Greens Greens and More Greens

Occasionally, we get behind, and the CSA vegetables take over the refrigerator. My heart sank the other day when I realized that there was an entire garden’s worth of greenery to be eaten before more was due to arrive. But I plunged into the recipe box, the plastic box that has taken up permanent residence in the dining room, the plastic box full of the recipes that I am forever ripping out of the newspaper, or printing out from Smitten Kitchen, or scavenging elsewhere on the intertubes, the plastic box which one day I will sort.

I’m fond of curry, but I tend not to cook with it all that often because although my husband will eat and like curries that are presented to him fully formed, if asked in advance he’ll reject them conceptually – something about curry having been invented to mask the flavor of spoiled meats in hot climates. But the recipe box turned up a recipe for a saag (curried greens) from a blog that I can’t remember ever having visited – and it sounded good.

Being a kind of seat of the pants cook, I started it before realizing that I was missing two sort of key ingredients, but I punted and it was just fine – delicious even. We ate it over basmati rice, with corn on the cob alongside.

The next morning over breakfast, I played executive chef and invented a pasta dish in my head, for my husband to make for dinner. He took it and ran with it, adding the fall crop peas from the farm market that I’d completely forgotten about.

And the third day, we ate enough green salad for an army, thereby making room in the fridge for more greens.

Anyway, without further ado, here are two recipes for making a huge dent in the CSA greenery – I think you can figure out a green salad on your own.

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Hearty Greens Saag
(adapted from Vic's Recipes)

2 T. butter
1 bunch swiss chard (cleaned and chopped)
1 bunch kale (cleaned and chopped)
1 cup of water
1 large onion, chopped [I was out of onions (!) so I just left it out]
1 large or 2-3 medium tomatoes, diced
1 T. curry powder
1 small hot chili, minced (or use a ¼ teaspoon of cayenne)
2 teaspoons fresh ginger, minced [I had none, so I used a teaspoon of ground ginger]
3-4 garlic cloves, minced
4 tablespoons heavy cream
Salt to taste

Heat the butter over medium heat in a large pan with a lid. Add the curry powder (and the ground ginger, if your pantry is as bare as mine was, and the cayenne if you’re going that route). Cook gently for a minute or two.

Add the chopped onion [if you had one], and cook 4 or 5 minutes, until soft. Add the minced ginger, garlic and chili pepper, and cook until fragrant, another minute or so. Stir in the tomatoes, greens, and water. Add salt to taste. Bring mixture to a boil, then turn the heat down to simmer, cover the pot and braise for 20-30 minutes.

Carefully, because it’s hot, transfer to a food processor and pulse it until it’s mostly chopped (not completely pureed). Return to the pot, add the heavy cream, and simmer for a few more minutes.

Serve over rice, or use as a sauce for chicken or tofu.

Note: You could make this with just about any greens, except maybe lettuce. I think it'll work with the packets of blanched collards and random asian greens that are cluttering up my freezer.

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Pasta with Arugula and Peas

2 T. butter
1 cup of freshly shelled new peas
2 big bunches of arugula (cleaned and chopped)
juice and zest of one lemon
2-4 T. olive oil
½ cup grated parmesan
Shaved parmesan for serving
Pasta
Salt and pepper to taste

Put a pot of water on to boil – for the pasta. Cook the peas in the butter, for a few minutes, until done. Transfer to a serving bowl, and add the lemon juice and zest, and the olive oil. Set aside.

Cook the pasta until done. Drain and add to the bowl with the peas. Dump all of the arugula onto the pasta, and toss – the heat of the pasta will wilt the arugula. Add the grated parmesan, and salt and pepper to taste. Serve with shaved parmesan on top.

Note: It sounds like a spring pasta, doesn't it? But my farm share has been giving us scads of arugula, and we ended up with fresh peas from the market. I asked the farmer about them; she said that she'd grown peas in the spring, then planted beans in the same area, and then found that she had volunteer peas coming up among the beans - a bonus crop!

Wordless Wednesday: Savour The Sea

I would not eat them anywhere...

Did you know that Green Eggs & Ham is 50 years old? And, more importantly, did you know that there only 50 words in Green Eggs & Ham? And of those 50 words, only one of them has more than one syllable? I’ve read Green Eggs & Ham numerous times – as a kid, and as a parent – and its charm remains... (read more)

My Husband Interviews My Daughter, About Me

So long ago that I don't remember where it came from, I copied a set of questions to ask the kidlet - a meme, if you will. Here's what she - at six and 5/6 - has to say about me. And despite a huge urge to editorialize, I have refrained.

1. What is something mom always says to you?

"Put your pajamas on!"

2. What makes mom happy?

When I wake her up and kiss her.

3. What makes mom sad?

When you don't do what she says.

4. What does your mom do to make you laugh?

She tickles me.

5. What was your mom like as a child?

No idea.

6. How old is your mom?

49

7. How tall is your mom?

About nine feet.

8. What is her favorite thing to do?

Make me laugh.

9. What does your mom do when you're not around?

Go to work.

10. If your mom becomes famous, what will it be for?

Singing.

11. What is your mom really good at?

Kissing me.

12. What is your mom not very good at?

Putting me to bed - she always forgets to sing me a lullaby.

13. What does your mom do for her job?

She works at a ballet studio.

14. What is your mom's favorite food?

Salad.

15. What makes you proud of your mom?

Never forgets to read me a book.

16. If your mom were a cartoon character, who would she be?

Tweetie.

17. What do you and your mom do together?

Hug and kiss and have fun.

18. How are you and your mom the same?

We both have blonde hair.

19. How are you and your mom different?

My personality is prettiness and mom's is "I don't know".

20. How do you know your mom loves you?

She kisses me.

21. Where is your mom's favorite place to go?

Home.

More #!@?&*

Remember the silly M&Ms policy where they wouldn't print #!@?&* on the party favors for my father-in-law's 80th birthday because it was a bad word and they were a family company even though #!@?&* isn't a word at all?

Niobe kind of threw down a gauntlet in the comments, wondering if they'd reject:

nick's
censored

or

nick's
xxxxxxxx

or

nick's
(bleep)

So, I tested them out. To her great joy (chocolate!) and my vague feeling of thwartedness (rejection would have been fun to snark at), Niobe got a bag of M&Ms from me for her birthday (today!), complete with bleep.

Now, of course, I'm wondering whether the appearance last week of that new TV show - $#*! My Dad Says - meant that the M&Ms people had relaxed their stance on the "bad word" status of#!@?&*.

What do you think?

Bookmarks

One of the things I love about taking books out of the library is finding the oddments that other people have used as bookmarks: a cash envelope from a defunct bank, a ticket to some outdoor Shakespeare two years ago, a grocery list.

The other day, the girl came home from her grandparents with a "souvenir" card from her father's birth stuck into the book she was reading. Back in the day, babies stayed in the nursery and Dad could only peer through the glass "during the hours when babies are shown". Incidentally, lest one think that formula marketing in hospitals is new, this 50 year old card was "compliments of Pet Milk Company".

I'm prone to using index cards as bookmarks. For years and years, my mother worked at a non-profit that provided a free audio anthology of magazine writing to blind people. They had an idiosyncratic method of managing the mailing list - or rather, managing the complicated process of ensuring that people were eligible to get onto the mailing list - a method that involved thousands and thousands of index cards on a temporary basis. The net result of all this was that my mother brought home scads and scads of barely used index cards - typed on one side, generally blank on the other, and therefore perfectly serviceable for note taking, bookmarking, list making. She brought home so many of them that there are dozens of shoeboxes of index cards stashed hither and yon in her house, and some in mine too. Sometimes I get a little wistful - there are often little pencil edits on the cards in my mother's handwriting - but then I turn 'em over and write "saver dog", which I found on a card in a book just the other day, a reminder that Miranda had once referred to a St. Bernard as a "saver dog".

What do you use as a bookmark?

Walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death

This day, the 23rd of September, it's odd. Not because 23 is an odd number (though it is, and prime too), but because it's the 17th anniversary of the day my friend Peter's boyfriend died. (Huh, 17's another odd prime.) The reason I remember when he died is because it's smack dab equidistant from two birthdays: my mother's, on the 21st, and my husband's, on the 25th. For years, in my head, it ran birth-death-birth. Now it's not so pat, since my mother's birthday is complicated by the fact that she's dead. Birthday of dead person, death day of dead person, birthday of living person.

It's curious how memory works. I can't remember when anyone else died, except my mother, and again, her death is paired with another's birth: my nephew was born on the 31st of March, she died on April Fool's Day.

And where did that 17 years go? Thinking of you, Petey.

Wordless Wednesday: Giraffe

It's quite tall, so I think it's a giraffe. But maybe it's a goat? Or a llama? In any case, I've been watching it take shape on the other side of the train tracks from where I customarily wait in the morning.

What do you think it is?

Gleekdom

It starts tonight! It starts tonight! What is it about Glee? I have a hard time putting a finger on why I like it so much. There's an awful lot not to like - it's on Fox, it's on broadcast TV with commercials, it has a penchant for maudlin ballads, every character is a stereotype, and it's about high school. But, I'm totally looking forward to the second season tonight, because there's something about it that... (read more)

The Sleeping Thing

Putting the kidlet to sleep has been a major chore recently. Out of necessity, she was sleeping with us during our two week road trip - and even in the places that had a cot for her, she tended to climb in (or worse, kick me out to the cot). Furthermore, because we were all in the same room, we all kind of had to go to bed at more or less the same time. So when we came home, it was "Mommy, are you going to go to sleep at the same time as me?" over and over again. We'd do the bedtime routine, I'd read her a chapter of something or another, and put her in her bed. BUT. Either I'd be downstairs doing stuff and my cell phone would ring, with her calling me from the house phone, or I'd come upstairs and find her making forts and playing with dolls. In short, she just won't go to sleep without being right next to me.

I got so frustrated the other day that I pulled out all the sleep books that I keep under my bedside table as talismans, and flipped through Weissbluth and Ferber and Kurcinka. Tucked inside one of them, I found an essay I'd ripped out of Brain Child in 2007 - an essay by Jennifer Niesslein talking about her seven year old who yeah, prefers to sleep with mom. And I felt awesomely better about the whole thing. One day, she'll outgrow it. Until then, I can just enjoy how much she loves me.

All About Me

So, you know I'm a Nintendo Enthusiast, right? Sometimes they send me stuff - DS games, Wii games. They never tell us they're sending it, it just shows up, a magic box on the doorstep. And the games are rarely unaccompanied - there's always a little relevant something alongside, like the huge plush dolphin that came with the Endless Ocean game, or the teensy perfect top hat that accompanied the new Professor Layton and the Unwound Future. I'm so not a gusher, but the Brand About Town team is awesome. Their promo tie-ins are always creative, they're incredibly charming to work with, and they are very hands off - letting word of mouth work instead of trying to dictate the message.

Yesterday, I came home from work and found a new backpack filled with a pad, water bottle, Mario keychain, umbrella, pen - and a little note: welcome back to school from your friends at Nintendo. No game, but no matter - the girlie was beside herself with joy. "Oh mama, can I use my new backpack tomorrow?"

Later on, we went off to open house at her school and met the second grade teacher with the nine syllable name. Up on one of the walls in the room was a series of mugshots - each child's picture along with an "All About Me" essay.

I nearly plotzed when I saw what she'd written. Can you read it? If not, here's the text:

My name is Miranda. My mom writes Nintendo blogs and I get lots of Nintendo stuff. I love cats. And I like the Mets. At school, I like recess and snack. I like Art! I am unique. I have 3 scars.

Yup. Viral marketing. Give a DS game to the mom, and the kid tells everyone how wonderful Nintendo is. And she wrote that essay BEFORE the backpack showed up in the mail.

The only problem is, what do I do if the principal asks me about my blog?

Vacuuming Sucks

How is it possible that we live in a 1500 square foot house, and own six vacuum cleaners?

Six!

1. A little handheld “dustbuster” (essential for anyone with children and no dogs to eat the dropped food debris)
2. A small “electric broom” because I hate getting out the big guns, though I hate the way my hair wraps around and around the whirling brush thing.
3. A “shop vac” because someone I live with sometimes does little construction projects
4. An old canister type one that works but not very well and lives in the basement and maybe ought to go to the thrift shop.
5. A new canister type one that works splendidly but is too complicated for ordinary humans.
6. And a brand spanking new vacuum that showed up on my doorstep the other day, bewildering my husband, because I went to a party that the Mouthy Housewives threw during BlogHer.

These vacuums, they mock me. Because the thing is that I never vacuum. Something's wrong here.

Wordless Wednesday With Another's Words

"The next day was foggy. Everything on the farm was dripping wet. The grass looked like a magic carpet. The asparagus patch looked like a silver forest.

On foggy mornings, Charlotte's web was truly a thing of beauty. This morning each thin strand was decorated with dozens of tiny beads of water. The web glistened in the light and made a pattern of loveliness and mystery, like a delicate veil."

-from Charlotte's Web, by E.B. White

Tomatillos, Two Ways

A couple of months ago, I made an offhand comment on an article in my local newspaper (which only exists on-line, so why do I persist in calling it a paper?). My comment prompted a personal response from the editor like 30 seconds later, and the next thing I knew, both my husband and I were signed on as volunteers to help get a new farm market off the ground.

Well.

It started Saturday and it turned out to be glorious. The day was perfect, the vendors were great, someone was there with a pizza oven on a trailer making piping hot fresh pizzas, and I spent two and a half hours chatting with friends and neighbors and acquaintances and farmers and strange dogs. And I felt relieved and proud that people showed up, because publicity - which is what I've been doing - is not my strong suit.

Anyway, I came home with a weird mish-mosh of things, like a wild boar cacciatorini and some fresh eggs and a jar of "cream of sausage" tomatoes (which was neither cream nor sausage, but just pale yellow plum tomatoes) - and a quart box of tomatillos. Why I bought the tomatillos is kind of a mystery to me, but it could be because they came from a tiny farm run by two charming women with dirt under their fingernails.

Of course, then I had to figure out what to do with the tomatillos - something I've never ever before bought.

First up, I made a salad, more or less as follows:

• 1 ear of leftover corn, kernels sliced off
• 1 can of black beans, rinsed and drained
• 1/3 cup of quinoa (which cooked up to about a cup and a half)
• 10 tomatillos, cleaned and diced
• some chopped parsley
• some chopped fresh oregano
• juice of a lime
• a glug of olive oil
• smoked paprika
• salsa salad seasoning
• salt
• pepper

Toss together and eat. I had the leftovers for lunch today, and if anything, it was even better.

The next night, I made kind of a salsa, which we ate with grilled chicken and polenta:

• 20 tomatillos, cleaned
• 1 medium tomato, chopped
• a glug of olive oil
• a splash of moscatel vinegar
• a few springs of oregano, chopped
• salt
• pepper

We roasted the tomatillos until they collapsed. After they'd cooled, I buzzed them with the hand blender and stirred the rest of the ingredients in. I should have chopped the tomato up a little finer, but no matter - it was a lovely, sweet sauce.

Moral of the story? Try the tomatillos.

I Feel Better Now

Letter # 1

10 September 2010

Aristidis Zaharopoulos
Gothic Cabinet Craft
58-77 57th Street
Maspeth, NY 11378

Dear Mr. Zaharopoulos:

Last Christmas, my husband & I bought a dollhouse for our daughter. We quickly realized that we needed a table of some sort to put the dollhouse on, and after canvassing various local stores and on-line retailers, we ended up in the Gothic Cabinet Craft store in (redacted).

We wandered around the store for awhile, not finding anything that was the needed dimensions. Finally, a salesperson pointed out a piece that was sitting up high, on top of a modular wall system – not down at floor level. In fact, we never would have noticed it without the salesperson’s assistance. As it was the right dimension, we decided to order it.

The salesperson wrote up the order, we signed it and paid for it, and left the store. A couple of weeks later, my husband returned to pick up the piece – and found that it was not what we had ordered.

Yes, the piece matched the stock number on the order form – but the salesperson wrote down the wrong item number on that order form. There was no way for us to have known that the clerk made a mistake until we saw the wrong piece of furniture. Stock numbers are idiosyncratic and obscure, kind of like medical billing CPT codes. Would you recognize that your doctor wrote down the code for an angioplasty when in fact you had a cholecystectomy? Unlikely.

We protested to American Express and after much back and forth, American Express has sided with your store.

I am appalled by this. We are out nearly $400 because of an error made by YOUR SALESPERSON. I simply do not understand why our failure to recognize the salesperson’s error in the stock number should be held against us.

The salesperson’s argument that we changed our minds is just not true. We needed this, we wanted this, we thought we ordered it. We would have glad taken receipt of the item had it been the right item.

I’m not a complainer – but this situation makes my blood boil. This is heinous treatment by your company and by American Express, and if I don’t get resolution I am taking this matter to the New York Times, the Better Business Bureau, and small claims court.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

[Magpie Musing]

---

Letter #2

10 September 2010

Kenneth I. Chenault
American Express
200 Vesey Street
New York. NY 10285

Dear Mr. Chenault:

I hope you can help me. I have been a CardMember since 1987. Membership has its privileges, right?

Last Christmas, my husband & I bought a dollhouse for our daughter. We quickly realized that we needed a table of some sort to put the dollhouse on, and after canvassing various local stores and on-line retailers, we ended up in the Gothic Cabinet Craft store in (redacted).

We wandered around the store for awhile, not finding anything that was the needed dimensions. Finally, a salesperson pointed out a piece that was sitting up high, on top of a modular wall system – not down at floor level. In fact, we never would have noticed it without the salesperson’s assistance. As it was the right dimension, we decided to order it.

The salesperson wrote up the order, we signed it and paid for it, and left the store. A couple of weeks later, my husband returned to pick up the piece – and found that it was not what we had ordered.

Yes, the piece matched the stock number on the order form – but the salesperson wrote down the wrong item number on that order form. There was no way for us to have known that the clerk made a mistake until we saw the wrong piece of furniture. Stock numbers are idiosyncratic and obscure, kind of like medical billing CPT codes. Would you recognize that your doctor wrote down the code for an angioplasty when in fact you had a cholecystectomy? Unlikely.

We protested to American Express and after much back and forth, American Express has sided with Gothic Cabinet Craft.

I am appalled by this. We are out nearly $400 because of an error made by a salesperson. I simply do not understand why our failure to recognize the salesperson’s error in the stock number should be held against us.

The salesperson’s argument that we changed our minds is just not true. We needed this, we wanted this, we thought we ordered it. We would have glad taken receipt of the item had it been the right item.

I’m not a complainer – but this situation makes my blood boil. This is heinous treatment by your company and by Gothic Cabinet Craft, and if I don’t get resolution I am taking this matter to the New York Times, the Better Business Bureau, and small claims court.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

[Magpie Musing]

---

I'm on the verge of cancelling my Amex card, and I am never shopping at Gothic Cabinet Craft again. What happened to "the customer is always right?" And on second thought, maybe the title should have been "I Feel Better Now Though I'll Feel A Lot Better When I Get My Money Back". Because right this minute, I'm still out that money.

Rambling about Motherhood (without any apple pie)

I have become my mother. Or my grandmother. Or actually? The self-sacrificing ur-mother.

Yesterday's CSA pickup included five ears of corn, which we decided to have for dinner. My people were outside peeling it; when I went out to check on them, my husband announced that he'd thrown one away because of a surfeit of worms and worm slime. "Yeah, Mommy, it was gross!" concurred the six year old. I offered to take a look at it. Squeamishly, my husband extracted it from the compost bucket.

It had a little worminess at the tip and 2 or 3 spots elsewhere, nothing a paring knife and some running water wouldn't fix. So I fixed it.

And later, despite protestations - "don’t eat that, Mommy" – I ate it, divots and all. And it was just fine.

How about you? Do you eat the grisly ends and chicken necks, and give everyone else the choice bits? Or do you save the best for yourself?

(And another question: do you peel the corn, or husk it? I always say "peel" and my husband always corrects me. But "peel" is a verb, and "husk" doesn't sound like a verb to me (though I think it can be - hey look, nested parentheses!).)

[Did I put the period in the right place in that last parenthetical construction? It looks wrong, but it seems logically correct.]

{I think I'll stop with the parentheticals. Next time, I'll use footnotes, like Alejna, if I can remember how to make superscript numbers.}

Wordless Wednesday: A Canadian Rainbow

The sky in PEI is big and beautiful. We were on our way to dinner, on PEI at dusk, somewhere between Panmure Island and Murray Harbour, and this little rainbow appeared between the trees. Later, after dark, the bright moon lit up a plane's contrail - something I think I've never before seen at night.

Is Your Bunny Under Your Lion?

Remember Mastermind? That game with the little colored pegs? A logic puzzle where you have to figure out the hidden code? I used to love playing Mastermind back in, oh, junior high school, so closet geek that I am, I was secretly thrilled to find (read more)

And Summer Comes To An End

Would you not like to be in one of these inviting chairs, gin and tonic to hand, toasting the end of summer?

One Last Pair

Seeing as I whined on Twitter about the fact that I’d miscalculated how many pairs of underpants I would need for that two week vacation of ours, someone was bound to leave a comment on my “vacation by the numbers” post.

You left out how many pairs of undies. ;-)

In point of fact, I lost track. We practice a suitcase management technique called “vacation underwear” where you pack and wear all your really ratty undies – the kind that can always be worn once more, but probably shouldn’t be – and throw them out along the way. After those were gone, I moved onto my standard issue cotton bikinis, which were duly filed away into the laundry bag at day’s end. Then I realized the impending shortfall, and suffered through a couple of days of two in a row – because I just couldn’t bring myself to doing laundry at a Laundromat for three pairs of underpants, and handwashing was out of the question because they’d have never been dry. Finally, though, we got to Mecca and hit the Jockey store in Freeport – all hail discount shopping on vacation (and yes, we went to the LLBean Mothership too). And then I found One Last Pair, which actually turned out to be the final pair of vacation underwear, and thus was discarded at home when we finally got there.

All I know is that I have six new pairs, three that I like and three that I don't.

But let me ask you this: if you go away on a two week road trip, do you take two weeks worth of underpants?

Vacation by the Numbers

3301 miles

16 days on the road

15 nights away from home

11 different beds

• Boston, MA
• West Tremont, ME
• St. John, NB
• Mavilette, NS
• Halifax, NS
• Ingonish, NS
• Panmure Island, PE
• Alma, NB
• St. Andrews, NB
• Orr’s Island, ME
• Boston, MA

7 ferries (from big ones with tractor-trailers and free wifi, to tiny ones where we drove off onto the sand)

7 museums/historical sites

• Boston Museum of Science
• Wedgeport Sport Tuna Fishing Museum 
• Maritime Museum of the Atlantic
• Halifax Citadel
• Fortress of Louisbourg
• Green Gables
• Ganong Chocolate Museum

5 states (NY-CT-MA-NH-ME)

4 audiobooks in the car

• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
• The Trumpet of the Swan
• Little House on the Prairie
• Pippi Longstocking

3 provinces (NB-NS-PE)

2 lunches with bloggers (Bon and Sue), which also means two more bloggers met in person!

1 first oyster eaten by the six and ¾ year old

And

The only time we stopped for fast food in sixteen days on the road was for donuts and coffee at a Tim Horton’s one morning, just because we were in Canada and all.

Eleven Into Fifty Minus Seven Equals FOUR

Four months to go.

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

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

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

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

Guest Post #4: Any Other Name

One night during the BlogHer conference, I went out to dinner with Sarah and Emily and Niobe. At one point, Emily turned to Niobe and said "you're really smart" in a wondering, admiring tone. Niobe replied "it's one of my salient characteristics". It is indeed. I remember precisely when she found my blog. She left a comment that was so oddly provocative that I dove into SiteMeter to try and figure who she was and where she came from. IP addresses being an imperfect methodology, I got it all wrong, but eventually we did meet. In fact, she shared a hotel room with me at BlogHer, and shot the photo below out our window.

* * * * * * * *

Any Other Name

When my mother was born, her father was out of the country, stationed overseas somewhere remote and inaccessible. Which gave my mother’s mother completely free rein in naming her only daughter – a situation she took full advantage of.

My mother’s mother was a grade school English teacher whose tastes ran toward red silk kimonos festooned with dragons and silverware embellished with acanthus leaves. She spent the last days of her pregnancy reviewing Shakespeare’s plays, searching for the perfect literary reference, a name so old-fashioned and obscure that no one else would even think of using it.

And she pretty much succeeded. According to the statistics compiled by the Social Security Administration, the year my mother was born there were only about 60 other girls given that name in the entire United States.

By way of comparison, that same year saw the arrival of more than 50,000 Marys and nearly 15,000 Dorothys (not to mention 400 Dorthys, 350 Dorotheas and 150 Dorethas). Even names that sound a trifle, well, quaint, to our ears were orders of magnitude more popular than my mother’s name, as evidenced by the 4,000 Mildreds, 2500 Thelmas and 1600 Berthas.

Predictably, my mother grew up with a decided preference for the plain and unadorned -- Danish modern furniture and Ryijy rugs. And, of course, she detested her strange, recherché name.

Now, I’m sure you’re wondering: so, Niobe, what exactly was this bizarre, bookish, Elizabethan-era name, anyway?

Well, as a matter of fact, it was, um, Jessica.

Which just goes to show that it’s difficult to make predictions. Especially about the future.

Magpie will be back soon. But, in the meantime, amuse yourself by seeing how popular your name was the year you were born.

Plus, if, like me, you’re a dyed-in-the-wool name enthusiast, you absolutely must download this file, which, while rather bulky, contains the stats for every single name given to at least five babies in the US for every single year since 1880.

And, finally, how do you feel about your own name? Do you think it’s kinda meh or totally awesome?

Or, like my poor mother, do you hate it with a passion that burns like the heat of a thousand suns?

Guest Post #3: The Big Three-Nine

S. is, I think, the first blogger I ever met, like in the flesh. She came to my house one day, and sat in my living room knitting a huge beautiful dark green afghan. Her blogging has gotten seriously sporadic, but when I asked her if she wanted to guest-post, she was all over it. Maybe this will be her jump start.

* * * * * * * *

The Big Three-Nine

Like Magpie, I frontload before big birthdays. When I turned 30, 9.33 years ago, my birthday fell on a Saturday—on Shabbat, that is—and I decided to spend the two years before that milestone buying a house, getting my first post-grad-school job, and preparing for my adult bat mitzvah. I also spent a lot of the year I was 29 listening to my biological clock. I was single then, and couldn't look away from the sense of lagging behind: my mother had finished her childbearing by the time she was 30, I hadn't started. Coming to terms with that took up a lot of emotional energy that year, but that was also the year I partnered off with A.

I'm making my way through my fortieth year now, and I'm not planning on doing anything so dramatic as a bat mitzvah to mark the turn of the next decade, but I do have a bit of the same sense that I'm not where I wanted to be by the time this number was looming, mostly because it's not as easy for me to pay my bills as I thought it would be. If my 20's were about meeting the expectations of my family and social class--college, grad school, job, home, partner--my 30's have been about coming to the end of those scripts and saying "oh, shit, NOW what?"

I married, I had the kid, sure. I put down roots. I also weathered a wave of friends leaving town for jobs elsewhere, took up a career that I never expected, decided the kid was going to be the only kid (rather than the first of several), and discovered that marriage is, well, complicated. A. and I are certain of our commitment, but there have been far more twists to these first ten years together than either of us could have guessed.

The years since Z. was born have turned our connection inside out, though, and I don't think we're alone in that. It's the thing about modern marriage none of us talk about enough: we expect our marriages to be egalitarian, or at least those of us who claim feminism do. When A. and I started dating, we earned roughly the same paycheck, but as with a lot of couples, when kids come along too many things had to give all at once.

A. and I have a much clearer understanding of how we balance each other now than we had before Z., and parenting together is the core of it, but the question of financial dependence has haunted our partnership since Z. came--I feel my dependence far more than A. does, which is too her credit, but that makes my awareness that there is a price to parenting that I'm paying in independence, and A. is not. And of course, parenting together doesn't mean parenting equally. I'm paying a price in time, too, as I'm working part-time hours putting in sweat equity to a business that is thriving and growing. Sweat equity, right: I still bring home no pay at all, while A. has a secure teaching job that provides us all with health insurance. There are many things to be grateful for, but during the summer, when A. is home and taking on the primary-parent role, I realize how cramped I feel the other 10 months out of the year.

Z. is five and starting kindergarten in the Fall, so I'll have a few more hours in my week to work. Even though she's been in day care since she was six months old, this feels like a new chapter for us. I don't expect to be paying myself before I turn 40, but I'd be okay if some of the extra space of the summer stuck around.

I'm not sure where the next decade will take me--if nothing else, my 30's have hammered that point home. You never know what's around the corner. But I'm glad I'll still be following Magpie on the journey!

Guest Post #2: The 10:50 to Pittsburgh

Sarah's some kind of sibling, one of those people who you meet in adulthood and think "we were sisters in another life". There are eerie coincidences in our lives: our mothers were similar, we married a day apart and had the same lemon-buttercream-with-raspberry-filling cake, and we're both children of divorce. She's been to my house; we've communed in New York City, by phone, at BlogHer. For now, she's hung up her blogging hat - but she's still in my reader because I know that a post will pop up one day.

* * * * * * * *

The 10:50 to Pittsburgh

The train pulled away from Penn Station not long ago. It’s just rising up and out of the tunnel into August’s haze when the conductor announces that he’ll be collecting tickets shortly. His voice is so obviously weary. A black man in his seventies with a more-salt-than-pepper beard, he looks too frail to be doing this job. He should have retired by now, but I imagine that life has not treated him well enough to allow him to rest in any sort of sustained way. Other passengers must sense what I do, because they forsake mere politeness for the nervous, friendly chatter that often overtakes people visiting hospital patients. “Good morning!,” my seatmate says brightly to the conductor as he tears off the receipt from her ticket. He nods in acknowledgment but offers her nothing more. She looks disappointed. I think that she must come from a small town where there aren’t many blacks, that she may have been hoping for affirmation of her enlightened attitude towards races other than her own. She got none.

I haven’t been on a train in years. The last time I traveled by rail was when I was still a student. Those rides were heady, suffused with the energy of new relationships, amorous or otherwise, and the expectant hope and reckless candor afforded by alcohol. Once, when I was riding a different train, one heading east, not west like this one, a boy in my Poli Sci class massaged my hand for a good long while. Back then, everything was infused with eroticism, even when it wasn’t.

One of the truths of being in my forties is that I am as invisible as I care to be. This wasn’t so in my twenties, and most of the time I relish the freedom I have now to watch my fellow passengers and guess at their stories. Everyone has a story, I counseled my eight-year-old son the other day. He’d been complaining that his life wasn’t very exciting, at least not to an outsider. I added, You just haven’t discovered yours yet. He looked skeptical. So I proceeded to tell him my story of him, which of course had little to do with his story of himself. Still. His eyes widened as I talked. When I concluded my little tale, I heard him sigh with satisfaction. You made me sound interesting, he said, a smile curving one corner of his mouth. I liked that.

But it’s not a secret. Everyone’s interesting. In the row behind me sits a businessman. He’s been abusing his cell phone on this trip. He’s from Scotland, I suspect, and his accent is truly lovely. I haven’t seen his face, and I don’t think I’ll turn around to investigate its contours. It’s enough for me to listen to the music his larynx is making.

In front of me is an elderly woman, and she is perched stiffly, properly, a lady even here on a train. She smells of rosewater-scented powder. She is describing her grown children to her captive seatmate. My youngest, she confides, is the strong one. She’s the one I worry least about, she’s the one I share all the secrets with. I wonder about her youngest, who may well be close to my age. Does she mind her mother’s perception of her? Is it a burden? Does she wish sometimes that she weren’t so strong? Is she even strong, or did her mother simply assign her the role?

By now the conductor is nearing the back end of the car I’m riding. I’d like to make my way over to him, place my hand on his arm, offer him my seat, tell him that I’ll walk up and down the aisles collecting people’s tickets, and their stories, too, add that I’ll come back to him, after, and place all the stories in his lap for his perusal, once he’s napped awhile.

And when he’s good and ready, I’ll collect his story, and I’ll take all its adjectives of hurt and verbs of pain and punch holes in them until each incident, each wrong he may have experienced, is no more to him than the paper confetti so insubstantial that I don’t mind leaving it scattered about on the floor of the Pennsylvanian #43 bound for Pittsburgh.

Six Bits

It's my father's 75th birthday. Here he is as a young 'un, with the smallest fish ever photographed. Happy birthday, Pop - even though you don't even own a computer.

Guest Post #1: In The Dark

I think Teresa found me first, found me through Jo(e). One day a comment from "YourFireAnt" turned up on my blog. Your Fire Ant? I still don't know what that means. Teresa's a poet, who blogs in fits and starts. And she's been naked on the intertubes in a post in which Jo(e) monikered her as "Often Erotic Sometimes Blogging Friend". Teresa and I have had lunch, fully clothed, a couple of times. The last time we had lunch, I sent her north to Madison Square Park, camera in hand, to see the naked bronze men.

* * * * * * * *

[After walking through Madison Square last month with its dozens of naked man sculptures and thinking about a recent post wherein Magpie said that everyone pretty much looks the same when naked, I resurrected a favorite fantasy.]

In the dark

I’ve often wished there was a class in blindfold sculpture of the human body. Don’t you think it’d be fun working the clay in bandanna-ed darkness, running your hands over the bare flesh of the model ? Imagine him shivering on his dais, one leg crossed over the other, trying for a pose without the artist’s direction, his skin, horripilated, sheened with sweat.

I imagine smacking clay into a mound I can work with and needing to touch the model’s flesh to see. To find the way into the piece I envision. My voluntary blindness, my carelessly placed hands on his bare thighs causing a shiver, his skin sprouting little bumps all over as he squirmed into a less vulnerable position. His closed body, my groping hands in the reddened darkness of a silk hood I’ve pulled over my head. Dropping into a crouch I pry his thighs apart to find the crevices and dips in flesh alive with movement, opening each hand, finger by finger, I move closer, breathe him in.

Then, a tea break. Hot cranberry and ginger to warm up so I can put my hands on him without so much jumping and startling. I rinse them in tepid water, dry them on a towel, then reach up and braille the fine half circles, dents, and curves, curling rounded shapes and tufts of hair, the secret bumps and softnesses of his face. A gentle hand to round off edges, reaching to grasp each ear and tug a little, humming as I work him over, memorizing as I go lower…. to jaw and throat, out-jutting adam’s apple, clavicles, one in each hand, pinched between thumb and index finger . . . . a meditation on how sound gets into bones.

Could I translate all this to a mound of clay? Turn warm sweaty hairy, flesh into something of what I had in mind? Or would I need to sing? I’ve noticed singing sometimes relaxes, easing an awkward situation, helps the work go smoothly. If I got him to sing a duet with me, he might not cringe away from my gritty fingers every time I touch him. If only the clay wasn’t so cold. or the warmth from a hot mug lasted longer.

What if I took my own clothes off? Distract him from the icy seeking hands frisking his inner thighs and down behind his knees, my nosy hands that so delight in finding out what makes this guy tick. I could place his hands in the mud too, let him touch himself to see how I’ve translated him.

We could both be blindfolded. Neither one of us knowing the exact moment of impact of cold snaking fingers on naked skin, both suspended in an agony of anticipation. I could work with him standing, me working my way up from the delicate cords running from each toe, bony ankles, on up the muscle-y calves, the almost-sharp shin bones, knob of knees with their mysterious moving plates, the cartilaginous clicks and pops, and softer widening-out of thighs, flare of hip, bones like clenched fists turning this way and that. And then another break. To rinse my hands in hot water before reaching around to grip a handful of each buttock, hear his yelp. Surprise at the little stabs of fingernail into flesh, then quick upward slide along his spine, and then hands off while I go over to the hotplate and turn off the heat.

Later on, after tea and a sandwich or peach, maybe some dusky merlot, we go back into the dark. My hands are warm from the mug, from running them over bare flesh, I’m down on the floor in a half squat for one more exploration before getting on with the work of shaping clay and making it stand on its own.

Taking his hand, I lead him to the table, where he stands with arms outstretched as if conducting a symphony, [or maybe just hanging at his sides]. The light’s off as we are both in hoods now, neither one quite knowing what will happen next. I plunge my hands into a bucket of rinse water and run them over the clay pile, punching in, squeezing hard in places. Mud splatters and runs down my front, the sounds in the room exquisitely clear--water slosh, little sighs and breathing, knock of ancient radiator, old floorboard creak, the wind outside tall windows, now and then a slap against flank sound that reminds me of horseback riding.

Gradually my fingers stiffen till I can barely work the cold clay and I ache to touch warm flesh again. It’s all I want at this moment, in the darkness where I am poised between the thing I make and the heat of human contact. I reach toward the comfort of his body, at the same time itching to take my own life in my hands. To make a living work of art, a thing of beauty bigger than myself, something I can leave behind in the room, that I’ve created in hundreds of afternoons and evenings laboring in the dark, never quite knowing what will come of it, if anyone else will ever see what I see in the dark.

Guest Posters

I have succumbed to the venerable tradition of coercing friends into blog sitting whilst I am on vacation, and so, over the next couple of weeks, there will be a handful of posts by others. All of them are by women, all of them are women I have met in person, all of them are women who I wouldn't have met if not for blogging, each of them is wicked smart, and they all have blogs in various states of dormancy.

Enjoy!

And see you in a couple of weeks.

Cranky About Chase Again

Remember how ornery I got back in December when Chase launched that Community Giving contest on Facebook?

Well, last month I got all cranky again. I opened my New York Times on Thursday, July 29, 2010 and found a full page ad from Chase, congratulating all thirteen winners from New York State. Seeing as I live in New York State, I work in not-for-profit, and I’d never heard of any of them, I decided to do a little poking around. This wasn’t the original contest; this was Chase’s second round – open only to small non-profits with annual operating expenses of under $1,000,000.

From Chase's Facebook page:

2.5 million people came together to give back in a big way!
Thank you for being part of the second Chase Community Giving! Because of what we did, 200 local charities will share in $5 million of donations!
By voting, inviting friends, and sharing your enthusiasm, you've helped communities all across the country! Together, we've shown the world what two and a half million people can do when they unite to do something amazing.
With a new focus on charities that serve their local communities, Chase Community Giving came back strong for Summer 2010. With another $5 million in donations, we're helping over 200 charities. 195 charities are receiving $20,000 each and four runners-up are receiving $100,000 each. The winning charity, HP Alliance of Somerville, MA is receiving $250,000. On top of that, the charities selected by our Advisory Board in the coming weeks will split an additional $500,000.
Chase Community Giving will be back soon. Keep coming back so we can do it again!

Out of pique, I made a spreadsheet of all of the 13 NYS winners, each of which got $20,000. The chart here shows how many votes each organization got, along with the expenses reported on their last tax return (and the date of the last tax return). [I got the tax returns, a/k/a 990s, via Guidestar - a great resource for information about charities and foundations. Guidestar gets the 990s directly from the IRS.]

Note that two organizations have not been filing tax returns - and therefore, because there's no return posted to Guidestar, there's no way to check the expense size of the organization. Of the 11 remaining that have been filing, four have reported expenses of under $100,000 - and one of those shows an expense budget of $17,853 - or less than the $20,000 Chase grant. That means that only seven out of thirteen have an expense budget in excess of $100,000. A $20,000 grant to an organization with annual operating expenses of under $100,000 is a distortion, and it's not sustainable - what are they going to do when they don't get that $20,000 next year?

Remember what I said in December?

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.

I'm not making judgments as to the worthiness of any of the winners - they may well be doing great work. But there's no evaluation as to fiscal responsibility or organizational stability, good governance and sound management. All they've proven is that they're good at getting their "friends" to vote for them on Facebook.

Ode To Forgetfullness

One thing led to another, and there I was at the Museum of Modern Art, entranced in front of a wall of fabric panels, pages from a book by Louise Bourgeois. A book! A fabric book! And by Louise Bourgeois - the spider lady! Made from bits and pieces of her clothes, her linens, the embroidered napkins she received as wedding presents. Each panel with a line of button-holes along the left margin, where straps thread through to bind the pages of the book.

It's silly to walk into MoMA and say "I can do that" - because I can't. But quilting, incorporating bits of this dress and that shirt into a new object, isn't far off. Bourgeois put together her fabric scraps into a textured, sculptural, graphic book - I can capture my memories otherly. But the book? That book inspired lust.

---

If you'd like to see more pictures of it, the Peter Blum gallery has a slideshow of all the pages - and as you click through, you see the facing page, i.e. the back of the preceding page, where the stitching shows through. A blog post by Joanne Mattera has some other photos, including details of the binding edge.

BlogHer: The Stuff

In between hanging out with the people, you wander around and collect stuff, more stuff than anyone needs.

I recycled a fair amount of stuff in the very excellent swag swap room, or I just didn't pick it up in the first place. I re-packed one of the (many) tote bags with a whole mess of stuff to give to my sister-in-law who had gotten me an awesome room at a cheaper rate than the Hilton, in a hotel far swankier than the Hilton (and with better elevators). But I carried enough stuff home to feel like I needed a sherpa.

Stuff that mystified me:
• An 8 ounce sample of interior latex eggshell paint from Martha Stewart, in "sultana". I mean, if I were thinking of painting something in my house, a sample size container of paint could be useful for color testing, but I'd like to choose the color myself. I think they'd have been better off handing out coupons for a free sample - paint's kind of idiosyncratic, in a way that dish detergent isn't.

Stuff that I loved:
• The paper punches from Martha Stewart - something that I'll love playing with and would never in a million years actually buy.

Stuff that my kid loved:
• The flashing ring.
• The HexBug and its corral.
• The pile of blank books.

Stuff that Niobe loved:
• The Demeter Play-Doh perfume.

Stuff that I totally needed:
• A box of tampons, because I was bleeding like a stuck pig, though I don't really understand why they need to be pH correcting - should I have been listening to the sales rep?
• More moisturizer with sunscreen because one can never have too much of a good thing.

Stuff that my kid will love when I surprise her with it later this week:
• The Nintendo DSi XL from the Brand About Town party.

Stuff that my husband loved:
• The box of chocolate covered mint oreos that he ate in one sitting.

Stuff that kind of irritated me:
• The iPhone charging receiver dock that doesn't work unless you have the PowerMat to go with it. Granted, I probably shouldn't have the dock thing anyway, because I inadvertently crashed a party and didn't get the swag bag which allegedly had the PowerMat in it because I wasn't on the list, but in my defense, there were two parties going on in the same general suite and I was invited to the other. How was I to know which was which?

Stuff that absolutely nobody needs:
• Mouse pads shaped like detergent bottles and alarm clocks with sausage on the dial.

Stuff that's going in the so-called gift closet for later this year (i.e. Christmas):
• I'm not telling, because my sister reads my blog.

BlogHer: The People

It's what it's all about. The people. The people you've met before and can't wait to catch up with, like Sarah and Nora and Gwen and Niobe and Debbie and Amanda.

And Marinka and Julie and Emma and Becky and Jessica and Stimey and Aurelia and Cecily and Lori and another Jessica.

And people you've never met in person, like Alejna (who's just as I expected) and Gina (who told me she'd just found out she was pregnant) and Maggie (who has excellently spiky hair) and Stacey (and her entrancing red-headed baby).

And people you'd never even heard of before - but you shared cabs with them, and wandered around at MoMA with them, and swapped cards with them, and talked CSAs with them, and let them take your picture (even though your bra strap was showing).

And that's what it's all about. The people.

Beware of All Enterprises That Require New Clothes

I had lunch today with my friend Martha. We met at the falafel shop, we walked to the park, we sat knee to knee on chairs without a table in between, we ate our falafel, she dribbled hot sauce on her white pants, and after awhile I said "Martha! Did you notice that I dyed my hair?"

And she looked straight at me and said "what?"

So I turned my head and she gasped.

Considering that it's cobalt blue, it's pretty subtle.

If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes.

I haven't painted my toenails, I haven't waxed my legs, I haven't invested in eye shadow, I haven't bought new clothes, and I certainly haven't bought a girdle. But I did dye my hair for BlogHer.

Would Thoreau approve?

On Visiting New York

Tourists walk three abreast, really slowly, clogging up the sidewalks.

New Yorkers walk really fast.

Tourists wear shorts and fanny packs and white sneakers, and carry maps.

New Yorkers don’t.

Tourists swipe their Metrocards slowly and deliberately.

New Yorkers know you need to swipe them fast, so you don’t break stride going through the turnstile.

Tourists call it Avenue of the Americas.

New Yorkers know that it’s just Sixth Avenue.

If you’re coming to NY for BlogHer, remember that 20 north-south blocks is about a mile, in other words, a distance you can walk. Taxis take credit cards and you hail them on the street, but they’re expensive. The Hilton is located in midtown, which is boring boring boring. Go down to the Union Square area for the Greenmarket on Saturday morning, or wander around Madison Square Park to see the naked bronze sculptures, poised on the edges of buildings as if to jump. Or head way west, to 20th Street and Tenth Avenue and walk south down the High Line. If you want to see the City from the water, do a round trip on the Staten Island Ferry – it’s free, in both directions, though you do have to get off one ferry and back onto the next. And don’t forget about Central Park – it’s walking distance from the Hilton and there are snow leopards at the zoo there.

I am going to be at BlogHer, but because I waffled about where to sleep - at the Hilton? at a friend's Chelsea apartment? at home more than an hour away? - I'm not staying at the Hilton, but at another fine hotel more or less nearby. So, if you'll be there, and want to find me, DM me on Twitter, or email me for my cell phone number. See you later this week?

Edited to add two things:
1) Read the comments - there are some good tips and suggestions.
2) I have a blue streak in my hair. Cobalt blue. In case you're looking for me.

Sending You Elsewhere

oh hi.

julochka, she of moments of perfect clarity, claims to have run out of ideas for blog posts - which i find hard to believe because she is divinely creative in many different ways, but i digress - so she's been interviewing her readers, of whom i am one. said interview is up today, if you'd like to read it.

when you're done finding out what my favorite wii game is, come back and tell me if you recognized this post's homage to julochka.

Eleven Into Fifty Minus Six Equals FIVE

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

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

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

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

She Loves Me

I came upstairs the other night, to find my bedroom door closed (an unusual occurrence, we never close the doors), and a note taped (well, Post-It flagged) to it. The first note (on the left) referred me to the second note, which was lying on the floor, tucked up against the door sill.

Of course I love you, sweetie, of course I'll write back.

There is nothing like getting mash notes from a six year old.

And yes, she was asleep in my bed.

Car Wash

Once upon a time, my husband worked for a construction company. One summer, they renovated all of the dressing rooms and back stage areas at a big non-profit theater, including the installation of fancy Toto toilets with washlet seats - you know, only the best. The job was ending just as a new production was moving in to begin previews. As there always are, a few punch list items had to be finished, even after the actors were in the dressing rooms. One of my husband's co-workers went up to the theater to install a handful of toilet paper holders. He knocked on the star's dressing room, and was greeted by the A-list actor in his Falstaff fat suit. "Hi, I'm here to install the missing toilet paper holder in your bathroom." The reply, in a fine Shakespearian bellow: "What the hell do I need toilet paper for? I've got a car wash for my ass!"


(With thanks to Vodka Mom, who reminded me of this story.)

This Is Not A Post

It's Friday, and my brain has turned to mush and is dribbling out my ears. Oh, and I have too much work to do.

So.

1) I'm guest posting at Gwen's, so go check out my riff on naked (what can I say? she assigned a topic).

And.

2) I dug up a video of people dancing in the Grand Central windows - more of a documentary, but you get the idea. I sent it to De last night; her reply this morning was "Thank you. My heart is bubbling over with joy into my brain. What a good way to start the day." It's cool. Watch.



Oh, and have a lovely perfect summery relaxing weekend, and let your heart bubble into your brain, instead of your brains out your ears.

Hidden in Plain Sight

When you walk through Grand Central Terminal and look up to the east or west, you see these huge windows. Really huge - they're about four stories tall. And you're awestruck at how big they are, and how the light comes through them just so, and how you can actually see buildings on the other side. It's marvelous, really, something to marvel at.

But if you're very very lucky, you know someone who can take you up and inside those windows. Because they aren't just big windows, they're double windows, with catwalks inside. And there are five separate catwalks in each of the two big windows, like five hallways traversing them, with glass floors and an intricate old mechanical system for opening the windows. They do, the windows open!



It's not for the faint of heart, or the acrophobic, but it is awesomely cool to get that bird's eye view of the commuters scurrying about in their unchoreographed yet oh so precise dance.

What Is It? Wednesday

(With apologies to Janet, from whom I filched the What is it Wednesday idea.)

Belief

You know that I'm an atheist, right? Yes, I believe there is no god. Parse that. Note that I didn't say "I don't believe in god", because that implies that there is a god that someone else believes in.

My sister, well-intentioned, gave me - for our good pagan Christmas celebration - a Flying Spaghetti Monster to stick on my car. It's still hanging on the fridge in its protective plastic wrapper.

Julie of The Mom Slant is an atheist too. Julie's husband has an FSM on the back of his car, and she thinks it's "the only one in town". But I haven't yet put mine on my car, because it ever so slightly rubs me the wrong way. I realize that it's parody, but it cuts a little too close to home. If I believe that there is no god, how can I believe that there's a Flying Spaghetti Monster?

Shooting From The Hip: Blue & White

I should have counted. On the train home yesterday, it seemed like every other person - male and female - was wearing a blue and white checked shirt. Or blue and white plaid. With a couple of blue and white striped shirts for good measure. Thin stripes, pale blues, vibrant checks, navy blues. A sea of blue and white.



It's like someone decided it was the summer uniform, and everyone complied.

RIP, even though I hate the Yankees

Yeah, whatever. I hate the Yankees. For several reasons: hubris on the part of the Yankees, a deep and abiding love of the underdog Mets, and the DH. I mean, come on, what is that business of the designated hitter and the pitcher not going to bat? I hate all American League teams, just because the pitchers are wusses.

Anyway, we were sitting there at the breakfast table yesterday, reading the New York Times as we are wont to do, and discussing the fact that George Steinbrenner was dead. The girlie looked up from her cereal at this photo, spread out in front of her, and said, "is that him in his box?"



Meaning, is that a picture of him dead in his coffin? Coffee came out my nose, despite the fact that it was a completely logical question what with the brown background and the hand placed just so.

More Posts I'm Never Going To Write

• The one about the ecological superiority of living in a small house.
• The one about (ditto) having only one child.
• The one about raising a gender neutral child.
• The one about "Baby X".
• The one about keeping a kid's gender a secret.
• The one about how irritated I am by sweeping generalities about "girls" and "boys" and what "girls" do and what "boys" do.

More About That Swim Team Stuff

After her somewhat less than stellar performance in that first swim meet, which was the "B" team, the takes-all-comers team, not the team that counts towards points in the regional standings, we got an email that her times were good enough to move her onto the real team, the "A" team. Go figure. She's competing in the six and under group.

So off she went to practice, and I got the following text from my husband:

I just looked up from my reading and there she went, diving (plunging really) off the starting platform and swimming a very respectable 25m for a small fry.

The swimming team business is surreal and sublimely entertaining.

Posts I Am Never Going To Write (Though I Reserve The Right To Change My Mind)

• The one about hospice.
• The one about the paradox of death.
• The one about hospice in jail.
• The one about palliative care.

Can you tell that death is on my mind? It has been, ever since my mother was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. I think about her death, which was as "good" a death as they come - at home, with two of her three children at her side (the third would have been there but for the fact that he'd had a baby 14 hours earlier).

I started a post about hospice a long time ago, mostly because I'd come across a paragraph about hospice workers in a comic novel called A Dirty Job, a paragraph that kind of flattened me:

"He turned to see a big, thirtyish woman in scrubs: another hospice worker - another of the amazing women that Charlie had seen in the homes of the dying, helping to deliver them into the next world with as much comfort and dignity and even joy as they could gather - benevolent Valkyries, midwives of the final light, they were - and as Charlie watched them at work, he saw that rather than become detached from, or callous to their job, they because involved with every patient and every family. They were present. He'd seen them grieve with a hundred different families, taking part in an intensity of emotion that most people would feel only a few times in their lives."

Benevolent Valkyries indeed.

Let me just say this: hospice is a good thing, a very good thing. It gives grace to death.

Cherry Quilt

I love that someone at the Greenmarket took the time to arrange many pints of three different kinds of cherries into a table top quilt. I didn't buy any of those particular cherries, but I did buy two quarts of sour cherries. I'll use one quart for a pie this weekend, and I'll pit and freeze the other quart for a pie in January when it will be an oh so happy reminder of summer.

What kind of pie are you going to make tomorrow?

Trophies!

The six year old was in her first swim meet yesterday. She wasn't even supposed to be on the swim team, but the "pre-team" practices are in the morning when she's at camp, so she kind of ended up on the team by default. She was a little nervous beforehand, "I don't want to lose, Mama", but she persevered and swam three races - two freestyle and one backstroke. If you look very very closely, you may be able to see that she received two sixth place ribbons, and one for fifth place. She was beyond delighted with her "prizes", and I am tickled at her delight because coming in sixth means, um, she came in last in the two freestyle races.

My husband, who was roped into timing, said that the child who finished last in the backstroke - that is, after our little fifth place girl - went off course, veering across the pool and under two lane markers, to finish the race two lanes over from where she'd began. If I'd been the one timing, I think I'd have been laughing too hard to click the button at the right moment. I guess that's why I have a desk job.

Twenty twenty Olympics? Here we come!

Accuracy At All Times

I have trouble with language sometimes - I'm too precise or it is or we both are but at cross purposes. How do I refer to my husband, who happens to be the father of my child? "We" means her daddy and I, or, my husband and I, or really both of those things. If I call him her Daddy, it sounds like we're not married; but if I refer to him as my husband, it can sound as though she's not his child. So complicated, this language of ours.

An Afternoon on An Island

Pro: It is salt water.
Con: It's not the ocean.

Pro: It's pretty close to home.
Con: The sand is coarse and rocky.

Pro: You get to take a tiny little ferry to get there!
Con: Beach pass, plus ferry ticket, plus parking adds up.

Pro: It's an island! The child can't get lost.

Over all, and even though it's not the ocean, we had a great afternoon at Island Beach - a tiny little public island park in Long Island Sound off Greenwich, Connecticut. It's totally charming, the girl loved building moats and sand castles with similarly sized strangers, and I'd go back in a minute. Hat tip to my next door neighbors; I'd never heard of it until two days ago.

Happy Fourth Of July!

Hoarders

In the summer, we always eat outside, unless it's raining. One day last week, I was out on the deck drinking my morning coffee in my bathrobe, when I heard the unmistakable sound of a large truck backing up. From around the corner of the house, we saw a dumpster backing gingerly down the neighbor's driveway. I thought, maybe they're doing some construction, or a new roof.

This particular neighbor has lived in his house for a long long time, and he's kind of a odd ball. He blows his leaves and snow blows his driveway at night, in the dark - not because he has a day job, he doesn't, but because he's a night owl. He spends hours moving boxes and traffic cones from one side of his garage to the other. While I've been in his house, an ordinary enough house, I've never been in his basement, which he once described to me as Collyer-Brothers-like. I can believe it, based on what I've seen in his garage.

Two mornings after the dumpster drop, I heard the truck backing down the driveway again. The now full 20 yard container disappeared - and was replaced with an empty one. Days later, it seems full again. Periodically we hear something clang in, though mostly all I can see are cardboard boxes. No construction work is happening. But occasionally, I see the neighbor out there pulling things back out of the dumpster. And then his wife or one of his grown children comes out, and gently escorts him back in to the house.

To all appearances, the wife and children are staging a hoarder's intervention. I'm torn between sadness, pity and desperate curiosity as to what the hell is in those dumpsters.