was really good. That little bit of barley gives the soup a certain unctuousness. There’s so little meat in it that the meat becomes more like a condiment, but the little chunks you pick up are delicious. And, parmesan rinds are a wee bit of magic – turning trash into goodness. Keep them in a bag in the freezer, and throw one into a soup. Like this one:

Sausage and Barley Soup

½ pound sweet Italian sausage, out of its casing (if it was in links to begin with)
A glug of olive oil
1 onion, chopped
1 big red skinned potato, raw & unpeeled, in ½” cubes.
1 or 2 carrots, diced
1 or 2 celery stalks, diced
1-2 cups shredded cabbage
½ of a 28oz can of whole plum tomatoes
Piece of parmesan rind (optional)
28oz of water
1 bay leaf
½ t. dried thyme
½ t. dried basil
Salt & pepper to taste
¼ cup barley

In a nice soup pot (I think mine is 6 quarts), sauté the sausage and onions in the olive oil until the sausage looks cooked through and the onions are translucent. Add the potato, carrots, and celery. Add the tomatoes, squeezing the whole ones through your fingers as you add them to the pot. Fill the tomato can with water and add the tomato tinged water to the pot. If you have a parm rind in the freezer, add it. It’ll add a certain funkiness to the soup. Add bay leaf, thyme and basil, and salt & pepper to taste. Bring the soup to a boil, then cover & simmer for a ½ hour. Check the liquid level and add more water if you think it needs it. Add the barley and simmer, covered, for another ½ hour or so.

When it’s done, fish out the parmesan rind, and chill the soup overnight. Like so many things, it’ll be better tomorrow. Serve hot, and bring the leftovers to work.

Commuting in Seventeen

On a southbound MetroNorth train:

Fifteen minutes to
Grand Central and you stand up.
First guy off train wins?

On the downtown #4 train at 9:42am:

Her long fingernails
Click on the MacBook keyboard.
That typing is loud.

In the 14th Street station:

Young man and red cord
Stealing power underground.
Google search can't wait.

Walking through the Union Square Market:

As I make my way
downtown, inexorably,
The haikus gush forth.

Judge Not

I am only just now deChristmasing. I should have done it the weekend after New Year's but we had a big party and I had to make 18 quarts of chili and Mary Berry's cherry cake. I could have done it last weekend, but I had to go spend the night elsewhere so we could play Cards Against Humanity with old friends and relatives. So here I am, a Tuesday night, into January's double digits, child and husband already in bed, fondling my Christmas ornaments and thinking about my mother.

It's hard not to. She loved Christmas. She's why I have enough antique glass ornaments to fill three trees - and I only have room for one tree. She's why I have fifteen mismatched red votives marching across the mantlepiece.

The votives were collected over many years, and a few of them have been repaired - with wire, with crazy glue. I take care of them as best as possible, honoring their past, remembering my mother.

Late on Christmas day, I lit the votives. We were sitting around eating cheese and opening second round presents, when, with a cra-ack, one of the votives broke, cleanly spitting out a chunk of glass.

Clearly my mother was visiting. Happily, though, my husband had gotten me a fresh batch of Sugru, so a few days later, I made a Sugru repair to the broken votive. I like to think it's in the spirit of kintsugi, treating the "breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise".

I'm not sure that the repair will work with a candle in it; the Sugru is only supposed to be good to about 350°F and not around open flame. But still - I had to fix it. Honoring the past, you know. Besides, my mother would have loved Sugru.

Warmth

As the subway slides into the station, I pull my 30 year old beige cashmere gloves out of the pocket of my Lands’-End-meets-East-German-army-surplus down coat. Each of my winter coats has a pair of gloves that lives in the pockets: thin blue wool in the short black duffle coat, grey fleece wristlets in the wool-lined raincoat, the warmest gloves in the warmest coat. I think to myself “don’t drop them in the gap”, knowing that I’ll never replace them. They were a gift from an old boyfriend back in about 1984, and it’s not that I care for him, but rather for the little piece of history that they represent.

As I walk uptown, towards my office, on this bright and cold cold day, I mentally catalogue the rest of my habiliment. A scarf, woven alpaca in muted blue, green, rust and grey – a gift from my father. A black fleece baseball cap – a gift from my sister eons ago. Wool socks, warm but not loved because they’re knee socks that won’t stay up. Black boots, newly acquired, as a result of a conversation on Facebook with an imaginary friend, in which she posted a picture of her new boots – and they reminded me of the cap-toe black leather boots my grandfather used to wear.

[At the reception after his first wedding, my cousin slyly winked at me, and lifted his dress pants from the knee. There on his feet, a pair of our grandfather’s boots. I’d no idea that John had that spirit of thrift and sentimentality that would lead him to claim used footwear for his own - and wear it to his wedding.]

Most of the rest of what I’m wearing is unremarkable – jeans, a pale grey top, a black cashmere sweater with lettuce edges and tiny buttons, my wedding ring, a pair of small silver hoop earrings – though I know where each and every bit came from. But five bangles jangle on my left wrist. Three of them are sterling silver that I’ve had since high school, one a gift from a then best friend, one a gift from a family friend, and one with a forgotten provenance. I’ve worn all three of them for years. Recently I added two – a skinny silly aluminum bangle dabbed with orange paint, probably Indian, once my mother’s, and an odd steel bracelet that looks kind of as though someone took a bead chain and affixed it to a piece of flat wire. I have no idea where it came from. In my strict what goes with what head, I shudder a bit at mixing sterling and aluminum and steel, but I'm also amused to be pushing the envelope.

It’s these things around me, they ground me, they keep me warm. They remind me of old times, of family, of people I’ve never even met.

Everyone complains about the cold; I think of my enveloping warmth, and I’m grateful.

All I Want For Christmas...

Last Thursday was Thanksgiving. Then came the shopping mayhem days: Black Friday and Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday. Today's Giving Tuesday, a day to make a difference.

And, though you're surely inundated by pleas from this great organization and that terrific non-profit, let me tug a little at your heartstrings.

Since sometime in the last century, more than 18 years if you really want to know, I've worked at a small awesome unique tuition-free ballet school. In a nutshell (though we don't put on a Nutcracker), we audition kids in the NYC public schools, and we teach them to dance. And, so that training is frictionless, we have an on-site public school for our students, we help them with transportation, we provide an after school program for working families, and did I mention that there's no tuition for the ballet program? If I may say so myself, we do great work.

In order to conduct auditions, we rent cars - lots of Zipcars - and send teams of people out to the elementary schools. Over the course of a year, we'll audition about 30,000 kids - kids who would never otherwise get a chance to dance. Crunching down the numbers, it ends up costing us just under $13 for each kid that we audition.

Do you have $13 to spare? If so, we'll put it to good use.

Here's a link. It's really fast and easy.



Think of all the people who ask you to sponsor them in walk-a-thons or the like. This is my walk-a-thon. Thank you. Really, thank you so much.

Game, Set, Match

Setting: Our car, at the outset of a two hour drive, the day after Thanksgiving.

Husband: "I can't believe you didn't swap your iPod over to all Christmas music."

I reach for the radio, and he says "how do you know you're going to find any Christmas music?" I push the on button, it launches into the usual last-listened-to NPR. I hit the station search button, and 94.3 locks in, in the middle of Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree.

How it is that my husband did not know that the FM dial is littered with all-Christmas-all-the-time at this time of the year is beyond me.

Point to the Magpie.

Alice Shook Her Head

It wasn't until I got to work this morning that I remembered about the tattoo.

"Is that a real tattoo?"
"What does it say?"

No, it's a temporary, and it's because months ago I signed onto a goofy Kickstarter where for a bit of pocket change, I got a temporary tattoo with a line out of Through The Looking Glass. The company doing this carved up both Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass into around 5000 unique sentences/phrases, and issued them as one-offs. My job was to apply the tattoo, and upload a picture to their website.

So I did.

Of course it's on my neck. It says "Alice shook her head". But the most entertaining part might be that people in my office actually thought it could be a real tattoo. As if.

Squash Bread #2

I love this bread. It's lovely toasted, it smells a little like Zwieback (which, unhappily, Nabisco discontinued), and it makes me feel virtuous because it's laced with puréed squash. The original recipe includes walnuts, raisins and cranberries and has a long rise in the fridge. I wanted a more versatile loaf, so I leave out all of the nuts & berries, and I start it in the bread machine, but I bake it in the oven.

Yeasted Squash Bread (adapted from Baking With Julia)

Wet stuff

1 egg
1 cup squash purée
2 T. warm water
5 T. butter (at room temperature)

Dry stuff

2 2/3 cups bread flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 t. cinnamon
½ t. freshly grated nutmeg
½ t. salt
2 t. active dry yeast

1) Preheat oven to 350°F and grease a loaf pan.
2) Add ingredients to the bread machine in the order listed - that is, wet stuff at the bottom, dry on top. Set it for "dough" and come back when it beeps.
3) Sprinkle some flour on your countertop, dump the dough out of the bread machine bowl, squish it into a rectangle and fold it into a log. Seam side down, put it in a greased loaf pan. Cover with a damp cloth and let it rise in a warm spot for a couple of hours.
4) Bake until done - about 45 minutes - I usually take it out of the pan after about 30 minutes and put it back on the oven rack for the last 15 minutes.
5) Cool on a rack.

[If you want to do this by hand, you are on your own - but dumping everything in a bowl, mixing it together, and then turning it out to knead sounds about right.]

Squash Bread #1

There are hundreds of dozens of recipes for pumpkin bread on the web. I'm posting this mostly because I finally tweaked one just so, and I want to remember it, damn it. It's good.

Squash Bread (adapted from Simply Recipes)

Dry stuff

1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup spelt
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 t. baking soda
1/2 t. ground ginger
1/2 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. freshly ground nutmeg
1/2 t. allspice

Wet stuff

2 eggs
1 cup squash purée*
1/4 cup water
1/2 cup melted coconut oil

Other stuff

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

1) Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease a normal sized loaf pan.
2) Mix all the dry ingredients together in a good sized bowl.
3) Crack the eggs into a medium bowl, and beat them up with a fork. Or a whisk. Add the squash and the water; stir to mix. Add the melted coconut oil.
4) Add the wet ingredients to the dry, and stir until just combined.
5) Add the walnuts. Oh, fine. Leave them out if you must.
6) Bake in that greased loaf pan until done - about 50 minutes - but check it with a cake tester to make sure it's done in the middle.
7) Cool on a rack for about 10 minutes, then remove from pan to finish cooling.



*I have no interest in eating winter squash, ever. I just don't like it. But I always seem to end up with an acorn squash or three butternuts - they're like the fall version of pass-along zucchini - and I don't like to waste. So I cut them in half, scoop out the seeds, and roast the squash cut side down on a silpat. When it's cool, I scoop the flesh out, buzz it in the food processor, and freeze it in 1 cup portions. It's good for quick breads or muffins, it gives body to a batch of chili, and I use it in a streamlined version of a pumpkin yeast bread from Baking With Julia (in which I leave out all of the crunchy bits and which I think I'll post later in the week).

The Eleventh Whale

The other day, I sent a text to my daughter:

Ask and ye shall receive:

Happy birthday, little goose.

Weekend Update

You know, it was kind of a nice weekend. I puttered around the house, and I caught up with an old friend while my kid was getting her hair cut. I passed along some Playmobil and Calico Critters, and I put my too-small hiking boots on eBay.

I took a picture of the Cimicifuga racemosa - which started opening its little flowers a week ago. It doesn't know that it's November?

I finished building the Lego Mini Cooper. The girl and I had started it a while ago, and then it got put away in a frantic house cleaning for something or another. I pulled it out this afternoon and had a delightful time snapping the rest of it together.

When I was done, we put a hamster in it. That's Ottilia, the docile hamster. Anastasia wanted no part of the Mini.

I love the Mini. I have made it abundantly clear that it is MY car, and that it is NOT to be cannibalized for other Lego creations. I may take it to my office, just for safekeeping.

In a not fun hour, I vacuumed up three million Nerds that a visiting child had strewn all over my house. Nerds are now off the Halloween candy list, and that child is never coming here again. Seriously, she opened all of the remaining boxes of Nerds and, I don't know, they were EVERYWHERE. We are going to be finding them when Easter rolls around. Nerds, by the way, are almost as annoying to step on in bare feet as Legos are.

I made 3 pints of potato and leek soup (two leeks, two potatoes, three cloves of garlic, a quart of chicken stock, a pinch of tarragon and a bit of salt) for my lunch for this week.

We had rice and stir-fried vegetables leftover in the fridge, so to amplify dinner, I tried out two new recipes, using miso, because I everywhere I turn, I see another recipe that includes miso. One was tofu with a maple miso glaze, the other was a salad dressing which I sort of improvised (a blob of miso, some apple cider vinegar, the last 1/2 teaspoon of sesame oil, a tablespoon of safflower seed oil, a tablespoon of mayonnaise, a dribble of soy sauce, some lemon juice because I'd forgotten that I'd already added vinegar). The girl rejected the tofu, because I made the mistake of mentioning the maple, but ate the salad without complaint. She seems to think that sweet doesn't belong in savory dishes, and yet she douses everything in ketchup. Even rice. [I've spared you that picture.] I liked the tofu, and I can see adding miso to lots of things.

I did not lose my temper at the awful postal clerk, but as I was tossing out the receipt later, I noticed that there was a website and a request to "tell us about your recent postal experience". So I did. THAT was gratifying. Maybe they'll act on my feedback and move the awful clerk to the back room where there are no customers. I know people in town - my husband included - who will wait for the next clerk rather than deal with her.

I made two loaves of bread - one a plain yeast bread for toast and sandwiches, the other a squash quick bread. Oh, you could call it pumpkin bread, but I used pureed butternut squash because that's what was in the freezer.

And I wrapped some presents for the girlie. Old road atlases are my new favorite wrapping paper.

How was your weekend?

Madness Lies This Way

I don't like loose ends. I hate it when things don't get resolved, I like everything in its place (although the clutter in my house might not lead you to think so). And when I respond to your PR pitch with a genuine question, I want an answer.

Last night, I was tidying up my email, in which "tidying up" equals "delete delete delete", as one does. In the morass I found a pitch from a PR company, flogging a GPS pet tracker, "that is perfect for your holiday or stocking stuffer gift guide" (like I have such a thing). If Fluffy runs out of the "safe zone", "you will receive an instant text message or email with a live-GPS tracking map to assist you finding your dog/pet immediately". Not only that, the thing acts like a combination FitBit/NannyCam for your dog: "this technology will showcase when your pet is getting exercise...and really let you know if your pet is getting enough exercise on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Also, if you have a dog walker--you can really monitor if your dog is getting enough exercise via this technology."

[Insert eyeroll]

I had, in September when I got this email, responded to the PR flack:

What happens to the GPS if the pet is eaten by a coyote? This a serious question, BTW. Lots of coyotes in my area.

And I have had no response to date.

I imagine that when the coyote (wolf, bear, lion) eats the tracked pet, the tracker ends up in the coyote (wolf, bear, lion). And then, we get a ping that the pet has crossed the line, so we start following the GPS tracking map on the trail of Fluffy, and OOPS, end up in the lion's den. Somehow, this seems like a misguided application of GPS technology. Or not, whatev.

But why didn't the PR flack answer my question?

In Which I Introduce My Child To Some Possibly Inappropriate Television

Despite a general feeling that I'd rather be reading a book, there are some TV shows that I've gotten sucked into. In the past year, I've watched all of House of Cards, all of Orange is the New Black, and all of Luther. In each case it's been in a not-binge, not-attenuated way like thirteen episodes in two weeks - not thirteen weeks, not thirty six hours.

A couple of months ago, I started on Call the Midwife, and I was hooked from the beginning. It's set in mid-century London, and the main characters are a group of lay and nun nurse-midwives, caring largely for poor working class families. Gripping explicit birth scenes punctuate a through-story of the interpersonal dynamics of the midwives, and a fascinating exploration of the life and times of post-war London. It's fabulous television (and my friend the midwife says the birth scenes are really well done).

One night, after I'd watched a few episodes, all by myself on the couch, enraptured, the girl child came downstairs to see what I was doing. Oh, watching TV, said I. Can I watch with you?

Around went the wheels in my head. Many of the pregnancies and births are difficult - babies die, a mother dies, a mother's been beaten, there's an illegal abortion, a teenage pregnancy, incest. I thought quickly, and said yes. (And then looked it up on Common Sense Media, which rates it 14 and up.) A week or so later, she came down and asked again. That time, I said let's start at the beginning, and we'll watch the whole series together.

We watched the first two seasons on Netflix, and switched to the DVR to watch the third season on PBS (it's since been added to Netflix). The girl was distinctly amused by the warning that came up on the PBS broadcast:

Call the Midwife is definitely not for every 10 year old. In fact, there are plenty of grown-ups who might be too squeamish for it. But for me and my girl, it was a wonderful TV experience. I paused it from time to time so we could talk about what was happening. Pre-eclampsia is still a very serious pregnancy complication. A rare few women have 25 pregnancies. Oh, that white woman had an affair with a black man - how's the mixed race baby going to go over? [Actually, that happened in two episodes, with radically different end results.] It's highly unlikely that a woman would give birth to triplets without having known there were multiples. No one should give birth alone. Sometimes babies die. Mostly babies come out head first; a breech birth is a hair-raising event. Wrap that baby in a blanket so it doesn't get cold! Placenta previa, diabetes, cystic fibrosis, polio, retained placenta and cancer all make appearances.

It so happened that her math teacher was pregnant while we were watching, which lead to a lively discussion about what would happen if said very pregnant math teacher went into labor in the classroom. I could deliver the baby, she said. I'd send all of the boys out to get clean towels and hot water, and I'd tell her 'little pants' and now 'a big push'. I suggested she might should run get the principal and have someone call an ambulance. She agreed. I don't think I want to see my math teacher's lady parts.