Have You Had Your Oatmeal Today?

For breakfast this morning, we had oatmeal. Because it was a work day, it was "fast oatmeal"; it took about 10 minutes from the time that the girl asked for it to the time the bowls plunked down on the table. Sometimes on the weekend, we do "slow oatmeal", the steel cut kind that takes a half an hour to cook. "Slow oatmeal" is more delicious, but "fast oatmeal" is better suited to getting out of the house on time.

Besides the fact that oatmeal is tasty and filling, it’s also good for you – low in sugar, high in fiber. A serving of “fast oatmeal”, made from a ½ cup of dry oatmeal, and with a teaspoon of brown sugar and a ¼ cup of 2% milk, has about 200 calories in it – and it’s a good filling breakfast, it'll keep you 'til lunch. As a bonus, the oatmeal provides 4 grams of dietary fiber, you know, to keep your insides nicely scruffed.

Later in the day, I had an oat-based drink. A what? A PR agency asked if I wanted to try it, so I said sure, because I do try to keep an open mind, well, within reason anyway. I'm pretty sure I'd turn down a case of Dinty Moore beef stew, and you will never talk me into frozen TV dinners or fat-free ice cream, ever.

So this oat stuff. It's called Sneaky Pete's, because they are sneaking oat fiber into a poor unsuspecting beverage. I tried the "Mango Mystique" flavor, and I had to look at the label several times, because it did not taste like mango, no way. It tasted like really really sweet peach jellybeans with a long chemical aftertaste. Now, if I'm going to drink something that is ostensibly healthy and tastes like peach, I'm going to want it to have peaches in it. (Or mangoes, as the case may be.)

Here are the ingredients:

Filtered water, Erythritol (natural sweetener), Evaporated Cane Juice [also known as sugar], Oat Bran Concentrate (avena sativa), Citric Acid, Natural Mango Flavor with other Natural Flavors, Stevia Extract (natural sweetener).

Ah. Three different sweeteners (two of which aren't sugar) and no fruit. Also, some of those "natural flavors", which may well have been made in one of those factories along the New Jersey Turnpike. And fiber, in the form of oat bran concentrate - providing 3 grams of dietary fiber. So what we have, folks, is fiber-enriched mostly-artifically-sweetened flavored water.

I'm all for fiber, no question. But "sneaking" it into things like drinks? How about eating real food, people, like a bowl of oatmeal washed down with a cup of coffee?

---

While I did receive four bottles of Sneaky Pete's for free, nobody paid me to write about it, and my opinions are very much my own.

September Song

Oh, it's a long, long while
From May to December
But the days grow short
When you reach September
And the autumn weather
Turns the leaves to flame
And I haven't got time
For the waiting game


And, the days dwindle down
To a precious few
September, November
And these few precious days
I'll spend with you
These precious days
I'll spend with you.

Our Joyce scholar died last week.

Before my husband and I got married, there was the complicated issue of who was going to perform the ceremony. Being that neither of us is religious, or conversely, that both of us are atheist, it didn't really seem right to have a cleric performing the ceremony. I had the idle idea that we call in the three wise men from the neighborhood: the Methodist minister from across the street, the rabbi from next door, and the Joyce scholar from down the hill - it could have been a gloriously high-minded cross-cultural mess. When I called Eddie's widow to offer my condolences, I told her about this not-acted-upon scheme we'd had. She laughed uproariously, and said he'd have liked that very much.

Eddie's obituary was in the Times yesterday, and reading it, I was struck by how much they didn't know about him.

• He read books while driving the car.
• He knew a lot of stuff, really, a deep and catholic amount of stuff. 
• I don't think I ever saw him wearing anything but a button down shirt.
• He played the piano at parties, so everyone could sing along. His gift was that he never stopped, continuing on even when he made a mistake. He played "O Holy Night" and "The Holy City" and "Adeste Fidelis" and we belted them out and Christmas will never be the same.
• He told me which sections of Don Quixote I could skip, and even armed with that knowledge, I never did finish reading it.
• For years, he ran a book club of sorts: Eddie's class - an informal class, for serious study (with lots of cookies). Everyone in town went, or at least, all of my mother's friends.
• He learned to drive as an adult, and he honked at stop signs, just in case.
• He was idiosyncratic and fabulous and as low-key as they come.
• At the end of every raucous singing-aloud party, he'd quietly play "September Song" and slip away.

Rest in peace, Eddie.Thank you for the precious days.

Scenes of Spring

Tulips on Park Avenue.



Dyeing hard boiled eggs.



Teaching the girl to play poker.

What can I tell you? It was the last three pictures I'd taken with my iPhone...the juxtaposition made me laugh.

Letter to a Real Person

On the last school break, when we were in DC in February, the kid lost her iPhone. (Lest you think I'm a crazy person for giving an expensive cell phone to an 8 year old, it wasn't really an iPhone anymore; it was one of our old ones, with no phone service, so it worked like an iPod touch.) She was crushed when she lost it, and spent some time whining about her misery, until she rediscovered her DS, that is. (She's all about the serial attachments.) However, she did kind of miss emailing her friends about petty dramas!!!!!! (All of her emails include more exclamation points than strictly necessary. In fact, she's probably used up her lifetime exclamation point quota.) I mentioned this to my boss, who kindly excavated his old iPhone from a desk drawer, and she was complete again. (This was before all the canvassing about the American Girl dolls.) Anyway, I told her she had to write a thank you note.

I love how the first paragraph is so, so, so, so, so very tidy, and the PS is exuberant and misspelled and hopeful. (Also, my ears bleed just thinking about violin practice next year. Why? Why did she pick the violin? What did I do to deserve that?)

Oh, and she's writing a book. She may need a blog of her own.

More Posts I'm Never Going To Write

Still cleaning. Found a pile of paper, articles and whatnot, things that had got me thinking that's a blog post. So here. Here is "this is not a post, this is just a list":

First off, a letter from a teacher (a/k/a The Book Whisperer) about why kids should read at home, and why she doesn't require book logs.

• Dear Parents: At-Home Reading

Lots of people have lots to say about reading logs.

• Join the Chorus Against Reading Logs

Is it possible to motivate students? "Let the students decide except when there’s a good reason why we have to decide for them."

• How to Create Nonreaders

She "called bacon on it".

• Some Pig: The development of the piggy confessional

It's not just about the education; it's good for families.

• The Real Value of Public Preschool

And, finally:

• I Regret Eating My Placenta

If you read nothing else, read the last one AND all of the comments, which range from "babies are tasty" to "gross" to "all animals eat the placenta" to "it's the best thing ever" to ... oh, just go read them yourself.

Designing

I've been spring cleaning - both at home, and in the office - filing, tossing, organizing and filing. Tucked in an unmarked folder in the office, I found a pile of dress designs.



The girl had drawn them a couple of years ago - when she was a size seven - and had sent them to work with me with the instruction that I get the costume shop to make them all for her. Um, right. I can't even imagine what it would have cost to have had even one of the dresses handmade by the union ladies, though I suppose the price would have depended on just how much beading and fancy work there was. So, no dresses, just designs.

I am, though, a tiny bit wistful about the whole thing, because the costume shop is no longer. All the pins were vacuumed up, all the irons were unplugged, all the sewing machines were idled, and all the magic dissipated.

Mommy - Girlie Day

To kick off spring break, the girl and I went on an expedition to NYC.

We started off with lunch at Brooklyn Taco in the Essex Street market (where she didn't eat her quesadilla because they're better at school), detoured to Economy Candy (where $20 buys heaven), and went on a fabulous tour at the tenement museum (where oddly the girl was the only child on the tour, and other than a guy in his 30s, everyone was older than me).

Then we headed uptown for the obligatory stop at the American Girl doll store. I refused to buy her a new doll, and she didn't have enough money for one, but I told her she could buy whatever she could afford. (She had a gift card from Christmas, and a wad of singles. Earlier in the day, I'd cashed in $7 worth of change so she wouldn't have to lug it around.) She picked out a new outfit (Kit's floral print dress, from the 1930s because one apartment at the tenement museum was from the 30s) and a Feel-Better kit with ace bandages and crutches and casts (which she is hell bent on applying to the cats).

Our last stop was a ballet performance that Julia's daughter was in, and then we headed back to Grand Central for a slice of pizza, another glimpse of Pegasus, and the train home.

Many miles. Much tiredness. A whole lot of yes.

I think we should do it annually.

Letters from Inanimate Objects

The campaign continues. However, the other dolls are now writing to me to ask for a sister doll.



Details to note:

• The youngest doll is "tired of being new".
• The dolls consider themselves to be my children.
• A new doll would be a sister for them.
• A new doll would be a new doll for my daughter.

But if they're my children, doesn't that make them my daughter's siblings? Does that mean I have four children? Why doesn't Ivy call me "Mom"? And how can a doll be both a doll and a sister?

This kid, she slays me.

Oh, The Drama

Another note delivered to my bedside table:



If you want me to be happy, let me get this one. If you want me to be sad, buy me the other. Well, how about I don't buy you anything? Then you can reside at that point of stasis between happy and sad.

Math Work

I found this on my bedside table when I went upstairs last night. While I could pull apart the logic (if you'll have money leftover, why don't you ask for less than $60?) and I'm not interested in anyone, much less my eight year old, spending $85 on a bed and bedding for an American Girl doll (especially given the cluttered-pigsty condition of her room), I do appreciate that she showed her math work.

To Have And To Hold

So different, this man
And this woman:
A stream flowing
In a field.

(Marriage, by William Carlos Williams)

There’s a part of me that doesn’t believe in marriage. I resisted it for a long time, finally agreeing because my husband felt more strongly about getting married than I did about not being married. Besides, it’s a great excuse for a party and you get all sorts of weird presents.

And you know what? It’s nice. It’s nice to know that there’s someone there who’ll take care of you when you’re sick, and who does all the driving so you can knit in the car. It's great to have someone who understands just why those champagne glasses are so cringe-inducing and how weird it is that your aunt didn't even dry the decanter she must have found at a thrift shop. It's perfect if you marry someone who likes to polish the silver.

It’s good to divide up the tasks, because one of you will be better at loading the dishwasher, and the other will be better at small electrical repairs. Someone will be the tidy one and clean up after the cats, and someone will be much better at running the household finances. One of you will know lots of William Carlos Williams, and the other will know the latin names of perennials.

We’re different, he and I, just like I imagine Flutter and her Clay to be. But different is fine, different is good, so long as the pieces fit together, here, here and here, just so.

I’ve never met him, but her? The woman with the red lipstick and pale skin? She’s divine and he is, therefore, a sublimely lucky man.

Join me (and Emily) in wishing Flutter a big congratulations and all the love in the world.

Mannish

Yes. One learns something every day.

I spotted an ad on the subway this morning that, frankly, I thought was a joke on the order of the Saturday Night Live sketch for the Bassomatic and I took a picture so that I'd remember to go look it up.

Mannish Water

Ram Goat Flavor Soup Mix

Doesn't that sound like a joke? It isn't! Mannish water turns out to be a spicy Jamaican goat soup, possibly an aphrodisiac, often served to the groom on his wedding night, at least according to Wikipedia. The manufacturer's website has a recipe if you want to make it yourself (though it requires 2 pounds of goat head and belly), but they also sell an instant soup, and the aforementioned soup mix.

Back when I was in graduate school, I had a part time job in the back office of a big law firm. I had nothing to do with legal work; I helped with systems and office supplies and emergency planning and oversight of the cafeteria. That kind of thing. I rarely ate in the cafeteria, usually preferring an outside adventure, but one day I was in there and they were serving lamb curry for lunch. "Lamb curry", I said to the cook, "sounds good!" He leaned over and winked at me. "It's actually goat, but we don't want to tell the lawyers that." I may well have had a Drake's Coffee Cake out of the machine for lunch that day, but I loved that the cafeteria guys were pulling a fast one on the lawyers.

On the other hand, now that I know about Mannish Water, maybe the cafeteria was trying to rev up the lawyers so that they'd have lots of billable hours and the firm would do well and everyone, including the cooks, would get raises.

No?

Whatever. I love New York City.

Wordless Wednesday: Everything Looks Better From The Roof

Sweet Potatoes Make Spicy Chili

I used the last of the sweet potatoes today. The last of last season's CSA sweet potatoes, that is. Ones that had been down in the cellar in a paper bag since, oh, October? One of them was a little funky looking, but the rest were fine. For some reason, I got it in my head that I wanted to make some kind of chili-ish stew-like thing, which is kind of crazy because it's like SPRING out today, but hey. So I kind of riffed on something I found on A Year Of Slow Cooking, and it was pretty good.

Sweet Potato Chili Riff

 2-3 sweet potatoes, peeled and chunked
1 yellow onion, diced
2 garlic cloves, minced¹
2 cups of cooked chickpeas
2 carrots, chopped
2 stalks of celery, chopped
2/3 of a 28 ounce can of tomatoes²
1 T. chili powder
1 t. smoked paprika³
1 t. chipotle chili powder⁴
1/2 t. crushed dried green jalapeno⁵
1 t. kosher salt
1 1/2 cups water
2-3 T. smooth peanut butter.

Use a 4-5-6 quart slow cooker. Layer all the vegetables in the pot. Add the seasonings. Pour the water over the top. Cover and cook on low for 6-8 hours, or until everything is nice and squishy. Turn off the cooker, and stir in the peanut butter. Serve over rice, with (or without) grated cheese and sour cream.

---

¹ Well, I would have used fresh garlic but WE HAD NONE. I swear. How did that happen? We did have some granulated Penzey's garlic, so I sprinkled some in.
² This is ridiculous. 2/3 of a can? It's what there was. Four of the (plum) tomatoes had been fished out for something else; it's what was left.
³ Smoked paprika is the bee's knees. It adds a smoky bacon-y-ness^a to everything. Get some if you don't already have it. It's the magical secret ingredient.
     ^a Or should that be baconiness? I don't think so; too reminiscent of marchioness.
⁴ Funnily enough, this was in the original recipe. However, my jar of it was a gift from a co-worker's girlfriend; she made it herself with peppers that his brother grew out in the midwest.
⁵ It's a jar that's been in the cabinet for YEARS. I think it's regenerating or something, because I stick a bit in anything spicy and the jar is still half full.

Wordless Wednesday: Cat in Hat

Last time, it was cat-sized pink doll hats. This time, it's a pop-up blue top hat, bigger than the poor cat. Stay tuned, I'm sure there are more hats in this cat's future.

Impossible Things Before Breakfast

My college reunion is later this year. For the "record book", we were asked for a 500 word essay. I thought I'd share mine with you.

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

All of these things are true:

Cauliflower drizzled with olive oil and roasted in a hot oven until crispy around the edges is a wonderful thing to eat.

My boss once called me a horrible Mensa bitch. I told him I was going to put it on my business cards.

I still read the newspaper, the printed inky broadsheet newspaper. Sometimes I even rip things out of it, like recipes which I will never make, or typos that make me cringe.

My eight year old falls asleep best when snuggled up close to me. Consequently, I tend to go to bed earlier than I might otherwise, but I get a lot of reading done.

I love belonging to a CSA. Having no choice in the produce we get each week is curiously freeing; we're forced to cook and eat things we'd probably never buy otherwise. I still hate butternut squash, but I can now make a great dinner out of eggplant or sweet potatoes.

As much as I sometimes wish I were the stay at home parent, I love my full-time job, and we're oddly lucky that a perverse circumstance has led to my husband being home to take care of our daughter. He makes her lunch, puts her on the bus, drives her to swimming, and manages her social calendar. I come home and drill her on the times tables.

My cats hate me, probably because I'm not home as often as the other two humans in the household. I'm trying to seduce them with a private stash of freeze dried tuna flakes.

Buying jeans is a thankless proposition, akin to shopping for bras and bathing suits.

There is a difference between believing something to be impossible, and believing in impossible things. The latter is preferable.

If you give me the choice of a lemon dessert or a chocolate one, I will take lemon.

My daughter thinks I am the most annoying mother in the world. She also thinks I'm the best mother she's ever had - but is clever enough to point out that I'm the only mother she's ever had.

I've never had a manicure. I think I'll keep it that way.

I can't imagine what it's going to cost in 2021 when my kid is ready for college.

One gift of a liberal arts education is "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function" (F. Scott Fitzgerald).

The summer before I went to college, my mother and I made a quilt for me to use on my dorm bed. It's now on my daughter's bed, fraying a bit, needing repairs from time to time. I keep fixing it though, because it's our quilt, and my mother's too, and it wraps us in memory and thrift.

On the far side of fifty, I revel in idiosyncrasy.

Extreme Couponing!

Yeah. I'm not a huge coupon user. Hell, I hardly ever go to the supermarket. I buy toilet paper and paper towels and cat food on-line, we have milk, eggs and butter delivered, we get fruits and vegetables from the farmer's market or our CSA, and we buy meat in bulk from a right-minded butcher. And, we don't even have a supermarket in town anymore, because they up and closed back in August, citing hurricane damage, and nothing has taken its place. Frankly, other than ice cream and the occasional potato chip, I don't miss the supermarket much though it is kind of irritating to run out of a staple in the middle of a recipe and have no place to go.

I digress. Someone offered me two free coupons to try some frozen pizza, and (true confession) it's a brand I've had and liked, so I took the coupons. (I know. But just because we eat local vegetables and well-raised chickens doesn't mean that frozen pizza isn't ever what's for dinner.) I was headed to the wine store because we were somehow out of wine (really, how could that have happened?) and the supermarket that carries that pizza is in the same shopping center, so I figured I'd cash in my coupons. I picked up the two pies, and headed to the check out, with my own nylon shopping bag. Imagine my surprise when the cashier rang me up, and concluded that I was due a nickel in change - because of the "canvas bag refund".

I think I win at extreme couponing. They PAID me to buy pizza. Even the cashier was amused.

Unite To Give

As you may know, I'm a big fan of charitable giving, and about finding ways to do so with my child. Part of my impulse is born out of the fact that almost all of my paid work experience has been in the service of non-profit organizations, and part of it is because I just deeply believe that helping others is the right thing to do. That helping can take different forms, like volunteering, sponsoring a friend in a walk-a-thon, donating stuff to a thrift shop, and of couse direct cash contributions.

At the end of the calendar year, we sit down and talk through the pile of envelopes from this, that and the other place. Shall we give to help the read more...

Chocolate Chip Cookies, or How I Fell Down A Rabbit Hole

If you're like me, you always make your chocolate chip cookies using the recipe on the back of the bag, the iconic "Toll House cookies", even if you don't actually use Nestlé chips because Nestlé is evil and all that. Whatev. Toll House cookies were one of the first things I learned to make by myself, so long ago that I remember when the recipe on the package included 1/2 teaspoon of water. They've dropped the water, either because such a tiny quantity seems ludicrous, or eggs are bigger, or flour is different, or who knows why. Toll House cookies were also the first thing I learned to tinker with - I'd skimp on the flour and change the ratio of brown to white sugar, but I always added the water. My cookies always spread just right, so the chips made little hills on the surface of the cookie.

Since Kim Boyce's book Good to the Grain came out a couple of years ago, I've seen reference to her chocolate chip cookie recipe a number of times, and noted that it uses 100% whole wheat flour. Despite the fact that I slip a little whole wheat into lots of things, I rarely use 100% whole wheat - it's just too aggressive.

But I recently came across yet another reference to those cookies, and it seemed like a chocolate chip cookie day, so I made them. And they're fabulous. Other than a little graininess at the finish, you'd be hard pressed to tell that they have any whole wheat in them, and the texture is perfect, mostly crispy and a bit chewy. I only baked a handful right after I made the dough; the rest I formed into a log, which I stuck in the freezer. Cookies sliced off the log and baked frozen were excellent as well.

I got to thinking - how different could the two recipes be? Besides the flour, what made Boyce's different from the old Toll House standard? Me being me, I geeked out and did a side by side comparison (leaving out the nuts, because I always leave out the nuts):

Huh. I'd have guessed that the Boyce cookies had a higher percentage of butter, given their crisp deliciousness, but actually, they've got more flour and more sugar than the Toll House. Boyce also adds baking powder, and uses cold butter in place of softer warmer butter. I'm no Shirley O. Corriher, so I can't really go into the science of the cookies, but it's kind of fascinating that two iterations of a recipe for cookies can be so similar and yet have demonstrably different results.

A couple of years ago, the Times published an article, by David Leite, in search of the ultimate chocolate chip cookie. He pulled it apart in many ways: the temperature of the dough, the length of time between mixing and baking, the size of the chocolate pieces, the size of the cookies, the amount of salt. One thing led to another, and I found a blog post by the Culinary Collections Librarian at the New York Public Library, going back to the original Toll House recipe - with the water! - and then I really felt like I'd fallen down a rabbit hole. I mean, one could make chocolate chip cookies all the live long day, testing out different flours and sugars and butters and leavenings, and they'd all be pretty good, not to mention the fact that your perfect cookie might not be my perfect cookie.

That said, I'll make Boyce's cookies again, because they really were good. Though, I've never tried the recipe for the Tate's chocolate chip cookies (which looks just like the Toll House recipe with only 2 cups of flour), and I've not tried the Times recipe (which has two kinds of flour), and, oh lord, I really ought to go on a diet.

Free Cialis!

There is some deep irony in the fact that, on the first page of the business section in today’s New York Times, there is an article about Rush Limbaugh losing advertisers, and on the back page, there is a full page ad offering up a 30 day supply of free Cialis. Contraception is on the front lines, but the drug companies are giving away “erectile dysfunction” meds. In 2006, Limbaugh got caught coming back from the Dominican Republican carrying a bottle of Viagra - in someone else's name, and joked that perhaps he'd gotten Bob Dole's luggage. So, let's see, a law school student filling a prescription for birth control pills is a slut, which makes Limbaugh a ... what? The mind boggles.

Like Mother Jones notes, it's possible that Limbaugh simply doesn't understand birth control:

It's almost surreal to have to point out that regulating pregnancy is a legitimate medical need. Unlike erectile dysfunction drugs, whose sole purpose is to facilitate sexual activity, birth control has other legitimate medical uses beyond preventing pregnancy.

And let's not forget that it takes two to tango - presumably Limbaugh had a partner when he was using his little blue pills, and presumably one or both of them was using birth control.

Sigh.

How is it possible that in 2012 we are talking about contraception? How is it that in 2012, white Republican men are trying to legislate women's health issues? How can it be that, in 2012, women's rights are being trampled on in this way?

I tell you, I want this sign:

photo from Jezebel - used with great glee and no permission

Self Portrait With Lamp Post

Miracles of Modern Technology

On Valentine’s Day, I sent my father an email with a link to an article in the online local paper near his house, about the reopening of a semi-major road that had been closed since Hurricane Irene. He doesn’t actually “do” email, though, and he wasn’t in his office anyway, so his secretary printed the email, added a handwritten note that she’d been “unable to open the attachment” (which wasn’t an attachment, it was a URL), and faxed the piece of paper to the home of the person with whom my father was then staying.

My father picked up the now cryptic fax, cryptic because the original email had been all about the URL, and the linked-to article wasn't included, and you can’t click a URL on a piece of paper, you need those glowing bits and bytes. He scribbled a question mark next to my name, and put the fax in an envelope. This envelope then went home with him, two states away, where he added a stamp and dropped it at the post office.

It arrived in my mailbox yesterday.

Did you get that?

• Email from A to B.
• Fax from B to C.
• Envelope transported from C to D.
• Envelope mailed from D to A.

Next time a bridge reopens, I’m going to call him. If nothing else, it’ll be quicker.

Wordless Wednesday: Shiny

I seem to have a thing for the shiny. Beautiful rotary motors, whimsical stainless steel trees, airplanes with polished aluminum skins - these are just a few of the glittery silvery pictures that I took in Washington DC last week.

Just Who Is Coming To Dinner Anyway?

I was totally channeling my mother this morning when I ripped a scrap out of the newspaper, sputtering. She'd have done the same, and circled the offending bit in red pen, and left it for me to read the next time I visited.

I'm just sharing it with you.

(And yes, I checked.  The oh-so-egregious error was fixed in the on-line edition of the Times.)

February Break

Home again, home again.

We left Tuesday, and came home last night after four nights in Washington, DC and driving through seven states to get there and back.

[New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. West Virginia was not strictly necessary, but we left DC and went to the Dulles branch of Air and Space and ended up in Middleburg for lunch and then up 81 and you know how it is.]

Other than the hotel reservation, and a spot on a White House tour at 7:30 one morning, we had no plans. It's a good thing we didn't have any plans, because our Friday would have been totally FUBAR by the fact that our Capital tour was aborted by an "incident" - not midway through, we were asked to leave. So we detoured over to the Library of Congress for an hour, and got back to the Capital just as they were resuming tours.  The words "white powder" were heard. Who knows? When we asked the guard at the x-ray station what had happened, he said "just stuff". Perfect answer.

[My Danskos set off every single metal detector. Every one of them. At least they're easy to slip on and off.]

The hotel was ... odd. It bills itself as a luxury boutique hotel - but what it really is is eight furnished apartments. Nice, tasteful, even stylish - but with no maid service, no doorman, no lobby, no elevator, no room service, and hardly any staff. They do empty the trash daily, but they don't make the beds or straighten the towels in the bathroom. There's a kitchen with a fridge and a microwave and a coffee pot and enough dishes for two people - and a supermarket across the street, and a Starbuck's almost next door.  If you're looking for a fancy hotel with lots of amenities, this isn't it - but it was $150 a night, with a Jacuzzi and very nice sheets.

[Gas at the Exxon station in the shadow of the Watergate was $4.99 a gallon for regular. High test was $5.19. No, we didn't buy gas there, but I checked in on Foursquare just so I had an excuse to take a picture of the price sign.]

Because the hotel was a little off the beaten track - in Georgetown, a ten-minute walk up the hill from M Street - we ended up taking cabs into the middle of DC (instead of trying to find parking). Friday morning, we were picked up by a chatty older guy, who asked our daughter her name and proceeded to launch into a karaoke rendition of "Hello Dolly" using her name. Yes, a singing cabdriver. He entertained us all the way to the Capital and told us to check him out on YouTube.

[People in DC, especially the docents and volunteers and tour guides, were polite and helpful and refreshingly engaging.]

The Lego room at the Building Museum was fabulous. I loved seeing the First Ladies dresses. Little airplanes make my heart sing. Thomas Jefferson's library made my husband tell me he felt uneducated. Mount Vernon is a really nicely done historic site; when you're wandering around, there's almost no evidence of the 21st century. Arlington Cemetery is - like all of our national cemeteries - incredibly moving. The National Park Service does really good didactic literature.

[We didn't make it to the Mint because at 2:06 on Friday, I realized that the last tour was at 2:00. Oops.]

We had a few really good meals, spent some time with our niece (who's a senior in college which was part of the impetus for doing this trip this year), had dinner with a friend of mine from college, stumbled on a fine restaurant in Alexandria thanks to Yelp, stumbled on another fine restaurant in Middleburg by asking a guy on the street, and ate at a McDonald's in the middle of nowhere on the way home last night because it was ... easy.

[Actually, it was the first time I've ever had a Shamrock shake. It was like ice cold toothpaste, but kind of nice.]

Visiting in February turned out to be a good time to there. There were people everywhere, to be sure, but nothing was hugely crowded. We didn't have to wait at Mount Vernon, or at the Capital. It wasn't hard to find cabs or get dinner reservations.

[And the weather was unbelievably nice. Well, except for Friday when it poured down rain while we were ensconced in the building museum. But that doesn't count, right? We were inside for the rain.]

Yes, we had a good time. We'll have to go back - for the Spy Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Newseum, the Mint, and the Holocaust Museum. And probably some other things.

Wordless Wednesday: School Break

Yes, we're in DC for a few days. Today: White House, Smithsonian Castle, Lincoln Memorial, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington Monument, Air and Space, American History Museum. Also, endless traffic because it was Washington's Birthday and there was a cornerstone being laid - these two things were unrelated. Tonight, my feet plan to fall off. Still to come: Archives, Building Museum, Jefferson Memorial, Mount Vernon, Arlington, Alexandria, The Capital, and I'm sure we've forgotten something terribly important.

The only reason i can remember any of this is because I am checking in ferociously on Foursquare. (I'm winning!)

Oh, and anyone have dinner suggestions?

Cottage Industry

When we moved in, the house came with a (nothing wrong with it) nice but boring (brass neo-Georgian) chandelier in the dining room. I hung things off it from time to time, to make myself like it more, but when a friend emailed me the do-it-yourself plans for a fetching modern deconstructo fixture by Lindsey Adelman, I became obsessed. I kept thinking about it. I sent it to my husband. I haunted the website and coveted the fittings.

And then, my husband surprised me - totally and completely - by making it for me for Christmas. How the hell he hid the fabrication and the finished object until Christmas Eve, I'll never know.

The finding friend is in the middle of renovating an apartment, and really wanted the fixture for her new living room. So she asked whether my husband would help her make it. She bought all the bits, had them shipped to our house, and arrived this morning with (fresh, warm, NYC) bagels and the two of them set to work.

She went home happy, chandelier in hand, and I think we might should start a cottage industry. Anyone need a chandelier?

Grammar Policing

Back in the day, before cell phone cameras, I would have stood on the subway sighing deeply to myself about the decline of English grammar as we know it. But in the new and improved world in which we live, I can take pictures and share my dismay with everyone.



Yes, note closely: there are two errant apostrophes: one in it's, and another in don''t.

Swoon.

The exclamation points might also be worth mentioning. Of the six sentences in the bubbles, five end with two exclamation points, and the sixth ends with one. Six sentences, eleven exclamation points!! I would suggest that it's a record, but my 8 year old uses a prodigious number of them in every single email she sends!!!!!!!

Death and Taxes

Now that it's well after the end of last year, I mean, it is February 15th today, my thoughts have turned to death and taxes. I spent a few hours last night scanning things and printing reports, and packed them all off to the accountant. (Yeah, I know, I could probably do it myself, but I just don't trust TurboTax any more, especially since Intuit screwed over Quicken for the Mac and forced us to change to Moneydance, which might be the stupidest name for a serious program ever, but hey, it works.) As for death, I'm not planning to die anytime soon, but I do want to print my blog so I can bring it out and sharing embarrassing stories about my child with her future suitors. Or something. I'm semi-current: last summer, I printed up 2006 to 2010. And when I get home tonight, I plan to dive into Blog2Print to get 2011 done - especially because I just found a 10% off coupon - huzzah!



It's good for two days only, and expires on Thursday 2/16 at 11:59PM Eastern. If you too feel the need to print out some or all of your blog for posterity and grandchildren, go to Blog2Print and use coupon code savetenb2p - it'll get you 10% off between now and the tail end of Thursday.

---

Disclosure: 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? I'll pay taxes on it next year and everything.

Happy Valentine's Day

The best valentines are the unexpected, right?



I extracted all the pink/red/purple cards from the box of Pantone postcards, stickered them up into unsigned valentines, and winged them out with 32¢ in postage, because I do love to amuse myself.

Eat Me!

The girl wanted to make cookies for Valentine's Day, so we did. We got flour and sugar all over the kitchen, we used six different colors and textures of decorating sugar, and four different colors of royal icing, and several icing tips, and pink and red edible markers.

I had to rein in my inner control freak, because, well, my cookies would have been tidier and far less gaudy. But I let it go, for the sake of the girl. She's ever so pleased and is taking them to school tomorrow.



But don't worry. Daddy ate the one that says "Eat Me!"

Spanish Spam Salad

I am confused. Why do you suppose it is that all of the spam in my blog email account is in Spanish?



Also, do you love how when you open the spam folder in gmail, there are ads for spam related products - like spam casseroles and ginger spam salad?

Right. I'm over-thinking it. Okay then.

Mock Mocha

How to make a mock mocha latte:

• Work for an employer with a fancy Keurig machine in the kitchen.


• Convince the office manager to stock hot chocolate pods in addition to coffees and teas.


• Get a nice big mug.


• Into it, make a pod of hot chocolate with 8 ounces of water.


• Now, add a pod of the strongest, darkest coffee using 4 ounces of water. (If there's some caramel vanilla flavored coffee, use that.)


• Add a splash of some of the milk your co-workers rescued from the school's cafeteria.


• And enjoy a hot caffeinated mock mocha without even leaving the office!

Lavender teardrops

Yesterday morning, I put on a pair of earrings, thinking nothing more than I need dangly today since my hair's pulled back. From time to time during the day, I fiddled with them, feeling the facets of the little glass drops, swinging them on their silver hooks.

Late in the afternoon, I heard that Susan had died. And all of a sudden, it came to me. I'd bought the earrings on Etsy, from a woman that Susan had blogged about, another mother with cancer. Susan was trying to help her, because that's who Susan was.

The first time I met her was at the BlogHer conference in 2008. She made me cry. My mother was in hospice care then, dying slowly of lung cancer, and Susan found exactly the right thing to say. Because that's who Susan was.

Susan gave advice freely and without sentimentality - like in this post about hair loss and hats, which inspired me to buy a Buff wrap for my mother.  She educated countless people about inflammatory breast cancer, the kind that can present without a lump. She was a rocket scientist, with a PhD in Physics. And she mothered her two little boys, and loved her husband, and lived her life with joy, because that's who Susan was.

The world is a smaller place without her.

* * * * * * * * *

If you'd like to honor Susan's memory, consider making a donation to the Inflammatory Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Or do what her husband suggested: "Please choose to make a difference somewhere, anywhere, to anyone." Because that's what Susan did.

The Week Begins

In one move, I
Push through the swinging door
Spin my chair around
Drop my bag on the seat
Slip my coat off my shoulders
Flip on the power strip
Brush past for the light switch
Turn on the computer
And
Breathe.
Another day.

Tree Man

On Sunday, the girl had a friend over. And then another kid called, so she came over too. Because three kids meant that the noise level in the house went up exponentially, I took them all out to a nearby museum. Partly I went because I have a friend who had two little monotypes in a juried show, and I wanted to see her work. But I also really wanted to see the tree figures by Joseph Wheelwright. They're really cool. Full sized trees, dug up, judiciously pruned, and set back in the ground, upside-down so that the roots become hair. It'll make you look differently at the forest.

To Be, Not To Be

It seems so long ago. Nine years, ten years, a lifetime ago we were enmeshed in (in)fertility treatments. We'd waited so long, too long, not realizing that there was a problem, not realizing that we couldn't have it all. 

When all was said and done, we ended up with a real live baby, but the road there? It was rocky. There was a medicated intrauterine insemination. There were three in vitro fertilizations. Laparoscopic surgery. Countless blood draws and many early morning visits with the dildo cam.

We were so happy when the first IVF worked. Big Fat Positive! Happy day! Heartbeat! Joy! Until it wasn't - I went in for blood work and a scan, and - poof! - not there anymore. Early miscarriage, at about seven weeks. I remember standing in my kitchen a few days later, wracked with tears, in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, wrapped in my husband's arms. He and I, we shared that grief. Real palpable gasping-sobs grief, for a baby that wasn't, a miscarriage.

 The second IVF ended in a BFN - big fat negative for those of you unversed in the acronyms. My husband was out of town, I'd gone in for blood work in the morning, and then out to Long Island for a funeral. I was heading home from Penn Station, on the cross town bus, when the nurse called with the results. Tears streamed down my face as we bumped along 34th Street. When I got home, I bought a bottle of wine, a piece of cheese, and I had a little pity fest, alone. Can you grieve that, a procedure that didn't work?  Most attempts at pregnancy don't work; lots of fertilizations the "normal" way end up in early miscarriage, so early that the woman doesn't even know she was pregnant. So, yes, I was sad that it didn't work, with all those dollars down the tube to boot, but that's not really grief, is it?

And then, the third IVF - the third one was the charm, that real live baby who now knows how to scramble an egg. But, but, but - we had ten embryos, and transferred five, and only one nestled in for keeps. What about the four others transferred? I think of them sometimes, though they have an unreality about them. Did they really exist? I know they did; I have a picture of the five that were transferred. Did the four just slough off, or did the triumphant girl absorb them into herself? Then, there were the five left in the lab. Grief, no grief? Who were they?

My daughter has no siblings. That's another loss right there, another kind of loss, an intangible one, not stemming from a treatment, a pregnancy. Maybe we'd have had a second child if we hadn't waited so long and worked so hard to have the first one. Maybe we'd have had twins if one of the other embryos had stuck it out. Do I miss that? Eight plus years out, I rarely have those pangs of wistfulness. I don't flinch when I hand-me-down her toys and clothes. And, on the bright side, she's afforded us a certain lifestyle - we don't need a big house, we don't need a minivan, we only go through two gallons of milk a week.

But what it comes down to is this: without all that went before, we wouldn't have her, the ferocious and magical girl. If that first miscarriage hadn't been, she wouldn't be. If that BFN hadn't happened, she wouldn't be. But she is. She is.

---

[Credit Mel, the Stirrup Queen, the community connector, for this ramble. She posted a few weeks ago about loss and grief and infertility and dichotomy.]

And There Are So Many

I found a diary, of mine, from ninth grade. Yes, it was kicking around under a bed at my mother's house. (Yes, the house is still on the market. Yes, it is still full of stuff. Yes, it is rather a poignant headache.)

The diary - an inane piece of gobbledygook - was a school assignment, for an English class. It's full of teachers, dreams, grades, boys, sleepovers, band, dances, "I got a desk chair, yellow" for Christmas. My handwriting changes on every page, the ink color changes almost more frequently, and the diary is called Katherine, Kitty, Kati, You, and Kathy. (Yes, my middle name is Catherine.)

In the margins, occasionally, there are notes from the English teacher. Apparently we had to hand it in - to what end, I cannot fathom. It seems like it might have been more appropriate to a psychology teacher or guidance counselor, because it's not creative writing, it's the mundane ramblings of a thirteen year old (a thirteen year old who was not smoking cigarettes or hanging out in cemeteries).

I did, though, like this passage:

Sometimes thoughts
just run [in] my head.
And there's so many
I can't write them
all down. Oh well, too bad.

Funny how not much has changed - today, instead of a diary for Miss Dissin, I'm writing here. And all day long, posts write themselves in my head - walking down the street, waiting for the train, watching the bread rise - and there are so many that I can't write them all down.

I think my grammar is usually better though.

Happy Birthday, Bobby Burns!

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!

Once upon a time, we went to a Robert Burns dinner. Actually, we went to the same Burns dinner several years running, a multi-culti fest organized by a Scottish woman and her Japanese-American husband at small Catskills hotel with a French restaurant. I know, the head spins. Men wore kilts, my husband addressed the haggis, Scotch was consumed. And photos were taken, with a disposable film camera that we had kicking around for some odd reason.

Many months later, many, I finished the roll of film and had it developed.

Much to my surprise, because of course by then I'd completely forgotten having had the camera at the Burns dinner, I discovered that some enterprising gentleman had "borrowed" the camera and taken a picture of what was under his kilt.

In case you are wondering, it was uncircumcised.

Gluten Free Baking With, Oops...

If you have a gluten-free friend with whom you get together for family meals, you think about gluten-free cooking and baking, at least I do, from time to time. That Deb, at Smitten Kitchen, recently posted a lovely sounding thing called "apple sharlotka", and we were having a pig roast with the gluten-free friend, and dessert was in my hands, and I thought, "oh, the apple thing will work fine with gluten-free flour".

So I made some lovely deep dark caramel sauce - another Smitten Kitchen recipe, because, well, let's put it this way, I'm totally buying her cookbook - and I chopped apples and I mixed up the eggs and sugar and flour, and just as I was about to dump the batter over the apples, I remembered the goddam gluten-free flour on the other side of the kitchen. Yup, I'd completely forgotten to use it.

But I only had two eggs left, and when I'd greased the pan, I'd used Baker's Joy, a wonderful product that combines grease and ... flour, so I couldn't have used the apples even if I did have enough more eggs, and I didn't have enough more apples, and I really should have been paying a little more attention in the kitchen.

Oh well. Gluten-free friend forgave me, and ate ice cream with caramel sauce for dessert. And the pig? The pig her husband made? The pig was hands-down awesome.

I still don't know if the apple sharlotka would work with gluten-free flour, but it is a really good and very easy thing to make for dessert, and it is divine with some deep dark caramel sauce dribbled over the top, and maybe I shouldn't try gluten-free baking anymore.

The Post About Breasts. And Cancer.

A long time ago - really, more than 20 years ago - I felt a lump in my breast. I trotted off to my gynecologist, she tried a needle aspiration, and sent me to a surgeon. Both the GYN and the surgeon were pretty sure it was a benign tumor, and I sort of shrugged and figured it wasn't worth doing anything about. Then I told my mother. She freaked - "how could you even think of not having it out?" - so I had it out. It was benign, a fibroadenoma. Having it out was the probably right thing to do - it would likely have gotten bigger, and would have been harder to excise later. But I really did think about doing nothing.

Sometime last year, I noticed a dark spot in my bra - and honestly? I figured I'd dropped chocolate into my cleavage. Then I saw a couple of drops of blood on the bed sheet - I asked my husband to tell me if I had a bleeding zit on my back. Finally, I realized that there was a tiny bit of dark ooze coming from my nipple. That's when I called my doctor.

My gynecologist managed to express a drop of greenish fluid, too little to even culture, so she sent me to a breast surgeon, and the quick answer is - after a number of office visits, multiple mammograms, and several breast ultrasounds - there's nothing the matter with me. It was probably a tiny little blockage or infection, there's been no discharge since, and yeah! I don't have breast cancer.

But.

In the past few months, two friends have been newly diagnosed with breast cancer, both cases found during routine mammograms. I've lost track of how many people I've known who've had breast cancer. Some of them have died, some of them have been successfully treated.

And Susan? Susan Niebur? Maybe you know her as WhyMommy, or as Toddler Planet. She's one of the most remarkable people I know - and yes, I've met her at several of the BlogHer conferences. She's been fighting a particular pernicious cancer for almost five years, with breathtaking grace. Send her your love - through the intertubes or in your heart - or by getting your own mammogram, joining the Army of Women, or supporting the Inflammatory Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

Love to you, Susan.

Exploitation, or, Blog Posts Written By Children

I'm probably a very bad mother, very bad indeed. I mean, last year, when my iPhone was clearly on its last legs, I replaced it with a new one and gave the old one to the kid. It's not got phone service, and its battery life is farshtinkener, but it does connect to the internet via wi-fi (at home) and she can use it as an iPod and play all manner of zombie games and send emails to her friends and take picture of the cats and make lists.

After she fell asleep clutching it in her hot little hands last night, I read all of her emails, looked at all of her pictures, and reviewed her "notes". She is one funny thing.  

Email to me and Daddy:

Subject: Periced Ears

Dear Mom & Dad,

I think it is very,very unfair that I am not allowed to get Periced Ears. I will buy my own my earrings and NEVER EVER complain about dinner. And I bet they will hurt about as much as my clip-on earrings. So PLEASE,PLEASE say yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  

Email to a friend, about a sleepover they've got planned for next weekend:

Subject: Sleep Over

Here are 9 things we could do at the Sleep Over.
1.Go on Webkinz.com
2.Watch Comedy Movies
3.Torcher George
4.Play with Barbies
5.Play Dress-Up
6.Plan Money-Saving for Goth Girlz
7.Play with American Girl Dolls
8.Play Beauty Salon(With real Make-Up
9.Play Super Model  

Notes to herself (version as of last night):

MY WISHES FOR TONIGHT:
1.To have 12 inches of snow
2.To get my ears pierced
3.To have a really good singing voice  

 Notes to herself (updated sometime this morning):

MY WISHES FOR TONIGHT:
1.To have 12 inches of snow
It happened!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2.To get my ears pierced
Not yet!!!!BOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3.To have a really good singing voice
It is half-way their!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

One of an endless series of pictures of cats up in the ceiling of the cellar:

(In case you are wondering, we did not get 12" of snow - it was more like 6". I'm happy that she figured out how to spell "pierced" - I'd corrected her after she sent that first email to us. Of course, she spelled "torture" and "there" wrong. One step forward, two steps back. However, torcher/torture is kind of a nice homophone.)

Lute Soup

Sopa - the spanish word for soup.

Pipa - a Chinese lute with four strings.

 In a world without Wikipedia and Google, how would you have known that? Well, you might be a Spanish speaking ethnomusicologist, but probably you aren't.

Right now, Congress has two bills in discussion, SOPA and PIPA - one's in the Senate, the other's in the House. Both aim

"to cut off the oxygen for foreign pirate sites by taking aim at American search engines like Google and Yahoo, payment processors like PayPal and ad servers that allow the pirates to function."

Yes, piracy is wrong, stealing content is wrong, copyright has a point. But SOPA/PIPA won't stop piracy and will quash innovation and damage the internet.

Here, go read what Sarah Granger has to say. Or check out The Oatmeal (because kitten BBQ = bad. Oprah and Jesus on a jet ski in outer space = good). Protest SOPA/PIPA via Wikipedia or via Google or via a participating site of your choice.

Let us blather on in peace.

Unpacking

There’s a piece in the Times today that made my blood run cold. Editorial, entitled "Defriending My Rapist". Facebook had suggested that the writer "friend" someone who’d raped her nearly 40 years ago. In and of itself, it’s a strong well-written piece, a horrible story of a past event, brought back to the present by the weird prism of the social network. But the thing is? The reason I sat paralyzed in the living room this morning? I went to high school with her. I grew up in that town. I know the gates to that cemetery – it’s where my grandparents are buried. I may well have known those boys.

I don’t remember her, and her picture in my yearbook didn’t ring any bells. But I know people who know her. And despite the fact that I well understand the reasons - both hers and the editors - for not outing the rapists in the New York Times, I kind of want to know who they are.

What’s gobsmacked me is the little assault on my own innocence. There were rapists in my junior high school, or maybe they were older, in high school. There were 13 year olds drinking rum in the cemetery. Sure, kids smoked - I didn't use the bathroom in high school, ever, because it was a de facto smoking lounge. And I'll never forget the day that the school nurse made an announcement on the P.A. system to the effect that there was a bad batch of Quaaludes around, and if you'd taken any, please report to the nurse's office. But sex and alcohol? Call me sheltered, but no one I knew was having sex, or getting raped, or drinking in cemeteries. How could that be my town? Or do I just not remember? Or was I just living in a parallel utopian universe?

There is darkness everywhere, isn't there?

Serendipitous Musing

1) My husband texted me at 5:13pm. The cats had caught a mouse, which somehow ended up in the clean laundry. He discovered it as he was trying to put away his socks. The working theory is that the injured mouse took refuge in a sock, and there expired.



2) Some twenty minutes later, on my way home, I was walking through the underground labyrinth that is the Union Square subway station. There, at a small table with a manual typewriter, was a poet: “Name a price, pick a subject, get a poem!!”  I walked past, considered the mouse text, and returned. I paid, and shared the mouse text with her.



3) While I waited, she composed. While she composed, many people scurried by, someone stopped to admire her "cool typewriter, dude", a couple took her picture, and an unsanctioned opera singer filled the station with an a cappella aria.



And I swear, though I asked her if I could put her poem on my blog, I never told her its name. Thank you, Abigail Mott, for your impromptu eulogy to Tiny Mouse.

Slow Cooking vs. Fast Eating

Perhaps "lazy" was the wrong word to describe the slow cooker. Long cooked stews, chilis, soups, pot roasts - they're wonderful, for many reasons. It's a way to tenderize a tough cut of meat, it's how to get your beans done. And I know there's a way to put the slow cooker to use there; I just have to find my way (and maybe get up a tiny bit earlier).

The thing is, the crock pot business has a bad name - there are too many recipes out there where a jar of this and a can of that are dumped on top of an indifferent piece of meat, which is then left to stew all day in its industrial food complex juices. Yes, Virginia, you too can make Sweet & Savory Brisket with only five ingredients: ketchup, grape jelly, onion soup mix, ground pepper, and a poor unsuspecting beef brisket.

Really, people, that is lazy ass cooking. Besides the fact that it probably tastes disgusting, do you even want to think about the high fructose corn syrup and MSG involved? When pressed for time, my inclination is to eat a slice of cheese, three radishes and a piece of bread for dinner - standing over the sink so there aren't any dishes to wash.

What's your favorite fast meal?

Goulash

For some time now, I've had a secret hankering for a slow cooker, despite the fact that they scream "lazy" and "cream of mushroom soup" and "not real cooking". The idea of prepping something in the morning, leaving it all day, and coming home to a finished meal is what appealed to me, even though slicing and sweating onions is not my idea of 7:00am fun. Besides, who needs another appliance?

Well, I got one for Christmas. I poked through books, and memory, and the internet, and remember a particularly delicious and easy goulash that had once been in the Times. One of the distinctive things about that goulash - one of the reasons it stuck in my head - was that there was no browning of the meat. All of the ingredients were layered into the pan, and it was cooked on top of the stove, and it was wonderful.

I dug up that Transylvanian Goulash recipe on the Times website, and then stumbled upon a somewhat similar thing called Kapusta* Pork that actually was meant to be done in a slow cooker. Remember, I'm a slow cooker novice - I was looking for instruction. I kind of combined bits out of both recipes and ended up with something thoroughly delicious, if I may say so myself.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Pork Goulash**

• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 big clove of garlic, chopped
• 1-2 T. bacon fat or olive oil or butter
• 3 lb boneless pork, in 1-2" chunks (I cut the meat off of a picnic shoulder)
• salt and pepper
• 4 cups cabbage, shredded (about a half a medium cabbage)
• 1 1/2 cups of sauerkraut
• 1 cup tomato puree
• 2 T. sweet paprika
• a 12 ounce bottle of beer (I used Sam Adams Winter Lager)
• 1 tablespoon caraway seeds

Saute the onion in the bacon fat, in a frying pan. Add the garlic after a couple of minutes. When it looks and smells nice, scrape it into the bottom of the slow cooker.

Put about half of the pork on top of the onions, and add salt and pepper. Add the chopped cabbage. Add the remaining pork, and some more salt and pepper. Spread the sauerkraut on top and sprinkle over the caraway seeds.

Mix together the tomatoes, paprika and beer, and pour it all. Cover and cook 8 hours on high.

Serve on egg noodles, with a blob of sour cream on the side.

*Yes, I googled Kapusta. It's cabbage. However, according to Wikipedia, "it also is representative of eternal power." I noted, though, that the sentence about eternal power did not have an initial cap, leading me to a conspiracy theory that someone grammatically challenged was working his way through Wikipedia adding "it also is representative of eternal power" to every entry.

**Adapted from Linda Cifuentes and Joseph Wechsberg

Always Work In Pencil

Wolves are not as bad as we think.

Snakes could be posinos.

Antelope run very, very, very, very, very fast.



I think I need to write in pencil insted of pen.



(Shamelessly scanned out of the 8yo's "reader's notebook")

2011: A Year In Books

The very deep irony in my railing about the elementary school book logs that my daughter has to do is that I love keeping track of my own reading via GoodReads. I just looked at my “stats” for 2011, and am happy to report that I read 60 books.

33 were non-fiction, and 27 were fiction. Five of the non-fiction books were cookbooks read cover to cover. I read four books as ebooks, five books from the library. [I don’t keep track of whether books are borrowed or bought used, or whether they’re hard or soft cover.] Fifteen of the fiction books were read aloud to my daughter. I read two books by each of two authors (Eleanor Estes and Peggy Orenstein), and three books by people I know (Melissa Ford, Emily Rosenbaum and Peg Tyre). And I simply didn’t finish one book, because it was tediously banal.

Not included in the total of 60 read are eight books which I’d begun but hadn’t finished as of midnight on New Year’s Eve (not that I was up that late).

My favorite piece of (grown-up) fiction was Wolf Hall – a dense, complicated, fascinating novel about King Henry VIII and his first two wives and a whole lot of other people, all through the prism of Thomas Cromwell. The runner up was a book of short stories by Michelle Latiolais, called Widow.

The four most satisfying non-fiction books were:

• As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto
• The Emperor of All Maladies
• Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
• Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

And the fifteen books I read to my girl were, in no particular order:

• Frindle
• The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
• The Secret Garden
• The Witches
• D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths
• Miranda the Great
• The Witch Family
• The Secret in Miranda's Closet
• Finn Family Moomintroll
• Mysterious Miss Slade
• From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
• The Magic Pudding
• The Prince of the Pond: Otherwise Known as De Fawg Pin
• Bridge to Terabithia
• Carbonel & Calidor

(Oh, and I read other books to her, but they were re-reads upon re-reads of picture books, and I had to draw the line somewhere.)

So, what'd you read last year? Oh, and happy new year!