Light and Momentary

Hello, Akron

Did you see Erin's post on the Akron U-turn? When I first read the title, I thought it must be a fancy engineering term, but it's really about being tricked by your own body into indulging bad habits.

This is the story of my life lately. I am circling in an endless loop, from Wilkes-Barre to Toledo. I can't quite decide how much effort to put into getting into Indiana, and so I keep finding myself eastbound on I-80 again.

In the spring of 2005 my son Pete was born. I gained 40 pounds during that pregnancy, more than I'd ever gained before, and I turned 35 in the summer. After my first three boys were born, the pregnancy weight pretty much vanished on its own. (OW. Ow ow ow PLEASE stop throwing things at me through the monitor. I have had my comeuppance already, okay?) I was aghast to be 20 pounds overweight when Pete was a month old.

It took me three months of diligence to get that weight off, and it appears that my days of effortlessly staying at "my weight" are gone. About half of that 20 pounds seems to think I might miss it if it stayed away. (Note to the fat cells: wrong!)

Here is the thing: I am a little stuck on the question of whether I really want to keep moving west. Is it vanity? Is it worthwhile? Should I just give away those pants that have been sitting unworn in my bottom drawer for five years? Should I muster my limited reserves of willpower and just DO IT already? (Again?) I don't think I need to go all the way to California, but I'd really rather be in Des Moines than in Akron.

(The ambivalence is compounded by a discovery I have recently made: I believe the corpus luteum must be made of chocolate, because for much of its existence it calls loudly to be fortified with same. I can eat my vegetables faithfully for a while, and then I am thrown off course by the wails of "Feeeeeeed meeeeeeeee. Not chaaaaaaaaaaard, chooooooooooooocolate!" What's a person to do but head back to Pennsylvania one more time?)

SIGH. This is kind of a stupid post, and I am worried that you are all going to roll your eyes at me, one vast collective eye roll, for public angst about ten pounds. But I have been posting less lately for a goofy reason: a friend of mine from college said such amazingly nice things about my blog that I got a little worried about it. If I posted about my disappearing eyebrows or my silly dream or my new knitting project, I would make it all too clear that I am not Ann Voskamp. But the reality is that I am not Ann Voskamp, so I am putting up a fluffy post on purpose in order to get over myself. Go read Erin's un-fluffy post and tell me if it rings as true for you as it did for me. Tomorrow, more fluff: recent knitting, with pictures.

PS I have also been quiet because I am having some Career Angst. Perhaps I'll post about that soon. It might be good for me.

Greetings!

Hey, everybody, it's National Delurking Day! Say hi! Tell me your favorite thing to cook for dinner in a hurry. Tell me whether you prefer Facebook or Twitter. Tell me how you found my blog. Or tell me what the low temperature will be in your town this weekend. Anything at all -- it's always fun to hear from you, whether you comment regularly or usually lurk.

Paging Judgmenta McSmuggerson

Sometimes a concatenation of blessings can leave me feeling less than beatific.

Blessings #1-5 are each spaced three years apart. There's a lot to like about that spacing, but it means that I always have lots of hand-me-down clothing in storage. If they had arrived every year or two, more of the clothes would be in dressers, not storage.

We are also blessed to live in a cozy yellow house built in 1923. People didn't build many closets into their houses in the 1920s. For part of its life this house was a two-flat, with a family downstairs and a pair of college students upstairs. (Sometimes they even had a renter in the basement, which astonishes me.) The renters had their own entrance, a side door with steps leading straight upstairs.

I used to store clothes in the basement. Then I stored clothes in the room over the porch that has since become the Lego hideout. I decided I'd use the back steps for my sewing/knitting things and for clothes storage. I bought big storage tubs and balanced them on styrofoam blocks. This worked fine for a while, and then my styrofoam blocks started collapsing under the weight of the tubs.

It was ugly.

I didn't even know how to tackle it. What could I use to support the tubs that would be exactly 16 inches tall and not too hazardous if it toppled down the stairs? How much time was it going to take to sort out those spilled bags? How many spiders would bite me on the ankle while I was knee-deep in cast-off clothing?

Elwood sawed a 4x4x8 into 6 lengths for me. (He thinks I should do my own sawing, but I pulled a Bartleby the scrivener and he did it for me with only a little eye-rolling.)

Like most tasks that I put off, it was a drag but not nearly as bad as I had feared. I tidied up the sewing table (if "tidying" means "swept the mending out of sight" in your personal lexicon, as it does in mine) and I cannot walk by the top of the stairs without an inner huzzah. It looks so nice now!

But if those 4x4 pieces start collapsing under the bins, I'll really know that I'm holding on to too much clothing.

All is vanity

Detachment is good, right? Humility likewise? I hope so, my friends, because OH did I have a memorable hair salon experience tonight.

I went to a swanky place by Gladlyville standards, a nicer place than I've been in years. I thought, Maybe I hate getting my hair cut because I'm always going to cheapo places. I'll go somewhere a little more upscale and see if I get better results.

Excuse me while I pause to laugh grimly.

She offered me a five-minute treatment to get any product build-up out of my hair and I hesitated. "Is it going to be hard on my hair?" I asked her. "My hair's pretty fragile." She assured me it would not. It would make my hair feel awesome! I've been using this stuff that gives me great curl definition but does tend to get gummy. I said yes. ALAS ALAS ALAS.

This treatment, whatever it was, turned my hair into one massive tangle. I was sure she had put a clip in it because I could feel it all stuck together in back. There was no clip -- just the most unbelievable snarl you have ever seen. Before tonight my hair was about bra-strap length when un-boinged, and the whole pile of it was glued together.

She proceeded to comb it out. She spent, no exaggeration, more than half an hour trying to get a comb through my hair. She kept kicking aside wads of it that she'd yanked out. Eventually she pulled out enough hair for a whole flock of birds to line their nests, with enough left over for me to knit a pair of socks from it. (Hand-knit hair socks -- mortification for the third millennium). My scalp is SO tender.

She recommended that I come back soon. She offered to make me an appointment on the spot. I declined. The cut is fine, I think, but at this moment I look like Roseanne Roseannadanna. And you know, I can look like Roseanne Roseannadanna for free.

How does your garden grow?

My neighbor ripped out the hideous bushes between our yards in the spring, and I put in a little garden that runs right down our family's side of the property line. I have been thinking that it would be a good idea to make some notes about what went well and what to do differently next year, and you, dear readers, are the victims of my compulsion lucky recipients of my acquired wisdom.

At the north end of the garden I put in a forsythia bush, because it seemed a little weird to me to have a vegetable garden so visible. Bah, I now say. Maybe if it were more obvious to people that a tomato grows in dirt instead of arising from the scum on supermarket shelves like a vegetal Venus, we wouldn't have so many crazy food issues in this country. I am moving the forsythia bush this fall so I can plant more veggies next year. (Any tips on when to do that without stressing it? I do love forsythia.)

I put in six tomato plants, three cherry and three plum. I couldn't believe, looking at my spindly seedlings, that I would really need to put them 3-4 FEET apart -- I just couldn't see ahead to the sprawling behemoths they would become. It's amazing, isn't it, to get all that life from one speck-sized seed? They are cranking out fruit, too, all six of them. I am going to pick up some tomato cages on clearance this fall, because the stakes-and-twine approach just didn't cut it. I practically need a machete to pick those tomatoes in the middle

In the spaces between baby tomato plants I put leeks, summer savory, and rosemary. Before next year I want to read up on herb gardening. Specifically, I'm wondering about putting all the herbs in the part-shade portion of my garden even though their packages say "full sun." My summer savory and my cilantro went to seed in about fifteen minutes.

Just south of the tomatoes, in the last bit of full sun, I put in six pepper plants: three Hungarian wax, three jalapeño. I should have split the jalapeño three-pack with my neighbor.

All of those things just went straight into the existing dirt. I also did a square-foot gardening bed, to which I added vermiculite, peat moss, and compost. (It was a hassle and I don't see a difference in the health of the plants in the bed.) There I planted radishes, peas, beets, carrots, onions, wax beans, green beans, mixed lettuce, and a half-dozen herbs. I will not regale you with every detail, lest you wander away to do something more interesting like watch an eggplant ripen, but here's the memo for next year: those green beans went berserk. They grew like kudzu, pulling down and devouring the pole tepee I put under them (I exaggerate only slightly -- it's a splintered wreck now). They killed the baby beets because they made so much shade. They need more space because by golly they are bent on garden-wide hegemony. I also want to plant more peas, so I can stand in the garden in June and eat them ALL ALL ALL like an off-the-wagon Twelve Stepper (it's really tough to find a Pea Addicts Anonymous meeting in this town), along with a second wave of those peppery juicy piercingly pink radishes.

The SFG bed is in part shade between our houses, and the shade deepens as the rooflines rise. In the southernmost end of the garden strip I planted zucchini (twice), chard, more onions, and rhubarb. Zucchini was a bust. (Who fails at zucchini?) I suspect something amiss with the seeds, since I never got one to sprout indoors or out. Chard, on the other hand, has been a roaring success, bearing all summer. Maybe next year I'll make it a chard-y lettuce-y bed and buy some different zucchini seeds. I'll need to move the onions, since months of growth got me only little almond-sized guys.

The rhubarb is an exercise in optimism: I should bake my first rhubarb pie in 2012. (I can probably harvest enough to fill out a strawberry-rhubarb pie next summer, though.) Next year I'd like to put in some asparagus, to aim even further into the future. I like the idea of planting something that will feed my children all those months from now. I don't know what we'll be doing when the rhubarb is ready, but I love to see its little leaves curling out, getting ready now for a future I can't see.

We got your patron saints right here.

Ladies! Are you trying to lose some weight? Do we have a patron saint for you!! Thursday is the feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. It's the first day of your slim trim life!

You might ask why, and sensibly so. Was St. JtB tearing up the runway in first-century Jerusalem? (You can't go wrong with camel hair, he'd tell you.) Was he the fitness consultant to the stars of his day? (We knew he was the forerunner; we just didn't know it was the forerunner of Jillian Michaels.)

No, St. John the Baptist can be your weight loss patron saint because of his famous quote: "I must decrease!" Me too, St. JtB; me too. Perhaps the Holy Spirit is leading me to write a bestselling weight loss guide, to be called You Must Decrease: Ancient Weight Loss Secrets. Here's a sneak preview of its foolproof strategies:

1. Find desert.
2. Eat locusts.
3. Also honey.
4. No, silly, you can't buy the honey. You have to chase it down and arm-wrestle the bees for it.
5. Eat more locusts. Admit it -- they're growing on you, aren't they?
6. Use the leather belt around your camel hair tunic (appealingly retro, am I right?) to record inch loss. Tape measures are scarce in the desert.
7. [Optional] Provoke sanctimonious religious authorities of the day.
8. Repeat steps 2-5 until desired results are achieved.

NB: St. John the Baptist is justly famous for his stunning loss of 11 pounds in one fell swoop. We urge readers, however, not to try that one at home.

What are you waiting for? Go forth and decrease!

Happy Semi-Lustrum to Me

This weekend marked two and a half years that I have been blogging in this space, and I am observing the occasion by putting up some posts from my first blog. It is dead and gone now, the domain name snapped up by someone who seems to be advertising jewelry and lamps, and I like it that way. But I have imported the archives here and re-published a few of the many posts I wrote there.

There is the first post I ever wrote about birth at home, the post I wrote about mice in our apartment (I hate mice), and posts about our homeschooling years. There are a couple of breastfeeding posts -- one about the time I was hassled for nursing on public transportation, and a favorite of mine about why I nurse my children past infancy.

I also wrote a paean to stretch marks and some thoughts on mothers and children and death.

Shoot me an email if there's anything you'd like to see resurrected. It's a little messy in there. I used the replace function in a text editor to update names, so there may be some post-replace goofiness, and there will be broken links and missing images aplenty. But I had a lot of fun writing those posts (well, fun's the wrong word for the mothers/children/death post), and I hope you have some fun looking back at them too.

Come out, come out, whoever you are

I have it on good authority that this is International Delurking Day. So delurk! Or say hi even if you're not a lurker. I love it when people say hi.

Finished!

This is my daughter, whose brothers call her "big standing up girl," in her February Baby Sweater. I followed the pattern as written except for knitting the sleeves in the round. Why purl + seam when both can be avoided?

This is her mother in the completed February Lady Sweater. Hurray! The baby version says to decrease the stitch count by 10% between the end of the lace and the beginning of the garter edge; I did the same thing with the adult sweater.

I have trouble picking the right size for tops. Imagine a person with slender legs and big, say, knees trying to buy pants: the ones that fit the small frame don't accommodate the unexpected bulges. I blocked the sweater aggressively to give it more room laterally, so the buttons would work with my, um, knees. I am hoping to wear this sweater for years and my figure will change as my baby gets older. (Knees-y come, knees-y go.) The next time I block it, I'll aim for more lengthwise stretch and not worry about the buttons.

Here we are together. We may have missed the autumn leaves, but this picture makes me smile anyway.

Oh, Dr. Freud?

I was in a railway station with my baby when I suddenly thought, "Why didn't anyone ever notice that this baby has two heads?" Two lovely heads, with golden-red hair and blue blue eyes, but still: two heads. I wondered, "Why didn't they pick that up on the ultrasound? Did I forget to take her for a well-baby exam? It's lucky that the birth went as smoothly as it did with such a complex presentation. Maybe that's why the pushing was harder this time."

I kept thinking. "We should have named each head separately -- two brains, two souls, right? It's going to be really frustrating for them when they start walking and each head wants to go in a different direction."

When I looked more closely I saw that in my arms I had two babies, joined at the hip but otherwise separate. I gently jiggled the spot where they were conjoined and it separated with a slight metallic click and only a bit of resistance, like those magnetic building blocks.

I cradled one baby, smaller and limper, so that I could not see her face. The bigger baby Stella took my finger and toddled off with me down the steps toward the trains. I was a mother of twins and I never even knew it! I was going to have to tell Elwood that I separated our conjoined twins all by myself.

Then the alarm went off.

Just Say No

I imagine the Starbucks marketing team sitting around joking about the most improbable thing they could get on a menu. "I know," says one. "Shiitake mocha!" "How about eggplant macchiato?" adds another. The third guy says, "Let's try a pumpkin latte!"

They all look at him and say, "That's so crazy it just might work."

I have complained before about the crazy that is pumpkin in coffee. Pumpkin. In coffee. I mean, what's next? Liver-and-onion cafe con leche? And yet people rave about pumpkin spice lattes.

I thought to myself, maybe I'm missing something. Maybe it's just coffee with the spices we use in pumpkin pie. I like cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger. I like chai. I asked the guy at the counter, Does this taste like pumpkin or does it taste like the spices we use with pumpkin?

Both, he said. It tastes like pumpkin pie.

I'm going to live on the edge, I told him. I'll take a medium.

And oh, my friends, what are we doing, lining up to buy these things? YEA VERILY, the pumpkin spice latte is an abomination in the eyes of me. Have you seen the color of one of those things, people? The orangey glow?

In general I'm an open-minded person, I think. In general I try to be receptive to new ideas. But this is truth immutable, right here at Light and Momentary:

Coffee should not glow.

And the taste! Ugh! Fake chemical-ly non-pumpkin pseudo-spice! Who has perpetrated this scam upon the American people, that they are shelling out $4 a pop for these things?

I have returned from my trip to the edge to say it plain: don't go there. It's a bad edge. It's an ugly edge. I like pumpkin; I like coffee. But never the twain should meet.

Sniffle

One of the fruits of spending less time online is that I have more time to do other stuff. This seems silly now that I have typed it out [note to my brother: don't leave me another comment with "duh" in it. It hurts my feelings and I am a fragile flower this week.] but it has been a pleasant surprise.

Since last Saturday I have finished both of the socks pictured in their embryonic state (or maybe the striped one was a fetal sock) in this June post. I decided to cast on something new and fun: Pomatomus, in the pretty green Socks That Rock yarn I bought for Stella's sweater and booties. I had a whole skein of it and I was cruising along. The pattern was easy for me to pick up but very fun to see developing all the same. This sock was a happy thing amid the festival of crud. [<-git yer foreshadowing right here, folks] Tonight I started the heel flap, thinking, "I bet I can get the heel turned before I go to bed and then I'll be halfway."

"...Hm," I thought to myself. "This sock-in-progress feels very heavy. And this ball of yarn does not feel very heavy." My kitchen scale confirmed my fears: I don't have enough yarn to finish the pair. This baffled me momentarily and then I realized: mediumweight yarn won't give me the same yardage I've come to expect from a skein of sock yarn. This would be another "duh" moment except see above re: temporary fragile-flower-ness.

This makes me gnash my teeth a little bit. Can I get some knitterly input? I could (a) order another skein, but they make a big deal about how skeins ordered separately might not match each other and that would make me even grumpier. I could (b) frog the booties and cannibalize the yarn. Would I have to wash it so it could relax? (In case it is unclear, the answer I am looking for is "No, Jamie, you can just pull it right off those booties. No need to wash and rewind it; just go right ahead. You are knitting on the same size needles, so it won't be a problem at all." Unless that answer will cause me greater teeth-gnashing down the line, in which case I might possibly be reconciled to a different answer. Possibly. Did I mention the fragile?)

I also noticed that the leg of this sock has a bunch of lengthwise stretch. I could (c) continue to rib across the sole and take advantage of that lengthwise stretch, knitting a sock that looks like it would only fit a Chinese foot-binding victim but which would actually stretch to fit my very own unbound feet. Would a ribbed sole be uncomfortable? Or would a stockinette sole stretch lengthwise?

Input much appreciated to save me from option (d): flinging myself out the window and running away in search of ice cream.

Having a Crunchy Moment

We share a driveway with the guys next door, two college kids whose parents bought the house last summer. Mostly these guys have been fine neighbors, much easier to get along with than the previous owner. But I just went outside and the guys' dad is there with a big can of insecticide. The problem is the cicada killer wasps.

Cicada killer wasps look imposing but don't hurt people in the normal run of things. You might get stung if a female flies up your sleeve accidentally, but they're not aggressive like yellowjackets. I had adopted a live-and-let-live approach to the ones that live between our two garages, but the neighbor is having none of it. He had hired some guys to fix his garage door, and they refused to do the work because of the insects.

He was unmoved by my amateur entomologist exploits, so I showed him the nest site and he sprayed it. My logic was that if he was determined to spray, he could hit the right spot instead of spewing chemicals around my kids' toys. But he is not content. He is spraying every hole in the ground he can find, and any live insect that flies near him.

Since it's hard to hear someone's tone in a blog post, let me be clear that I am not freaking out (toxins! cancer! disaster!), only rueful. Like this guy says, I liked watching them.

Oh, well, I think he's done spraying. I am off to recycle some old paint. In my Birkenstocks, of course.

P.S. Now his son is now walking around the garden with a giant -- like, 5-gallon -- sprayer unit filled with weed killer. The previous owner was a gardener and these college kids are not, and the weeds have spread. If I were really crunchy I would go out there with my guitar and serenade him in my Birkenstocks: "All we are saying, is give weeds a chance." Perhaps one of the boys would accompany me on a compost bin drum.

Shore Leave

Hershey bar: Hey, Captain, looking for a good time?

Willpower: Are you addressing me? An officer in Her Majesty's Navy? I have a ship to keep on course, madam, and I'll thank you to keep your trollopy offers to yourself.

HB: You look like you've been running that ship a long time, Captain. Shall we dally?

WP, icily: That, madam, would be fraternising with the enemy.

HB, meltingly: It's awfully lonesome here in the refrigerator. Can't you bring a girl out where it's warm?

WP, wavering: Maybe there's no harm in succouring a lady in distress.

HB, inwardly: I'll show you suckering...

***

It occurs to me that if I am imagining a candy bar thinking devious thoughts, there might be something hallucinogenic in my salads. It could be. I've been eating a whole lot of salads. Scale was down 4 pounds this morning, though, in spite of last night's indiscretion, so I see more salad in my future. (That's probably a blip -- I'm betting it will be back up by a pound or two tomorrow. But still, progress.)

Declaration of War

WHEREAS 180 days have elapsed since the conclusion of our most recent pregnancy, and

WHEREAS the final 10 pounds (known variously as 4.5 kilos, 9.57 minas, or 0.15 talents) accrued during that pregnancy have most rebelliously, incorrigibly, and unlawfully declined to remove themselves from our sovereign borders, and

WHEREAS our preferred royal shorts can only be zipped in a supine position, and

WHEREAS this state of affairs is most unbecoming to our royal dignity, and

WHEREAS in four short weeks we shall celebrate the commencement of our quadragesimal year, and we are earnestly desirous not to cross the bounds of that year in our present steatopygian state, and

WHEREAS our previous desultory attempts to evict these unlawful trespassers have proved unavailing,

BE IT KNOWN that we hereby declare war on those accursed ten pounds.

Chocolate!

I am finally following up on my offer of chocolate to the people whose guesses about the baby's arrival were closest. Julie got the weight right and guessed that she'd be born on the day I actually went into labor. Susan called the Dec. 23 arrival. Ariella also got the birthweight exactly right. Email me your address and I will send some chocolate your way. Let me know if you're a milk person or a dark person. :-)

In Which I Am Relieved Not To Eat That Particular Slice of Humble Pie

Okay, I'm now two hours or so from the beginning of my 41st week, so it looks like I can skip the placentophagy. I have long labors as well as long gestations, so even if I am felled by a mighty contraction in the writing of this post, I'm going past my due date. Which is good, because a person so confident that she is not no way nohow going to have a baby is a person in a vulnerable position. Humble pie with added homegrown organ meat is not a dish I would relish, personally.

Oh, a funny about due dates: the woman who coordinates music at our parish called me today. She is a very kind lady, if perhaps a bit too heavily influenced by Liberace in matters both musical and sartorial, and she asked me when I was due. "Today," I said. She gasped. "You're so tiny!" she exclaimed. (I am tiny like a beluga whale is tiny. Compared to a sperm whale, maybe I'm tiny.) I told my husband about this conversation and he said, "You mean today's your due date?" Isn't it a little surprising that he didn't know?

A few December knitting pictures, and then I am going to kick back and enjoy the quiet in my house. All my children are sleeping and my husband is out playing poker with the guys.

(Trying Not To Be Quite So) Garden-Impaired

Back in July I asked for ideas about the weed-infested beds around my house, but I have only done anything about them in the past couple of weeks. (Jody said fall was the best time to put in perennials, so I figured I had time.) I was excited to put in some of the things you all suggested, but then realized when I went to the garden store that I hadn't told you: we have lots more shade than sun. This is mostly good -- we didn't turn on our air conditioning a single time this summer -- but rules out many of the plants I might have liked to try.

I am going to make a note of what I planted, so that if it comes back up next year I won't have to puzzle over what it might be called. I put in about two dozen bulbs: grape hyacinths, crocuses, and daffodils (my favorites). I'm hopeful that since daffodils bloom before the trees are leafed out, they'll get the sun they need. On the north side of the house I decided I would just be boring and stick with hostas for now: reliable (barring a late frost like the one that took out most of the hostas that used to live in those beds), reasonably pretty, nice and leafy to keep the weeds from getting a foothold. So I've got hostas behind and purple pansies, at the moment, in the front. I can manage to keep a few annuals in there, I think, despite my garden impairment.

Moving clockwise: on the east side of the house I put in a speedwell variant that can be happy with some shade, and cheery yellow daisies. On the south side, where it's full shade, I put in some vinca (purple-flowering ground cover) and lily of the valley. A pal offered me some ferns and they might go back there as well.

Around on the west we've had these hideous perennials: giant broad-leafed things with ugly ugly white flowers. I hate them. So I dug them all up, which was a project, and thinned out the badly overgrown tiger lilies that live by the sidewalk between our house and the next-door neighbors' house, and plopped in a mix of tiger lilies and day lilies. I am hoping for a riot of orange and yellow to replace the forest of ugly. On the northwest corner I put in another speedwell variety that prefers more sun, and some lavender. I am hoping they will grow up tall and purple and low-maintenance.

I am doing this pretty late in the season, but it's been quite warm here so I'm hoping they can get settled in before the first frost. If not, they were mostly 75% off so I'm not out a ton of money. We'll see, I guess.

Keeping Me Humble

Some things about me you can't tell from this blog. One of them is that I have crazy hair. If left to its own devices, it would stage a takeover of the free world -- it's that crazy. I have a serious gel habit. I have put lanolin on my hair because I was so sick of the frizz. But in July I set aside my book snobbery long enough to buy a copy of Curly Girl, and I've been happier with my hair ever since. This is me on my birthday, mostly frizz-free: 

Today I was planning to run for the first time in a while (actually, since right before all that CPS garbage started), so I didn't take a shower this morning. My attempt at a run was abortive: one ankle was complaining loudly about carting 17 extra pounds around, and then my round ligament started aching. I didn't get very far. Still unshowered, I went to pick up Pete from preschool. He and I and my hellbent-on-hegemony hair (it's been rainy in the Midwest and my hair gets huge in the rain) went to the new natural foods store in town.

Pete had a lot of fun scooping rolled oats and flaxmeal out of their bins and into our bags. We browsed through the aisles, and I was just about to head for the register when a woman approached me. "Would you be willing to be in a commercial for the new store?" she asked me.

I agreed. We cruised the cereal aisle for the camera, talking about the options and chucking one box in the cart. I signed a waiver allowing them to use the footage. We left the store and I realized I had just given permission for them to put me on television with hair that looked kind of like this.

Oops.

Garden-Impaired

In the spring when I should have been setting out petunias, I was alternately struggling to finish the spring semester and lying on the couch moaning. Ergo, no petunias. Instead I have a breathtaking crop of weeds in the beds around my house. This afternoon I went out and hacked and pulled and wrestled several cubic feet of them down to the curb (doing a less thorough job than I might have liked because when I pulled out my gardening gloves they were filled with insect egg sacs -- ick!). I still have more to do but I am going to replace the gloves first.

I aspire to be a gardener but I do not even know where to start. Fact 1: I have killed mint plants. Mint plants! Fact 2: I have killed hostas. (Actually it was a late frost that killed the hostas but then they didn't come back the next year. I thought hostas were supposed to be tougher than that.) Fact 3: I do not have a lot of time for gardening.

If you have any recommendations for me -- plants that will thrive in partial sun under benign neglect, favorite websites, any tips or tricks or what have you -- lay them on me, please. I live in a pale yellow house and so red and pink flowers are probably mostly out. I'm willing to pay for some perennials but I don't even know if I can put them in the ground right now. I need to figure something out fairly soon or the weeds will come creeping back. Not even creeping -- they'll come galumphing boldly while their vorpal thorns go snickersnack (she types ruefully with her scratched and sweaty hands).

P.S. My brother, who comments here as Stephen, is 29 today. He is ushering in his thirtieth year with a frenzied effort to finish his dissertation, due to his committee tomorrow for his defense in two weeks. Want to wish him well?