Popeye

One of my mother's go to vegetable side dishes was spinach with onions and sour cream. It wasn't a fancy dish, but rather something that could go alongside a meatloaf or a pork chop on a weeknight. She'd take a block of frozen chopped spinach, out of one of those waxed paper boxes, sprinkle it with dehydrated minced onions and steam it in one of the Revere Ware skillets she'd gotten as a wedding present. Just before serving, she'd stir in a big blob of sour cream. It was delicious - sort of like a tangy creamed spinach.

The other night, I was rooting around in the freezer looking for something green to go with a pork chop - it being that time of year when fresh greens are an occasional proposition - though the greenmarkets are starting to burst. Happily, I found a package of blanched spinach, from the CSA greens glut last fall. We had onions, we had the tail end of a container of sour cream, and I decided to reinvent my mother's old standby.

Spinach and Onions with Sour Cream
1 onion
2 T. butter
a pinch of cayenne
1/2 t. salt
1 package of spinach (fresh or frozen)
1/3 cup sour cream

Peel and trim the onion. Cut in half, vertically. Cut sides down, slice into little half moons about 1/8" thick. Melt the butter in a pan with a lid. Add the onions and a tablespoon or two of water. Cover and cook slowly, until the onions are tender, melted, not brown. Add spinach, cayenne and salt. Cover the pot and cook until heated through. Take off the lid - if there seems to be too much liquid, turn up the heat and boil some of it off. Off heat, stir in the sour cream. It's not beautiful, but it's awfully tasty.

The Salt Course

Is it Teacher Appreciation Day in your neck of the woods? It is here, and once again, the PTA at my child's school held a lunch to, you know, appreciate the teachers. A few weeks ago, they sent out an email soliciting parents to cook - but as before, this was no ordinary pot luck, oh no, you had to cook exactly what you were assigned to cook.

I had a choice of chicken or cookies; I picked cookies not realizing that the recipe was going to require 8 ounces of bittersweet chocolate and that they'd have to be rolled into sticky, oily black balls, then dipped in granulated sugar and then dipped in powdered sugar. The chicken would have been easier.

When the recipe arrived by email, it was accompanied by a thoroughly compulsive set of instructions, including the following:

Attached is the recipe. Please follow it EXACTLY as it is written. All of the cookies will be combined so they must taste the same.

I would like to confess to you, dear readers, that I substituted dark brown sugar for the light brown that was in the recipe, I used 2% milk instead of whole, and I melted the chocolate in the microwave instead of over a pan of boiling water. But I was happiest about using coarse salt in place of the course salt that was called for. Because I'm evil that way.

On The Bedposts of A Dilemma

It's Goon Squad Sarah's fault that I'm telling you this and it's probably in the category of "no one cares what you had for lunch", but I don't make my bed.

Really. It's just going to get messed up again, day in and day out. We long ago gave up on blankets and top sheets and bedspreads; we just use a down comforter and a fitted bottom sheet. And lots of pillows, most for me. You could argue that there's not much to do to shake out the duvet, but I just can't be bothered.

But I hear my mother's voice in the back of my head - did you make your bed? She always made her bed, she always nagged us children to do so, and I wonder - should I be teaching my child to make her bed? Encouraging her? Nagging her?

It's the tiniest of dilemmas.

Spring or Fall?

In the fall, everyone goes on about the autumn leaves, the gaudy reds and fiery oranges, the blazing hillsides. But it’s coarse, and it presages death – that ferocious color a last gasp before the end.

But spring! Spring is a far subtler beauty, all pastel and fluff. The yellowy green of the early willow. White flowers on the callery pears, as white as snow. The nascent pink swellings on the maples and the redbuds. A chalkier green here, a ruddier bud there. Great swaths of exuberant forsythia, harbingers! Summer is coming – the leaves will fill out, the flowers will bloom, the fruit will set, and the tomatoes will be everywhere.

Which do you prefer? Spring or fall?

Sharing

I love the idea of a hydroponic garden in my house, though I don't think I'll actually do it, given that we've got a CSA and multiple farmer's markets supplying our vegetable needs. But still:

Window Farms

I am very glad I don't work for a Koch brothers company, and I'm even happier about the fact that we prefer Scott toilet paper around here:

Big Brothers: Thought Control at Koch

I wish Matt Taibbi wrote his banker eviscerations for the New Yorker, but since he doesn't, I might have to buy a subscription to Rolling Stone:

The Real Housewives of Wall Street

Apparently, the State Department thinks that they might want to know things like the circumstances of one's birth (and names of people present) and one's every residence from birth to present in order to issue a passport - at least according to a proposed new biographical questionnaire:

State Department Biographical Questionnaire Proposal

I kind of want a kidney-shaped wooden phone. Or maybe I just want a marimba running down my backyard hill:

Touch Wood

Damned Squirrels

Heidi loves crack plants. They show such tenacity.



I'm mystified about how this squill ended up alongside the house, tucked under the sill of the sliding glass door. Oh, I'm sure it was squirrels or chipmunks or some other varmint, but I don't know where the squill came from in the first place. There isn't any anywhere nearby.

Delicate Steve has Rheumatoid Alzheimer's

Is your in-box full of pitches for products and public service announcements?

• I am contacting you today on behalf of the Arthritis Foundation, asking you to spread awareness to your readers about rheumatoid arthritis to help facilitate early diagnosis and treatment.
• Today is the long-awaited release date for the Blu-ray and DVD of The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
• I wanted to update you on what the Power Rangers have been up to lately.
• We'd love your help in getting the word out on Magpie Musing about the important information in Generation Alzheimer's, so we can make sure the public understands what can be done to conquer this devastating disease.
• Have you ever considered buying all of the moms in your life the amazing Vizit frame?
• You probably already know that college students often engage in risky behaviors and gambling can be one of them. With the NCAA Basketball Tournament well underway, this is the right time to raise awareness about gambling on college campuses.
• The reason I´m writing to you is to inform you about a matter that I believe and hope will interest you and your readers. Today, in the year 2011, the struggle for equality has come a long way. But there are still many women-related taboos in our societies. One of these is menstruation.
• I'm contacting you today on behalf of Mount Sinai Medical Center, to introduce you to Dr. Eva Dubin's state of the art Dubin Breast Center in New York City and invite you to take a tour.

Mine is, and I usually just delete delete delete, except when I pause to wonder what list I ended up on that someone might think my blog was a good venue for a discussion of gambling on college basketball.

But here's the thing - if I were going to tell my readers all about rheumatoid Alzheimer's, wouldn't you think I'd want to learn something about the Vizit frame, so that I could understand why I was visiting a breast center in search of the Dawn Treader?

Yeah, right.

I was thinking about the whole blog/advertising/PR nexus, which I'm not going to get into because plenty of other people have done it. But look at it this way. If I'm a publicist sending out a press release to the Times to announce a performance season by a small dance company, do I expect them to run my release as is? No, of course not. I expect them to put it in some kind of context that means something to their editorial staff. Or, more likely, ignore it all together, unless the listings are thin that week. And if I'm lucky enough to get a review, the reviewer's just going to say what the reviewer's going to say, press release or no press release.

The reason I was thinking about this was because I happened upon an NPR story last week, a story about a band and a press release - a press release that turned out to be a bunch of fake bios and a big dose of loopiness: "The critics unilaterally concur: Delicate Steve is a band who creates music." This essentially fictional release got picked up, whole cloth, no questions asked, by venues where the band was performing and writers who cover the music business. It's a real band - Delicate Steve - but the record label's take was that the band's lyric-free music was kind of esoteric and they wanted "music writers to pay attention". So they hired Chuck Klosterman, and had him write whatever the hell he wanted:

"You mean I don't have to talk to the band or listen to the record? That's AWESOME! OK, I'll do it!"

When NPR interviewed him about the release, Klosterman said:

"The whole idea of public relations is to stop journalism. It's to basically give journalists an opportunity to write something without really asking any critical questions or investigating at all. It's really antithetical to journalism...One person asked me, 'Will you feel bad if someone goes to this show or buys this record based on the fact that you wrote this fictional piece? And then you're kind of ripping them off in a way.' I'll be honest — I don't feel bad. Because to me, I've probably helped that person to learn that you should not make consumer decisions based on some random media message that someone just fabricated for no reason. And I'm just not talking about my press release, I'm kind of talking about all press releases."

Hear that? Press releases are antithetical to journalism. Don't make decisions based on press releases, don't reprint them word for word. Stand on your own feet, use your own cognitive powers to know what you're getting yourself into. And don't believe everything you read. And apply all that to the blog world as well as old-school and on-line media.

Easter Monday

What has happened to egg dye? I didn't use food color, I didn't buy some off-brand dye; I bought a Paas dye kit, the kind I always buy.

On Saturday, we dyed 2 dozen (well, minus the one that burst out white stuff in the boiling). They were tidy and clean and solid shades of fuchsia and turquoise and sunshine and lavender, except for the few that we attempted to turn Lithuanian with melted wax and crayon. No stickers. No plastic "egg wraps". Nothing fancy. We stored them back in their cartons until the Easter bunny could have at them.

Yesterday morning, said Easter bunny hid them 'round the lawn and the girl went hunting. And when she was done finding 22 of the 23 eggs, we spread out them out so we could admire them and I was perplexed and disappointed because the dew had made the eggs all mottled, speckled and smeary and the damp dye was coming off on our fingers. Is nothing what it used to be?

Next year, no artificial colors. I'm wrapping them in onion skins.

Oh, and not to worry. We found the 23rd egg and it won't turn up putrid in July.

B Kind 2 Earth Day

Yesterday, we made little pots out of strips of newspaper.

Yesterday, we filled them with potting soil.

Yesterday, we planted sunflower seeds in our little homemade pots.

Today, we will be kind to the earth.

Tomorrow, we will plant our sunflowers, so that they may grow nine feet tall and grace our garden with their yellow faces and provide seeds for the birds next fall.

What will you do?

Extra Pizza Fun

Remember how I said that the pizza came in a box with dry ice? That was totally fun, because, well, dry ice!

After unpacking the pizza, we dumped the dry ice in a big flower pot saucer and added water. Instant ground fog! Hours of entertainment!



And the next morning, because we still had some dry ice left, Daddy carried a galvanized pail of fog up to the bus stop, to the amusement of children and parents alike.

We know how to have a good time.

---

(If you actually watched the video, and are now wondering why she wanted to add vinegar, you'll have to go back to my Fun With Science For Susan post, in which we experimented with vinegar and baking soda. The kid loves vinegar. When we serve her cucumber spears for dinner, we give her a shot glass of vinegar on the side. After she's done dipping the cucumber in it, she drinks the remaining vinegar. Go figure.)

Spontaneity

It was maybe a little like Wednesday Spaghetti, writ small and on Monday. Alejna was visiting relatives not too far from my house, and came over at almost the spur of the moment, for pasta and brownies on Monday night.

After dinner, the happy dressed-up children (one of mine, two of hers) were a whirling heap of color and tulle:



In an oasis of calm on the other side of the room, Alejna was trying to take their picture:



Chaos, spontaneity, friends. And a good reason to have homemade tomato sauce in jars in the cellar.

I think it's time for another potluck. You'll all come, right?

Instant Dinner

For years, I've seen Dr. Oetker products in the baking and dessert aisles at the supermarket - glazes, flavorings, puddings. But until The Motherhood asked me to participate in a Valentine's Day chat, I had no idea that they made frozen pizza. But they do! (read more)

Guitar Types

So, in a fit of madness, or (thinks my husband) subconscious evil (because she has the week off and I'm at work all day), I bought the girl a Paper Jamz guitar yesterday. I honestly don't know what possessed me, but lordy me - it ranks right up there in the annoying toy pantheon, and the child loves loves loves it. We have heard the chorus of One Way or Another so many times that I think I'm in college again.

Because I categorically refused to put the batteries into it in the Target parking lot, she was forced to read the packaging in the car on the way home. From the backseat I heard "there's a regular one, and a rock band one, and the one I have, and a vee-shaped one and one shaped like a dress and one shaped like Batman's head."



I'm thinking there's a market for a guitar shaped like Batman's head. Or does one already exist?

Reading Hither and Yon

I like books. I like newspapers, I like magazines. I like turning pages, and how the magazine doesn't wake you up when it hits the floor, and how you don't need to worry about running out of batteries. I like ripping scraps out of the Times while I'm on the train in the morning; just this week I did that to remind me to put The Coffins of Little Hope on my Amazon wishlist (which I use as one of several "books to read" lists).

But I see the utility in electronic books, really I do. I've had an iPad since Christmas, and I kind of love having the ability to download the beginning of almost any book. Of course, after I read the beginning of The Emperor of All Maladies, I took the book out of the library instead of paying $14.99 to get the rest of the ebook, but that's not really the point. Or is it?

So far, the only ebook I've paid for was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I bought it before I went out to Seattle a few weeks ago, knowing that I'd need something diverting to read, and wanting to keep my baggage at a bare minimum. It's a book that I wasn't sure I'd like - besides my general avoidance of anything that hits the top of the best seller lists, I was expecting to be put off by the myriad acts of violence against women, but it turned out to be an engaging page turner, and the bad guys got taken care of.

It was an interesting experience, reading that book that way. On the one hand, I used the highlight and note features to flag particularly annoying words and phrases. Like "anon" - used three times. Once, okay. But using an archaic word three times, when "soon" would have done? Feh. And "a real smack in the nose" and "moved like a scalded cat" - contextually awkward turns of phrase. I also flagged bits that I liked, like "Norsjö Snickerifabrik", and "here she was, hunting a madman out in the back of beyond". So that was nice - the ability to take notes without scribbling in the book.

But. The book has a family tree right up front, and a couple of other charts within, and you want to be consulting them regularly. (Or is that just me?) And the problem is that it's really cumbersome to page back and forth to the family tree - the electronic "dog ear" just isn't as efficient as a post-it stuck there in a real live book. And maps - it's the kind of mystery where I found myself drawing maps in my head - who lives where, how far away is that - well, it turns out there are maps in some editions of the book - but not in the ebook! I found the maps on line and resorted to printing them out - so much for saving paper.

I still prefer real books.

Poem on My Blog day

It's Poem in Your Pocket day today, and spring is upon us, so pretend I just pulled this poem out of my pocket, just for you.

Today

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.

-Billy Collins

(with thanks to the Poetry Foundation for having such a nice website)

Fishing Derby

Before

After

Frenemies

The other night at dinner, my child told me that someone in her class was her "frenemy". My child is 7. She is in second grade. Second graders do not have frenemies. Oy.

When pressed, she told me that the boy had made up the word "frenemy". It's friends and enemies put together, mama. No dear, he didn't make that up; Jessica Mitford's sister did.

Antlers

Sometimes it gets interesting at the farmers market, like the day someone was selling warm delicious pancakes.

I had to tweet about it.



The Twitter and Facebook consensuses* were that they were, in fact, pulling my leg, and when I emailed my husband, he thought so too. That is, until curiosity got the better of him and he found that yes, yes there is a leavening made of reindeer horn:

Salt of hartshorn (Ammonium Carbonate)

Hartshorn is one of the oldest of "chemical" leavens. It was actually in use for many centuries before the predecessor of modern baking powder was developed in the middle of the nineteenth century.

The original hartshorn, as its name implies, was ground from deer antler and used primarily in Scandinavian countries. Today it is almost unknown although there is a chemical version of the original, better known as "baker's ammonia," available from King Arthur Flour.

A dough that contains hartshorn produces a strong smell of ammonia when it's in the oven, but the ammonia dissipates completely during the cooking process leaving no aftertaste or odor. Its unique action makes extremely crisp cookies and crackers.

Go figure.

But here's the really pressing question, courtesy of a comment on Facebook:

I'd love to know the backstory of how the baking properties of ground up deer antlers were discovered. What happens if I stew porcupine claws? Are discarded nail clippings the secret to a nice souffle? Hard tellin' not knowin'!

Would you all like to chime in and hypothesize as to just how someone found that ground reindeer antler would work as leavening?



* Doesn't that look wrong? I think it should be "consensi".

The Petting Zoo

Cathy owned a little private zoo. It had been around forever, or since the 40s anyway, and my father knew her - he'd done legal work for her family. So, periodically we'd take the kiddies up on a summer weekend and go wander around looking at giraffes and rhinos and lions and zebras, and we'd feed the little animals in the petting zoo. They had a handful of electric golf carts for getting around, and Cathy would drive us around on them, because, hell, she owned the place.

One visit, we were tooling around in the golf cart, piled high with toddlers and diaper bags and giddy adults revisiting their childhoods, and some paying customer asked Cathy where he could rent one - a golf cart, that is, not a toddler. She nicely told him that she owned the zoo and the carts weren't for rent, they were for staff. He turned away, disappointed, and Cathy stage-whispered to me and Pinky can you imagine what a clusterfuck that would be?  I think of Cathy every time I hear or use the word clusterfuck.

I also think of her every time I eat a lamb chop. She had that petting zoo, see? There were baby potbellied pigs, and goats, and little spotted fawns, and lambs. You could buy special crackers to feed them, or you could get little bottles of milk with huge nipples that the animals went wild for. But think about a petting zoo for a moment. Eventually, the animals get big and they aren't cute anymore and they're liable to knock over your toddler clients. So what do you do?

Lamp chops. Tiny baby lamb chops, milk fed by children. From time to time, Cathy would send my father a box, two to four butchered lambs, racks and legs and chops. Best lamb I've ever eaten.

She went out of business a few years ago. Nostalgia wasn't cutting it anymore, people want the tidiness of Disney.

No more baby lamb.

Clusterfuck.

A Diversion

How is it that it is now Wednesday? How is that even possible?  I got on a plane last Thursday, and came home on the red-eye on Saturday night, and climbed into my bed when I got home at about noon on Sunday, and now it's Wednesday.

Oh, I got up and went to work on Monday, and on Tuesday, but I was catching up from two days away and my assistant was out having surgery, so here it is Wednesday and I sort of have my head above water. A little.

Seattle was great. It was wonderful to be away, terrific to be there, lovely to be alone, awesome to be surrounded by bloggers - a complete mixed bag of bloggers, all there because we're Nintendo Brand Ambassadors. I got to spend time with Amie and Stimey and Ilina and Julie and Aimee and Kim and Cooper and Emily, and I met two food bloggers at dinner, Marisa and Jen. Jen took pictures of our delicious meal at Black Bottle, and I'm in some of those pictures. (And if you want to see me in action on the 3DS, I'm in a couple of the photos in Rachelle's post.)

We were in Seattle for a "summit" - basically a day of hanging around the Nintendo headquarters playing video games on the new Nintendo 3DS. 3D + DS = 3DS, get it? It's kind of amazing that you can have dogs jumping out of the screen without having to wear funny glasses. It has motion and gyro sensors, for games like the mesmerizing Steel Diver where you're manning a submarine periscope and shooting down boats. The "augmented reality" games are kind of wild - and actually make you get up and dance around the table as you aim at little moving targets.  I bought a copy of Nintendogs (+ kittens) because I knew the girl would love it, even though I think it's tediously boring. I didn't love all of the games, but I was oddly captivated by Street Fighter, because I was like an idiot savant at punching the lights out of bad guys. Steel Diver, though, I could play that on my swivel chair in the basement...

The device has hands-off features that work when you're just walking around - if you're carrying it, and it's in sleep mode, it counts your steps like a pedometer. It also "talks" to others of its kind - and exchanges miis. I collected a mess of miis in Seattle, even outside of the hotel we were all at, but I think no one in NYC has a 3DS because I haven't picked up any more. And yes, I'm carrying it around with me, for research, you know. Apparently, this irritated my kid yesterday when she got home from school and couldn't show it to her friend.

Now? Back to reality. Or something



Disclosure: Nintendo provided the airfare, accommodations, meals, a Nintendo World gift certificate, and a Nintendo 3DS. No one paid me to write about the trip or the DS, in fact, they didn't even ask.

Embarking

I'm sitting here in the airport, using the free wi-fi, backpack at my feet. The last whirlwind trip I took was the one with my sister, back in January. This time, I'm alone - flying out to Seattle for a Nintendo event with a mess of other bloggers. Two nights in a hotel - alone. A visit to Nintendo headquarters, with a chance to try out the new 3DS. Dinner out in Seattle And three visits with friends on Saturday before I fly home on the red-eye.

It's a chance to escape my life for a bit - no child to read to, no work to do, no laundry to sort.

I feel lucky today.

But I'll love getting off the plane on Sunday, to the big hugs from my little family.

How often do you get your hair cut?

Oy. Between now and about April 15th is like some kind of clusterfuck, and it’s not even that I’m a CPA doing other people’s taxes. Just too much work, too many volunteer obligations, too much child and family and friends stuff. And a trip to Seattle, even.

At the end of last week, I decided that my hair needing cutting - in advance of all of these various events - so Saturday morning I hauled myself over to the cheap salon. You know, the big boisterous local salon, the one that caters to little kids and blue-haired old ladies and everyone in between. I go there because it amuses me, and because you don't need an appointment, and because it's $24 for a women's hair cut. I've never had a bad haircut there. Undistinguished, sure, but bad? No.

Until Saturday.

I walked in and said I needed a haircut, and the receptionist asked whether I had a preference for a man or a woman. I said I didn't care, and ended up with the old man. The old man usually sits around, perched on one a vacant chair, peering eaglelike at the goings on, and not actually doing anything. I've always assumed that he owns the place, but I really don't know. I sat down, and he cut my hair. And it was crooked and I made him fix it. And I left, and I looked in the mirror when I got home, and I thought "this is the worst hair cut I have ever had". Old man. Don't let the old man cut your hair. Damn it.

I groused about it to myself, pissed off that I'd just wasted $24 (plus tip!) on a terrible haircut, until I remembered that Heidi had a hairdresser friend in the town where I was headed. Heidi texted me the phone number (and texted Ilene to warn her), and at 5:15, I settled in for the second haircut of the day.

You have to remember: I never learned how to be a real girl. I don't wear make-up, and I didn't get my hair cut by anyone but my mother until I was like 40. So the idea of two haircuts in ONE DAY was really just over the top.

But Ilene was great, and there wasn't anyone else there, and the late afternoon sun was streaming through the windows, and she had jelly beans.

The next few weeks are still going to be a clusterfuck, but at least I got a nice haircut to face 'em with.

Talismans

For years now, since before the girlie was born, I've had a little stack of parenting books by my bed. They come and go - all of the baby care tomes are gone, and I'm slowly replacing them with books like Reviving Ophelia and How to Talk So Kids Will Listen - but until the other day, there were three in the pile that we really didn't need: Weissbluth, Ferber and Satter.

It was like some kind of magical thinking: As long as the sleep books are under the bed, the child will sleep. As long as the sensible eating book was at hand, the child will eat.

Of course, she doesn't sleep, except with me. Oh she went through a period of sleeping in her own bed every night right after we got her a heated mattress pad, but she fell back into her old ways soon enough, and now every last stuffed animal she owns is on the floor of her room and she only goes in there to fetch clean clothes. I've given up.

And she doesn't eat, except with ketchup. The other night she ate salad for dinner - hallelujah! a green vegetable! - with a dressing that she'd made by stirring equal parts of ketchup and vinaigrette together. She eats rice with ketchup for lunch. Rice cakes with ketchup for snack. Hard-boiled eggs dipped in ketchup. She's discerning: only Heinz will do. Frou frou organic ketchup from Whole Foods? Feh. Homemade stuff from the Greenmarket? Feh.

I know that one day she will go into her room and close the door and blast the stereo and refuse to talk to me. I know that one day she'll eat something other than ketchup.

But I finally gave up those books, those talismans, and passed them along to my brother and sister-in-law. Maybe they'll do someone else some good, under another bed.

Whoosh!

One of the many delights of raising a child is living through her language development.

Last week, she had a dentist appointment. I asked her how it went, and she told me "It hurt. She poked my gums and fondled my teeth". Yeah. Fondled.

Then, lying in bed this morning, we saw the early bus go down the hill - the middle & high school bus. I said to her "It's a good thing you're not in high school; you'd have to be out there getting on that bus." She went off into a monologue about her bus driver and how he does the early run and then the elementary school run, and then "he puts the bus in the parking arena" until after school. Yeah, parking arena.

It's so ephemeral, this growing up thing. The best I can do is take a few pictures, write down some of the awesome phrases, and hang on for the ride.

Disaster

All week, I’ve been turning over disaster in my head. Here’s the thing: natural disasters are just that. They’re natural. You can try and anticipate them, build to ameliorate them, insure against them. But they’re going to happen and it’s no one’s fault when they do. You clean up the mess, mourn the dead, feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. Japan could recover from the one-two punch of the earthquake and tsunami. But the nuclear power plant problem? The one that gets scarier and more unmanageable by the day? It’s a man-made disaster that didn’t have to happen.

Three years ago, when we officially enrolled the girl in kindergarten, we had to sign a blanket permission slip to allow the school to administer potassium iodide in the case of an “event” at the nuclear plant that sits about 12.5 miles from our house. Let me tell you, it frosted my ass. I so wish I hadn’t had to sign that slip – not because I have some concern about the school system medicating my kid, but because that plant shouldn’t be there.

And now we’ve got Ann Coulter going off half-cocked that “radiation is good for you”. OMFG.

I sent that link to my husband and got back this:

Maybe she could go do a news segment from the top of the spent fuel pool in Reactor Building Four -- the one that's got 35+ years' worth of brightly glowing spent fuel-rod assemblies in it. When she points her camera into the pool it will help responsible scientists see how much water there is. Then we'll know that some radiation is good, because she'll be dead in an hour.

That husband of mine got himself arrested protesting a nuclear power station, back in the day. I think it might be time start protesting again. Who’s with me?

Memento mori

I took a picture of a dead bird yesterday, and I’m trying to figure out why.

I was late, rushing to the subway to go meet a friend for a drink before heading home. I saw the bird out of the corner of my eye.

Step.

That bird was there on Friday.

Step, step.

It’s Monday. How is it still there?

Step.

I’m late.

Step, step.

If I don’t go back and take its picture, I’ll regret it.

Step.

And then I turned around, and walked back the 15 feet to where the bird was, and I squatted down and took its picture on the sidewalk in front of the church, where it had been lying since I’d seen it on Friday afternoon.

It was a little grey bird, body about the size of my thumb. Three days on the sidewalk had left it somewhat the worse for wear. Its belly had been neatly opened, exposing its guts. Lungs? Liver? And its gaudy orange legs – had they been so vibrant on Friday? I can’t remember. And why is there a band on its leg? I hadn't seen that until I pulled the photo off of my phone.

I took a picture of a dead bird last summer. It was on the beach, a big gull, equal parts dried, decayed and eaten, yet it maintained a majesty. Head tilted just so, wings arrayed as in a zoological museum display.

But yesterday’s dead bird? I’m trying to understand why.

I was late because we’d been clustered around someone’s computer in the office, watching sobering, heartbreaking videos of the Japanese tsunami – boats splintering like balsa wood toys, buildings floating away, cars tossed around as though Styrofoam.

Somehow, in an instant, that little bird crystallized for me the horror of the triple punch that Japan just received. I can’t do much for Japan beyond a donation to the Japan Society, but I can think on natural and manmade disasters, and remember that we all must die – a bird flying into a window, an elderly Japanese man in the path of a tsunami, my mother felled by lung cancer.

I took a picture of a dead bird yesterday, and I hugged my girlie hard when I got home.

More Griping About Homework & Schoolwork

On a regular basis, I get all bent out of shape about the second grader's homework. Herewith, three examples:

MATH

@Magpiemusing When Mommy has to dump all of the change out of her wallet in order to play the math games homework, Mommy will be grumpy.

The instructions were to roll a pair of dice and then to take that many cents out of the kitty. We were to take turns, until one of us got to 50¢, swapping out coins to end up with the fewest number of coins possible. Honestly? Not a stupid game, and I was happy to see that her change-making and adding skills were pretty good. BUT. First I had to find a mess of change, and then I had to raid the Monopoly game box because who has dice sitting on the kitchen table, and then I realized that in more than a dollar's worth of change, there was not one single quarter. Without the proper tools, it's hard to support the kid's homework, but if you don't know what tools are going to be required, it's hard to have them on hand.

SPELLING

She has a spelling test every week. That's great. Last week's test came home marked "Perfect"! That's awesome. Unfortunately, the girl wrote down PRIASE when it should have been PRAISE, and the teacher failed to notice. So out of my mouth is coming praise at her for doing such a good job, until I realize that the teacher screwed up. So what do you do? Undermine the teacher, or keep your mouth shut? Oy.

GRAMMAR

In class, they do quick little grammar tests - drills for things like capital letters and nouns and punctuation and contractions and verb tense. The tests come from a published workbook - this isn't something that the teacher whips up in her prep time. Because I'm a diligent mom and a cranky nitpicker, I always read through the questions (and answers), and recently found one of the worksheets that really annoyed me - three of its ten questions had no right answer. I think that second grade grammar worksheets ought to be black & white and not subject to interpretation - which means that the answer should be present tense or past tense, not both! Save interpretation for a discussion of Mrs. Cantrip's motives in The Kingdom of Carbonel.

Patchwork and Denim

Besides ribbons, I picked up a bunch of other weird bits in the aftermath of the costume shop going under: fabric glue, zippers, 75 iron-on roses and a odd swath of cotton patchwork that no one recognized.

I turned the patchwork into a cover for a throw pillow, and was left with a strip of material about 5" wide.

Then the girl demanded a new outfit for Ivy, so I made her a black skirt out of the sleeve of a shirt of mine that had ended up in the rag bag. And then she wanted a bag to carry around thus and such, but it had to look like Ivy's denim bag. I keep way too many old blue jeans around, because one day they're going to come in handy - like when you need to make a denim bag! I cut the end off a leg, just below the knee, stitched it closed at the cut side (with a box bottom even, though you can't tell from the photo), folded over the cuff end and used Velcro for a closure. What to use for a strap? Aha! The leftover strip of patchwork turned into an admirable strap - perfectly in keeping with the "San Francisco in 1974" era of her two American Girl dolls.



Oh, and now I have 74 iron-on roses left.

Ribbons

The costume shop in my building went out of business, a casualty of a bad economy, bead-work outsourced to China, more shows in street clothes, and expensive labor. It's a damned shame, and makes me wistful on a number of levels.

On the other hand, I'm never buying Christmas ribbon again, and my packages will be the best dressed ever.

Sugru

So, the sweater error. I decided to punt and put in a zipper, so I wouldn't have to learn to make the damned buttonholes. I lucked into a zipper from the costume shop that was downstairs in my building, but, you get what you pay for: it was too long. So I cut it off. Alas, I cut it off without enough room to turn it properly so that it would form a stop at the end, meaning that the zipper pull was liable to go flying off. That'd be one thing for a sensible grown-up, but a chance not worth taking with a seven year old.

What to do? Sugru!

I read about Sugru sometime last fall, somewhere on the web*, and I promptly sent the link to my husband thinking his tinkering self would love it. Time went by; I forgot about it. But! Bestill my heart - I found some in my Christmas stocking! It is the coolest. It comes in tiny little packets, each holding a couple of teaspoons of this stuff that's sort of like sticky Play-Doh. You form it as needed, and over a day or so, it cures into silicone.

So, I made stoppers at the top of the sweater zipper so the zipper slide won't fly off.



And then, because once the packet of Sugru is open you need to use it all up, I made feet for a little ceramic bowl, to replace the felt feet it had - because the felt feet can't go in the dishwasher and the Sugru can.



And I made two pins - brooches? - out of cobbled together bits and pieces of stuff that was kicking around, just because I could!



It's insanely wonderful, the Sugru. It's only problem is that the packets have a shelf life, and mine has to be used by mid-May. I have more than enough left to fiddle around with, so if you'd like to try it, say so in the comments, before the end of the week. I'll send three packets out into the world, so more people can experience the joy of Sugru.




* I can't find the reference, but I think it was something that Katherine Belsey wrote about.

The Sweater

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

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

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




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

Best Friend

I have a friend.

Wait, that’s lame, I have lots of friends.

I have a special friend.

Oh, that’s not right either.

I have an old friend, a dear friend, a friend from freshman year of college. We lived in the same dorm that first year, and in the same suite during our second year, and near one another after that. And we’ve stayed friends ever since. We were pregnant at the same time – she with her fifth child, me with my first and only. Somewhere, I have a funny picture of the two of us at my baby shower, both of us in black shirts with big bellies, back to back.

My dear old friend is extraordinary. She’s wise, and smart, and kind of unflappable, even in the face of difficulties. And her life is complicated, with bright wonderful highs, and dark unthinkable lows, and not nearly enough hours in the day. Five kids will do that to you!

I’m hugely proud that she's just edited a book - Daily Guideposts: Your First Year of Motherhood - which comes out at the beginning of April. It’s a book of devotionals, for first-time moms. As she says:

'This book is a guidebook of sorts, a travelogue written by those who have already gone down the sometimes rocky road of becoming a parent. The twenty moms (and one dad) you'll meet here will regale you with tales of love, frustration, exhaustion and humor. They open their hearts and lives so that you can walk with them through the daily challenge of growing in faith and parenting wisdom.'

You're probably wondering why I'm plugging a religious book, given my avowed atheism. My friend is a person of faith, deep and abiding faith. It's an important part of her life - as it is for many people. But to me, she's one of the most lucid parents I know. When my daughter was old enough to be in the bath by herself, but not old enough for me to be in the other room, I used to call Julia to chat. She was my touchstone, my "am I doing this right?" person. Still is, in lots of ways. So I know in my bones that any book on parenting that she's involved with is going to be a good one.

If a devotional is something that you could use, or share with a new parent, check out Daily Guideposts: Your First Year of Motherhood. And if you just want an astute parenting blog to visit, add Lotsa Laundry to your blogroll.

She's the best.

And she could use a hug right now.

Guardian

For Christmas, the girl got an Alien Spy Camera. It has bendy legs and suction feet, and I recently found it wrapped around her iron bed, gripping her DS firmly against intruders in the night.

It's also been found protecting her doorway from those who might wish to enter, and keeping Daddy away from the baked goods.

I wonder where it'll turn up next.

A Physics Lesson

Grey day. Rainy, drizzly, damp.

A bit of color sparked up from the sidewalk – a patch of oil shimmering on a puddle.

I took physics in high school. Everyone did, we were nerds. Do non-nerds take physics? Maybe everyone takes physics; I just don’t remember it that way. Our teacher seemed always on the brink of losing control of the class. Notes winged across the classroom, chaos erupted in the corners. He wore coke-bottle thick, black-rimmed glasses, and couldn’t see very well. “Legally blind”, we heard. And, “has tunnel vision”. Ah, tunnel vision – that might account for his inability to see objects tossed blithely from one side of the room to the other.

I remember nearly nothing from high school physics. I can’t remember what I got on the Regents. I’ve internalized some core piece of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, but that could be from having grown up listening to Flanders and Swann singing “heat is work and work is heat”.

You know that song? It’s excellent. Here, have a look:




Back to physics class. I guess I learned something about waves and periodicity. Surely we talked about gravity and velocity. Amps and ohms must have been on the syllabus, along with Planck’s constant.

Picture by John,
from the Wikimedia Commons

But the only thing I really remember? Thin film refraction. That’s what you’re seeing when the rainbow glints off the oily splotches in the road.

I said it to myself this morning – “thin film refraction” – as I walked from the subway to the office, and I thought about Dr. Goutevenier and his thick glasses, and about how you may learn things and you may know things, and how it’s really about the learning, not so much the knowing, because if you know how to learn, you can figure out the knowing.

Because honestly, I don’t really know what’s going on in that pretty oily rainbow – I just know what it’s called. But I can look it up.

The Table of My Memory

What makes a memory?

When I think about my childhood I remember the beach, the ice-skating, the neighborhood block parties. The day Wally – a grown-up! – dropped the bread peanut-butter side down, and then jumped on it. Sailing. My sixth grade teacher. The children’s librarian at the public library. The annual pig roast, and the day my father brought the suckling pig home on the Long Island Rail Road cradled in his arms and dressed in baby clothes. The long long grass in the backyard of the house we moved into when I was eleven – it hadn’t been mowed in years. Kittens. Our jungle gym. The Christmas party. My fourth grade phonics workbook. Stinky cheese and poison. Going to the ballet, the circus, the Museum of the City of New York.

Trips to the city usually included restaurants – special occasion meals, pre-theater meals, lunch in the city meals - storied places, now largely defunct. Like Sloppy Louie’s and Sweets – fish places down by the Seaport, near my father’s office, where he’d take us to lunch on those rare days when we got to go to work with him. The Auto Pub – a kitschy car-themed restaurant in the basement of the GM building, where the Apple Store now is. Pearl’s – a fancy midtown Chinese restaurant, known for the lemon chicken incongruously flavored with lemon extract. The Xochitl – a cheap Mexican restaurant in the theater district where I remember daring my siblings to dip a toothpick in the little open ramekins of hot sauce that were permanent fixtures on the tables. Luchow’s – the huge German restaurant on 14th Street – we went there for my birthday one year. And Keen’s – the chop house with the clay pipes on the ceiling.

Of them, Keen’s is the only one still around.

Last night, we took the girl to a one-man circus, which she thought was hilarious. We needed to eat beforehand, so in some fit of madness, I suggested Keen’s. It’s on 36th Street, where it’s been forever. We couldn’t get a reservation in the main part of the restaurant, so we took a chance and landed a table in the pub. Dark wood paneling, wood-burning fireplace, framed pictures and handbills tiling the walls – it’s like hasn’t changed in the 125 years since it opened. 125 years! It’s been around since before any of my grandparents were. I had a “mutton” chop with a side of sautéed escarole and it was so good that I picked that bone up and gnawed on it, even though it turns out to be lamb. The girl had a hamburger, most of which came home with us, though she ate the whole bun and drank all of her Shirley Temple and polished off a piece of chocolate cake. Before we left, we traipsed upstairs to the bathroom, through the brass embellished rooms with their oriental rugs, past the portrait of Abraham Lincoln and the entrance to the Lily Langtry room and the display case of novelty pipes. “Look, Mama, that one’s shaped like a lady’s leg!”. And then we left and walked uptown to Times Square, through the crowds, past the lights, under the enormous signs, to the one-man circus in the jewelbox theater.

And I wonder, what will she remember?

Eggs + Rice + Panko = Breakfast

I like to cook, and my husband likes to cook, and we both do a reasonable good job of it. Because he’s the stay-at-home parent and I’m the commuter, he does far more of the cooking than I do, but I do a lot of the inventing. I’ve dubbed myself the “executive chef” – I invent a dish, he makes it happen.

Somehow this morning the cupboards were bare of our usual breakfast fare. No bread, no Cheerios, no “snap, crackle, pop with brown sugar on top”. We could have had oatmeal, good real oatmeal (and I digress but if you haven’t read Mark Bittman’s piece about McDonald’s oatmeal go read it now) but I found a cup of cooked rice in the fridge – leftover from last night’s dinner – and the little wheels in my head turned 'round.

"How about little pan-fried rice and egg cakes?"

My husband looked at me sort of skeptically, but got out the rice and two eggs and beat them together. He paused, and added a handful of panko because the “batter” looked too thin. Then he melted some butter in a skillet and fried up two perfect little cakes using the silly little round silicone rings that he'd bought one day.

They were soft and crunchy and salty and delectable – a perfect little breakfast, for two. Alas, there were three of us, so I had to content myself with a half a grapefruit and some stolen forkfuls of goodness.

The moral of the story? We may need three of those silicone rings.

Wordless Wednesday: Bath Aftermath

"I feel left out."

It’s the saddest thing she’s ever said to us: "I feel left out".

Everyone else has pierced ears.

I know that isn’t true, but they were making earrings in her after-school jewelry class and one of her friends is in the class and has pierced ears and wore her new earrings to school the next day. So of course she felt left out – because she doesn’t have pierced ears and we don’t think that 7 year olds should have pierced ears so it isn’t even on the table as a discussion point.

Everyone else buys their lunch.

Again, I don’t think that’s true. We let her buy lunch once a week, occasionally twice, but mostly she brings her lunch. And she brings good things, like risotto and spaetzle and meatballs and gnocchi, things she likes. Furthermore, the day she brought the meatballs, she said everyone else thought they smelled yummy.

All the girls want to do girly things like play hopscotch.

I don’t know what to make of this. Until the "I feel left out because everyone else has pierced ears" bit came up and was then elaborated on, I’d never had an inkling that she felt left out on the playground at school. I kind of think she’s making this up.

All the other girls have twenty American Girl dolls.

Yeah, right. In our materialistic town, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a kid with twenty, but the kids we know and that she plays with have one each, or maybe two.

All the other girls wear lipstick (said while peering in the bathroom mirror instead of brushing her teeth and simultaneously telling me she’s a tomboy).

Gah. This child-rearing thing is hard.

Pence

You know what? I hate that you can't email members of Congress anymore. Nope, unless you're in their district, you can't just fire off an email. If you're in the district, you have to fill out an on-line form, which is bad enough, but if you aren't in the district, you need to call or write an old-fashioned letter.

I'm all cranky about this because of the Pence amendment business. My representatives in Congress aren't people I need to worry about - I voted for them, I mostly like how they represent me - but the doctor in the district next door was on the fence. But for a few miles - hell, my zip code is split between two districts - that doctor would be my Congresswoman. The medical practice she came from is the one my family uses.

I'm seething about this because I feel powerless. So I'm telling you - maybe you can make a phone call, send an email, jump up and down.

Separately, you could sign a petition on behalf of Planned Parenthood:

Did you hear? The House voted to bar Planned Parenthood from federal funding. They cut funding for HIV tests, cancer screenings, birth control, and more, putting millions of women and families at risk. We can't let it go unanswered. It's time for you and me to stand with Planned Parenthood. Sign the open letter to the reps who voted for this bill — and to the senators who still have a chance to stop it. http://www.ppaction.org/IStandWithPP

This still has to get through the Senate, which looks unlikely, but that's not the point. I feel hopeless because there are elected officials out there who are trying to dismantle programs that save lives and there are unnecessary barriers to communication.*

You don't believe in abortion? Fine. Don't get one. But don't take Planned Parenthood down too.

---

*According to a congressional website, the "Write Your Representative ... Reduces the heavy burden placed on the House mail servers by the high volume of emails sent to Congressional offices every day - over 15 million emails per month."  Maybe they could get beefier mail servers, so people could talk to them.

Wordless Wednesday: Coneheads

Yeah. This is what I find on the coffee table. The Pollys got new hats.

That Cannibalistic Princess Book

I just finished reading Peggy Orenstein's new book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter.

There's been a lot of good reviews of the book*, and I don't really need to add anything to the discussion, except to say that it's really interesting - and I think it's equally useful for parents of girls AND boys. Orenstein writes a lot about the marketing of toys to children, using the Disney Princess phenomenon as a launching pad for a broad and didactic exploration of gender differences, shopping as a stand-in for intimacy, kids getting older younger, and grown-ups staying younger longer.

She touches on the series of "Daring and Dangerous" books - questioning why some activities are in the girls' books and others in the boys' books - who's to say that girls can't juggle? She points out that while the American Girl dolls have a veneer of wholesomeness, they also foster a consumerist culture - buy more expensive stuff for your doll! Orenstein dives into film and TV as well, dissecting everything from Mulan and Mulan II to the Wizards of Waverly Place to Lindsay Lohen. 

Incidentally, the book has as terrific index: you want to see what she's got to say about the Twilight series or Toddlers and Tiaras? Look it up.

Orenstein's style is thoroughly engaging - she writes like she's thinking out loud, or having a conversation in a coffee shop. She frequently shows you her vacillations through an issue, weighing heavy handed marketing against natural developmental stages.

In short, it's an admirable book, well-researched and not screechy.

* Three reviews that I went back and re-read after reading the book were the Times Book Review, She Started It, and Slate.

---

PS: No one asked me to review this, in case you were wondering. I just wanted to tell you what I thought. Also, maybe my post title is misleading - it sort of sounds like I don't like the book? But Cinderella eating children is kind of cannibalistic, no? Or wait, Cinderella eating Barbie would be cannibalism, because they're the same species. But are girls and dolls the same species? I guess not. So it's not cannibalism. Too bad; the title stands.

Happy Valentine's Day

(I'd had grandiose plans for homemade valentines, made from scraps of this and bits of that, but they didn't happen. Instead, you get this charming vintage valentine found at Hearts Atwirl, via Alpha Mom, but it doesn't mean I love you any less.)

This is why my shoulder hurts and why my hair is messy

Heide kind of challenged me to dump out my handbag and inventory its contents. So I did.

• Wallet
• iPhone & cable & charger
• iPad & cable & charger (and duh, I really don't need two cables)
• iPod headphones
• Purple bandanna
• A reusable shopping bag wadded up in its integrated stuff sack
• Dental insurance files, so I can call and find out when I'm getting a few cents back for the root canal and 2 crowns
• A folder full of odd bits of paper and recipes printed off the intertubes
• Office keys
• Cinderella Ate My Daughter (library book)
• A paystub
• A check from my MIL because they're on our AT&T Family Plan
• 2 metro cards
• Teeth cleaners (free samples that've been in my bag forever)
• A cello-wrapped toothbrush with embedded toothpaste, filched from the dentist's office
• Toothpicks
• 2 lip balms
• Ibuprofen, Sudafed and Tums
• A moist towelette
• 2 packs of tissues
• A green penlight flashlight, which seems to need batteries
• Index cards
• 2 pens and a highlighter
• Checkbook (with a ironic sticker: Reagan taught us deficits don't matter)
• Business cards for work
• Business cards for the blog
• The glow necklace my daughter made me.

And ... no hairbrush. I wonder where it went. The swiss army knife is also missing, but that's because I took it out before I went to California last month.

What's in your bag?

Grace in Small Things: The Winter Edition

#28 - A pair of plain wool gloves in the pockets of every coat I might want to wear, so they’re at the ready when and if I want or need them.

#29 - Capacious pockets, well-deployed, for the afore-mentioned gloves and because I hate carrying a purse and as long as you're wearing a coat, you might as well have good pockets.

#30 - Waterproof boots, for tromping through snow and stepping carelessly in the inevitable slush puddles that form in the gutter on every NYC corner.

#31 - Hot apple cider at the Union Square Greenmarket.

#32 - Electric mattress pads, because there is nothing so glorious as climbing into a pre-heated bed.

Blue Sky

Blue skies
Smiling at me
Nothing but blue skies
Do I see...*


I love looking out the window. I especially like being up high, so I can look out and down. I was waiting in a swank 40th floor bank's reception area, taking pictures out the window of a gorgeous copper-clad roof below. The copper had patinated to just that shade of green. Alas, the roof got blown out - perils of cellphone photography - but oh, the sky. It really was that blue.




*Lyrics from "Blue Skies", by Irving Berlin

Chat with The Motherhood Later?

Not my usual kind of post, but rules are made to be broken.

At 1:00 EST - today - Wednesday the 9th - I'll be participating in an on-line chat at The Motherhood. Stop by and join in. It's a text only chat, no need for speakers and microphones.

Here's the blurb from The Motherhood site:

Just in time for Valentine's Day, join us for a discussion about how you spend quality time with the people you care about, and how to manage your time to maintain strong relationships! Thanks to Dr. Oetker Pizza Ristorante for sponsoring this Talk, and for offering four prize packs to give away!!! Don't miss out!

Be My Valentine!

I could grumble about the silly "shoebox snack" project that the second grader has to do for Valentine's Day, but instead I have a gift for you. Your kid is probably expected to bring in valentines for the whole class, right? And if you're like me, you have zero interest in buying some ugly branded character cards at the drugstore, right? You could do what we did when I was a kid, and glue cut-out hearts on a doily, or you could be more twenty-first century crafty clever.

I'd seen cute cellphone valentines in two places - a folding one on Family Fun, and a flat one on Dandee (which I found through The Crafty Crow). We could have cobbled something together based on the sketchy instructions given in those two sources, but instead, my husband made a template that let us print out four on a two-sided sheet, with the only trimming to be done on the ends and the corners. Snip, trim, cut and glue, and we had 24 valentines done in a jiffy.

If you'd like to make up a mess of cell phone valentines, download the pdf I put up on Scribd, get yourself some card stock and find some candy buttons - the little sugar blobs on a strip of adding machine tape. The pdf includes a fill-in box for your kid's name, and each of the four valentines has different text. Experiment with your printer to figure out how to get page 1 and page 2 properly back to back. You'll probably need to make a couple of test runs - do that on plain paper so you don't waste card stock - and then you'll want to run out several copies of page 1 and then run them through again for page 2. We used yellow card stock because we had it; silver would be more cell-phone-like. Once they're all printed, you'll just need to trim the ends, cut the phones apart, fold, and round off the corners. Then get to work with a glue stick and add the candy keypad. Some of this is work you'll have to do, but some of it is certainly kid-appropriate - depending on the kid's age.

Have fun!

Torso

I love Freecycle. You list stuff, people come and take it away. I've gotten rid of all sorts of weird things that way - like the chain link dog run that came with our house which some kind people are now using for greyhound rescue. And sometimes I actually get stuff - just recently I got a perfectly lovely vintage Mirro cookie press. I totally don't need it, but I love having it and one day we'll squeeze out some little poodle-shaped cookies.

But maybe the best part of Freecyle (or Freeshare, same concept, different people) is just reading the email digests with the OFFER and WANTED posts. Like this one:



I mean, what's Betty going to do with it? My sister - yes, we forward these back and forth - said "She's trying to cheat in the car pool lane."

What do you think Betty's going to do with the torso?

Books Books and More Books*

I read a lot. And I like making lists. I started using LibraryThing a few years ago, because it had a nice little what I’m reading now widget that I once had in the blog’s sidebar, but I switched to Goodreads because it’s more gemütlich. The interface is easier, and the social aspect – who’s reading what, who likes what – is appealing to me.**

If you asked me last week, I’d probably have said that I read more fiction than non-fiction. But, out of curiosity, I looked at the Goodreads list of all the books that I read in 2010 – books I finished, that is, and not including the ones that I read aloud to my daughter – and was kind of stunned to find a precisely equal split between fiction and non-fiction - 18 of each. Furthermore, of the fiction that I read, only one of them really knocked my socks off – most of the others I can barely remember. On the other hand, a full handful of the non-fiction books were real keepers – books that have stuck with me, that I’ve thought back to or referenced or recommended any number of times since I read them.

So, without further ado, here’s my thoroughly idiosyncratic best of list for 2010, only a few of which were published in 2010:

FICTION
Room (Emma Donoghue)

NON-FICTION
The Blood of Strangers (Frank Huyler)
The Tender Bar (J.R. Moehringer)
Grave Matters (Mark Harris)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot)
The Secret Life of Lobsters (Trevor Corson)

What's the best book you read last year?

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*Did the post title make you sing?
** Are you on Goodreads?

Ice

It's a snow day. No, it's an ice day. It's below freezing, and it's raining, so the trees are slowly becoming encased in a deadly glittery sheath. We have never before had so many icicles on the house, and they are growing as you watch. (And yes, the Christmas lights are still hung outside - there's been too much snow to get them down safely, and besides, they look pretty.) The driveway is thickly coated with ice; we sent the girl up it this morning - hey, she's the one that wanted to go to work with me - but she got about a third of the way up and slid back down on her back (and then cried because we laughed at her). So we're trapped in the house until we can fabricate some crampons, or the temperature rises, whichever comes first.

On the agenda? Baking bread, as much work as I can manage by email and/or phone, and an indoor winter Wii Olympics later this afternoon. Ski jumping, here I come!

Matters Domestic

I walk a funny line. I’m the person in the household who gets up and goes to work every day; my husband stays home and puts the girl on the bus. And gets her off the bus and makes her lunch and takes her to swimming and picks her up from after school activities and organizes play dates. And he does the lion’s share of the cooking, and has even taken over what used to be my purview: the baking. Just this morning I had apple pie for breakfast, the last of the apple pie he made on Sunday.

I take the paper, head for the train, talk to grown-ups all day long, and head home to dinner and spelling and reading and bath time and bed.

But then, this morning, before I left, I asked my husband to make sure the generator works and that we have enough extension cords and that we can run the electrical controls of the gas furnace with the generator – all because there’s this storm raging that’s supposed to dump 50 hours of snow, ice, rain and snow. I packed a couple of oranges and some clean socks, in case I don’t make it home, and got on the train.

If it had been the other way round, if we had an old-style traditional marriage where I was the stay-at-home wife, would he have asked me to check the generator? I doubt it. I tend to believe that electricity jumps out of the wall and I am sorely deficient in understanding how internal combustion works. So, while I kind of long for a sabbatical – I’ve had my nose to the salaried grindstone for nearly a quarter century – it’s probably just as well because I’m clearly lacking in some practical domesticity (not to mention the fact that I am a slovenly housekeeper).

At least I know how to balance the checkbook.