Flat Stanley

The first grade classes at our daughter's school do a Flat Stanley project every year. You know Flat Stanley, right? He's a kid who gets accidentally squished to two dimensions, which turns out to be sort of cool because he can slip under doors and travel in a mailing envelope. The school project has the kids make their own Flat Stanley, write a letter to someone, and mail their Stanley off on an adventure.

Me being me, I suggested that the girlie send her Flat Stanley to a State Department friend of mine who was then in Ethiopia. So she did. We got some wonderful emails and photos from Ethiopia:

Sorry for the many delays of Flat Stanley - he has had some adventures, though. We went to a track meet at the International Community School in Addis Ababa. Stanley had a tour of the school, looked at a Tukle, the traditional round Ethiopian house, and hung out in a garden, including a banana tree. The running track here is the best running rack in East Africa, and is a track where the Ethiopian Olympic team frequently trains.

Then they went to Sabahar, a silk weaving place started by friends of ours, where local extract and weave silk at fair wages. Stanley got to hang out with some silk worms and mulberry leaves - the silk worms seemed happy with Stanley and did take any bites out of him - they only eat the leaves!

Stanley got lost for a little while - we had hoped to send him home during a recent visit back to the US, but he got lost in our stuff, so instead we took him traveling some more with us in Ethiopia. A couple weeks ago, we traveled to Axum and Lalibela, Ethiopia. Axum has these huge obelisks called "stellae" that were built over 600 years ago. The churches at Lalibela are often thought to be the 8th wonder of the world - buildings carved out of rock since the 1200's. Look these places up - they're pretty cool.

We may get some other traveling with Stanley done - then finally Stanley should be ready to head home - sorry it's long after the end of the school year, but I hope you enjoy seeing some of his travels!

Stanley didn't come home. And a year went by, and the girlie was now a second grader, and she saw all the Flat Stanleys go up on the bulletin boards in the first grade hallway, and she got teary. Where's my Flat Stanley? Oh, out having adventures, I said, he'll be home one day.

And then Maternal Dementia posted about their Flat Stanley going missing, and I felt better. Except that she was able to clone theirs, with the full acquiescence of her child, because Stanley had been lost In Their Very House, so I didn't really feel better. But I knew in my heart of hearts that Stanley was going to turn up.

And you know what? Stanley just came home, after 18 months of international travel. I do believe he's the best traveled Stanley ever sent out from that school - having gone to Virginia, then Ethiopia, then Pennsylvania, then back to Ethiopia, and then to New Jersey, and now back to New York. He's just exhausted, and terribly thin, but we're all so pleased to have him back. I think he'll stay home for a while.

But we're definitely going to have to fatten him up. Luckily, there's an Ethiopian restaurant in the next town. He'll probably like that.

Wordless Wednesday: Birthday

Today would have been my mother's 76th birthday. She dearly loved the beach, the ocean, and when we were up at the Cape, I gathered pebbles and wrote her name on an unsullied stretch of smoothly packed sand. I imagine that it pleased her.

Tuesday Parentexting

In a fit of optimism, because we've never tried to communicate this way, I texted my 76 year old father when we arrived in Newport a few weeks ago. (I knew he was in a meeting, and didn't want to interrupt with a phone call.)



He answered me 16 days later.

I think maybe texting isn't going to be the way.

---

P.S. Mental P Mama posts parentexts every Tuesday. But hers are with her kids, not her older parents!

True Confessions

Don't ask me why, but I was reading Town & Country not too long ago - fluff, you know, upper crust fluff - it was in the waiting room where I was getting a mammogram. I was distinctly amused to find in it an article* about stealing soap from hotels, with the subhead What is it about hotel soaps that inspires such avarice among even the most sensible of people? I mean, really, did you think that the readers of Town & Country would bother to pilfer the amenities?

I confess. I always take the soap. And the shampoo and conditioner and lotion. And sometimes the shower caps. It's like a little souvenir. And occasionally, if it's a swank hotel, it's a really nice little souvenir. Of late, I've been using conditioner from the Del Coronado - I open the bottle and the citrusy-coconuty scent wafts me back to San Diego. And I'm at the tail end of a bottle of Bulgari body lotion from the Four Seasons in New York - I slather it on my legs and think wistfully about the big suite we hung out in for my mother-in-law's birthday. Yeah, sometimes you get something truly indifferent, but the seven year old doesn't care what her conditioner smells like.

I don't travel enough for my soap acquisitions to make much of a difference. But my father? He travels all the time. And he takes the soap too. (I guess it runs in the family.) And because he travels so much, it starts to accumulate, so when I go to visit, I steal his pilfered soap from him. It's getting complicated, right?

But here's the true confession, the one I can't believe I'm about to share. I take all of the little bottles of shampoo, and I pour them all into one big one. It's some crazy Yankee frugality mixed with a bit of stick-it-to-the-man.

I can't remember the last time I bought shampoo.




*I'd link to the article, but I can't find it anywhere; Town & Country doesn't seem to have entered the digital age. USA Today summarized it, though.

Shoe Friday - Vintage

There were always dress-up shoes at Granny's house. Somewhere, there are pictures of me in these very shoes, which came home with us one day. They almost fit the seven year old, though they're a size 7AAA. I've no idea whose they were. My mother? My grandmother? A lady with a delicate, small foot.

Wordless Wednesday: Spiderweb

(Don't embiggen the picture, it's not a very good picture, because I took it outside at night with my cellphone. But as we were sitting on the deck eating dinner one night, the outdoor light with the motion-sensor came on, for reasons unknown, and bang, the spiderweb was all lit up. If the light hadn't turned on just like that, we'd have missed the spiderweb. And it was huge, and its spider was in the middle of it, and I didn't even think to go looking for the actual camera, not that it's all that much better than the cellphone camera, because what if, I don't know, something happened and I missed it?)

A Little Charity, and a Rant about Scent

You may recall my post-Blogher post, in which I mentioned that P&G handed out no swag, but instead promised to mail a box to your house. Said box arrived last week, full of full-sized products to try. Lots of the things in the box were products that I've no interest in trying (washing machine cleaner) or just don't need (tampons and pads) or don't ever use (mascara).

Happily, though, the box came the day before our local fire department was doing a supplies drive for people upstate affected by Hurricane Irene. So I repacked about half of the things and delivered Tampax tampons, Always pads, Olay facial cloths, two Cover Girl mascaras, Ivory body wash, two kinds of Febreze, the aforementioned Tide washing machine cleaner, Downy Unstopables, and some Pantene Curly "damage repair ampoules" down to the collection point at the farmer's market.

So, P&G, thank you for helping me to help some other people. Someone whose basement had two feet of water in it is likely to appreciate the Febreze. And someone whose whole house washed away may well be in need of the pick-me-up provided by a new mascara.

---

<rant>Okay, okay. I have to poke it with a stick. Downy Unstopables? 1) They spelled it wrong; it should be "unstoppable". 2) Why? Why would you want to dump little pellets in the wash, to add fragrance to your laundry, fragrance that according to the promo language on the Downy website is supposed "to keep active wear, towels, and other fabrics smelling “wow” right up until the next wash." Huh? It's such a persistent odor embedded in your clothing that it lasts through the wash, through the dryer cycle, into the closet, and the whole while you're wearing that shirt? What the hell is in it? Why would I want to do that to my clothes and my nose? To be fair, I'm probably the wrong person for it - I never use air fresheners because I'd rather smell a fart for the few minutes before it dissipates than have possibly dangerous artificial chemicals wafting through my house, I use unscented deodorant, and the laundry detergent I use is so lightly scented that there's no odor left if I run the load through the dryer. But still. Downy presumably saw a need. Why?</rant>

Tales of the First Week of Third Grade

Fine, sure, okay, whatever.

School started last Tuesday. It was pouring rain, so there was no "first day of school" photo. Also, since I am a slacker mom, I don't think I've taken a "first day of school" picture since kindergarten, which was actually THE first day of school. For the record, she was wearing a purple/turquoise sundress dress from Target ($4, on sale, can't beat that with a stick) with a pale aqua sweater and similarly colored leggings. And silver sandals. The girl has some style.

On Thursday, at breakfast, that is, after two days of school, she anxiously confessed that she was worried about "international" tests in April. Oy. I'm a little irritated that the school, or the teacher, is already winding these kids up about mandated standardized tests. Not fair. Wrong.

We are, and this really has nothing to do with school, knee-deep in D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths. I am enjoying reading it to her as much as she is in having it read to her - "please, Mama, just another bit". I'm liking the Greek myth refresher I'm getting; she's captivated by the myriad interleaving stories. The other night, I went in to shoo her into bed - I had to clear something off of her bed so she could climb in, and so dropped a pile of something on the chair, on which all the Groovy Girls were sitting, in a row. "No, Mama, that's the council of goddesses." Okay, then.

The pernicious book log is back. I am working up to a conversation with the teacher, after "back to school" night next week. It's one thing to sign her homework book and certify that she read for at least 30 minutes. But the nitpicking log too? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

And so begins third grade. In ten years, we'll be packing her off to college.

Tweet Beet

Two things happened last week while I was poking around the internet looking for news of the tiny valley in the Catskills where my father has a house.

First, while I like farting around on Twitter, its utility as a news source really became clear as I found people tweeting information about roads closed, bridges out, alternative routes, and utility services. I mean, it's one thing to read tweets about the revolution in Egypt or the assassination of Bin Laden - important, yes, but not as tangible as something happening in a place where you know the people, the roads, the streams, the landmarks, and where all the phone lines seem to be out.

Second, I found a recipe for a beet pie. I know, who'd a thunk it? Beets? In a pie? A dessert pie? It was on the blog of a person who has a house up there in the Catskills, who I'd found via Twitter. (I know. You were wondering how these two things were connected. Everything is connected to everything, if you just know where to look.) I was intrigued enough to make it, especially because I had beets in the fridge from the CSA. What I really wanted to do was make it for the assembled friends and family up on the Cape, and not tell anyone what was in it, but that didn't really happen; there were too many people in the kitchen. (Let's digress again - have you ever made the mock apple pie recipe on the back of the Ritz Cracker box? It's worth doing once, because it really does fool people.) Because I assumed (correctly) that the rental house kitchen wasn't going to be well-equipped, I prepped all the dry ingredients into a plastic bag, and got my husband to make a pie crust, and brought everything else that we needed. And, you know? It was really good. It's almost more like a mince pie, what with the dried fruit and nuts. The original recipe called for cooking the beets; I somehow failed to notice that step and used raw grated beets - it came out just fine. Also, I used the maple syrup called for, but because there was no detectable maple flavor, I might try it with Lyle's Golden Syrup next time. Here's the recipe, as adapted from Edible/Usable.

Beet Pie

• 1 single unbaked pie shell (9 inches)
• 2 medium beets
• 1/2 cup grade B maple syrup or Lyle's Golden Syrup
• 3 eggs
• 1/4 t white vinegar (I used balsamic, because it's all we had)
• 1 t vanilla
• 2 T butter
• 1/2 t salt
• 1 t cinnamon
• 1/2 t nutmeg
• 1/2 t ground cloves
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 1 T flour
• 3/4 cup raisins or dried cranberries
• 3/4 cup roughly chopped walnuts

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
   
2. Peel beets, and grate on a box grater - measure out one cup of grated beets (you may have a bit leftover).
   
3. Beat the eggs gently in a bowl. Add all other ingredients except walnuts and raisins, and mix well. Add beets, walnuts and raisins (or dried cranberries) and stir until blended. Pour into the unbaked pie shell.
   
4. Bake for 10 minutes at 400 degrees. Reduce temperature to 375 degrees and bake for 25-30 minutes or until pie is firm. Cool on a rack and serve still warm with vanilla ice cream.

ConAgra Kerfuffle

You hear about the latest blogger / PR fiasco? It was in yesterday's Times, headlined Bloggers Don’t Follow the Script, to ConAgra’s Chagrin, among other places. Basically, Marie Callendar's PR agency invited a bunch of food bloggers to a talk and a dinner with a chef, and instead of chef-made food, they served up some frozen lasagne. Oh, and there were hidden cameras.

It reminded me a little of the time that I was invited to a cooking class/cocktail party with Cat Cora - there was mention made of a "secret ingredient" but not until we got there did we know that the secret ingredient was margarine. Yuck. At least Cat Cora was cooking with it, not that the food was any good. But she gets brownie points for making the best of it - instead of serving up frozen lasagne and pretending it was homemade.

Here's the thing. If the PR agency had been up front about the frozen lasagne, would anyone have accepted the invitation? I doubt it. They were trying for the bait and switch, dangling a four course meal and a celebrity chef in front of bloggers who, from the accounts I've seen, don't eat frozen food, avoid food additives they can't pronounce, read labels and know how to cook.

I've said it before: eat real food, people. If we don't buy the overly processed food in the frozen section of the supermarket, they'll stop making it. Right? Sigh. It's a sad battle to be fighting.

Container Synchronicity

Driving home the other day, we passed a structure right near the highway in Providence, an eye-catching cobalt blue building made of shipping containers. It was intriguing enough that I looked it up - it turns out to be a little office building, called The Box Office. Totally cunning, and according to NPR, it was about half the cost to build as an ordinary building would have been.

Then, in today's paper, in one of those moments of synchronicity, there was an obituary for - wait for it - the inventor of the shipping container, one Keith Tantlinger. Given that yesterday I was rooting around on the intertubes trying to find the containerized office building, I felt compelled to read the obituary, all 1220 words of it. It was worth it, for this sentence alone:

Tens of millions of shipping containers roam the world today, filled with lumber, coal and hay, not to mention computers and cars.

Tell me, are you not now imagining a container bursting at the seams with hay, while you sing Low Bridge, Everybody Down?

Where Have I Been?

Where have I been?

Excellent question.

Short answer: in the car



and at the beach.



Longer answer:

The girl and I went to Newport for a night, and then to Cape Cod for two. My sister-in-law rented a house on the Cape for the entire week – and invited various family and friends to come share in its ocean views and easy beach access. Of course, we could only spend two days there, sob, because school started today – which meant leaving the Cape on Labor Day, thank you very much and yes it took us umpteen hours to get home yesterday, with so much traffic that I was able to take pictures in the car and track my progress via Foursquare. The beach was fabulously glorious, but next time, we really have to go for a week so as to amortize that horrific traffic thing. That, or win the lottery and fly in by private plane.

Still Life #1 –



Still Life #2 –



Someday maybe the kid will learn how to take off her clothes and not leave them in the middle of the floor. On the other hand, I loved the inadvertent whimsy of the piles so much that I had to take pictures. Then, of course, I had to sweep up the sand.

But, school! Huzzah, hooray! The girl was completely excited and a little nervous about the first day of third grade, and I failed to take a picture because, well, it was raining. She was totally color coordinated in purple and blue, and thrilled to be in a class with the boy she’s been planning to marry since PRESCHOOL. Thrilled to the point of blushing. Gah.

I can't believe it's September already.

Shipwreck

We were supposed to go to a pig roast on Saturday. I’d taken Friday off of work, and in the middle of the day, after carrying in the outdoor furniture and shuffling the potted plants, we headed north, to the Catskills. In retrospect, it was kind of crazy.

On the way up, we stopped at the butcher to buy a steak for dinner, and ran into the pig roast crew buying the pig. Once we got to where we were going, the seven year old went “swimming” in the stream, if you can call paddling around in knee-deep water “swimming”, and then soaked in the hot tub. Later, we visited the scene of the impending pig roast, and helped them stoke the fire in the pit, and had a lovely summer grilled-steak-and-buttered-corn dinner with my father. And the next morning, we decided that we’d be better off (meaning, more adult) riding out the hurricane at our own house, and so left my father’s place and his whole house generator. No pig for us; it was still buried in its pit in the ground.

It rained on and off all the way home, where we finished our hurricane prep with a quick trip to the supermarket - the shelves were stripped of bread and Cheez Doodles. Just in case, we ground some coffee beans and filled the French press – knowing we’d be able to boil water if need be. Saturday evening, we hunkered down and played Monopoly, the girl and I ganging up on Daddy, a bit anyway, complete with dramatic crocodile tears every time she had to pay rent and demented cackling when her hotels bore fruit. Eventually, the girl and I, together with the cats, went to bed, and fell asleep to the heavy spatter of raindrops on the metal cover of the air conditioner. Daddy stayed downstairs, glued to the TV where Irene was making her way north.

At five, we woke up. Crash. Power out. Boil water. Make coffee in the French press – yes, I win at hurricane prep! Pull the generator out of the cellar. Rig up a blue tarp under the deck to keep the rain off the genny, which decides not to start. Cursing and moaning, my husband field strips its carburetor – there’s a reason to keep him, huh? Finally gets it started, and we run some extension cords – to the two fridges, to a light in the kitchen, to the computer router - yes, wifi!

After awhile, we ventured out. Trees down across our street, taking the power line with them. Trees down up the street. We checked on various neighbors – one’s house had a huge elm down and draped over the roof, and them not even on the East Coast. We invited people to a shipwreck party – wine at four. Later, chainsaws. Again, a scouting expedition – it turned out to be not an official crew, but a ragtag batch of good samaritans bearing handsaws and chainsaws and rakes and shovels – clearing away enough to let cars through, smartly avoiding the downed wires.

My husband suggests we feed everyone bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches. That seems complicatedly messy to me so I propose a BLT panzanella, like a chopped BLT. He fries the bacon, chops the tomatoes, tears up some basil and makes the bread into croutons, fried in the bacon fat. I make a potato salad, a cucumber salad, a green salad. We feed the neighbors red wine and salads, and it’s well after dark when they all go home.

Monday dawns bright and pretty – and all in all, things near home are fine – we’re safe, no one’s hurt, life’s more or less back to normal on Tuesday.

But upstate? They didn’t fare so well in the Catskills. The pig was delicious; the aftermath, not so much. Roads out, bridges out, mudslides, rock slides. One friend broke her ankle in two places – and they couldn’t get her to the hospital; she was finally helicoptered out on Monday. The friends who had the pig roast weren’t able to leave until today. Rumor is that the power may not be restored for a month – my father’s generator will be out of fuel long before then. If someone tells you Irene was a poor excuse for a hurricane, direct them to Greene County – devastated.

Suger and Tomatos

Someone sent me a slightly treacly set of questions with answers from alleged second graders. I put the questions to my kid, and she stabbed me in the heart.



But have it be known that I am made of sugar and tomatoes!

Wordless Wednesday: Cat Scan

As soon as humanly possible after my sister sent me a link to a Tumblr of cat scans, I scanned the cat.



You're welcome.

Multiplication!

Back in June, when the girl was trying to raise money for an American Girl doll, I told her I'd pay her $10 if she learned the times tables over the summer. You know, good old rote memorization. Forget this new math stuff.

To help her, I cobbled together some flashcards. Of course, I didn't print them out until this week, so she's really only got the zeroes, ones, twos and tens down, but there's another couple of weeks before summer's over - a month if we're counting to the autumnal equinox.

In case you're interested, I put the pdf up on Scribd. Download it and print out your own old-fashioned math tools.

The Eggplant Fainted

A couple of years ago, I got a copy of that Simon Hopkinson book, Roast Chicken and Other Stories, because everyone was going on and on about it. And though I've tried to understand the fuss, I just don't get it. There's no magic in the writing for me, and there's a certain superciliousness that doesn't belong in the kitchen. I like my cookbook writers to be people I want to just hang out with, like Julia Child and Nigel Slater and Deb Perelman. (Someday I'm going to run into Deb at the Union Square Market, and then I'll be all tongue-tied or something, but I really like her cooking sensibilities. And Nigel Slater? She Curmugeon and I are planning to stalk him together. Julia? Nothing needs be said.)

Anyway, I pick up the Roast Chicken book from time to time, hoping for clarity, and finally, I've found one thing in it that maybe makes it all worth it: an eggplant salad - a spiced eggplant stew-like salad to be precise. Hopkinson says it's from Elizabeth David, but I can't find it in any of the eight (8!) Elizabeth David cookbooks I have. (I know, what's the matter with me? Five are in a Penguin boxed set that I got at the library book sale because I just couldn't resist. And of those five I already had two, so would you like a copy of Italian Food or French Country Cooking? Tell me in the comments, and I'll send 'em out.)

The closest thing I found in Elizabeth David is her version of imam bayaldi - the seasonings and ingredients are almost the same, but she stuffs the eggplant and bakes it, unlike Hopkinson's rendition where the vegetables are all cooked on the stovetop. I liked the Hopkinson version enormously. It reminds me a bit of caponata, with an exotic hit from cumin and allspice. Eat the leftovers for lunch tomorrow with a blob of thick Greek yogurt on the side. Oh, and save the cilantro for sprinkling on at the table if you have one of those "cilantro tastes like soap" people in your household.

Spiced Eggplant Salad, adapted from Simon Hopkinson, who got it from Elizabeth David

• 1 large eggplant
• salt
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 2 large onions, peeled and roughly chopped
• 3-4 ripe tomatoes, coarsely chopped
• 1 t. ground cumin
• 1 t. ground allspice
• 1/4 t. cayenne
• 4 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped
• 2 T. currants
• 2 T. chopped fresh mint
• 2 T. chopped fresh cilantro

1. Cut the eggplant into 1/2-inch cubes; place in a colander and sprinkle with 2 t.salt. Mix together with your hands and leave to drain (in the sink or on a towel) for 30 to 40 minutes.
2. Heat 1/4 cup of olive oil in a pan and saute the onions until golden. Add the tomatoes and spices. Stew for 5 to 10 minutes, then stir in the garlic and take off the heat. Stir in the currants.
3. Shake the colander to release some of the moisture from the eggplant, and then dump the eggplant onto a clean dishtowel and blot it dry. Heat up the remaining 1/4 cup olive oil in a big frying pan - to smoking hot - and stir-fry the eggplant until it's golden on all sides and cooked through, about 15 minutes. Add the eggplant to the tomato mixture, and add the fresh herbs. Transfer it to a bowl, and set aside to cool. Adjust the seasoning to taste.

Moky Ephemera

Every time I set foot in my mother's house, to clean up and clean out, we find things.

1) A fragile yellow ceramic bowl, up on a shelf, with an index card tucked inside:

Do Not
Use. Please.

2) The first time we ever went on an airplane was a trip to Bermuda, sometime after my parents had gotten divorced. How this card survived the past 35 years, I don't know. Why there was outdoor carpeting, I also do not know.

3) The label on a file cabinet in the cellar:

Metal Junk

4) She was exceedingly fond of ripping bits out of the newspaper, especially when there were good typos involved.

Wordless Wednesday: Self Portrait in Convertible

(No, I wasn't driving!)

BlogHer, Fragmented

I've been feeling like I should write about BlogHer, but I had a hard time knowing where to begin. It's more than a little overwhelming, it's lots of fun, it's full of people I'm really happy to see, and yet? I don't know. Will I go back? I don't know. Was it worth the time and the airfare and the hotel room and the conference fee? I don't know.

I took hardly any pictures, almost no notes, and not much swag at all. The expo hall was good for outfitting my sightseeing family with snacks, I missed the flash mob, and I didn't even see the unicorn cake.

But did I see lots of people, including (but not limited to!) Bon, Kate, Stacey, Catherine, Monica, Cecily, Neil, Julie, Varda, Donna, Stephanie, Janet, Angela, Darryle, Briar, Dresden (OMG, her name isn't really Calliope) and Jessica. I took a picture of Aurelia and Anissa, at the very excellent Aiming Low party, but I'm not allowed to post it. Oh, and I saw Aunt Becky at that same party, who was, um, holding court with a large, firm, crocheted penis. And I saw Liz and Mel and Schmutzie - each of whom wrote a good BlogHer recap post, if you want other perspectives (and some great photos).

I went to something during almost every single session slot. I loved the Voices of the Year Community Keynote - if you click through to that link, you can read them all. If you don't have time for that, start with Eden Riley's post called Every Little Thing - about hanging art on the walls in a hospital and helping to remember a person who'd died of cancer - it's sad and wonderful and subversive. I thought the closing keynote with Ricki Lake and Fatemeh Fakhraie and Carol Jenkins was fascinating. And though I'm really not a fan of packaged foods, and I definitely prefer Coke (in a can, with sugar and caffeine, thanks), Indra Nooyi talks a good talk, and is pretty inspirational as a female role model. One good quote from her: "Capitalism without a conscience is dangerous".

Jenn drove me and my husband and my daughter over to La Jolla for dinner, and I have a picture of the two of us together (Jenn & I, that is), which Jenn forbid me to post because she thinks it makes her "look like a mentally ill chipmunk with very white teeth".

I ran into a vaguely familiar looking woman on the airplane out; she was on her way to the conference AND she lives in my town - but we'd never actually met before. I finally met Holly and Dagmar, two other bloggers who live not far from me. Crazy to have to fly to the West Coast to meet people from your own backyard, but there you have it.

And one of the most serendipitous things was meeting a semiotic anthropologist - who totally understood me when I told her I had a master's in ethnomusicology.

At the so-called end of the day, what BlogHer and blogging is all about - for me, anyway - is the community of people I've met and whom I now have the good fortune to know.

Maybe I should go ahead buy my ticket for next year.

BlogHer in Swag

Right, I still haven't written the BlogHer post, but I did finally unpack the stuff that came home from San Diego.

Here's the thing: BlogHer depends on corporate sponsors. It's what keeps the conference price down, and when you think about what the conference price entitles you to, it's kind of staggering. $199 gets you two days of keynotes and sessions, two days of lunch and breakfast, three nights of parties (including 10 free drink tickets), access to the Expo hall, free wi-fi in all the public areas, and a conference tote full of swag.

The sponsors run the gamut from the huge (Pepsi) to the tiny (Dolphin Organics), and cover all manner of products (sex toys, office supplies, yogurt, pharmaceuticals, financial services). Because I'm feeling charitable, and not inclined to bite the hand that feeds me, I'm going to restrain myself from dissing the sponsors who got it all wrong, or who sell products that I find abhorrent - and believe me, there's some in both of those categories. Instead, here's a few that made some sort of favorable impression on me. There were others, but either I've eaten the evidence (hello, Dove) or plum forgot.

• Dolphin Organics is a brand-new company making organic baby care products - which I'm not in the market for - but I was charmed by the fact that their booth was staffed by the husband/wife team who started the company. If you're looking for organic baby shampoo and conditioner, they've got a coupon code up right now: use code news0811 for 50% off a bottle of the aloe-based shampoo when you buy conditioner.
  
• Bill My Parents is a credit card company, with a product geared towards teenagers. The schtick is that the parent can set it up so that the parent gets text messages every time the kid uses the card, and can lock and unlock the card at whim. My seven year old doesn't need a credit card (though she's asked!), but I'd consider something like this when she's older.
  
• Eden Fantasys was handing out sex toys. Yeah, there's a joke there about vibrators and a conference for women ... but I was particularly happy to send my husband off to Sea World with a branded package of their all purpse wet wipes - knowing he was going to need to destickify the child at some point. I also liked my very non-PC disposal of the condoms, which I think I'll keep to myself, lest someone get furious with me. However, I was nonplussed when my seven year old found the purple vibrator in my suitcase, but that was my own damned fault.
  
• 3M was there handing out all manner of Post-Its. The Flag+ pen/highlighter is going to live next to my bed; I'm always wanting to stick notes in books and scribble on the end papers.
  
• At breakfast one day, after the conference but before we'd left San Diego, we were scarfing down some very excellent fresh pineapple. The waitress said yeah, one day the Dole ship comes in full of pineapple, the next day it's full of bananas. This explained the quality of the pineapple - it's never so good on the East coast. Coincidentally, Dole was at the conference, handing out oodles of coupons for free Dole product - processed fruit, not fresh. Kudos to them; coupons are a much saner way of providing samples to conference goers because who wants to get on a plane with a suitcase full of canned fruit?
  
• Proctor & Gamble did a similarly friendly thing - they weren't handing out any samples at the conference, but if you signed up at their booth, they promised to mail a box of products to your home. I haven't seen any such box yet, but I appreciate the idea behind it - and hey, it meant less stuff for them to ship to the conference.
  
• HTC sponsored the Voices of The Year Community Keynote, and smartly handed out tissues in the party favor bags - because you know that keynote is all about the weepy.
  
• Hallmark was there with a novel offer - they had greeting cards on hand, and would mail them for you. So, a conference all about blogging and on-line and social media, and there they were promoting old-school snail mail cards. Yes, I sent two.

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Hey FTC, no one paid me to write any of this stuff, though I did get some free coupons and products. My opinions are very much my own.

Traveling

Everyone always complains about air travel. But you know something? Sometimes it works out just fine.

Remember my tale of the nice twitter assistant at Delta? Our flight to San Diego was just swell. Sure, tight quarters because we were flying steerage, but there were TV screens on the backs of the seats which made the girlie swoon.

The day before we were to fly home, I duly checked in and got our boarding passes printed. We went to bed, setting the alarms for 5:00am because we had a 7:30-ish flight.

At 4:30am, my phone went off. I picked it up and fumbled around, thinking it was my alarm. When my husband said, but it's 4:30, I realized it had been a phone call, not the alarm at all, not that I needed an alarm anymore. My heart sank when I looked at the number and found that it was Delta calling. Without listening to the voice mail, I called them back. Cancelled. They'd cancelled our flight due to "equipment damage". The chipper person on the end of the line told me that we'd been rebooked at midday on a one-stop through someplace, and were due home at midnight. While my first thought was more time on the beach, I protested, isn't there anything else?

Yes. In fact, there was. The nice Delta person proceeded to book us onto a non-stop American Airlines flight at just about the same time the Delta flight would have left, meaning virtually no change in travel. Because she was from Delta, she couldn't do anything about seat assignments, and told us to work it out at the airport.

I stood on line to get boarding passes from a human, a very nice human who gave us three seats not together, but sent along a note to the gate and told me to talk to the gate agent. I was first in line at the gate, and sure enough, the gate agent gave us new boarding passes, three seats together in the last row, but he said I'll let you know if something changes. About 10 minutes later, he called my name - at the desk, he took my boarding passes, and handed me three new ones, three seats together in the eighth row.

It was lucky and awesome and efficient, and I'm kind of amazed it worked out as well as it did.

San Diego in Fragments

The girl spent many hours boogie boarding in the surf, after having never really been in the ocean before. It was all we could do to get her out of the water. And now, her bathing suit is forever full of sand.

At a stop light, we pulled alongside a curvy red convertible, with the top down, driven by an ordinary looking guy. He was blasting his car stereo: bagpipes. Totally incongruous.

In an effort to inject a little history into the trip, we drove up to the San Diego Mission. I wondered, as we parked, why it seemed so crowded. Oops, we'd stumbled into Sunday morning mass.

We ate at a "nouvelle" Mexican restaurant, called El Agave, which doubles as a tequila museum. The food was mind-blowingly good - delicate, complicated, tasty - and nothing like the rice and beans slop you get in so many "Mexican" restaurants. Thousands of bottles of tequila surrounded us, lining all the walls and even on shelves hanging from the ceiling.

While I was at the conference, my peeps went to Sea World and the San Diego Zoo. In retrospect, my husband said he'd rather have spent two days at the Zoo. The girl would like to go back and buy everything at Sea World.

The storied Hotel Del Coronado was built in 1888, and is a huge pile of wood - one of a few surviving Victorian beach resorts. The main building is a riot of shingles and balconies, and when the fire alarm went off at 6:53 in the morning, we got the hell out. It turned out to be a false alarm, but we were shocked at how few people actually did leave their rooms. They'd have been toast if it had really been a fire.

A friend from high school - elementary school actually - met us for a drink. She'd moved to San Diego in 1987 and never looked back. I understand it; the weather and the natural beauty and the contained distances make it seem like a really livable city.

I knew San Diego was a military town, but I didn't know that it had a national cemetery. Fort Rosecrans overlooks the Pacific and is ineffably lovely. If I'd been in the military, I'd want to be buried there.

This or That - REVEALED!

1. Stick shift - Driving's so much more fun when you have something to do with your left foot.
2. Books - I'm really indifferent to movies; sitting in one place for two hours seems like such a waste of time and I love losing myself in a book.
3. Broccoli - I'll eat squash, if I have to, but I'd much rather eat a cruciferous vegetable.
4. Butter - like it's a question?
5. Cast iron - neither of them can go in the dishwasher, but cast iron is cheap and lasts forever and is enormously versatile.
6. Cats - dogs smell when they get wet, and they jump on you and stick their noses in your crotch, and they have to be walked.
7. Eau D'hadrien - hello, citrus!
8. Cheez Doodles - preferably in a blue bowl.
9. Lemon - I will always choose the fruit dessert over the chocolate one, and lemon trumps 'em all.
10. Danny Meyer - I haven't read the Twilight books but I've eaten in Danny Meyer's restaurants and my favorite recipe for Brussels sprouts is from the Union Square Cafe cookbook.
11. Elvis Costello, a/k/a Declan Patrick Aloysius Macmanus - again, was it really a question?
12. Spring - it's so full of hope.
13. Salt water - I grew up swimming in the ocean, and in a salt water pool, and to this day I think fresh water is weird.
14. Gin - why drink something with no taste?
15. Miracles of modern technology - a) I'm an atheist, b) IVF brought me my daughter
16. Shell steak - grilled over charcoal, with a tomato salad and corn on the cob. Lobster does nothing for me.
17. Mets - National League. End of story.
18. The Four Temperaments - just a perfect ballet to a fabulous piece of music.

This or That?

So.

I'm on a plane (unless I'm not and we're still on the tarmac at Idlewild in which case I'm sehr cranky) and through the magic of scheduled posts, this post is posted (unless it's not because Blogger is down or the internet has imploded or, oh, something).

So, while I'm gone, let's play a game. Tell me how well you know me by identifying what I prefer. (Please put your score in the comments.)

Quizzes by Quibblo.com | SnapApp Quiz Apps

Discursive answers on my return.

Yellow Hair, Yellowed Paper

My mother's house is finally on the market, and my siblings and I have been slowly trying to make some headway with the contents. There is an enormous amount of stuff: furniture, tchotckes, toys, pots, buttons, towels, and endless stacks of paper.

Moky kept files on all manner of things - local history, friends, nuts and cranks. The files are full of letters, ephemera, gritty xeroxes, clippings, and photos.

Later today, I'm having lunch with an old friend of my mother's, the kind of friend who had her own folder. They'd actually gone to college together, but hadn't really known one another until years later when, by coincidence, they ended up living in the same town, and my mother's friend's daughter was my elementary school (and junior high and high school) classmate. After a time, the friend moved away, to California, and they kept up by writing letters back and forth, often with clippings involved.

When I see her, I'm handing over her folder, but I skimmed through it first, I had to. It's full of letters and birthday cards and newspaper clippings about the friend's husband, but it's the letters that fascinate me - for how they reflect upon events in my mother's life, and necessarily mine. In one letter, there's a whole Yeats poem about blonde women typed out, with this comment:

I always think of that poem in pondering Pinky and Magpie and their beautiful flaxen hair, and of course yours too-- when I first knew you, yours was just like theirs.

There's some delicious semi-catty chatter about the guests at my wedding in another letter, but my favorite bit might be this tantalizing post script:

P S 2 A___ tells me that M___ T___ has broken up with the fabled panty-hose woman. She wanted to have a baby so he decided enough was enough. We had a mimeographed account from him of the fabled lawsuit, but no personal word in a long time.

Is that not the makings of a short story?

No, No, No

Rehab came on in the car the other day, shortly after Amy Winehouse had died.

They tried to make me go to rehab but I said 'no, no, no'...

The girlie was in the back seat, so I paused the song and took a moment to talk to her about drugs and rehab and what it all meant.

A few days later, it popped up again, Rehab, that is. This time, the girlie said to me "Grandma says she did go to rehab". So we talked about that, and that sometimes rehab doesn't work, and you have to do it again. I probably should have said something about how song lyrics are a kind of story-telling, but I didn't think of it at the time.

All the while, though, I was feeling a little befuddled at the idea of my 7 year old girl having a conversation with her 80 year old grandmother about Amy Winehouse and rehabilitation. Only quite some time later it occurred to me that perhaps they hadn't been talking about Amy Winehouse and drugs, but that maybe Grandma had said that she, Grandma, had gone to rehab after her hip replacement, or her knee replacement, or her back surgery...

Why, yes I am a bleeding heart liberal...

In little chocolate truffle bites, I've been reading the totally charming letters between Julia Child and Avis DeVoto. It's a perfect bedtime book - easy to put down when it's time to turn out the light.

But I stopped in my tracks the other night, at a quote that just seemed so completely, what, contemporary?

Except that I cannot regard the Republicans as people, somehow, only as monsters, foils, beasts and foul excrement.

Julia Child, letter to Avis deVoto, 12/8/1954

I guess some things never change.

Alchemy With Lime

Do you know Ilina? She's a feisty cocktail inventor, a fellow homonym aficionado, and a left-minded rabble-rouser. I recently got her attention with an en passsant remark on Twitter (or Facebook, who can remember?) and ended up doing a guest post for her 5:00 Fridays series. Looking for drinks inspiration? Check in with her every Friday.

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I love a good gin and tonic, but what I've come to realize is that it's all about the lime. I don't much care what brand of gin you use, I prefer the tonic freshly opened so it's not flat, but whatever you do, give me more lime!

Not too long ago, I happened upon a recipe on the Times website for a "better mixer". I wasn't looking for a better mixer but the photo, involving what was clearly a lot of lime, intrigued me. I immediately put 18 limes on the shopping list.

I washed the limes. I carefully shaved off the green peel with a vegetable peeler. I squeezed the limes. I measured the juice and added sugar and stirred in the peel. I let it sit overnight. I strained out the peel. I waited another day, until I was quivering with anticipation as I got out the cocktail shaker.

We mixed up a batch using a 1:1 ratio of gin to cordial. We served it up, over ice cubes, in martini glasses. It was thoroughly delightful, if a tiny bit on the sweet side.

For the next one, I got out the tiny angled measuring cup - which is less cute but more useful than a traditional jigger - and we tried 2 ounces of gin to an ounce of cordial. That was a little too heavy on the gin for my taste.

The third version was the charm: an ounce and a half of gin plus an ounce of cordial made the perfect balance of sweet, tangy, potent. It might even be better than a gin and tonic.

The cordial is amazing. It's just lime juice and sugar, in a 1:1 ratio, with the peels infused into it, but somehow those simple ingredients transform into magic, unctous, viscous, pale green magic.

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Lime Cordial, adapted from the New York Times

10-12 limes
sugar

Wash limes in warm water and towel them dry. Shave off the green peel with a vegetable peeler.

Cut limes in half and juice them. Measure the juice. Measure an equal quantity of sugar. (If you have two cups of lime juice, measure out two cups of sugar.)

In a glass jar (like a 1 quart mason jar), add sugar to juice and stir until fully dissolved, 3 to 5 minutes. Drop the peels in and mash them around with a wooden spoon to extract some of the lime oil. Cover and refrigerate for 12 to 24 hours. When ready, strain the cordial off from the peels into a clean mason jar or stoppered bottle. Put it back in the fridge for another day, to cure, before using. (I got about 3 cups of cordial out of 2 cups of juice from 11 limes. Your quantities will depend on the size and plumpness of your limes.)

Perfect Gimlet

3 ounces lime cordial
2 ounces gin

Shake together and serve over ice.

Perfect Lime Soda

3 ounces lime cordial
8 ounces selzer

Serve over ice.

How to Find Anything

Finally, I’ve had that parenting moment where I felt I’d turned into my mother.

We were going someplace, and the girl wanted to bring her Harry Potter book, but she couldn’t find it.

Where’d you have it last?, I asked.

Well, it was in the other room, but Daddy must have moved it.

Look again, I said.

She padded into the other room, and called back to me but it’s not here.

I followed her in, swiveled my head 90 degrees and spotted the book on the counter by the television. And I had this flashback to my childhood, when I could never find the screwdriver / buttons / baling wire / glue / sweater / cake pan my mother sent me off to look for, and she could always find everything. It’s the omniscience of the mother, yes?

Use Real Chicken Broth, People

Okay, since I didn't win a free trip to BlogHer with my recipe using Knorr's new shelf-stable concentrated chicken stock, I'm not biting the hand that feeds me when I tell you that the stuff is rather nasty and not worth cooking with.

Should I start at the beginning? Sometime last month, BlogHer set up a competition. 200 bloggers got samples of Knorr Homestyle Chicken Stock, a product about to be released in the United States, to use in the creation of a recipe. Recipes were submitted, 8 people were chosen; there'll be a cook-off at the BlogHer conference next week. I entered, out of curiosity, and because I do like to cook and I thought it might be fun to create a recipe to toss into the stockpot.

A package containing four little tubs of stock arrived by mail. We examined the label:

Water, salt, modified palm oil, autolyzed yeast extract, sugar, carrots, chicken fat, lactic acid, leeks, maltodextrin, xanthan gum, potato starch, garlic, chicken powder, parsley, locust bean gum, malic acid, thiamine hydrochloride, natural flavor, disodium phosphate, ascorbic acid, disodium guanylate, disodium inosinate, caramel color, succinic acid, spice, mustard oil, beta caratene, coconut oil.

Let me tell you something. To make chicken stock, take the carcass of the roasted chicken you had for dinner, fling it in a pot, cover it with water, and boil. Strain off the bones, and put the stock in the fridge. When it's cold, scrape the fat off the top. Divide it up into 1 cup plastic containers and stick it in the freezer. DONE. Two ingredients. Hardly any work.

We forged ahead, disheartened by the long list of unpronounceable ingredients. I peeled the foil off the top of a little container, and sniffed. Cat food! It smells exactly like cat food! I lovingly made the meatballs, with a package of ground free-range, organic chicken from the philosophical butcher. I harvested herbs from my garden, and used an onion from my CSA. And then I poured disodium this and disodium that in the pan around the patties and put them in the oven. And I used the rest of the gums and acids to make the couscous. And I cried a little in my heart, because I was selling my soul for a chance at a free plane ticket and a free hotel room and a free conference pass.

We ate the chicken balls and couscous, with cats on the prowl. They thought it smelled like cat food.

And I submitted my recipe, and I didn't win. I'm kind of relieved, because really? I couldn't have lived with myself otherwise.

Try my meatballs. The trick is that you brown them on top of the stove, and then you finish them in the oven. The stock reduces a bit, making a little sauce for your couscous. Substitute rice or orzo, or just serve the meatballs with some nice crusty bread to sop up the sauce. (Oh, if you'd like some cooking photos with acerbic commentary, click on that picture of the ingredients - it'll take you to a Flickr set.)

And remember what Michael Pollan said: Eat food, mostly plants, not too much.

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Chicken Balls with Couscous

4 T. olive oil (divided)
1 medium onion, minced
1 T. minced fresh tarragon
2 T. minced fresh parsley (divided)
¾ cup panko (Japanese bread crumbs)
1.75 lbs ground chicken
1 T. kosher salt
1 t. ground pepper
3 cups homemade chicken stock
1 T. butter
1 ½ cups instant couscous

1. Put 2 T. olive oil in a large oven-proof skillet. Add onion. Cook onion over fairly high heat for about 4 minutes, stirring often, until onion is softened and translucent. (Yes, start with a cold pan, it’ll be fine.) Add tarragon and warm through, about 1 minute.
2. Put chicken in a large bowl. Add panko, 1 T. parsley, salt and pepper. Scrape onion/tarragon mixture from skillet into bowl. Mix everything together gently, with your hands.
3. Form mixture into seven slightly flattened balls, and put on a cookie sheet to rest. They’ll be a bit smaller than a tennis ball. Set aside for about half an hour, and clean up the kitchen or supervise some homework – but don’t wash that skillet you cooked the onions in.
4. Preheat the oven to 375F.
5. Add the remaining 2 T. olive oil to that big oniony skillet, and put it on the stove to heat until the oil is shimmery. If the skillet’s not big enough for all seven patties to cook without crowding, work in two batches. Cook the patties for three minutes on each side.
6. Turn the pan off, pour 1 cup of the chicken stock around the patties, and pop the pan in the oven.
7. Bake for 25 minutes. [Another built-in pause! Make a salad, feed the cat and go water the herbs on the back porch.]
8. When the chicken is almost done (meaning, the timer’s about to go off), bring the remaining 2 cups of stock to boil in a small saucepan. When the chicken timer goes off, add the butter and couscous to the saucepan, put the lid on it, and turn off the heat. Set the timer for another 5 minutes. The patties and the couscous will be done at the same time. Fluff up the couscous with a fork, and mix in the remaining 1 T. parsley.
9. Serve patties with couscous on the side, with some of the now reduced chicken stock drizzled over both. Add a vegetable and you’ve got a meal.

Total time, about 90 minutes. Active time, about 30 minutes. In other words, you can do other stuff while you’re making dinner.

This will serve anywhere from four to seven people, depending on how hungry and/or greedy they are. In my house, the seven year old was so hungry that she needed two patties and more couscous and all of the ketchup.

Eat real food, people.

Five Years

Remember my oh-so-irritating list of things I was going to do before I turned fifty?

Well, I finally finished another one of them.



Yup - I got printed books for 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. (Apologies for the awful glare besmirched photo - the books look better in person.)

I started blogging on the 23rd of July in the year 2006, with a post about the inimitable Julia Child and butter, which means that those five books actually represent four full years and about half of another. It's a lot of words, words that I didn't know were going to come pouring out the way they have, words that I wanted to keep in a tangible form. I mean, what's going to happen to my blog when Al Gore invents the thing that comes after the internet?

After futzing around with several different services that would suck all the posts in and print them, I ended up using Blog2Print because it was by far the easiest of the choices. While their service isn't as granularly editable as, say, Blurb, I cranked out the tweaking necessary to get my five books done in under an hour. They offer free shipping, which is supposed to take weeks; I had my books in days. (Yes, you can pay for faster shipping, but I found it unnecessary.) And I'm really happy with how they came out - it was a good ratio of time input to product output.

In fact, I'm so happy with the books that I got in touch with the company and asked if they'd give me a discount code for you all, my readers. And they did. If you feel the need to print out some or all of your blog for posterity and grandchildren, go to Blog2Print and use coupon code b2pmagpie15 - it'll get you 15% off between now and August 23rd. Call it my anniversary present to you.

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Disclosure: Nope, Blog2Print didn't pay me to tell you any of this. There is, however, an affiliate link in that there url - if you click over from here and make a book there, I'll get a little referrer fee. Is that okay with you?

Sleepovers

You know how whenever your kid has a sleepover, you wonder whether everything will be okay? Are you going to get a call in the middle of the night, please come get your whimpering mess of protoplasm? Are you going to have to call someone else’s mother, your child is scared and wants to go home?

I settled the two little girls on the floor in their sleeping bags, with pillows and stuffed animals deployed, and read them An Awesome Book (which is indeed awesome and you should run right out and buy several copies now). Then I went downstairs, watched an episode of Weeds, and went back up to bed. The little girls were sound asleep.

I was reading, and still awake, when the little girl who isn’t my daughter came sobbing into my room, I can’t sleep, I want to go home. I tried comforting her, futilely, and called her mama. They came and got her, but we left her stuff and her sleeping bag for rounding up in the morning, not wanting to wake up the still sleeping child of mine.

I went to sleep.

Sometime later, who knows when, the little girl who’s mine came sobbing into my room I can’t find her. She climbed into my bed with her little cold feet and told me she’d been all over the house looking for her friend who wasn’t in her sleeping bag. Why’d she go home? Why’d she leave her bag? Why was she scared? Can she come back for breakfast?

All was well in the light of day, but these are the things they don’t tell you about.

Wordless Wednesday Watch

$5 plus a half hour =

Do you have any idea what these are?

If I hadn't seen the sign at the Greenmarket, I wouldn't have recognized them, at least not from just looking at them. Despite a lifetime of eating chickpeas in various forms, I'd never seen fresh ones before yesterday.

So I bought a pint, for the rather spendy sum of $5. I quizzed my husband when I got home - he didn't recognize them either, and guessed they were soybeans, which the pods slightly resemble. But these pods are smaller, and only have one or two chickpeas inside.

I set to work shelling them - if shell is what you do to chickpeas. Maybe you shuck them, husk them, peel them? (Maybe you call them garbanzos.) Shelling the pint took me a half an hour, and resulted in 3/4 of a cup of little fresh chickpeas, looking kind of like wrinkled peas.

The farmer had said to boil them for a five minutes, so I did that, and tossed them with a pinch of coarse salt and a drizzle of olive oil. And they were seriously good, toothier than a pea, less mealy than a dried cooked chickpea.



But $5 and a half hour for a small side dish for two adults? I'm unlikely to buy them again.

Monday Mincement

Is it because I'm someone's mother that I feel the urge to tell strangers to tie their shoelaces?


It is annoying the hell out of me that just because I engaged in online commerce to obtain new little yellow plastic flowers for our hummingbird feeder, I keep seeing banner ads for the little yellow plastic flower company. Time to scrub the cookies out of my browser.


Why does the bank waste paper by sending a whole page of "how to reconcile your account"? Is that some archaic law? Don't people know how to reconcile their accounts? And if they don't, does anyone really think they're going to start because of an extra piece of paper in the envelope?


This morning, between the subway and the office, I saw a kid in a stroller. Yeah, yeah, so what? The nanny was pushing the stroller with one hand, using the other to talk to her phone (read, paying no attention to the kid). The kid was leaning back with her feet up on the bar, using the stroller like a La-Z-Boy. In one hand, she held a sippy cup, in the other, an iPad (read, paying no attention to the out of doors). Yeah, kid was watching movies on her iPad, while her nanny talked on the phone. I think they should have stayed home.

Making Travel Plans

Back in the olden days, if you wanted to go somewhere, you went to the travel agent and bought a plane ticket, and when you got to the airport, you got your seat assignment (without having to take your shoes off first, thank you very much). Oh and there was red carbon paper involved.

Nowadays, it's search Orbitz-Travelocity-Peapod-Amazon-Priceline-Kayak for the best price, unless you want to use points, in which case you toggle back and forth between the airline site and the credit card where you've racked up said points, and hope that you get the points transferred and the ticket "bought" before your reservation expires. And if you're really lucky, you don't have enough points for all three tickets, so you have to use points for two and hard cold cash for the third, and then you end up with separate confirmation numbers, and when you want to try and get seats together for at least two of the three people because one of them is seven and probably should be sitting next to a parent on the plane, you can't for the life of you manage to do that because the only seats that appear to be available are single seats in the middle.

Sigh.

So you call the airline, and they helpfully tell you to just show up early at the airport, which is code for "your seven year old is going to be sitting by herself, sucker".

Then you politely turn to Twitter.



And your husband texts back nicely landed on one foot.

I'm still kind of amazed that it worked as well as it did. Of course, if I get to the airport and they've shoved things around so we're in three single middle seats, I might have to have a cow.

Telling Wally Tales

Remember Wally? The guy who played the Mendelssohn at my wedding on the contra-bass clarinet? And who once jumped up and down on a peanut butter sandwich?

Here's a picture of him that turned up in a pile just recently - an old picture, not at all new. He'd been renovating a bathroom, and is very fond of oak furniture, so someone - possibly my mother - gave him that nice oak toilet seat for Christmas, for the new bathroom. Of course he had to wear it. It's kind of like how when you get new underpants for Christmas you wear them on your head? Well, we do, anyway.

Wally and toilet seats and my family go way back. Sometime not too long after we'd moved into our house, there was a plumbing emergency of the never-flush-tampons-again variety. There was a blockage in the sewer line, and my father thought it would be a good idea to open the clean-out plug in the cellar, at the point where the sewer line exits the house. It would have been hunky dory, except that there was three stories of sewage on the wrong side of the plug - which came pouring out when he opened it. Yeah. After a frantic phone call, Wally came up the hill wearing a WWII gas mask and carrying a camp toilet - one of those contraptions that's a toilet seat on legs with a plastic bag attached. Somewhere, I think there's a picture of Wally wearing that toilet seat.

He's good people, that Wally.

Second Grade Poetry In My Heart

My heart is as happy as a cute cuddly kitten.
My heart is as angry as a stampede of buffalo.
My heart is as sad as when Slinky and YoYo died.
My heart is happy like a puppy.
My heart is angry like squawking geese.
My heart is sad like a rain storm.


(Yes, I'm still putting away the piles of school paperwork.)

Trail of Thought

Sputter, sputter

A postcard came in the mail – addressed to the seven year old – offering "pre-planning" at a nearby cemetery. Yeah, like she’s going to buy a "clean, dry, above ground crypt" anytime soon. The card included a proactive disclaimer: If this information reaches you at a time of sickness or loss, please accept our apology. All well and good, but where’s the apology for making the seven year old’s mother apoplectic about the state of direct mail lists and the attendant waste of natural resources?

Bubble, bubble

Also in the mail, the same seven year old got a thank you note, for a birthday present, from a friend. It was a homemade fill-in-the-blank card, dear _________, thank you for the _________. At the bottom, though, the friend had written in big letters: FREEZE THE TOURIST. I scratched my head, my husband scratched his head, we were both completely baffled. The girl child read it a couple of times, and then lit up: FREEZATORUS! It is, of course, their rendition of the freezing charm from Harry Potter, which the girl and her friends are all presently obsessed with.

Dollar, dollar

A couple of weeks ago, in a fit of trying to raise money to buy a new American Girl doll, the seven year old asked "Mama, if I read all seven Harry Potter books this summer, will you give me a dollar a book?" I'm not really in favor of paying kids to read books, but a dollar a book for all seven rather long and complicated Harry Potter books? Yes, indeed. She's midway through book two. She was supposed to be getting cash for cleaning the cats' litter boxes too, but has been somewhat less diligent about that. Funny that. I'd rather read a book than scoop poop too.

Kitten, kitten

To Be Not Alone

I've been wondering to myself why I bought a ticket for BlogHer again this year. I've never been to San Diego? That's part of it. The swag? Really, I don't want any processed food coupons, thanks. The cocktail parties? Oh, they're fun, but I've got better wine at home.

Clarity descended in the form of a post by Maternal Dementia - who was writing on the heels of attending a blog conference in England:

...to be in the company of others who, finally, understand why you blog...there’s a huge sense of connectedness – and relief – when you think to yourself, that’s just like me and oh, I’m not alone.

That's it. That's why. It's the meeting of the tribe.

Are you going to be there?

I am from...

I am from cast iron skillets, from white Keds and yellow foul weather gear.

I am from the afternoon southerly, splintery docks, the cannon fired at sunset.

I am from coral bells and basket of gold, blue hosta and purple irises, from cherry trees made for climbing, and ivy covered walls.

I am from Christmas Eve and blonde hair, from Albert and Marcus and Marie. Marion too, she who revealed little, is that where I'm from?

I am from hoarders and fixers, cooks and lawyers, politicians and artists.

From stinky cheese and poison, and a fog as thick as pea soup.

I am from show tunes, Handel, Pete Seeger. From summer Sundays at the beach, and winter Sundays at the skating rink. From red velvet seats and first position arabesques, and Edward Gorey in his many rings.

I'm from Germany and France and Ireland and England, from weisswurt and springerle, hot cookies and gorgonzola, oysters on the half shell and icy cold Schaefer long-necks, and five pound bags of Bazzini’s pistachios.

From the rules about mayonnaise on the teak, beer croquet in the side yard, the blowing of the big horn and hand-cranked ice cream after a long hot day.

I am from fly rods, bear skin coats, block parties. From black and white snapshots and Kodachrome slides. From sterling silver and hand-me-downs. From hope, pain, love and old age. From oriental rugs and footlockers, station wagons and bicycles, charge cards and index cards, and wicker chairs found on the curb.

And what's after me is from what's before me.

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I spotted this poetic exercise in personal history at Amanda's and Flutter's and De's, and finally succumbed. If you want to too, visit the template. Schmutzie's done it too, and is making a link-up. Join in. Come back and tell me where you're from.

America The Beautiful in Sisterhood

You know I went to women's college, right? Well, one campus tradition is a gentle revision of the words to America the Beautiful:

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above thy fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed her grace on thee,
And crown thy good with sisterhood
From sea to shining sea

But 'tis okay, because the lyrics were written by Katharine Lee Bates, a graduate of and an English professor at Wellesley. I mean, if anyone's going to mess with her lyrics, it'd be her fellow alumnae and matriculants, yes?

On Memorial Day, there was a singing of America the Beautiful down at the ceremony at the train station. I sang along, I always do, and I sang out my cranky feminist version of the lyrics (which, incidentally, I've taught to my daughter, thank you very much) and the woman standing next to me just grinned at me approvingly when we were through.

So, if you happen to be of the female persuasion, and happen to be singing America the Beautiful today, Independence Day, perhaps you want to fix the lyrics too.

Enjoy your Fourth.