Snow Day!

It's beautiful out, and there's no school, and I didn't try to slog my way into the city, and the kid had a playdate here this morning, and is over at the other kid's house now, (because we've discovered the joys of playdates with the other only child first grader who lives around the corner), and I had tomato soup for lunch, and the power hasn't gone out, and there's no place we need to be. Oh, and there are harvested icicles in my freezer.

The only foreseeable flaws are that we are short on wine and firewood, which will be tragic if the power does go out.

Wordless Wednesday: On The River

Actually, on the pier at Piermont, with her badass shades and her new-from-eBay winter jacket and some phragmites (with three syllables, not two, just in case you'd been wondering).

Dear Mr. President

Several months ago, I had a mammogram, at the very civilized hour of in the evening after dinner. (Really. I have a full time job. Scheduling mammograms during the day is a pain in the ass. Besides, the group practice we use has the machinery - they might as well get more hours a day out of it. And the technician likes it too - she works from 12 to 8 and avoids traffic. And I don't have to wait at all. Win win win.) When I got home, the child asked if I’d gotten a lollipop - because of course you get a lollipop after going to the doctor. I told her she might should write a letter to the President, offering up her suggestion. Periodically, it comes up again. Yesterday, she wrote her letter.



I'm not sure that her letter is going to add anything to the health care debate underway in Washington, but I do think it is important to encourage one's child to participate in our democracy.

Monkey Doll, Redux

Last week was school break in these parts. Sometime during the week, the girlie started asking if she could come to work with me, so I brought her in on Friday.

We had a lovely day - lunch out at a restaurant, movies on the office DVD player, ice cream on the train home, and in between, a trip to the mecca downstairs that is the costume shop. We went down to show them the fringe become doll hair, but then one thing led to another and she left with a bag full of ribbons and bits of trim and a tassel and two yards of pink silk damask and beads and baubles and "diamonds" and fabric flowers. And while we were wandering around collecting all of this joy, one of the stitchers whipped up a green tutu for the doll - just like that. Back upstairs, she spread everything out and proceeded to sew red bands on an arm and a leg, and a diagonal sash of pink flowers. She cracks me up.

Now we've got everything stashed away in a plastic tackle box, "my own sewing kit, Mama". Time to teach her to sew on buttons, methinks.

Happiness

The lovely Mayberry Mom says I make her happy. Lots of small things make me happy:

• That first cup of coffee in the morning
• The sun shining in the brilliant blue sky
• Shuffle on my iPod
• This charming M - for me and for Mayberry. [You can find your own decorative initial(s) here.]
• Sheepskin slippers
• Gorgonzola
• The girlie reading books to me
• Clean sheets
• Slitting open the package of Peeps so they ripen in time for Easter
• Dinner every night with my husband and child

Tag, you're it!

Monkey Girl

I made the girlie a monkey. Well, it was supposed to be a monkey, like the ones that Kelly made, but the girlie didn't want a tail, or ears, or hair. I finished it - the doll - one night, while listening to Slouchy read aloud her poem about her grandmother, which ends with the apt line "I watch your busy hands. They fly." Poking stuffing into the legs and stitching them up, while my friend remembered her grandmother's handiwork, was some kind of lovely synchronicity.

Slouchy's grandmother might well have appreciated the monkey's provenance. The bit of pink for the body was leftover from a skirt I had in high school. The white of the arms and legs and head was salvaged from a worn out bedsheet. The beige of the face came from the cut off leg of a pair of pants - either my husband's or my father's - and the vintage green calico is the mystery. (The Palm Beach chintz on the hand-me-down sofa is a thorn in my side; I need to get that couch reupholstered and soon!)

The next morning, the girlie found the doll in her bed and came climbing in with me to tell me "Mama, make a list, she needs hair, and a hat and shoes and a skirt, make a list, Mama". Got that? Hair.

Luckily, there's a costume shop in my building, so I went down and begged for 18" of glittery fringe - which my boss saw draped on my desk and wondered aloud if I was planning to make it into pasties. I think not. Monkeys don't wear pasties. And it'll make perfect hair when I get a chance to hand-sew it to the doll's head.

Chicken And Potatoes

Ever since we started buying a huge amount of beef at once, chicken has become an infrequent luxury in these parts. The mere thought of a roast chicken, sizzling in the oven, filling the house with that ineffable scent - oh, it makes me weak at the knees. And hungry.

The other day, after an outing to see eagles - live eagles, a bald eagle and a golden eagle, but in a tent, not on the wing - we decided we needed to stop by and get a (dead) chicken born and raised in our NYC suburban county. I don't think that there's any connection between seeing the eagles flapping around (and that golden eagle was BIG) and wanting to eat poultry for dinner, but there you have it.

Later that day, I went upstairs to take a nap. About five minutes after I fell asleep, my husband started bellowing from the kitchen that he needed me. I stumbled downstairs, without my glasses, and found him waving the chicken around by its neck. Which was attached to its head. And its feet were dangling around down at the other end. It was quite a sight, and a distinct reminder that this was no Frank Perdue bird, no sir. Unfortunately, it turned out to be kind of a tough bird, the kind that probably would have been better off braised, not roasted. Its carcass became a lovely stock, enriched by the afore-mentioned feet.

Alongside the chicken, we had potatoes, (twice) cooked my new favorite way. Take some medium sized potatoes with thin skins. Wash them, but don't peel them. Pile them in a bowl, cover them with plastic wrap, and microwave them until you can stick a fork in them. (Or boil them, though this is one of the few things I countenance using the microwave for. That and making tea in the ingenious teapot.) Drain the potatoes and, working on a cutting board, gently smash them with the flat side of a big knife. You want to squish them down to about 1/2" thick. And the reason you left the skins on is because it helps hold them together. Smear some olive oil on a sheet pan, and carefully transfer the potatoes over. Drizzle olive oil on the top sides, and sprinkle with a little kosher salt. Bake them for about 20 minutes at 400°F - flipping them once if you're so inclined. They come out like the love child of potato pancakes, mashed potatoes, hash browns and baked potatoes - crispy and molten and earthy and wonderful. They needed nothing on them, though the child dipped hers in ketchup because she dips everything in ketchup.

Existential crisis

I put the girlie to bed and settled in to watch some of the Olympics, as one does these days. A little while later, she crept downstairs; I walked her back up again. As I tucked her in for the second time, she began wailing:

I don’t want to grow up. I want to be six forever and ever. I don’t care if my friends grow up. I don't want to die. Granny died. I want to stay six. I don’t want to grow up.

How can’t I grow up?

I don’t want to grow up. I don’t I don’t I don’t.

How don’t I grow up?

Deep sobs, many tears, much snot.  Me, snuggled up next to her, feeling at a complete loss. Everyone grows up, everyone dies. How do you assuage the fears of the six year old, when no one wants to grow up, no one wants to grow old, no one wants to die?

Two Answers, A Questions, A Request, and An Apology

Lord knows I am no kind of blogging guru. I know enough to get around, meaning, I only mess with HTML if I have to.

But I figured out two things about Blogger recently that I thought were worth sharing.

Answer 1) Like lots of people, I am periodically plagued with comment spam. Word verification helps, but it's so annoying that I usually leave it off. Recently, the comment spam has all been landing on old posts - which, happily, is easy to remedy. Find your Blogger Dashboard and then go to Settings > Comments > Comment moderation - and enable comment moderation on older posts. Blogger's default is 14 days, but you can set the time frame to longer or shorter. Then, if a spammer tries to comment on an old post, it won't appear, and you can easily delete it from your Blogger dashboard.

Answer 2) I finally got sick of the blogroll that ate my sidebar, a blogroll that was pulling from Bloglines even though I stopped using Bloglines as a reader. It was out of date and out of control. But I'd been reluctant to use the Google Reader widget because it was, to me anyway, ugly and I didn't know how to make it match my template. I figured it out! I started by selecting a handful of feeds and tagging them "Blogs You Should Read" - tagging them let me select a subset of the whole damned list of feeds, and creates a folder with the tag name. Then, in Reader, click on Settings > Reader Settings (towards the upper right of the window). From Settings, click onto Folders and Tags.


Make sure that the folder is marked "Public", and then click the link that says "Add a blogroll to your site". That'll take you to a pop-up window where you can configure the sidebar widget. Leave the title box EMPTY and set the color scheme to NONE. Copy the generated HTML and go back to your Blogger Layout page. Add an HTML widget and paste in the HTML that you just copied out of Reader. If you want a title, add one here. That way, the title and list in your new blogroll widget will pick up the styling that applies to the rest of your blog. Matchy matchy joy!

Question) Sitemeter lets me see a lot of information on a per visit basis - like Domain Name, IP Address, Country, City, Time of Visit, Visit Length, Page Views, Referring URL, Visit Entry Page, etc. Is there a way to get that kind of detail out of Google Analytics? Because if there is, I can't figure it out.

Request) Please enable your email in your Blogger profile. Click on your profile and make sure it's linked to your blog and your email. You can have a separate email exclusively for blog stuff, if you'd like. If you don't have a real blog, you can set up a "blog" without any content so that you have a profile with an email. This also goes for people with other than Blogger blogs - you can have a Blogger profile that links to your Wordpress/SquareSpace/TypePad blog - or even to your Etsy shop. But the email is key - it's what lets me reply to your comment, which I dearly love to do.

Apology) Blogger seems to be comment challenged of late. I can't comment most of the time, at least from the (cough) PC in the (cough) office. So, I may well have been reading and not commenting, but the not commenting isn't my fault. And I still love you.

This is why they invented cellphone cameras

Perhaps "constipation" would be a better word choice than "inconvenience", because if you were looking for the Senokot, you might be more than inconvenienced by its unavailability. And no, I wasn't buying Senokot - I was merely picking up a prescription, for something unrelated to my gastrointestinal tract, if you must know.

Wordless Wednesday: Snow Day

Is there anything better than a snow day on a Wednesday? I think not. We got the valentines done (the secret ones and a pile for the first grade class), I made a pot of chili (with hidden sweet potatoes), I put the laundry away (that had been sitting around since Sunday), we went for a walk, and the kid went over to a friend's house for an impromptu playdate.  The mail came, though nothing but bills, and the UPS man delivered some new underpants. (Is there anything weirder than ordering underwear on Amazon?) I even shoveled a path up the driveway, but not the whole thing, because, why?

The only flaw in this lovely day is that the newspaper never got delivered - although it could be buried out there.  I'll probably find it in April.

Duct Tape

We have a kind of half-assed set of blocks and chutes with which to build marble runs. I call it half-assed because it's nearly impossible to actually get it to work - the pieces are all too clumsy, and the marbles tend to blow the whole thing apart, and the pieces aren't graduated enough to let you get just the right amount of incline.

So here's my question. Is it allowable to use duct tape and popsicle sticks to make the thing work right, or is that unsporting?

---

[What I really want is a Cuboro set, but they are so damned expensive.]

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

I was standing on line, waiting for my lunch, eavesdropping on the people in front of me. At one point, she said to him "oh, yeah, and they want it ay-sap" – which got me thinking. When you say ASAP out loud, do you say "ay-sap" or "ay-ess-ay-pee"? Or do you just say "as soon as possible", which, to me anyway, rolls off the tongue more easily? What about when you see it on paper and read it to yourself?

How about WTF? Do you say "double-you–tee–eff" or "what the fuck"? "What the fuck" has 40% fewer syllables than saying each letter individually, and you get to speak that magically strong multi-purpose word. Fuck.

According to that bastion of definition, Urban Dictionary, "roffle" is a verb derived from pronouncing ROFL as a word. Have you ever actually said "roffle"?

Wikipedia has a staggeringly long and quite fascinating article on Acronyms and Initialisms - which discusses none of these three.

I think, though, my favorite conglomeration of initials is Initials:

LBJ took the IRT
Down to 4th Street USA
When he got there
What did he see?
The youth of America on LSD

LBJ IRT
USA LSD

LSD LBJ
FBI CIA

FBI CIA
LSD LBJ

Luckily the girlie hasn't yet asked me to explain this or any of the other songs from Hair.

Firsts

Her first backpack has fallen by the wayside, a year and a half into her elementary school career. It's developed holes, and terminal grunge, and lining flakiness. I assumed it would last longer - somewhere I still have a backpack that I used in high school, and it looks nearly new. I tell you, things just aren't made like they used to. Planned obsolescence?  I thought about returning it to Lands' End and invoking their unconditional guarantee, but guilt got the better of me, as it has been exceedingly well used. I did buy a replacement in a more dirt friendly pattern.

She sent me her first text message the other day, using her grandmother's phone. Grandma stood by offering instruction, but the girl did all the writing and typing. She dearly wants a cell phone, and claims that other first graders have them, which I find hard to believe. She also wants a DS which other first graders do have. In fact, she came home from a playdate with two games for it that the other kid didn't want any more. This caused a serious rift, because she knows I have a DS, and "why can't I use yours, Mommy?", but I really think a six year old needs to be doing something more constructive. We've compromised for the moment - five minutes a night on not-school nights (yes, 10 minutes a week, I am the mean mommy). And threatening to take time away is proving a good inducement to better behavior. It's slippery, this navigating through the intersection of parenting and technology.

The first grade play was yesterday - a sort of musical revue adaptation of "Where the Wild Things Are", with songs written by the school's music teacher (who, incidentally, I've known since fifth grade, and no, I don't live in the town I grew up in). All the first graders participated, singing songs en masse interspersed with Sendak's lines, each one recited by a different kid. The girlie got to be the emcee - opening the show alone in front of the curtain, speaking right into the microphone, memorized lines and all - and yes, those are snow boots she's wearing with capri length leggings under a skirt.



A week of firsts.

Shiny Pretty Hearts and Things

Pretty things attract the eye of the magpie from time to time.

Like valentines, insanely cute, with no branded characters, and free for the printing. Alpha Mom rounded up a whole mess of them last year, and added more this year. I printed out these whimsical vibrant cards for the first grader to hand out; I'll bet you a nickel that no one else in her class will have the same valentines.

And Japanese masking tape in a gazillion colors and patterns. I want it all, though I haven't any idea what to do with it. Decorate packages? Make collages? Create handmade greeting cards? I could live in my cellar all day long, puttering around and acting crafty.

Or printable graph paper, variously variable, for doodles or what have you. What's so appealing about graph paper? Well, kind of the same thing that makes a Moleskine notebook jump into your hands - the contained possibility.

---

Are you still thinking about Haiti every day? I am. Want another way to help? Lovely SweetSalty Kate has put together an online auction of art, photography, paper crafts, clothing, and creative goods. The proceeds will go directly to the St. Joseph's Family of homes for children in Haiti. Buy something. I've already been outbid once. You've got until Monday.

Do You Wait In Line or On Line?

So, I know it’s partially my own damned fault, for waiting until the first of the month to buy my monthly train ticket. But, honestly, should it have taken waiting on line for thirty-five minutes, while I missed two trains home?

Yesterday morning, the lines were so long that I’d have been late to work. In the evening, I arrived 21 minutes before my desired train, thinking – wrongly – that 21 minutes would be enough time. I couldn’t buy the ticket last week, because my office participates in the TransitChek program, and I didn’t have my TransitChek Visa card until the end of last week – and Friday night in GCT is as crazy busy as the first and last of the month. I couldn’t buy the ticket at my train station, because they closed the ticket office at my train station in the middle of January. I couldn’t use the ticket machines at my train station or in Grand Central; the ticket machines can only take one form of payment and because my $230 TransitChek Visa is less than the cost of my monthly ticket, I have to pay the balance some other way.

So I was stuck, waiting on line, watching the trains disappear from the Big Board, and thinking evil thoughts about the antiquated system by which MetroNorth has you line up to buy your tickets – there’s a single line for each ticket window. So, if you pick the slowpoke line, you’re screwed. A better system would have a single line feeding all of the ticket windows – you can’t pick the wrong window that way. The Whole Foods near my office has an ingenious queuing system, and it works almost flawlessly. But the powers that be at GCT probably don’t want to mar the august glory of the great space with something so pedestrian as queuing ropes.

When I finally got up to the window, I gave the slowpoke rookie clerk my TransitChek Visa and my other credit card – only to be told that I couldn’t put the balance on a second credit card, I had to pay by cash or check. That in itself is insanity – but luckily I’d been to the cash machine at lunch time so I actually had the cash on me – I’d left the house in the morning with about 89 cents in change in my wallet, and I almost never carry my check book.

In concept, TransitChek is a good thing – it encourages and rewards public transit users by giving us a tax break. But you could cut out a whole level of bureaucracy by letting people have a tax deduction of up to that $230 a month, properly documented of course, and eliminate the silly TransitChek Visas and vouchers and hassle.

By the time I finally got on the train, I was hopping irritated, not to mention damned glad I hadn’t waited on line in the morning what with the no cash in the wallet and all.

Did you have a nice day yesterday?

Eleven Into Fifty

In exactly eleven months, I'll be fifty. Yeah, whatever, but damn. Fifty? I'm not much for new year's resolutions - but fifty?  It's that kind of round and divisible number that demands something, something big, special, tangible, memorable. The only time I've ever thrown a surprise party was for my mother's fiftieth birthday. Lauren (a/k/a Mental P Mama) is running a marathon for her fiftieth. And so, I've decided to mark my fiftieth year on this planet with a list of eleven things to accomplish.

In no particular order, and with nary a nod to work or self-examination, here's my list:

1. Read Gödel, Escher, Bach - which I started about 25 years ago. I just bought a new copy, because the old one had a complete and utter glue failure and had to be thrown out. A book! Discarded!
2. Finish the patchwork baby quilt that I started when I was pregnant - I don't know what we'll do with it, but I'd rather have a finished quilt than that box sitting dolefully in the cellar.
3. Teach myself how to make croissants - probably with Julia's help.
4. Get off my ass and start running - I've downloaded a Couch to 5K app. I still need to buy some sneakers, but I might have wait until it's a teensy bit warmer out - it was 10°F when I went out to get the paper this morning.
5. Learn to play the ukulele - I bought one on a whim. I do need to figure out how to get the kid from untightening the strings - one was loose and floppy the other day.
6. Create printed books for each year of my blog - I've started this a dozen times, and gotten fed up with all of the editing involved to get the photos in the right places. If you know a better solution than Blurb, let me know, okay?
7. Knit my girl a sweater - I've got the yarn and the pattern, I just need the gall.
8. Weed out my closet. You know that rule about "if you haven't worn it in two years"? Well, there are a lot of things in there that haven't been worn in way more than two years.
9. Leave the country temporarily - after all I've got a passport that I should use at least once before it expires. Maybe we'll go visit the Maritime bloggers, Bon and Kate and Mad, if they'll have us.
10. Take the girl to Washington, DC - she's itching to meet the President, and her cousin goes to college there, and maybe Stimey will show us around.
11. Have a quarterly potluck party and invite the neighbors in. You can come too, if you're around.

I plan to post progress reports on the 29th of each month. Wish me luck!

On Not Watching TV

I really watch hardly any television. This isn't a rant for or against TV, it's just that I'd rather read a book. I may find one show at a time that I'll watch with some urgency - like Glee this past fall, and Big Love right now - but that's it. It's like serial monogamy; I can only get involved with one at a time, and there are episodes of celibacy between the marriages. I never watch TV news because it seems thoroughly redundant, and I didn't grow up watching it, and who's home at that hour anyway? I can't stay up late enough to watch The Daily Show or anything of that ilk, and we don't get whatever channel it is that Rachel Maddow is on. And I do rather like watching figure skating, but that comes round awfully infrequently, so it doesn't count.

But there's a downside to the never watching the news. Last night, during the State of the Union address, the cameras were skittering through the audience, looking for sleeping congressmen and inappropriate eyerolling. I was watching, in the good company of the Momocrats, and periodically the camera would pause on someone - and I had no idea who. Well, it's not that I don't know who Harry Reid is, it's that I don't know what he looks like. Oh, sure, I can recognize Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and Janet Napolitano and Ruth Bader Ginsburg - but most of them I couldn't pick out of a line-up.

It is a hole in my knowledge base.

Transformation

Remember how I said that I'd découpaged an old stool as a Christmas present? The recipient's parents sent me some pictures, since I'd forgotten to take any before wrapping.



All the greenery is from magazine advertisements, catalogs, invitations or brochures. I save seas of green grass, aerial landscapes, stylized leaves, water droplets. I collect stuff without text or figure or structure - but with pattern and texture and color.

The block letters of the name are cut from a glossy brochure that introduced the Gehry building at Bard College - its undulating roof of shimmery steel shingles abstractly blue in contrast to the greens underneath.

I didn't do much to prepare the stool - I roughed up the flat surfaces with some sandpaper, and set to work with the Mod Podge. I'm pleased with how it came out - but even better? So's the nine month old recipient.

Rite of Passage

The other night, we were having dinner when it dawned on me - the kid had cut her hair. It wasn't a complete hatchet job, just a little layering along the left side, but - here's the slacker mom part - it took us almost two days to notice. Yup, Parents Of The Year.

A couple of days earlier, she'd been out at an evening art class with her father. She had a sheaf of papers with her when they got home, and retired to her room, with the kitchen scissors, to cut images out (and make confetti). I went up a little later, to read to her and put her to bed, and found her under the bed with the paper and scissors - where she was, apparently, also giving herself a haircut. Because I didn't have to crawl under the bed to fish her out - as I sometimes do - I didn't notice the little pile of hair and paper clippings. Bedskirts hide all manner of sins.

I realize that it's almost a rite of passage for kids to cut their own hair, and I can't get too worked up about it. I'm stunned, though, that we completely missed it.

What's in a Name?

For Christmas one year, my sister gave my child a book called Miranda's Ghosts. It sparked something in me, and I've since made a point of adding books to her library that include her name in the title.

Besides Miranda's Ghosts, we have What Is Miranda Looking At?, Miranda the Explorer, Miranda the Great and The Secret in Miranda's Closet.  I quite like the first three, but I can't vouch for the last two as we haven't yet read them.



I've poked around Amazon and put a handful of other titles on my wishlist:

• Miranda and the Cat
• Dancing Miranda
• Miranda's Beach Day

Incidentally, there are a stunning number of bodice rippers about Miranda, a goodly assortment of books about Miranda v. Arizona, and a set of Carmen Miranda paper dolls.

And, though Miranda isn't in the title, I was thrilled to learn that Miranda is the protagonist of When You Reach Me, the winner of this year's Newbery Medal. I put that on my wishlist too.

Do you seek out books that feature your child's name?

Edited to add: It goes without saying that we have several copies of The Tempest around, and yes, she knows she's Prospero's daughter.

Styrofoam vs. Staffordshire

I'm in some kind of blogging slump, combined with way too much to do at work, and the sloth of the deep dark winter.

In the meantime, I need to share a passage from yesterday's New York Times, from an article titled Therapists Report Increase in Green Disputes - that is, you want to compost, your husband doesn't want to bother. Or, you want fluffy dryer dried towels, someone else is okay with crunchy air-dried towels.

Anyway, here's the passage I had to read aloud at the breakfast table:

If Ms. Petso prepares a vegan meal for the family, her parents prepare hot dogs to go alongside. Her parents serve on throwaway Styrofoam plates; she grabs a plate that can be cleaned and reused. Her mother, who says she prefers the way food tastes when it is served on Styrofoam, notes that washing dishes has its own environmental costs.

Please. Explain to me how food tastes when served on Styrofoam, because I am at a complete loss.

Haiti / Heavy Heart

The earthquake in Haiti has unsettled me in many ways, and I have a hard time articulating why. Perhaps it's that I've known, and still know, friends and co-workers from Haiti. Perhaps it's that a college friend adopted a Haitian baby not long ago. Perhaps it's that it's here in this hemisphere, not that far away from this city of mine that supports a large Haitian population. Perhaps it's remembering Tracy Kidder's New Yorker profile of Paul Farmer.

Yesterday, I made a contribution to Partners In Health - Paul Farmer's organization - the subject of an op-ed piece, by Tracy Kidder, in today's New York Times:

...There are effective aid organizations working in Haiti. At least one has not been crippled by the earthquake. Partners in Health...has been the largest health care provider in rural Haiti. It operates, in partnership with the Haitian Ministry of Health, some 10 hospitals and clinics, all far from the capital and all still intact. As a result of this calamity, Partners in Health probably just became the largest health care provider still standing in all Haiti.

I know that there are a lot of organizations doing good work. PIH has its "boots on the ground" already - which is why I sent my donation there.

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

The friend who adopted a Haitian child sent out an email last night in which she talked about her daughter's orphanage. Because I thought it was interesting, and that you might too, I've made it into a pdf which you can read here.

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

And my daughter. My little philanthropic child. After school yesterday, she and her daddy watched a little of the news coverage - they talked about what had happened, what an earthquake is, where Haiti is, what the people needed. Her response? "Let's collect money and send it to them. I want to get my class to help, and all of the first grade." She rounded up three quarters and a nickel and a penny, and handed it to me: "Mommy, I want this to help."

It breaks my heart.

Trading

One of my 4 and a half year old nephew’s Christmas presents was a switchblade comb – wildly inappropriate, thoroughly amusing. He ran around the house whipping it open and menacing folks, having a grand old time.

Some while later, I caught my six year old daughter attempting to trade him a gold drawstring bag of Hanukah gelt AND a pirate charm for the switchblade. I put a stop to it – thinking it’s kind of unseemly to trade out your Christmas presents on the very day on which you receive them – not to mention the fact that I really didn’t need to have a switchblade living under our roof.

Later, when I asked her about it – amused, mind you, not rattled or horrified – she explained that “Tiny didn’t want to trade because he already had a bag of gelt”. Okay then.

There’s some moral in here about capitalism and big bags of money and giving the people what they want, but I can’t figure it out.

Pointless Feckless Aimless and Graceless

Yesterday, I got a Facebook message from someone, which read follows:

Some fun is going on.... just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. And send this on to ONLY girls no men .... It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a color in their status.. Haha

It pissed me off, for a number of reasons - the silliness, the sexism, the trivialization of cancer. It’s like junior high school or something. First of all, how the hell is this supposed to "spread the wings of cancer awareness"? If you see a status update that says "black", are you going to make the cognitive leap to cancer? I don't think so. Second, I'm irked by the men vs. girls thing in the text. The opposite of girl is boy. The opposite of men is women. Grown-ups are men and women (unless they’re ballet dancers, in which case they’re girls and boys – but that’s another day). Third, is this supposed to be about breast cancer? What about lung and prostate and pancreatic cancer? What about lymphoma and melanoma? Not sexy enough because lungs don't wear undergarments?

Susan (Why Mommy) weighed in with a post today – reminding us that women who’ve had double mastectomies don’t wear bras. In her post, she linked to a Newsweek blog post about this whole Facebook meme, in which the author points out "This isn't awareness or education; it's titillation". And Barbara Card Atkinson got all hot and bothered on Facebook – privately, to me, and publicly, where she said: "Instead of listing your bra color, why not send a donation to the cancer fighting foundation of your choice? Everyone *is* aware - so go make an actual difference!"

That’s it, people – we’re aware of cancer, we need ACTION, we don't need to know what color bra you are or aren't wearing.

Argh.

To Cut Apart / To Cling Together

I bought my husband a copy of Julie Powell’s book, Cleaving, for Christmas. I didn’t buy it because of her blog (which I never read) or her other book (which I haven’t read) or the movie (which I didn’t see until after Christmas). I didn’t buy it because of Julie Powell. I bought it because of the butcher.

Because, you see, that’s our butcher. All of the beef we’ve eaten in the past couple of years has come from Fleisher’s. We've got ground lamb, lard and stock in the freezer from Fleisher's. We had their Rockin' Moroccan sausages for dinner the other night.

I have to say, though, if I'd read the review first, I might not have bought the book. Because, whoa - the marriage and obsession parts of the subtitle are pretty squeamy making. She's totally not likeable, and her cheating on her husband is revolting, not least because the lover is also revolting, and anonymous sex in a stairwell? Yuck.

That said, the butcher shop parts - which make up the bulk of the first 80% of the book - are interesting. She gets the meat, she gets what they're doing, she brings the cutting and the grinding and the roasting alive on the page. Knowing that butcher shop from the front of the house, as I do, it was fascinating to read about the back of the shop antics and practices of the owners and staff.

The last 20% is a travelogue of meat 'round the world - and it feels lame and irrelevant.

I have to hand it to her though - as much as I loathed her person, for the infidelity, for the texting on the Taconic, for the whining, I finished the book in a kind of breathless whirlwind of "what's she going to cut up next?".

---

Incidentally, the title of the book is one of those cool autoantonyms, with two distinct and opposite meanings:

CLEAVE: To cut apart / to cling together

Clearly the butchery is the cutting apart. The obsession is the clinging together. Is the marriage coming apart or sticking together? Ah, language.

O Tannenbaum

Tomorrow I have to go back to work. It's been a nice week and a half off - with Christmas celebrations that began on the 24th, and finished today. There was champagne, and good cheese, and excellent beef, not to mention raised waffles and candy cane crisps. Oh, and bagels and wine and clementines and pistachios.

Our tree is still up, though most of the presents have found their places around the house. And I hate taking down the tree. It takes so long, and it sucks all the glitter out of the air. And then there are needles to vacuum up, and boxes to carry down, and the tree itself to be dragged, unceremoniously, to the curb.

If I were brave and had a back forty and some explosives, I'd rocket launch the tree instead.

After all, a Christmas tree deserves a good send off as reward for filling our hearts with gaiety, no?

More Birthdays

Julie did it first. And I filed it away for my birthday. Because I want more birthdays, for me, and you, and you, and you too. And because this year, this birthday, is my first birthday without my mother.

If you're paying attention, you'll notice that it's four days after Christmas. Because I was born four days after Christmas, the vast majority of the people that I have known kind of lump Christmas and my birthday together - so yeah, I get gypped - a dearth of cards, a paucity of gifts. My mother, though, always remembered. She always set aside birthday presents, and wrapped them in non-Christmas wrapping. She knew - after all, she birthed me.

I'm not asking for gifts. I'm not even soliciting for the American Cancer Society, or any of the myriad organizations out there doing good work in cancer research. But I am asking you to stop and think, think of someone you know who died too soon, who didn't get more birthdays, because of cancer or for any other reason. That's present enough for me.

A Synchronicity of Books

Every single book that the adults got for Christmas was food related non-fiction.

1. Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession
2. Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-time Eater
3. Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York
4. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
5. Far Flung and Well Fed: The Food Writing of R.W. Apple, Jr.
6. The Opera Lover's Cookbook: Menus for Elegant Entertaining

I think they have us pegged.

The Christmas Cards

When the girl was two, we sent a picture of her in shades, holding a life-sized Elmo in a death grip.

When she was three, we sent a picture of her naked on the beach, coyly looking over her shoulder.

When she was four, she was in an undershirt and a crown, with a devilish expression on her face.

And this year - the seventh Christmas card since she was born - she's riding a tractor.



We're all about the untraditional card.

Happy Christmas and a Merry New Year to you and yours.


(PS - to forestall the anticipated question, zero, one and five were lovely photo cards of our dear child, but in a much more traditional vein.)

Brown Paper Packages Tied Up With String

Ribbon, yarn, string. Tissue, kraft paper. Cardstock. Old paper patterns.

Armed with a paper cutter, scissors, whimsy and a hot glue gun, I wrapped every single present this year without buying any supplies - and they all had a thematic coherency.

The wrapping was beige, brown, ecru, taupe, cream, buff, tan, and khaki - a neutral palette of saved sheets underlaying the recycled red, green, gold, silver and white ribbons. For the tags, I typed everyone's name enough times into columns in 36 point type, picked a random handful of nice display fonts, and printed out sheets of buff cardstock. A pass through the paper cutter and the hole punch, with a little piece of red crochet thread - bang zoom, tags.



One set of (mailed) packages had non-standard orange and brown ribbons, only because I know that family of recipients not to care that Christmas is Red and Green. The family's set of presents was, however, internally consistent and complementary.

And Santa? Santa wrapped in red/green/white/silver/gold wrapping paper, paper that we already had, or that had been carefully saved last year; the packages that will mysteriously appear overnight will be in magical colorful paper, not the buff/brown/ecru that the human parents used.

Ribbons can be reused over and over. And why spend money on wrapping paper? It's just going to be torn off. It's about the giving, not the wrapping.

Upcycling

I don't know when I learned the word upcycle - but it wasn't long ago. However, I love it - it's what I like to do! Take something with little intrinsic value and transform it into something new. A quilt made of scrap fabric, a knitted hat made of odds and ends of yarn, a wool sweater felted and remade into a bag. It's a particularly thrifty version of craftiness: there's little or no need to purchase raw materials.

For years, I've been collecting pieces of scrap paper - pretty bits torn out of catalogs or magazines. The things that appeal to me have pattern, color, texture - no text, no figures, no illustrations. They're architectural details, oriental rugs, grasses, paisleys, shimmering seas. Finally, I got around to buying some Mod Podge and began transforming everyday objects.

I took a handsome turquoise and blue chocolate box, covered the top and bottom with a wallpapery pattern, added some rectangles of oriental rugs, and ended up with a gift box for a handmade scarf.

I covered an old stool with rough squares of leafy greens and distant landscapes, added a name in blue block letters cut from the undulating roof of a Gehry building, and produced a personalized step stool for a not-yet-walking baby (which I wrapped before I took its picture).

And the little wooden box that had once held a tasty wheel of Epoisses got a new life with some (different) oriental rugs.

There is the danger that I will découpage everything in sight.

Excitement

The child spent yesterday afternoon at her grandparents' house. While there, she helped make Christmas cookies, and brought home a little ornament that her grandmother gave her. When we got home, she asked to go down to the cellar "to wrap something". She insisted. I escorted her down to the cellar, she glommed onto some scrap red taffeta and wrapped up the ... little ornament that her grandmother had just given her. "I need a ribbon" so I found her a piece of green ribbon - "red and green, it's the Christmas colors!" - and she made a label out of paper and affixed it with enough tape to fix the space shuttle. Then she put it under the tree.

I thought that was the end of things, until Friday anyway.

We sat down to do her homework: fill in some blanks, do a word search, read a book (her out loud to me), read another book (me out loud to her), write a sentence about the second book*.

And then she asked "Can I open a present?" At this point, the only presents under the tree are two that came by mail, one that she brought home from school, one that she wrapped using fabric and a needle & thread (and I have no idea what's in it, except that she told me it's edible, and I hope that means it isn't perishable because it's been there for days) and the two that we bought and wrapped for Daddy before the snowfall on Saturday. In other words, hardly anything, and she knows that no presents are to be opened until Christmas.

Indulgent and perspicacious mama that I am, I said yes, and she proceeded to open the present from Grandma that she herself had wrapped an hour before. We said "Ooh what a beautiful ornament", and she went to bed clutching it in its box.

Her excitement about Christmas this year is palpable - so much more so than ever before. It's rather magical.

---

* "What was interesting was that the egg didn't go back in the book", in case you wanted to know.

Once Upon A Fruitcake

Remember the dear fruitcake? Someone from Grandparents.com contacted me not too long ago, asking for a "holiday disaster" story. In a fit of madness, and with the caveat "This may not be what you were looking for", I sent them links to the fruitcake tale and the fruitcake reveal.

And they put it up on their site, but with a stock photo of an intact fruitcake, not my well-aged one. She did say "Have a wonderful holiday and try to make your keepsakes nonperishable from now on!!" Point taken. But perishable keepsakes are more the funny, don't you think?

Whine / Anti-whine

I lost a necklace last night. I think it might have snapped off when I picked up the whining cranky child.

I’m playing Bob Dylan’s Christmas In The Heart at my desk.

I feel very bah humbug about Christmas at the moment.

All of the presents are bought; almost all of them are wrapped.

I hate this pair of jeans I’m wearing – they are the wrong shade of blue.

My new favorite substance is Mod Podge; I told my husband that I was going to decoupage everything in sight.

It may snow this weekend, and I have to go someplace.

I love the down coat I got last winter.

The whining cranky tired child made us miss the second act of Hansel & Gretel.

It looks like the whole opera is available on the Met’s website, so we can watch the second act at home.

Whine, whine, whine.

Do you have a whine, or an anti-whine?

---

Post title & concept filched from Phantom Scribbler and Wednesday Whining.

Wordless Wednesday: Incongruities

Why yes, there are wire ties and a popsicle stick holding the tree topper in place.


And yeah, there's a gin label on my wine bottle, just because I'm odd that way, or maybe it's wishful thinking, because (see above) there are wire ties on my Christmas tree.

I think I'm not winning any Martha Stewart awards this year.

How To Sew A Button

I had the usual two grandmothers as a child. One was a lovely, but distant, woman – given to proper hats and an occasional foray into gardening. I can’t remember any domestic feats of hers, beyond making mashed potatoes in an electric mixer, which I knew was wrong even as a child. Her husband ruled her and the household, and it’s him that I remember roasting the Thanksgiving turkey, and making (read more)

Antimicrobial Lint

In the category of now I’ve seen everything: I got an envelope in the mail (at the office) with an "antimicrobial" lining.


The girl looked at my copy of The Dread Crew and asked me "Is that about Jack Sparrow?"


This morning, there was a five year old boy on the train - on his way to see the Rockettes. When we got into the tunnel, he asked his mother "is this the basement of Grand Central?" She replied "no, it's the tunnel". He then asked "is it the tunnel of love?", to laughter all around.


At least the antimicrobial envelope came from a hospital. One wouldn't want to be getting MRSA by opening mail from doctors, right? If the Con-Ed bill starts coming in antimicrobial envelopes, I'm going to start worrying.

Naked Mondays

Oh, this is excellent. If you tweet about Mondays and naked Christmas trees, you get odd retweets and replies.

Let's Review: Science

"Hank and Patrick watched as one bright star moved across the sky."

I was reading to the girl the other night, reading a charming book called What Happened to Patrick's Dinosaurs? At the end of the book, as the brothers watch the night sky, my girl interrupted me to tell me "a shooting star is not a star, it's a meteor". "How do you know that?" "From the science DVD."

I'd recently gotten her a copy of the latest kid release from They Might Be Giants (thanks to a hat tip from Cool Mom Picks). It's called Here Comes Science, and if you buy the physical CD, it comes with a DVD with cunning videos of all of the songs.

And you know what? It's excellent. It's got songs about blood, and songs about elements. They cover evolution and paleontology, and Roy G. Biv turns out to be the guy at the end of the rainbow.

They play with language, so there's one song about the sun that begins:

The sun is a mass
Of incandescent gas

and another that starts with:

The sun is a miasma
Of incandescent plasma

And the song that taught my daughter about meteors is a lovely little ditty that turns into a clever round.

The whole shebang is a great package - fun for kids, enjoyable by parents, and slyly educational. What more could you want?

---

Disclosure: I bought this record with my own money and no one paid me for this review.

The Other Side of The Great Interview Experiment

When it rains, it pours?

Somehow, my guest post for Ree and my Great Interview Experiment interview by TC both went live yesterday. Want to see me interviewed about various and sundry things, like blogging and free time and vacations and parenting? Visit TC at I Have Things.

The usual blathering will resume tomorrow.

Being Anonymous Even While House-Sitting

The great and powerful Ree, a/k/a The Hotfessional, is in India, and I'm house-sitting. Please visit me at her house today, where I'm not making curry or speaking Hindi or making bad jokes about bodacious tatas.

Pregnancy ≠ Nine Months

You know what really gets my goat? Okay, well, lots of things, but one of them is when someone whines that pregnancy is ten long months, OMG, because they've concluded that 40 weeks divided by four-weeks-in-a-month is ten.

WRONG.

Let’s do the math.

One year = 12 months = 52 weeks.
¼ of a year = 3 months = 13 weeks.
¾ of a year = 9 months = 39 weeks.

Now, gynecologists have perpetrated the myth that pregnancy lasts 40 weeks. But that’s only because they assume that most women don’t know the date of conception, but that most do know the date of the beginning of their last menstrual period (LMP). For convenience, therefore, gynecologists start counting the pregnancy from the date of the LMP. But the date of the LMP is generally understood to be about two weeks prior to the date of conception – two weeks in which one is most definitely NOT pregnant. You aren’t pregnant until you’ve conceived.

So, take the 40 weeks, subtract the two weeks in which you aren’t pregnant, and you get 38 weeks of actual pregnant time. The careful reader will note that 38 weeks is LESS than nine months. Ta da!

Millicent

My father lives in a little farmhouse, up in the middle of nowhere. He bought it from some people who'd gotten it from her aunt, and the aunt had been in the house for a long time.

The aunt was apparently something of a character. There are still people in the valley who remember when the house was painted entirely pink, and Hazel drove a pink Cadillac to match. At some point, she changed over much of the downstairs to yellow - there was yellow cotton shag carpeting everywhere when Pop moved in - but the chandelier in the dining room is still pink glass. Outside, there are hot pink tiny roses planted along the rock wall, interspersed with wild orange day lilies - around about the Fourth of July, when they're both blooming, you could be blinded by the vibrating pink and orange.

Hazel was the kind of modern woman who didn't use her husband's last name - and had a career to boot, as a painter of some skill. Once upon a time, the story goes, her husband was in the hospital, after a heart attack or some such. Hazel arrived for a visit, and gave her name to the nurse. The nurse escorted her into the room, and announced her: "Mr. Carter, your girlfriend's here." Mr. Carter sighed "Millicent" and Hazel turned on her heel and left.

When he finally got out of the hospital, and arrived home, he went upstairs to use the bathroom. Imagine his surprise when he discovered a naked woman in his bathtub. He asked Hazel about her; she snipped "That's Millicent".

Neighbors ask if she's still in the bathtub. If visitors haven't been to the house before, they're escorted up to see the lady in the tub and the hand painted hollyhocks on the bathroom walls. Children are particularly titillated. I've never actually taken a bath in the tub; the paint is a little flaky and we've not researched the proper conservation technique for bathtubs painted in a fit of pique. Luckily, there's a shower elsewhere in the house.

Ah, Millicent.

Snow Duck

The nice thing about having an independent six year old is that you can dress her up in snow pants and send her out into the backyard for hours with no supervision on a Sunday morning after the nice first snowfall of the year and she comes back hollering "Mommy, I made you a snow duck" and carries said duck into the kitchen, wet boots and all.

Cell Phones For Domestic Violence

The other day, BlogHer threw a party in NYC. It turned out that that same day was also "It's Time to Talk about Domestic Violence" Day. I learned about this from someone I met at that holiday party.

Today, in an effort to clean house and do the right thing, I googled to find out how to get rid of some old cellphones that were kicking around.

In a flash of synchronicity, one of the first sites I found was for the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Bang zoom - the phones were in a postage paid box waiting for my mailman - to be either refurbished for use, or recycled. Out of the landfill, and repurposed for good.

Fisher and Chickpeas

I was taught at an early age that one should never ever write in books, or dog-ear their pages. In college, I wrote in books of necessity, especially for English classes. But after I stopped reading for a grade, I stopped writing in books again.

Until recently.

I don’t like to write on the pages, because it’s too hard to get back to what piqued my interest unless I also dog-ear the page, and that I just can’t do. Instead, I write on the back end papers, and include the page number. My notes are decidedly cryptic, like the following from the back of the M.F.K. Fisher anthology that I just finished:

p. 203 Railroad (sat upon sandwich)
p. 213 Matzoh
223 Tomato Soup
229 Regional
298 “In Nice, Snacking in the Flower Market”
311 Sugar shaker “little star-shaped holes”

A Stew or a Story is a mish mosh of short pieces that Fisher did for various magazines. It was compiled a couple of years ago, not by her, some fifteen years after her death. As such, it’s of uneven quality, not like the uniformly sparkling and acerbic work released during her lifetime. I was finding it quite a slog for a while - as you can see, the first note I made was about page 203.

But matzoh, spread with butter and spices, and warmed through in the oven? That sounds divine. So does the “Railroad”, a picnic dish of her devising – in which one removes all of the insides of a loaf of French bread, leaving nothing but crust, spreads the crust with butter, layers it with ham, wraps it in a dishcloth, and invites a guest to sit on it 15 minutes before serving. A pressed sandwich!

Tomato soup proves to be her comfort food, when served just so in a particular little jug, with a dash of cinnamon. She waxes rhapsodic about local eating, a locavore well before the term was coined. She buys a sugar shaker for her father, at an antique shop in London – I read her description of the “top with a dainty finial…star-shaped holes…unscrewed neatly for refilling” and wondered in recognition – I’ve seen sugar shakers and not known that that’s what they were.

The moment that sold me on the book, though, was when I came across a 1986 New York Times Magazine piece called “In Nice, Snacking in the Flower Market”. Somewhere in my house, I am quite sure that I have that very piece ripped out of that very issue of the magazine. I know I ripped it out; I think I still have it; I know I never tried to make socca. It’s a sign. I will now try to find some chickpea flour. MFK Fisher wants me to.

And I think she’d approve of my small cryptic notes on the end papers of her book.

Wordless Wednesday: My City Child

Dancing on the Lincoln Center fountain, in the rain, on Thanksgiving Eve.


(Edited to add: it occurs to me that this is the second picture this year of the girl in a fountain IN THE SAME DRESS.)

Charity vs. Democracy

Maybe you've heard this. Chase Bank is giving $5,000,000 away via Facebook . Sounds great, right? All you have to do is vote for your favorite charity, and tell everyone you know. Actually, in the first round, you can vote for 20 favorites, so you can horse trade with your friends.

It's crowdsourcing philanthropy! A new model for the new social media! Charity by the people!

But the problem is that it’s a popularity contest that rewards those organizations with the greatest social networking savvy and not those with the greatest impact and/or efficiency of operations. Arguably, a small organization with terrific grassroots skills but mediocre delivery of a dubious service could win a million bucks - and then fritter it away on pizza and airplane tickets. There's no vetting, no due diligence.

Forgive me for being a deeply cranky cynic, but this whole thing just looks like Chase spending $5,000,000 to make itself look good by tossing some spending money at a handful of charities. Sure, the top vote receiver will get a cool million, but 106 organizations out of 500,000 will split $4 million (the last million will be doled out by ”a special Advisory Board led by prominent national philanthropists...to the nominated charities of its choice").

Keep in mind here that Chase got $25 BILLION in bailout money last fall - $5 million is chump change.

This isn’t philanthropy, it’s marketing. And what’s more? They’re making the 300 million Facebook users do all the work.

Sushi

The last time we were at my father’s house, the girlie spotted a “sushi maker” – namely a handful of boxes from Sushi Chef, including short grain rice, a bamboo rolling mat, and several sheets of nori. Since then, she's repeatedly told us that she wants to make sushi, mostly because she likes the sticky rice. [Occasionally, she eats the insides; she claims to like crab.]

After we arrived at his house the other day, she discovered some antique popsicles in the freezer and announced that she wanted to make popsicle sushi. Sure, why not? Live large. Holiday weekend and all that.

We made some sticky rice, I flattened it out between two sheets of plastic wrap and we stuck it in the fridge for a while. Then we rolled it up - the nori, the rice, and the popsicle (stick and all).

We couldn’t cut much of it, what with the stick still in the middle, but we got off a couple of slices – which looked stunningly like tuna rolls - and she ate every scrap of the rest off of the stick. Strawberry popsicle, sticky rice and nori.

People, we’ve invented something.

The Thanksgiving Table Cards

The girlie wanted to make place cards for Thanksgiving dinner, so I dug up some ancient index cards, folded them in half, and cut them to size.

I wrote out all the names for her, and she set to work. Of her own volition, she added "Love" after everyone's name - which meant that one card was marked "Mike Love". Alas, no, we had no Beach Boys at the table.

Somewhere during the course of the meal, someone unfolded one of the cards and discovered my tidy microscopic handwriting on the back – they’d originally been notes for a college art history class – yes, a hundred years ago. Because of the way the cards had been cut, the notes were rendered into some obscure haiku-like poetry.

Life size, dark granite
Kerma
Surrogate body
No motion, no time

Middle Kingdom

Thirteen Things, and Thanks

There are some things in this world that I just don't understand:

1. Scented antiperspirant
2. Flavored coffee
3. American cheese singles
4. Artificial sweetener
5. Football
6. American Idol
7. Mashed potatoes from a box
8. Aluminum siding
9. Fruit-flavored toothpaste
10. Polyester sheets
11. Uggs
12. Cosmetic surgery
13. Margarine

On the other hand, I am thankful for butter, and good coffee beans delivered by mail, and freshly laundered cotton sheets, and bare feet, and garlic mashed potatoes, and excellent cheese, and cinnamon toothpaste, and iTunes piped through the house.

Oh, and you.

I am thankful to have all of you in my life. Happy Thanksgiving.

When Smart Technology Backfires

I don't really use the Amazon "Gift Organizer" but I did set it up a couple of years ago, and made a list of the people for whom we "must" find gifts for Christmas, and once in awhile I do actually add something to one of the lists as a kind of aide-mémoire. But some of the people? I've never actually put anything on their list.¹

What Amazon does in that case is make some random suggestion - Here's the most wished for camera. How about a Kindle? Here's the most gifted in Gourmet.²

Imagine my surprise when I looked at the Gift Organizer the other day and discovered that it was suggesting the Vinturi Essential Wine Aerator for my nephew.

Obviously, Amazon does not realize that Tiny is FOUR.




¹ Not because I don't love them, but because I buy in lots of other places, like the thrift shop, and I make things, and, well, even though it likes to think so, Amazon doesn't sell everything.

² Can I just say how much I hate that use of "gifted". It's "I gave you the book", not "I gifted you the book". Argh.