Instant Dinner

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

Guitar Types

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

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



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

Reading Hither and Yon

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

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

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

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

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

I still prefer real books.

Poem on My Blog day

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

Today

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

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

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

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

seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking

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

releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting

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

-Billy Collins

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

Fishing Derby

Before

After

Frenemies

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

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

Antlers

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

I had to tweet about it.



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

Salt of hartshorn (Ammonium Carbonate)

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

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

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

Go figure.

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

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

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



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

The Petting Zoo

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

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

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

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

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

No more baby lamb.

Clusterfuck.

A Diversion

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

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

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

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

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

Now? Back to reality. Or something



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

Embarking

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

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

I feel lucky today.

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

How often do you get your hair cut?

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

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

Until Saturday.

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

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

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

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

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

Talismans

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whoosh!

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

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

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

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

Disaster

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

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

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

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

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

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

Memento mori

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

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

Step.

That bird was there on Friday.

Step, step.

It’s Monday. How is it still there?

Step.

I’m late.

Step, step.

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

Step.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Griping About Homework & Schoolwork

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

MATH

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

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

SPELLING

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

GRAMMAR

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

Patchwork and Denim

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

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

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



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

Ribbons

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

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

Sugru

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

What to do? Sugru!

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

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



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



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



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




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

The Sweater

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

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

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




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