Moky's Black Book

One of the things I did for Christmas was make scanned-printed-bound copies of my mother's cookbook, her well-loved, oft-repaired black book, as gifts for my brother and sister. It was her repository of recipes, tried and true, and perhaps never tried at all. Some are edited, or annotated: “good w/ peas instead of carrots”. Some were cut out of magazines or newspapers, glued into the black book, tried, and ripped off the very page - no good, bland, awful, never make this again! And some are part of the family history - Butterflied Leg of Lamb followed by Fruit Ice Cream? Yup, that sounds like dinner.

For me, reading it is a huge nostalgia trip. The Seven Layer Dinner is, I think, the meal that got served to Aunt Gertrude once - it didn’t cook long enough and the potatoes were raw. Then again, maybe it was the Lamb-Potato Casserole - that too has raw potato layered with the meat. That lamb-potato casserole also has the note “add 1 c. garlic”. I have to think that’s one clove, not one cup. The Duck with Lentils has this uncharacteristic note from the woman who didn’t generally cotton to fruit or other sweet notes in savory dishes: “more apple would be good”.

Lots of friends and relatives supplied recipes which made it into the book. There's a hand-written recipe for Shish Kebabs in my grandmother's hand, which Moky edited to “omit” the ground chili. Gigi - my grandmother - also appears with a recipe for Brownie's written out my handwriting, complete with that errant apostrophe.

Possibly the simplest recipe is Elizabeth’s Pork Chops:

Close together in
pan - cover
w/ milk
350 °F for an
hour or more

A couple of the printed recipes include pricing - a nod to the economizing housewife. The punch recipes are said to cost $15-$25 for fifty servings. And Lydie Marshall’s Poulet a la Grecque says that a 2 1/2 pound chicken will cost $1.42. Um, right. But the recipe sounds tasty - chicken and onions and tomato sauce and feta, baked and served on orzo.

Making the book was a labor of love - I scanned about 150 pages, made a half-assed (idiosyncratic and incomplete) index, wrote an essay of sorts, and uploaded the whole shebang to Blurb. But it was about my favorite gift that I gave anyone this year, and I had a third copy printed just for me - and for my daughter, one day.

Homographs

Someone I know is a great player with words - he can find palindromes at the drop of a hat, DENIERS REINED being a recent great example.

But every time I see the word DENIER, I mispronounce it in my head and confuse myself - because

DENIER = one who denies = De Nye Er

but also

DENIER = a unit of measure for how sheer your stockings are = De Near

Homographs are just another delightful confusion wrought by our English language.

All Manner Of Games

A couple of years ago, I read a book by Jane McGonigal called "Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World". It was oddly fascinating book, a taxonomy of games, mostly online games, but not all, with a methodical explanation of how games make us smarter and happier, and how we can collaborate - game-ways - to make the world better. At the time, I thought it was hugely ambitious, largely successful, and fairly irrelevant to my life.

Curiously, though, it's a book I think of often. I think about it when I check in someplace on Foursquare, especially places like the local farmer's market, where I move in and out of the mayorship on a regular basis. Foursquare is essentially a game - checking in gets you points, points get you to the top of the list, WIN! And for the farmer's market, I figure that if I remember to check-in, maybe one of my local friends will see it and head down to visit the market - because the market gets better when more people shop there. So it's multi-purpose, my check-in: help the market, coddle my competitive streak.

We recently invested in a Nest thermostat. The Nest is wifi-enabled, so big brother knows when you've goosed the thermostat. And it sends you monthly reports that cheer you on: you did great, you're in the top 20%, you used more energy but it was really cold out. You can even control it from afar with an iPhone app. I kind of wish I'd remembered to do that last weekend: we'd been away, and left the house at 55°F - if I'd been on the ball, I could have told it when we were on the way home, so the house would have been a little less than frigid. [I saw a guy doing just that on the subway the other day.] Anyway, at core, part of the Nest's appeal is its encouragement of better habits through rewards, i.e. game-like behavior.

The present array of fancy pedometers on the market speaks to the gamification of fitness: share how many steps you took, and compete with your friends on who climbed more stairs. As it happens, I spent four weeks wearing two such devices: a FitBit One and a Wii Fit U Fit Meter. Honestly, I don't walk enough - it's what comes of having a desk job - but I like the idea of trying to best myself, trying to get more stairs in, more steps in.

I had the Wii Fit U Fit Meter because - as you know - I'm a Nintendo brand ambassador. I've had the FitBit for a while. While they both count steps, they differ in interesting ways.

The Fitbit One wirelessly syncs to your computer. You can log on to their website and check your results, and you can set it up so you get weekly status reports. It's also possible to create a community of friends - so you're competing on steps, again with the competition. The FitBit counts steps and floors (flights of stairs), and estimates miles and calories. You can use it as a sleep tracker, too, but I don't. (I'm a good sleeper.) And it'll give you badges for milestones. You walked 15000 steps? Badge for you! Oh, and it has a clock.

The Wii Fit U Fit Meter tracks steps and altitude (in feet), and has a clock. Oddly, it also has a thermometer - all well and good if the thing is sitting on your desk, but if you're wearing it, slipped into a pocket, the thermometer is useless because it's reading neither ambient temperature nor body temperature, but some irrelevant admixture. [I just took it out of my pocket - it's reading 87.6°F - way higher than room temperature, and way lower than body temperature.] The Fit Meter needs to be synced to the Wii U console, a slightly fiddly transaction where the Meter has to be pointed at just the right spot on the console. Once you've done that, though, you can check your progress on your walking tour of Italy:

Or your scaling of the Eiffel Tower:

As I said, I was wearing both the FitBit and the Wii U Fit Meter for a while. Because I am a geek, I noticed that the two devices were giving different readings, different by some percentage points not by just a few steps. If I was wearing them each clipped to a belt loop - i.e. up near my waist - the FitBit recorded more steps (6546 to 6088, or 6126 to 5770). One day, though, I dropped them both in the pocket of my jeans - where they were riding lower on my body. That day, the Wii U read higher, 7452 to 6514. Without getting all scientific about it, I haven't any idea which of the devices is more accurate, but clearly they aren't perfect systems.

Anyway, if you're looking to gamify your fitness, a fancy pedometer is fun. Besides, like The New York Times said, "it’s cheaper than joining a gym". And if you're fascinated by gaming's inroads into everyday life, read McGonigal's book". Reality isn't broken, it's just being codified and tracked and socialized in more and more ways.

---

Disclosure: I was sent the Wii Fit U Fit Meter by Nintendo, but without any expectation of a review, and with no compensation. My opinions are my own.

Creative Chaos of the Fictional Variety

Interestingly enough, while I was reading Seven Life Lessons of Chaos, I was simultaneously reading Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker. It's a book that I probably wouldn't have stumbled upon, but for an imaginary friend whose review so intrigued me that I put it on my list. And, probably because I was primed for chaos and fractals, I found myself sticking yet more post-its in a library book, harnessing the synchronicity:

I had not considered the idea; rather than seeking to rule out variations in quality, accept and adopt the reality of imperfection. A very powerful model indeed.

The book is throughly enjoyable - a war story, a spy story, a clockmaker and gangster and dictator story, complete with two time periods and mechanical bees.

The saddle of the bee comes away, wings and all, revealing an inner cavity. Even through the loupe, he can barely make out the parts. Cogs, yes. Springs. Everything spiraling downward, inward, smaller and smaller and smaller, each layer geared to take instruction from the one below in a repeating pattern. Cellular clockwork. Fractal clockwork?

The main character is a Spork, another character has a collection of false teeth.

"I've brought my most alarming teeth!"

And indeed, she has, a steel set made in 1919 for an American prospector who like to chew rocks and taste the precious ores.

It's a delicious fantastical yarn. Great exotic characters, a steampunk bent, and a more or less incomprehensible 'machine' at the core. Suspenseful, bizarre, funny, and totally enjoyable. It's not what I usually read, but I loved it.

Be willing!

My daughter is in the fifth grade, and tacked up on the wall in her classroom is a quote:

The mark of a creative person is a willingness to accept 

ambivalence - the liminal stage between problem 

and solution as a place of both discomfort and possibility.

The quote intrigued me, partly because it evidences a degree of ambition on the part of the English teacher, but also just because. So, I tried to track it down, and located it in an article on Whole Living.

"The mark of a creative person, according to Briggs, is a willingness to accept ambivalence -- that liminal stage between problem and solution -- as a place of both discomfort and possibility."

And so, one thing led to another, and I've just finished reading a book by John Briggs and F. David Peat called Seven Life Lessons of Chaos - which I quite liked, so much so that I filled up the library copy with post-its, and may need to get my own copy.

Chaos is everywhere. Order tends towards it, entropy. And yet, "thousands of tiny interconnections hold the system in place". I behave one way, it affects you. And vice versa. And when we all keep to the right on the subway staircases, we all get where we're going faster. Beauty is often alive with chaos: "Like healthy heartbeats, the rhythmic intervals in such music are always slightly irregular...fractal fluctuation within regularity...brings the music alive." Rivers and coastlines evidence organized chaos, where "apparent disorder masks an underlying pattern."

I found myself thinking a lot about the PTA. The PTA in my town is a bunch of petty bureaucrats, who make everything overly complicated and who tend to do things the way they've always been done because that's the way they do things. But! Now I understand them better - they are a collection of negative feedback loops, obsessive and repetitive:

"Limit-cycle systems are those that cut themselves off from the flux of the external world because a great part of their internal energy is devoted to resisting change and perpetuating relatively mechanical patterns of behavior. To survive in such rigid and comparatively closed systems, everyone must resign a little--or often a great deal--of their individuality by blending into the automatism.  Those who rise "to the top" in such systems are generally the ones who use empty phrases, those mindless formulas that keep the mechanism of collusion together. Limit cycles are the systems that make us feel powerless. They are the ones we want to change but can't because they appear to resist all our efforts. These systems are everywhere in society." (p. 40)

I found myself thinking about my town too, a town that is consumed with agita over two significant potential projects, with angry people on all sides of the arguments. What it needs is a way to "suspend their polarities and non-negotiable convictions long enough for something new to emerge".

Really, it's one of those books that really gets you thinking. My post-its are scribbled with words and fragments:

• synchronicity
• o we like sheep
• ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny
• the highway system as a distributed airport of take-off and landing strips
• creativity not competition
• how to "dialogue" to a new paradigm, not a compromise
• irrational numbers

The end is apropos:

Rather than ending this book with a summing up, some definitive statement about life and chaos theory, perhaps we should be simply asking a question.

What question shall we ask?

The View From My Bed

NO GIFT FOR YOU

Here's what I think. If you go the the emergency room, the hospital should not be allowed to - three months later - send you fundraising appeals that start out:

Going to the hospital is never fun.

But we hope that when you came to [redacted] Hospital, you received top-notch care close to home and you found the Hospital to be a warm, caring place where you were treated with respect.

Because that right there? That solicitation violates the tenets of separation of church and state, and the bright line between advertising and editorial. It's an invasion of my privacy. It's completely improper and wrong. The fundraisers should not know who the patients are. It's like ambulance chasing.

Besides, I'm broke, because that little trip to the emergency room cost me something in excess of $5,000, thank you very much.

---

Update: Apparently this is legal under HIPAA. But that doesn't make it right.

The Gingerbread House, part 2

Okay! You've got a big bowl of chilled dough, templates, parchment, a Silpat, cookie sheets, an icing syringe, the ingredients for the glue, a mess of candy, and the patience of a saint? Good. If not, re-read the previous post. I'll be here when you're ready.

Preheat the oven to 375°F.

Lay out your Silpat, and lay a sheet of parchment on top. Using a rolling pin with a nicely floured sleeve, roll out a blob of dough on the parchment until it's big enough for your first house piece and about 3/16" thick. Using a pizza wheel, or a gently wielded table knife, cut out your piece. With the knife, nudge the scrap dough away from the house piece.

Trim the parchment if you'd like, and transfer the dough - ON THE PARCHMENT - to your cookie sheet. Repeat until you have all of the pieces made - and don't forget to make two roof panels, two pieces for the front/back, and two gable end pieces. [Note - you're actually not using the Silpat for cooking. I find that it has a nice stickiness about it that serves to hold the parchment in place on the counter while I'm rolling out the dough. I used to try to glue the parchment to the counter with dabs of shortening, but the Silpat works much better.] If you don't have enough cookie sheets, colonize all the flat surfaces in your house with dough-covered parchment, until the cookies sheets are free again.

You want doors and windows, right? Before baking, cut out window openings, and a door. You can use some of the scrap to make shutters, you can roll scrap into little balls for decoration, you can gently score the chimney sides to make the dough look like bricks. If you're crazy, you can even make window muntins out of thinly rolled bits of dough. You might want to keep the piece you cut out for the door, so that you can later glue it in place propped open. [I used the wrong sized platform this year, and so there was no room for the door. It got eaten by someone.]

Bake the pieces in the 375°F oven for about 10 minutes. You want the pieces to be well-baked, and nicely dry, but not burnt. Cool on the pans. The pieces are big enough that you don't want to risk having them sink - even a little - into the spaces on a baking rack.

Stained glass windows are a delightful thing to include in your house, but making them isn't for the faint of heart. I always used to do it by smashing up the sour balls and carefully filling up the window openings BEFORE baking. It was always kind of messy looking though, and when I did it this year, the candy didn't melt properly. So we cut that window out, and hit the google looking for a solution. Ta da! The microwave! Thanks to Heart of Light, we used the microwave to melt the crushed candy in custard cups - which we then spooned into the window openings. Again, stained glass windows are not for sissies - and not for children. Melted sugar is dangerously hot, so be careful.

Once all of your baking is done, and your stained glass windows are fabricated, make the royal icing, and find a big board or huge platter to build on. This would be a good time to enlist a helper monkey, like your ten year old.

Also, if you're planning on putting a light inside that requires a cord to exit the house discreetly at the back, you'll want to position the light and make a little cut-out for the cord. This is completely optional, by the way.

Load up your icing syringe and pop on a small plain round tip. [Or use a piping bag or a ziploc - I prefer the syringe.] Peel the parchment off of the back of one of the four sides of the house and run a bead of icing along the bottom. Position it on your board, and get your helper monkey to hold it in place. Find the adjacent piece, run a bead of icing along the bottom and the side that will be adjacent to the first piece. Maneuver it into position, and help your helper monkey hold it in place. Continue around until your four walls are up. If your husband is a wood-working model-builder, he may try and "clamp" the house together with string.

Use the icing like caulk and make sure all the gaps between the walls are sealed. Not only does it help with the aesthetics, the icing is structural - it dries like concrete and will help hold your house together.

I cheat at the roof. Using dental floss and a blunt needle, "sew" the roof together with two loops, hinges, if you will. Run a bead of icing along the tops of all of the walls and gently place the roof. Take a deep breath, and pause for a cup of tea. Once the icing is good and dry, add your chimney (if you made one).

Meanwhile, have your helper monkey start unwrapping the candy. I always start with the roof. We used to do it with rows and rows and rows of mini-marshmallows, but Necco wafers are really the best roof tile ever. Work two-handed, and squirt a blob of icing on each wafer as it goes on the roof. Work from the bottom up, just like a real roof.

Once the roof is done, get to work on the rest of the house. I like doing rows of spice drops like quoins, and candy canes can be broken into lintels. I also have OCD control issues, but I did hand the syringe over to the helper monkey. In fact, she did the whole Mike and Ike application for the chimney bricks.

You can also tint some of your icing. This is nice if you want to make vines, and morning glories, and Painted Lady Victorian doodads around doors and windows.

If you happen to have access to cotton candy of some sort, it makes nice smoke coming out of the chimney. However, it has to be replaced periodically, because it tends to absorb moisture out of the air and collapse into itself.

When you're all done, have a party, because you're totally going to want to show off your house. And when the kids go back to school in January, the whole thing is edible, so break it up and pack it off in their lunch boxes.

Enjoy!

The Gingerbread House, part 1

For years, starting when I was about 12, and annually until sometime in my 20s, I made a gingerbread house at Christmas time. It was a major production, and got to be a thing - people expected it, so you did it, so people expected it. I think I've been asked about it every year ever since.

This year, what with the girl having turned 10, I thought it was time to resuscitate the tradition, and so we did. We laid in candy. I located the templates - which had surfaced as we were cleaning out my mother's house. [Have I mentioned that she kept everything? She did.] I made a batch of dough. I dug out the frosting syringe; I got out all the cookie sheets. I convinced my husband to wire an extension switch onto a little battery powered light, and several days later, we were done.

You want to make one too, right?

Here goes. [And if Christmas is twelve days, this post isn't too late!]

You'll need candy. I'm very particular - no chocolate allowed, fruit flavors only under duress. It's a gingerbread house; the flavors need to be complementary. Or something. So:

CANDY SHOPPING LIST

• spice drops (spice flavored gum drops)
• Necco wafers (7-8 rolls - for roof tiles)
• cinnamon red hots
• wintergreen Lifesavers (or another solid white flavor)
• green & white starlights
• candy canes
• red Mike and Ikes (chimney bricks)
• sour balls or five flavor Lifesavers - or other multi-colored hard candy (for the stained glass windows)
• mini marshmallows

You'll need dough. Make it today, bake it tomorrow.

GINGERBREAD DOUGH (adapted from the New York Times cookbook)
2/3 cup shortening
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
3 T. ground ginger
1 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. ground cloves
1 1/2 t. salt
1 egg
3/4 cup molasses
3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 t. baking soda
1/2 t. baking powder

Cream together the shortening, brown sugar, spices and salt. Add the egg and mix thoroughly. Add the molasses and blend. Stir the baking soda and baking powder into the flour; add flour to wet ingredients and stir well until blended. Chill overnight. [Note: this will make enough for the house - if you want to make gingerbread trees or people or stars, bump it up by 50%, or double the recipe.]

You'll need glue, to glue all of the pieces together and to attach all the candy. Make it last, though, right before you want to assemble the house.

ROYAL ICING (a/k/a glue)
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1 egg white
1 t. lemon juice
pinch of salt

Put it all in a standing mixer and beat the hell out of it - it wants to be smooth and white and it will look almost like meringue. Seriously, 5-7 minutes in the standing mixer. Sure, you can do it with a hand mixer, but you'll get bored and tired. Use the stand mixer. After you've loaded up your frosting syringe, keep the bowl covered with a damp towel while you're working on the house. Otherwise the icing gets crusty. [If you're squeamish about the raw egg white, it is possible to make royal icing with powdered egg whites, but you're on your own for the recipe.]

You'll need templates. Use mine - print out the pdf onto card stock, or trace it onto shirt cardboard. Make sure you note which pieces you need two of - nothing worse than having all of the dough baked and realizing that you've forgotten one of the four sides of the house. Or be adventurous and design your own house. You might should make it simple the first time out, though.

Lay in some parchment - it's essential for transferring the dough onto the cookie sheets. Lots of cookie sheets help, as does a Silpat.

Okay - you have everything in hand?

The instructions continue here: Gingerbread House, part 2

Facebook: Good or Evil?

Because part of what I do with my life has to do with not-for-profit organizations and raising money, and because I am as bemused by Facebook as everyone else, I found it interesting that Facebook has decided to help out non-profits by adding a "donate" button to a non-profits Facebook page. Good or bad?

Well, driving donations is good, and Facebook is even picking up the vig - meaning that 100% of the donation is going to the charity. [When you give by credit card, the charity normally pays about 3% to the credit card processor, so your $100 gift is really only $97 to the charity.] On the other hand, Facebook isn't telling the charity anything about you - so from the charity's point of view, not so good - if they don't know who you are, they can't ever solicit you again. Granted, maybe that's what you want, as an individual.

Just to test it out, someone in my office made a little donation to the World Wildlife Fund, through that organization's Facebook page.

Here's the email receipt that she got from Facebook:

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From: "Facebook"

Date: December 17, 2013
To: [redacted]
Subject: Facebook Payment Receipt #[redacted]

facebook Donation Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2013 at 12:50pm, Receipt Number: [redacted] Hi [redacted], Thank you for your $10.00 donation to World Wildlife Fund. On behalf of World Wildlife Fund at 1250 24th Street, NW, Washington, 20090, we thank you for your generous support. You may print this receipt for your records. This receipt confirms that you have made this donation as a charitable contribution and you are not receiving any goods or services in return. As the tax laws vary by state and by country, please consult a tax professional regarding the deductibility of this donation. Thanks, The Facebook Payments Inc. Team

---

The thank you from Facebook - not from the WWF - is awfully sterile, and it seems to be the end of the interaction. Also, at no point in the transaction did she get notice that the WWF wouldn't know that the gift is from her. Also, even odder, she had no option to "share" the donation event with her Facebook friends - and since Facebook is always all about the share and the self-glorification, that's a little peculiar. The Facebook help page for Charity Donations says that there's a "share" option, so maybe she missed it, or it was a glitch.

From the point of view of a non-profit administrator, I want to know who my donors are. I want to be able to thank them, personally, in our own idiosyncratic style. I want to be able to invite them to things - paid things like performances, but also unpaid things like open class day. I want them to know about us. Yes, some of that can go on our website, or our Facebook page, but special invitations to donors only? That needs to be more controlled than Facebook allows.

I don't think this is going to be a great tool for the non-profit world. But I'm curious - how do you, as individuals, feel about it? Do you like the "make a gift without leaving Facebook" friction-less-ness of the transaction? Do you like the anonymity of it? I'm genuinely interested in your thoughts, so leave a comment, pretty please?

Perplexing Packaging

It's cold. So, I stopped at the Greenmarket for a hot cider on the way into the office, as I am wont to do. The guy put the cup down in front of me, while I fumbled for some money. And out of the corner of my eye, I read the numbers on the (unsidedown) lid.



12/16? Why's today's date on the lid? Is it an expiration date for what, the cider?

It took longer than it should have for me to realize that it read 12/16/20 - as in, what size cup in ounces the lid was for. I probably should have been at Starbucks buying coffee.

* * * * * * * * *

Puttering around my kitchen this weekend, I was bemused by the labeling on two household staples.

The bacon was marked as gluten free.



The sugar was marked as fat free.



Am I especially enlightened in that I already knew that bacon is gluten free and sugar is fat free? Because, frankly, I thought everyone knew that, in which case, WHY ARE THE PACKAGERS TELLING US THINGS WE KNOW?

When It Rains...

I was sitting around chewing the fat with my father the other day when the subject of "It's Raining Men" came up - why, I can't say. It turns out that he loves that song, and knows all the words, and plays the CD in his car all the time - this, my seventy-eight year old, Fox-watching, conservative father, who voted for Nixon in 1960. I mumbled something about "gay anthem" but he dismissed that notion - "it's sung by some women", he says, "the Weather Girls". Then he tells me that he played it for my even older, even more conservative uncle while they were making Thanksgiving dinner, and that my uncle was "dancing around the kitchen to it like a maniac".

I'd like to say there's hope for us all, what with my father and his brother singing "It's Raining Men", but...

At least they know how to cook.

Giving Tuesday

I had this idea that I was going to do a Giving Tuesday post about how to read a 990, and why you'd want to, and what you might want to look for, in case you wanted to check out how much net profit your local non-profit hospital was making and what the percentage of contributed income was, but instead, I decided to ask you to support a cause near and dear to my heart.

It's a tuition-free ballet program for New York City public school children. With an on-site public school. And an awful lot of laundry to do, each and every week.

Support Ballet Tech on Crowdrise


The 990 dissertation will have to wait. Just for the record though, Guidestar is a great resource where you can download 990s - which are the non-profit equivalent of an individual's 1040, also known as a tax return - for free.

So, if you're into Giving Tuesday, assuming you survived Black Friday and Cyber Monday, won't you please support Ballet Tech?

Black Friday? Cyber Monday? No...

A Cranberry Manifesto

I can't abide cooked, overly sweet cranberry sauce - you might as well put a jar of strawberry jam on the table with your turkey. I have no time for the cranberry sauce that plops out of a can, ridges and all. The raw cranberry orange relish? It's the only kind of cranberry sauce that graces my table. Cold, tangy, a nice biting edge, a good texture, it's the one I grew up on. See? Here's the recipe, in my mother's hand:

See her penciled notes? I can only assume - because I can't ask her - that once upon a time, cranberries came in a one pound bag. She had to adjust the recipe when they got downsized to 12 ounce bags, but you'll note that she dialed the sugar way back, catering to her own not-sweet tooth. It's better that way - brighter, bracing, an anti-dote to the heavy, rich gravy-mashed-stuffing-turkey assemblage on the Thanksgiving plate. It's why I like salad with my turkey - a bitter watercress and endive salad, dressed lightly with my favorite moscatel vinegar and some good olive oil, Sam Sifton be damned. (Also, Sam Sifton has never had Julia's purée de pommes de terre à l'ail or he wouldn't be all NO GARLIC IN THE POTATOES. I like a person with opinions, but I think he's got some funny ideas about Thanksgiving.)

Back to my mother and her cranberry recipe. Nowadays, you'd use a food processor, whirling electro-powered blades. But she says "food chopper". And what I remember is that she used an old-fashioned hand-cranked screw-onto-the-countertop meat grinder to make this, back in the day. If I were making the cranberry sauce, I might be tempted to dig out the meat grinder that attaches to the KitchenAid mixer, just to see, except that our mostly white kitchen would probably look like a crime scene afterwards. But I've no need, because my mother-in-law is bringing the cranberries - happily, she has no truck with the cooked stuff either.

Here's to you, and you, and you too. I'm grateful for all of you.

The Aesthetics of The Innards

When you're rummaging around in your turkey tomorrow, see if you turn up one of these:

It's cool, isn't it? The farmer/lawyer/blogger we got our turkey from does his own butchering, and waxed rhapsodic about the loveliness of the gizzard.

When opened this way, the gizzard is an object of considerable beauty. The inner sac, with its ridged membrane, resembles a taupe-colored squash blossom. Once removed, the sac leaves behind a ridged slightly yellowy, flower-like impression, which contrasts with the deep red of the surrounding, pleasantly symmetrical muscle. The opened gizzard is as colorful and pleasingly symmetrical as any still-life subject—an opened fig, an oyster, or a skull by Georgia O’Keefe.

Alas, too often a supermarket bird comes without the usual innards: neck, liver, heart, gizzard. Besides being tasty additions to your feast, they're lovely and interesting. The neck reminds you that the chicken or turkey had a head, the neck reminds me that my grandmother always said it was the tastiest meat on the bird. The heart of a big bird? Feed your brain two ways, by poking it through with chopsticks or small fingers to figure out which chamber is which, and then by tossing it in your stock. And contemplate the beauty of the gizzard, and contrast that to its hard work of grinding: strength disguised.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Gravewalking, Or, Maybe I Am An Inappropriate Parent

The girl's birthday was earlier in the month, and in a fit of madness, we took her and six friends up to my father's house in the Catskills for an overnight. A slumber party, if you will, but two hours away.

The kids had a delightful time - and actually? We did too. We fed three meals to the seven girls, they got back rubs from my father's masseuse (and I got a full-on hot-stone massage), we drove them up the valley (illegally!) in the back of the pick-up truck, they fed carrots to an elderly horse, they collected rocks in the stream, they went in the hot tub, I made them wander around a cemetery, and they had cake for breakfast.

Yeah, a cemetery. It's a small cemetery up the road a piece, old but still conducting burials - someone was planted there this summer, and Trowbridge Milk was born during the American Revolution.

I'd wanted to show them the grave I go back to visit at least once a year, the grave of an infant, born and died on the same day in 1857. So we located that grave and I got all didactic about infant mortality and antibiotics and modern medicine, and then they wandered off...

and found another unnamed infant, also born and died on the same day - this time in 1871. Said infant's grave marker included his/her two brothers. The siblings lived long enough to be named, Wesley and Gamaliel, but only lived about three weeks each, in 1874 and 1876. More didacticism. More reflection.

After that, the girls wandered off; they were the ones who found the woman who died in 2013, whose grave was marked with a modern granite stone. I looked at the beautiful, fading marble stones, like Eliza Middaugh's - look at the swooping treatment of her name, and "his wife" in italics, and "born" in boldface type. [Is it "type" if it's carved in stone?]

And I looked at the beautiful homely, practical repair on Ron B. Dunham's stone, metal braces unabashedly holding the top of the stone in place - though concealing his death date - sometime in the 1880s, eh?

I think it's unlikely that any of the girls will remember anything about the weekend beyond the cake and the hot tub, but the cemetery is going to be an indelible part of my memory of my girl's tenth birthday.

Holy Bagumba! or, Small Delights.

It's rainy. And gloomy. But warm. Which is good because apparently it's going to be frigid in a day or so and there might even be SNOW for Thanksgivukkah. And I'm finding charming things left and right.

1) My father's girlfriend sent me an email. This is remarkable because he does not email. Or text. He still loves his fax machine and has no computer or internet access or smart phone. I was oddly delighted to get her email.

2) On the downtown train, when the doors opened at 34th Street, in wafted the dulcet tones of a steel drum playing "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da". I've been humming it happily ever since.

3) I splurged on set of cunning twinkly lights - little light-up lumps on delicate copper wire. I shoved them into an amphora-shaped wedding present vase that lives on the mantel and it pleases me enormously even if it is rushing the season a tiny bit.

4) There's a cheese encyclopedia on line! I was looking up my favorite cheese so I could send a link to someone, and there it was: The Cheese Library. Swoon. I love cheese.

5) I think I'm completely alone in this, but I rather love the deeply subversive and quite demented portrait of the Danish royal family.

6) My sister-in-law sent a book to my daughter for her 10th birthday. It's called Flora and Ulysses, and it's by Kate DiCamillo, and it is completely wonderful. I've been reading it aloud to the girl, and I'm captivated by how nicely the words flow off the tongue. You should put it on your shopping list, assuming you have a 9 to 12 year old who needs a present.

What are you finding charming these days?

Dirty Little Secret

It snowed the other day. Not a lot, not so much that oh my god we have to shovel the driveway or yes you have to wear snow pants today, but enough. My sister whined on Facebook that she was having snow envy, not having any snow where she was, so I posted a picture to her, captioned "the view from my bed".



Of course she asked me what I was doing in bed. Well, first of all, I wasn't really in bed - I was standing at the window with the phone pushed right up against the glass - though if I'd backed up about eight feet I'd have had my head back on my pillow. Second, moments before I took that picture, I had been in bed, because my dirty little secret is that every morning I get up, go downstairs, eat my breakfast, and drink some coffee. Then, I fill up my coffee cup and head back upstairs "to get dressed". But really? I get back in the still warm bed just for a few minutes and fart around on Facebook or play Words With Friends or delete unnecessary email until oh no, I really need to get dressed and leave right this very minute.

It's gotten worse, too. It used to be that I'd leave for work before the kid had to get to the bus, but now, now that's she's in middle school? She's out of the house about an hour earlier than I am, which means less guilt about all that lounging about.

What I ought to do is take the screens out of the windows. I mean, it's not like it's flying insect season anymore.



Maybe tomorrow morning.

Ten

Happy birthday to my favorite baby.

How did she get to be ten?

Leaves...of Absence, of Trees, of Books

Last week, I went to a seminar, a day long thing on human resources issues for non-profit organizations. Because, in addition to being one of the accidental techies in my office, I am also the accidental HR person. And, while most of the time, I'm good with making it up as I go along, sometimes I think I ought to have a bit of practical knowledge.

It was useful enough.

But my absolute favorite moment during the day was an unexpectedly poetic PowerPoint slide title:

THE MYRIAD OF LEAVES

Is that not beautiful? All around, the leaves are changing falling crunching swirling, falling swirling crunching changing, and now it is darker earlier earlier, and soon it will be winter. Of course, they were talking about a different sort of leave altogether.

* * * * * * * *

I've been reading a lot. Right now, I'm in the middle of three books, one fiction, two not. As happens, as it always happens, there are odd parallels and coincidences among them.

Though I'd read Tracy Kidder's profile of Paul Farmer in the New Yorker, oh, 13 years ago, I'd never gotten around to Mountains Beyond Mountains. Wow. It's kind of fabulous and now I feel a little bad that Partners in Health went on my bad charities list because they sent me way too much mail. Paul Farmer's administrative partner in Partners in Health is Ophelia Dahl (as in, daughter of Roald, but that's just an interesting aside). And because I am easily amused, I find it funny to be contemporaneously reading Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. There's no real connection between the books, other than the Ophelia, but how often do you run across an Ophelia in your day to day life? The fiction rounding out my current reading is The Poisonwood Bible, and it ties closely back to Mountains Beyond Mountains - it's in the Congo, everyone is poor, lots of people are sick. But it also resonates with Reviving Ophelia, what with those four daughters, growing up.

* * * * * * * *

Books. It comes around. My sister-in-law is helping raise money to buy books for a children's library in Africa, Zambia, to be precise. Clearly, my current reading and her current project have a connection - books, children, Africa. "It is a proven fact that higher levels of literacy are associated with the availability of classroom libraries with a sufficient quantity of books, providing children with the opportunity to read." Won't you help? Melissa set up an Indiegogo campaign, which you can get to by clicking the photo, right there, to the right.

And when you're done, you can have a book for your troubles. My friend Emily wrote an irreverent guide to Disney World called Princess Wishes and Monorail Dreams. She's giving the book away - but asking that people donate to charity in return. So I've got it a little backwards here, by asking you to donate to charity and then go "claim" your copy of her book, but I think we're on the same page in spirit.

* * * * * * * *

Books. Each page is a leaf. Turning leaves, turning pages, and so the circle continues, unbroken.

Affected by the Hearsay Minions

I've been decidedly out of sorts recently, and no, it's not about the headache - I've recovered from that, although I am dreading the bills. Whatever. It's only money.

Partly I'm feeling a generalized existential dread, and partly I'm just annoyed with so many people around me. But my friend Julie (a crafty American who lives in Denmark) posted something on Facebook the other day which seemed like a perfect call to action.

So, in lieu of actual voodoo dolls and actual pins, I'm going to air my grievances, even though it's not the 23rd of December yet.

1) One of the people running for supervisor in my town posted a "oh how wonderful you are" comment on Facebook, that included "Kudos to you and the minions of special people who helped you." I restrained from public comment, but I did send her a private message:

you maybe didn't want to call [the] book fest helpers "minions" - it has a rather negative connotation:
nonn: minion
plural noun: minions
1. a follower or underling of a powerful person, esp. a servile or unimportant one.
synonyms: henchman, flunky, hanger-on, follower, servant, hireling, vassal, stooge, toady, sycophant

She had the courtesy to thank me for the correction. But does no one know what a minion is, because Despicable Me sowed confusion?

2) Tutoring comes up as an issue in our school system all the time. Sometimes it seems like every single kid in town has a tutor, just because their parents are Strivy McStriverpantsers. I totally understand that there are times when a kid needs to be tutored. But I got in the middle of a Facebook discussion (on a private local page) about tutoring / bad teacher / not enough tutors - where a teacher seems to be so bad that every kid in the class has a tutor. And I gently suggested to one of the school board members, who frequents that group, that she relay the conversation to the superintendent and the rest of the school board. Her response?

It is not a best practice for board members to report a conversations that happen on FB. It becomes here say. If there are issues with a teacher, the best course is to discuss it with a counselor at that particular school. If that does not provide an answer than please make an appointment to speak to the principals.

Multiple errors in her few sentences, but "here say"? That sent me over the edge. I made sure to work "hearsay" into the email I sent off to the superintendent, to which I had a thoroughly unsatisfactory response.

3) The almost ten year old has been learning about landforms in social studies - like archipelago and delta and isthmus and peninsula. And part of the work has been to describe the way in which a particular landform affects the people. But she keeps using "effect" when she should be using "affect". And maybe vice versa. And then I found that another of the teachers on the team (her math teacher, who teaches social studies to a different group) had used "effect" incorrectly in her posted homework:

"Social Studies: Finish first 3 landforms: archipelago, delta, plateau (name, picture, definition, and how it effects the people who live near that landform)"

I queried my Facebook friends, and they were about equally divided as to whether or not I should call the teacher on it. I decided against it, partly because technically the teacher who made the mistake isn't my kid's teacher for that subject. But the kid keeps making the same mistake, and got all defensive and said "my teacher didn't say anything" when I tried to talk it through with her. Now, maybe I'm just being a stickler, but this is annoying the hell out of me, so I did send the actual teacher an email today, putting all the onus on the kid and wondering whether fifth grade was just too young to finesse something as delicate as affect vs. effect.

So.

What's annoying you? Air your grievances. It lets you let them go.

Maybe.

Weather System

Sunday
It started in my shoulder, crept up through my neck and settled into my head - a dark cloud encompassing two thirds of my grey matter.

I need an ambulance; no sirens please.

A cop and four other men clattered into the house, and bundled me out. The thing about living in a small town with a volunteer ambulance corps? We knew most of them. The father of one of my girl's classmates held my hand as we bumped down the state road that needs repaving. He assured me that the ride would be bumpy even if the road was as smooth as silk.

In retrospect, it seems crazy, going off to the hospital like that. But one minute I was calmly brushing my teeth, and the next I was hyperventilating from the pain, a headache like none I've ever had before. In short order, I had dilaudid, a CT scan of my head, an MRA of my neck, and a spinal tap. Nothing, nothing and nothing, except for some drug induced loopiness.

Please, take a picture of that sign; I'll know you love me if you do.

I'm still fascinated by that sign. My knowledge of Spanish extends to my (inadequate) ability to read ads on the NYC subway. Why is there only one Spanish word? Vocera = Spokeswoman. Said spokeswoman, the MRI tech, was all alone in the MRI suite. She was as fascinating as the sign: a pale, golden-tressed pre-Raphaelite maiden, consorting with her chirping whirring clanking dæmon.

Sometime in the middle of the night, there was a commotion in the ER: a stabbing victim. They packed him off to another hospital, the county hospital that's equipped for that kind of trauma.

Eventually they sent me home with a script for Fioricet, and instructions to follow up with a neurologist. As the Filipino transporter wheeled me out to the sidewalk, she spoke to the three men waiting in the lobby. He's not here, they sent him to the other hospital, he's not here. No one had told the friends, the ones who brought him in by car, that the stabbing victim had been moved down county. They got up and shuffled off; I went home and went to bed.

Monday
I spent most of Monday asleep, having gotten no sleep in the ER. At some point during the day, I emailed the office.

Hi. I believe I've been run over by a truck. But I'm not dead, so there's that. I think maybe you should look into choreographing to the noise of the MRI machine. It wouldn't be for kids though. Too hard to count.

And I found my jewelry on my bedside table.

I dimly recall taking off my jewelry before the MRI but I didn't know that the nurse had handed my husband a little ziploc specimen bag for storage.

I did feel well enough well enough to take a short walk in the late afternoon, and to eat dinner, before heading back to bed at about seven.

Tuesday
Oh my god the pain. I burst into tears at the breakfast table and went back to bed, in too much agony to even drink the coffee with the caffeine that might have, should have, helped. My husband called the neurologist and, happily, got me an appointment shortly after lunch. The neurologist called it a spinal headache, pressure gradiant, and sent me back to the ER, because the pain management doctor had gone home sick.

I emailed a few people.
In the department of things I really didn't want to be doing on a Tuesday afternoon I am back in the ER waiting for the on call anesthesiologist to come and give me a blood patch because I have a spinal headache from the lumbar puncture I had the other day.

I did the worst crossword puzzle I've ever seen.

Clue: full of elms
Answer: ELMY 

Clue: telephone
Answer: TEL

Yes, it wasn't the New York Times.

Two liters of saline (along with dilaudid and toradol) helped enormously; I was able to walk out of the hospital with the spinal headache about 80% abated - and without having the blood patch.

Wednesday
It didn't last. By breakfast, the vertically induced headache was back. But the pain management doctor could see me at 2:00, for a blood patch. A blood patch is bizarre. On the one hand, it seems positively medieval - on the order of leeches and blood letting. On the other hand, miracles of modern technology. An x-ray guided needle is placed in the spine, near where the spinal tap went in. Then, and only then, fresh blood is drawn from a vein in my hand and immediately injected into the spine. A half hour later? The blood clots and seals the hole where the cerebrospinal fluid has been leaking. Magic.

I emailed the office again.
I am home and the blood patch seems to have worked. I am a little loopy and my back is sore but, barring any unpleasantness, I expect to be in the office tomorrow.

---

It has been a long week.

The Jungle Books

It's funny, synchronicity. You decide to read a book, and then another falls in your lap, and they're both about the jungle.

If it hadn't been for Ann Patchett's State of Wonder, which I loved, I'd never have heard of the anti-malaria drug Lariam, the side effects of which are a recurring thread through out the book. So I wouldn't have been so fascinated by an op-ed piece in the Times about Lariam, which appeared right after I'd finished the book. And if I hadn't first read State of Wonder, set largely on the Amazon in Brazil, would Ingrid Betancourt's Even Silence Has an End - set in the Colombian jungle - been as interesting? Actually, it's kind of long-winded, and not a little tedious, so much so that I almost ditched it halfway through. I was this close to leaving it in the laundry room/swap shack at our Cape Cod vacation rental, but instead I took it home and finished it. And frankly, I was really moved by the end, even almost a little weepy when Betancourt finally gets rescued from the FARC. More than six years in captivity? Emerging from that largely intact, physically and mentally, is a feat.

But still. What's the likelihood of reading two books about the jungle just coincidentally?

And who was the father of Dr. Swenson's baby anyway?

Cuckoo

The world is complicated, and sometimes things are not as they should be.

Today is the last day of September. Yesterday, we picked apples and pears, we enjoyed the brilliance of the changing leaves, we gloried in a chairlift ride up Hunter Mountain on a perfect fall day.

And I took pictures of some of the flowers around in the yard:

Flowering Quince

Dandelion

Rose

Mountain Bluet

Why yes, they aren't supposed to be blooming now, in the fall, on the verge of October. It's supposed to be in the spring that cuckoo-buds of yellow hue do paint the meadows with delight...

But aren't they lovely?

Let's Review: Baby Bangs

You've probably seen baby girls wearing head garters, you know, elastic bands with a big bow or flower, a sad attempt to disguise the fact that the kid is bald. Those things are bad enough, but it gets worse. You can actually get headbands for babies with hair attached, so your bald baby girl doesn't look bald and, I guess, looks more like a girl.

My kid wasn't exactly bald, but she had a bad greasy comb-over for a while. Still, I never stuck a head garter on her. Yuck! Gross! Ugly! Plus, in some dark anxious corner of my soul, head garters will slip down to the baby's neck and hazard! Strangulation will occur! (And I'm not even a helicopter parent.)

I've never been a girlie-girl, and one of the reasons we kept our child's sex a secret was to minimize the pinkalicious pink pink pink that revealing her to be a girl would have caused. But after she was born, and announced as a girl, the little pink dresses and footies and hats and blankets came rolling in. So, she wore plenty of pink in those early days. It's kind of unavoidable.

One day, when she was about six months old, in those halcyon period when she went to work with me every day, I went out to get a sandwich for lunch. She was wearing a pink sundress and a pink hat and strapped on my chest in the Bjorn. As I was paying for a my sandwich, the guy asked me how old HE was. I said "she's a girl!" and he asked "but where are her earrings?"

A head garter with bangs would not have done the trick.

Skim The Fetid Scum

I was at the Strand the other day, hoping to find a nice old copy of The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, because I need to read it for the library "Farm to Table" book club, and somehow, I don't already own it. I was a tiny bit disappointed that they only had a newish paperback edition, but I was intrigued by another book on a nearby pile, called A History of Food in 100 Recipes, especially when I flipped to an Egyptian meatball recipe from 1250:

I'm so fascinated by recipes like this. It's so sketchy, and leaves so much to the imagination. And, of course, it assumes that the cook already has the basics down.

➤Cut the meat into pieces, put in a pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil while removing the fetid scum. 

What kind of meat? How much? What size pieces?

➤Next add small meatballs the size of a hazelnut. 

Are these meatballs made from the just cooked meat? Or are they meatballs from some other recipe?

➤The quantity of broth must be reduced so that when the cooking is done only a residue of light and velvety juice remains. 

Is the broth to be reduced with the meat/meatballs in it? Or is the meat removed, and then the broth is reduced?

➤In the meantime, take some sour pomegranate juice, sweeten it with rose water syrup, 

How much pomegranate juice? How much rose water syrup?

➤add some mint leaves and pistachios crushed in the mortar to thicken it, 

How much mint? Fresh or dried? How many pistachios? Are the pistachios crushed alone, or together with the mint?

➤colour it with a little saffron and season with all the [ingredients of] atraf tib [a mixture of spices including black pepper, cloves and ginger]. 

Again, how much saffron? And, do you add all of these ingredients to the broth and that's it? Or does the broth need to be cooked with the flavorings? Further, if you removed the meat before reducing the broth (and adding the flavorings), when does the meat get returned to the sauce?

➤Sprinkle with rose water and diluted saffron and serve.

What is the saffron diluted with?

It's tricky, reading old cookery books.

Incidentally, I had always thought that that Alice B. Toklas had included a recipe for pot brownies in her Cook Book. In point of fact, they aren't brownies at all - they're called "Haschich Fudge" - and actually, it's not really fudge, either. For one thing, there's no chocolate. It's more like some kind of middle-Eastern sweet, made from crushed dried fruit, sweet spices, and nuts. And hash.

Somehow, I don't think there's going to be any at the library book club meeting, but wouldn't that be kind of awesome?

Green Soup, Or What's All This About Yogurt Anyway?

Once upon a time, I talked incessantly about my CSA. We still belong, and I still love it. I love that it challenges us to prepare and cook and eat vegetables that we'd otherwise pass up at the farmers market. I love knowing that our food comes from not too far away, from people who care deeply about their role in making the world a better place. And every year, they try growing things that they'd never grown before. This year, it was tomatillos. And I had no idea what to do with them.

Sure, I could have made a salsa, but something sent me to the cookbooks, and something impelled me to pull Annie Somerville's Fields of Greens off the shelf. And there I found a recipe for the unprepossessing sounding "Green Corn Soup". I had the corn, I had the tomatillos, I had an approximation of most of the other ingredients, and so I set to work.

I suppose I could have fed it to my husband and child, but instead I brought it to work, along with a bunch of cilantro, and a container of plain yogurt, and for three days running I had a glorious, virtuous, delightful soup for lunch. Hot, as a nod to fall, but garnished with fresh cilantro and creamy cold yogurt, because summer's still hanging on, it was just what I needed to be eating.

Speaking of yogurt, what is going on with the yogurt explosion? It used to be that there was yogurt, silky, low fat, not especially dense. You know, just yogurt. And then came the "Greek" yogurts, like Fage (which is now based in Luxembourg) and (moldy yucky Greek-style US made) Chobani. And if you're paying attention, more and more countries are getting into the yogurt game. I've seen Australian yoghurt (note the H spelling) and some Icelandic yogurt ended up in my fridge not long ago. In point of fact, Smari, the "Icelandic" yogurt, is actually made in the United States, from milk from cows from Wisconsin, by bosses in California. Whatev. I like their plain yogurt. It's thick, to be sure, but it stood up to being plopped into a bowl of hot soup. And it has an appealing gaminess about it - it's not a bland, boring yogurt. [I didn't much care for the Smari fruit flavors, but I nearly never buy anything but plain yogurt anyway. You want fruit flavored yogurt? Stir in some jam or a cut up peach.]

---

Corn and Tomatillo Soup (adapted from Fields of Greens)

1 T. olive oil
1 onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves, chopped
2 ears of corn, kernels cut off the cobs
salt
pepper
3 cups chicken stock
1 pint tomatillos, husked and halved
1 poblano pepper, seeded and chopped
fresh cilantro leaves (for garnish)
yogurt or sour cream (for garnish)

Heat the olive oil in a soup pot. Add the onion and saute until soft and translucent. Add the garlic and corn, and cook until the corn is heated through. Season with salt and pepper, and add 2 cups of chicken stock, cover the pot, and simmer until the corn is tender (about 20 minutes). Add the tomatillos and poblano, and cook until the tomatillos are falling apart tender (5 to 10 minutes). Puree the soup with a blender (a hand blender in the pot would be perfect). Add chicken stock if the soup seems too thin. Adjust seasoning as necessary.

Serve hot, garnished with a handful of fresh cilantro and a blob of yogurt or sour cream.

Makes enough for three lunch sized portions.

---

Disclosure: The publicist for the Icelandic yogurt had some dropped off at my house. My opinions are my own, and no one paid me to talk yogurt.

Let's Review: Bamboo

Okay. "The Snugg". What do you think that is? Honestly, the name makes me think it's gonna be one of those blankets with arms, for when you have to be a couch potato. Or maybe some kind of body pillow, if you like to curl around something when you sleep.

Actually, though, it's the brand name for a line of cell phone and tablet covers. And because I was on the verge of upgrading my phone - and therefore was going to be needing a new cover - I said sure, send me a case when the PR rep emailed me. Timing is everything.

I'm actually very fond of bamboo. Unlike hardwood, it's a rapidly-renewable resource. It's got an appealing fine texture, with a plasticity about it that lets it take a good amount of detail. It's multi-purpose - it can be made into flooring, and cutting boards, and even bicycle fenders.

actual bicycle fender on a bike
parked down the street from my office

So, I picked the bamboo case out of The Snugg's line-up. Because face it, there's something delicious in juxtaposing the high tech glassiness of the iPhone with a tactile bamboo jacket.

actual cell phone case (on cell phone) sitting
on one of our bamboo cutting boards

You know what? It's a really nice case. It feels good in the hand, it snaps on pleasingly, the myriad holes are all well-machined. In fact, it's so nice that my husband, the appliance slut, stole it from me. That's actually his phone encased in the bamboo case above.

I've no idea how well it'll hold up, or how protective it is. But it's rather lovely.

And in a pinch, you could probably use it as a cutting board at a picnic.

---

Disclosure: Yes, I got a free case sent to me by The Snugg people. But my opinions are my own and they didn't pay me to talk about the case.

A Question Without An Answer

If I write a post in my head, did I write it?

Spectacular getaway.

Were the Millers the conjuring mortal instruments?

There are many questions.

There are only some answers.

"Okay, Mom, stop putting a downer on my logic."

Maybe I do have all the answers. And when I have more time, perhaps I will write some more posts. Lord knows, they're rattling around in my head all the time.

This is the end.

[It's never the end. Until, well, it is the end, which it isn't. Yet.]

And who the hell are the Millers anyway?

One Chapter Ends, Another Begins

Last week, I dropped off a bunch of board books at the daycare the girl attended from when she was 20 months old until she entered kindergarten.

And today's her first day of middle school (because in our town, for better or for worse, middle school is grades five through eight).

You've come a long way, girlie.