Light and Momentary

Surprise!

Zig's adoption fell through, so he'll be staying with us for a while longer.

I know you were all worried about how I was going to keep the back of my neck clean after his departure.

There was much cheering after the rescue organization called me this morning.

I do not think Ziggy would be very happy in our post-pandemic life, because he hates to be alone. I do not think it makes sense to adopt him.

But I keep thinking about it anyway.

Farewell to Ziggy

I told the kids I expected Ziggy to be adopted quickly, but I was still surprised when they called me up yesterday to say he would be leaving us on Saturday. It's only been 2.5 weeks.

Last week Pete asked me to text him from the driveway when I came home from church, so he could record Ziggy's welcome. The whole video was 2.5 minutes of enthusiastic dog greetings. I am sharing the middle 25 seconds here.

That's been pretty nice to come home to.

It wouldn't make sense to adopt a dog in the middle of the pandemic when our non-pandemic lives are not especially dog-friendly. But I'm thinking about it anyway. And if Ziggy's adoption fell through and they asked us to take him back, we would say yes in a hot second.

All My Children

Today I hit my work goals, and the smoke alarm did not go off, and no one cried when the technology didn't work properly, and we all took a long pleasant walk with Ziggy when school was over for the day. We'll call it a win.

Remember my grand fermentation plans? My legions of lactobacilli are multiplying. My kombucha is on its second ferment, and my kimchi is delicious in an eye-watering way.

I was really glad that I posted about how to brew kombucha back in 2016, because I wouldn't have remembered otherwise. After a while I got kombucha-ed out and passed my brewing setup along to a young adult of my acquaintance. As sometimes happens with young adults (and older adults too, I suppose), he was enthusiastic for a while and then his enthusiasm waned. When he returned my stuff I found [shudder SHUDDER SHUDDER] a grub living in the threads of the jar. 

Obviously, I set it on fire in the driveway, my preferred method of dealing with unexpected annoyances, and did not even think about brewing kombucha again for years.

So when I wanted to try it again, I needed a new scoby. This one seems to be working fine. If I get aspergillosis I'll be sure to let you know.

I followed this kimchi recipe, with 4 T. of gochujaru, and so far I'm very pleased with the flavors. Doesn't it look tasty?

There wasn't much brine at all, though, so today I mixed up some more and added it to the crock. Pete asked if I'd pull some out and store it in a little jar out for him before it got any funkier.

I have to say, it gives me a my-work-here-is-done feeling that Pete wants his very own kimchi.

Next up: sourdough. MORE lactobacilli! ALL the lactobacilli! 

(Let us disregard the weirdness of calling this post "All My Children" when I am raising all these lactobacilli specifically to eat them. Moving right along!)

Pipe Cleaner Queen

Back in the spring one of the kids made me a pipe cleaner crown to wear when I was working. It was such a weird season: I was trying to get my class moved online and stay on top of my work, I was consuming a lot of news, and I was trying to help the kids make the transition to online school. It wasn't always easy for them to tell when I was thinking hard while staring at the laptop screen and when I was just looking grumpy while staring at the laptop screen, so I wore the crown when I needed to work without interruptions.

Today I donned the crown again. This is hard, you guys. It's a first-world privilege-y flavor of hard, in which we have jobs and savings and health (we hope! worrisome COVID exposure for one of the college kids, so we'll see what happens there), but it's hard nonetheless.

The school assumes a degree of parental availability that I find intensely frustrating, and a degree of tween tech savvy that I find unrealistic. I mostly get it; it's a terrible situation for them. But at the same time, it is making me BONKERS. Why would a teacher assume that I can go over to the school on short notice during work hours? Why would she pressure my child about it?

It seems like the teachers assume the tech learning piece will be quick and effortless. Install the browser extension and start using it immediately in this class discussion. Create a Flipgrid account and use their interface to upload a three-minute video, due today. Download this app and use it to submit your assignment in the next 30 minutes.

I am providing a lot of tech support and a lot of reassurance: it's not your fault if Google Classroom won't load. It's not your fault if Google Drive is laggy. If the audio isn't working on your school-supplied laptop, your teacher will work with you to complete the assignment later.

The kids are also dealing with some of the same video chat woes that the grownups are. Was that mean or just clueless? Was I weird and awkward in that conversation or was it normal for this weird and awkward situation? Peer feedback from junior high students is not improved by moving it online.

What I am finding with Stella is that the amount of figuring stuff out she has to do to make the technology work is siphoning off a non-trivial fraction of of her ability to learn the curricular content that the technology is supposed to deliver. I doubt she has any idea about the substance of the class in which she installed the browser extension, because she was so panicked about not being able to get it to work immediately. "Darling," I say, "everybody has trouble getting browser extensions to work sometimes. Grownups have trouble with this stuff too. It's going to be okay."

She would prefer it, I think, if it were already okay. I would also prefer it.

I have been feeling mounting frustration about the volume of interruptions. Elwood came home from the office on Friday and asked me how my day had been, and I surprised myself by starting to cry again. "I can't think hard about hard things if I'm interrupted all the time," I said, "and the school's assumption is that the kids can interrupt me. I can't work like this."

This morning at 8 I pulled out the pipe cleaner crown and a pair of earplugs, and I said, "If the house is actively burning down at some point in the next two hours, please let me know. If something is just smoldering, I expect you to address it yourselves. The fire extinguisher is in the pantry."

After those two hours I checked in with the kids and walked the dog around the block, and then I put the crown back on again. I was not asked to assist when the smoke alarm went off during lunch preparations, but I did need to assist with a medium-sized after-lunch meltdown. Were those things related-- would it have been a smoother afternoon if I had been more available in the morning? I don't know. I just don't know.

He has looked with favor on some of his servants

I didn't tell you guys about the Big Kerfuffle last year around this time, when my pastor told the leaders of the parish Sanctity of Life committee that nobody could be in parish leadership who wasn't willing to acknowledge the authority of the pope. This resulted, apparently, in a pretty tense meeting and the departure of two long-time committee stalwarts. He told the committee that they were expected to take a broader view of life issues going forward, and he asked me if I would be willing to get more involved.

This has been a bit of a struggle for me. I'm pretty sure I didn't tell you about the Respect Life month blow-up last year. I had written a blog post about climate change as a sanctity-of-life issue, and the pastor put it in the bulletin. I asked my family to edit THE HECK out of that post before I put it up on the parish website, but I did not foresee the intensity of the reaction: many, many angry emails about the folly of putting liberal claptrap in the parish bulletin. The pastor was entirely supportive and unruffled, but DANG I found it stressful.

The people on the committee are lovely, generous people. It's just that they like the way they've been doing things, with the Life Chain and the October fundraiser for Birthright and the Five Non-Negotiables voting guides from the days before Fr. Pavone jumped the entire shark. They're not so interested in a parish campaign to urge our congressman to oppose legislation that makes it easier for corporations to dump chemicals in local waterways. That doesn't feel like protecting gestating babies to them, even though gestating babies are the ones most likely to be harmed by that piece of legislation.

Today is the national day of remembrance for the unborn, and I went over to the Catholic cemetery in the rain for a prayer service. I was getting dressed in a hurry and pulled a random T-shirt* out of the drawer. "Maybe that's not a great shirt to wear to this particular meeting," I said to myself, but I put it on anyway. It's the feast of the Holy Name of Mary, and Our Lady is the patroness of the unborn, and most importantly I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO WORRY about wearing a shirt with LITERAL SCRIPTURE QUOTES to a PRAYER MEETING full of CATHOLICS.

"Jamie," said one of the participants after the prayer service was over, "what does your shirt say?"

"It's the Magnificat!" I said, with cheerful voice and sinking heart.

They read it aloud: cast down the mighty, send the rich away, fill the hungry, lift the lowly.

"Oh," said someone. "Well, let's not send all of the rich away."

*It's a great T-shirt: soft and durable. If you decide to buy your own Magnificat T-shirt, be advised that they run small. I ordered two sizes up and the fit is just right.

Ziggy the Barbarian Dog

"Will you write a guest post about Ziggy?" the kids wanted to know. "Will you? Will you?"

I can't really write a guest post in Ziggy's voice, though, because Ziggy is still figuring out how to speak Human. Ziggy came from a place out in the country where a bunch of dogs were removed from the owner's care because of animal hoarding concerns. We are lucky that he seemed to understand the idea of Outside Business right away. But there are lots of other ideas that he did not grasp: Eating Like a Normal Dog, Drinking Like a Normal Dog, Playing Is Fun.

The shelter gave us a big bag of dry dog food and I scooped some up for him when we got home. (Oh, you guys, he was so shy about coming out of his crate when we first brought him inside the house. I put some peanut butter on a spoon to coax him out, and he had to think very hard about whether it was worth it.) I was expecting him to react like Champ, whose attitude toward food was always NOW!NOW!NOW!MORE!NOW! Ziggy didn't know what the heck to do with that dry food. He would pick up one piece at a time, like a little old lady with loose dentures trying to eat a bowl of dry shredded wheat. He would step away from the bowl with his one piece of food, and chew it slowly and deliberately with his mouth open. As often as not it would fall out on the floor.

It was so weird that I asked the vet to check his teeth on Tuesday night when he went back to the shelter to be neutered. They think it's 100% behavioral. "Those dogs were barfing up zucchini peels and plastic when we left with them," the director explained. I guess dry dog food is probably pretty weird if you're used to eating garbage. Ziggy still seems to think it's like food-flavored packing peanuts, but he's getting better at eating it. (He is very happy to eat the egg/rice/pumpkin mixture I am giving him twice a day. He doesn't think it tastes like packing peanuts at all.)

He had no idea what to do with a bowl of water, either. He would take tiny sips occasionally, but I was getting a little worried about how little he was drinking. When we took him along to meet the college kids at a Labor Day picnic, Joe claimed credit for teaching him to drink from his little portable bowl. (I asked Joe if he could also teach Ziggy not to tear at his stitches with his teeth, but Joe is still working on that one from afar.)

The weirdest thing is that he had no idea how to play. I roll a ball to him and he just...watches it roll. We bought him a squeaky chew toy and he surveyed it with genuine alarm. Tonight he was chewing on Pete's mechanical pencil and instead of feeling annoyed I was like, "Go, Ziggy! You're being so normal!"

He is awfully fond of us, though. When I came back from a 20-minute errand today (can we talk about the schools' assumptions re: parents' availability? because I am finding those assumptions pretty frustrating), he greeted me as if I were returning from an expedition to Samarkand. When he first sees us in the mornings he jumps for joy and tries to give us a million kisses. He is sleeping next to me as I type, all four feet resting on my leg, his head resting on my arm.

He is snoring gently. It's hard work, figuring out those wacky humans.

BLT-ish Pasta

Cook up about 4 pieces of bacon -- crispy or chewy, as you prefer. Fry a thinly sliced small onion in the fat until it is browned. Chop a bunch of arugula and wilt it in the fat. Deglaze with a tablespoonful of nice balsamic vinegar. Add in a cup of halved cherry tomatoes and cook them until they sag slightly. Sprinkle generously with black pepper.

Boil up the pasta of your choosing. Drain it when it is a still a tiny bit bit too al dente, pulling out a mugful of cooking water before you tip the rest down the sink. Finish cooking the pasta in the skillet, using the cooking water to amalgamate the noodles and sauce. Top with the bacon. Parmesan is nice, too.

Broody in Midlife

I was sure I had blogged at some point about the word "broody," which is how British women say they're thinking maybe they'd like another baby. It's a useful word with, as far as I know, no counterpart in American English. The closest thing I could find was a brief mention in this post from the end of 2008. (I'm glad I have those belly photos -- look at that baby!)

It is exceedingly unlikely that I will have more biological children, but I have been feeling a weird itch lately. "I want to brew kombucha!" I said to myself last week. "And learn to make kimchi! And give sourdough another go!"

Now I have a jar of kombucha fermenting in a corner of the pantry, and a head of cabbage in the fridge awaiting my ministrations. Is this strange determination to engage in fermentation the result of my middle-aged body crying out for probiotics? Or is it the midlife equivalent of broodiness, in which I am attempting to rear not children but teeming hordes of lactobacilli?

There might be a lot more lactobacilli in my house next week. Or maybe just a lot of weird smells. One of the two. 

Physicists

Seven years ago I published a paper that got some media attention, and one of my colleagues told me I should document the coverage for my tenure file. This is how I became aware of a blog post about my paper, written by a man who seemed to have been angered by the title. Seriously, it was clear from his post that he had not even read the abstract; he certainly did not read the full text. Instead, he concluded (based on the title, I remind you) that I had been permitted to write this paper because I was "a girl" and not because my hypothesis had any scientific merit.

I was grousing about his arrogance to Elwood, who said, "He must be a physicist." My mouth fell open, because this guy was indeed a physicist. Elwood (who was trained as a physicist) pulled up this XKCD comic:

In the years since then I have occaaaaaasionally been reminded of this comic while discussing various corners of the social/behavioral sciences with my husband. So when I saw this tweet yesterday--

U of Illinois brought back 40,000+ students to campus based on a model created by 2 very confident physicists, who said epidemiology was important but intellectually unchallenging.

Things are not going as planned, because it turns out students party and live together. pic.twitter.com/g5abUj1KsC

— Self-certified armchair epidemiologist (@yellingatwind) September 3, 2020

--it is just possible that I rolled my eyes and muttered about physicists and arrogance.

And it is also possible that I snort-laughed at this new XKCD today:

Meet Ziggy

We are fostering another dog.

Isn't he a cutie? His name is Ziggy.

So far he is much calmer than Champ.

Champ did have the idea, though, that he was supposed to sleep in his crate at nighttime, and Ziggy is not so sure that's a good idea.

He had juuuuust fallen asleep by my feet when the phone rang and woke him up. Hoping he eases back into sleep and stays there for a nice long stretch. We shall see.

Things have been tough around here, you guys. The combination of supporting kids in online school while also getting my own work done is kind of squashing me. I miss my big kids. I am crying regularly about dumb things and about not-so-dumb things. And I felt terrible telling Pete I didn't think he should go to the climbing gym, even though I think it was the right call. So I said yes to a foster dog instead, thinking we could all use a few more cuddles and a few more walks and a little bit of furry distraction.

Let us hope this was not a terrible idea.

Today a major publication listed Gladlyville as one of the places where the wheels are falling off the fastest nationwide, and when I read the story I felt this unexpected surge of relief. Like, "Oh! I'm not being a drama queen! We have had a sudden and troubling shift here and it does make sense that I would feel worried and uncertain."

I do not know what will unfold here, or in the town where my college kids are also watching the wheels fall off. (Let me tell you, if I were not deliberately vague about my location I would have some ALL-CAPS THOUGHTS for you about that situation.) I told Joe all summer that he should expect to come back home within six weeks, but it's still a little horrifying to watch the train as it flies screeching off the rails. But now there is a small and furry creature who is counting on me for food and love and walks, and who appreciates it when I skritch behind his ears.

Wish us luck as we help him settle in.