Light and Momentary

Hot Bananas

"The first day of the semester," I said to myself this evening, "always feels like hot bananas."

"Wait, what??" I said back to myself, before I realized that I must have mashed up "feels like hot garbage" and "is bananas." The first day of the semester has not left me feeling like hot garbage, thankfully, but I must have needed an intensifier there, because just regular old bananas were not adequately descriptive. I do not usually live a life in which I get 50 work emails a day; that's how it always is during the first week of the semester.

A few of you asked to see a picture of the weekly page I mentioned in my last post, so here you go:

You guys, if you need your own pineapple washi tape, the set I've been linking to will only cost you $0.17 per 5-meter roll. It's a whole lot of fun for the low low price of $8. (Periodic reminder: most Amazon links that appear here are affiliate links. If you click that link and buy yourself some hedgehog/pineapple/rainbow mustache washi tape after you read this post, Amazon will give me a nickel or so with which to buy myself more washi tape.)

When I drafted that last post I included a picture of my then-current daily log page, but it left me feeling unexpectedly vulnerable. It was a little weird, actually: I would totally blog an observation like "Mood: cloudy with a chance of meltdown" but I didn't want to post a picture of that observation. Some of the reluctance was more sensible, because there are some real names and other identifying information on that page. The idea that someone has waded through years of rambly quirky posts in order to seize with nefarious intent upon the one moment in which I mention my kid's school by name, or to use my course numbers to determine when my house is likely to be empty-- that's a wacky idea, I know. And yet I didn't post the picture.

One of the keys to marching through all those tasks cheerfully is to be disciplined about getting to bed on time, so I will keep this post brief and head off to bed with Edwin Drood. Good night, all. Wish me luck with my hot bananas, please.

I announce with trembling pleasure

Oh, man, no post could ever live up to a title like that one, but especially not this post. The title comes from a London Times review of Watership Down, which was quoted in the copy of Watership Down that I checked out from my junior high library over and over again. The reviewer said something like "I announce with trembling pleasure the appearance of a great story," which could not be more different from the book reviews I mostly read these days. I am reading Watership Down to Stella these days, and thinking as always about the reasons why I love it. She is totally into it, and Pete is listening in some of the time too. So that's a happy January thing.

Although it sparked the title of this post, it has nothing to do with the planned content of this post, which is: I announce with trembling pleasure that I have devised an excellent washi tape storage solution. I mean, they're practically the same thing, right? Adams wrote 450 pages describing a fictional world with its own language and folklore; my husband went to Hobby Lobby. Six of one, etc.

Here is what I did: I bought a plastic pencil case at Walgreens that was big enough to hold the stencils. (Oh my word, you guys, the stencils came on Monday and I realized that I had failed to read the fine print. There are twenty sheets of stencils. I have a leaning tower of Pisa stencil, for all my Italian-engineering-fail stenciling needs. I have a Google Plus logo stencil, just in case I have an urgent need to stencil my feelings about a defunct social media platform, I guess? Anyway: stencils in the bottom. Pens and highlighters on top. Elwood brought me a 5/8" dowel and a little bag of dowel caps. I sawed the dowel into appropriately sized lengths and TADA!

Even Blackberry would find it clever, I expect.

So now I have a portable toolbox that will allow me to make more log pages, adorned with rainbow mustache washi tape. And stencils. I did not perceive a need for rainbow mustache washi tape in my life before 2019 came along, but here in the new year it is definitely taking up some space in my head.

The trouble with bullet-journaling, as with any planning system, is that it's entirely possible to spend more time deciding whether you want to adorn your to-do list with the white tape that has russet hearts OR the salmon tape with gilt hearts than you do actually accomplishing the tasks upon it. But I've been pretty motivated to clear the decks this week. I'll head into the new semester with the laundry caught up, flat surfaces cleared off, email inboxes empty, paper inbox in good shape. And tomorrow when I make a new weekly log page in an attempt to corral the chaos, I will be able to select a roll of washi tape without sending five other rolls flying every which way. Will lit be pineapples or tiny gold stars? 

I'm sure the suspense is crushing you.

DOMS of the Will

Over the weekend I was trying to get back in the exercise groove. I ran on Saturday and Sunday. I did yoga on Saturday; I went rock-climbing with Joe on Sunday. And, perhaps predictably, by Monday afternoon I was too sore to reach up and scratch my head. I needed, like, a robot hairstylist to assist me. 

In this week where the kids are in school and I am not, I have been trying to Get Stuff Done. I did so many things on Tuesday in particular -- phone calls and emails and errands. On Wednesday I spent part of the day at a big noisy symposium, and part of the day trying to do more things, and by Wednesday night I needed, like, a robot hairstylist except for routine brain tasks. They call it DOMS when it's in your body -- delayed onset muscle soreness. I was feeling something DOMS-like in my brain. 

Up to a point this is part and parcel of being a person who loves new year's resolutions. If you always resolve to push your body a little farther in the new year, you're always going to be a little bit sore in January. It would have been smarter if I had preserved my ability to apply conditioner without assistance, I know, but a little muscle soreness can be a pleasant reminder of a happy productive workout. Generally, I think, I am able to read my body's cues about how hard to push and when to back off. (Rock-climbing is a different kind of workout, with shorter bursts of high intensity.)

The thing that causes me perpetual perplexity is how hard to push and when to back off when it comes to matters of the brain. I have a problematic tendency to measure my value in terms of my output. Sometimes when I feel myself getting brain-tired I pause and say to myself, "What would feel restorative right now?" Often the answer is "Finding a different kind of box to check!"

I have arranged my life so that doing things I enjoy often gives me boxes to check: when I finish the cowl I am binding off for my 19yo, I will check it off my knitting list. When I read a Watership Down chapter to Stella tonight (the story of the king's lettuce!) it meant not only that we enjoyed the mysterious doctor describing the perils of the festering Lousepedoodle but also that I had a box to fill in on my habits page. Sometimes I say to myself, "Do you really want to do this thing or are you actually trying to please someone else and check a box in the process?"

Sometimes I'm not sure what the answer is.

Pushing back against the peculiar longevity

Our new fridge has been leaking. It started right after we got it in November: we'd wake up in the morning and there would be an ominous puddle in the floor. At first we weren't sure if it was an ominous dishwasher puddle or an ominous refrigerator puddle, because we have a tiny galley kitchen in a 1923 house where none of the floors are quite level. "Argh," one of us would say to the other, "there is a puddle in the floor." "Argh indeed," the other would say, wiping it up. I cannot in good conscience recommend the "argh at it and see if it goes away" management strategy for minor appliance malfunctions, but in this case it worked for a while. After about a week, the puddles disappeared. But we started seeing puddles again shortly after Christmas, sometimes twice a day. 

I called to schedule a repair visit. That's the kind of thing I often put off, because I expect it will be annoying, and lo it was annoying. The person at the call center kept calling me Mr. Gladly, and didn't seem to register that we have no plumbing attached to the fridge-- no ice maker, no water dispenser. Note to Future Jamie, though: it is much better to bite the bullet and get the 10 minutes of annoying out of the way. They scheduled a visit for the next day; the repair guy showed up within the promised window; the fix is easy.

Our fridge is supposed to have a plastic pan underneath it to catch the water generated by its self-defrosting mechanism. This pan is easy to break, apparently, because it's plastic. If you load it on a dolly, you have to do it just so or you'll crack the pan. Maybe the third-party delivery folks accidentally cracked it and thought we wouldn't notice the absence of a pan? Who can say? The repair guy, an extremely nice fellow named Phil, showed me how to slide the pan in when it arrives in the mail. "If you have trouble," he assured me, "it's under warranty. We'll come out and do it." I'm pretty sure we can handle a part installation that requires only two screws, but it's always good to have a backup plan. For now he has slipped a spare jelly roll pan into that spot, so we should be puddle-free until the new part arrives.

We are almost 14 years into owning this house, and I am finding that we work around a number of low-level annoyances instead of resolving them. Have you ever read the paper called The Peculiar Longevity of Things Not So Bad? It's about the outsize impact of low-level annoyances, CONFIRMED BY SCIENCE. So I am writing this post in case you have your own "thing not so bad" niggling at you today. Probably it's not your fridge; probably you have not been saying to yourself every morning "what if it's not water what if it's coolant what if the whole thing is breaking dying and Sears won't replace it because they've gone out of business alas what if" (because probably your brain is less likely to loop repeatedly through worst-case scenarios than mine), but I bet you have an annoying ten-minute phone call on your list that could make your life more pleasant once you suffered through the annoying part. This is a gentle nudge from me to you: go for it!

All The Things

"All The Things!" I exclaim every January.

"All The Things?" I ask a week later.

Don't mind me; I am just doing my usual January expectations dance. If dances still had names (what was the Watusi, anyway?) you could call it the Washing Machine: throw a bunch of stuff in there, shake it around, see what you get on the way back out. This year it is the Washing Machine With Added Washi Tape. (I bought a package of 48 tiny rolls from Amazon and my family is a little mystified by how much fun I am having with it. Well, to be honest I am also a little mystified by it, having long been baffled by the appeal of washi tape. But you guys: I have hedgehog washi tape. And pineapples. Also there are some stencils landing in my mailbox on Monday.)

Every year I go back to my resolutions post from the year before, and see what needs to be tweaked, or rebooted, or discarded with a wry and knowing chuckle. I had thought that it would be a little painful to walk through that process this year, because I kept thinking about the stuff I had resolved to do that just didn't get done. I had planned to read a bunch of Victorian literature and only read a little; I had resolved to do some adulting that remained un-adulted or only preliminarily adulted. (Is "adult" a transitive verb? I am not sure it can appear in a passive voice construction. But I suppose if I am going to verb that particular noun I can bend it all the way to my will.) It wasn't actually that bad, but there are some places where I'll need to try try again. That tenure packet, you guys, coupled with the bananapants state of the world in 2018, was not good for my resolver. 

I usually make Epiphany resolutions rather than new year's resolutions. The first week of January is a good time for me to think about possibilities and try some things out, and we're almost always on the road near the first of the year. To stick with that plan I'll have to fill in some blanks tomorrow, figuring out how much to emphasize habits vs. goals, and how high to aim. As Robert Browning wrote, a mom's reach should exceed her grasp, or how else will she manufacture a painful mid-February crash with spasms of self-loathing and a side of despair? (I kid! I kid!)

One of the lines on my shiny new habit grid says "L&M (3/wk)" and another says "in bed @ 9:45." Tonight I could only pick one of those things. Sometimes that's how it goes, I guess.

A rabbit hole lined with washi tape

i was given a Leuchtturm notebook for Christmas and I fear I have fallen down the bullet-journaling rabbit hole. Hit me with your favorite bullet journal resources, please, especially tricks for organizing miniature rolls of washi tape. The washi tape situation could get unmanageable. 

Travel Adventures

Hi, happy new year! We returned this evening from a visit to my parents' house and I am glad to be safely home. Last night I helped to start a fire in my mother's oven, and today we thought for the better part of two hours that our van was toast. I am hoping for a quieter tomorrow.

I made a cake for Alex's 22nd birthday in my mother's kitchen on Sunday. I put it in a springform pan, with a foil-covered tray on the rack below it. It didn't leak at all, which is not my usual experience with springform pans of a certain age. So last night, when I went to make a cake for our New Year's Eve celebration, I left out the foil-covered tray.

Surprise! Ten minutes after I slid it into the oven I smelled burning cake batter. It had oozed out of the pan in big buttery globs and plopped down onto the element. We slipped a foil-covered tray onto the rack below it to prevent further drips, and planned to clean it up after dinner was over and the oven was cool.

Except! Surprise, part deux! My mother jacked up the oven temperature to 450 after the cake was out so she could brown up some frozen Texas toast. 

"There is a fire in the oven," I said.

The cake batter which had contented itself with quietly blackening at 325 was actively burning at 450. There was a line of butter-fueled flames, lighting up the oven from the inside. They continued to flame after the oven was off. "Should I put flour on it?" my mother asked as she dumped a scoop of flour on it.

"Flour is a combustible powder," said my brother. 

We all watched with interest as the flour began to burn.

My brother smothered the flames with a saucepan. I put the Texas toast back in the freezer. After dinner my mother vacuumed up the flour. No harm, no foul. (No harm, no flou...r?) A tip from me to you: don't attempt to extinguish an oven fire with a scoop of flour. Maybe my mother's half-remembered tip is for grease fires, where the flour might absorb the grease and make it less available for burning. Or maybe it was 1950s-era Russian propaganda, designed to burn down the maximum number of American houses. Who can say?

***

This morning I rousted everybody out of bed early. We drank our coffee and packed our bags and loaded our van and said our goodbyes and zipped off to Mass. We headed toward home. Less than an hour into the trip the check-engine light clicked on and the van declined to drive at highway speed. It could go a labored 60mph, but it was clearly unhappy doing so. 

This seemed unlikely to work out smoothly on New Year's Day. We stopped in a tiny town to see if we could find an open auto repair shop, and after about 20 calls we found a place that could assess the car. To get there we had to drive back to the city.

I was doing my best to pray and trust, and I was remembering all the times that we have seen the kindness of strangers when unexpected events have slowed us down, but it was a stressful drive. The car was stuttering and complaining, struggling with any acceleration and especially with hills. "Seems like it's the transmission," said Elwood, as we listened to it working to reach its top gear.

Eventually we limped our way to our destination, where they told us they'd update us in about an hour. We walked to a Shoney's and started planning for the worst. Thankfully, through a sheer gift of grace, we were both really calm about the whole thing. The most likely explanation seemed to be something big: a serious engine problem or a transmission failure. After we finished eating we started looking for one-way rentals that could hold six people. We wondered if my dad would be willing to help us sell it for parts, or if we should try to figure it out on our own. It just doesn't make a ton of sense to put big repair dollars into a ten-year-old vehicle.

But! You guys! On the solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, the Blessed Mother came through for us in a big big way: the whole problem was that an oil pressure valve had failed, causing the van to run on just three cylinders. That's why it couldn't accelerate except in a sad half-hearted quarter-hearted eighth-hearted way. That's why it couldn't get to its highest gear-- not because of a transmission problem, but because of a power problem. An EASILY FIXED power problem. They had the part in stock and the repair was straightforward. We walked back from lunch expecting a terminal diagnosis and instead found a fully operational vehicle.

It makes me a little wobbly with gratitude, just typing it out.

Subtly Apocalyptic. Owlishly Apocalyptic.

Our tree-topper is this blingy star I bought on clearance at Target and have hated ever since. It always sits askew on the topmost branch, causing me vague dissatisfaction. I've thought for years about knitting a felted angel to replace it, and this year I finally sprang into action.

I've always hated our tree-topper and I keep thinking I should knit up a little felted angel. Elwood was on board with this plan until I said I'd need to buy a skein of yarn.

"How can you not have enough yarn?" he wanted to know. "There's so much yarn in our house!"

— Jamie (@mostgladly) December 17, 2018

For Elwood's sake I decided not to felt the angel, so I could use up a stashed skein of cream-colored superwash. I used Elizabeth Zimmermann's angel pattern from Knitter's Almanac and cast on 56 stitches on the 17th of December.

If you are a Catholic person thinking about angels on the 17th of December, especially a Catholic person who is fond of the O Antiphons, you might find inspiration striking you as you work on a project with seven ribbed panels. 

I decided to knit ERO CRAS into the panels of the new angel tree-topper's robe, and so I am googling knitted alphabets while drinking a pumpkin smoothie.

This is pretty much me acting like a caricature of myself.

— Jamie (@mostgladly) December 18, 2018

"That is very on-brand," observed my 19yo, when I told him what I was doing.

I am finishing up my annual read-through of the Bible, which is structured so that I'm spending December reading Revelation and the prophets. This reading schedule does not bring warm cozy angels to mind. The angels in these books are not saying "fear not!" because the world is scary and they've come to make things better. They're saying "fear not!" because they ARE the scary. (I mean, yeah, they've come to make things better. But I myself would need a little fear-not-ing if I encountered an angel with eyes like flaming torches.)

I decided that if I was going apocalyptic I might as well go whole hog, and give my angel eyes like flaming torches. My 16yo suggested a little butane. Elwood thought solid fuel would be a better choice. I decided to go for a subtle array of purl stitches to represent flames, which seemed less likely to send our Christmas tree up in smoke. Sadly, my angel's face now looks more like a mutant owl than like a herald of the almighty God. "You gotta go big, Mom," counseled my 16yo. He is optimistic that we could have actual flaming eyes without an actual flaming tree, but he says that if I am unwilling to go the butane route I should at least break out the red and gold yarn.

I hesitate to dip a toe into embroidery territory, given that Christmas Eve is Monday and this angel still needs arms and wings.

"You'll have to give it six wings, of course," said the 19yo. "I don't think I have time for that," I told Elwood, "although if it's covering its face with one set I wouldn't have to worry about how accurately I had rendered the flaming-torch eyes."

"Maybe," said Elwood, "angels grow a new pair of wings every year. One for this year, one for next year, one for the year after that."

"Like antlers!" I said, and we burst out laughing.

So. I do not love this quirky angel, but OH MY GOODNESS do I enjoy my quirky family.

Ragtag Messiah

You guys, Elwood told me yesterday about the singalong Messiah happening in our very own neighborhood tonight and I signed up and sang and it was SO SO FUN.

I thought I might need a corner to myself somewhere in case the praisiness of that splendid libretto overcame me like so--

via GIPHY

--but I managed to restrain myself. 

This was a volunteer production: volunteer orchestra, volunteer soloists, volunteer organizers, and of course a volunteer chorus. We were rough around the edges. I think one of the first violins needed to pause and tune her E string, maybe, and also there is a reason that Messiah rehearsals spend so much time on the melismata. But oh, you guys, an imperfect performance of astounding music is something well worth doing. It was a most excellent remedy for seasonal blues.

The kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord, hallelujah!

That's a wrap

Thirty days, thirty posts, ten Novembers in a row. Thanks for reading, my friends!