Light and Momentary

Done!

Hey, look at that! I made it to the thirtieth of November without any posts complaining about the trials of posting every day. Maybe I'll even post tomorrow, now that I'm in the groove. (But probably not.)

Happy feast of St. Andrew. We always have (vegetarian) haggis and neeps and tatties and a little gift for my Edinburgh-born son. Are you praying the novena?

I gave my last lecture for the semester today. I have four more classes to teach, two of which are stressing me out a little bit, but I don't have to prepare a full-length lecture again until January. Lecture prep is a crazy amount of work.

I am running one of the stressful classes tomorrow morning, so this evening's post will be quick and randomish. The end.

Cosmume Party

We have a chest full of costumes accumulated over the past 15 years, and they are in heavy rotation around here. Stella calls them "cosmumes," which is so heart-meltingly cute that the boys and I have adopted it temporarily, and she likes to dress me up. I was sitting on the couch tonight with various capes and other accoutrements draped fetchingly around me, watching the two younger boys play a game. I am still a little vague on the rules of this game, but they seem to go something like this:

1. Make loud laser death ray noises while bedecked with at least three items from the cosmume chest.
2. Say "HaHA! I got you with dark energy!"
3. Shake your head skeptically at the inevitable riposte ("No you didn't either!")
4. Switch roles.

Pete jumped on the couch and snuggled in close. He said to Joe, "You forgot that touching Mom makes you invincible!"

How's that for a superpower?

Mission accomplished, sweater detested

Remember that ferociously pink sweater in need of steeking? I cut the steek, which was kind of a rush, and I tacked down the facings, which wasn't too much of a pain, and I wove in the ends, and I said, "Here, sweetie, let me see how this fits."

"No like it! Don't wanna wear the Pink."

Pete was willing to model it briefly. (Do you see the sculpture in the background there? It's not a soul-sucking season-sucking sisyphean slog awaiting me. It's Art! Three-dimensional art. It is called "Seven People Live Here" and I fully expect it to make me a wealthy woman after its installation somewhere other than my couch.)

Morals of the story: (1) Steeking is fun and not scary, or at least not on this scale. (2) Knitting for preschoolers is unpredictable.

Third time's the charm

I just started two other posts and saved them as drafts. In one I was going to tell you all about some exciting logistic regression models. Can you contain your excitement? (I thought not.) In the other I was going to talk about things I wish I had known when I was going through RCIA 20 years ago. (Twenty years! I will have to have a party at Easter.) But neither of those posts will see the light of day (or the dark of night, as the case may be) until another time, and so I am trying again. This is a post about pasta.

When my husband and I were first married he would cook up a whole pound of pasta at dinnertime. "Why do you keep doing that?" I asked him a few months in. "We never come close to eating it all and leftover spaghetti isn't very good." He said, "When you make pasta you're supposed to make the whole box. That's how we did it in my family."

I forget now how our pasta argument worked itself out. Did he begin making half-boxes? Did I adjust to the leftovers? It was 18 years ago and the details are fuzzy. But as our family grew, the demand for pasta did too. For a while a one-pound box worked out perfectly. Lately, though, a pound of pasta leaves people asking for more. Unless it has a hefty sauce or I serve up a heavy side dish, there's competition for second helpings on noodle nights.

My husband has been saying for a couple of months that we need to accept the end of the one-pound days instead of looking in surprise at the empty colander. He has experimented with cooking up 2 12-ounce boxes, or some fragment of a giant box. I've been stuck in my one-pound rut, though -- after those months spent arguing with my husband that I was not no way no how going to cook a whole box, I have a hard time doing anything else now.

Tonight I cooked up two full pounds. I served it with a sauce of garlic/spinach/chickpeas/diced tomatoes, and do you know what? They made a pretty serious dent in that second pound.

That's a lot of noodles.

Betrayal

I have fierce and chronic pangs of guilt over my difficulties with follow-through. If I say to a child, "I will [fill in the blank]" -- then by golly I try to fill in that blank. But I often, too often say, "I could [bake cookies / take you to see that movie / read a particular chapter book to you]" and it never happens. I worry that my children will remember me as distracted and crabby.

For Thanksgiving I baked two pies (one pumpkin and one pecan, as God intended), which didn't leave us with a lot of pie leftovers. This morning, on learning that the last piece of pecan pie was spoken for, my 9yo asked me if I could bake a pie some other time. "Sure," I said. The boys conferred. A chocolate pie? Today? "I could do that," I said, mentally running through the steps involved: pastry mixed, chilled, rolled, rested, chocolate custard cooked and cooled. Shortly afterward it slid out of my overfull brain.

Stella and I ran to Walgreen's to get Advent candy this evening. We could have Advent prayer with three candles or with chartreuse candles or with the Scientologists' Book of Common Prayer. (Wait, surely they would notice that last. Don't you think??) But Advent prayer without candy afterward? Inconceivable. One of the endcaps featured boxed mixes for pies; one of the flavors was chocolate. I tossed a box in the cart, wondering if anybody would notice that it was made by Nestle. I thought briefly about making a last-minute pie without a mix -- graham cracker crust and ice water bath for the filling -- but I thought about the time and the absence of dinner preparations and I marched myself up to the register.

When I set the box on the counter my 12yo fled the room in mock horror. He ran around the house shouting, "An alien has abducted my mother! There's someone in the kitchen making pie from a MIX!!" When he returned from broadcasting these tidings of woe he took a closer look at the box. This prompted another circuit of the house, with more hand-wringing: "And it's a Nestle mix! What has happened to my real mother??"

The pie went together in no time flat: wafer crust, instant pudding, whipped topping, a few reserved crumbs on top. "Maybe," I thought to myself, "I am making a fuss over nothing with all of my cooking from scratch fanaticism." Then I licked some whipped topping from my finger and shuddered: nothing like the real thing, baby. The 12yo came back in and saw the finished pie on the countertop. "It looks," he announced in tones of finality, "like a betrayal of the Gladly family's ideals."

He was laughing throughout, and so was I. I was sure I'd serve it up and they'd ask for more. It tasted better after it had a little time to chill, and surely fake chocolate pie is better than no chocolate pie. So I was surprised to hear their verdict: "Tastes artificial," said the 9yo with the legendary sweet tooth, and his brothers concurred.

I still wish I followed through more often on those "I could..." thoughts, and I am not convinced that real whipped cream reflects my highest ideals. But I am glad that my boys think homemade food tastes better than the alternative. And I am delighted that my kids know exactly how to make their mama laugh.

Speedy Gonzalez writes a movie review

I see very few movies. Maybe I am the last person in North America to see Man For All Seasons. But maybe I'm not -- maybe I'm only the next-to-last person. And if you are the last person, I'm here to tell you that you should sit yourself down and watch that movie.

The Thomas More character demonstrates that you can stand up for truth without being intrusive or strident or obnoxious. He is none of those things; he is only persistent, and he is willing to go wherever that persistence takes him. It would have been very easy to render him as a sanctimonious prig, but there is no trace of sanctimony or priggishness in his character. Instead he is grave and brilliant and collected, no matter what the circumstances. I loved the portrayal of his relationship with his daughter Meg. (I once posted a snippet from a letter he wrote to her.)

I tried to imagine such a movie being made today and promptly shorted out the spark plugs on my imagination. Can you picture it? A Hollywood movie in which a sympathetic main character refuses to bend on the issue of the Roman Catholic Church's authority? Especially its authority over marriage? And the people who disagree are all clearly power-hungry or weak or both? If so, your imagination is made of sterner stuff than mine.

Huh, I just peeked at the Wikipedia entry and discovered that the play was written by an agnostic. That's interesting, isn't it?

The last scene of the movie made me burst into tears. I can't remember the last time I cried at a movie. Well worth two hours.

Tendril

The first thing I have to say tonight is praise the LORD for dishwashers. Mine is running for the third time today and I am grateful my hands are not any more dishpan-ated. If I were Ann Voskamp I would doubtless have something loftier to give thanks for, or at least something with more adjectives doing adverb duty* --except, hey! I just remembered: she's Canadian and probably not running her dishwasher three times today.

(*I hope that doesn't sound snarky. I admire Ann Voskamp; I also find her writing style distracting.)

The second thing I am grateful for tonight is my sad little garden. If I were so inclined I expect I could have a magnificent garden -- we have that fantastic Midwestern soil. But I have a short attention span, and gardens need a gardener who can go the distance without getting bored in July.

Despite my neglect, I was able to harvest sage and parsley and carrots and arugula for today's meal. (Very fun to see the carrots: fat and bright and sweet and also unexpected -- I tried and failed to grow carrots last year.) I finally took down the tomato cages, and they sparked the thought that is the core of this post.

Last year I trained the pole beans around poles, figuring they were called pole beans for a reason. Tell you what, though: they chewed up those poles and spat them out. This year I trained them around the tomato cages instead. [Edited to clarify: tomatoes in the middle, pole beans outside.] The real gardeners out there are saying, "You did what??" but it worked well enough. When I took down the tomato cages, I had to cut off the bean vines. They had wound themselves around the metal so thoroughly that I couldn't pull the cages out of the ground.

The plants were dead, but the tendrils were tenacious. I thought, "I want to be like that. I want to cling so tightly to the Lord that even in death it will be obvious what I was holding on to." Day by day over the summer those bean plants inched up the cages, wrapping themselves more and more securely. I think sometimes we like to imagine ourselves more like corn plants, tall and self-contained. The vine and branches analogy suggests to me that we are more like the pole beans: we bear best when our tendrils find purchase.

All of the mild lettuces succumbed to the frost, but the arugula was thriving. I cut a pile of it, but there seemed to be two different varieties and I was a little worried about serving a weed for Thanksgiving. I nibbled at a leaf and thought it was probably fine, but I asked Elwood to help me out. "Will you tell me if this tastes poisonous?" I asked him. He declined.

And I don't think he ate any salad at Thanksgiving dinner, either.

Undetached

So I was just posting about how I'm not really addicted to sugar, and Lilian left a comment on that post about feeling addicted to the internet -- a comment which made me nod sagely and reflect on my recent progress on that front -- and I tell you what, friends, nodding sagely about addictive behavior is probably the surest way to get knocked on your butt. Not for nothing does the Bible say "Pride goeth before a SMACKDOWN."

My husband brought home three cartons of ice cream on Sunday. I proceeded to eat ice cream as if an ice cream famine were imminent, as if I'd had my very own personal dream of fat cows being consumed by skinny cows and then the Skinny Cows being consumed by people other than me so there was no ice cream in the land. And ice cream doesn't keep very well in granaries, so I fear we'd be out of luck even if we were warned in a dream about an impending ice cream famine.

Anyway, I ate a lot of ice cream.

And then, as if gluttony weren't enough for one week, I went berserk with glazed-over checked-out internet goofing off. ("Berserk" and "glazed over" don't usually find themselves in the same sentence, but neither do long-deceased pharaohs and reduced-calorie frozen confections. Let's just roll with it, shall we?)

I forget how much of this I have posted here, so pardon me if I am being repetitive. But after years -- years! -- of struggling with my internet pseudo-addiction I've seen some real changes. First, about 18 months ago I made a solemn promise that I would not touch the computer in the morning before everything on this list was finished:

1. bed made
2. laundry begun
3. clean dinner dishes put away/breakfast dishes loaded in dishwasher
4. both bathrooms wiped down
5. dinner planned
6. rosary begun
7. Morning Prayer prayed
8. daily chunk of the BIble read

Occasionally I've made exceptions for things like finding out if school is canceled before the bus is due, but very rarely. It has been so SO helpful to start out the day with my focus clear. I have not been put on this earth in the service of my email client. I am here to serve Jesus with heart and hands and to live out my vocation to the best of my ability, dernit. Begin as you mean to go on, and all that. (Am I quoting Franklin Covey? I hope it's someone like Virgil but I fear it's actually Franklin Covey.)

Earlier this year I also resolved that I would not play on the computer at all, at any point in the day, unless I was caught up on laundry, dishes, meal prep, and the rosary. That's been hard for me, but also hugely fruitful -- until this week, when I persuaded myself that "caught up" could be interpreted broadly. Hey, there are only 3 baskets of laundry that need folding! You can consider yourself caught up since you hurt your back and folding would be hard. (Snort.)

SSSHHHHLLUUUUURRRRRRRRPPPPPPP.

That is the sound of the internet sucking me RIGHT back in. My self-congratulatory feeling that I'd made some real steps toward detachment? Oh so unjustified.

But -- here's the thing. It dawned on me tonight that part of my recent bloggy neglect has resulted from my carefully cultivated detachment. I just haven't cared as much about putting things out there. I love having things out there -- skipping through my archives always makes me happy -- but posting regularly seems to require (for me) a certain lack of detachment. What to do?

(This is yet ANOTHER post that I would never publish if it were not NaBloPoMo, but it's 10:52 and I've got nothing else for you, so random cows/morning to-do lists/anthropomorphized internet sound effects it will be.)

I think part of my trouble with self-discipline is that I've given up my Adoration hour because of scheduling conflicts. I'm covering for a friend on Saturday morning, and maybe the thing to do is just lay it all out there in the chapel. I'll let you know if I figure anything out.

Notes to myself for next year about things that were a good idea

On the Monday before Thanksgiving, roast a chicken for dinner. Put in a whole tray of sweet potatoes -- some for dinner, the rest for Thursday. If you start the chicken at 400, you can also bake up your skillet of cornbread for stuffing at the same time.

When you clean up the kitchen after dinner, throw the chicken carcass straight into the crockpot. Add a halved onion, a stick of celery, a carrot, a parsnip, and a bay leaf. Cook overnight on low. Cool and strain in the morning, and you'll have delicious stock for stuffing and gravy.

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, make Pasta of Awesomeness for dinner. Save some of the squash cubes for this salad, and some of the browned sage leaves for the stuffing. (I had no idea sage was frost-hardy, but I am still using leaves from the sage plant in my garden. I feel very domestic even though it is dumb luck rather than good planning.)

Pasta of Awesomeness: peel and seed a butternut squash. Preheat your oven to 450. Cut the squash in smallish cubes and in a large mixing bowl toss them with olive oil and 1-2 T. brown sugar. (I know, I know: I hate putting sugar on vegetables too. Totally worth doing here, though.) You want them to be coated with the mixture so that when you roast them (about 25 minutes, and be sure there's a lip on your baking tray) you get a delicious brown carapace. Except it's a vegetarian carapace.

While the squash is roasting, melt a stick of butter. Over gentle heat, brown a cup (or more! these are so yummy you might want more!) of sage leaves in the butter. Boil a pound of your favorite pasta. Save a mugful of cooking water before you drain it. Toss the pasta with a cup of Parmesan cheese and a dab of cooking water. Tip out the squash and the sage leaves on top. Resist the temptation to toss them all together, because the squash cubes will sink to the bottom if you do. (From The Quarter-Acre Farm.)

Oh, browned sage leaves! I've never been a huge fan of straight-up sage out of the garden, but I could snack on a whole plant's worth of leaves browned in butter. In fact, do you hear that? It's the leftovers, telling me they are very lonely. And I, chivalrous soul that I am, will not leave them in their despair.

Read this book: Raising Elijah

Back in (oh dear) March I requested and received an electronic review copy of Sandra Steingraber's Raising Elijah. I galloped through the book, taking notes for my review all along the way, but I never wrote it up. Why? Because it's about a divisive political issue, and I don't talk about divisive political issues very often.

Steingraber's previous book, Having Faith, looked at the effects of environmental toxins during pregnancy and lactation. I read it when I was six months pregnant with Joe and spent the ensuing weeks flipping out about toxin exposure. Her new book looks at risks faced by children beyond toddlerhood, and it is equally flip-out-inducing. Maybe that's the most important thing I have to say here: you should read it and see what you think. Read it and see if there's anything you want to change, because if enough of us want to make changes that will protect our kids, maybe we can do something about it together.

I'm finally writing this post today because it is [was] the feast of Christ the King and I am thinking about our obligations to "the least of these," and because there is [was] a horrifying story in today's NYT Magazine about the after-effects of fracking -- which, incidentally, is discussed in the final chapter of Raising Elijah. (And also because it's NaBloPoMo.)

Steingraber's book winds through an alarming array of topics of particular interest to parents. There is a chapter on the carcinogenic properties of pressure-treated wood (which is probably an integral part of at least one playground structure near your home), one on the relationship between toxins and asthma, one on the neurotoxic properties of environmental contaminants -- their possible role in ADD/ADHD and autism spectrum disorders.

She writes about the discovery that the kitchen floor in her home was actually a triple-decker terrine of toxicity: when she and her husband decide to replace the vinyl flooring (after you read about the explosion at the vinyl plant you'll never think about vinyl, or freight trains, in quite the same way again), they uncover asphalt tile (necessitating emergency asbestos abatement) atop lead-painted hardwood. It's a story that makes a person say, "When are we going to figure this out? When will we stop building our homes with substances that harm our children?"

In frequently lapidary prose, Steingraber urges us to protect our children. Here is the thing that deterred me from writing this post: many of the women who read here are Catholics who tend to vote Republican. On that end of the political spectrum, there's a tendency to argue about the existence of climate change and downplay the importance of environmental issues -- the issues that Steingraber labels "the great moral crisis of our day." Many of you who read here will have a very different idea about the great moral crisis of our day, and will be saddened to learn that Steingraber is open about the abortion she scheduled when she learned that her first baby had multiple anomalies. But I think there is an important truth submerged in those colliding narratives of crisis.

In this country at this time, there is a strange alliance between pro-lifers and pro-industry forces: the politicians more likely to support legislation that restricts abortion are generally less likely to support legislation that requires external regulation of industry, including the chemical industry. Does that really make sense? Environmental contaminants play an important role in fetal anomalies. Fetal anomalies play an important role in late-term abortions. What if we could protect the least of these and steward the earth more wisely at the same time? We say that we believe God knits us together in our mothers' wombs. Why, then, are we silent about the substances slashing savage steeks through his handiwork?

When I was pregnant with my oldest son, I worked with a woman from a small farming town. She was also pregnant, as were two of her neighbors. She was broken-hearted when both of their babies were diagnosed with multiple anomalies incompatible with life. "Why?" she asked her OB. "Is it something in the water?" "Oh, no," the doctor assured her. "It's just one of those random things." Given the stats I later encountered on reproductive toxicant release in that region, I am disinclined to believe it was "just one of those random things." We mothers clutch our vigilance like a totem; during pregnancy we take our folic acid and we steer clear of unpasteurized cheese. But the reality is that we need systemic changes if we are to shield our children, born and unborn, from harm.

Steingraber proposes three changes in Raising Elijah: she encourages each reader to plant a garden, to use a reel mower in lieu of a gas-powered mower, and to line-dry clothing. (I tell myself, in the immortal words of Meatloaf, that two out of three ain't bad.) She acknowledges that to some readers these suggestions will seem ludicrously difficult while to others they will seem ludicrously inadequate. Wherever you fall on that continuum, I suspect you will find her book intriguing and provocative. Read it, and tell me what you think.

Disclosure: I received a free .pdf of Steingraber's book. I was not compensated in any other way for this review.

Placeholder

I am writing a messy post. I said I would write it in the spring, but I never did. I'm not a very political blogger and it's partly a political post. I was scrambling to get it written by 11, but really it's more prudent to take time and edit.

My students have this week off, so no classes for me. Wheeeee! I have group projects to grade (tomorrow), notes to post for my hybrid class (the goal is Weds), lectures to prep for next week (slides up by Weds), a house to clean and organize (M-F and then some), and a meal to prepare! I was going to get a jump on things by making cranberry sauce tonight but I made a mess of it. If you're going to shake too much of a spice into something, don't do it with cloves.

With that word of wisdom, I bid you good night.

Addictive, again

I have blogged regularly about my sweet tooth: I'm going to give up sugar, I've given up sugar, I ought to give up sugar, blah blah blah. My brain works better when I am not eating sugar; I am more energetic and purposeful, more able to take annoyances in stride.

But I like sugar a lot. And my brain works reasonably well most of the time.

I used to think I was addicted to sugar. I was never really sure where that left me, because the world is full of sugar. For a long stretch I was pretty hardcore about avoiding it, but this was not my friends' favorite phase. Or my children's favorite phase. (I once brought a pan of brownies to friends when I came to visit, and they were visibly relieved to discover that the brownies were really brownies and not Carob-Barley Malt Surprise masquerading as brownies.)

Two years ago, though, I was talking to an addict who had been pressed to give up his favorite substance, and I found the conversation eye-opening. It left me thinking, "I have never been addicted to anything." I've talked for years about having an addictive personality, and I have spent a lot of energy reining in my compulsive tendencies about food / internet usage / varying embarrassing video games, but real addiction is a horse of a different species. If Elwood ever said to me, "I am going to ask you to move out because of your poisonous and intractable problem with chocolate / blogging / [heaven help me] Super Methane Brothers," then I would give them up -- instantly, permanently. Not this guy, who was only furious at the ultimatum. That's the core of addiction, I think, that inability to imagine life without the substance.

I can imagine life without sugar, because I've lived it. And I think I can see the impact it has on me reasonably clearly, which is another anti-hallmark of addiction. (Recently I was listening to a man talk to a mutual friend about his use of alcohol, and he denied categorically that it was possible for his 9 or 10 drinks a day to contribute to the irritability and depression he experienced when he wasn't drinking. He drank because he was depressed, and he was certain that the causal relationship ran only in one direction. Dopamine downregulation, schmopamine schmownregulation.)

I am sounding a little smug about those conversations, I am afraid, sorting people out into "Real Addicts" and "Enlightened Sorts Like Me Who Are Not Actually Addicted, Just A Little Compulsive." Maybe I'm just as blind as they are. Maybe I'm making a mountain out of a molehill with this sugar thing. Bottom line: I think I'd be happier here in the crazy season if I kicked sugar again, and I can't quite muster the motivation to do it.

Discuss

One of my children is convinced that I play favorites: that he is my least favorite child and one of his brothers is the apple of my eye. Any kindness directed toward the brother is viewed as confirmation of his preferred status. What would you do?

Half a stone, part 2

For years now I've been exasperated about my weight. I gained 40 pounds while I was pregnant with my youngest son in 2004-05, and the last ten decided that chez Jamie was a happy place to call home. I've been posting about it for almost as long as I've been blogging: Jamie's homeopathic ice cream diet, Jamie's John the Baptist diet (that's the one that made Bearing-Erin say, "What have you been smoking?"), Jamie's Vegetable Project. I would resolve to Do Something about the state of the scale (and the state of my pants not fitting) and chisel away seven or so of those ten pounds. Then I would get tired of eating salad and -- whoosh! -- they would come back racing back. Or waddling back, as the case may be. (Waddling speedily, though. They wasted no time waddling back.)

In the spring I decided that perhaps I should make peace with the poundage. Perhaps it was kind of dumb to expend mental energy wishing that a perfectly normal BMI could be a unit smaller. Perhaps I should just buy some new pants already, instead of looking wistfully at the ones in the back of my drawer.

And then I started my new job.

i kept meaning to post about my nerves: teaching caused a huge flare in my ever-present anxiety. I kept waiting to get an email from a student that said, "Dr. Gladly, you're a fraud!" I would feel so relieved when Friday afternoon rolled around and there were no unanswerable questions in my inbox. I would walk to class thinking, "I cannot do this." I would jangle awake at 5 in the morning, vibrating with tension about teaching that afternoon and unable to get back to sleep.

I couldn't eat. I would sit down at the dinner table and be unable to eat more than a few bites. I lost seven pounds in the first month.

My happy posts about teaching were all telling the truth. I have great students and I was delighted to be in this job. But I had zero job security and a whopping case of impostor syndrome, and I have always, always been anxiety-prone. I was beginning to think seriously that I should call the doctor and get some drugs when it abated.  I never wrote a follow-up to this anxious post, but the class went fantastically well. Like, so well that I would be embarrassed to blog about it. So well that my chair came to my office afterward to tell me about the student feedback she'd received. The next time I told Elwood I was feeling nervous, he said, "What more do you want? A tickertape parade?" I stopped complaining, and I stopped feeling like a fraud.

I was sure the seven pounds would whoosh-waddle-whoosh-waddle right back onto my behind when my anxiety subsided, but they didn't. Six weeks later, I'm down two pounds more. This is baffling to me. Is it because I am walking briskly to and from my office every day? Is it because I have laid down the psychic weight of thinking, "I rearranged my whole family's life so I could get a PhD so I could teach in this department but what if they hate me and my plan is a terrible idea?"?

Today I wore a pair of pants that I bought in 1995, when I started my first post-MA job. I loved them but they've been too small for years. They fit fine today, but do you know what pants from 1995 look like? The waistband, no exaggeration, comes up to the bottom of my ribcage. If I hadn't worn a cardigan atop, I would have looked like Marty McFly's dad in Back to the Future.

Oh, ugh, if it weren't 10:58 I wouldn't post this. Kind of annoying, I know, to write a post that says, "Guess what? Half a stone fell off my body and I don't know why! And even though my pants fit now, I'm going to buy new ones." But it's NaBloPoMo and this is all I've got for today, so I'm going to publish it. Please hurl your rotten tomatoes gently.

Eek

I was sitting in our little office, typing away on the desktop computer. I am giving my students an in-class assignment in the morning and I was just finishing up the description when I heard crunch crunch crunch.

Footsteps, in the fallen leaves that have collected in the flowerbed beneath the office window. Unmistakably footsteps.

Now the rational part of my brain said instantly, "Cat." There are a few prowly cats on our little block and during daylight hours we are happy to say hello and offer them a quick scratch under the chin or behind the ears. There's a groundhog living under a neighbor's porch, and he is certainly fat enough to make an impressive crunch. Occasionally there are possums and skunks. The rational part of my brain considered all these possibilities.

Alas, the rational part of my brain was beaned by my sneaky irrational side. I've been reading too many creepy stories lately -- this blog post, and a story in this week's New Yorker about a man acquitted too soon in a nasty rape and murder. I've been feeling more fearful and fretting about benign old-house noises in the night, and so the voice saying "cat" was quickly drowned out by the voice saying "axe murderer! Gladlyville strangler! rapist killer psycho flee flee fleeeeeeee!"

Did I mention that one of the slats in that blind is broken, the one that would be right at eye level if a person happened to be standing in the flowerbed?

So I have taken my laptop upstairs, and while I type I am listening intently for sounds more ominous than the thrum of the noisy dishwasher. I am not quite ready for class tomorrow, but it's going to have to wait for daylight.

Half a stone

Did anyone else love the James Herriot books as a kid? In hindsight it is a little funny to me that I liked them so much -- in them he spends a lot of time lying on a cold stone floor, his arm buried to the shoulder in an animal's nethers.

I learned a lot from those books, about medicine and food and British culture. That's where I first heard about the omohyoid muscle and the existence of dandelion wine, and about actual people listening to Wagner and reading Shaw for pleasure. I remember being constantly confused about British money. What was half a crown, and how many shillings did it contain? There was no Google when I was reading those books, so I kept trying to make the math work out with a little assistance from my parents' battered Collegiate Dictionary. It wasn't much help. I never did figure it out -- not until 1998, when we moved to Scotland and I met a lovely older lady who could tell me about life before Decimal Day.

I was pleased with myself, though, when I figured out what a stone was. There are stones all over those books, measuring goods and livestock and people, and I remember being baffled about what exactly a stone might be. (Collegiate Dictionary entry: a rock (n.), made of rock (adj.), kill with rocks (v.) -- not so helpful.) Finally I encountered enough numbers to allow me to puzzle it out: a stone is 14 pounds.

When we moved to the UK I was surprised to discover that many people still use stones for talking about weight: a 170-pound man would weigh 12 stone 2. When I turned up for my first prenatal appointment there I was given my weight in stones, even though I would have had an easier time converting from kilos. Britons might go to slimming clubs because they want to lose a stone or two. It's a useful unit.

Why am I writing about stones? Tune in tomorrow. I have essays to grade tonight.

Sick and Wrong Pie

About ten years ago I was swapping meatless recipes with some email pals, and I shared a Nigella Lawson recipe that she calls supper onion pie. One of my friends made it for her children, assuring them that the Gladly children snarfed it down. Her daughter, resolutely appalled by the offering, said, "That is sick and wrong."

My friend shared this story with me and then had immediate second thoughts about sending the email. Would I be offended? I would not. I cracked up on the spot, and ever since I've thought of this as Sick and Wrong Pie. It makes an easy, cheap, and cozy meatless main dish for a chilly evening.

Preheat your oven to 400. Peel and quarter four onions, and in an ovenproof 9-ish-inch skillet fry them in a blend of melted butter and olive oil until they are tender and lightly browned. This will take some time -- maybe 25-30 minutes? -- but it's mostly hands-off time. Stir regularly so they don't scorch, but no need to hover over the skillet. At the end add salt and pepper and a sprinkle of thyme, along with a handful of grated cheese sprinkled on top.

Make a speedy biscuit dough (here my recipe diverges slightly from Nigella Lawson's, because I am as bossy about biscuits as I am about cornbread): 2 c. flour (whole grain works fine) stirred together with 1/2 t. salt and 1/2 t. baking soda, about 5 T. cold butter, cut in small cubes and rubbed briskly into the flour, and enough buttermilk or thinned-out yogurt to bind it into a cohesive dough without making it soggy. Add a sprinkle of thyme and grated cheese to the biscuit dough too, if you like. Pat or roll your dough into a skillet-sized circle and flop it on top of your browned onions, tucking in the edges all around. Bake for 15 minutes at 400; turn the heat down to 350 and give it 10 more. Flip it upside down onto a plate for serving, so it's like a savory tarte tatin.

This doesn't serve my whole crew these days, so I also made a tomato pie (same idea, with biscuit crust above and below and thinned-out mayo poured over the tomatoes, which sounds disgusting but is not). Typing this post is making me think I should go and investigate the leftovers. Wouldn't want them to go to waste, you know.

Stoked to Steek

If you are not a knitter, the word "steek" may not ring a bell. If you are a knitter, the word "steek" may ring a sort of Pavlovian bell, one that says "flee! take your knitting and flee!"

Steeking is a trick that lets a knitter work in the round, so she can knit a big spiral without any purling, and still accommodate a body that has all these annoying parts like arms and shoulders. Knitting in the round yields a tube of fabric, and most people are only tube-shaped here and there. If you want to knit garments in the round (other than eel cozies), you're going to have to take a pair of scissors to your knitting.

Last month I was in the yarn shop with my daughter when she found some wool so Pink it requires a capital P. "Pink!" she said, handing me a skein. "Yes," I answered absently, "it's very pink." I put it back. She brought me two skeins. "Pink!" she reminded me, in case I had forgotten. I put it back again. She objected. After a few rounds of this I thought to myself, "She has a birthday coming. And an Aran-weight little-girl sweater would knit up pretty quickly." I brought home some of the Pink yarn and stashed it away.

I started a cardigan for her but it wasn't as pleasant as I expected. I do most of my knitting on skinny needles, and my hands were aching on the purl rows. I made what may turn out to be a rash decision: I cast on a few stitches at the end of the round and joined it to the beginning. This meant that I could knit all the rest of the stitches, but it also means I have to cut a steek and tack down a facing. I've never steeked anything before, but I feel cool even using steek as a verb. Steek, steeking, steeked, stoken? What's should the perfect participle of steek be? (Probably the very boring "steeked.")

The sensible thing would be to wait until I get the sleeves finished so I can see if it fits. The downside to steeking is that you can't rip and reknit if your plans gang agley as oft plans gang. But I'm not sure I can wait that long. I'm itching to pick up those scissors.

One minute 'til bedtime

Do you have the book Ten Minutes 'Til Bedtime at your house? Talk to me: is that a girl or a boy? Are those hamsters? Why does he or she get out of bed and into the bath?

I find the book very puzzling. Also a little stressful, because can you imagine that many rodents in your house? Ick.

Syllabus planning

I don't know exactly what I'm going to be covering next semester in my classes but I know one thing: having this many assignments/exams/quizzes/projects scheduled back to back was not the best idea I ever had. A wise academic once said you shouldn't assign more work than you want to grade. I'll have to remember that for next time.