Light and Momentary

Seven Quick Takes: Blooming Viburnum Edition

1. This morning I couldn't find my iPod so I pulled the breviary down from the shelf. (I know! That's so 2008!) Stella pulled out a Bible and sat down beside me on the couch, murmuring snippets of prayers and various other bits and pieces. At one point she said, "You're the sparkliest pig I ever seened." Part of my brain detached itself from Morning Prayer for a minute to think about where you might find that in the Bible. There aren't a whole lot of pig moments in the Bible, are there? Did one of the Gadarene swine say it to another on their fateful jog? Did the prodigal son overhear it at the feeding trough? I glanced over and saw that she was flipping the pages in Psalms. I'm don't know of any pigs in Psalms.

2. I had another the-internet-is-eating-my-brain moment while I was trying to remember the right adjective for those possessed pigs. I wanted them to be the Gennesaret swine, but I wasn't quite convinced. If you ask Google about Gennesaret pigs, it will suggest that you might mean Gadarene swine. I mean, I'm glad to have found the modifier I was seeking, but what is Google doing inside my brain?

3. Just recently I was reading a book in which a character talked about the deaths of the gabardine swine, a moment that made me say, "Hey, that's funny!" Alas, I cannot remember who or where-- I think it must have been either Dorothy Sayers or G.K. Chesterton. Google is coming up with Jack Aubrey, but that's not where I saw it. That's kind of a tangle, isn't it? My memory lapse reminds me of someone else's slip of the tongue which turns into another memory lapse. UGH, my memory is not as sharp as it once was.

4. I am binding off the Color Affection that I started earlier this week. It's been totally fun. The color combination reminds me of a big stripey caterpillar, which is perhaps not an effect I would usually aim for. Of course, my usual fashion choices run more along the lines of "faded rust-colored T-shirt or really old and battered public library T-shirt?"

5. I'd like to do some kind of edging around the Color Affection, but I'm not sure what. I thought about applied I-cord, but I am not sure I have the stamina for that. I'm pretty sure no one has ever died of applied I-cord, but I'd hate to be the first. Aside from the painful factor, I'm concerned about the impact of I-cord on the drape of the piece. Crochet also seems like it might be too firm. Any thoughts?

6. My husband bought Petely an ant farm and it is surprisingly hypnotic, watching them go about their business. Pete and I can just sit and admire them, which is not what I expected when I first heard the words "ant farm."

7. The end-of-year paper inundation is beginning. Hold me. Or else bring your snow shovel. I've been trying to get on top of the clutter this week, but I've also been working on the poster I'm presenting next month (and, okay, all those miles of caterpillar-esque garter stitch). The clutter is not actually diminishing very much, which makes me crazy. "I am going to pile it all in a laundry basket," I mouth-frothed in Elwood's direction, "and haul it in the front yard and SET IT ON FIRE." He cast about desperately for something to say to his would-be arsonist wife. "Here, Jamie," he said, "sit down and look at the ants."

You probably had to be there, but it still cracks me up.

Game ON

You guys, I have a Plan. It's my S Scheme: Sixty-three dayS of Sanity and Salutariness (with Scads of Strengthening and poSSibly Some Slenderizing).

Eight years ago I found myself twenty years over my pre-pregnancy weight when Petely was two months old. I embarked on The Vegetable Project: 30 days in which I consumed 5 servings of vegetables and a gallon of water every day while giving up sugar. I lost 13 pounds in 30 days, and took off the remaining 7 in the following 2 or 3 months.

Something weird has happened to my body over the past year or so. I am eating well and exercising often, but my set point seems to have shifted. At the moment I weigh almost what I did when I started the first Vegetable Project. It's easy to be a little crazy about weight gain. (Exhibit A: when my SIL asked me to sing at my BIL's funeral in March, I thought, "I am too fat to appear in public.")

I am pushing back against the crazy. The goal of the S Scheme is not to lose a particular amount of weight. It's to work on good habits here in the summer while I have a little more space in my head. It's to tend the body that I hope will carry me into old age, and to accept that its shape is going to change over time.

The details:

1. Vegetables! Five servings a day, no excuses. 

2. Water! (Not a gallon a day, because I am not feeding a 2-month-old these days. We'll say 3 quarts, to cut down on the nibbliness that is actually thirst in disguise.)

3. Planning! Dinner on the table at 5:00 sharp, and no snacking afterward.

4. Sugar! Give it up entirely for the next nine weeks, and then re-evaluate. 

5. Exercise! At least four hours per week of moderate intensity exercise, plus daily bursts of lower-intensity movement-- walking to the library instead of taking the car, even when it's hot. Biking to the pool.

Recently I was thinking about how much more fit I am than I was ten years ago when I weighed less. I thought to myself, "If I could be that skinny and that out of shape or this weight and this level of fitness, which would I rather be?" The answer came immediately: skinny. But that's a stupid answer. I am pushing back against that nonsense. If I eat sensible portions of nutritious tasty foods, and push my body to be stronger and faster, I need to relax about the scale. This is me giving myself permission to be the shape I am right now.

Book Snob

Pete brought home a flyer a couple of weeks ago about an author visiting the school. We could buy her book, an inspirational rhyming book, for only $20. And! It came with an accessory -- a very girly accessory. Call it a pink hair ribbon. 

"Please can we buy a signed copy, Mom?" Pete implored, his gray eyes earnest. "My teacher says it's a really good book." 

I said, "Oh, honey, I don't think so. 'Inspirational' is one strike and 'rhyming' is two strikes and the presence of not one but two dangling modifiers in the author's bio makes three. And what would you do with a pink hair ribbon anyway?"

"But Mom," he said, disappointed, "my teacher says it's a really good book and she knows about good books."

At this point I wondered if the school got a slice of the proceeds, because really? Twenty bucks for a children's book (with hair ribbon)? I kept my cynicism to myself. I said, "We should choose our books carefully because we don't have a lot of shelf space. We can get it from the library and see if we really want to own it."

I felt a little dissatisfied with myself after the conversation. It sounds arrogant, refusing to buy a book based on a hunch that its scansion will be suboptimal. Was this a Charlotte Mason No Twaddle kind of proclamation, or just a surfeit of intellectual pride? For better or for worse, I have decided that life is too short to read terrible books to my children. This means I will never again read anything written by Stan and Jan Berenstain (or at least nothing from the past 35 years -- Spooky Old Tree gets a pass). I guess it also means that sometimes I say no to my favorite pair of earnest gray eyes.

A couple of days ago I came home to find a worried neighborhood grandma on the front porch. Joe had seen the pink hair ribbon in her grandson's backpack. "Dude," he said, "why do you have a pink hair ribbon?" In his version of the story, the kid said, "I don't know. You want it?" Joe took it from him and looked it over, but quickly realized he had no need for a pink hair ribbon. He turned to a classmate. "Want a pink hair ribbon?" he asked. The classmate took it and Joe thought no more about it.

In the grandson's version of the story, he said, "You can look at it if you want to, but you'll have to give it back to me because my grandma bought it as a gift for someone else." In the grandson's version of the story, he had been very clear about the importance of the pink hair ribbon. I admit to a certain curiosity about the story the grandson might tell without an irate grandma standing by, but in the moment we had reached an impasse. I said I'd call the other kid's parents. I said I hoped the ribbon could be recovered.

I wound up leaving a message in an anonymous voice mailbox, which was not encouraging. I imagined the grandma telling me that Joe should chip in for the lost book/ribbon set. 

I thought it would be the height of irony if I wound up buying (part of) the book I had so loftily declined to pay for a few weeks earlier. 

I was relieved when the ribbon turned up. I'm still thinking about intellectual snobbery and children's books. I still can't deal with rhyming books that don't scan.

What books do you hate to read your kids? And will you read them if asked nicely? Will you buy a book you hate? What about a book you only suspect you will hate?

Rabbit Holed

One of my online pals was complaining about knitting a really boring Color Affection. Her email started the wheels turning in my head. In my sock yarn tub I had a beautiful skein of Madelinetosh that I'd been saving for something special. I had a skein of Sockotta that I'd been thinking I should give away: too much cotton for pleasant knitting. I had a skein of semisolid black that I'd bought with these socks in mind, but then my enthusiasm cooled.

Yesterday it dawned on me that the three of them would go together nicely and I've been knitting ever since. Pictures soon...

Ugh

It's been a complicated mothering day.

That's not my favorite kind.

The end.

Fallow

Bonnie asked about my vegetable garden: I've decided to let it rest this year. I'm going to put sunflowers in the full-sun part of it and mustard greens in the part-sun part of it, a plan I pulled straight out of the comments on this post. (Thanks, you guys!) I have no idea if this strategy will work on soil that may be contaminated with dioxin and its cousins, but I have contact information for a lab that will test for toxin levels. I think I'll do that next winter and decide what to do from there. We've been eating our asparagus, since it is further from the neighbors' house than anything else, but that's it. I have radishes and frisee that self-seeded, and garlic greens standing up tall and proud, and a lovely thyme plant that came back as well. Unfortunately, they're all right in the potential hot zone.

We signed up again for the CSA we joined last year. I really enjoyed the vegetables, but the trouble with a local CSA is that the stuff that's ready in their fields is the same stuff that's ready in my garden. In a non-drought year it could get pretty overwhelming-- there is only so much chard I can put on the dinner table. (Last year I was determined to use every.single.scrap of CSA produce. I might have been a wee bit obsessive about it.)

The thing I will miss most is my herb garden. We do get CSA herbs, but I love wandering out in the late afternoon to luxuriant basil and sage plants and cutting off couldn't-be-fresher piles of herbs for dinner. Pesto! Browned sage leaves! Oh, so delicious!

I think I might plant a new herb garden along the sidewalk that runs up to the front door. I'm not entirely sure this is a good idea. Will it attract too many bees? Will it look too jungle-y? If I plant mint, will it take over the joint? I'm not especially worried about that last one because I seem to have a talent for killing mint plants. I think I'm going to do it: parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme along one side (probably also cilantro, tarragon, lavender, and chervil), and on the other side a veritable forest of basil along with oregano and marjoram. And maybe mint, unless you guys tell me it's a bad idea.

My husband just read the words "veritable forest" and said to himself, "Oh, dear, this is not my favorite idea..."

Speedy speedy brownies

Today I got it into my head that I was going to make a video post. The impetus for this impulse was the Cub Scout cookout last weekend. The parents were supposed to have the boys cook something as a potluck contribution, but there wasn't a lot of actual cooking happening.

I've also been reading food books: Rowan Jacobsen's American Terroir, Michael Pollan's Cooked, and Tamar Adler's An Everlasting Meal. It's easy to be preachy about food (I have to admit: Funfetti Cake Dip gets me up on my high horse in a hurry), but preachy is not my intent. The thing is, cooking doesn't have to be slow and complicated. It is entirely possible to crank out something significantly better than a mix without causing yourself stress and extra work.

In my video I was going to see if I could get a pan of brownies in the oven within five minutes. It actually took me six minutes and two seconds, but still: six minutes to get from-scratch brownies in the oven. Six minutes, start to finish (including preparing the pan) for a recipe I hadn't made in months. Joe said, "You could have done it four minutes if you hadn't been talking so much."

I still swear by this recipe (it's at the end of the post, after the book review), except that these days I add a bit more chocolate in the form of semisweet chips, and dial back the sugar slightly in consequence. It turns out that making an interesting cooking video is more complicated than making brownies from scratch, so I will spare you all the shots of the back of my head. But spread the word: there is no reason for brownie mix to exist. You can make them yourself, a million times better and every bit as fast.

Seven Quick Takes: Tall Grass Edition

1. The rain is delicious after last year's drought. It seems like a little miracle to see how fresh and green everything is. I bet I have the finest crop of creeping charlie in the neighborhood at the moment. Could I make, like, creeping charlie eau de vie? Sell it at the farmer's market, perhaps, in fancy glass bottles? If they have creeping charlie in France I bet it would sell better under its French name.

2. You guys, I just looked up creeping charlie and discovered that the Wikipedia entry was written by a delusional tree-hugging sort. I mean, people who live in Birkenstock-filled houses shouldn't throw shoes and all that, but Wikipedia is trying to tell me that people grow creeping charlie as a potted plant and eat it in salad. Eat it! In salad! Wikipedia is suggesting that immigrants brought it from Europe on purpose. Thanks a lot, immigrant ancestors.

3. I bet if I looked up the "last edited" date for that Wikipedia entry it would be 4-1-13, don't you think? Because that is crazy talk.

4. (says the person who loves dandelions)

5. The tree that was closest to our neighbor's house was damaged in the fire too: three-quarters of the branches are blooming and leafing out. The others are blackened and empty. Sad to see. My neighbors anticipate being back in the house a month from now (though I bet they're not keeping in mind The One True Rule For Construction Estimates), so there are lots of different workers in and out of the place. They are not especially careful about property lines. I was out there one day this week making sure the table saw in the front yard wasn't blowing sawdust from pressure-treated wood into my vegetable garden (arsenic in my veggies = not my favorite thing), and then the next day asking the painter to dump his rinse water on the right side of the property line, preferably far away from my asparagus patch. I will stop grumbling now and think about how nice it will be to have our neighbors back. What a crazy thing a house fire is.

6. On the subject of grumbling, I often say that email has changed the professor-student relationship for the worse. I would never, and I mean never, have casually challenged a grade back in the days when such challenges needed to be issued face to face. Students write me routinely at the end of the semester to say, "I worked hard! Can you give me the next grade up?" (Answer: no.)

7. But email also has happy effects. I love the end-of-the-semester notes from students that say, "I really loved your class! I learned so much! Hope to see you again soon!" Spring semester is all wrapped up. Here's to summer!

More quick takes at Jen's.

Summer's coming

On one of my email lists we're talking about what we especially want to do this summer. I'm having trouble thinking of just one thing. I submitted grades today and my manuscript revision is due Monday, so my plate will be quite a bit emptier in just a few days. Some of the things on my mind:

...Maybe I will read all of Dorothy Sayers

...and Romola and In This House of Brede

...and finally get back to Hamlet and Othello and The Two Noble Kinsmen.

...Maybe I will launch another Vegetable Project and blog my way through a summer's worth of CSA veggies

...and exercise 5 days a week while life is quieter

--oh, who am I kidding? Life does not get quieter when five kids are home from school for the summer--

...but maybe I will get up early and exercise anyway

...and no matter what happens with my personal exercise plans I think I will sign up for that uber-fun running group again.

...I've been stalled near the end of Fellowship of the Ring (reading it to Joe and Pete), but summer's the perfect time for getting un-stalled

...and finding a secondhand sandbox

...and cranking up the ice cream maker and squeezing lemons for real lemonade together and maybe making another batch of profiteroles

...and reading the bits of the Simple Mom archives that talk about making your backyard a place where kids want to play (instead of saying, "Why can't I stay inside and have computer time?").

...I think I'll contact the guy who wrote the language software I use and see if he has any ideas about the paper I want to write

...and write down my Research Plan for the next couple of years.

...I will for sure for certain get those rassafrassin' pictures into the equally rassafrassin' albums

...and clean the dining room carpet, no matter what

...and maybe plant herbs alongside the front sidewalk, maybe,

...and I think once or twice I might take a nap. A nap!

Excellence

This morning I yelled at one of my boys until he cried.

Let me back up. He has a brother who has been amply endowed with brains and much less amply endowed with motivation. This combination frustrates me and I am never sure how to deal with my frustration. If I were a dyed-in-the-wool attachment parent, perhaps I would just tell him to follow his inner guiding light and not worry about his grades. If I were a tiger mom, perhaps I would have booted him into Kumon classes long ago. Instead I am just muddling through, trying to figure it out as we go.

This morning my frustration landed on the wrong target. Does that happen to you sometimes, when you work hard to be patient and understanding in one situation that frustrates you and then-- kerblam! -- you are an instant Krakatoa of unpleasantness in a situation that is objectively less frustrating? 

I hate when I do that.

I ought to know better than most people that this is a tricky balance. I was a highly motivated high school student, but it was not a healthy version of highly motivated. I loved my undergrad institution, but I always felt like an impostor there. Even two weeks ago when my parents were here, I thought, "I wonder if they are proud of me" --a thought that would be pitiful if it didn't still choke me up.

There must be some sweet spot, in which you nudge them to do their best and simultaneously communicate your unconditional acceptance. Instead I am bouncing around in the not-so-sweet zone. I want them to be diligent, to grow into adults who strive for goals that matter. I want them to be relaxed, certain that they will still be essentially themselves, essentially worthwhile people, if they fail to meet those goals.

Some days I worry that neither message is getting through.