anno's place

Welcome!

2011-06-05T21:01:00.004-04:00

For more than four years, from late 2005 through early 2010, this was was my home: my retreat, my studio, my kitchen table, my life. I wrote about building a house, starting a garden, home schooling our daughter. I wrote about my favorite books, scenes from my favorite movies. I wrote about all the restaurants I had loved and lost, about my first paella, about my quest for the perfect gazpacho. I wrote fictional riffs, lots of bad poetry. I wrote more about dark chocolate and red wine than I would have ever thought possible.

During that time, more than 33,000 visitors made their way here. I met some amazing people: teachers, photographers, poets, expatriates and artists, homeschooling mothers and dreamers, just like me. I met someone clear across the world who lived in the same Dutch neighborhood where I had lived as an eight-year-old, whose children attending the same international school I had attended so many years ago. I met people from my own community whom I otherwise would have never met. We exchanged reading recommendations, traded writing prompts, commented on each others posts and in many other ways encouraged our creative interests: we became friends.

And then, after nearly 900 posts, all the usual distractions intervened. We were home schooling again, and I was teaching middle school algebra and high school geometry at the co-op where our daughter was taking classes. We had started a half-acre vegetable garden, acquired seven ducks. Life was busy -- too busy for the high standards of indolence and indulgence I had established here at anno's place: I closed it down.

What remains here today is a much compressed version of the original blog. I've taken out most of the quizzes and memes, nearly all of the poetry, and just about anything else that struck me as whiny or dull. It contains just enough of the original material that if you feel like opening up the archives and reading it through from start to finish, you'll have some sense of the spirit that anno's place once represented. On the other hand, if you want to get straight to the "good stuff," the links in the Favorites column will take you to the posts that are both my personal favorites and the ones that have consistently generated the greatest number of hits.

Regardless of your reason for coming by, or the journey you choose to take through these posts, I hope you enjoy your visit. Thanks so much for stopping by!
~anno

Thanksgiving!

2009-11-26T05:27:00.008-05:00

To all my wonderful friends, whose posts and comments inspire and encourage me, make laugh, broaden my perspective, improve my understanding, and otherwise warm and brighten my life, here's wishing you all the blessings of the harvest:

Happy Thanksgiving!

...and, of course, there's a poem:

Blessings
occur.
Some days I find myself
putting my foot in
the same stream twice;
leading a horse to water
and making him drink.
I have a clue.
I can see the forest
for the trees.

All around me people
are making silk purses
out of sows' ears,
getting blood from turnips,
building Rome in a day.
There's a business
like show business.
There's something new
under the sun.

Some days misery
no longer loves company;
it puts itself out of its.
There's rest for the weary.
There's turning back.
There are guarantees.
I can be serious.
I can mean that.
You can quite
put your finger on it.

Some days I know
I am long for this world.
I can go home again.
And when I go
I can
take it with me.
--Ronald Wallace

Ghosts

2009-10-08T22:34:00.000-04:00

Ghosts crowd
my shoulder
hover
in the periphery
never bearing
direct glance
or inquiry.

They offer
no reproaches, express
no regrets, provide
no comfort, promise
no hope,
and,
despite the platters
of oranges and chocolates,
I offer,
the stories I tell,
all our shared memories,
whatever I can think of
to coax them to stay,
they never do.

At the slightest provocation,
the most innocent question
-- Where have you been? --
the most heartfelt declaration
-- I have missed you --
they disappear,
retract instantaneously
into the dark ether, far, far away,
into a place I do not understand.

Sometimes in dreams
they appear,
shimmery figures
in aluminum lawn chairs
set in faded green yards
near distant clapboard-sided homes,
and wave.
Hello?
Goodbye?
I never can tell.

Autumn Day, 5:30 a.m.

2009-09-26T22:35:00.000-04:00

Clouds from a mackerel sky race in front of the setting moon,
portending rain; the sun has not yet risen.
The dog dreams at the garden door, front paws twitching,
tail wagging.
He is Mighty Dog,
vanquishing the mysterious foe -- a coyote? --
he could only warn us about, loudly, at 2 a.m.
Our daughter still sleeps, but M. is already well into his day.
Outside, three cubic yards of dirt stand in the back yard,
awaiting dispersal into the garden and various planters.
There will be essays to read,
math notes to prepare,
German vocabulary to study.
For now, there is only the smell of coffee brewing,
and a promise I made to make spicy potatos for breakfast.
These moments of domestic tranquility.

Sunday Scribblings: Keys

2009-09-05T15:21:00.007-04:00

Not for me, the
keyed up cuties
queued up on the quay
waiting for their
keylime pie

My keys are legend
dark chocolate
pinot noir
the intentional
accidental
encounter
CK Opium for Men
That smoldering key
of disrepute
artfully transposed
into
reckless joy
wild abandon

Sunday Scribblings

Hello, he lied #1

2009-08-26T22:34:00.000-04:00

Hello, he lied, his low growl of a voice curling around her as insistently as his hands had once prowled her body back in the private recesses of Sandy Meier's darkened basement. Had she learned anything since then? She had a hunch she was about to find out.

A long, meandering piece that travels many places, arrives nowhere in particular; a small bit for Sunday Scribblings

2009-08-24T14:57:00.008-04:00

There's a mercury retrograde coming soon, and the finely tuned antennae of the Gemini with whom I share my life seem to be already picking up on its chaos-inducing energy. Last week was a week filled with missed cues, misunderstandings and miscommunication, sudden failures, unexplained bumps and bruises, appointments, appointments with repair technicians, unexpected visitors, and a confluence of scheduled social engagements that somehow all landed on the seven days following our return from the lake. So much for thinking about sending out my plans for the year out to the parents of next year's students. Maybe this week.

In case you were interested: it is not a good sign when the first thing asked by the repair technician sent to fix your obviously overpriced totally defunct cooktop is "Do you have a copy of the manual for this thing?"

The Sunday Scribblings prompt this week was "Adult". Here's my take: being an adult means facing up to life, whatever comes your way. Some weeks I act like an adult; some weeks I don't. Last week, I wanted to run and hide.

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

About Julia Child's My Life in France... it's possible I've set some expectations for a complete review that I'm not entirely ready to fulfill. But here are some notes:

If you somehow missed the synopsis of this memoir in the deluge of stories that accompanied the release of Julie & Julia, the book is as the title describes: the story of Julia's life in France, that period after World War II when she & her husband, Paul, moved to Paris, where he would be responsible for promoting French-American relations through the visual arts, and where Julia would come to promote French-American relations in her own inimitable style.

It is, above all, a love story. There is that famous first meal she ate in France at the restaurant in Rouen, the sole meunière that she described (to the NYT) as "an opening up of the soul and spirit for me". It was an awakening and an introduction to French cooking that drove her determination to make it her own; the encounter that led her, eventually, to writing Mastering the Art of French Cooking: the quest that defined the rest of her life.

OK. That's overblown AND an oversimplification. It wasn't just a love affair with French food that led Julia to write MTAOFC; it was her desire to recreate these experiences for her husband, who also loved this food, and her conviction that the secrets to cooking well and enjoying wonderful food ought to be available to everyone. These were the deep sustaining bass notes of the underlying love affairs that kept Julia going during the years it took to research, write, and find a publisher for The Book.

By modern standards, Julia's memoir is striking in its limited emotional revelation, her refreshing lack of interest in her own fears or feelings: her passion is all for the people around her, the experiences she enjoyed; there's passion, and the desire to do right by her passions and everything she loves. As Paschal's wise commencement speaker said earlier last week: Love wins. Love ALWAYS wins. And so does Julia. So much love; makes every word of this memoir worth reading.

Julia always claimed to be a cook rather than a chef, a distinction that to modern ears, with our elevation of Latinate words over common Anglo-Saxon ones, comes across as self-deprecating. For Julia, though, the difference was only technical, a matter of scale: a chef was in charge of a restaurant, responsible for directing the battalions of butchers, sous chefs, and other trained staff required to carry out the mission of preparing food for a hundred or more diners every night; a cook prepared food at home, for the people who would be sharing a meal with her. That was all.

So it is interesting to me that so many people insist on calling Julia Child a chef, as if to deny her that title would be to deny her the level of creativity and imagination we all associate with her. In that way, it reminds me of the disparaging way students in college used to refer to performers of all types: as if playing music or playing a part were just a matter of getting the right notes or saying the right words in the right order; that if you were really creative you would be creating your own music or writing your own plays.

That's a topic that deserves a lot more exploration. But even when it comes to something as apparently easy following a recipe, how simple is it to to do only that, without leaving any trace of personal judgment -- your determination of "simmering nicely," or "seasoned to taste"? Very hard indeed. Just try duplicating your friend's wonderful green bean salad from the recipe she gave you. Even if you're happy with the results, chances are that somebody will notice that it doesn't taste quite same as the dish they remember.

The fact is, any attempt to make anything at all requires a level of interaction with whatever materials you're using that can only be described as creative; it is a kind of formation that alters your way of thinking, changes your perspective. As Julia Child remarked, through practice, through making mistakes, she began "to feel la cuisine bourgeoise in my hands, in my stomach, in my soul."

So. Being a cook is a creative job. Let me take take this idea one step further and suggest that eating is also a creative job. If you don't believe me, then consider what it means to take communions, or, if you're reluctant to return to church, try a movie such as Babette's Feast or Chocolat -- you'll see that appreciating even a simple piece of chocolate clearly has transformational possibilities.

If eating is a creative job, then reading certainly is. There's even a school of thought that argues that training the imagination with creative play is just as important for preparing children to read as is learning the alphabet or mastering phonics. Another school of thought suggests the meaning of a text depends on the perspective of the person reading it: in other words, it takes a reader to complete a text.

Bloggers know this in their bones. It's never enough just to publish our posts: we crave our readers, we need their comments. (Feedcrack, the brilliant Luisa -- and author of the wonderful cookbook, Comfortably Yum, calls it; and you should read her post about it here.) To be a member of the blogging community means a willingness to leave a comment, to let the writer know that someone was there, someone liked their work.

Lately I've been remiss in this aspect of blogging life; I'm reading beyond my means. I love my blogging community, but it's become large enough that I can't keep up with it in any thoughtful way. It's made me long for the days before Google Reader when I could depend on writers keeping stats on their blogs and knowing their readers from their IP addresses. Even if I didn't leave a comment, the writer could see my calling card and know I'd stopped by: the post had been read.

What keeps me from commenting? Here are my top five reasons:

1) I get interrupted, or I have to leave. Happens all the time. I close up my Reader, and when I return I forget where I am in my commenting.
2) I think I've commented on something, but I haven't: I've only thought about it. This happens all the time, too.
3) The post stirs up such a response that I really need to sit down with the writer and share a pot of coffee or a bottle of wine to explain my reaction. You are all extraordinary writers; this happens a lot. If it's going to take me half a day to write a comment, chances are I'm not going to write it at all.
4) The post already has several thousand comments congratulating the writer on a wonderful piece: I really hate being late to a party.
5) Like the teacher in Kevin Henkes' wonderful book, Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse, the only thing I can think to say is "wow."

So it's lack of time that does me in; never lack of interest. For some reason, though, I can't seem to rein in my reading; like the greedy monkey of the old fable, I'm not willing to drop a single word.

While on vacation, I spent some time thinking about this problem. How could I invite comments, I wondered, if I couldn't reciprocate in kind? I considered shutting down the comment function of my blog: anybody could still read whatever I posted, but there'd be no comment link to leave anybody feeling guilty. Too draconian, I eventually decided; unfair, too, to cut people off like that: the chance to interact with other writers is one of the more appealing aspects of blogging.

Then, I remembered something I heard about several years ago, the idea that it was ok for bloggers to post whatever they liked, whenever they felt like it: they called it Blogging Without Obligation. Made sense to me. It was how I operated anyway: somedays I wrote memoir, others I wrote about food & recipes, there's haphazard fiction and bad poetry, not to mention long stretches where I depended completely on quizzes and memes. My readers put up with a lot.

So why have I been so slow to come to a similar response to commenting: Commenting When I Can? Sure seems obvious. I can still read all my blogs, maybe make more of an effort to click through and bring up your posts so those of you who still keep analytics will know I've been around, and I'll comment when I can. That's where I am, for now. And for now, that's all.

What's Cooking This (Art Fair) Week

2009-07-15T10:59:00.008-04:00

Art Fair begins today, the annual four-day extravaganza during which more than 400,000 people will attempt to navigate our maze of one-way streets through a town that is so inadequately developed for transportation that even the most congenial and good-natured of its 100,000 residents are brought to a snarl trying to run the must routine of errands.

All roads through the center of town are closed; every possible parking lot or structure is entailed for art fair vendors only; if you can find a parking space, it probably goes for $20 or more. Not too bad if you intend to exhaust yourself with a day at the fair, but on the pricey side for a quick run to one of your favorite markets or bookstores. Wise residents flee for the calm of lakefront properties. The rest of us stock of up on provisions early in the week, then stay home and avoid the chaos.

Today, though, also happened to be the day I'm scheduled to pick up our farm share from the Farmer's Market. The downtown Farmer's Market. The one where, even on a normal market day, parking can be hard to find. Definitely a day to arrive early.

Which explains why, at 7 a.m. today, instead of being comfortably ensconced on our sofa, gently coaxing myself out of drowsiness with a pot of excellent Italian roast coffee, I was already showered and dressed, racing along with the rest of rush hour traffic, on my way into town.

Was it worth it? Well, I did find a parking place. And I was so early I didn't even have to pay for it. That fact alone has me re-thinking my morning routine.

Then, there was this -- the cornucopia of our share box:

That's the entire share, a quantity of produce I usually split with my friend Jen, who happens to be on vacation this week. It is a lot of food. Another reason I was glad to find a parking space close to market.

There's spring onions and basil, yellow crookneck squash, a quart of new potatos, green beans, a cucumber, rosemary, garlic, carrots, beets, peas, swiss chard, a full head of romaine, a head of red-leaf lettuce, and a large bunch of arugula that looks suspiciously similar to the basil it is unfortunately placed next to in the photo. Not shown: the kohlrabi I neglected to get because I still have two from the previous weeks lurking in my vegetable crisper, nor the broccoli, which when I unpacked it from the box looked frankly anemic and unappealing, better suited to the compost pile than a dinner plate.

The rest, though, is glorious, inspiring even. And what it's inspiring me to think is thoughts like these:

1) Pesto! Of course. I even bought extra basil. Because, as several of you pointed out on my last post, there can never be too much pesto.

2) A frittata made from chard, carmelized onions, boiled new potatos, maybe chopped chorizo or bacon, and possibly a handful of cheese.

3) Roasted beets cut in thick dices, dressed with walnut oil and served with toasted walnuts, crumbled bleu cheese and a bit of chopped dill (from our garden).

4) Borscht made with the beets from our share, a cup or two of raspberries from own garden, some finely grated onion, lots of lemon juice, and a splash or two of balsamic vinegar.

5)Minted carrots.

6) Pasta with peas, bacon, and fried sage; finished with grated parmesan.

7) Lots of salads: The house salad around here is mixed greens topped with grated beets and grated carrots, some toasted pine nuts, and dried cherries, but arugula with thinly sliced pears, slivered red onion, chopped smoked almonds and bleu cheese is another favorite. That cucumber is probably destined to be doused in sour cream, chives, and dill, but the green beans I might just serve steamed with a little salt.

8) As for the crookneck squash, who knows what I'll do with them. These, like zucchini, always seem like little more than water and a bit of fiber, an excuse to bread and deepfry and consume a bunch of empty calories that I can ill afford. If anybody has some favorite recipes, I'd be thrilled to hear about them. It looks like there might be a lot of summer squash in our future.

So that's what I plan to be cooking this week. First thing, though: something chocolate. Our chocolate situation, I have been notified, is desperate. Time to make some chocolate sorbet.

Sunday Scribblings: Indulge (a News & Notes production)

2009-07-12T12:36:00.009-04:00

Another cooktop bit the dust again early last week, went out with a sudden pop and a curl of smoke, a rank of error codes. Took five days to get a repair technician out here who looked at it, said (basically), "it's broke," and ordered every possible replacement board for the thing; said he'd be back next week.

We'll see how this goes. Last guy who tried that tactic ended up frying the new boards as well, decided he'd be better off just giving us a new cooktop. Might happen this time, too. Sometimes I wish for more reliable appliances like this or this, but in lieu of such foresight, I'm glad we've been getting the five-year warranty. Also, that we bought a relatively high powered burner plate so we can boil water for coffee in the morning; and finally, that it's summer, a good time to use the grill.

*******************
There are a couple of other reasons it's been good to be able to boil water: for one, with the profusion of basil we've been getting from our farm share, it's been hard to resist the opportunity to over-indulge in pesto. Not that it's necessary, of course, to make pasta for pesto -- stoned wheat crackers work well as an edible scoop for a single person in quest of a convenient and tasty lunch -- but serving it on pasta makes it nicer for a family supper.

For another, we've been getting fava beans. Lots and lots of fava beans. Enough fava beans that I have to blanch and skin them as soon as I return home or there'd be no room for anything else in the refrigerator. That many fava beans.

Personally, I like fresh fava beans so much that I'd be happy eating them blanched & skinned, boiled until just tender (sometimes the blanching is enough to do it), and then lightly dressed with olive oil and a bit of salt: that way they get to be the main event. Makes me happy.

They work just as well, though, in supporting roles; for example, with salmon fillets poached in court boullion. This may be French, but it's certainly not complicated; simply delicious. You start by combining three parts of water to one part dry white wine in a shallow pan (a braising dish or deep skillet is perfect) along with a handful each of thinly sliced onions, carrots, and celery, a sprig or two of parsley and thyme, a teaspoon of salt. Bring to a boil, immediately reduce the heat to a gentle simmer, and cook, partially covered, for 20 minutes. In the meantime, prepare an herb butter from 4 tablespoons butter, 1 small finely minced shallot, 1 tablespoon minced dill, 1/2 tablespoon minced chives, a pinch of salt.

After twenty minutes, add four quarter-pound salmon fillets to the broth -- do NOT increase the heat -- and cover the pan. If the fillets are completely covered by the broth, let them cook for five minutes; with a sharp knife, check the center of the thickest fillet to determine when they are done (my preferences here are somewhat heretical: I like overdone fish, and have been known to poach my fillets for as much as seven minutes).

If the fillets are large, and not completely covered by the broth, turn them after three minutes and begin checking to see if they are done after six minutes. To serve, place each fillet in a shallow bowl, top with a tablespoon or more of the herb butter and a handful of blanched and skinned fresh fava beans, and then ladle the broth over the salmon.

Goes with with parker rolls and a simple salad.

Be forewarned: cowboys may make fun of this, but they will like it, I promise they will. But just in case someone is hungry afterward, it might be worth making sure to have some bbq chicken wings stashed in the refrigerator, or a triple layer chocolate cake ready on the counter. Like I said, just in case.

*******************
On the wildlife watch, the coyotes are surprisingly quiet this year; no bears so far. We have, however, seen hummingbirds feeding at our delphiniums and a pair of sandhill cranes strolling together along our trails. The cygnets at the pond at Scio Church Road & Parker are getting larger, losing more of their gray every day. On my way to the farmer's market early one morning last week, a family of raccoons -- mama and four kits -- brazened their way across the road ahead of me. The monarch butterflies have returned and the viceroy, too The fireflies are numerous, one of our evening entertainments.

That's all from around here. What's new in your world?

Sunday Scribblings

Now that we have internet service again: a long tirade about home improvement projects, followed by a bit about paella

2009-05-27T06:12:00.017-04:00

Once upon a time, summers were for long, hot afternoons spent lounging at the pool; spicy salsas made from plump, ripe tomatos brought straight home from the farmer's market; crisp, warm corn chips, and frosty margaritas; Stan Getz fading into John Coltrane or Thelonius Monk; novels by Jackie Collins.

Alas, such summers are now but misty memories, hazy holograms from some nearly forgotten, more frolicsome life. No longer for the likes of us.

These days, summers are for home improvement, and this summer, high on the list of home improvement projects is caulking and painting. "Caulking?" you protest. "Again? Didn't you finish this for the inspectors just a few years ago?"

Oh, there's that pesky word, "finish," again; such an elastic term. Did we do enough caulking to pass inspection? Yes, of course we did; couldn't have gotten our mortgage without it. Finished, though, as in finished the job so completely that we wouldn't have to think about it again for 10 years? Well, that's a different matter altogether. Let's just say, those who caulk in haste will soon regret it.

What we have now is caulking that has pulled away from the joints. Caulking that permits water to get behind the cement board siding; water that, when it freezes, has occasionally cracked or broken corners of the siding, for some reason always breaking so that the nail securing the board is lost with the piece that broke away. So not only do we have the occasional unattractive flash of Tyvek behind the siding, but there's this worrisome prospect of unsecured siding eventually sagging and falling off the house: and this is the shift -- from the effete territory of aesthetics to the far more testosterone charged issues of home defense and security -- that has landed this project at the top of our list. This time, though, I promise: we won't let the caulking settle for a year before putting on a coat of paint

If this weren't enough distraction from other more pleasurable entertainments, there are the engineering projects that promise to fill in the rest of our dance card. These come in two flavors: those motivated by the need to water trees and a garden that are widely dispersed over our 10-1/2 acre parcel; and those -- like the fireplace insert, wood-burning oven (still in the design phase), and various explorations in solar and wind-power -- motivated by unpleasant experiences with lengthy power outages and a deep suspicion that the power we enjoy may not always be so freely available. So far, except for the fireplace insert, these explorations have not come to much, but my own dependency on long hot showers, air conditioning, hair dryers, and modern laundry facilities is too well documented for me to pretend nonchalance. More stories on this to follow, as developments unfold.

Water issues, though, have claimed more of our serious attention. Before we even started to build, M., dreaming of reforesting our alfalfa field with white oak, sugar maples, and blight-resistant American chestnuts, and encouraged by his childhood experiences of growing things in the silty, fertile land around Saginaw Bay, planted something like 200 seedlings in the stony seven acres of our "front yard" to the east of our house. Until he started to plant, the fields were lush and green, the rain so plentiful it threatened to delay our hopes to build. As soon as he planted, the rains stopped. Good for our building projects, bad for the trees: not a one survived that first year.

The following year, after an early, wet spring, we replanted the forest. Again, the rains stopped nearly as soon as we had planted, and the ground grew so dry that even a summer breeze kicked up brown clouds that hovered over the withering corn fields. By now, though, we had a well on the land: If we could just get water to the trees, there was a chance our seedlings could survive.

From our perspective as former city-dwellers, this seemed easy enough: just attach some hoses and go to town. Practical realities, however, intervened. For one, our front lawn stretches out nearly 800 feet from the house. That's a lot of hose. And, for the record, that much hose is heavy. Really, really, heavy. And it's not particularly maneuverable. Just try dragging 800 feet of hose into a field 300 feet wide to water a tree at its center; and do it without dragging the hose over other baby trees or snapping their tiny trunks. Good luck.

We quickly figured out that the best way to water the trees was to load up the tractor with some 80-gallon barrels of water and carry the barrels out to the trees. The only drawback to this plan was that, from the tractor, we (OK, mostly M.) had to hand-carry the water to the trees, five gallons at a time. Here's another fact: water weighs just over eight pounds per gallon (actually, about eight and a third pounds per gallon). This meant we were carrying over 40 pounds of water to every tree. Multiply this by 200 trees, and you begin to get some idea of the work involved. Then, imagine doing this at least twice a week every week from late April until the rains finally return, usually mid-July. If some of the more despairing scenes from Jean de Florette crossed with the intense obsessiveness of Harrison Ford's character in Mosquito Coast come to mind, you are on the right track.

Thus, the attempted innovations: systems of hoses ingeniously connected to offer more flexible watering options (failed due to insufficient water pressure from the house; as it turns out, 800 feet is a long distance to pump water); different varieties of hoses; use of a 55-gallon sprayer tank that permitted M. to water trees from the relative comfort of his tractor (deemed impractical because of its small capacity and need for frequent repairs to the frame to keep it attached to the tractor; M. turned it into a composter). So far, regular rain offers the only real solution, and this year, we are grateful to have it in something like its usual quantity. Our water innovation project this year -- collecting rainwater from our roof -- is a bit like a trip to the beach in comparison to our previous years' projects.

There are other troubles, though: deer eat the trees in the winter, and the fences we installed to prevent that calamity failed to keep away the mice and the rabbits. Then, there was the intense cold of this past winter: nearly three weeks where the nightly temperatures fell to -10 degrees. The net result, over the five years we've attempted this reforestation: out of the 400+ trees we've planted, only two oaks survive.

Believe it or not, this year, we're trying again, in a limited fashion: four white oaks, six American chestnuts, and two Korean pines. This time, though, we're doing it with tubes (not for the pines), and mulch mats; reasonable hopes for rain to continue.

*************
As you might suspect, my role in all this backbreaking outdoor work is relatively modest: I evaluate the plans, forestall potentially misguided efforts, approve budgets, praise progress, and succour the labor with cold drinks and excellent sustenance. Maybe especially excellent sustenance, being personally a believer in the notion that hard labor deserves a celebratory meal. It's an important role, and, well, someone has to do it. Why not me?

In one recent post-project celebration, we attempted our first paella on the grill, and it was so successful, we're already planning our next one for Father's Day. Following wendyo's (apparently no longer blogging, but stop by and say hello; maybe she'll start again) advice on one of my earlier posts about paella, we started a charcoal fire in the grill and when the coals were very hot, we heated a great quantity of olive oil in our paella pan, then briefly sauteed our prepared shrimp (shelled, brined, rinsed, and dried)until just done & then removed them from the pan to a plate. The sliced spanish chorizo was next into the oil, slowly fried -- with the smoker lid on -- to render out much of the fat before stirring in fat grains of Bomba rice. Time required: a sip or two of wine, thereabouts; a few moments contemplation of a pair of sandhill cranes flying overhead.

Then, time for the broth. I'd made this earlier, a mixture of chicken broth heated with crushed saffron threads until it turned warm and golden, spectacularly fragrant, and now I added it a cup or so at a time, stirring the rice until, bored the effort and more inclined toward another glass of red wine, I added the rest, along with the tomatos and peas and a generous amount of crushed garlic and watched it until it all began to bubble nicely, then covered it with the smoker lid.

When the rice had not quite absorbed all the broth, another glass of wine or so later, I added some scallops and mussels; and a few minutes after that, after the seafood had thoroughly cooked, it was time to finish the dish with the cooked shrimp and a handful or two of smoky roasted red pepper strips. Carry the dish -- by now a gorgeous, colorful abstract masterpiece -- into the dining area. Take your bows; graciously accept the spontaneous applause. Serve with a green salad, champagne, and a chocolate cake for dessert -- the perfect festive meal.

As wendyo says, the kind of burned carmelized rice/grease stuff on the bottom of the pan is the prize. And if you've been working out in the fields all day, you get first dibs. Enjoy.

Friday News & Notes

2009-04-30T21:08:00.001-04:00

Besides the cold, which has been unusually brutal, and which has spawned yet further discussion about a woodstove to supplement our kerosene heaters and generator and possibly a windmill to power a shallow well, there has been snow. Lots of snow. And if there's not been snow, there's been thaw, which, on dirt roads without any decent drainage, leads to flooding, followed by freezing, which leads to ice.

The roads around here have been completely impassable for so many days since Christmas that being snow-bound is becoming a way of life: when we can't do anything else, we stay at home and do lessons, scrounge meals from whatever we can find in the refrigerator and pantry, hope the power stays on and the hot water keeps flowing. When the roads are clear, we run errands, drive everywhere, see everyone, get everything we think we might possibly need, plus some. Just in case. Makes for some interesting impulse purchases, most recently a bunch of nearly every variety of herb I could find, including some, like savory or lavender, that I practically never use.... you know, for just in case.

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One thing I probably should stockpile is champagne. I just keep forgetting. It would have come in handy on Sunday when, once again snowbound, I discovered these savory pancakes. Of course, being snowbound, I was stuck with the materials I had at hand: No Madrigal cheese? No problem -- I used some Stilton instead. No ham? I used bacon. No mushrooms? Well maybe next time, when I'm making them just for me and M. Instead, I just crumbled a bit of Stilton between the layers, along with the bacon. I did happen to have some buckwheat pancake mix, and got lucky with the fresh thyme, and just for good measure, I seasoned the batter with a tablespoon or two of finely chopped green onion, crossed my fingers, and hoped for the best. The result: amazingly fabulous, much better than I had any right to expect, given the alterations I'd made, and given that it was my first attempt at poached eggs. Everybody loved them. Mimosas would have been nice, though. Thus the need to stockpile champagne.

So, simple concept: many delicious possibilities. What would you do with this?

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What I'm doing when I'm not cooking or complaining about the weather: prepping materials for next term, tutoring students.

How I know there's a mercury retrograde going on: MS Word just vanished into the ether, taking with it a full page of typeset equations. So far, though, no appliances have crashed, making this a fairly mild retrograde. Call me grateful.*

*Amended, Saturday a.m.: Just lost my monitor. Good thing M. has two and is willing to loan me one for a while.

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Things we never used to get when we lived in town: junk mail flyers for Backyard Poultry magazine. "Don't throw that out!" cried M, when I attempted to hurry it into the trash. Do you think I should be worried?

Notes

2009-04-30T07:55:00.010-04:00

Things that can go wrong during a classroom presentation about preparing roast pork tenderloin:

For one, just about everything. Your presentation can, for example, be scheduled for the first day after everyone has heard about the possible swine flu epidemic: unnerving, even though the tenderloins you used came from a local farm and had been in a freezer for at least several weeks.

Then, it can take your students nearly 20 minutes to chop a quarter-cup of rosemary, a task that normally takes you barely 3 minutes. The electric cooktop heats slowly and the pan never gets hot enough to sear the meat; the oven is likewise slow, and certainly not as hot as the 400 degrees it allegedly registers. The meat never quite cooks through and you end up taking the brutal course of panfrying slices of the tenderloin just so everyone gets to try a bite, gobbling it down during the five minutes between the end of our class and the beginning of the next.

During that brief period while the pork is allegedly roasting, you succumb to the challenge of demonstrating how to make biscuits -- I'm blaming this one on my teaching assistant who begged me to show her how to make these -- but it turns out you forgot a mixing spoon; no pastry cutter, neither. So you demonstrate how to make a virtue of necessity by using your (clean) fingers) to mix the ingredients and press the dough into shape; the flour flies, the mixture clings, you make a royal mess. Without a rolling pin, the biscuits you end up making are thicker than usual: they, too, fail to completely cook by the end of class.

You do it all in heels.

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The heels were a mistake.

I knew they were a mistake the moment I put them on and walked out the door. But I was running late, the forecast was for temperatures in the 80s, I was wearing a skirt, I needed to wear sandals, and the only pair I could find in the mudroom heap had heels. Three-inch heels. It was that, or my boots.

I wore the heels. I wore them while carrying eight-foot tables, while carting stacks of chairs, while hauling music stands (10 of them this week!) from the sanctuary to the classrooms downstairs, while carrying my crate of pots & pans from the car to the kitchen. I wore them while illustrating the properties of quadrilaterals and polygons at the chalkboard, while explaining (yet again!) how to calculate slope, while carrying crates of textbooks back to my car, while shopping for last-minute biscuit-making ingredients and supplies, while standing around making chit-chat, and, yes, while demonstrating how to make a pork tenderloin dinner. I wore them for more than 10 hours before I ever sat down again.

They came in handy once, as a doorstop, but otherwise, wearing them was a mistake. Today, three days later, I am just beginning to walk. My feet hurt, my back aches, and my arms are so limp it's all I can do to recline on the sofa, gesturing with feeble waves of my hand my desperate needs for assistance -- just a book to read, a piece of toast, a glass of wine -- small claims, really, on the attention of my loving family.

I promise, though, I won't do it again.

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On the other hand, after devising this orange-scented chocolate cake* this weekend, maybe I could be forgiven for feeling just the teensiest bit entitled?

*My starting point was Dorie Greenspan's Almost Fudge Gateau, which until Saturday was my family's latest favorite almost flourless chocolate torte. From there, I added roughly a third of a cup of ground almonds, the grated zest from one orange, and just a couple of tablespoons of tangerine juice along with two tablespoons of coffee. Then, instead of the creamy chocolate ganache that Dorie suggests for finishing the cake, I made a glaze of melted chocolate & butter, along with a splash of tangerine juice and coffee, just enough to echo the flavor in the cake.

The result: a dense chocolate torte that tastes rich and complex, maybe even a little exotic and mysterious -- no screechy citrus notes here -- like the best chocolate you've been searching for all your life. Maybe the Holy Grail of chocolate cakes. I'm not sure if I'll ever make any other kind.

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We harvested our first asparagus! We probably won't get much this year, but when you've been told that your soil looks like someone spilled battery acid on your sand dune, you are grateful for anything you can get.

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Closing note: there's a rumor that Pre-Algebra may end up back on the schedule for next year. Guess who might be teaching it if it does?

channeling your inner linguist

2009-04-19T14:56:00.002-04:00

There should be a place on Ebay--maybe there is--where you could sell those ideas or projects that, though sound, never quite came off. That baby sweater you started, for example, for the friend whose baby is now heading off to college. The quilt you just got tired of working on. Just for example. Not that I have anything like that hanging around here.

Except maybe this: the prototype for some phonics puzzles I've been working since m. was first starting to sound out words.

What I wanted were puzzles that 1) introduced three-letter words in groups with common endings; 2) helped reinforce the idea that -at, for example, is pronounced "at" regardless of whatever consonant appears before it; and 3) had a picture part that was separate from the letter part. At first, I tried to buy something. Believe me, I looked. I don't believe they exist--at least they didn't way back then. Thus I came to make my own.

Notice that all the -at pieces are interchangeable; likewise the -an pieces and the initial consonants (any "c" piece can be used anywhere a "c" works). Correctly put together, however, they make a key that will fit only one picture piece. Nifty, eh?

Nothing gets done around here in a small way, though. To get this far, M. and a wood-working friend of his cut 1000 sets of these 10-word puzzle sets. You may see only eight words, but two of the puzzles--rat and van--are currently out on loan. At three pieces per puzzle, that means there were at one time 30,000 pieces of cut oak sitting in our basement in various boxes.

After they're cut, each piece has to be routed and sanded on all edges, so they are nice and smooth for young children to handle. Another job for the wonderful Mr. M.

Then, using a heat transfer tool and a laser printout, I transfer the design to the wood, ink in the outlines with windsor-newton inks, wait for them to dry, and afterwards coat them with polyurethane. They are not for any child who might be tempted to chew on them.

Two or three times, I even made a box to contain them. After that I decided that canvas draw-string pouches were easier and certainly much more practical.

So far, there are eight sets of these puzzles in the world: most of them ended up as gifts, a couple ended up at schools and libraries. Which means that there are 992 sets of cutout pieces, or more than 29,000 cutout pieces of wood still sitting around in the basement waiting to be finished. Anyone interested?

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And then there's this project: Born from the peculiar thrill I once got from scanning foreign languages and describing the rules that made them work, it attempted to introduce late-elementary-aged children to grammar by teaching them the idea of discovering patterns and having them come up with their own technical vocabulary for describing those rules.

They were to be Senior Language Scientists on a space expedition to the planet Robotia. The robots spoke in a symbolic language flashed on their front panels. The job of the Senior Language Scientists was to figure out what the symbols meant and how to construct their own correct Robotian sentences.

To start them off, I gave them some Robotian sentences and their translations.

There was, of course, an obligatory worksheet for creating a dictionary.

After figuring out the meaning of each symbol, the Scientists went on to explore the rules that determined the order of the symbols. I gave them both correct and incorrect sentences to examine.

A second sheet introduced the idea of direct and indirect object (maybe I was moving too fast?).

And in the final sheet, the Scientists had to figure out how to place adjectives.

Overall, the exercise worked well, although it was perhaps a bit much to cover in the space of an hour. Also, it would have been VERY useful to have made up some kind of checklist or matrix, like those provided in logic puzzles, to help my students organize their thoughts as they developed their rules. And of course, the whole exercise needs to be extended.

Anyway, it's a well-intended project, in need of a good home. If you're interested, feel free to borrow!

Baby Steps to Blogging Recovery: Miscellaneous Things On My Mind

2009-03-18T09:56:00.004-04:00

Signs of spring: swans nesting on the shoulder of Scio Church Road, near the ponds on Parker. Just like last year. The return of sand hill cranes. Frogs singing. The neighbor's sheets drying on the line. Seed potatos that arrived in a 50-pound box just today. Oh, and it's sunny. And 70 degrees. Won't last, I'm sure, but it sure feels good.

Signs of a hard winter: The Japanese maple in front of our house, left alone for five years, was completely girdled by mice or rabbits; the euonymous we planted last spring have been eaten to the ground. Some of the tree fences we hurriedly put up last fall, weighted down only by bricks, were blown over in the 50 mph winds, and many of those trees were nibbled as well. In the past we would have despaired, but we've seen too many trees, apparently dead, return and bear leaves, so we are still hopeful (and planning to stake the fences into the ground this spring!).

Heavy snow and high winds brought down more than our tree fences: we've seen downed hoop houses and chicken coops; several old red barns crumpled to the ground. Old barns, old bones all have a hard time bearing up to winter.

Our neighbors, though, apparently deciding that two children, two dogs, four horses, one pony, three cows, and innumerable cats were insufficiently challenging, have added two new kids to the mix. The kids are darling, and Mighty Dog is enchanted. I think I might want one...

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Coyotes raided our neighbor's hens around 1:00 a.m. the other day, and the combination of the coyotes' hunting call coupled with the distress cries of the hens woke me from a decent sleep. Coyotes are mercifully fast, and, surprisingly, not terribly greedy; the hens, once they realized that they were not going to end up on the dinner plate, did not mourn the victims for long and quickly settled back into quiet; I, however, was awake for the rest of the night.

Mighty Dog had an encounter of his own with a lone coyote this morning, well after dawn. Went nose to nose with him, sniffed, romped a bit, and only reluctantly responded to M's calls when the coyote went loping off into the bordering woods. Mighty Dog knows the boundaries of treat territory, and he is careful not to get too far away from them. That is a good thing. I'm not sure, though, whether to be relieved that he returned unscathed, or to worry that one positive experience might encourage another less successful one.

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The project for my cooking class this week was Eggs Benedict: Nine servings of Eggs Benedict, produced, eaten, and, yes, enjoyed (whew! you never know how a 12-year-old might respond to their first poached egg), in just over 45 minutes. If I ever get around to starting that cafe I keep thinking about, this experience might be good training. Takes teamwork -- and a job chart -- to get everything done. Surprised me, though: buttering & toasting the English muffins took more time than making the hollandaise, and the muffin crew took some considerable surveillance to ensure that they did not let those muffins burn. Shows I still have much to learn, I guess.

Teaching has become a consuming interest this term, and it's not just the cooking class. Planning for next year at the co-op is already in full swing, and I'm up for another cooking class, two math classes, and a couple of writing classes, plus there's figuring out the texts and projects for the environmental science class m. needs to take; more than I can do, certainly, and it will be interesting to see what my jobs for next year actually turn out to be. One thing is nearly certain: we won't be leaving the house at 6:30 a.m. to help with set-up. m. is greatly relieved. Me, too.

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Reading: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1200 densely packed pages of travelogue, history, and memoir from Rebecca West's trip to Yugoslavia just before WWII); interspersed with readings from Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac.

Watching: Just finished Iron Man. On to Jesus Christ Superstar, from which we were diverted months ago, but which we recently added again to the top of our queue.

Listening to: The Ultimate Aria Collection. The perfect accompaniment to gnocchi baked in cream with bleu cheese and ham, or Italian country-style chicken, or just about anything really. Perfect music.

Toward a Grand Unified Theory of Omelets (just notes, barring unforeseen developments)

2009-02-25T06:20:00.019-05:00

As everybody knows, there is only one infallible recipe for the perfect omelette: your own. --Elizabeth David

1) An omelet -- whether a French omelette, an Italian frittata, Chinese egg foo yung, or any one of the variations found around the world -- is basically just an egg pancake: a mixture of eggs cooked in a pan until set.

2) Some omelets have fillings; some don't. If there are fillings, sometimes they are mixed in and cooked with the eggs and served open-face; sometimes the omelet is served folded over the fillings, like a sandwich. Although fillings are typically savory, I, for one, have been known to slather a thin, plain omelet with raspberry preserves, roll it up, and sprinkle it with confectioner's sugar, and I thought it was perfectly delicious!

3) This may be heresy or just plain dead wrong, but in my opinion, an omelet is a dish where the eggs provide all the structure: It's okay to mix cream or a bit of water with your eggs before cooking them, but if you start adding flour, or just as much cream as eggs, you've crossed the line into the territory of crepes, puddings, souffles, or cakes. And that's a whole new world.

4) Omelets run the gamut from thin and flat to high and fluffy; some are meltingly tender, while others have considerably more bite; some, like a frittata or Spanish tortilla can seem almost cake- or bread-like. I've seen recipes that call for frying omelets at high temperature, others that swear that only low temperatures will do, and others that insist on oven-baking them. In this way, omelets are much like statistics: you can always find one to prove your point. So, make them the way you like; chances are you can find an expert who will agree.

5) The first omelet I learned how to make came from my mother's Better Homes & Garden cookbook: it was a 3-egg fluffy omelet that I baked in a small cast iron skillet, and it was the meal I made for myself in high school before heading off to work my evening shifts at the library three times a week. To make it, you had to whip the egg whites until they were quite stiff before folding the beaten yolks into it. It puffed up spectacularly while cooking, and I was much impressed with it; it does, however, tend to be a little dry. This was not the omelet I taught to my students.

6) After high school, though, I forgot about omelets. It wasn't until I had graduated from college that a friend, amused by my complaints that I had nothing to eat, showed me how to make them; if you have eggs, he said, you always have something to eat. The version he demonstrated was allegedly French: the flat kind, that at its best is moist and creamy. He had lived in Paris for some years, so I was inclined to believe him, despite the block of Velveeta he kept in the back of his refrigerator. For enchiladas, he claimed. This is also not the omelet I taught to my students on Monday, but it, too, was exceptionally delicious.

7) There were two reasons I opted for the fluffy omelet I taught on Monday: For one, although it takes more work to prepare -- all those whites to beat into a proper state of frothiness -- it's much more forgiving in the pan; students would be much less likely to break or scramble this kind of omelet, more likely to feel successful. And for another, they're just kind of cool to make, a bit of a surprise. Which happens to be nice to have right around 5th hour.

8) Here's how to make them: Separate two large eggs so that the yolks end up in a small bowl and the whites are in a medium mixing bowl, preferably one with straight sides. Season the yolks with salt & pepper and beat them with a fork until they are creamy and lemon-colored. If you are making an herb omelet, I would add the minced herbs to this mixture.

Beat the egg whites with a whisk until they are completely transformed into a soft white mass: if you lift a spatula from them, they do NOT form peaks, but settle into soft cloud-like forms. If you use a mixer to beat your egg whites, always start beating them on low speed until they turn frothy; then only turn the speed up to medium. If you use a high speed, you will break up the lovely froth before it can foam and you will end up with a useless puddle of watery whites.

But really, the state of the whites hardly matters. As noted before, you can make omelets with egg whites beaten into a state of total rigidity or those only mixed together with the yolks. If you don't achieve the state I described, as was a challenge for my students, you will simply end up with some flatter-style omelet batter that will leak away from the sides of the fluffy omelet; nothing that can't be coaxed back into shape.

Fold the beaten yolks into the egg whites. I always fold in some grated parmesan, too. Just because I like it.

In a heavy skillet -- more heresy here: I use a cast iron 10-inch frying pan, not a proper omelet pan at all -- melt a tablespoon of butter at medium heat until it foams and then settles. Pour the omelet mixture into the pan. It should hold the shape of a large pancake. If any of the mixture leaks away, lift an edge of the omelet and use a spatula to coax the runaway batter back under the the rest.

Let it cook at medium to medium-high heat until the omelet has set to the point where you dare to flip it. Some people, fearing the flip, put the omelet under the broiler to cook the top side; others cover the omelet pan with a lid to encourage it to cook; both methods work, with differing results. All are tasty.

I like the flip. It's fun, and I like the buttery taste the top of the omelet gets when it's lightly seared in the pan. I use the largest metal spatula I have, work it under the omelet, lift & flip, just like flipping a pancake. I've never lost one yet.

Let the top side cook for under a minute -- it won't take long -- and then flip it again. If you are using a filling, add it now: sprinkle or spread it on one side of the omelet and fold the other side of the omelet over. I always let the omelet cook for a moment of two at this point to warm up the filling & let the cream cheese I always use become a little gooey. For the record, my filling of choice is smoked salmon mashed with cream cheese & minced chives; after spreading that on my omelet, I'll also sprinkle on some lightly salted chopped fresh tomatos, and, if available, a chiffonade of basil. Guaranteed bliss.

Remove from the pan, and devour immediately. Bon appetit!

Sunday Scribblings: Art(less) Observations on Reading Eat Pray Love For the Third Tme

2009-02-08T20:24:00.011-05:00

It was the pick for book club this month, the second time someone from this group has chosen this book to read. No one objected -- no one even seemed to remember that we'd picked it more than a year ago -- and several were thrilled: they said they'd had this book sitting on the shelves for ages and had never quite gotten around to reading it. I wasn't going to complain, either: the first time I'd read this book, I was so sad to see it end, I just turned back to page one and read it through cover to cover. Since then, it's stayed on my office shelves -- no basement storage for this one -- and I was looking forward to the opportunity to read it again.

And I am enjoying the experience. I want to make that clear. Ms. Gilbert is in many ways an excellent traveling companion: good-humored, attentive to compelling detail, a lively narrator. She reignites dormant desires to learn Italian, makes me crave the experience of eating pizza in Naples or sharing an evening meal with friends at a Roman villa, and awakens real lust to travel to India and Indonesia. I appreciate the reminder to avoid giving in to indulgence -- even just once -- lest indulgence become a tendency. And I am glad to come across her references to different types of meditations (strategies I intend to research as soon as I am finished with the book). She makes it seem possible to cultivate a personal relationship with God, to feel God's presence in one's life. That she at least makes this attempt and succeeds on any level makes the book worth reading, at least for me.

Early on in the book, though, she describes herself as a golden retriever with barnacle tendencies, and this time around, these traits seem more assertive than I remembered them. She's just a little too eager to please, a little too eager to establish herself as bright, personable, attractive. She talks too much when she should listen; too frequently turns the reader's attention back to her own feelings and observations when perhaps the reader might have preferred to linger a few minutes longer over an idea or an experience just introduced.

As travelogue, the book works fine. As memoir, though, it is far less satisfying. Ms. Gilbert's personal circumstances may change over the course of the book, but her character doesn't: despite the devastation she suffered as her marriage unraveled at the beginning of the book, the person she describes then seems too similar to the person we meet at the end, when tears and frustration have been replaced by peace and new love. There's no insight offered, too little reflection either about the person she was, or about how her experiences have altered her, making her capable of the new happiness she discovers. The absence of this kind of reflection could lead a person to think that her transformation was simply the result of her travels. As for me, I'm suspicious: in my experience change always comes at a cost, and her lack of discussion about this cost makes me feel that the high pitch of personal chatter in some parts of the story is a smokescreen, meant to deflect the reader from some of her harder introspection, darker considerations that she is unwilling to share.

That's ok, of course. There's nothing that obligates a writer, even a memoirist, to reveal everything. It's just I wish she had been more forthcoming about what she was willing to reveal, and what she wasn't; it could have made her experience more universal, less dependent on having the means and opportunity to spend a year in Italy, India, and Indonesia, much more accessible.

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This isn't the first time I've had trouble with a first person narrator. Maybe you could call it I-fatigue, but lately I've been finding these memoirists a troublesome lot: by turns self-absorbed, deceptive, dismissive of other points of view; occasionally, dull -- failings I recognize all too well in my own flawed character.

I'm having a hard time with the I in my own writing, too. Who is this "I" who keeps showing up at the page, this avatar I use to negotiate the web: what is this mask I wear? Why does she talk about food and gardening all the time? What is all this interest in poetry from someone who spends most of her days tutoring math or badgering her daughter to pick up her room? Why all this talk about yearning -- is it some manufactured discontent?

None of it is a deliberate lie, but it's not a complete picture, either. And lately the fit has felt off, as if I were trying to struggle into those pants I haven't worn in 15 years, or, to use another metaphor, as if I were trying to pitch my voice for a range that no longer suits me.

There's change in the air, but its destination is a mystery, and the course uncertain. I'm moving slowly these days: words stick, verbs hesitate, and in general I feel more like cocooning than trying to fly, more like reading than writing. And after finishing Eat Pray Love, I think I'm going to want to read The Cloister Walk again. Maybe a recommendation for book club next month? Who cares if I picked it once before, or that people found it difficult, or no one made it past Chapter 3? That was ten years ago. Surely, they've forgotten it all by now.

Sunday Scribblings

A Midweek Gastronomic Antidote to Winter

2009-01-29T12:18:00.009-05:00

These ceaseless gray and bitter days have finally drained my formerly abundant enthusiasm for root vegetables and roasts: no more sauerkraut, please! no matter how good it is for me. Left in place is an insistent craving for warm sun-drenched tastes that just won't be satisfied by anything except, well, warm sun-drenched flavors. So yesterday, dreaming of warm Mediterranean waters and the cerulean blue of a Moroccan sky, and sustained by astrological winds -- your creativity could use a nice workout, and the kitchen is the perfect place for it, advised my horoscope -- I did the best with what we had on hand:

I started with a brief saute, a sofrit of chopped onions, garlic, and red peppers in a generous amount of olive oil. When they were just beginning to get all wonderfully aromatic & the other members of the house were coming 'round to ask what smelled so good, I added a can of Muir's fire-roasted chopped tomatos, juice & all, a can of drained & rinsed garbanzo beans, a cup of water, a teaspoon or so of Better Than Bouillon - Chicken Flavor, some Spanish hot smoked paprika, a healthy pinch or two of saffron (crumbled), some fresh thyme, and red pepper flakes to taste, and then let it simmer uncovered for 15 minutes or so. Just long enough to warm the house & carry the scent to the furthest bedroom. That's ok. It's part of the experience.

While the stew was stewing, I turned my attention to making whole wheat couscous. This is easy: Just pour a quantity of couscous into a roughly equal quantity of salted boiling water (I used 1-1/2 cups of couscous to just over 2 cups of water). Remove from heat and let sit for 10-15 minutes. Fluff with a fork.

Then back to the stew: Near the end of the cooking time, when the stew was beginning to thicken, I added chopped artichoke hearts, chopped black olives, plenty of chopped parsley or cilantro, and a squeeze of lemon for good measure. It probably didn't need it, but I added a swirl of olive oil anyway. Serve with couscous.

Best accompanied by Stan Getz or Paco de Lucia; Gypsy Kings in a pinch. Stands up well to red wine, and is an excellent match for The Mambo Kings. Enjoy!

Sunday Scribblings: (Organic) Temptation

2009-01-10T14:30:00.010-05:00

"Just try it," hissed the snake, coiling himself provocatively about her shoulders. "Oh, I know, it's from that tree, the one you're not supposed to touch. But what are you supposed to do? Go without anything fresh while these long days of late winter bleach into the beige blandness of early spring? It's not like those withered old things He still stores in his cellar possess anything like their fresh-picked flavor. About the best you could do with those is stud them with cloves and throw them in your closet to freshen your clothes. ... Clothes? Oh, darling, I'll explain those later. ... Anyway, have you looked at this apple? Have you ever seen anything so perfectly symmetrical, so free of bruise or blemish? Practically unnatural, you might think, and you'd be right. It takes some doing to make this kind of apple. Words you never hear around here: hybridization, pesticides, alar, fertilizers. Don't look so alarmed. Those trace residues of neurotoxins, endocrine disruptors, and carcinogens are really irrelevant compared to the benefits of adding more fresh fruit to your diet. You want to keep that luster in your hair? Your smooth skin? Your bright smile? Eat your fruits and vegetables, regardless of where they come from, that's my advice, and I'm not the only one who would tell you that. ... It troubles you, though, I can tell, the thought of these words that sound so dangerous invading the territory of the food you eat, the boundaries of your body, and I guess I can understand your concerns. There are alternatives: these apples, for example, from New Zealand, grown, if not in the same idyllic symbiotic relationship with other supportive organisms as the fruit He supplies, at least without the pesticides and additives that so alarmed you. In the interests of full-disclosure, though, I feel obliged to remind you that "organic" though they may be, they are an energy-intensive fruit to grow, requiring nearly 10 calories of petrochemical fuels for every single calorie of sweetness they yield, and although that may not seem too high a price to pay, there are those in the generations that will follow who will shake their heads and wonder at your lack of long-term judgment. Others will worry about the fragility of the monoculture promulgated by these large industrial orchards. But anyway, that's all beside the point. Can't you see the possibilities? Fresh apples in January mean fresh strawberries in March. Tomatos all year round. The end of this "to everything there is a season" nonsense. ... Of course it's all right. What else were you supposed to do with the minds and bodies you were given? Here's your chance to set your own course, make your own destiny. Just look at that apple. Try one bite. Tell me it's not sweet."

Sunday Scribblings

Clementines: A Repost. (Because it's that time of year...)

2008-12-05T00:00:00.003-05:00

At last, a few markets are selling clementines in a state of nature: as singletons as God intended them to be purchased instead of in unwieldy cartons where they inevitably turn blue before we eat them all.

The best way to buy clementines, though, is in an open air German market from a vendor whose voice you can hear extolling the virtues of his clementines over all other voices in the market square. Yes, they sell fruit by day, but in the evening they are probably singing Wagner at the local opera house. Despite the cold snap in the air, a few bees still hover over peeled fruit set out to sample, and the air is heavy with the scent of oranges. You pick up a few, testing them for weight, evaluating the quality of their peel, tasting the samples, certain to buy only the sweetest, juiciest fruit. You buy one, maybe two, tuck them in your pocket, wrap your scarf more tightly about your neck to ward off the draughty chills, and hurry off to class.

The best way to enjoy clementines is like this: you are in your history seminar, in the middle of a rainy November, sitting in a large unheated auditorium in a former castle, one of more than 500 students in the class. Today, though, you are sitting next to the tall boy with the wide smile and long hair that curls at his collar. Someone you like. Someone you might like to know better.

So as the professor drones on, listing page after page of books he recommends, you take the clementine from your pocket, puncture its skin, peel it, and gently lean into your neighbor's shoulder as you offer a him a wedge. He will appreciate the distraction, and he may welcome another; and if his shoulder lingers long enough for you to notice the scent of damp spruce on his coat, or his leg accidentally presses against yours, well the world is a cold place and we should all be grateful for whatever heat, whatever comfort, wherever we may find it.

Sunday Scribblings: A Winter Tale

2008-11-30T05:53:00.008-05:00

From a train on my way from Luxembourg to Bonn, in a blizzard (1978/9)

The train had halted its progress again. More than ten hours into a trip that should have taken three, with no real promise of ever making our destination, we all seemed a bit deflated. Children slept, curled up in their mothers’ laps. Some people tried to read, a few mustered conversation; most waited patiently, arms crossed, with typical German stoicism. I paused from my own book to break open a clementine, still warm from my pocket, grateful for a bag of almond macaroons I had picked up at a stop in Trier, back when all this still felt like an adventure.

Outside, it was dark. The snow was still falling, thick and soft. Warm lights in the distance indicated a farm. There were great trees, evergreens heavy with snow, and a farmer carrying a lantern was bringing in the horses, gathering them into the barn. One reared up, its tail switching, and the farmer stepped back, still holding the reins, his loden cape swirling about him in the snow and the soft glow of the lantern light, fixing in my mind a memory of that moment as sudden and sweet as my first kiss.

[A repost, something I was going to post later this week, but it seems to fit this week's prompt. Plus, everything I've tried to write keeps tending in this direction anyway.]

Sunday Scribblings

Random News & Notes: Trying To Put a Chaotic Week Into Perspective

2008-10-12T06:16:00.010-04:00

We got the soil analysis back from the MSU Cooperative Extension, and the news wasn't pretty: our soil is sandy and low in nutrients, requiring substantial new organic matter to make it suitable for most garden vegetables. Goes a long way toward explaining why our tomatos never quite work (it's not just the crummy weather), why carrots don't taste quite right, and why our pumpkins rot before they ripen.

Unfortunately, the idea of supplementing a half-acre garden with substantial new organic material is a little daunting, so our plan now is to scale back our ambitions a bit: Potatos grow very well here, and blueberries do, too. We'll keep growing those, moving the potato patch year by year so that the soil can recover. So far, the asparagus looks promising, and if we're not careful, the sage will take over the entire garden. We'll keep these, too, as well as our other perennials, the raspberries and strawberries, which comprise a relatively small area of the garden that could possibly be supplemented as required. I see a composter in our future.

For other garden essentials -- tomatos, please! and basil, thyme, and other leafy herbs -- we're building a planter wall along the south border of our walkout. Something high enough that the rabbits can't get into it. Something protected from the wind. Something we could think about filling with rich, organic, dirt that we purchase from someplace else.

And for all those other garden essentials (carrots, radishes, garlic, beans, and greens), well, I'm thinking we might be buying a share in one of our local CSA farms next year.

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Negative numbers. No, not the current financial crisis. Math. Specifically, trying to figure out how to model addition and subtraction with negative numbers. So far, I've modeled it on a number line, with positive and negative markers, and with semantic analogies. Most of my students are getting it, but this seems to be a nerve-wracking concept.

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Error analysis: why do students make the mistakes they do, and what can I do to help prevent them. This is what I'm thinking about 90% of the time these days.

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Candy corn is the devil.

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This recipe, adapted from Jerry Traunfeld's The Herbfarm Cookbook, for preparing pork tenderloin with an herb crust, however, is pure heaven. Traunfeld recommends serving it with a roasted red pepper & hazelnut sauce. Having neither the time, inclination, nor ingredients to do so, I just deglazed the cooking pan with a 1/2 cup each of white wine and chicken broth, let the sauce cook down until thick, then added 4 tablespoons of butter, and no one complained. Next time, I'll remember to mince some additional herbs to throw into the sauce at the end.

Suggested accompaniments for this dish were slices of fried polenta or roasted potatos with herbs. Instead, M., working from another Traunfeld cookbook, The Herbal Kitchen made this it-must-have-been-divinely-inspired Mushroom Marjoram Bread Pudding, a savory addition to the meal that was received with extraordinary enthusiasm and my everlasting gratitude.

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Today, we are hoping for peace and quiet. After yesterday's exertions in the kitchen, we have plenty of leftovers. No need to cook. I'm reading an excellent book, All the King's Men, and I'm hoping for some extended time on the sofa to read some more. There is laundry, and the floors are dirty. But, I note, there is always laundry, and clean floors seldom stay that way for long. So maybe I will just read...

And you, what are your plans?

The week: a short review.

2008-10-03T13:56:00.007-04:00

I may have found my groove this week. There's been time for teaching, time for exercise, time for helping m. find a topic for her next Research Writing essay. There was even time for folding laundry. I finished a great book (Bridge of Sighs), met a friend for coffee, attended book club. And I managed my first backbend in something like a hundred years! All in all, an absorbing and rewarding week.

Not much writing, though, and I'm not sure why. It's not due to lack of time, more lack of urgency: I'm watching things, learning lots. Writing, I expect, will follow...

Details from a Dizzying Week: Something for Write On Wednesday

2008-09-26T15:47:00.005-04:00

Not quite what the lovely Becca asked for, but perhaps in the spirit of her prompt:

Discovering baby mice -- five of them! -- behind the glove compartment of my car as we drove from school to a cafe one day. We unceremoniously scooped them out of the car and into the nearby grass, stripped the car, vacuumed everything. No sign of Mama Mouse so far.

The piney smell of sage leaves on my fingers after harvesting them from the garden. We'll be skewering the leaves to bits of gruyere wrapped in prosciutto, dipping them in a light batter of flour, cornstarch, and water, and then deep-frying these goodies so that the cheese melts and the sage leaves become crisp. Ecstatically delicious!

Seeing m. dressed, at 6:00 a.m., before morning light had even appeared in the sky, in a long black 1940s-style dress, black cloche, hair spiked, full eyeliner, deep red lip gloss. She calls it elegant Victorian Gothic. In contrast, I was still in my nightgown and robe, nighttime dreams not yet clear from my eyes, my hair still lank about my face.

Getting a call from m's Lit. teacher to let m. know how much she loved the soundtrack m. had compiled for the Song of Roland. Made my day, too!

Dreaming about babies. Triplets, no less! And because I had forgotten that I was pregnant, I had neglected to buy any clothes for them. Poor things were stark naked under their hospital baby blankets. Bad Mom!

Watching the coppery glow of the silo to our north, reflecting the low light of the rising sun in the morning as I sipped my tea & talked with M.

Receiving The Pink Prayer Book in the mail on Monday. Edited by my new blogging friend at OH!... on BOOKS... PAPER... REAL LIFE..., and including an introduction by Cokie Roberts of NPR, this collection of prayers, anecdotes, poems, and quotations from breast cancer survivors succeeds in avoiding treacly sentimentality and offers instead real encouragement, hope, and inspiration. I bought a copy as a gift for a friend, and I may well end up buying more. For more information about this book and how it came to be written, see this post.

That's it from my week -- what's your week been like?

Not Because You Asked, But Because I Need To Sort This Out Just So I Don't Forget What I Need to Do And Why

2008-09-19T14:17:00.007-04:00

This is what it takes to make my math class work each week:

Class notes. These explain the key concepts from the five sections we cover each week; they also include the problems we'll be demonstrating in class -- and space to take notes about how we solve them.

I use these notes instead of the text for several reasons: 1) The book is really heavy, very cumbersome to bring to class. 2) Because we meet only once a week, we cover material in many sections; it can become difficult to keep everyone on track if we're flipping through lots of pages. And 3) By making up notes for the lecture, I can use analogous problems (supplied by the teacher's text) to the examples in the student book. Thus 4) when I assign reading from the text, it won't be the same material they just saw in class.

Quiz: Call me mean, but I start every class period with a short quiz about last week's material. It settles everybody down; helps them remember the questions they might otherwise forget to ask.

Homework assignment: This includes pages to read from each section, a quick question from each section to check their understanding, problems to solve (and check!), and an example from each section that they are supposed to explain to their parents.

I would be lying if I said that I was entirely comfortable with the structure imposed by the co-op, where I am supposed to cover a week's worth of topics in a single hour, even if I keep assuring parents and students that I'm completely happy if they call me any time (well, before 9 pm) with any questions.

One problem I saw last year was that my students assumed that because we had covered the material in class, they did not need to review the material in the book afterward. Too many times, someone would call with a question about a problem, and I would answer with one of my own: Look at the examples at the beginning of the section, I'd say. Do you see any that look like this one? How did we solve that one? What might you do with the one you're working on? That's why I'm assigning reading this year. We'll see if that circumvents some of the issues.

The other problem I saw was communication with parents. When asked about a class or homework for the week, middle school students are just too likely to say that things are going fine. Even if they had a hard time with every single problem. So this year, I'm trying something different: requiring students to explain one problem from each section to one of their parents. I've got my fingers crossed.

Notes to parents about the homework for each week. This is the piece intended to close the loop. It summarizes key concepts, and, for each problem their child is supposed to discuss with them, it both explains what parents should hear and includes some questions they can ask to help prompt their child. If there are problems, I'm hoping this means I'll hear about them earlier, rather than later.

It all means a fair amount of writing each week. I drafted the class notes this summer, which was a good thing, as it involved a lot of typesetting equations and developing graphics -- slow work for me. But I still have the quizzes, homework assignments, and notes to parents to write each week. If you don't see me around much, that's why.

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On a completely different note, the other day, m. and I were driving into town and I was ranting about some common grammatical error that was driving me nuts. "Why are you so geeky about grammar?" m complained. "Why couldn't you be geeky about something cool?"

My lot in life...

Meme: Seven Unremarkable Facts About Me

2008-09-18T20:37:00.007-04:00

I've seen this one around several places, but I can't remember exactly where. Now, though, it's time for me to try it myself: Seven Unremarkable Facts About Me.

1. I love foreign languages. Or at least foreign accents, sort of like Jamie Lee Curtis in A Fish Called Wanda. (Um, sort of.) It's an affliction, really. A curse.

2. I'm still working on Russian. Given that I have to fit my studies in between preparing for my math class, reading m's essays, and making sure we all get fed around here, it's going slowly, but it is going. This week, I worked on recognizing the gender of nouns. Next week: verbs!

3. A few weeks ago, while drinking coffee with M. on morning, I realized that I wasn't really enjoying it. So I quit. I am now a green tea drinker, mostly Jasmine, but occasionally Dragon Well or Tazo Zen.

4. To the dismay of my family, I love cabbage. I tormented them this summer trying to devise a coleslaw recipe we all could enjoy, to no avail. I suspect that they would all prefer a sweet and creamy dressing, where I prefer a spicy, olive-oil based dressing. They do, however, like this recipe that I always seem to remember as soon as I feel the first bite of autumnal crispness in the air:

1/2 medium head of red cabbage, washed, trimmed, cored, and shredded
1/4 cup minced parsley
1/4+ cup toasted walnuts, coarsely chopped
1/4 cup crumbled bleu cheese (Stilton or roquefort work well here)
1-1/2 Tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1-1/2 Tablespoons olive oil
Salt and pepper

Mix together the shredded cabbage and parsley. Sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste. Heat the balsamic vinegar until steaming, then pour over the cabbage and parsley. The cabbage will look glossy, a deep garnet color -- it is beautiful! Then add the olive oil and mix well. Sprinkle with the bleu cheese and toasted walnuts. Allegedly serves 4. I've been known to eat the entire thing for supper.

5. My love of cabbage is leading me into dangerous new directions: sauerkraut! And were it not for my various misadventures while making sourdough bread, I might even consider taking up pickling. There's a kapusta salad at Amadeus that I'm dying to duplicate: fresh sauerkraut mixed with pickled onions, shredded carrots, and minced parsley served with a light dressing of lemon juice and honey. It's so refreshing I could make a meal out of it and a basket of dinner rolls...

6. I stand on my head every day, and I'm working on my handstand. One of my life goals is to be able to do a backbend again.

7. I am fascinated by the ways people discover their place in the world and the communities they create around themselves. How do people mesh their dreams and their circumstances? These are the questions that drive my reading and my writing. (And that's my answer for this week's Write on Wednesday).

And now, it's your turn -- anyone else care to play along? Let me know!

Teaching

2008-09-17T10:34:00.005-04:00

I had forgotten what a compelling diversion the classroom could be. This summer, preparing for classes, I had to drag myself through lesson plans, bribe myself with brownies for working through assigned homework problems. I brought home books and DVDs about ideas for teaching algebraic concepts and let them languish on my desk until the threatened overdue fines prompted me to return them, unwatched and unread. I had nearly convinced myself that maybe I wasn't as interested in all of this as I had thought, maybe it was just a job.

All that changed on Monday. Seven students, all girls, all surprisingly enthusiastic and alert for 8:45 on a Monday morning. It was basic stuff this week -- properties of addition and multiplication, learning the order of operations -- material I now secretly call "the grammar" of algebra. That we succeeded in having a lively discussion about the commutative and distributive properties and the reasons they might be useful left me with a warm glow I'm still feeling two days later.

That, and one of my students from last year came up to me and asked why I couldn't be her Algebra teacher this year. I told her that she would come to love her new Algebra teacher, too.

sigh.

Now I wish I'd watched some of those Teaching Company DVDs this summer.

Recognition

2008-09-05T15:12:00.011-04:00

What is it within us that triggers that feeling of recognition, that feeling of "I think I know you"? Sometimes I've felt it the moment I've met a person: we meet, perhaps in a grocery line, or at the library, begin to talk, and perhaps spurred by this feeling that we have much in common, begin to discover that we have an astonishing overlap of experiences and interests. Maybe they attended the same school as I did, grew up in the same small town, worked for the same guy who never could pay his writers on time. Whatever the connection, and regardless of whether our experiences even overlapped, it left some kind of physical or spiritual mark on us, something we recognize, even if we can't identify just what triggered the recognition.

Lately, though, I've had the experience of running into people I used to know and hardly being able to recognize them at all. For example, some time ago while shopping at my favorite produce market, I saw a stunning woman with short red hair. She smiled, said hello, asked how I was doing. Her voice and gestures were familiar, but I couldn't place where I knew her from. She read my confusion, and explained. She owned a chocolate shop I once frequented (and frequently!) when I was in my 20s; we had mutual acquaintances who were making crazy decisions, making life miserable for everyone who cared about them, and occasionally she and I met for a glass of wine to talk about them.

Then, she was a stunning woman with long platinum blonde hair. During the year before I saw her at the produce market -- more than 10 years since I had last talked with her -- though, she had been treated for breast cancer. She had lost her hair, her body had changed, but she had survived, and to mark her survival, she had finally given herself the red hair she'd always wanted but feared to try. It was a dramatic change, and coupled with the weight she had lost as a result of her illness, it required her explanation before her features could resolve into my memory of the person I knew.

I have now lived in Ann Arbor for the greater part of nearly 30 years, long enough to have archaeological strata to my life here. There is the office job era (the protozoic period?), the gallery era, the grad school era, the time when I was absent doing other things in other places, not to mention my more recent life as mother, teacher, and freelance writer. Buried in the strata are too many relationships, old jobs, former colleagues, former students, friends whose lives have taken divergent paths.

It is surprising how seldom I see any of these past associates, a testimony to the possibilities within even a small community. All it takes is a slight shift of a schedule -- the decision to take the 10:00 yoga class instead of the one at 6:00 am -- and suddenly, I may never see someone I once spoke with every day. By the time I see them again, they may have married, divorced, graduated, been promoted, lost their job, suffered illness or injury, grown their hair, dyed their hair, given up jeans and ratty t-shirts for expensive suits, learned to speak Norwegian, traveled to China ... all kinds of things.

So when our paths do happen to cross -- the result of an unexpected encounter at the grocery store or the library, or maybe while walking downtown -- we peer at each other, searching past all these layers of recent experience for the person we sense we recognize, the person we once knew. "Is that you?" we ask.

And when we finally locate that person we once knew, sometimes there is rejoicing; it becomes an occasion for finding a cafe, ordering a bottle of wine, and enjoying a long conversation. More often, there is just a nod of acknowledgement, some easy pleasantry, before continuing on our way.

But sometimes, just as features resolve into someone we recognize, the armor of recent life drops back into place. We do not speak, we do not nod, but proceed on into our separate lives; strangers now, friends or acquaintances no more.

Write on Wednesday: My Writing Practice

2008-08-28T06:12:00.007-04:00

During a week when I am buzzing from appointment to appointment, my attention constantly on call for one reason or another, when I finally sit down at the computer, all that is going through my head is the dull staticky hum of white noise: there are no words at all.

And even though I'm thinking about the question, what is my writing practice? how do I learn things?, and even though, I actually have one or two vague thoughts about how some things you start small, train for, and build up to, like learning languages or math or piano, there are other things you just have to have the desire for and go for them, like jumping over a vault, I am so scattered from the various claims on my time, that I just can't quite seem to get these small ideas onto the page.

As much as I might claim that life is practice, that I find meaning in the -- how did I put it recently? - in the encounter between myself and my material, the truth is that I need a greater vision to keep me at my practice. I'm pretty certain that one reason I gave up my music practice was that I didn't see a future in it: after a while, playing through the same scales and arpeggios, polishing the old repertoire, or working through the occasionally new piece just didn't offer enough satisfaction. When I quit, I didn't miss it. It's quite enough for me to sit down once in a while and bang out something badly. I just don't care.

I learned to knit because I wanted to make a sweater for someone I loved. I learned to cook because I wanted to make a souffle. I write because there is something I want to say. Sometimes it comes from direct and immediate observation (yesterday, I saw a fox wading through the faded grass), sometimes it comes from something I've read, a voice that inspires me, or an idea that won't quite let me go.

Without that feeling of urgency, I just can't go through with the work. It's like lying awake in the middle of the night trying to will one's self to sleep. If the ideas aren't there, it's much better to get up and read a book, fold the laundry, or straighten my desk. Writing pages about how I've got nothing to say, or mindlessly surfing only reinforces my sense of dullness. From my point of view, engaging with life is a surer path to inspiration -- stay alert, and something interesting will come along. It might be something I want to write about, or it might be something else I want to do. Ultimately, staying alert, alive, and engaged -- having fun! -- is what matters most to me. If writing helps, I'll be at my desk. If it doesn't, chances are I'm in the kitchen.

For other responses to this prompt, see Write on Wednesday

The Things I Love (This Week)

2008-08-22T13:14:00.002-04:00

The praying mantis we found one morning outside the garage

My acupuncturist -- a month without migraines!

Onions slowly fried in butter until golden brown and completely sweet.

Sunflowers in bloom against a red barn

Morning glories

The promise of a rainy day, when rain is desperately needed

Basil-Lime Fizz, M's latest summertime thirst quencher

Watching several hundred gray and white geese march across our neighbor's field

Sangria & plates of creamy cheese, smoked meats, spicy shrimp, amazing nachos, shared with good friends and long conversations

The full moon rising over the horizon earlier this week, luminous and copper with the glow from the setting sun

Walking our trails after dinner and hearing the fields rustle with crickets

Laughter--and the good friends, good books, and good movies that encourage it

That's my list for this week -- what's on yours?

And Another Monday Meme-ing...

2008-08-18T11:40:00.005-04:00

What I'm reading: Straight Man, by Richard Russo. One of my all time favorite books, and, to my mind, one of the funniest stories ever. Still, in case you pick this one up and wonder what I ever saw in it, here's my hedge, straight from the prologue:

Truth be told, I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. they want to be comforted.And, of course, my idea of entertaining might not be yours. I'm in complete agreement with all those people who say, regarding movies, "I just want to be entertained." This populist position is much derided by my academic colleagues as simpleminded and unsophisticated, evidence of questionable analytical and critical acuity. But agree with the premise, and I too just want to be entertained. That I am almost never entertained by what entertains other people who just want to be entertained doesn't make us philosophically incompatible. It just means we shouldn't go to movies together.

What I just finished eating: Eggs baked with sauteed spinach and feta cheese, served with sliced cucumbers, tomatos, and olives. Just lovely. And the opportunity to catch up with a good friend while enjoying this meal, even better.

What I'm drinking: Iced ginger lemon tea.

What I'm watching: Just finished watching Michael Clayton, which was really good. And not just because of the near-constant presence of George ~~Swooney~~ Clooney. Really. There's a lot more to it than just George Clooney.

What I'm listening to: Some unidentifiable, innocuous jazz. The hiss of a cappuccino machine, squeals from reunited friends, murmur of quiet conversations. Cafe noises.

What's on my mind: An exchange with m., where she asked me to help her figure out how old some new manga characters she had just discovered might be. "There's this mad scientist who has lines all over her face," she said. "And she's crazy."
"Hmmm... Must be 50," I replied.
"OK." she said, and went on to describe the next one.
Not a word of argument. No dissension at all.

What's on my mind II: The bear that's been sighted in our township, digging potatos. Yes, that's right: a big brown bear. Right in our neighborhood.

What's on my mind III: The 9 pecks of potatos sitting in our basement, and two more rows of potatos yet to dig. Maybe we should leave them for the bear?

What I'm ranting about: The past tense of the verb "lead" is led. NOT lead. When lead is pronounced like led, it refers to the metal, not the verb. It's one of those mistakes that I see everywhere, and it drives me crazy. So you're going to help change things, right? Whew. Thanks! I feel much better now.

Major accomplishment last week: Learned all 33 letters of the Russian alphabet. If I were in Moscow (Moskva), I could ask where the billiards club is and I might even be able to order a pizza supreme and maybe a bottle of vino!

What's ahead for the week: Writing a letter to the parents of my pre-algebra students. Meeting friends in town for dinner. Meeting another friend for coffee. There are rumors that my book club might once again resume. Getting materials ready for school to begin.

What I'm feeling: Quiet and content.

What I want: Autumn!

And how does your week look?

Friday's Love List

2008-08-15T00:01:00.005-04:00

Blue skies

Coppery sunsets

Fresh dug potatos

The first tomato

Fresh onions (and we thought they had all died!)

This green bean salad

My good night ritual with m.

Days (Elvis Costello), a song that always restores my faith, or at least focuses my attention on the good fortune I enjoy

Running

Having a stack of great books in my TBR stack:
     Cicero (Anthony Everitt),
     Lush Life (Richard Price),
     Radiance (Barbara Crooker), and
     Straight Man (Richard Russo, a re-read, but an old favorite, and one that always makes me laugh)

Accounts that balance

Pesto!

New clothes, comfortable clothes

The color orange

Appliances that work when they're supposed to

The tiny woofs our dog makes -- and the way his tail twitches -- when he dreams about chasing rabbits

The promise of a pitcher of sangria and tantalizing appetizers with good friends next week. (And somehow I've ended up with plans as well for brunch and coffee with other friends on other days! Summer vacations are ending -- people are coming home!)

Having a weekend ahead with no plans and no greater ambitions than to read a book or ride my bike.

That's my list this week -- what's on yours?

Friday's Love List

2008-08-08T00:01:00.006-04:00

The things I love (this week's edition):

Fireflies
Chocolate cake
Driving in the car by myself and getting to sing along to my CDs
Cool nights
The smell of damp earth in the evening after a cooling rain
Crickets
Friends who can tell you need to talk and who will make time to see you even on a day when your time is chopped into awkward 45-minute sections that make it hard to see anybody at all.
Black-eyed Susans
Learning that the redbud we thought had died is making new leaves
The first tomato
Libraries
Michigan blueberries
Flannel sheets on cool nights
The honey bees that made a hive in our shagbark hickory
Sam Baker's Pretty World
Every kindness
Sleeping 7 hours in a row
Riding in the car with m. -- so much opportunity to talk with her
School books arriving from amazon.
Trying a new recipe -- chicken satay! -- that everyone loves
Starting to hear from math students again
The dog leaning against me on the sofa
The red barn I see every morning
Coffee in the morning, this week with brown sugar, cream, and cinnamon
Treats!

.... and what's on your list this week?

Taking a Stand: Cabbage

2008-08-07T20:35:00.004-04:00

To my family's dismay, I love cabbage. After all, it's crisp, delicious, cheap, an excellent source of fiber, and exceptionally nutritious. I like it stirfried with garlic, shredded in salads, braised in wine, and pickled with garlic and chiles in kimchi. A salad of thinly shredded napa cabbage with a dressing of rice wine vinegar, sesame oil, red pepper flakes is fabulous. That's what I think. And that's why it is not going away.

Talkin' To Myself...

2008-07-29T19:48:00.006-04:00

The day began with a bike ride, my first morning ride. The dirt road out of our neighborhood was covered with yellow petals -- sulfurs, I realized as some of them, stirred by the breeze I created, fluttered about me as I passed. Kind of like swimming with the dolphins. I like these close encounters with nature, one of the real advantages of riding a bike. Close encounters with roadkill, however, are far more pungent and far less desirable. On a hot day, they can make you wish you'd taken the car.

The dirt roads, too, are a hard ride, and I have learned through hard experience that if you are barely making your way uphill in first gear and have the misfortune of finding a patch of new pea gravel or sand with your wheel, you might as well get off your bike and walk. It's either that, or topple sideways, which rates even more humiliation than to be seen pushing my bike uphill like the wimp I am.

Going downhill, though makes me giddy with the speed. I love it, absolutely love it. I am, however, a grown-up, and all too aware of the unexpected ruts and channels and rocks that suddenly unseat me, so my thrills are mixed with the tendency to ride the brake. I must look like I'm enjoying myself, though. People always smile and wave when they see me -- it's part of the red bike phenomenon -- and I smile back. If I'm not going downhill, I try to wave.

***************
I picked up the latest edition of Cook's Country last weekend, and I've been happily cooking my way through it ever since. We've all agreed that the recipe for Creamy Peppercorn Dressing -- made with freshly cracked pepper sauteed in olive oil -- is a winner, not only an excellent topping for the pictured wedge of iceberg lettuce, but a superb accompaniment for all kinds of vegetables. Maybe especially broccoli.

We also liked the concept for their stove-top skillet pizza. The crust for this "30-minute" pizza used a no-rise dough that received its characteristic yeasty flavor with the surprise addition of beer. We loved it. And M. and m. claimed to love the topping I used -- a mixture of diced chicken, BBQ sauce, & cheddar cheese topping -- which I chose due to some excessive quantities of leftover of chicken in the refrigerator. And I thought it was OK, but too sweet. Next time, I think I'd rather try the tomato-basil-mozzarella option, or maybe the tomato-prosciutto-fontina combination. Something more savory, more like pizza, dammit! It was, however, fast and easy, dinner accomplished in just over 30 minutes!

Somewhere along the way, I got seduced by the picture of the Tiramisu Ice Cream Cake featured on the back cover and momentarily forgot all my prohibitions about ostentatiously baroque desserts, which I usually suspect of being all style and no taste. I even forgot that I don't really like Tiramisu, very much. Company was coming (two people!), and I was determined to make that cake.

Fortunately, when I mentioned that I was off to fetch a gallon of ice cream, M. intervened, suggesting that perhaps a gallon of ice cream was a bit much for the five of us, and mightn't I better consider a scaled-down version? Did we really want to be finding this dessert in the freezer for the next three months?

They were good questions to consider, and they resonated with some uneasiness of my own. So instead of making the cake in an angel food cake pan as shown, I used a large loaf pan, which required only a far more reasonable two pints of ice cream. Lined with rum and coffee-soaked ladyfingers, the final presentation still possessed a certain drama, if not all the flash of the original.

For a flashy dessert, it was surprisingly tasteful. I think it falls into that category of experience that we were all happy to enjoy once, but I doubt whether anyone will ever urge me to make it again. I have, however, discovered a new vice: ladyfingers dipped in coffee & rum. And there's yet half a package, beckoning from the pantry...

Write On Wednesday... the Saturday Edition

2008-07-26T13:06:00.006-04:00

From Becca: What do the three P’s of writing…practice, pleasure, profit…mean in your writing life?

While shopping for Christmas gifts last year, I picked out a book, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, that seemed just perfect for my sister-in-law, a pianist who has been studying French for the last five years, intending to spend three weeks in Paris this autumn. As so often happens, though, with such book gifts, I could not resist the temptation to read a little, to reassure myself that it really was an appropriate gift. And, as so often happens, once I started, I could not stop.

It surprised me, because this memoir does not have the romantic abandon that I usually enjoy in the memoirs of music students, for example, Noel Adam's, Piano Lessons: Music, Love, and True Adventures. Instead, Carhart's memoir seems less about his own experiences as a musician, than an opportunity to explore his interests in the history of the piano and its construction, its place in middle class culture, the intricate art of piano tuning, and the occasionally flamboyant personalities -- the musicians, teachers, tuners, and shopkeepers -- that comprise this otherwise subdued and mannered segment of society.

Fascinating stuff. But where he really got me was in his discussion of piano teachers, and in particular, the insistence of his earliest teacher that the goal of study was The Recital, that if he didn't share his accomplishments, what was the point of all the practice? Carhart liked to practice, he liked to play. He hated to perform. Just like me.

For me, practicing piano was my first exercise in meditation. It wasn't just about spending the hours attempting scales and arpeggios, working out lines of music with first one hand and then the other before attempting to bring both together: it was an encounter between myself and the music, an opportunity to discover new possibilities in both sides of that encounter, creating something beautiful -- at least to my ears -- in the process. The practice was its own reward. I sure didn't need to perform, and I resented the recitals and competitions that seemed part of every music teacher’s schedule.

Likewise with my writing, which these days is limited to my blog and occasional comments. I love the practice. I love the encounter between myself and the page, that opportunity to discover new possibilities, both in myself and in the material of my daily life. I like finding an apt metaphor, or sometimes just any metaphor at all. I like the opportunity to use long strings of ridiculously over the top adjectives. Most of all, I like the chance to sound far more confident and opinionated than I ever do in real life. Writing blog posts is fun. Pure pleasure. No profit.

As a former tech writer, I have written for profit. It was not fun. My first job drove me crazy with its repetitive requirements, stonewalling software developers, and schedules that seemed out of sync with the realities of production. I thought it was just a mistake. I tried another company. And another. And still another. It took years of fruitless job searches before I realized that I was just congenitally unsuited to the profession. By the time I became a mother, there was no question in my mind of "giving up" a career to stay at home with my daughter. I hated my job. I loved my daughter. We didn't need my income. So much for my tech writing career.

"But what about publication?" people ask. "Couldn't you sell some of your pieces?" Well, yes. That's happened. And it provides a momentary thrill whenever it works. It does, however, require a fair amount of effort: not only do you have to write the essay, but then you have to write a letter that will convince an editor to READ the essay. If one editor rejects a piece, you need to be ready to send it off to another. And the markets open to the kind of work I've produced so far -- very short articles and essays -- are relatively limited. The killer, though, is this: it's just not very satisfying to be published in a magazine that will be tossed as soon as it's read or on a web site that will change tomorrow. So either I have to figure out how to write something longer than a 1200-word post, or I have to figure out how I can collect some of my material into a coherent larger whole.

Mostly I have to figure out if this is something I even want to do. Does it matter to me that I could sell a book? Maybe. Maybe not. There are many things that matter to me. My husband matters to me, my daughter matters to me, and my friends matter to me – and all of them matter more than a book I could write.

I’m not one of those people who has characters talking in their head, stories begging to be told. My impulse to write comes with images, gestures, and moments easily captured – and shared – in my blog, where, as it turns out, I’ve found a community that also matters to me.

Profit -- and the time may come when that is what I need -- will have to be found in some other quarter…

Be sure to visit Becca at Write on Wednesday, for more thoughts on the practice, pleasure, and profit of writing.

Today

2008-07-24T20:01:00.005-04:00

Bare feet
prickly grass
hot dirt
hidden raspberries
smooth cool concrete
a Magritte sky
so blue
We nearly forgot about
the coals
Let them burn down almost to embers.
We sipped cold wine
and watched the swallows (many)
the condors (a few)
and the hawk (only one), highest of all.
A good day.

What's Cooking Wednesday: Plum Tart

2008-07-23T01:00:00.007-04:00

In late July, when the days are hot and long, and heavy humidity drives all creatures except the most industrious insects to find shelter in shade or air conditioned comfort, rich chocolate desserts can feel just about as out of place as a heavy woollen winter coat. Then, it is time for popsicles, icy fruit sorbets, thin slices of crisp watermelon and sweet canteloupe, and regular excursions to Dairy Queen.

Sometimes, though, as easy and refreshing as these options may be, you may find yourself craving something a little more substantial, a little more like dessert, but perhaps not as predictable as a cherry pie. On those occasions, this plum tart -- featuring fresh plums nestled in a fragrant almond creme, and adapted from Simply French, by the wonderful food writer, Patricia Wells -- might offer just the right finishing touch to a summertime feast. With a glass of chilled wine and thick wedge of a ripe Camembert, I'd be tempted to call it dinner.

It takes a little time to make, mostly because the dough for the pastry dough needs to chill for an hour after you've mixed it and for another hour after you've rolled it out and put it in a pan, but otherwise, it's a very simple, 3-step process: 1) Prepare the easy-to-handle tart pastry. 2) Prepare the almond "cream" (a mixture of ground almonds, butter, sugar, and eggs) and pour the mixture into the prepared tart pan; and 3) arrange wedges of fresh plums in the cream and bake!

The Pastry: Blend 4 tablespoons of softened butter with 1/2 cup sifted confectioner's sugar until very light, very smooth. Add 1/2 teaspoon vanilla and two egg yolks (you can use one of the discarded egg whites for the almond cream) and mix until blended to the consistency of thick frosting.

Add one cup of unbleached flour and mix until just blended; the dough should not form into a ball. If the dough seems too sticky to work with, add up to 2 tablespoons of flour and quickly blend. Scrape the dough onto a sheet of wax paper and with your hands, form the dough into a ball, then gently flatten it into a circle. Wrap in wax paper and chill in the refrigerator for at least one hour or up to 24 hours.

After the dough has chilled, roll it out between two pieces of wax paper into an 11-inch circle. Gently peel away the top sheet of wax paper, and invert the dough over a buttered 9" tart pan (if you don't have a tart pan, a pie pan will do just fine; it just won't have that continental flair that the straight sides of a tart pan somehow conveys). Carefully lift the edges of the dough so that it falls naturally into the pan. There should be enough dough to overhang the edges of the pan. Prick the bottom and sides of the dough lining and then chill for at least one hour (or, covered with foil, up to 24 hours).

Preheat an oven to 375 degrees F. Bake the chilled shell for 5 minutes, then remove and trim the edges of the dough to present a smooth edge. Return the shell to the oven and bake for 15 more minutes, or just until the edges begin to brown. Remove from the oven and let cool on a rack for at least 10 minutes.

The Almond Cream: Process 1/2 cup of whole blanched almonds to a fine powder. Blend with 4 tablespoons of softened unsalted buttered and 2/3 cup of granulated sugar until creamy and light. Then add 1 large egg (room temperature) and 1 large egg white (also at room temperature) and thoroughly blend. Pour the almond cream into the prepared shell.

The Plums: The recipe calls for 20 purple plums (1-3/4 pounds, cut in half), which seems like about 14 too many for the tart. All I can figure is that the plums in France must be much smaller than those we have available here. Also, if I cut our American-sized plums in half, the resulting halves are too large to easily eat, so I cut my plums in quarters. If you don't have plums, nectarines, apricots, or pluots all work equally well. Layer the fruit in the almond cream with the cut side up.

Bake at 350 F until the almond cream is golden brown and mounds up around the fruit. The recipe estimates this at 30 minutes; in my oven, with my fruit (more juice?), it takes closer to 50. Transfer to a rack to cool. When cool, sprinkle with confectioner's sugar. Serve at room temperature.

Enjoy!

What's Cooking Wednesday

Friday News & Notes

2008-07-11T13:08:00.010-04:00

The workshop is over! It was fantastic! 10 kids, hiking all over town, exploring art galleries, taking portraits, playing with light and shadow, color, abstraction, talking art! m. loved it. It was wonderful! It was exhausting! I never want to see another cafe again! Thank God it's done!

The high point of the week (for me): Returning to the Map Room at the Graduate Library. We were there last year and promised ourselves to return. This year we had time to explore the room, also time to see the map of the Roman empire, first made ca. 400 AD (then carefully reproduced during the late medieval period), showing courier routes extending from Brittania to India, that we missed last year. It was a long map -- about 40 feet -- and very narrow.

It offered an interesting perspective, and, thanks to the lively commentary provided by the grad assistant who presented the map, awfully interesting conversation as well. She and m. exchanged ideas on topics ranging from the soap opera of the Roman Empire to manga, to the case structure of Latin, to the dubious character of Roland (from The Song of Roland), who, according to the grad assistant, swooned at the sight of blood and died, not of a wound or any particularly valorous action, but from a burst blood vessel caused by blowing a trumpet. m. was totally captivated. I have a new list of books we're supposed to read.

Another favorite moment during the week: sitting in the porch swing at Portofino Cafe one evening, reading a book, Love Invents Us (Amy Bloom), listening to some kind of tropical twang band playing over at The Roadhouse interspersed with someone nearby practicing scales and arpeggios on an old and slightly out-of-tune piano. Somehow very peaceful.

Other notes:

Fingerle Lumber has put their nearly 100-year-old business up for sale. They offer prime downtown property, and the Ross School of Business is probably already slavering after it. I still feel nostalgic for Schlenker's, the old hardware store that required a knowledgeable guide to navigate it. I am sad to see the lumber yard go, too.

Protesters at Chelsea Lumber; more layoffs.

A factoid: In May of this year, more than 3200 martial arts studios closed across the country.

Art Fair begins next week, and town is expected to swell to at least twice its normal size every day from Wednesday through Saturday. A few years ago, I thought it remarkable to see signs of Art Fair activity as early as Monday morning. This year, more than a week before the Fair is schedule to begin, the barricades are already staged, ready to block roads, there are notices warning people that their favorite parking places will be unavailable as of this Sunday, No Parking! signs in abundance, crowded roads, and testy tempers. At this rate, town will be uninhabitable from the 4th of July through the end of the fair. Sometimes I miss living in the midst of it all -- that's the only way to really enjoy it.

I am glad for this week to be ending. It is time to be home. Time to ride my bike, time to sit on the sofa and read, time to sit outside and watch the stars.

Happy weekend, everyone!

Sunday Scribblings: Chance Encounter -- Music Camp, 1975

2008-07-06T13:39:00.010-04:00

The practice pianos were housed in small rooms in small cabins, kind of like study carrels, but with pianos instead of desks & chairs. They had windows. My favorite one looked out over the lake; you had to wake up pretty early to snag that one.

The windows were probably intended to prevent romantic trysts. Or possibly they were meant as a safety measure. What they meant for certain was that, unlike the vocalists, the flautists, the violinists, or anybody who could carry their instruments and practice wherever they wished, we pianists were on display for anybody who might walk by. And whether we had whirled through a passage with virtuosity or stumbled through it with less than grace, it seemed that someone would always be there, with the same inevitable questions -- what are you studying? how long do you practice? what are the instructors like? -- the same interest in what we were doing.

In return for their interest and admiration, we treated our fans with the patronizing boredom of world-weary celebrities. We smiled, we were polite, and we answered every question, but we were occasionally a little clipped in our responses. We were serious musicians, people! We had music to learn! Performances to give! We needed to practice!

And so, one afternoon in my second week when I heard a familiar knocking at the window just as I was working through an awkward bit of fingering on a Chopin Prelude, I was not terrifically friendly to the older man (probably not quite 30 years old) who was standing there. He asked about my studies, asked about camp. He loved Chopin, wondered if I had ever heard Horowitz, told me about someone else I might enjoy named Martha Argerich. He was nice, non-threatening, more talkative than most tourists, but nothing he said elicited more than terse one-word responses from me. I'm not sure I even thanked him for the new fingering he suggested--a strategy that worked out well after he left. Finally, he gave up trying to talk to me. "Well, good luck," he said. And then he left. I was relieved, glad to be rid of him.

That night, the Duke Ellington Band was playing at camp, and everybody was going. I went with a couple of friends from my cabin and a perfidious saxophone player named Tim, who forgot my name and broke my heart even before the end of the summer. We arrived early to get good seats, and while we waited, we commiserated among ourselves about the various trials of camp life. The food, the fans, the crazy practice hours. We talked about my encounter from the afternoon, decided it was creepy, decided the guy must have been a perv.

The lights dimmed, the musicians started to arrive on stage. And then I saw him. My guy. On stage. Playing bass. He saw me, too. After all, I was sitting practically in the front row. He winked, and waved, then started to play.

For more tales of chance encounters, go here.

[About] Me and My Editor(s) -- v.2

2008-07-04T13:15:00.013-04:00

(Not really an essay, but perhaps a response, of sorts, to Becca's thought-provoking prompt at Write on Wednesday.)

Editors have a bad reputation. Even at their best, they are seen as the dusty, stern, comma-niggling, fragment-fighting agents of language conservation and dutiful composition. They are antithetical to creativity, blind to originality, oblivious to the merits of poetic expression, and the kiss of death to anything novel or interesting.

Of course, they can also save your butt, keep you from waltzing out into publication with a metaphorical piece of toilet paper trailing from your heel. Good editors can even save what might otherwise be lost. They will say, "Hey, look here, this is great stuff. It just needs a bit more polish so everyone can see it." Maybe that's why we keep them around.

I am, myself, a compulsive editor. I edit street signs, billboards, cereal boxes, signs outside auto-repair shops, menus, store signs, everything. I feel it a civic duty to notify cafe owners -- especially in a university town -- that they are selling desserts and not deserts. I once sent a strongly worded complaint to E!Online because of an ad they had posted for a reality TV show, the name of which I have LONG forgotten, with the tagline, "Whose hotter, Mom or Daughter?"

Although it seemed appalling that a mother and daughter would vie for such questionable distinction, it was that awful and offensive Whose that jolted me into action. How could I teach my freshman comp students the difference between who's and whose if their errors were propagated in the very venues they were most likely to read? To E!Online's credit, they corrected the error.

I disdain creative spelling, and see in Krispy Kreme the decline of civilization. Or at least the English language. I am a vigilante for the correct use of words, a Zorro who redlines its when it's is clearly called for, a relentless crusader against irregardless, an advocate for strong, active sentences. I hear every misuse of "you and I" when these pronouns are the object of a sentence and not the subject; I may not correct you, because I am polite, but I will notice. I see every typo, every missing word, every grammatical faux pas, every single error.

That is, in other people's writing. My own writing is mortifyingly susceptible to every fault I may sneeringly find in that of others. Everybody, I like to say, needs an editor. Even me.

My first editor was my high school writing teacher, the inestimable Ms. Isquith. She believed that writing was noble work, and that doing it well could be a lifetime's practice. It was she who taught me that good writing was supposed to be clear, coherent, concise, concrete, and something else that I have also long since forgotten. Probably to my detriment. She insisted that every word mean something. She allowed no fluff, permitted nothing extraneous. She liked tight, terse sentences. Clear, concrete prose.

It was good advice, and an inspiring vision, but for me, with my Germanic syntax, my love of every embedded phrase, each carefully nested in its own subordinated clause like so many Russian dolls, my affection for elliptical remarks and dashes of every size and variety -- like this! -- and my deep admiration for the torrential prose of Churchill or Thomas Carlyle, this presented a few challenges.

Mostly, just getting anything written at all. The sentences I loved didn't cascade from my pen onto the paper. They took thought and effort, too many false starts, plenty of awkward prepositional phrases that I eventually learned to delete, and long hours of hard work.

Keep in mind that when I first started to write, there were no computers, no word processors. Every paper began as a handwritten draft, and the final version was painstakingly typed. Simple typos could be fixed with whiteout, which if you weren't careful could end up smeared across an entire line. But, if you realized midway through your paper that you had forgotten to include an important point or needed to revise your entire thesis, well, you were just sunk. You'd make another pot of coffee, swallow another No-Doze, and start to re-type the entire thing.

It was an arduous process fraught with frustration, designed to separate "real" writers from the pretenders. I both loved it and hated it. I loved writing to my standards, was excited when I felt like I had discovered something interesting or somehow snapped two disparate points into place with a dramatic comparison, but I hated the process. Every paper felt like it drained my blood to write it. But at least I felt like I had said something. I was a quiet person, a shy person, notoriously bland. In writing, I acquired a voice that few others had ever heard. I liked the person I became when I wrote.

In college, I encountered a different set of editors, frustrated academics and certain creative types, for whom no idea could be sufficiently original. "Derivative," they sniffed, and it became the word I feared, a word that haunted my dreams and nightmares. I didn't stop writing, though. I just stopped sharing it quite so freely.

These days, thanks to the marvelous advances in computer technology that make composition a much more pleasurable task and the incredible wisdom I've acquired just by growing old, I'm on much better terms with my various editors. Even the one who sniffs "that's so derivative." I just offer him a glass of wine, and pretty soon he's relaxed and offering suggestions, often creative ones, from the sidelines.

The most insidious editor of all, though, still lingers. He's the one who suggests that maybe I've finished, maybe I've said all I need to say, maybe there's nothing more for me to write. I'm often tempted to agree. I could be riding my bike, visiting friends, baking a cake, or weeding the garden. Writing is always a little hard for me -- why not do something with more certain rewards?

In these cases, I've found the best response is what I imagine to be a very tai chi-like maneuver: give in, go with the flow, give up. If I can live without writing, so be it. I'll certainly be happier without its frustrations. My house will certainly be cleaner, I might be inspired to cook something more than a roast and potatos for dinner, and who knows, maybe I'll even find time to look for a job.

That's when it's time to give in to the impulse to take a walk instead of sitting at my desk. I return to my favorite yarn shop instead of writing a post. I read some books, dream of making a quilt, meet a friend at a cafe, visit my favorite blogs. And somehow, after a day or two or sometimes even a week of looking and reading and thinking -- feeding my heart and soul -- I always feel a little tug, something that says, did you see that hawk? did you notice that wind? did you feel that quiver of desire? It's time, you've got something to say. Don't miss your chance. Don't lose the opportunity. Hurry.

And so, here I am, at my desk, writing. Again. So much for the Insidious Editor. And thanks as ever to all the good editors with their vision of excellent writing who inspire and abet me.

Sunday Scribblings: Happy Endings -- A collection from some of my favorite books

2008-06-21T15:00:00.005-04:00

1. The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger

Clare: This morning everything is clean; the storm has left branches strewn around the yard, which I will presently go out and pick up: all the beach's sand has been redistributed and laid down fresh in an even blanket pocked with impressions of rain, and the daylilies bend and glisten in the white seven a.m. light. I sit at the dining room table with a cup of tea, looking at the water, listening. Waiting.

Today is not much different from all the other days. I get up at dawn, put on slacks and a sweater, brush my hair, make toast, and tea, and sit looking at the lake, wondering if he will come today. It's not much different from the many other times he was gone, and I waited, except that this time I have instructions: this time I know Henry will come, eventually. I sometimes wonder if this readiness, this expectation, prevents the miracle from happening. But I have no choice. He is coming, and I am here.

******************
2. Emma, Jane Austen

The wedding was very much like other weddings, where the parties have no taste for finery or parade; and Mrs. Elton, from the particulars detailed by her husband thought it all extremely shabby, and very inferior to her own. "Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business! Selina would stare when she heard of it." But, in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union.

******************
3. Straight Man, Richard Russo

Normally I'm subject to the kind of blind claustrophobic panic that then filled the room, but I happened at that moment to catch the eye of Paul Rourke across the room, and when I grinned, he tried valiantly to smother a grin of his own. For twenty years he'd steadfastly maintained that anything I thought was funny most assuredly was not, and I could tell he felt his twenty-year resolve crumbling. I could see him let it go, and his big, mean-spirited face broke into the widest imaginable grin, and his shoulders began to bounce up and down.

Clearly, the only solution was for all of us to take one step backward so that the door could be pulled open. By this time, a group of plumbers, a group of bricklayers, a group of hookers, a group of chimpanzees would have figured this out. But the room contained, unfortunately, a group of academics, and we couldn't quite believe what had happened to us.

******************
4. The Ten-Year Nap, Meg Wolitzer

But now, ... he still thought about the women who until recently had come here most mornings. ... He might see one of them sometimes, or maybe another, but they didn't appear consistently anymore, or in a group. In the past, they had always lingered after the breakfast rush. They overtipped the waiters, he'd noticed, leaving amounts of money that seemed to have nothing to do with how much food they had actually ordered.

But as he thought about it now, he decided that he could not believe they had gone somewhere new; it just didn't seem like something they would do. He imagined that they felt a kind of loyalty toward the Golden Horn, as if it were their school or their house of worship, and that this feeling had held them in place over such a long stretch of time. For his own reasons he was glad it had. But now the world, he thought, had taken them. He knew that this could suddenly happen. One day you just woke up, and there was somewhere that you needed to be.

******************
5. Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert

The little fishing boat anchors right off the shore of Gili Meno. There are no docks here on this island. You have to roll up your pants, jump off the boat and wade in through the surf on your own power. There's absolutely no way to do this without getting soaking wet or even banged up on the coral, but it's worth all the trouble because the beach here is so beautiful, so special. So me and my lover, we take off our shoes, we pile our small bags of belongings on the tops of our heads, and we prepare to leap over the edge of that boat together, into the sea.

You know, it's a funny thing. The only Romantic language Felipe doesn't happen to speak is Italian. But I go ahead and say it to him anyway, just as we're about to jump.

I say, "Attraversiamo."
Let's cross over.

*****************
6. Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichl

"What did it feel like to be an alcoholic?" I asked.

Marion considered for a minute. "As if there was not enough gin in the world," she said finally.

"You're amazing too," I said.

"Marion waved her long hands as if she were pushing the thought from her. "Oh hon," she said. "Nobody knows why some of us get better and others don't."

I thought of my mother. And then, suddenly, she seemed very far away. The bridge was strong. Doug was waiting on the other side. I was not afraid. If I wanted, I could just keep driving.

I stepped on the gas.

*****************
7. Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, Susan Jane Gilman

Looking across the right bank, I could see the office building where Bob was working, struggling with a hopelessly slow computer, his face poignant in its frustrated concentration, a cold cup of coffee abandoned by his keyboard. The sun seemed to burnish my skin, the wind raked through my hair. I felt weightless, exhilarated. This was it. I was doing something I'd dreamed of. I was living in the middle of the world, and all of us were in it together, each one of us extraordinary and yet, really, no different from each other. I flung my arms back and for a minute, it felt like I could levitate. Then I laughed, loudly, like an American. Like a defiant bride. Like a seven-year-old girl with a rhinestone earring clipped to her nose. I had absolutely no idea what would happen next. But then, I suppose, no one ever does.

*****************
For more stories with happy endings, visit Sunday Scribblings!

Friday's News and Notes

2008-06-20T15:52:00.011-04:00

Most of the week has gone to wrapping up the school year: writing course descriptions and evaluations, figuring out how to format a transcript, researching curriculum materials for next year, buying books.

Buying books is, of course, one of the best parts of homeschooling. The other part is planning the curriculum for the next year. It's that time when you get to be hopeful, maybe even ambitious, when you can imagine all kinds of rich educational experiences (field trips, experiments, projects, 30-page papers!), traversing widely, reading deep. Experience indicates that the reality might require one or two adjustments. For now, though, we are enjoying our dreams.

M. turned 50 this week -- did you hear the champagne corks pop? -- and, as always, his birthday is a stern reminder of my own 50th coming up just around the corner. I suspect I will face this one in the same attitude of denial as I have faced other similar markers. I'll dim the lights a little lower, and if someone wants to read a book, well, that's what the library is for.

The advice to the aging is just as confusing as that doled out to adolescents. On the one hand, it's easier to gain weight, so you are told you need to exercise more often, longer, and more vigorously. On the other hand, you need to avoid anything too vigorous because of the risk of injuring thinning bones or overtaxed tendons and ligaments. All that, and I'm somehow also supposed to reduce my already paltry allowance for red wine, chocolate, and potato chips?!? (You know the old saw about healthy living... you're not really living longer, it just feels that way...). Or maybe, as with my daily caffeine fix, I'm not supposed to worry (too much) about those red wine calories... all those excellent anti-oxidants, all that heart-healthy resveratrol. But no more than an occasional glass, lest I increase my odds of suffering breast cancer. It's a fine line we old people have to walk.

Periodically AOL runs a feature titled 5 minute fixes to looking younger, thinner, and more gorgeous. Or something like that. It is pitched to women, of course. The suggestions started off innocently enough with recommendations to wear pink lipstick and soften harsh eyeliner but quickly transversed the slippery slope from make-up tips to deliberate subterfuges for disguising whatever might be deemed unsightly (Spanx!) to even more intrusive alterations such as bleaching your teeth at home, "quick" botox injections for those insidious expression lines, or quick and easy surgery to tighten flabby triceps. How that last recommendation fits in the "5-minute fix" category defies my understanding, but the author underscored that this was a scar-free operation, so maybe that's how it qualified.

Mostly this just amuses me more than it offends. I fully intend to grow as gray, wrinkled, and baggy as any elephant -- large and expressive -- and if the sight offends anyone, they better stay out of my way.

I am, however, dead set on having a middle age crisis, and this purchase from earlier in the week just might be the beginning of something interesting:

From the Giant Bicycles site

It's not quite the Schwinn Collegiate I remember last riding with any pleasure (for the last 18 years, the streamlined aerodynamic affair I purchased when I was a California girl has languished in the garage, a torment to ride) -- it's better! More comfortable! The gears are easier to change! And it's red!

My goal is to start riding it to the local grocery store, the one we use when we need only milk and eggs and it just makes more sense to spend $5 extra on those items than to spend the same amount -- plus the hour in time -- driving to Ann Arbor & back. M. swears that this model will never make the 50-mile round trip to Ann Arbor, but I used to take my old Schwinn on 40-mile rides, so I might be tempted.

The weekend weather report threatens rain and storms. For now, though, it is sunny and mild, the road is beckoning. Call me tempted.

Here's wishing all of you tempting weekend pursuits! Succumb and enjoy!

News & Notes and a little something for What's Cooking Wednesday

2008-06-12T12:31:00.000-04:00

First, there's been rain, more than two inches in the last 10 days, and thankfully without any of the damaging winds or hail so many other areas have suffered. Everything is green, lush, and abundant, which after last year's dry spring, where brown grass crunched beneath our feet and any place we failed to water (that's a lot on a 10-1/2 acre parcel of land) died away to dust, is a huge relief.

Each year we've lived out here, we've altered the landscape in little ways -- we've let the grasses grow, carved trails, planted trees and lilacs, made a fire circle -- and with these changes the wildlife that makes it home here has altered as well. There's a pheasant that now lives in the tall grasses of our backyard prairie, killdeer build nests along our driveway, the hawk has returned to nest in our eavetroughs. Tribes of deer forage their way through the alfalfa, coyotes prey on our neighbor's geese, and once in a while, we see a fox.

We discover new pests, too. The first year, it was just the deer who munched our newly planted saplings. The next year, the crows ate all the sunflower and corn seed we planted. Three times. This year, we've added rapacious hordes of bunnies to our list of scourges. Let's just say, my sympathies are with Farmer MacGregor. (And, I have a wonderful recipe for rabbit stew.)

Despite the endless list of gardener's woes, though, things are growing beautifully this year. The asparagus is getting huge and ferny. The beans have unfurled large heart-shaped leaves, and the kale is going to town (time for pasta with kale & bacon!). We gathered a small bowl of strawberries from the garden last night, and noted that the blueberries are flowering. We might get a handful of them this year, too, if the birds and the deer don't beat us to them. The raspberries are looking promising as well. We have high hopes. I am keeping in a store of heavy cream. Just in case.

And so, it feels that summer has arrived at last. And during the summer, the one drink we enjoy most often, the drink that goes with everything we eat -- from fried chicken to corn fritters to a salad made with fresh greens and wild berries -- is iced tea. Here's how I make it, guaranteed to be full-flavored, smooth & refreshing -- with no bitter tannins that might be potentially irritating or upsetting:

Over medium heat, bring one quart of fresh water together with 5 teabags of your favorite tea (we're kind of partial to Lipton's around here) to 190 degrees. This usually takes just about six minutes. Watch the thermometer -- you do NOT want to bring the water to a boil lest you release those bitter tannins. The tea (if you're using a black tea) will be the color of cognac and small bubbles will be beginning to form at the bottom of the pot.

Immediately remove the pot from the heat. Let the tea brew for three minutes. Remove the teabags. If desired -- and boy, do I ever desire it -- add 2-4 Tablespoons of sugar. Stir until dissolved.

Add one quart of ice; let dissolve before serving over ice.

Best enjoyed on a hot day while reading a book on a front porch. Other options: lemon, crushed mint, a slice of orange.

See What's Cooking Wednesday for more wonderful recipes.

The Things We Get To Do

2008-05-15T14:26:00.005-04:00

Spent the day yesterday with my friend who's been undergoing treatment for breast cancer. She's been through chemo, had two surgeries, and now has six weeks of radiation ahead of her.

It's been tough, but so far all the news has been very, very good, so we are hopeful. None of the experience has been easy, though, from chemo to the fact that both of her teenaged daughters have chosen full-time custody with their father rather than be with her during this time. She is, as she says, grateful for her friends.

Despite all this, she is radiantly beautiful, and she has acquired a peace she did not possess beforehand.

When I prepared to leave, she asked what I would be doing the rest of the afternoon. Running errands, I answered. I've got to pick up some groceries, stop at Lowe's.

Oh, Anne, she said, those aren't things you've got to do. They're the things you get to do.

Now there's a distinction I want to remember.

What's Cooking Wednesday: Home Alone 2 (pasta with gorgonzola)

2008-05-07T19:01:00.010-04:00

What's Cooking Wednesday
It is becoming a habit. On Wednesdays, M. takes m. out for dinner and then to her NIA class, and I have the evening at home. During these few hours alone, I can read or write uninterrupted. I can bang on the piano without fear of interfering with a business call or my daughter's studies. I might choose to wash the windows, or close the blinds, turn up the music, and dance. No one will know.

Best of all, I get to eat whatever I want. Often, it's a salad, but sometimes it's a quesadilla or an omelet. Sometimes it's a bowl of popcorn.

Tonight, it happened to be pasta with gorganzola.

Based on a recipe from Deborah Madison's marvellous book, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, this dish satisfies my two most important requirements for any meal I make for myself:

1) It is fast & easy.
2) It is something I love, but that no one else in my family will mind missing.

To begin, fill a 3-quart pot with water and begin bringing it to a boil. While it is coming to a boil, set a bowl -- this is probably heresy, but I have even set a heavy ceramic pasta bowl on top of the pot -- containing one mashed clove of garlic, two ounces of your favorite creamy bleu cheese, a half tablespoon of butter or olive oil, and a tablespoon of cream or half and half or milk.

As the water comes to a boil, the sauce will warm up and much of the cheese will melt. Don't worry about any chunks that might remain. They will melt when you add the cooked pasta.

Remove the bowl from the pot and set aside. Salt the water. Add about two ounces of uncooked pasta. Fettucine is what the recipe calls for; I used farfalle. Cook until tender, then drain & add to the pasta. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Topping with toasted pine nuts is strictly optional, but really, really tasty.

While the pasta was cooking, I roasted some asparagus and steamed some broccoli, two vegetables that seldom appear in the same meal together, but, hey, this is just for me. A glass of wine and a piece of chocolate, and I am very happy... and looking forward to seeing M. and m. later tonight.

Just because I liked it: May Sarton

2008-05-03T08:46:00.008-04:00

Today, according to Writer's Almanac, is the birthday of May Sarton, the poet who once said, "One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being."

I like this quote; it rings true. I also liked the poem that accompanied the quote. So for all of you out there, friends and heroes every one, here is this:

Fruit of Loneliness
--May Sarton

Now for a little I have fed on loneliness
As on some strange fruit from a frost-touched vine—
Persimmon in its yellow comeliness,
Of pomegranate-juice color of wine,
The pucker-mouth crab apple, or late plum—
On fruit of loneliness have I been fed.
But now after short absence I am come
Back from felicity to the wine and bread.
For, being mortal, this luxurious heart
Would starve for you, my dear, I must admit,
If it were held another hour apart
From that food which alone can comfort it—
I am come home to you, for at the end
I find I cannot live without you, friend.

Just in case you think I exaggerate how infrequently I buy new clothes...

2008-05-02T11:40:00.004-04:00

Today I emerged from the bathroom wearing a new shirt -- a recent internet purchase -- and the dog BARKED at me.

The verbs around here

2008-04-23T19:18:00.007-04:00

Mourning doves coo
Cows moo
Roosters crow
Peacocks caw (and struggle across the road, long tails blowing into their face in the wind)
randy horses frolic
"Get a room," says m.
geese bicker
killdeer twitter
tractors growl
rototiller roars
lambs baa, where's my maa
bunnies plunder
M. curses
the forsythia blaze
daffodils nod
the tulip trees take my breath away
the phone rings, Mrs. G. do I have to
    write that paper
    do that assignment
    prepare for that test (that I left in my folder, forgotten at school)
    know all that stuff you told us on Monday
Oh yes, oh yes, you must.
Out of the cold dark earth you must come
and into the warmth of the sun
For now it is spring
And time to bloom

What's Cooking Wednesday: Home Alone

2008-04-09T17:35:00.013-04:00

Once, in the early days of our marriage, M. and I met at home after we had each spent long demanding days at our respective jobs. "What shall we do for dinner?" he asked.

"Hmmm... maybe we could have baked potatos and a large tossed salad?" I answered. It was hot, our apartment lacked air conditioning, and we were both tired, and sitting on the sofa with a glass of wine and a plate of cheese and crackers while the potatos baked seemed a lot more appealing than bustling off into our cramped apartment kitchen.

He paled slightly at the suggestion. No crispy fried firecracker chicken? No four-course Indian feast? He probably wondered what had happened to the girl he thought he had married. He knew I sometimes ate salads for dinner; he'd seen me order them. But I think he was surprised, even horrified, to learn that I might consider it a possible dinner option for both of us.

He was diplomatic, however. "The potatos will take forever," he said. (This was before we had a microwave; also, I would never wreck a perfectly good potato by zapping it in the microwave.) "Maybe we should go to Gratzi's instead."

My favorite Italian restaurant? Or a baked potato and an evening at home baking in our steaming apartment? That required no discussion or debate. We went out.

Eating out back then, when we both worked, was a common resolution to any of our differences in appetites. Restaurants are pretty handy that way. After m. was born, however, and I quit my job, we discovered that 1) eating out with an infant is not nearly as relaxing as you might think; and 2) eating out on one income posed a few more constraints than eating out on two incomes. This combination is what finally brought us home for dinner, where we finally had to learn to compromise and accommodate--maybe especially the limited palate of a toddler and young child.

I still had salad nights, though. M. traveled frequently back then. I fed m., and put her to bed, and then I made a salad for myself. Or sometimes grilled sandwiches made with cheddar cheese and mango chutney. Or maybe just pasta with olive oil and garlic. Although I wouldn't have an endless stream of these days, I treasured these times. Cooking for yourself is a luxury, a rare private indulgence.

These days, between homeschooling and my husband's permanent residence at home as a 100% telecommuter, I am rarely alone. Tonight, though, M. was able to finish up work early and he took m. into town for dinner and her exercise class. And thus, I was faced with my first dinner at home alone in more than a year.

What to make? I was tempted by this lovely Mediterranean vegetable soup, but I didn't have all the ingredients on hand, and I didn't want to spend my time running another errand into town. Pasta? That sounded too heavy. As I was ~~rummaging through the refrigerator~~ deliberating my choices, I ~~discovered~~ remembered some lovely organic dandelion greens I'd purchased earlier in the week. They seemed light and refreshing, a healthy change from our usual meat and potatos. Plus, I was pretty certain that only I would enjoy them.

So, borrowing heavily from a Tyler Florence recipe on the Food Network, this is what I did:

In a large salad bowl, I mixed one bunch of young dandelion greens torn into bite-sized pieces together with a handful of fresh dill (which I always keep around) and some thinly sliced sweet onions (the recipe calls for green onions, which I had on hand --they just looked too dreary to use).

I dressed the salad with a bit of lemon juice and olive oil seasoned with salt & pepper. (The recipe calls for preparing a dressing from the juice of half a lemon mixed with 1/4 cup olive oil, then seasoning with salt and pepper; I probably used just over a tablespoon of the mixture. But then, I like lightly dressed salads).

To accompany the salad, I had a slice of Zingerman's excellent whole wheat farm bread and a couple of slivers of parmesan cheese. It was sublime.

Having thus satisfied my appetite for virtue, I ~~scarfed an entire family-size bag~~ daintily nibbled a handful of potato chips and sipped a glass of white wine. For dessert, there was chocolate. Of course.

And then I took a walk.
And then I read a book and wrote this post.
And now M. just called to say they are returning home, and I am so ready to see them again.

What's Cooking Wednesday

Signs it might be spring

2008-04-08T14:35:00.010-04:00

We've had sunshine and 60-degree weather. Two days in a row.

The grass is turning green.

The crocus are coming up downtown.

The parking lot at the hardware store was full today. On a Tuesday.

The home & garden store was out of humidity covers for those of us foolhardy enough to start plants from seeds.

The bullfrogs are singing wildly. Everywhere.

The farmers are tilling their fields.

M. has been rototilling the garden. And a few patches for flowers and bushes, including 12 lilacs, 12 forsythia, 40 day lilies, and 20 iris bulbs that are due to arrive any day.

He has commandeered every bit of southern exposure, not to mention the dining room table, within the house for starting his garden darlings, including these -- 50 pounds! -- seed potatos.

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

In other signs of a warming trend, m. was putting spring sheets on her bed this morning. "We should really get you a new quilt this year," I remarked.

"But I like this one," she insisted.

"Really?" I said, "But it's got that giant ink stain on it [from the time she inadvertently left an uncapped pen in her bed while she slept], and the squares are practically shredded. It's pretty old and mangy."

"Yeah," she said, "It is. But you and Dad have taught me to love things that are old and mangy."

And then she gave me a hug.

Um. Thanks. I think.

The Things I Love (a partial list)

2008-04-06T09:17:00.014-04:00

Inspired by this post by Tiff at TruthBombs.

I love...

Fresh flowers in every room. Linoleum block prints. Black and white photos. Medieval tapestries and paintings by Van Gogh. Fields of lavender and meadows covered with tall grasses and wild cosmos.

Chopin nocturnes and Patsy Cline ballads. Spanish guitar music, people whistling on the street, hearing someone practice saxophone on a summer night. Saxophone players, poets, and painters. Operas by Mozart and Verdi, piano music by Beethoven. Anything by Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk. Dinah Washington. Stan Getz.

Short hair. My daughter's hats: her grey top hat, her burgundy velvet floppy-rimmed fedora, and her jacquard cloche. Wearing shawls and going barefoot on cool summer nights.

Sitting with M. on a hot summer afternoon, sipping cold white wine while a chicken turns on the rotisserie over a hardwood fire, watching the birds and occasional glider or hot air balloon fly overhead, and enjoying long easy conversations about nothing in particular.

Long, easy conversations. Any time.

Red barns, orange tulips, sunsets. Reading a book while eating breakfast. The smell of bacon cooking. Being able to find the Pleiades. Being able to spell the Pleiades.

Making discoveries. Finding new music, new writers, bold colors, exciting flavors, new restaurants, new friends. I love finding things I can wear, because I know I will wear them forever and ever. Being old enough not to believe everything that sales people tell me.

I love walking through city neighborhoods, looking at the garden spaces people create, waving at people who still sit on their front porches. Meeting friends at Zola's or Barnes & Noble. I love soft boiled eggs and toasted rye bread with cherry preserves served with strong coffee and fresh-made orange juice.

The smell of freshly-mown grass and a pot of coffee brewing on a hot summer morning. Christmas carols and bright lights. Seed catalogs. Maps. Any map.

I love making connections. Figuring out the etymology of a word & its relationship to words from other languages. Meeting old friends after long absences. Explaining how to turn a repeating decimal into a fraction or demonstrating the Pythagorean Theorem and having one of my students say, "Wow, that's really cool!" Yeah, I think so, too.

I love to run and I love yoga, but working with weights has helped diminish all kinds of chronic aches and pains. I might love it even more.

Puns. Irish drinking jokes. Shaggy dog jokes. Romantic comedies, action adventure buddy movies, and just about anything with Owen Wilson. Poems--all kinds. Books that make me woozy with words. Stories that make me laugh. Thin, crisp, salty potato chips.

Dark chocolate. Long talks with m. as we drive to town. Sitting on the sofa each morning with M. Love letters. Sudden kisses under snow-burdened pine boughs on a starry winter night. I love reading the Bible, the King James Version, even though it's difficult and scholastically outdated, just because I love the language. Ice skating. Shopping for Christmas presents.

I love having the bills paid, the checking account balanced, the housework done, and nothing to do but sit on the sofa and read & dream (well, it's at least a theoretical possibility). Wind chimes. Stormy skies. Skipping stones and walking on sandy beaches.

Planning vacations. Receiving letters and e-mail. All my internet friends. Comments. M. and m., of course.

Writing this list. It sure put me in a better mood. If you care to try, let me know. Also, just so you know, today would be a great day to delurk -- I'd love to hear from you!

Hope you are all enjoying a wonderful weekend!

Perhaps I would like the telephone more if most of my conversations didn't go like this:

2008-04-01T12:32:00.000-04:00

Your call is important to us.

Please continue to hold and a representative will be with you shortly.

Let me transfer you to another department.

He’s at the University Hospitals ER. Can you pick me up?

We cannot determine the amount of your actual bill until you have completed the next billing cycle.

We haven’t received any of those claims. Perhaps you could have your providers re-send them.

Unfortunately, all of your claims were assigned to the incorrect contract number.

Could you have your providers re-send their bills?

George Bush would like to talk with you.

I have another call coming in -- can you hold on for a moment?

Before we can cancel your service, you need to speak with one of our retention specialists. Please hold while I transfer you.

Please call to schedule an appointment to discuss the results of your recent blood tests.

Could you pick up some pizzas while you're out?

I’m not feeling well. Can you come pick me up?

There has been some unusual activity on your card.

For signing up today, you are eligible for a free $25 gift card and other offers.

Please hold while I transfer you to a membership services representative.

Please hold….

Please hold…

Please hold...

Sunday Scribblings: The Telephone

Sunday Scribblings: 10 Things I Just Don't Get

2008-03-23T14:48:00.007-04:00

(a partial list, because I am still fever-addled)

1) Sudoku
2) Meanness
3) Anything to do with NASCAR
4) Scary movies
5) Hummers for civilians
6) People who take vacations specifically to go shopping
7) Celebrating Easter when there is 6 inches of snow on the ground
8) This phrase, from my college calculus textbook: let x = x + 1
9) Kiwi fruit or brussel sprouts
10) Why no one has put away the boxes of cereal and crackers out on my kitchen counter.

Sunday Scribblings

What's Cooking Wednesday: Dr. Weil's Ginger Tea

2008-03-19T19:51:00.006-04:00

These days I shuffle around the house swathed in an ancient white blanket that I have vested with magic powers of healing and warmth, looking very much like the White Witch of Narnia--if the White Witch of Narnia ever shuffled. Or had a nose slightly less aquiline.

I shuffle, and cough and sneeze, and sleep. Somewhere in there, there are lots of hot baths and showers. I am a big believer in the healing properties of heat, rest, and hot water. And when I am awake, this is what I drink to bring myself comfort; it helps clear sinuses, soothe coughs, and warms the soul. And it's so easy to prepare, even a sick mother can make it.

Dr. Weil's Ginger Tea

Ingredients:
one-inch piece of ginger, grated
two cups of water
pinch or more of cayenne (Dr. Weil suggests 1/2 teaspoon; we found even half that undrinkable)
juice from one half lemon
honey, optional, to taste

Instructions:

Grate the ginger with the large holes of a cheese grater (not the small ones used for grating parmesan) into a small pot. Cover with two cups of water and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer for five minutes. Add pinch of cayenne and simmer for one more minute. Remove from heat and add lemon juice. Strain into a cup or glass and add honey to taste.

What's Cooking Wednesday

About Yesterday

2008-03-12T05:49:00.006-04:00

1) The dog killed a possum in our front field. Whatever leisurely plans I might have had for the early afternoon were immediately pre-empted by the urgent demands to bathe the dog and dispose of the body.

2) I received an invitation to join AARP. Not even M., who is six months older than I, has received one of these yet. AARP?! I'm not old enough to join AARP.

An elderly person such as myself can only sustain so many shocks. If you don't hear from me later this week, it's because I am recovering on the cozy comfort of my sofa, sipping lavender tea, soothing my aching joints with Ben-Gay ointment, and reading large-print editions of every Agatha Christie mystery I can find.

Signs of spring

2008-03-05T15:40:00.004-05:00

Sure, the roads are covered with snow, and the day before they were flooded. This is Michigan, and those of us who live here are used to it and all the excuses the crummy weather gives us to complain. Spring arrives in small, mucky steps around here, and it's probably just as well that summer arrives fast on its heels. For what it's worth, here's what we have so far:

Seeds for the garden arriving in the mail: M. claims he's going to keep it simple this year. Just some tomatos and green beans, pumpkins, corn, and potatos.

Plans for more: blueberry bushes and raspberry canes, that is. We're thinking about some lilacs to mark off the area between mown grass and prairie in the back. And bulbs. I want to plant huge quantities of iris this year. Tiger lilies, too. I don't think the deer will eat them.

New haircuts -- for all of us!

M. plotting construction projects: building counters and shelves for the laundry room and mudroom; finishing up the trim around the house; making a desk for m.; more shelves in her bedroom; maybe a bed for us.

Me, thinking about the colors orange and purple a lot, great banks of tiger lilies and iris. Drifting and dreaming.

All of us, sneezing.

No crocus or daffodils yet. No baby lambs yet either. Not a bit of green anywhere. I am looking, though, looking hard. Will keep you posted.

Sunday Scribblings: Passion

2008-02-24T10:57:00.005-05:00

Passion is the
purple crocus
that persists,
insists its green shoots
through frozen earth,
crusty snow
to unfurl wide
and greedily embrace
the sun

Sunday Scribblings

Ellen Gilchrist: The Writing Life

2008-02-11T05:58:00.003-05:00

I am reading Ellen Gilchrist's The Writing Life, her collection of essays about writing and teaching, and there is so much truth and inspiration in it that I want to stop people on the street and make them listen to selected passages. "Isn't this amazing! Isn't it wonderful!" I would exclaim. I'm sure they would agree.

Perhaps it's just that she did not publish until her mid-40s--and that gives me hope. Or perhaps it's her admission that balancing love, family, and work is so difficult that she only resolves it by spending six months out of the year at home with her family and spending the remainder of the year in an artists colony in the Ozarks, "living like a nun," that offers some comfort.

No matter how many women may claim that they wrote their first novels in 10 minutes a day on grocery store receipts or on laptops while locked in the bathroom, Ms. Gilchrist acknowledges that she needs time to herself, and lots of it. She says OUT LOUD that she has hurt everyone she loves at one time or another by choosing her work over them, and this resonates with my own experience, and somehow makes me feel less selfish about my own (lesser) demands.

I admire her discipline, a 70-year-old woman who still runs daily, plays tennis, practices yoga and Pilates. A 70-year-old writer who is funny, and enthusiastic, and generous; a teacher who still holds interest in the blooming love-lives of her students.

She says things that make SO much sense, like

--The way you start writing is by writing.
--Writing is rewriting.

that I want to write them in all caps on my blackboard at school, emblazon them on my students' hearts. Mine, too.

Her essays cover everything: Finding inspiration. Finding time. Rewriting. Publishing. Dealing with alcoholism. Love. Her demand for art that is beautiful, or at least redeemed by some kind of love or charity or goodness. Creating characters. Moving them around. Students. The allure of teaching (a management position!), and its frustrations: It is November and I am tired of teaching these sad students. They are like baby birds waiting to be fed.

If everything she says does not instantly resonate -- I'm still resisting her admonition to "get your work out there," to publish -- just about everything she says makes me think.

Here's something else she says:

Rules are made to be broken. The best thing a writing teacher ever told me was that every time he said something about how to write it ricocheted and came back and hit him in the head. Show, don't tell, always ricochets because every great writer has told us plenty. The work for the young writer is to find the balance. This is the work of the ear. A good writer is a person with a good ear who can hear what the sentence or paragraph is supposed to sound like to the reader. It must ring true to the writer's voice.

I agree with her 100%. And because I agree with her, I want to read all the books she recommends. I want to read Shakespeare out loud on Sunday afternoons, starting with the earliest works first so that I can see how his writing changes over time. Even Shakespeare improves, she says, with practice. I want to read Eudora Welty and Dylan Thomas. I might even try Faulkner once again. At this week's visit to the library, I found:

The World As I See It (Albert Einstein)

The Snow Leopard (Peter Matthiessen)

The Nora Jane stories (Ellen Gilchrist)

I wanted to get her first volume of short stories, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, but it was not available. Neither was Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human, and it looks like I will wait for Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem as well, but I have After Henry sitting on my shelves from a previous visit. Sometime later, I might attempt The Curve of Binding Energy by John McPhee and Disturbing the Universe by Freeman Dyson; that is, if I make it through the Einstein.

So now you know. If I am not writing these days, it is because I have retired to become a full-time reader.

Food, the Internet , and Everything

2008-02-05T13:44:00.002-05:00

It is foggy here today, and bleak. A nighttime thunderstorm drowned the roads. There is no getting out. Not today.

The good news is, we have a newly opened bag of fresh, crisp & perfectly salted potato chips. Also homemade brownies. Lots of diet coke, a new batch of movies from NetFlix, and John Grisham's latest. These things will sustain us for a while.

That... and our new high speed bandwidth.
For now... this is bliss.

I Never, #1

2008-02-01T04:21:00.002-05:00

I never had that ballooning accident, a sudden strong gust causing me and my inexperienced crew to to bounce off the dirt road -- our intended landing site -- skid fifty feet, and then tumble down a hillside of lavender somewhere in southern France. Crowds of shouting villagers steadied us as we climbed, shaken, from the basket, then checked us for broken bones and abrasions (none). Someone brought a cart drawn by two large black and white goats to carry our gear back to the road. And while we waited on that hot and dusty day for our chase vehicle to arrive, Madame Lambert invited us back to her home with the thick, cool walls and the grape-vine covered patio, where we sat at a large plank table and steadied our nerves with fresh bread, thick slices of creamy camembert, a succulent raspberry tart, and glass after glass of excellent red wine.

What's Cooking Wednesday: Braised Rapini

2008-01-30T19:18:00.002-05:00

There's something about the dull featureless skies and ferocious cold of a midwestern winter that awakens my appetite for strong, spicy flavors. Perhaps it's just the desire for something with more of a nutritional jolt to it than the tasteless tomatos and withered romaine currently on display at the produce markets, or simply a desire to counter the too many truffles I enjoyed over the holidays. Whatever the reason, during these late winter months, I suddenly become ravenous for the intense bite of bitter greens, and especially rapini.

Rapini, also known as broccoli rabe, looks like broccoli with its green flowerettes, but it is instead classified as a member of the turnip or mustard family. Even more so than these other dark leafy greens, though, rapini can be intensely bitter. This recipe, from Molly Stevens' fabulous book, About Braising, mellows rapini's more strident flavors with a long slow braise, and then enlivens the flavor with a quick finish of fresh arugula. Toasted pine nuts complement the warm nuttiness of the greens and add a lovely contrast to this dish, making it a perfect antidote to whatever form of Januaryitis may have befallen you.

My favorite way to serve rapini, if I have time and inclination, is as my friend Annie, who grew up in Sicily, recommended: with spicy Italian sausage, slices of cooked polenta fried in olive oil, a wedge of gorgonzola, and a bottle of rough red wine. More often, though, we enjoy it as a foil to roast chicken and roasted potatos. That is, of course, if I have successfully resisted the temptation to eat the entire recipe just before dinner, scooping it up straight from the pan with a bit of crusty bread.

Braised Rapini:

To begin, just trim the bottom inch or so off the stems of one bunch of rapini, rinse well, chop in one-inch pieces, and let drain in a colander. Rinse one large bunch of arugula and chop in one-inch pieces and let drain in a colander; if you are using baby arugula leaves from a salad mix, there's no need to chop them. Thinly slice one small onion and three cloves of garlic; set aside. You'll also need a quarter cup of olive oil, red pepper flakes, a quarter-cup of water, and salt.

Heat 1/4-cup olive oil in a heavy 12-inch pan (with a lid) over medium-high heat until it shimmers. Add the chopped rapini--it may sizzle a bit, that's ok-- sprinkle with salt, and stir with tongs until it is completely wilted. Lower the heat to medium, add the sliced garlic and onion, sprinkle with more salt and crushed red pepper flakes, to taste, and saute for a few minutes until the onion and garlic become fragrant. NEVER let the garlic brown.

Add 1/4 cup water or broth, cover, reduce the heat to low, and let barely simmer for 20 minutes, turning the greens occasionally.

While the greens are cooking, wash 5 oz. of arugula and chop it coarsely. Toast a generous handful of pine nuts.

When the greens are thoroughly tender, add the arugula (more salt, if desired), and cook for 5-10 more minutes, uncovered. The arugula should be wilted, but still bright green; the broccoli rabe will be almost melted. Transfer the braised vegetables to a serving dish, drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with pine nuts. Serve immediately!

What's Cooking Wednesday

I Think I Pack More for a Trip to the Grocery Store

2008-01-24T06:47:00.002-05:00

Here's M., ready to leave for an overnight business trip, carrying a single small bookbag.

That's all you're taking? I ask.

It's all I need, he says. My computer, some pens, something to write on. A fresh shirt.

(A shirt I ironed the day before.)

He kisses me goodbye and walks out the door...

Achievements (minor)

2008-01-07T20:21:00.002-05:00

The tree is down, and the garland, too. The stockings are packed away. Next year, help me remember this: I am allergic to cedar. Very, very allergic to cedar. I'm hoping I can bare my arms by summer.

The lights, though, we somehow could not put away. I strung them under the mantel, and we're enjoying them so much, it's possible that might be their permanent home.

Everyone claims to be tired of truffles, so I stashed them in the hidden recesses of the freezer that only I know about, to be surreptitiously enjoyed. In case of emergency.

And then I baked a chocolate cake.
Paid the bills.
Deposited roughly ten cubic yards of cardboard boxes (oh amazon, oh amazon), holiday catalogs, and empty wine bottles at the recycling center.

Lessons have begun again.
My husband went into the office today.
Life is good.

Bandwidth!

2008-01-06T06:49:00.003-05:00

Shhh.... don't tell anyone just yet. But we might be getting better bandwidth around here. The company that's supposed to be helping the county go wireless just installed a new and improved transmitter that puts us well within range of their signal... instead of just slightly, maddeningly, beyond it.

After four years of dial-up, we are ready. More than ready. M. needs bandwidth for his job. m. has nearly convinced us that without easy access to YouTube, her life is in ruins, she might as well be living in a cave and wearing rags. I, naturally, need broadband to support my research interests, environmental concerns (shopping by Internet is so much more ecologically correct!), blogging habit, and last, but not least, to finally, at long, long last, get to see the photos and YouTube videos that I've been missing out on. Do you see me now emerging from my cave, rag-adorned, bleary-eyed, squinting at the sun, the bright light of a new age?

We've anted up some money for equipment and installation, and in return, they are promising service. Probably in a week or two. Promises, promises. I know. We've heard them before. But there is hope, oh my darlings, there is hope.

Interim Notes

2007-12-30T14:48:00.005-05:00

Maybe there were too many cookies, or too many truffles (can there ever be too much dark chocolate?). Whatever the cause, since Christmas I’ve been in a terribly langorous state, barely able to stir myself from the sofa and the companionship of several excellent books: The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters, I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies) by Laurie Notaro, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan.

*************
I love Laurie Notaro. She’s next on my binge list.

*************
If you ever need to host three parties in three days, here’s a tip: Tea Sandwiches. Just mix up the fillings in advance -- we went a little overboard and made five varieties: smoked salmon, egg salad, ham & cheese, chicken/cherry/tarragon, and date/nut/carrot --and the sandwiches are easy to assemble either on the spot if you wish, for ultimate freshness, or a few hours beforehand, for ultimate convenience. People think they’re charming, and, because they’re small, low-calorie. No one, not even anyone in my calorie and cholesterol-aware extended family, ever turned one away with a voice full of regret, “Oh, I could never…”. Only I know how much mayonnaise, sour cream, and crème fraiche went into their construction.

*************
I was also happy to rediscover Brach’s Christmas candy mix, a bright mix of cinnamon sticks, spearmint pillows, cherry crowns, and lemon wafers that I recall receiving at every Christmas Eve carol service I attended… back in a time when every Christmas Eve came with a new red velvet dress. Maybe it never really disappeared, but this was the first time I noticed it. Made my mother’s eyes light up, “Oh, Brachs!” she exclaimed. m. liked it, too. At least I don’t think I’m the only one eating it…

*************
m. said that it was the best Christmas ever. We baked lots of cookies, ate too many truffles, played piano duets, sang songs, and hosted several parties…. I’m too often too hasty, impatient, and self-absorbed to be typecast as naturally maternal, so it is a peculiar revelation to me – and a real gift – to discover that something of my spirit seems to nurture my family and contribute to our happiness. None of it would have happened, though, if I hadn’t practiced, as several of you suggested, saying “no” very firmly. A lesson to remember into the New Year.

*************
Apparently it is possible to have too much smoked salmon -- who knew? For new year's eve this year, we are returning to an old favorite: Thumb pasta and tomato-braised beans, Piacenza style. Remember that scene in Godfather III when Vincent is making pasta with Mary? Like that. Except our version involves the whole family and is likely to be a far more G-rated event.

So pasta, a salad, some savory froth M. is preparing as an appetizer, and chocolate bread pudding spiked with Grand Marnier for dessert. A champagne toast or two; and a movie. That's what we'll be doing tomorrow night. And you?

*************
This is a slow, desultory time. Greg said it best here. I hope you are all having a wonderful respite, savoring the transition into the new year -- I look forward to seeing you all there!

Merry Christmas!

2007-12-24T21:47:00.002-05:00

Wishing you...

Peace
Love
Joy

... and maybe a chocolate Santa, too!

No rest for the wicked...

2007-12-18T20:57:00.002-05:00

I had just managed to dig myself out from under various burdensome professional obligations -- tottering gingerly about on unsteady feet -- when suddenly I was met with clamorous demands: Where are our Christmas cookies? Why aren't there presents under the tree? Where's the fudge, and baked brie, the peppered pecans, and those impossibly thin ginger wafers you make, you know, the recipe that makes 300 cookies and takes all day to bake? Let's play some music and bang the drums! We should have a party!

It took a glass of my favorite champagne and nearly an entire platter of smoked salmon to recover.

Thus sustained, though, domestic duty calls... part two of the story I began last week will have to wait a little longer.

Learned/Discovered: Notes to Myself

2007-12-12T14:36:00.002-05:00

Learned:

The Redwoods in California are the largest trees on the planet. I knew that. What I didn't know was that the canopy of these Redwoods is so extensive that it contains its own ecosystem. Topsoil accumulates on its branches, sometimes up to depths of 4 feet; maybe more. It retains water well; salamanders enjoy the environment; flowers and shrubs thrive. The researcher I spoke with had even seen a fully-mature hemlock growing there. I am amazed, still trying to comprehend the idea of a garden in the sky.

Discovered:

m.'s old cursive notebook, from the days when we homeschooled her during her elementary years. On the back, angrily scrawled: I am NOT your slave!!! One of the reasons I didn't mind quitting back then. Interesting, though, how a few years of school have altered her perspective: now she demands her assignments every morning; she worries if she thinks we are not pushing her hard enough. Things have been going much more smoothly this go-round, much more fun.

The Beginning of the End...

2007-12-09T15:40:00.003-05:00

There has been an unlikely amount of discussion this last week about the Kindle Reader from Amazon. It’s small. Lightweight. You can store incredible numbers of books on it. As someone who routinely carries around 20 or 30 pounds of books, I appreciate this feature. As someone who also routinely, and occasionally frantically, raffles through 10 years of back issues of Cooks Illustrated, looking for a favorite recipe, I’d also appreciate the ability to search a digital index of the magazines I’ve subscribed to. And, I agree: the Kindle Reader offers some interesting self-publishing possibilities: distribution through amazon.com and inclusion in its remarkable database, just for starters.

It was only a derogatory reference about books – the hard copies, that is – as “merit badges” that caused me to raise my brows in skepticism. Sure, I’d appreciate the convenience of an e-reader for those times when I’m traveling, or for dictionaries, style guides, and other books I use primarily as reference.

But give up books? The real things? Never.

I love physical books. I love the feel of paper. I love the covers. I love the type. I love the smell of books. In Silverado, Kevin Kline walks into The Evening Star, takes a deep breath and exclaims, "God, I love the smell of a good saloon." That's how I feel about a great bookstore or an excellent library. As if the very smell captures the adventure, the romance, all the passion promised in a newly discovered favorite book.

More than that, though, books reflect a person’s interests and histories. A personal library is at least as intimate a revelation as a scrapbook or photo album. For many years, my theory was that books were the only necessary decoration. And I had them everywhere. Piled on shelves, spilling over counters, coffee tables, and desktops, nestled in the corners of the sofa, stacked next to my bed. They are read, re-read, dog-eared, and frequently annotated. They are mine in a way that an electronic book can never be wholly possessed.

There are certain books that instantly make a place home for me: the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, The King James Bible, Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone, Jeffrey Steingarten's The Man Who Ate Everything, the Rand McNally Deluxe Illustrated Atlas of the World, my cookbooks, and a couple of artbook from the Mauritshuis and the Rijksmuseum. There are always others, too. But these are my mainstays -- until they are on the shelves, I can never quite relax.

A house where a Kindle has replaced a library may be less cluttered than mine. But it will never be home.

A Better Mood (and a few reasons why)

2007-12-08T17:10:00.002-05:00

The log jams are beginning to shift around here. I'm not yet totally clear, but the signs are hopeful, and I am beginning to feel that light-headed giddiness that comes with gulping the possibility of freedom.

A few other things that made me unreasonably happy this week:

Treats from my students. They brought me brownies (LOTS of brownies), a loaf of whole wheat bread, candied almonds, a banana bread heart. Lots of hugs. It was unexpected... and hugely affecting.

Finding a favorite pair of dangly earrings in the basement. I don't wear much jewelry, but I love dangly earrings. These are geometric shapes cut from silver and bronze. They jingle. They make me feel ridiculously feminine, and they have gone far to restore my flagging vanity.

This incident: I was complaining about being cold earlier in the week when M. came up and gave me a hug, then started to gently shake me from side to side. "What's that for?" I asked. "I'm activating you," he replied. Activating me? Huh? And then I remembered the HotHandz packs I carry all winter to keep me warm... with their firm directions printed in bold capital letters on the back of every package: Shake to activate.

Snow. For now, I love it. Makes me hum Christmas carols and look forward to the long, dark nights, all the better to enjoy the bright lights.

All your kind comments on my previous post. I am a wimp of the worst order, and I needed to hear everything you had to say. Every word of it. Thanks so much!

Hope you all are enjoying a wonderful winter weekend!

Why We Built (a repost, with slight revisions, for SOS)

2007-11-25T07:10:00.002-05:00

Once upon a time, we lived in town. Theoretically, I could walk to market or the library. There were sidewalks and neighbors. Easy access to grocery stores, interesting markets, bookstores, and cafes. Easy access to friends. Just perfect, right?

Sort of.

The kitchen in our previous house was a 1960s galley-style kitchen, tucked into a faraway corner as if cooking were some vulgar unmentionable activity. The hostess of this house was not intended to slave over a hot stove: she was meant to wear mini-skirts and Pucci prints, host cocktail parties, and enjoy the new freedom brought her by the miracle of frozen foods and the efforts of the Pillsbury DoughBoy.

It was therefore my misfortune that I tried to cook in it, that I sometimes attempted dishes that required chopping fines herbes or panfrying meat, setting it aside, preparing a sauce, and then bringing the whole thing together. Here were the usual results:

Counters clogged with cooking detritus
A stovetop dangerously overrun with pots and pans.
A sink, alas, that was hardly allowed to be a sink at all; more a sinkhole.

There was, I regret, a fair amount of cursing in this kitchen. Renovating it was supposed to be the first project we were going to undertake. Right after we replaced all the windows--the ones with the seals that had broken, the ones that rattled in the winter winds.

May I suggest that it is not entirely wise to buy a house after having driven 17 hours from Minneapolis to Ann Arbor through a blizzard? When you are three months pregnant and not entirely past the morning sickness phase? When all you want is a place to rest your weary feet?

It was the first house we had seen that would accommodate my piano, M's laboratory, and the Nordic Track. We could walk to town. There was an amazing view of tree tops. Both of us were exhausted. Being lousy negotiators, we offered the asking price, and the sellers gleefully accepted it.

It wasn't until the snow melted that we realized the roof might need some repair. When one of the aging trees that grew next to the house dropped limbs on it after an ice storm we had to replace it. The plumbing sucked: the upstairs bathrooms leaked. We ripped up the floors, pulled down tile in the baths, replaced everything, fixed the drywall.

The sliding door (the one closest to the driveway) froze shut every winter. We tore it out, put in a stud wall and an insulated metal door. The deck rotted through. M and his dad rebuilt a new one.

There was always something. We never did get to renovating that kitchen.

m.grew up. We acquired a dog. There was never enough room. No space for corn or blueberries.

These were all good reasons for buying a new house, and depending on who you ask and what mood they're in, you'll hear one version or another: it was the dog's fault, the crummy kitchen, we needed more space, M. wanted a garden, etc.

Personally, I think it was the fault of the riding lessons m. took that last summer we lived there. I came home one day, mentioned in passing that the drive out to the farm was kind of pretty and didn't seem to take as long as I'd feared. M. took this as encouragement. Within hours, he had ransacked the listings on realtor.com, found several possibilities, and a day or two later, after a whirlwind of house tours, we made an offer on a country home.

Please note: we fully intended to buy a house. We knew it took time and money to build a house; we knew we had neither. So we found a place we liked, on seven acres, with a fireplace, pear trees and a pond, and we made a deal contingent on selling our house within 30 days. It sold, but not in time to conclude the deal within the 30 days.

Home prices were then escalating wildly, with homes often selling before their listings could be published. The sellers suggested that the price we had negotiated was perhaps not quite fair, especially as it turned out the well on the property was not up to code and would require repair before the county would allow them to transfer title.

By then, though, we'd had begun to reconsider the rashness of our hasty commitment to purchase: the pear trees were lovely, and we liked the slate floors and Frank Lloyd Wright style fireplace, but our new home was going to required a lot of work. The roof needed to be replaced immediately. The kitchen and bedrooms were covered with ugly wallpaper. The appliances were dreadful. If the sellers were unhappy, well, so were we. We backed out of the deal. (BTW, the house finally sold nearly two years later for about 25% less than we had offered)

Unfortunately, we had just sold our house and we were now committed to moving out less than a month later. We packed up our belongings. Looked at possible homes every evening. I prayed that our buyers would be unable to sell their house, that we might be able to stay where we were. I even cried. Nothing worked. The end of the month came, and we moved our belongings into storage. Ourselves, we moved in with my in-laws. And not long after that, M. suggested we build. It would be easy, he said. All we have to do is dig a hole, pour a foundation, frame it in, put in utilities, drywall, paint, floors, and voila! A new home. We could be done in three months, moved in before Christmas!

And so, seduced once again by the soft promises of a dark-eyed scoundrel, I found myself under water and over my head... and on a first name basis with every cashier at Lowe's.

That was five years ago. We are still not done.
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For more Soap Opera Sunday adventures and misadventures, see this week's list of participants at Twas-Brillig.

This Really Happened

2007-11-20T14:10:00.003-05:00

So last night, M. was telling me about the resignation of the U-M Head Football Coach, Lloyd Carr. From there, the conversation shifted briefly; I read a book; he talked with m.

A few minutes later, he said, "Looks like we might be getting Les Miles from Louisiana."

"Fewer miles, you mean," I corrected him, annoyed by his egregious abuse of less when fewer was clearly called for. "And what seismic event will make that happen?"

He stared. "It's a man's name," he said. Very slowly.

"Oh, come on," I sniffed, "Louisiana is the name of a state, not a man."

Then he explained. And didn't laugh very much at all. At least not in front of me.

Personally, I think it's a very understandable mistake.

Today

2007-11-16T14:19:00.002-05:00

I really wish I could curl up under a warm blanket and spend the day reading the latest Stephanie Plum mystery, sipping tea, and dozing off until evening when somebody would bring in some spicy Indian food with plenty of crispy papadam and green chutney. And if they happened to pick up a copy of Bridget Jones's Diary, so much the better.

Today I am sick, and I do not feel like being a grown-up.

Not to make anyone jealous or anything, but we're getting some of this today

2007-11-10T10:04:00.002-05:00

Sunshine!

(For more wonderful words, see the list of Singular Saturday participants at Jenn's always fabulous Something to Say.)

49 - notes to myself

2007-11-04T06:06:00.002-05:00

Someone once said that I haven't changed at all in 30 years. I think what he really meant was that at the age of 19, I seemed like a 49-year-old.

I think I was born to be this age: imperious, querulous, and a bit of a crank.

It is frankly a relief to be spared those insufferable burdens of even attempting to be "hot." No more shoes that pinch or clothing that confines. Never again forgoing a triple creme cheese or a glass of wine just because I want to wear a certain dress.

Instead, my new ambition is to achieve a kind of regal dignity -- a quality that is far more in alignment with my own idiosyncratic character. If I can ever avoid stumbling over my own two feet or my own convoluted syntax, it's an ambition that seems at least remotely possible. My wardrobe is certainly no worse than that of Queen Elizabeth II. Judy Dench, Emma Thompson, and Mary Poppins are my heros.

Posture matters: take care of your bones, stay strong, hold onto your mobility.

There's a reason the start of life is called a "quickening". Life is movement, and you have to stretch a little at least occasionally even if you want to stay in exactly the same place.

I'm not so good at that last item, sometimes groaning that motherhood and building a house were enough of a stretch to last me a good long time and that now I should be permitted some period of contraction -- preferably sitting at a cafe with a good friend or reclining on the sofa with a good book -- to relocate my new boundaries. But then again, I sometimes wonder where the next stretch will take me.

Surprisingly, graying hair and sagging everything bothers me less than the loss of sensory detail. My hearing is no longer as acute; even with bifocal lenses, I struggle with fine print on the back of boxes or on maps; thanks to Raynaud's, my ability to thread a needle, play piano or do anything requiring fine motor control has become frustratingly constrained. These are the losses that make me mad, the ones I mourn.

I like the fact that I can dress for myself, say what I please, and except for my ongoing quest for satisfying, paying work -- perhaps the source of my next stretch -- I am generally happy with my life. I enjoy good health, a lively and interesting community, an energetic and happy family. I might wish for exotic vacations (or any vacation!) or a more varied wardrobe, but really, I am very content.

If fame and fortune have eluded me, I have found a rich life in my family and friends. Yesterday, my friend Jen presented me with this lovely award. Now, if I weren't so nice, I might quibble with this award, but the fact is that Jen, besides being a warm, encouraging, and inspiring teacher, a fabulous baker of outrageously delicious muffins, and an excellent and insightful writer -- someone I look forward to meeting as often as possible for coffee or a glass of wine -- also happens to be intimidatingly bright, well-read, and keenly perceptive. She must be right. I am honored.

This is also an award that begs to be passed along. In truth, all my readers are all the very nicest people, and one of the biggest gifts of this last year has been becoming a member of this wonderful internet community. Some of you have already received this award, others of you wish to remain private or you don't really "do" awards, and others, if presented with it, would snarl, "Me? Nice? Bah humbug!" Yes, you, too -- I think you all are wonderful, and my life would be sorely diminished without you. If you are reading this, consider yourself tagged. Take the badge & post it. If anyone asks how you earned it, just say, "Because anno said so!"

And now, I am off to enjoy brunch and mimosas, and that gift I've always most wanted for my birthday: an extra hour in my day! Hope you all are enjoying yours as well!

Singular Saturday

2007-11-03T12:17:00.002-04:00

Wishful

(Jenn instigated this; for other devotees, go here.)

Typos

2007-11-02T21:03:00.002-04:00

Earlier today, I got carried away with passion over at Jennifer's place, posting a torrid diatribe that included some rather pointed remarks about the typos and grammatical errors we constantly found last year in notes from my daughter's former language arts teacher... only to realize afterwards that I had left more than a few errors of my own.

This is so embarrassing. Now I'm off to find a rock to hide under for a while. See you later this weekend.

Not that I've ever felt like this before...

2007-11-01T16:35:00.002-04:00

To the Man in a Loden Coat
--Deborah Garrison, The Second Child

Hey, mister
man in a loden coat
standing in front of me
on the escalator and blocking my
way--
I know
I'm self absorbed,
particularly at this hour,
5:22 to be precise and I need
to make the 5:25 home--
don't you know that in this city,
in this life, we
walk on the left,
stand on the right?

Don't tell me to chill out,
don't tell me to "breathe,"
I hate breathing
I mean unless it is happening
without my knowing it,
which is, thank God, most of the time,

and don't tell me life is long
because it actually isn't
it's all I can do not to
give you a sweet shove
on your rich loden back,
same as all the bottled-up
left-lane travelers
behind me want to do
to my own navy-clad shoulder,
a nice blue to your green,
like water for the earth,
sky for the forest,
green and blue a tea for two,
etc., among the vistas
that call me home now,
at 5:23, about to miss the bus,
so would you please

MOVE OVER?

Halloween 2007

2007-10-31T22:16:00.002-04:00

No trick or treaters tonight. Not in this neighborhood.

The coyotes came through, though, on one of their unpredictable raids, riding the wild winds that toppled our garbage cans, knocked over the bird feeder, and blew the windchimes off their hook.

The neighbor's geese were in an uproar, obviously distressed. We heard sheep lowing nervously. Our dog -- the mighty thunder chaser -- growled but lacked his usual eagerness to defend his territory. And then, perfect silence.

Who needs scary movies?

Home schooling: what we do at home

2007-10-30T19:09:00.004-04:00

No one has ever accused me of being a saint. In fact, one of my goals when we began home schooling was to spend as little time as possible actually teaching my daughter.

Does that sound bad? Let me explain.

I knew that she needed a different environment, and I knew that she needed interesting, challenging experiences in various disciplines, and I was happy to find books, take her on field trips, administer tests, etc. I just didn't think I was the person to teach her. I've had some experience in that arena, and I think it's safe to say that everyone prefers it if I'm the empathetic listener and appreciative audience rather than the strict taskmaster, probing evaluator, and critic. (M., on the other hand, quickly -- and very successfully -- staked out Math as his domain.)

Thus, I had great hopes for the co-op, and it has been a wonderful resource. Unfortunately, we couldn't fill our schedule from its offerings. The lab science they were offering this year -- Physiology and Anatomy -- was too advanced for m., and the history options focused on American history, which m. has just had for the last five years. She wanted something different. Understandably. Then there was the matter of foreign language: Spanish is the only language the co-op has offered consistently, and m. wanted Japanese or German.

So it came to pass that we grudgingly concluded I would "administer" Biology and Ancient Civilizations, and teach German... at least this year. By "administer," I think I imagined assigning readings, worksheets, and tests -- somehow all without having any real understanding of the subject matter. Perhaps with sufficiently developed curriculum materials, this approach is theoretically possible, but it is one I have found impossible to implement. After some trial and error, we've found books that we like -- college freshman survey texts that are MUCH better written than their high school counterparts -- but the accompanying supplemental materials, such as quizzes, projects, and tests often require significant adaptation to work for us at home.

And so now, most days, early in the morning when I once would have been sipping coffee and reading the latest posts to all my favorite blogs, I am scanning these texts, coming up with the focus questions for her reading assignments that day. I'm learning a lot, lately, reacquainting myself with Hammurabi's code and learning about the nonequilibrium model of community structure. This is kind of fun. But it takes a while.

Her schoolday starts at 8 a.m. with a Math lesson from M. After that, I give her a list of reading assignments and discussion topics for the day -- on Tuesdays she also gets a list of writing assignments for the week -- and explain whatever German grammar we happen to be studying. And, yes, she just sits down and begins her reading. Mostly, she likes it. In the afternoon, we check back in together: often practicing German in the car on the way to the grocery store; discussing her responses to her Biology and Ancient Civs assignments while I'm making dinner. I have to be very careful about correcting her. (Are you sure? I might ask. Would you mind checking that in the book?) This way, I don't really have to explain much to her; she explains it to me. I'm very happy with the Socratic method.

We spend at least one afternoon a week in the library. There are movie nights and museum trips and a manga group. Somewhere in there, I edit essays, attempt to write a newsletter, visit my parents, plan my own lessons in math and writing, respond to students, and occasionally cook; any impulse to clean has long been forgotten -- the spiderwebs and dust bunnies have conquered the house!

For m., this has been a great change, and it has been good to see her relax, unfold, and bloom. For me, though, well, I'm pretty sure that I'm not keeping everybody happy, and spineless people-pleaser that I am, it matters to me. I'm having more migraines, a familiar reaction to overextension. It's becoming clearer that something I'm doing is going to have to go, but it's not obvious what the best candidate is (well, the newsletter is at least one thing, but there's no way out of producing at least one issue).

So here I am, on the brink of my 49th birthday, back at those age-old question:
What really matters? And who do I really want to be?

The Homeschooling Co-op (in 5 minutes, more or less)

2007-10-29T18:43:00.002-04:00

Mondays are co-op days for us. Just as some people pool energy and resources to enable themselves to purchase or enjoy the benefits of something they value -- organic produce, a kiln, woodworking tools, or a library -- so our homeschooling co-op allows us to pool resources (teaching skills/interests) to provide educational support for homeschooling families.

We are approximately 100 families, nearly 300 students, of which roughly 90 are in high school. We meet in a large church. The sanctuary is used for theater, dance, and speech productions; there is a gym, a kitchen, and several nurseries; three wings of sunday school rooms are pressed into service as classrooms.

There is an elementary school program that runs from 8:40 until noon; classes for middle school and high school students run until 4:15. Some classes for high school students, mostly science lab courses and foreign languages, are offered only on Wednesdays. m. is currently not taking any of those; we only attend classes on Mondays.

It is not a school. It does not offer credits or provide a transcript. Some courses have little or no homework attached to them; on the other hand, the core academic courses (math, science, social studies, and literature) are incredibly demanding and easily worth a high school credit per year (roughly 150 hours of class time + homework).

The emphasis of this particular co-op is on supporting parents who want to homeschool their children through high school, a time when many people enroll their children back in school. They offer a core curriculum of general studies -- science, social studies, and literature/language arts -- that rotates over four years; for example, one year focusing on American Lit., American History, and Physiology/Anatomy, the next on British Lit, World History, and Physics. There is a full range of high school mathematics offered each year, from Algebra through Calculus.

As much as possible, they recruit teachers from the co-op families. If they cannot find a teacher for a desired subject within the co-op population, they will hire somebody and charge a modest tuition for the course. So far, it seems to be working.

Some people use the co-op just for electives and extracurricular activities; there's a fantastic range of drama, music, art, phys. ed., and handcraft courses offered. Other people use it for their serious academic classes. We're kind of doing a mix of both.

This year, m. is taking Art History, American Lit., Writing Short Stories, Beginning Drawing, and Fencing through the co-op. She attends on Mondays, enjoys lectures & discussion, and receives her assignments for the rest of the week -- work we supervise at home. (We're also doing Biology, Algebra, German, and Ancient Civs at home; but that's another story)

While she's at school on Mondays, I'm doing my co-op jobs: teaching Pre-Algebra and Writing for Middle School Writers. Not everyone teaches -- although if you stick around for any period of time, one of the coordinators will discover something you do that they think you could teach -- there are nursery care workers, people who set up and clean up, lunch room supervisors, data administrators, facilitators & coordinators. There are jobs for everyone. Mine just happens to be teaching.

On Mondays, we leave at 7:45 a.m. and return shortly after 5 p.m. They are long days, and we are always tired, but they are good days, and we are glad for them.

And another thing...

2007-10-28T15:43:00.002-04:00

I maintain that my slowness to react on occasion stems from a desire to staunch M's instincts to blow everything out of proportion. (I think he'd call it responding appropriately to circumstances requiring urgent action.)

He still makes fun of me, though, for the time I called him at work to say, "Now, I want you to stay calm. Don't go ballistic. But I think you might need to bring home some crutches for me."

And he is wont to remind me, during discussions in which I am advocating patience or a slower course, that despite my insistence that all I required was some rest and ice (and crutches for a few days), that it was because of his insistence I see a doctor -- right away -- that we learned I had a fractured foot requiring a cast and weeks of physical therapy afterwards to fully repair. [With apologies to Marianne who is on a crusade against "that-itis."]

Men. One time they're right about something, and they will never let you forget about it.

M. (and smothered potatos): an SOS Production

2007-10-27T09:37:00.005-04:00

I knew there was no future with this guy.

For one, I wasn't anything like the Bond movie bad girls I knew he had been dating.

For another, he was all swagger, black leather jackets, every bad habit. He drove a TransAm, ate red meat, scorned vegetables, preferred high-octane coffee, and possessed a vocabulary that came straight from officer training in San Antonio. He had wicked brown eyes.

At work, where we met, he was always holding court in the atrium, always talking with somebody, other research guys, engineers, tech writers, marketing types, admins, and facility staff--everybody. People laughed a lot around him. Seemed to me that he spent rather an inordinate amount of time having fun. I was a serious girl.

"Don't you ever work?" I once asked.
"Don't have to," he said, "I get by on my good looks."

[Later, someone once said that M. was the only guy who could spend all day talking to people who seemed to enjoy talking with him, and then sit down and in half an hour write a program or a paper that cleared away all the chaff, set direction, and inspired a new sense of possibility. Even today, after we've had our morning coffee together and before I've cleared the breakfast dishes or done my time on the treadmill, he'll often have written three new pages, cleaned out the basement, or designed a new backyard grill. Given that it might take me all morning to write a single paragraph, this energy and focus occasionally makes me crazy with envy.]

He was definitely trouble, and I knew it. A friend of mine who had just started work with the company saw him one day and nudged me. "Who's that?" she asked.

I looked. "Oh, him." I said. "He's trouble. Nothing but trouble."

If only I had heeded my own instincts. Instead I was so certain I couldn't be serious about him, that when he asked me out for dinner, I figured why not? I was onto him -- he couldn't hurt me. I was willing to take on a good time for an evening or two.

And the evenings were generally enjoyable. As it turned out, he told stories -- interesting stories -- about everything: black holes, the economy, ghosts, religion. At work, he developed algorithms for software designed to recognize objects and detect flaws in complex spaces; to explain his solutions, he drew metaphors from brain research, psychology, Carlos Castaneda, action adventure movies. He had ideas about improving everything: musical notation, conducting research, creating interconnected books, representational government. He wrote stories, recited poetry, spoke Russian, German, and Japanese -- all badly. Even I could tell that.

Conversations were interesting, challenging, sometimes exhausting. He was conservative; I was liberal. He was Catholic; I was Protestant. He was an extrovert; I was an introvert. I thought he was melodramatic, egocentric, and self-indulgent. He thought I was stubborn, desultory and inattentive, frequently careless. Yes, he had ideas about how to improve everything; sometimes he thought he had ideas about how to improve me. Working out boundaries was a prickly business.

It was a good thing we didn't really like each other. Even though we met for dinner at least three nights a week -- as though it was a truth universally acknowledged that two single people who are hungry will of necessity want to share their mealtimes together -- we maintained that we weren't really very interested in each other.

We kept this up for three years.

I'm not sure when we finally noticed that maybe there was something more going on than we had been willing to admit. For me, I suspect it was the first time I saw him wearing a carpenter belt and helping his father put in a new bay window. Or maybe the first time I saw him in a garden with sunflowers he'd grown himself. When he is happy, he is the most completely happy person I have ever known.

For him, he claims it was the first time I made Indian food for him. He wasn't going to let someone who could make a meal like that get away.

For both of us, I think it was some kind of recognition that we both liked to make things; that perhaps we might make something larger together.

So for today, here's a recipe from that meal he claims won his heart, Smothered Potatos (from Anna Thomas's Vegetarian Epicure). I'm not offering any promises nor any guarantees, but I will say this: if you make these potatos, and perhaps a spicy curry and aromatic rice pilaf as well, for someone who intrigues you, who knows what might happen? I will not be responsible for whatever consequences may follow.

Smothered Potatos

Peel about two pounds of russet potatos and cut them in 1-inch chunks. boil them in salted water until they are about half done, 8-10 minutes. Drain them and prick them a little with a fork.

Make a paste of 2 teaspoons turmeric, 1 tablespoon garam masala (I used to blend my own, but Penzey's has cured me of this little snobbery), 2 teaspoons salt, 1/2 teaspoon cumin, 1/2 teaspoon black pepper, and 1/3 cup yogurt. Roll the hot potatos in this paste until they are all thoroughly coated.

Melt 3 tablespoons of butter in a medium-sized, shallow fireproof casserole and add 2 whole bay leaves and a generous quantity of red pepper (1 tsp, or to taste), stir them over low heat for a few minutes, then add the sugar. In a few minutes, when the sugar just begins to caramelize, add the potatoes, and toss them gently for a few minutes, then cover the casserole tightly and bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for about 30 minutes.

Great by themselves, with sauteed greens, or as part of something more complex. A gin & tonic works well to offset the heat.

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For more tales of heartbreak, sorrow, humiliation, and revenge -- and occasionally love triumphant -- be sure to see this week's listing of Soap Opera Sunday participants at Twas-Brillig and Walking Kateastrophe.

Never Settle

2007-10-26T12:56:00.002-04:00

There have been a lot of calls from my math students recently. Last week I told them that if they didn't score at least 90% on their weekly quizzes, I was sending them home with additional homework on those topics until they could achieve a 90%. So now they're a little nervous; nobody wants more math homework that might impinge on their ability to do something more fun.

The fact is, they all can do this work. The kinds of errors that prevent them from making the grade are typically careless errors in arithmetic or some small confusion about how to apply a concept -- errors and misunderstandings that they often correct themselves as soon as they slow down and explain the problem to me. As soon as they really look at the problem, become willing to engage with it, they calm down and become capable of solving it.

It has always annoyed me to overhear students say things like, "Well, I'm getting a C, and that's good enough to transfer/good enough to graduate/good enough..." It means someone is settling for less than what they can do. I hate that.

Never settle. If nothing else, I hope my students learn this.

Five Minutes a Day

2007-10-24T14:40:00.003-04:00

My brother-in-law is an actor; also a fine writer and teacher. (He once had a bit part in a movie with Cheech, a long, long time ago. That's the only commercial work he's ever done. Mostly he does performance art, in places like Zagreb and London.) He is generally a quiet guy, more watchful and observant than talkative. So that is why it was his wife who told me about the five minutes he spent every day recording an improvisational monologue. She claimed he thought it was his most important creative exercise.

I liked the idea. One reason I once spent two years taking (grainy, unfocused) pictures was because I was pretty certain even I had the attention span to take a picture -- 1/125th of a second? Sure! Five minutes a day on writing? Hey, maybe that was something I could do!

Thus, the blog was born. At first I stuck to my five minutes a day program. But then my ideas grew. I wanted to spend more time on them. People I liked started to read my posts. I was inspired by the things they wrote, too. The idea of just writing whatever was on my mind in the few minutes I had before starting dinner kind of disappeared. I discovered I had Things to Say. It made me feel a little giddy.

Lately, though, feeling neither particularly responsive or responsible, it's been hard to meet my own expectations. So I'm dropping them for a while, worrying less about having Things to Say, and working on this:

Just say anything.
Five minutes a day.
Most days.

This, I think I might manage...
Hope to see you around!

Finding boundaries

2007-10-21T15:29:00.002-04:00

We returned home late last night. m. was exhausted; M. wanted to listen to the UM-Illinois game. So I took care of the dog who was hungry and needed a walk. Something about being a grown-up, maybe about being a parent in particular has meant fewer walks under the moonlight, and I was glad to escape the confines of my usual routines.

The air was cool, and I wished I had worn a jacket in addition to the sweatshirt I was wearing. The quarter moon cast just enough light that I could barely follow our gravel driveway in its pale light. In the country, when it's dark, it is very, very dark. I walked slowly down the driveway, breathing autumn air scented with woodsmoke and fallen leaves, and walked like a child, my eyes trained on the stars. I found familiar constellations -- Cassiopeia, the Little Dipper -- and wondered about some of the others I saw. Last night I saw no satellites or comets; the sky was peaceful. I felt protected by the stars.

Just that morning I had wakened to a dream: our neighbors to the north of us had suddenly decided to extend their driveway 800 feet to join ours. "Look," they said, now we won't have to stop at the corner of Meyers and Bethel Church Rd. again." I didn't get it -- why should they care about a stop sign at the intersection of two dirt roads? They had also moved their house and shed back by the same 800 feet to sit on our property line, right next to our garage. I felt panicked and distressed; very crowded.

I need to remember this: a few minutes alone, under the moonlight, and the world returns to me, with all its possibility.

Greedy Monkey

2007-10-18T11:13:00.003-04:00

There's a story I remember about a greedy little monkey who sees a large jar filled with colorful candies. He reaches in through the mouth of the jar and grabs as many of the candies as he can. But then he is stuck. He tugs and tugs, but no matter how hard he tries, he can't get his hand out. Not until he relinquishes his grip on all the candy he is holding.

Lately, I feel like that monkey. There have been so many wonderful opportunities coming by these days -- and for so long, there weren't -- so I've been grabbing them all. And now, I am stuck.

Unfortunately for me, I can't easily let some of them go. And frankly, I'm not certain which ones would be wisest to put back in the jar. So maybe I'm more like Pooh when he got stuck in Rabbit's door after indulging in too much honey. I'm just going to have to stay here until I get thin enough to move. Or something like that.

Oh, the problems of ambition and opportunity!

Time to exercise discernment. More on this later.

Books! (Edited to add new participant!)

2007-10-10T12:26:00.002-04:00

Today's book meme comes to you courtesy of Rebecca, who tagged me!

Total number of books
Too many, that's for sure. If you haven't seen our basement, here's a peek.

Last book read
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. Actually I'm still reading it, but I'm almost done. Portrait of an unhappy marriage, written in 1961, with observations that seem shockingly modern even today. One of those books where the characters are in situations so awful you're not sure you really want to keep reading. But you do, anyway.

Last book bought
How to be Alone by Jonathon Franzen. Wonderful collection of essays on literature, the pleasures of reading, and privacy.

Five meaningful books
White Oleander by Janet Fitch. If it were not the 13-year-old narrator's fierce intelligence and objectivity, this story about her life in various unsettling foster care homes following her mother's imprisonment for murder would be nearly impossible to read. Instead, it is a riveting story, taking her from 13 to adulthood while charting her relationship with her powerful and manipulative mother, and written with such intensity and passion that I felt woozy for days afterwards.

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett: Wonderful writing here, too; pure poetry. Sort of a dreamy Gabriel Garcia Marquez story of terrorism, music, a beautiful opera singer, love, and inevitable consequences.

Grimm's Fairy Tales: Read and re-read and re-read. Even today, if it starts with "In the city of ... a long, long time ago..." I'm hooked.

Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Culinary adventure, spiritual journey, and the quest for true love. This book spoke to me on so many levels, that if I end up in Italy any time soon, this is why. One of the best books I've read this year.

The Vegetarian Epicure by Anna Thomas. One of my first cookbooks. I didn't know it then, but Anna Thomas is a screenwriter, married to film director Gregory Nava (Mi Familia, El Norte), and this book is the result of their travels around the world after graduating from film school. Lots of wonderful recipes accompanied by interesting anecdotes; until then I had never realized that learning to make and savor new foods meant learning to appreciate and enjoy other cultures.

That's it! Who's next? Betsy? Greg? Fourier Analyst? Marianne? Anyone else? If you want to do it, consider yourself tagged. Let me know & I'll link to you!
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Jennifer of the Verges completed her project -- congratulations! See her list here.

An Episode In the Life Of an Unlikely Math Teacher

2007-10-08T13:39:00.000-04:00

She's not a real math teacher! She just pretends to be one on Monday mornings!

Yesterday, one of my students called with a question about a -- shudder -- word problem just as I was pulling into the parking lot at Meijers. There I was, without textbook or solution manual -- and pressing/inflexible responsibilities awaiting me at home when I returned. Could this possibly work?

I asked him to read the problem aloud. You don't need to know all the gory details, but basically, there was a triangle involved; he was told what the area was and the length of the base. What's the height?

Maybe the solution seems obvious, but I’m finding that it’s much harder for kids to translate words into equations than you might think. So first I ask him if he knows of any formulas related to triangles that include the area, base, and height of a triangle. Oh yeah! He remembers: Area = base x height/2.

That's great! Now, what information does this problem provide: what can you plug into the formula? I hear him rewriting the equation. And then, sounds of understanding, and delight: Oh, I get it! Now I can just multiply both sides by two and solve for the height! Thanks Mrs. A!

He hung up, and I continued into the grocery store, relieved, and happy. The truth is, this is more fun than I ever would have suspected.

If you should find yourself at 5:30 on a Friday evening, suddenly hungry

2007-10-05T21:30:00.003-04:00

If you should find yourself at 5:30 p.m. on a Friday evening, after having struggled the entire day to work strident and graceless fragments into some harmonious whole, faced with the dark-eyed snarling beast of your own sudden hunger -- not to mention your daughter's silent reproaches and your husband's noisier complaints -- then you should hope, really, really hope, that you followed your butcher's advice the last time you were there and bought a little extra pancetta -- that fabulous Italian bacon, salt-cured and spiced -- just a little something to store in the freezer. Just in case. Because now it is going to come in handy.

Chop the pancetta into small dices, about a quarter inch. Warm some olive oil in a pan over moderate heat and add the diced pancetta. It will take a while, but the fat will render out of the bacon, leaving you with crispy golden bacon croutons. Tentative smiles begin to appear on the faces of your beloved ones.

While the pancetta is browning, take a walk to the garden. Listen to the rustling of the sunflower leaves against the garden fence; marvel at the morning glories still in flower. Gather lots of sage. Be amazed to discover that the arugula has returned! And there are ripe tomatos that have not yet rotted!

When you return to the house, the aroma of the pancetta is at its peak. Someone has thought to put on the CD with your favorite arias and there's a glass of your favorite Chianti sitting on the counter. Because you have become spoiled by your induction cooktop, you only now start the water boiling for pasta--it doesn't take long. (For this dish, I like orecchiette, because of the way the shape holds the little pieces of pancetta, but farfalle works, too.)

Remove the pancetta dices from the pan and let them drain on paper towels. Slice the sage leaves into thin ribbons and panfry in the olive oil and pancetta fat until just crisp. Drain them on paper towels, too.

As the pasta is cooking, gently saute one or two large cloves of garlic in the oil with as many red pepper flakes as your family enjoys. Add a quarter cup or so of the water from the pasta pot, and maybe a little salt. Combine the oil, aromatics, and drained, cooked pasta along with a quarter cup or so of water from the pasta pot. Season with salt & pepper as needed. Toss in the pancetta slices and combine; then sprinkle with the fried sage ribbons. Serve with freshly grated parmesan cheese and lots of black pepper.

Guaranteed to make everyone very happy.

Friday Five: Random Thoughts From This Week (or this is as close to 15 as I'm gonna get)

2007-09-28T15:39:00.003-04:00

15 of anything is simply beyond me this week. Here's my Friday Five:

1) The deadline for first-round applications to Harvard Business School is Tuesday. We are all besieged, bleary-eyed, with calloused palms (from endless mousing). If we've been this busy in a month when there was only one application deadline, next month, when 13 schools have first-round deadlines, promises to be a real test. If I'm not around, this is why.

2) I am worried about my ability to blog, but mostly I'm worried about the lack of decent food around here. There is nothing in the house but some dessicated chicken from last weekend and cold pizza. Instead of eating great food, I've had to be content just to read about it, especially here and here.

3) But then, there's Durham's Tracklements -- one of my favorite places in Ann Arbor, and not just because I'm always looking for an excuse to eat smoked salmon. There's the fact that I just like the guy who runs the place: he looks like a Maine fisherman, but the books he reads lead me to suspect that he was once a professor. For another, he does incredible things with hot smoked salmon. The first version I fell in love with was a barbecue smoked salmon that even those around our household who claim to despise salmon find themselves indulging in prodigious quantities. Lately he's been pairing smoked salmon with tandoori spices to marvellous effect. When I asked him how he came up with this unlikely combination, he shrugged, "I like Indian food, why not try."

4) m. and I saw the Shen Wei Dance Arts company performing Second Visit to the Empress, described as a fusion of Beijing opera and dance theater. It was one of those rare occasions where the experience -- especially the highly stylized Chinese opera -- initially seemed alien and incomprehensible, but by the end we were completely won over by this extraordinary performance.

5) This week around here, we have seen a rainbow, a brilliant arc in the evening sky; also horses, escaped from our neighbor's fence, romping in our corn. The dog chased a thunderstorm. We celebrated m's 14th birthday. October is coming soon. Red-leafed maples and cold apple cider, crisp nights, and cozy flannel sheets cannot be far behind.

Undermining the Effect

2007-09-25T14:07:00.003-04:00

m. got a hair cut last week.

First, she had the stylist cut 12" of hair to donate to Locks of Love. The remainder, she had cut into one of those very short choppy, piece-y styles that drew even more attention to her expressive brown eyes. She was happy, and I thought it was beautiful, but, according to her, I have to say that: I'm her mother.

Then we went to our usual produce market, a place where I ~~drag~~ take my daughter at least once a week. m. investigated the flowers and chocolates, while I purchased green beans and red peppers, more mundane supplies. Then we checked out with our usual cashier, who kept pausing to glance at my daughter behind me. Finally, she leaned over the counter: "Who's visiting you?" she whispered.

"It's my daughter," I said.

"I'm here all the time," insisted m.

"No way," said the cashier. "I thought you were someone visiting from Europe." She scanned a few more items. "Very sophisticated. Nice change."

We paid and left the store. Walked to the car in complete silence.

m. buckled up, then turned to me. "Did you hear that? European! She said I looked European!"

"That's right," I said.

"Sophisticated!"
"Mmhmmm" I agreed.

"Oh YES!" She pumped her fist in a cheer. Then chortled for a moment.
Then turned to me. "That wasn't very sophisticated, was it?"

No.
But it was just perfect, anyway.

Friday 15: Things On My Desk

2007-09-21T11:21:00.002-04:00

1. You're Wearing That? by Deborah Tannen. The selection for next month's book club meeting. Interesting discussion of the conversations between mothers and daughters, focusing on clothes, weight, and hair. As m. remarked, those are never contentious topics between us. Her room, however, is another matter. Mine is a social book club, where even if we've enjoyed a book, we might not ever get around to talking about it. This time, I bet we do.

2. Glencoe Pre-Algebra. Glossy, glitzy, busy presentation of basic algebraic ideas. Too many sidebars. Too many examples forced into inappropriate service. Fussy. I favor old-school textbooks: matte-finish paper, black ink, key ideas and examples clearly marked; judicious use of red and blue ink. But fussy is what was already purchased, so that is what I'm using.

3. A stack of DVDs about early civilization. Because that's a topic we're allegedly studying this year.

4. Discovering Tai Chi with Scott Cole. Because the muscles in my neck, shoulder, and jaw seem to be welding into a constricting grid. Running helps, but not enough. And anything requiring scheduled trips into town is out of the question until the end of editing season. February, probably. I'm looking forward to trying this out.

5. My monitor and keyboard. Some speakers I never use.

6. A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. A book I'm reviewing for the school newsletter I am allegedly writing. He writes about the qualities people will need to cultivate in the new, global economy; different qualities from the analytical, left-brain qualities traditionally instilled. Interesting stuff here, especially living in an area where the entire economy seems to have been outsourced. At one point, he mentions an exercise for developing what he calls the capacity for symphony: drawing a self-portrait with only five lines. I keep thinking that this could somehow connect to a haiku exercise, but I'm not sure if I can really carry it off.

7. Record book for tracking grades, assignments, etc. Emblem of my new status as teacher. For the record, I am a crummy teacher, apparently unable to explain my way out of a wet paper bag. My students, though, are incredibly sweet, and for their sake, I'm hoping to improve.

8. More Home Cooking, by Laurie Colwin. Yet another wonderful collection of essays by a wonderful writer. Comfort food for my soul.

9. The latest issue of Cooks Country. As if I am ever going to cook again.

10. A pencil box I made.

11. How Like an Angel by Jack Driscoll. Sympathetic characters and luminous prose, like reading poetry.

12. A penguin. A wooden one, that is; an ornament given to me by m.

13. The J. Peterman Company catalog. The closest to fantasy reading I ever get. That Out of Africa Skirt catches my attention every time. Every. Time. If only I had a waist.

14. Stacks of papers and bills, the usual signs of my usual inattention to domestic affairs.

15. A paper weight: "What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" A question I'm still working on.

Friday Fifteen

Fading Rituals

2007-09-19T10:09:00.002-04:00

This is the baby blanket I knit for m. long, long ago. She still sleeps with it. Along with an entire zoo of stuffed animals.

Other bedtime rituals, though, are fading, or have already disappeared. She no longer requires me to read (at least) three bedtime stories, or sing the entire roster of Richard Scarry's Nursery Rhymes (+ Christmas Carols from Thanksgiving through Valentine's Day) before consenting to turn off the lights.

My husband is an erratic and restless sleeper. Perhaps my desire to maintain the quiet he needed to sleep explains why our bedtime rituals became so embellished. I'm not sure it's sufficient to explain the last exchange of our bedtime rituals, which goes like this:

"Sweet dreams and all good things." (my line)
"Buenos noches" (hers, after we read Donde Esta, Spot)
Star bright (mine)
See you in the morning (hers)
Good night!
Good night!
[close the door]

We've been doing this now for 11 years. She's turning 14 next week, so it took a while to invent the entire routine. There used to be another part, where after I closed the door, m. would pop out of bed and demand a hug-kiss-squeeze (our daytime departure routine), but that hasn't been requested for years.

Lately, though, we're slacking even on this last bit of childhood magic. Sometimes we hurry through the exchange, like a too familiar mealtime grace. And sometimes, it feels like something we don't have to say anymore.

Good night, sweetie, I say.
Good night mom, she replies.
I love you, I say.
I love you, too. she replies.

At 14, this is enough.

Friday 15: Random Notes and Observations From This Week

2007-09-14T13:25:00.002-04:00

1. The back to my desk chair broke. I am using a piano bench instead.

2. Our internet connection, already as slow as we thought it could go, has gotten slower. MUCH slower. If I haven’t commented on your blog, it’s because I haven’t been able to load it.

3. After telling a local school that I could help them with their newsletter, based on last year’s experience of having no work at all last September, I’ve received essay sets nearly every day this month.

4. m. wants to cut her hair. Last time -- a year ago -- there were tears afterwards. We are hopeful of better results this time.

5. Rambunctious westerly winds blew away the last bits of humidity and lingering mist. Autumn has arrived.

6. Our watermelons are finally ripening. They are enormous. And sweet!

7. The biology software we purchased doesn’t seem to appreciate our slow internet connection; every time we try to access quizzes or tests, it crashes. Given my abysmal grasp of anything scientific or technical, I am casting about for other solutions.

8. Classes at the co-op began this last week. m. loves The Scarlet Letter, and is hard at work creating a soundtrack for a section of the book. The fact that she loves this book, has always enjoyed biology and any science class, and prefers scary stories to mysteries sometimes makes me think that I was only a vessel for her creation.

9. But she loves German. And opera. So maybe we have more in common than appearances would indicate. I might have to wait a while for an appropriate appreciation of Hank Williams to develop...

10. By the time I finish covering a year’s worth of algebra in 24 one-hour sessions, I am going to be talking like an auctioneer. Or a gibbering idiot. Take your pick.

11. Things undone seem to be accumulating in precarious towers about the house. I am afraid to check my mail.

12. Despite it all, I am still posting. Go figure.

13. Thank God for carryout.

14. And M’s willingness to pick things up on his way home from work.

15. And for posts like this one, from Greg, that remind me to breathe, to pause, and to notice the life around me. A gluttonous accumulation of achievements is not the point.

My ambition this weekend: Take a walk!

10 Things I Love That Begin with the Letter C

2007-09-03T14:45:00.002-04:00

Marianne issued the challenge, and I accepted. Thus, the following list:

10 Things I love That Begin with the Letter C

1. Chocolate, of course. And the movie Chocolat… And my favorite chocolate bakery, Cocolat… in California… even if it no longer exists. And chocolate covered cherries.

2. Christmas! Even though I’m not quite ready to begin thinking about it yet. And Christmas carols, which m. is already singing. Even though I’m not quite ready to think about them, either.

3. Chez Panisse. My favorite restaurant. Ever. And Casey's Tavern, home of my favorite margaritas and onion rings.

4. Carmina Burana. My favorite piece of choral music. Exhilarating. Devastating. Better than anything. Anything.

5. Essays by Carlyle, and speeches by Churchill. Charles Simic's poetry.

6. Cathouse Teri, who always makes me laugh or think or feel.

7. Charity’s blog, where I am always inspired to be a better person and to try to be a better writer than I really am.

8. Chopin, the first love of my life.

9. The Characters in my life, like M. and m. And Conor O'Neill, my favorite canine. Others, too!

10. Coffee. Last in my list. First, though, every morning.

Close calls: Caraveggio, canteloupe, camembert, cabernet, Chagall, cats, and carillon. Maybe I'll get them some other time.

Anyone else feel like playing? Let me know, and I'll send you a letter!

15 Articles of Faith

2007-08-31T08:32:00.002-04:00

1.When you're going through hell, keep on going (Winston Churchill)

2. It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. (William Shakespeare)

3. Lots of red wine and something chocolate for dessert can rescue the worst dinner disasters.

4. Cold hands, warm heart.

5. I still believe people are really good at heart (Anne Frank)

6. It is better to be kind than right.(someone else. not me)

7. Closed minds come from never venturing from your comfort zone: every once in a while you have to go someplace new, try something different, or attempt something that scares you.

8. A home full of books needs little other decoration.

9. Make sure to leave yourself a little room for unexpected possibilities. (like dessert!)

10. Sometimes it is important to stay the course, but other times quitting is the wisest option -- knowing the difference is essential.

11. Good triumphs. Always.

12. In the long term, respect is more important than common interests or beliefs.

13. All art aspires to the condition of music. (Walter Pater)

14. Everybody can sing, and everybody can dance. Except me.

15. Popcorn should be salty, coffee strong, and chocolate must be dark!

Friday Fifteen

Transformation

2007-08-29T10:25:00.002-04:00

For the past three and a half years, our closets have looked mostly like this (on good days):

Thanks to M. (stands for MiracleMan), they are starting to look like this:

I am encouraged. Very very encouraged.

The Bourne Ultimatum: Notes

2007-08-25T19:28:00.002-04:00

Well, we enjoyed the movie, and with a bag of popcorn and a very refreshing cherry coke, it made for a fine afternoon's entertainment. I don't get many afternoons alone in the dark with M., and I'll take them however they come.

There's just one problem: Matt Damon is not Mark Wahlberg. Matt Damon has that humorless frat boy thing going for him that works best in roles requiring a kind of squishy morality. I liked him in Rounders, for example. Or in Oceans 11, where everyone else is having such a good time that you don't care that he's so self-righteously earnest and utterly incapable of enjoying himself. Mark Wahlberg has that mercurial bad boy charm that is the hallmark of the very best, or at least most interesting superheros. Better to seem bad and turn out to be good, than to appear clean and noble and turn out to be a sleaze weasel. Not that Matt Damon as Jason Bourne turns out to be any kind of bad guy. He's just so homogeneously impassive, it's hard to care about him or any of the hardships he finds himself in.

Then there's that scene where Matt Damon as Bourne is fighting hand-to-hand with some guy named Desh, who turns out to be another state-of-the-art specially-trained agent of assassination. The combat goes on and on and on. It is brutal. And long.

And for some reason, during the whole thing, I'm thinking about that scene in Zoolander, where, after the two arch-rivals of the male modeling world -- newly crowned male model of the year, Hansel (Owen Wilson), and former top model Derek Zoolander -- each try to prove their dominance in a ferociously vicious (and viciously funny) male model walk-off, emceed by David Bowie, Derek is forced to take refuge at Hansel's skate cave, because, well, he's just discovered that he's been programmed to kill the prime minister of Malaysia and he, like, needs some time to think about things. Plus, there's this bodyguard who may be trying to kill him.

Hansel is a surfer dude, pretty relaxed about things, but before he'll let Derek in, he wants things to be straight between them. The conversation goes something like this:

Hansel: Why you been acting so messed up towards me?
Derek Zoolander: Why you been acting so messed up towards me?
Hansel: Well, you go first.
Derek Zoolander: Well, I guess I was feeling kind of threatened by you, you know, you winning the Male Model of the Year award and all.
Hansel: Oh man, I've looked up to you. It hurt me when you didn't respect me.
Derek Zoolander: (looks stunned)
Hansel: You know that 1992 campaign for [insert whatever you'd like here]. Your work in that campaign is what inspired me to become a model, too!
Derek: Oh man, I've been so whack.
Hansel: No, no, I'm sorry, I've been so whack, too.
Ends with hugs and tears.

So maybe it wasn't exactly an appropriate scene to be thinking about as I'm watching Bourne battle for his life. But the fight goes on for such a long time that it gave me time to think about some things. So there I am in the theater, waiting for Jason Bourne to hold up his hand, beg for a time-out, and ask the other guy, "Why are we doing this to each other? Do you even know why you're trying to kill me?"

Of course, in this scene, the bad guy is after the girl, so nothing like this happens. It actually happens later, when he's facing off yet another assassin, believe it or not. The assassin is down, Jason Bourne's finger is on the trigger, but he doesn't pull it. A few scenes later, the assassin is back after him, has Bourne backed up against railing, a long drop to deep water below, but then instead of killing Bourne, asks instead "Why didn't you shoot me?" I think their conversation was pretty much verbatim that between Hansel & Derek. Except they didn't say "whack," and no one hugged at the end.

But I expect I'm the only one who caught the comparison.

This Weekend: 15 Things I'm Gonna Do!

2007-08-24T09:25:00.003-04:00

1. See the new Bourne movie!
2. At the theater. With popcorn, cherry cokes, and maybe licorice twizzle sticks.
3. Buy books!
4. Every single one I haven't been able to get to the library recently to find. That includes Driscoll, Yates, and On the Threshold: Home, Hardwood, and Holiness.
5. Grill a chicken over the rotisserie, and slow bake some roma tomatos with garlic and basil, and maybe a bit of parmesan
6.Play my Chopin Nocturnes, even if I'm not as swift on the chromatic runs as I used to be. Just because they make me feel dreamy and romantic.
7. Open the windows wide and play Swingin' Molly. Loud. Because it makes me feel great.
8. Sit out under the stars and learn a new constellation.
9. Find an excuse to wear my black dress and silver necklace and alpaca shawl. And heels.
10. Even if it's just to sit out under the stars at home.
11. Memorize a poem. Probably a short one.
12. Draw a map of my life.
13. With cozy nooks and coves
14. And plenty of uncharted territory
15. And certain hidden treasure.

Enjoy your weekend, everyone!
Happy Friday Fifteen!