Abstemious Oatmeal

Sometimes you need a bowl of oatmeal. The addition of a bit of flaked coconut bulks it up without adding much in the way carbohydrates. It doesn't taste especially of coconut, and there's an appealing chewiness to the finished porridge.

Coconut Blueberry Oatmeal

1/2 cup water
1/4 cup rolled oats
2 T. coconut flakes, unsweetened
pinch of salt
1/3 cup fresh blueberries
2 T. 2% milk

Boil water in a little pot. Add oats, coconut, salt. Reduce heat and simmer for about 4 minutes. Add blueberries and cook for another minute or so; you want the berries warmed through and starting to pop. Serve with milk.

How To Stave Off Ennui

Last weekend, I had the great joy of a weekend away with my sister and her wife and my brother's wife, at a fancy schmancy spa. We spent our time laughing and eating and dancing and lounging. We hydrated the connective tissue of our spines; we practiced NIA; we took an African drumming class. Some of us did athletic things like Tabata and kick boxing; one of us went outside and went snowshoeing. We were buffed and rubbed and oiled and wrapped; we luxoriated in the dry sauna and inhaled in the steam room and soaked in the hot tubs, naked because we've finally shed our modesty as more cumbersome than necessary. We tried water aerobics with a side of in-pool yoga, we tried restorative yoga complete with Tibetan singing bowls vibrating against our hips. And when we weren't spa-ing, we sat in the room with the view and fireplace and read books and did crosswords and drank strong black coffee and fruity herbal tea.

The day we arrived, there was a jigsaw puzzle on a green felt table near the fireplace, complete. My sister and I looked at it, and looked at one another, and looked at it again, and took it apart. Surely it was time to for us to (re)start the puzzle. And what a puzzle it was. No ordinary cardboard puzzle this, it was made from meticulously cut plywood, about a half centimeter thick. The pieces slipped together with precision, it wasn't a rectangle, and the whole puzzle was embued with a sense of wit.

A piece shaped liked a hummingbird fit its beak into the yellow center of a flower.

A piece cut into a pair of cherries hides in the cherries of the puzzle image.

Other guests joined in - we’d come back past after a meal and find a few more bits snugged together. The singing bowl lady took full credit for having suggested the puzzle - “they used to have these crappy cardboard puzzles, I told them they needed an upgrade”. And there is no question that this precise and lovely wooden puzzle is an upgrade from your run-of-the-mill jigsaw. Discreetly tucked next to the puzzle was a little pile of promotional materials - from that we learned that the puzzle come from a company called Stave. And the prices? BREATHTAKING.

Honestly, there are puzzles on their website that cost as much as a small car. This is seriously crazy. The best analogy I can muster is that they are to regular puzzles what flying in a private jet is to the sardine tin ignominy of commercial coach. Both ways are going to get you to Chicago, but do you really want to spend scads of money on the luxe leather-lined jet that takes off on your schedule? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

It was a fun diversion though, given that it wasn’t my dime.

This is why we read the print edition.

Because seriously? You never would have spotted this on-line.

The New York Times 

Saturday, the 10th of March, 2018

Sports section, page B11

Condiment

You know how one thing leads to another?

A couple of weeks ago, I was scrabbling around on the internet investigating cauliflower pizza - where instead of a yeast dough made with flour and water and yeast and a drizzle of olive oil, you somehow mash cauliflower into a disk and pretend it's a crust. I landed on a recipe on the WaPo site, which was not uninteresting for a couple of reasons. 1) It turns out that you can actually buy the premade cauliflower crusts from a company called, ha ha ha, Cali'flour Foods, which is good because it is a pain-in-the-ass to make it yourself. 2) The guy tweaked his version of the cauliflower crust by riffing on a recipe from a cookbook I'd never heard of: “Eat More Greens” by Zita Steyn.

So I took the book out of the library. It's a little woo-woo, but there were enough things in it that looked interesting, so it's currently sitting on my dining room table with a handful of post-it notes flagging said interesting-looking things. Like a barley and mustard green risotto, and a cauliflower couscous, and a lentil salad with avocado and roasted tomatoes and spinach, and HOLY SHIT dukka!

Years ago, really a long time ago, I acquired both of Laurie Colwin's memoir cookbooks: Home Cooking and More Home Cooking. I love them. She was a terrific writer who had a dab hand in the kitchen and some of my absolute favorite things to eat are from her. The Nantucket cranberry pie is hers. So is the Cider jelly. And for years I've been circling around her recipe for dukka, never really needing to make it, but really wanting to. After all, Colwin calls it Condiment and says "I must confess that I eat it right out of the jar". And later she offers it to her sister, who is subsequently caught eating it out of the jar with a spoon.

Finding dukka in another cookbook was all the encouragement I needed. I even had a handful of hazelnuts in the freezer. Before I started, I dug up a third version of dukka, one from Claudia Roden, which Laurie Colwin alludes to off-handedly because it seems like Colwin actually got her recipe from Jane Grigson's daughter Sophie. (Tracing recipes back is worse than genealogy.) (Besides, dukka is clearly one of those things on which every family in Egypt has their own idiosyncratic take.) Armed with three recipes, I went to work.

And, dear reader, it was GOOD.

It's good on a spoon out of the jar.

It's good sprinkled on some plain boiled farro.

It's good dressing up steamed broccoli.

It's good on a fried egg.

I haven't tried it on avocado yet, but I think that'll be my lunch tomorrow.

Colwin includes cinnamon; I skipped that. Steyn uses dried mint and nigella seeds; I skipped them. Steyn also uses ground coriander; I stuck with whole. Roden keeps it simple: hazelnuts, coriander seeds, sesame seeds, cumin seeds, salt and pepper.

I went with Roden's ingredients but made a smaller batch.

Dukka (or Dukkha or Dukkah or Do'a or Duqqa) (or Condiment)

1 cup whole hazelnuts
1/4 cup sesame seeds
2 T. coriander seeds
1 1/2 T. cumin seeds
1 1/2 t. kosher salt
1/2 t. ground black pepper

Toast the hazelnuts in a skillet. Dump them onto a kitchen towel and rub them around to get some of the skins off. Put the skinned (or semi-skinned) nuts in a food processor. Now, toast the remaining seeds until the sesame seeds are staring to color and the cumin and coriander are fragrant. Add to the food processor, along with the salt and pepper. Buzz a few times until nicely chopped, but not pureed. Eat at will.

The moral of the story? When the dukka itch gets you, scratch it.

I really don't know what I was looking for

But Amazon helpfully sent me a list of books I might want "based on [my] browsing history.

"

Can we connect the dots?

The Pocket Pastafarian Quatrains
by Jon Smith

Did we know that there was an "epic poem of the eternal struggle for enlightenment, the Pastafarian Quatrains" much less a pocket edition? No, we did not. I do sort of need a new Flying Spaghetti Monster for the back of my car though.

The Communist Manifesto
by David Harvey

I may call myself a lefty-commie-pinko, but I haven't been buying books in support of that facile soundbite. Unless Amazon knows that I took that silly test on Facebook the other day, and was told that my "political views are Hardcore Left-Wing". But more interesting is that Amazon's email claims that The Communist Manifesto is by one David Harvey, when everyone knows that it's by Marx and Engels. What is Amazon trying to prove here?

The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary Edition
by Richard Dawkins

I got nothing. All of my genes are altruistic.

Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables
by by Joshua McFadden and Martha Holmberg

Yes! I love vegetables! I love cookbooks! This makes perfect sense! Maybe I'll take it out of the library. Sorry, Amazon.

Yogurt Eggs

I fell hard for Julia Turshen's yogurt eggs when the recipe showed up on Food52. It's delightful - more interesting than a plain fried egg, and about 30 seconds more work. This morning, I didn't have any fresh herbs, so I sprinkled the end result with a bit of smoked paprika.

Yogurt Eggs, adapted from Turshen

2 eggs
1 T. olive oil
1/4 cup whole milk yogurt
1 T. lemon juice
pinch of salt
freshly ground black pepper, to taste
dash of smoked paprika

Mix yogurt and lemon juice in a small bowl, and season with salt and pepper. Smear mix onto your dinner plate. (Or skip the bowl and mix the yogurt and lemon juice right on the plate you're going to eat off of - less photogenic, but one less dish to wash.) Fry eggs in olive oil. Slip eggs onto yogurt, and if there's any oil left in the pan, drizzle it over the eggs. Garnish with salt, pepper and smoked paprika. Eat, all by yourself, and feel virtuous and hedonistic all at the same time.

Crunchy Granola

The granola that I grew up on was basically this Crunchy Granola, and always called Crunchy Granola, not just granola - although over time, I've edited the nuts and seeds content. In an effort to understand the nutrition profile of a homemade granola, I made a batch today, and weighed every ingredient, and ran it all through a nutrition calculator.

Crunchy Granola, 2018 edition

2 cups / 241 g oatmeal
1/2 cup / 34 g wheat germ
large pinch / 1 g salt
1/3 cup / 34 g almonds
2 T. / 18 g pepitas
2 T. / 20 g flaxseed
2 T. / 15 g sesame seeds
1/3 cup / 24 g dried coconut flakes
1/4 cup / 40 g coconut oil
1/4 cup / 53 g honey
2 T. / 12 g psyllium husk

Using the microwave, melt the coconut oil and honey together in a small pyrex cup. Stir into the dry ingredients, massage well to distribute the honey and coconut oil evenly, and bake in a roasting pan at 350ºF for about 30 minutes, stirring every so often. [Volume measurements of the coconut oil and honey are approximate - I eyeballed them.]

Makes 4 cups - or 16 1/4 cup servings.

Blackberries and Fresh Milk

If you ride the subway, you know about Poetry In Motion - a public service project of the MTA wherein poetry replaces advertisements.

This morning, I was amused to find an advertisement masquerading as poetry, indeed referring to those "other subway poems.

I particularly like the fact that the sleeping man is obscuring the logo of the advertiser.

Poetry, for the win!

The Almost 14 Year Old

On Sunday, I taught the girl how to make a pot of coffee. And then she delivered a fresh hot cup to my bed.

* * * * * * * * * *

A couple of weeks ago, she and I were in the supermarket, wandering down the bread aisle. A song from Footloose came on the PA. “Let’s watch Footloose tonight, Mama!” I - thinking about broadening her cultural education and knowing that she's seen Footloose rather more than once - asked her “have you seen Dirty Dancing?” She said “no”, and with that, a woman about 8 feet ahead of us whipped around and said “whaat‽” It was an exaggerated what, a go home this instant and watch it what, a spectacular moment of a stranger unable to stop herself from joining a conversation uninvited.

So the other night, we settled in to Dirty Dancing. Not far in, Baby’s mom makes an appearance. “It’s Emily Gilmore!”

Maybe you had to be there, but somehow, that was the icing on the cake.

* * * * * * * * * *

Tomorrow she turns 14. And the cake will be cheesecake, because the tagline on her finsta reads "I probably love cream cheese more than I love you".

I love her more than cream cheese.

The Day After

Every year, the politicians campaign, standing around the train station, and in front of Starbucks, and at the farmers market, and anywhere else they can see and be seen. Last night, election night, all six of the people running for town office - plus a bunch of their surrogates - were on the train platform or in the overpass or at the bottom of the stairs. It was like running a gauntlet to get out of the station.

Once upon a time, we lived in Manhattan, on the Upper East Side. Our state senator was, for most of the time that we lived there, a liberal Republican named Roy Goodman. He was the kind of liberal Republican that won cross endorsements from the Independence Party and the Liberal Party - so I'd happily vote for him on the Liberal line. After a nail-biter of a last race, in which I voted for his opponent, he served one last term in the Senate - thirty three years altogether.

The thoroughly endearing thing that Goodman did after every election? He'd assume his campaigning position at the top of the stairs to the 86th subway station, wearing his utilitarian and slightly wilted trench coat, and hold up a sign that said "Thank You".

This morning, there was no one at the train station to say thank you. I don't need to be thanked for my vote, but I have to say that it made an impression.

The Bachelor, Redux

So, you will recall that Peter was a bachelor, in the eyes of my grandmother.

Imagine my delight at finding a passage in a Miss Fisher, in which "if he was not a baptized bachelor, Phryne considered, he was certainly a confirmed one."

If you are in need of diversion, the Miss Fisher books are a delight.

7 days, 7 black-and-white pictures, no people: CAPTIONED

End of day scotch on the rocks. Laphroaig if you're curious. One ice cube. In the last of my grandmother's little polka dot glasses. 

My mother bought this sign in a hardware store in France a long time ago. She had it in her garden and eventually the white letters chalked away. She repainted them, by hand. Last winter the sign fell over; the stake was rotten. My husband repaired the whole thing - new screws, new varnish, new stake. And no, there are no mushrooms in my yard. 

Spaghetti, right out of the pot, still in the colander. 

Every morning, I mind that gap. And I think about the angle of the sun, and how the shadows are different in October and May and December and August. 

I love my linen duvet cover with its retro sketch watercolor flowers. They're upside down because I was in bed when I took the picture.  

The view from my office, looking west. It was VERY early in the morning. 

End of week, last minute bonfire at a friend's house - complete with wine and burgers.

The Health Insurance / Care Morass

A several weeks old issue of the New Yorker has been sitting on my desk, folded open to a page from an essay by Atul Gawande titled Is Health Care A Right? because I keep re-reading one paragraph:

The reason [that health care is so broken] goes back to a seemingly innocuous decision made during the Second World War, when a huge part of the workforce was sent off to fight. To keep labor costs from skyrocketing, the Roosevelt Administration imposed a wage freeze. Employers and unions wanted some flexibility, in order to attract desired employees, so the Administration permitted increases in health-insurance benefits, and made them tax-exempt. It didn’t seem a big thing. But, ever since, we’ve been trying to figure out how to cover the vast portion of the country that doesn’t have employer-provided health insurance: low-wage workers, children, retirees, the unemployed, small-business owners, the self-employed, the disabled. We’ve had to stitch together different rules and systems for each of these categories, and the result is an unholy, expensive mess that leaves millions unprotected.

Employer-provided health insurance is the problem.

If you have employer-provided insurance, do you know what the premium is? Not the premium you pay, that gets deducted from your check, but the underlying premium that often an employer splits with you. Or doesn't. My employer pays 100% of the premium for the individual employee - but if the employee has a spouse and/or children to add onto the plan, the employee pays that difference. That's a good chunk of change.

Right now our rates are:

Each employee gets the same benefit from the organization - an untaxed benefit of almost $700 per month.

What if it were different, and the organization paid 80% of the premium no matter what spouse/children were covered? The rates would look like this:

In this iteration, the single employee pays something, and the employee with any dependents pays a lot less than in the first version. On the other hand, the employer pays a lot more for an employee with a family.

[I lay these numbers out, because it seems to me that a lot of people don't realize that the $xx per pay period that's coming out of their paycheck is not 100% of the premium.]

Which is fair?  Consider it this way. If your employer coughs up $1600 a month for an employee with a whole family on the plan, isn't that shorting the single employee for whom the employer is only paying $560? Would it be fair for an employer chose to hire the single employee over the married with children one, because the cost to the employer is lower? Of course not - and it's probably discriminatory.

I don't know what the solution is, but I firmly believe that health insurance ought to be severed from employment. You're a person, your kid is a person, your mother is a person - all of the people should be provided for. How that happens, I don't know. But the patchwork we've got going on - where some people are on Medicare, and others covered by employers, and others elsewhere - is not cutting it.

Consider this: when you are on Medicare, Medicare is only covering you. Not you and your spouse, and certainly not you and your children. Just you. Your spouse has his/her own plan. Doesn't that make more sense? Each person on their own plan - a baseline provided by the government and the choice to buy-up via a wraparound plan. Each to his own.

How do we get there?

Jeans, Genes, Jean

Yesterday's New York Times crossword was all about the homophones, but jeans/genes wasn't in it.

Jeans
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an ordinary woman in possession of a need for new jeans must be in want of a pair that fit.

And yet, it seems impossible.

I ordered several pairs online – different styles, same size. I decided one pair was okay. I wore them a couple of times, and they stretched out in the waist so much that they started falling down. I could take them off without unbuttoning and unzipping. Hiking up your pants every few minutes is not conducive to living one’s life. I got out the big shears and the sewing machine and took a triangle out of the center back and put it back together like Frankenstein. That worked…for a while. I don’t know, they stretched out again? The thing is, they fit through the hips and thighs, but the waist is too big.

In desperation the other day, I reached around and gathered up another fold, marched over to my husband with a binder clip, took the pants off, and crudely hand-stitched the pleat with black button thread. I have never been so happy with a crude repair as this has made me.

But I would rather have a pair that fit without alteration. So – if you have any suggestions about where to find a pair of jeans that have an actual waist, I would be delighted to hear them.

Genes
Every so often, I get the genealogy bug. It’s been in the back of my mind that I’d like to go to Europe and visit the German island that my maternal grandfather’s family was from. He was born in the US, not long after his parents moved here from Föhr. Down the rabbit hole I went, and I was thrilled to find my grandfather’s paternal grandparents on Find-A-Grave! They're buried in the Friedhof Nieblum auf Föhr cemetery.

I haven’t found his maternal grandparents yet, but the internet is a deep and wide place, and Föhr is a small island.

Jean
My aunt Jean died recently, at the age of 96. She was a total pip – tap dancer, showgirl, puppeteer – and a delight.

When she was 89, she gave my sister a tiny little tap dance lesson. (She didn’t try and teach me, because she didn’t have any shoes that fit me.)



Here's to tap dancing in jeans.

And Cancer Sucks

I confess that I wrote yesterday's post a week ago, scheduling it to run yesterday because yesterday would have been my mother's birthday.

But on Tuesday - two days before Moky's birthday - I learned that an old friend had died. She had had lung cancer for years - almost a chronic condition. She was in good shape, making plans to travel to Europe, volunteering as an archivist, doing what she did. And Monday morning, she woke up and had trouble breathing and called 911 and died.

She's the one that told me about Lungevity when my sister was diagnosed and was looking for support. She contributed to my Lungevity walk-a-thon with a donation a couple of weeks ago. She'd never smoked.

I am just shattered.

Lung cancer sucks.

Arlene, I miss you.

Birthdays Are Hard

A couple of weeks ago, my sister gave me a bag of ephemera: my baby book, a box of our grandfather's letters & schoolwork in German, a folder of congratulations on the 1925 birth of a baby girl whose mother once upon a time lived across the street from my mother, and an envelope of photos. This here picture is my mother, in about 1995, with my cat Yoyo. I think it was taken in the crazy days leading up to my wedding, because it was in with some outtakes from that event.

Today would have been my mother's 82nd birthday, but that she hadn't died 8+ years ago, of lung cancer.

In her memory, and because cancer sucks, and because my sister has lung cancer, I'm doing something I have never ever ever done before: I'm participating in a walk-a-thon, raising money for Lungevity.

If you know someone who has had, or who has, or who has died from lung cancer - and you surely do - please help. Lungevity funds scientific research, educates on early detection, provides patient support - helping "people live better with lung cancer and dramatically improve on the current 18% five-year survival rate", and they have a four-star rating from Charity Navigator.



Click the Donate button above, or use this link: https://lungevity.donordrive.com/participant/36990

When you've done that, treat yourself to a popsicle. Red. In memory of Moky.

And thank you.

The Stories I See

My commute to NYC is not short, but it affords me the luxury of time to read. I read the inky, unwieldy Times, I read books from the library. I read long form articles that I print on the backs of discarded spreadsheets and copy drafts, because I digest paper words better than digital. I do the crossword, easily on Monday and sometimes with glee on Friday (though I occasionally cheat and check cranky Rex, justifying it as a learning tool - cheating today will mean more chance of success tomorrow.)

Today, I pulled a paperback out of my bag - not a library book, but something I'd bought at a warm and funky independent bookstore in Saugerties. Because it's mine, I felt no compunction about marking a phrase that jumped off the page at me:

"It was interesting to consider ... that a story might merely be a series of events we believe ourselves to be involved in, but on which we have absolutely no influence at all."

The subway pulled into 14th street. On the platform, I could see a 20-something couple, lips locked in a theatrical embrace, one of her feet in the air. They stood rock still, like they were posing, and as I exited the train, I looked for their photographer. But there was only me to record the scene.

Later, as I walked up Broadway, I mentally dress-coded a young woman 10 feet ahead of me. Tight black knee-high boots, black t-shirt, and tailored plaid short-shorts, her butt cheeks were visible at every step. Between us, an older woman in jeans delicately reached back and traced the arced outline of her own butt cheek. I wondered - was her action a subconscious reaction to Plaid Shorts? Or merely an itch?

The passage above, from Outline, came from a bit where the novelist/narrator is teaching a class in creative writing, and has asked her students to "tell me something they had noticed on their way here".

Reading begets noticing; noticing begets writing. I stand outside myself, etching stories into my head, speaking them softly into my phone, involved yet not at all.

When Plaid Shorts turned into my office building and got on the elevator with me, I refrained from commenting on her attire. Because her story is hers to tell and my place was not to interfere.

And yet I am involved.

Today, I'm Robin

Since yesterday, I've been mulling the pledge I made to donate $24 to a good cause. At first I thought about funding a bit of a classroom project, given that the whole thing came up because of back-to-school shopping.

But Charlottesville has been on my mind. And so, with the help of a Medium post by Sara Benincasa, titled "What to Do About Charlottesville", I sent my little donation to Great Expectations, a project where foster kids in Virginia get help navigating out of the foster system into adulthood, through programs at Virginia community colleges.

The current overt burbling up of the alt-right, of racists, fascists, Nazis, Klansmen, is deeply disturbing. And yet, as a middle-aged white woman in a liberal NYC suburb, what do I do? Benincasa makes an apposite point:

I believe in the Superhero Sidekick theory of helping, which is to say that if you’re trying to ally yourself with the interests of an oppressed group of which you are not a part, you pull a Robin, not a Batman. You’re not the star of the show, so you don’t direct the mission. You listen, you learn, you assist. You definitely don’t lounge around and wait for the superhero to do all the work and then take all the credit. You also don’t throw up your hands and wail, “WHAT WILL WE EVER DOOOOOOO? THIS IS HOPELESS!” when Batman is right there going, “Um, Robin? There’s like ten things you could do today that would help everybody out. You listening?”

So, here's how I did my Robin part today:

1. Little gift to Great Expectations
2. Repost/amplification of Benincasa's "What To Do" piece

How did you do your Robin part?

Back to school shopping, and how I regained my will to live

The child has been begging to go shopping. Yes, she needed new sneakers. Yes, she needed new bras. Yes, she needed new jeans. Yes, she starts high school and wanted a “first day of school outfit” and I caved in because sometimes I am nice (although I did think about invoking Thoreau's beware of all enterprises that require new clothes except that I thought she might take that to mean that high school was optional or something).

So, it was time to go to the mall. There are several malls not too far from us, but to hit all the stores one wants to hit, one needs to go to two different malls, and pay for parking at each, and paying for parking GALLS ME.

I elected to go to a farther away mall because 1) free parking and 2) everything under one roof and 3) a less crowded Trader Joe’s on the way home.

She got sneakers. We went into both Sephora and Ulta and walked out with only one hair clip, for me. We were sweet-talked by a cute young not-our-camp Spanish guy with terrific glasses, who was shilling expensive beauty products out of a kiosk; we bought nothing (hello $99 jar of goop), but he was amusing. We both got bra-fitted, at Soma, where they have wireless bras. She got an overall dress, and a sweater, and two pairs of jeans, and a tiny backpack.

And in Aeropostale, we were on line to pay for two cheap t-shirts, when the customer ahead of us at the register called to us: “I’ll pay for those shirts. I have $24 of credit that is just going away unless I spend it right now.” She had a pile of merchandise and some complicated return deal and was DONE WITH shopping. So my girl’s two shirts went into mall lady's pile, but she needed another few dollars worth of merchandise so another t-shirt and then a $4 tank top went in, and the whole total came to 63¢ due. I paid it, meaning that for 63¢, the girl got four new shirts. I told the other woman that I’d been on the verge of losing my will to live because 3 hours in the mall and that she had restored my gumption.

Today, in honor of mall lady, I’m going to donate $24 to a good cause.

But I'm not setting foot in another mall for at least a year, and the girl knows that.

Do cats eat bats?

​At 12:15, I drifted from sleep into consciousness and noticed that a light was on - the girl was in the bathroom. I sleepily muttered "go back to bed" and with that, she let out a blood-curdling scream. "BAT, BAT, there's a bat!"

There is a little closet off the bathroom - a closet that's really a part of the crawl space that runs under the dormers on the front of the house. And while she was sitting on the toilet, a bat had slipped out from under the closet door.

And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, 'Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?' and sometimes, 'Do bats eat cats?' for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which way she put it.

My husband scrambled out of bed in a haze, I grabbed the hysterical child, the cats fled, and we pondered what to do about the bat careening around the upstairs of our little house. The girl offered to find her tennis racket, except that she would have had to cross the dangerous hallway with the frantic bat. I thought about calling the police, and eventually my husband towel-snapped it to stun it. He gathered it up loosely in the towel, and took it downstairs and outside; it flew away, apparently unharmed.

Far too much drama for the middle of the night, but no one got carted off in an ambulance.