Light and Momentary

Speedy speedy key lime pie

Four of my five children are home this week and Alex assures me that I do not have to send him mashed potatoes in the mail. I know, objectively, that he is in Manhattan, able to obtain any quantity of any type of food his heart desires. But I cannot shake the certainty that he will be pining for MY mashed potatoes.

I am holding out hope for a spectacular Easter.

Stella is suggesting that we mix it up a little this year, since this will be the smallest Thanksgiving dinner of her entire life. She wonders: is pumpkin pie truly necessary? She suggests that key lime pie would be a better alternative.

We will of course be eating pumpkin pie on Thursday. (Side note: in another year I would have ended that sentence with "because we are not heretics." But this year I am so troubled by the conflation of heresy with political affiliation that I can't make that little joke any more. Serve pumpkin pie, or don't serve pumpkin pie. No skin off my nose. In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.) But this key lime pie is so easy and our Thanksgiving is so much smaller than usual that I am perfectly happy to make a pre-Thanksgiving pie.

Here's what you do: make or buy a graham cracker crust. If you make it, let it cool. Combine a can of sweetened condensed milk, 1.25 cups of heavy cream, and key lime juice to taste. It should be tart enough to make you wince a little bit. Whip with an electric mixer until it holds its shape. Plop into the crust and chill. I think most key lime pie recipes require eggs and baking, but we love this no-bake version at our house. If you are looking for low-stress alternatives to more conventional Thanksgiving dessert recipes here in this most unconventional November, Stella thinks you can't go wrong with this one.

A 2020 Ornament

This morning I was talking to an old friend who is in the middle of some hard things. I cannot do anything about the work stuff or the family stuff or the health stuff, but my ears pricked up when she said she had been looking unsuccessfully for a Christmas ornament: she wanted a Santa Claus wearing a mask.

That is a problem I can solve.

I am going to add a pompon to the top of his hat, and I have a bunch of ends to weave in. But he's almost done.

Pete wants me to make one for our tree too, and I think I will extend the mask a little higher (even Santa needs to cover his nose) and make it slightly less rectangular.

I started to write out the pattern, but I got to the short-row section of the beard and the pattern degenerated into "and then I kind of wung it; you can too." I'll pay closer attention next time.

This is not a post about baby hiccups

I had planned to post about knitting progress today, but I accidentally posted a time capsule instead. I republished a post from 2004 when Miriel asked on Twitter for cranberry baking recommendations. Instead of "publish on..." I clicked "publish now." This resulted in a post dated today, chronicling my trip to the zoo with friends and speculating about whether Pete was already having in utero hiccups. As you might imagine, a post about my 20-week pregnancy sparked some confusion. So! If you need cranberry recipes, they should now appear in the correct decade's archives. (I can recommend both the cranberry cake and the cranberry-dried cherry bars (scroll down to #7).) Let us now discuss knitting progress.

Do you remember that I was doing a Stephen West mystery knit-along? I should have known that it would be hard to keep up with the weekly pattern releases, because he told us up front that we needed 500g of fingering weight yarn. That is 1.24 miles of yarn, worked on 3.25mm needles. I was never going to get that finished in a month.

This pattern seems to be focused on exploring fun if not especially cohesive things you can do with slipped stitches. The middle section was a blast, but it has become less fun. The thing about big shawls is that the further you go, the more endless rows of purling are required. Current stitch count: 467 and growing. It's a lot of acreage.

That honeycomb section in the middle is supposed to lie flat, but it is rolling like the dickens. I suspect it will continue to roll even after I smack it around with a steam iron, because it's all stockinette. This is the downside to a mystery knit-along; you can't say to yourself, "You know, I'm going to edge this section with garter stitch so it doesn't roll like all the ones I'm seeing on Ravelry."

Its recipient is enthusiastic, even if its knitter is a little less so at the moment. I still have to finish the checks, the triangles, and the chevrons. I am trying to decide whether the hot pink should reappear for the triangles, the chevrons, or maybe both. I will report back.

A public health ditty

Look, it's a silly song about the pandemic. Lyrics follow.

Chorus:
It's not that hard to cover your nose
Inside your mask is where it goes
The COVID case count grows and grows
So please take care to cover your nose

Verse 1:
You wouldn't wear your pants below your privatest of parts
You care about your neighbors' lungs; you care about their hearts
You can spread the virus long before your very first symptom shows
So please take care to cover your nose

Verse 2:
Your doctors and your nurses are among the hardest hit
Spare a prayer for long-term care workers; they're in the thick of it
Pneumonia is no picnic and a vent just straight-up blows
So please take care to cover your nose

Bridge:
We are all in this together, friends and strangers
So we all must work together, no Lone Rangers
(though even the Lone Ranger wore a mask
I suggest you do the same)

Verse 3: 
It's not a magic bullet but it cuts the odds you'll spread
the virus to your neighbor, who might wind up all too dead
A quarter-million deaths and counting; here's what I propose
Let's all take care to cover our nose

Even in Australia

On this day my two youngest kids resumed online learning. It went fine for one of them. The other-- well, I'm pretty tired right now. In August it got better after two weeks. I will keep saying this to myself. (But you guys, those two weeks were bad.)

Also on this day my husband returned to working at home; his office is closed indefinitely. 

In between interruptions I contrived to lose all of the work I did in my stats program today, and learned that a collaborator thinks we should redo all of the quantitative analyses for our paper.

I know that people have no-good very bad days in Australia too. But if I had had this bad day in Australia, it would not be pitch dark at 5:08pm. And huh, I just discovered that the total number of COVID cases reported in 8 months across the entire continent of Australia is less than the number of new COVID cases in my state this week. There's something to be said for Australia.

A Cautious Defense of Ezekiel Emanuel

Ezekiel Emanuel is getting a lot of hate these days, ostensibly for an article he wrote for The Atlantic six years ago, but really, I think, because outrage is contagious and reading long-form articles requires effort. Do I like the ableism and the utilitarianism in that article? No, I do not. Is it appropriate for people to be freaking out because a EUTHANASIA ADVOCATE has been appointed to the COVID PANEL and it is MORE PROOF that Biden worships Satan?

No. No, it is not.

To my eye, that article is an exhortation to think seriously about your own preferences for end-of-life care, and to have the hard conversations up front with your loved ones. It is a distortion of Catholic teaching to suggest that maximum lifespan should be the goal in managing end-of-life care. If an 80-year-old woman is diagnosed with advanced cancer, she can absolutely refuse the chemo that might give her three more months of retching and brain fog. If I get seriously ill with COVID, I want to be treated aggressively. I have a lot of living left to do. But I might be less willing to be mechanically ventilated if I were 25 years older -- it's hard on anybody to be intubated, it's especially hard on elderly people, and the last time I looked at the numbers on post-extubation recovery for elderly COVID patients, they weren't very encouraging. I'm not obligated to consent to a highly invasive treatment that's not very likely to help.

Far too often, this kind of risk-benefit analysis turns into accusations about DEATH PANELS and KILLING GRANDMA (although, weirdly, many of the people who were yammering the loudest about DEATH PANELS in 2008 are now loudly asserting that Grandma's had a good run so let's protect the economy). Let me be clear: direct action to end a patient's life is gravely immoral. But Emanuel seems to agree with me about that: he says, "Since the 1990s, I have actively opposed legalizing euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide."

Making good decisions about end-of-life care is hard work, and we often do a rotten job of it in this country. I cannot say enough good things about Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, which treats many of the same questions Emanuel considers in his article. (Seriously, read it. One of the best books I've read in the last ten years. The usual reminder applies: if you click my affiliate link and purchase the book, Amazon will pay me a few cents.) When I worked in long-term care facilities, I was often a part of these conversations: your mom is dying, and she can't eat safely, so let's talk about the options. This stuff is never going to be easy, but it is a whole lot more straightforward if the family is in agreement and confident that their decisions align with their loved one's wishes. If the loved one has just had a massive stroke and you can't tell whether they're asking for water or quiet or a bedpan, it's significantly more complicated to have a conversation about DNR orders.

It is a core truth of our faith that we cannot be ruled by fear of bodily death. We see this in the writings of St. Paul, looking with equanimity at his prospects of living and dying. It's kind of weird that St. Francis called death our sister, but I am not going to argue with him about it. It seems very odd to 21st-century eyes that the Mother Superior at the Carmel in Lisieux required St. Thérèse to forgo pain medication, but it is another piece of evidence that refusing medical treatment is compatible with living a holy life. We cannot deliberately speed death's arrival, but we don't always have to fend it off vociferously.

I dislike much of the reasoning that undergirds Emanuel's thinking. His distaste for disability is problematic, for one. (Although-- he is making an excellent point when he writes about how seldom people understand that disability can be an unexpected side effect of medical treatment. We want to believe that a recommended treatment will make us all better. Sometimes it makes us worse.) His emphasis on productivity as a metric of human worth is also problematic; my value as a human being is unrelated to the number of papers I wind up publishing. But his conclusions seem correct to me: end-of-life care in this country is a mess, and we can make it better by approaching it thoughtfully. Furthermore, he is not saying that his decisions should be your decisions. He says explicitly that he provides concrete assistance and emotional support to elderly people who want to pursue medical treatment that he would decline for himself. I think we do him an injustice when we assume that his thoughts in a personal essay will translate into egregious policy errors. There is nothing in this essay that makes me think he will be sneaking into hospitals, holding pillows over the faces of elderly COVID patients in order to free up intensive care beds for younger people.

When it was just people ranting on Facebook about the evils of this appointment, I wasn't too fussed. But today America published an article that I find weirdly alarmist. I was braced for the worst when Emanuel started talking about policy recommendations in his Atlantic article, but I'm 100% comfortable with his policy recommendations. He suggests that we rethink our emphasis on lifespan as a metric of healthcare quality, and that we put more money into researching the disabling conditions that affect the elderly, such as Alzheimer's.

I am open to other perspectives here, but I do think that if a person says, "I have reached this conclusion about my own personal decisions, but other people are welcome to conclude differently," we should not infer that he is SECRETLY PLOTTING to MAKE everyone do what he would do for himself. If he has other published writings I should know about, I'd be happy to read them. (I'll let you know up front that I don't think being more deliberate about end-of-life healthcare spending is evil, as implied by the America writer.) If your work with dying patients is more recent than mine (I haven't worked in long-term care since 2003), I'd be very interested in your point of view. If you just want to share some thoughts about end-of-life decision-making, I'd love to hear from you too. [Wonders briefly if it's a bad idea to write about euthanasia on the internet; pushes "publish" anyway...]

And counting

How many people do you know who have had COVID? I know six people who are currently ill, one person who had it in the summer, and one person who probably died of COVID in March.

A week ago I only knew one person who'd had confirmed COVID and one person who'd had probable COVID. It's kind of troubling that the number quadrupled so quickly. But I bet I'm not the only person seeing the nationwide acceleration happening in my own friends and family, right? You too?

This is a post about vacuum cleaners

Occasionally I bump up against something that makes me say, "Wow, I am totally middle-aged. My younger self would have wept if she had known this was her future." Last month I met an old friend for a hike, and she said, "I drove below the speed limit to optimize my gas mileage!" I burst out laughing when I imagined how her 20-year-old self would have greeted that dispatch from the future. But here I go, writing an entire blog post about vacuum cleaners.

Three years ago my husband the Mighty Bargain Hunter found a Xiao Mi robot vacuum on super-sale. It worked really well for more than two years, and then its performance began to decline. It complained about its new filters. I bought different filters and it complained about those too. I turned the volume down so I didn't have to listen to its complaints about perfectly good filters. This did not work at all, because the volume would be minimized for warnings I actually wanted to hear -- "please rescue me," it would whisper inaudibly, "I am trapped beneath the bed" -- and then it would override the app's volume control somehow so it could grouse about its filter at the usual volume. "I don't like this filter! Clean it! Or fetch me a new one! Not that new one, a better new one!" 

It didn't affect the vacuuming, so we all just learned to tune it out. But then it came time to change the main brush. And you guys, this vacuum cleaner just could not deal with its new main brush. I bought the replacement parts from the recommended vendor, but something was badly wrong in Vacuum World. "I can't do this," it would whimper, "there's something STUCK in the main brush." 

Now the first 47 times it told me that there was something stuck in the main brush, I rushed right over to sort it out. But there was never anything stuck in the main brush. You think I'm exaggerating about the 47 times, but it started happening every five minutes. What is the point of having a robot vacuum if you have to leap off the couch to manage its hypochondriacal discontent every five minutes for an hour?

"It was really cheap," said my husband, after a factory reset failed to improve matters and I pondered my other options. "You could just buy a Roomba." So I bided my time and watched for a sale, and bought a Roomba.

If I were grading them, I'd give the Xiao Mi an A- for its first 2.25 years of service, the span between when I figured out how to get it to stop berating me in Chinese and when it started to believe it was being done in by its replacement parts. I'd give the Roomba a D+. It will just decide randomly that it's done, nine minutes into a cleaning, and return to the charging station. Or it will fail to notice that it doesn't have enough battery to return to the charging station, and die in the middle of the floor. It prefers to have its charging contacts aligned just so, and it may or may not charge if it's not perfectly situated.

The Xiao Mi would draw a map as it cleaned. I could view the map inside the app, so I could tell approximately how soon it would be done. I could pull up the map of my house and tell it just to clean the dining room, or to clean under the dining room table in MAXIMUM SUCTION mode. The Roomba's app tells me that a comparable zone cleaning option is Coming! Soon! but it is not coming soon enough for me.

This problem could not possibly be any first-world-ier, but that's what's on my mind tonight. Please regale me with your robot vacuum stories and advice.

Maybe this is a niche recommendation

The kids and I have been watching a show called Critter Fixers on Disney+. It is set in a veterinary clinic a hundred miles south of Atlanta, where two black men own a vet clinic. Part of what I enjoy about the show is their relationship. One is a little older and a little more sedate, and the other never seems to stop joking around. Pete said, "Mom, he's like you if your goofy streak was activated 100% of the time." They laugh, they diagnose and treat, they laugh some more.

They see a surprising variety of animals, which is part of the fun: wild turtles, whopping snakes, a chinchilla in need of an amputation, a bulldog in need of a C-section, a donkey in need of less testosterone, a cluster of alpacas in need of pregnancy confirmations. I also love the sense of place, the way they talk about their alma mater and their part of the world. 

The kids do not enjoy this show quite as much as I do, because the gross factor is indisputable. Tonight they exteriorized a cat's bladder and talked at length about how angry it looked, and they showed exactly how the vet removed three stones approximately the size of ping-pong balls. (Hold the phone, I just typed ping-pong into the browser bar to confirm hyphenation, and the internet wants me to know that ping-pong is also called whiff-whaff. Have you ever heard of whiff-whaff? Is this regional? Or is it a disinformation campaign at Wikipedia? Whiff-whaff, hmph.) They are not romanticizing the work that the vets do; there are plenty of shots of people up to their shoulders in animal orifices.

But if you share my interest in bodies' inner workings, you might like seeing what goes on in their lively and diverse clinic. Weirdly, the hard part for me is not the scenes where they are removing maggots. Instead I feel a little sad every time they hug their clients, which is a thing they frequently do. SOMEDAY we will be able to hug our veterinarians again if we choose to do so. 

Snip

Today was the day of the pandemic on which I cut off all of my hair.

I had let it get really long. It never looks very long, because it's so curly, but back in July I stretched it out for a picture -- my hands are at my waist.

The first time I gave myself a dramatic haircut the stakes felt a little higher because I had to go back to work the next day. But now-- who cares? It will grow out by January. The next time I get a professional haircut she may well say "who the HECK put these layers in the back of your hair?!" Oh, well. I won't be the only client who looked at her reflection in the bathroom mirror and said "this is a good day for a big change."

Heck, maybe I'll dye it blond to boot.