Light and Momentary

Pie

Probably four desserts for six people is a bit excessive.

Thawing

Laverne has decided that this is not a terrible place to be. It took her most of the day to reach this conclusion, but she is seeking out affection and accepting belly rubs a little gingerly. She isn't eating or drinking very much and she seems reluctant to do her business in front of people she doesn't know very well yet (I mean, I can sympathize with that feeling), but she is doing so much better tonight.

Today I finished my portion of the revisions for paper #3. You guys, I feel SO RELIEVED. It is likely that my co-author will recommend some minor final tweaks, but we're almost there. I told a friend tonight that I feel like a crane came along and removed a house from on top of me. I have been so squashed down by the weight of that task. It was so much work! Yikes! Academic publishing is a weird little ecosystem, because it is entirely possible that the editor could look at our stevedore-esque efforts to address every single concern raised in the review process and say, "...nah, reject." But I'm not going to think about that right now.

Today I made the Penitential Cranberry Sauce and the cornbread for stuffing, and whoops, I should have turned off the stock in time for it to cool. I'm not sure there would have been room for it in the fridge, though. Hm. Maybe I will put it in the Instant Pot overnight on the slow cooker setting.

A 16-pound turkey awaits my ministrations. I didn't get around to placing my turkey order until later than usual, and the butcher shop couldn't get me a fresh turkey smaller than 16 pounds. Nobody wants big turkeys this year, the guy on the phone explained. All right, I said, 16 pounds it is. It will be fine. We go through an astounding quantity of food when the college kids are home. If they're scrounging around for snacks tomorrow night I'll tell them to go gnaw on the turkey carcass.

Tonight's burning question: will Laverne finally break down and pee before we go to sleep for the night? Tune in tomorrow.

Laverne

We have a new foster dog. She is far and away the shyest of the dogs we've had here.

Her owner surrendered her to the shelter a couple of weeks ago, and she has been living with a foster family that had planned to leave town for Thanksgiving. We told them she could stay here with us over the holiday, and they dropped her off this afternoon.

Well. Laverne had some Thoughts about coming to our house. She growled at me when I tried to take her leash from their son, so I gave it back. They wound up carrying her up the porch steps (she weighs 50 pounds, so this was not like tucking a little purse dog under your arm) and plunking her on our welcome mat. We got the storm door closed behind them, and Laverne sat there, immobile and tense, for a solid hour.

We tried the treats they brought; we tried our peanut butter-oat dog treats. We tried peanut butter on a spoon. I scrambled her an egg, which they told us she loves, and she just looked at it, like, "Haven't you ever heard that you're not supposed to eat any food when you visit hell? I'm Laverne, not Persephone."

Slowly she let us pet her, and after that first hour we got the front door closed. But things didn't really improve from there. She spent the next two hours in the same spot, waiting forlornly for her family. At one point after I thought she and I were on petting terms, she told me to back the heck off.

After a little walk she came back inside more willingly, and parked herself on the steps for half an hour or so. Our steps are not the place I would choose to park myself if I were a 50-pound dog. She did not appear comfortable, but she was also not willing to move. 

As I wrote this post she eased cautiously down the steps and took up her station on the welcome mat, right by our drafty front door. With some coaxing she consented to move a foot or so to her dog bed, and she fell asleep there. I guess there are some tenuous good signs so far: she made a small effort at grooming herself, she gave Pete's face a tiny lick (he is her favorite so far), and she relaxed enough to fall asleep. 

But man, you have to wonder what could be in this dog's past to make her feel this anxious. I hope she is not having sad dreams about her other foster family.

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?