Light and Momentary

Dear Internet

I need some advice. Last month I asked on Facebook if anyone would be willing to let me use a food processor with a shredder attachment in exchange for some shredded zucchini. An acquaintance of mine said, "Sure, no problem, I'll bring it by tomorrow."

It's an old machine -- clearly older than the one I acquired in 1992. It worked just fine and I sent her off with a quart of shredded zucchini. She didn't have time to stick around while I cleaned up, but she said, "Keep it as long as you'd like. I only use it for shredding zucchini myself, and I don't have a garden this year."

I've had five monster zucchini awaiting their date with the machine, and today I pulled it out again so I could finish the job and give it back to its owner. About halfway through the first zucchini, the shaft snapped. It's completely unfixable.

Recently I tried to find a replacement shredder blade for my 2001 food processor, with no success at all. What are the odds that I'm going to find a replacement part for a 1985-ish machine? Approximately zero, I have to think. So what's the best way to handle it?

Ugh.

9-8-7

So you guys, I have A Plan. You know how I love having A Plan. You know how the shorter days always grind me down, leaving me a gray and weary shadow of my perky springtime self? (A gray and weary shadow who is not IN THE LEAST overdramatic.) Today is the autumn equinox, and I am testing out a new idea for dealing with my seasonal blues.

NINE: Every day, eat five servings of veggies and four of fruit. If you've been reading my blog for a really really long time (like, since it was a different blog), you might remember The Vegetable Project -- my strategy for losing the baby weight after Pete's arrival in 2005. TVP was five servings of veggies + a gallon of water daily, with no sugar. I've tried variations of this again and again, but never with as much success as the first time. I think this permutation may be a little more sustainable. Giving up sugar entirely is not easy, and my children complain, and so my plan is to eat lots of plants and not sweat the rest. The goal is zip! vim! get-up-and-go! -- not weight loss. (Will I complain if weight loss is a side effect? I will not.)

EIGHT: When I am blue, I stay up late doing pointless things. I tell myself I need the quiet time. Then I am tired the next day and the world seems even gloomier, so I really need the quiet time, so I stay up late again doing pointless things. No more! I am getting into bed at 10:00 each night, allowing myself half an hour to read in bed and say compline. There may be circumstances that interfere with this plan, but they should only be unpredictable things, like sick kids or unexpected work deadlines. Unpredictable things ≠ googling that one person I met in 1989 who loved bloodhounds and aspired to be a poet and wait, how do you spell that last name again? and hey, who knew? isn't bloodhound breeding fascinating? EIGHT hours in bed every night.

SEVEN: I am going to run seven miles a week or do a comparable amount of a different exercise. I thought about setting a higher goal, but it's good to have modest expectations as the year winds down and the obligations ramp up. I can do seven miles in two chunks without causing myself distress, or I can do a few shorter runs if that's how the schedule shakes out in a particular week. I am not quite sure how to count today's 25-mile bike ride, which was going to be mellow and easy except that I forgot my arrhythmia meds and we rode back into a savage headwind. It was not mellow at all, but it was fun anyway.

Anybody want to join me? C'mon, it will be fun. I am skipping upstairs because my self-imposed bedtime approacheth.

Seven Quick Takes: Midterm Edition

1. I am writing a midterm today. I gave a similar exam last year, entirely in short-answer/essay format. I think it was a good test, but it was a bear to grade. I'm swapping in some multiple-choice questions this time. Writing them is slow.

I think I'm good at writing tough multiple-choice questions. I'm not sure that's a skill I really want to have, but I think I've got it. Yesterday I was filing some papers when I stumbled across midterm evals from my students in the spring. I'd asked them for exam feedback. "Tricky!" said one paper after another. "Tricky! Tricky! Tricky!" They sounded pretty grumpy. I am keeping that in mind as I write this exam.

2.Teaching is a constant reminder that you can't please all the people all the time. I am by nature a pleaser. This is an ongoing tension.

3. I had a manuscript rejected yesterday, but I am not crying into my coffee over it. I submitted it to Fancypants Journal, which rejects more than 90% of its submissions, at the encouragement of a friend who has published in Fancypants Journal multiple times. I was braced for it to get rejected immediately upon receipt in July, but they sent it through peer review. (Good thing #1.) One of the reviews consisted of three dismissive sentences, but the other was lengthy, detailed, and full of helpful ideas presented in an encouraging way. (Good thing #2.) It's so much nicer when a reviewer takes the time to say, "Here's how this could be a better paper."

4. Now here's something that strikes me as weird: both reviewers dinged me for my sample size. I have data for 47 kids. This is a small sample, small enough that I wouldn't fund a study like this one if I were handing out grant money. But it seems to me that the concern should be about study planning, not about study publication.

When you use statistics you're trying to avoid two kinds of mistakes. The first, Type I error, is when you say you've found a meaningful association but it's really just random noise in the data. Your chance of a Type I error is called your alpha, and it's often set at .05 in behavioral sciences. The second kind of mistake, Type II error, is when you say "there's no association here! nothing to see -- move along!" -- even though there actually is an association. That chance is called your beta, and it's sensitive to sample size. The larger your sample size, the smaller your beta. If you look for a subtle effect in a group of 10 people, you're probably less likely to see it than if you're looking in a group of a thousand people. If you say, based on your sample of 10, that the effect doesn't exist, you've got a Type II error going on.

I'm sure my beta was huge, but why does it matter now that we don't have to worry about Type II error? I'm not reporting a null finding: the hypothesized association was right there in my data. My alpha is .05, same as it would be if I had a sample size of 200. To get a significant result in a smaller sample, you have to have a clearer pattern. Isn't it kind of interesting that I found a definite trend in a small sample?

5. One of the things that persuaded me to stop reading Amy Tuteur was the post in which she conflated Type I and Type II error in her critique of a study, because DUDE that's a rookie error. And yet I am getting a similar message from these reviewers. Are we just supposed to think that bigger is better? Am I missing something from a stats point of view?

6. I have been writing multiple-choice questions in between takes and I think I'm done. Hurray! Tweaking the old short-answer questions should be fairly quick, and I'll be good to go. That's a relief.

7. Kids will be home from school any minute and I'm done with my work for the week. This calls for chocolate applesauce muffins, I do believe. (Thanks for the suggestion, Linda!)

Probably Truncated

All right, you guys, I am just going to spew out words until I am summoned upstairs, or until Stella falls asleep without me. Don't bet on the latter.

My Petely says the sweetest things. Yesterday: "Nobody appreciates me, except you." Today I picked him up at CCD, feeling a little self-conscious that I'd had a run but not a shower. I wasn't really smelly but my hair goes crazy when I run. It's like the exertion causes it to fling itself, piece by piece, out of whatever is binding it and thence towards heaven. "I'm coming, Jesus!" it exclaims as it approaches the vertical. Or perhaps it is just indulging its inner Lindsay Buckingham. Anyway, I went walking down the hall with this crazy halo and Pete came running toward me. "I knew it was you because of your beautiful nice hair," he told me. I can't even tell you how much that makes me smile.

I was out on the trail recently, flagging after 4.5 miles, when I heard a voice behind me call out, "Jamie, is that you?" I turned and waved -- it was one of the leaders from my summer running group. She said, "I'd know that ponytail from a mile away." One of the unexpected perks of running with the group all summer is seeing other women from the group frequently out on the trail. Always encouraging to see a friendly face or a familiar ponytail.

I keep meaning to write a knitting post, but I am never sure how many people are interested in knitting posts. Do you remember that I was doing a mystery knit-along, in which I was making a shawl (even though I don't wear shawls) by a designer whose previous work has never really grabbed me? It was a weird impulse but it wound up being the most fun I've had knitting in years. There's lots to love about the rise of online patterns and Ravelry, but knitting patterns are so...curated these days. The cardigan is flung artfully over the shoulder, disguising the fact that the raglan increases leave you with an underarm that would only fit someone who had breasts growing out both sides of her torso. Or you can find 16 close-ups of the lace pattern in Ravelry, allowing you to decide whether you want to stick with that k3tog or substitute an S2KP. (I love S2KP. If you had told me that I would one day be a person with emphatic ideas about double decreases, I would have thought I should set down the knitting needles and back away slowly, but there you go: S2KP all the way.)

Anyway, with this project I was knitting blind. I had a set of clearly written instructions, with a comfortable amount of knitting for each of the first three weeks, and off I went to see what I wound up with. It was not a pattern I would have purchased if I'd seen a picture of it first, because I don't do ruffles and I really don't do ruffles with simultaneous vertical and horizontal stripes, but it was totally fun making that ruffle despite my anti-ruffle bias. For the fourth week we had to knit up manymanymany yards of sock yarn in garter stitch stripes, and it turned out that the yardage estimates were low (meaning even more yards of garter stitch stripes), but I'm still glad I did it. You can see pictures here whether or not you have a Rav account, or you can admire my oldest son being Emperor Palpatine. He said I should make a solid black one as an Emperor Palpatine costume, but I will need a little persuading that His Imperial Highness was a ruffle kind of guy.

Also this summer: Space Invaders socks and funky macrame bags. Joe decided when I was making a Monteagle bag that if I could make one for him in beige it would allow him to look like Indiana Jones. I am not any more convinced that Indiana Jones hauled around a macrame-looking hand-knit than I am convinced that Emperor Palpatine hankered secretly for ruffles, but I am an obliging sort when it comes to kid knitting requests (except for the kid who asked if I'd make these socks, which -- no) so I cranked out one for him and then another green one for Pete.

One of the things I wanted to do this year was finish all of the stuff I had on the needles in January, which was a lot of stuff. All that remains is a tea cozy and a French press cozy, now that I've finished up this scarf.

Eek, it got late! The End. More soon.

Bookends

On Monday I sang for a funeral.

I've sung for a handful of funerals since the one I wrote about. I haven't known any of the deceased, but each one has moved me. The Church offers such a tender farewell in the funeral Mass: the white pall, the incense for the coffin. We say, "This body was redeemed by Our Lord, and we believe He will raise it up."

This guy was one of the founding members of our parish. A long procession of family filed in, dressed somberly. The line of black was broken up by a white cloth diaper flung over one suitcoat shoulder. Was that a great-grandbaby? I don't know, but I was glad to hear those squeaks and coos during the Mass -- an audible reminder that life goes on.

In the coffin he held his rosary, and his veteran's flag was tucked in beside him. I was acutely aware, there in view of his stilled body, of the evanescence of life. That morning my legs had run five glad miles for me; somewhere in their future lies a last step. My cricothyroid muscle contracted just so to hit the high notes in the Ave Maria; someday it will be stiff and cold. It's a good thing, I was thinking as I biked home afterward, to be reminded of what's coming-- to pull my head out of my various electronic conversations and work preoccupations and remember what matters.

On Friday a message on my answering machine shook me hard.

It was kind of silly for me to get so upset but I did it anyway. There was an Incident at one of the local high schools, a lockdown followed by frantic sirens and police with assault rifles looking for suspects kind of Incident. A 70-point headline on the front page of the local paper kind of Incident. As Incidents go, this one was fairly minor. No one was hurt. My kids don't even go to school there. And still, I couldn't quite get a grip afterward.

School violence hits me hard: the idea that high school kids would willfully try to kill their peers knocks me back every time. We were living in Edinburgh when Columbine happened and I read the London Times coverage of it obsessively, sending prayers across the ocean to our friends in Littleton, wiping away tears and snot to keep reading so I could understand.

I still don't understand. I still can't talk about Columbine without choking up.

It made for strange bookends to the week-- Monday's calm certainty (we're all going to die) juxtaposed with Friday's wobbly uncertainty (and sometimes it's really ugly). I don't have a tidy ending for this post, just an echo of the prayer that the man from my parish offered tens of thousands of times: pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

The mutiny over bounty, resolved for now

So you guys, I was surprised by the comments on my last post-- I had thought there was lots of vegetable stealth out there. (Melanie B., are you reading this? Don't you hide beets in chocolate cake occasionally?) I asked my mother for her opinion, which was a loud harrumph: she thinks the boy in question owes me an apology and not the other way around. I think he may have been embarrassed that he had kicked up such a fuss about zucchini being unsuitable for human consumption, and then had eaten it blithely, untroubled by its presence in the chili.

I did apologize, because I would be mad if the shoe were on the other foot and because it is a dangerous precedent to tell your kids that partial truth-telling is A-OK if it gets you what you want.

Tonight at dinner they grouped vegetables into categories A, B, and C. Category A includes the vegetables they eat pretty much plain without complaints: carrots, peas, beans, broccoli, celery, asparagus, potatoes. Category B includes vegetables they'll eat if they're slightly disguised (chopped up finely, or part of quiche or soup or something): kale, chard, spinach, tomatoes, cauliflower, parsnips, rutabaga, beets, radishes, cole slaw, pumpkin. Category C is the Vegetables of Doom: eggplant, zucchini, summer squash. (These are not the more exhaustive lists they came up with at dinnertime, just the bits I can remember without going into the kitchen to retrieve the paper on which I wrote it all down.)

They also told me that the more vegetables there are in a given meal, the more likely they are to get grumpy about vegetables. This is a commonsense comment, but it sparked a little inner "oh yeah" moment. I think I may have gone too far in my anti-white-flour zeal. If they eat pasta salad with olives and tomatoes willingly, they will consume more vegetables than if I put a little dish of olives and tomatoes in vinaigrette on the table and it goes untouched. "Pasta salad!" they said, when I mentioned this at the table. "We like pasta salad!"

So. They are reasonably good eaters, I think. They have reasonably similar tastes, so that I don't have to worry about turning into a short-order cook if I try to accommodate kid preferences more often. I think I ought to make meals a little less vegetable-heavy, with a little less focus on eating seasonal foods here in eggplant/zucchini/tomato season.If you're local and you need some zucchini, I can hook you up.

This morning I noticed that the zucchini plant that had produced most consistently was near death: yellow leaves, moldy stem, lots of little bites missing from the maturing fruit. (I wondered for a moment if BWMNBN had slipped outside and peed on it.) When I reported its demise at dinner, there were cheers.

Much Ado About Zucchini

Remember when my zucchini plants presented me with three giant specimens? They've kept at it. This could be a good thing, except that a Boy Who Must Not Be Named (BWMNBN) has declared that he will not eat zucchini. Not in a house, not with a mouse, not in the rain, not on a train. He does not like green zuc-chi-ni; he does not like it, Sam-I-be.

It turns out that food prejudices are considerably more contagious than food enthusiasms. When the BWMNBN says, "Give me zucchini-less-ness or give me death!" and "I have not yet begun to fight [against zucchini]!" it can begin to seem downright patriotic to eschew zucchini.

Sometimes, when a person has as much zucchini on hand as I happen to have at the moment, this leads to stealth cookery.

Yesterday I made a big pot of vegetarian chili. To the onions and garlic and peppers and scallions, I added some shredded zucchini -- at most a quarter-cup. "Diced would be better," I thought to myself, and so I set my kitchen helper to dicing. Enter BWMNBN. "Are you putting that in the chili?" he said in tones of deepest suspicion and disgust, pointing at the dice. "Because I'm not eating chili with zucchini."

"Wow," I said in a neutral voice, "that's a pretty emphatic reaction." He came back shortly before dinner was ready. "Did you put that zucchini in the chili?" I answered him with the truth, though not the whole truth: "I did not add a single speck of zucchini to the chili after you told me how strongly you felt about it."

Tonight for dinner Elwood added ground beef to yesterday's chili and baked it under cornbread. BWMNBN was scarfing it down when the truth came out: there might, just possibly, be a shred of zucchini on his plate. Or -- horrors! -- even two or three. You guys, Thyestes himself could not have been more outraged than BWMNBN. I had lied, he insisted. LIED!

There are all kinds of ways that parents respond to food preferences. There's the "be quiet and eat it" school of thought (too harsh for me), and the "fix yourself a substitute if you hate it" school of thought (leads to too much ramen noodle consumption), and the mom-as-short-order-cook approach to family meal prep (completely untenable in a large family, and IMO unwise even if doable). I am usually sympathetic to food aversions (by which I mean there'll be something that everybody can eat, even if he doesn't love what's served), though I do require impolite complainers to donate to Food for the Poor.

Tonight I was flummoxed. I mean, really? Fingers pointing, lips quivering, voices rising -- over a couple of shreds of zucchini? BWMNBN said he would need an ingredient list for future meals.

I did not laugh. I said to Elwood, "I'll be back in a little bit." If I had been Atreus I might have sailed away in my black-hulled ship, but I am a zucchini-slicer and not a child-chopper. Instead I hopped into my minivan and drove away scratching my head. I stayed away until I had cooled off, but I'm still mulling over the conversation. I would be indignant if a child deliberately withheld relevant information when I asked him a question. Does that mean I shouldn't have done it? How often does honesty require the whole truth?

And would they notice the zucchini puree in the chocolate cake I'd made for dessert?