Light and Momentary

Weivretni

Today I did that thing where you go to a potential place of employment and they ask you questions all day. I suppose it's a little paranoid to think that these potential employers might do a Google blog search for weivretni spelled backward and find my post, but you never know.

Paranoia aside, guess how many people asked me how many children there are in my family! Did you guess THREE separate people? Because that's how many. The chair of the department asked me how many children I had and what their ages were! How can she not know that better than that?

It's always kind of fun to see people's eyes bug out when I tell them the answer.

I am tired. I am being summoned to lie down with an impatient 4yo. More soon.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Eclamptic

For a long time I was completely out of the loop on TV shows. We gave away our TV in 1998, and while this had many happy effects it also meant that I was hopelessly lost when TV came up in conversation. It's surprising how often TV comes up in conversation.

Only recently have I taken to watching TV shows online. Now I know that Glee is not a show in which the happy muppets (like Elmo and Ernie) have voted the grumpy muppets (like Bert and Oscar) off the island and thus can effervesce to their fuzzy hearts' content. But Glee didn't suck me in like Downton Abbey.

I never thought I'd blog about TV, but I can't resist. Birth! Death! Drama! Spoilers ahoy--

1. Whenever I see a woman on the screen suffering through a contraction in bed I have to advise her through the monitor: Get UP! It hurts more BECAUSE you're lying down. Stand UP! Lean FORWARD! You'll feel BETTER! Don't complain that it hurts if you're HORIZONTAL!

I might not be a very patient doula. Although-- I would totally have felt bad about shouting "get UP!" at a woman with fulminant pre-eclampsia if she hadn't been fictional.

2. Is it really true that there was no treatment whatsoever? I am remembering a James Herriot story in which he blows off a man worried about his pregnant dog. He jolts awake in the middle of the night, saying, "Myrtle's got eclampsia!" He speeds over to the man's house and administers...something. I thought it was calcium but maybe that was for cows down with milk fever. Would it have been magnesium in that era? Speaking of things that make a person want to shout, how about those two august doctors standing agog?

3. Isn't Cora's ire misplaced? If Sybil's condition didn't resolve after delivery, a marginally faster C-section wouldn't have improved matters, would it?

4. Can you imagine if this had gone down in Dublin? They'd have assumed it was all Tom's fault for taking her to live among barbarians.

5. This was the first time I've ever shed a tear for a TV character. Sybil was so sweet and earnest and well-meaning.

I have been interrupted approximately 70 times to arrange ponies' manes and tails into pompadours. In my previous experiences of mothering 4-year-olds, the required skill set included things like "draw a skid steer loader that is clearly different from the mini-excavator you drew yesterday" and "identify a scelidosarus accurately while feigning interest in same." Not so much with the pompadours. I am interrupting my musings about Downton Abbey to tend to my ordinary life, which features no Mrs. Patmore and no O'Brien (though thank goodness for that, really), but I'd love to hear what you think about this development.

"This used to be a really good blog"

I have been getting pounded with spam comments in the past couple of days, so I've turned on comment moderation. I turned off captcha verification months ago (I hate captcha verification), and didn't notice an uptick in spam at all. And then, for some reason, the spammers suddenly went crazy.

They are mostly the "buy apple iPad cheep" and "pharma pharma viagra now" sorts of comments, interspersed with random snippets about somebody else's post on sports or art or whatever, but one made me laugh. It said, "This used to be a really good blog." I so agree that this blog has seen better days that I almost clicked the link.

Tuesday Night Tidbits

Things on my mind, in no particular order:

1. Our primary credit card number was stolen, not very long after I had re-memorized the number they issued us following the last hacking incident. It was a weird kind of theft, with purchases sprinkled across the month. Only one was big enough to make us suspicious, so we went through the whole bill a line at a time. On doing so, we found several more -- the kind of small-scale purchase where I might normally say, "I'm not sure what that is, but I expect Elwood knows."

2. Dear Mystery Thief: How about if you get a job, so you can buy your CSNY albums with your own money?

3. This time I am going to make an Evernote list of all the automated payments that this credit card handles. It would be smart to include their contact info as well, but I'm making no promises. Ugh, it's not my favorite part of modern life: requesting password resets for accounts I only visit when I need to update my credit card information, and waiting on the phone with customer service.

4. This is another one for the Dept. of First World Problems file.

5. I love my job. The semester is off to a good start, I think. I haven't been in my office very much because of renovations. I have a huge south-facing window, and they took out my blinds. All of us along the corridor have been completely crippled by the sunlight. It sounds implausible, I know, but it's impossible to work in there. I feel like Gollum sneaking out from under the mountain after years in the goblin caverns, pinioned by the sun. I'm here to tell you: it's no wonder he was crabby!

6. Oh, oops, that's another first-world problem, isn't it? Too much sunlight in my office is not exactly a tale of woe for the ages.

7. I am knitting a pair of purple Errant Socks for a pal. I thought I was pretty comfortable with cables but these are a little brain-bendy. (In places you need two cable needles, one to dangle in front and the other to dangle in back. Fun, but weird.) The thing new knitters most need to know, if you ask me, is how to fix mistakes confidently. Nobody ever gets it all right the first time, but the ability to say "Oh, yes, I forgot to cable those stitches three rows down but I can sort it all out" is worth rubies. I would have enjoyed my first dozen knitting projects a lot more if I hadn't been seized by spasms of despair and exasperation every time I goofed something up.

8. I think I might enjoy my life a lot more if I were not seized by spasms of despair and exasperation when I goofed something up. Knitting As Metaphor, yet again.

9. I started the half-marathon training program in Train Like A Mother and realized quickly that I need a deeper base before I can finish it. I can't double my weekly mileage that quickly without consequences. My shins are still complaining about last week, even though I skipped the 5-mile run I was supposed to do yesterday.

10. New plan: 10K in the spring, think again about a half-marathon in the fall. (I'm still considering the Hal Higdon half-marathon plan, which I'd need to start in a couple of weeks, but I'm leaning toward the 10K.) The TLAM 10K training program requires less mileage, as you might expect, and more speedwork. To my great surprise, I love the speedwork. 

11. This is deeply weird.

12. But also true. After I finished the first speedwork run (they are mostly a variant on the idea of 3 miles + some number of strides, at least in the early weeks) the thought that popped into my head was "I feel like a badass." This is a preposterous thought, because my idea of "fast" after a 3-mile run is a hundred yards at a 7.5-minute mile pace, but it sailed into my head anyway.

13. And what is a blog for if not to record the improbable thoughts that sail into one's head?

14. One more running thought, because I want to remember that the nature of my aches and pains has changed. I used to have joint pain: knees, ankles, hips. After working on a shorter stride and a stronger core, the joint pain has vanished. So even though my shins are hurting enough to make me reconsider my spring running plans, I'm pleased that a) I've been consistent about running through the dreary season and into the winter, and b) I have a different kind of pain, one that's a known issue for runners who bump up their mileage too quickly. That's a problem with a solution.

15. Did you make it through this concatenation of random snippets? Thanks for slogging through!

Seven Quick Takes: The Butt-Kicking Edition

1. 2013 is kicking my butt so far. My house is still in disarray. I haven't had a dresser for weeks and my clothes are in plastic bags in a too-small closet. There are still some Christmas presents on end tables. I am ready for this state of affairs to end.

2. Part of the trouble is that I am skating around the edge of being sick. Far better to skate around the edge than to plunge in, I know, but I have been a little achy, a little queasy, a little sore-throat-y for a week now. Here's hoping for good health and better sleep. (When oh WHEN will my daughter sleep better? I wish I knew.)

3. While my interview was approaching, I kept dreaming about it. I had a hard time -- a really hard time -- getting ready for my talk. I had thought it was scheduled for an hour, but I was actually only allotted 45 minutes. This meant I had a fair amount of unwelcome pruning to do. I worked and worked and worked and WORKED on that talk, all the while thinking I was going to stand up in front of the people I wanted so much to hire me and make an idiot of myself, and then a funny thing happened. On Wednesday morning I was filled with this...infusion of confidence. The chair asked me if I was ready and I said yes quite calmly, because suddenly I was. I walked into that room like it was my very own personal room, and proceeded to own it for the next 45 minutes. I was, as the kids say, kicking ass and taking names. All day long people told me how well the talk went. So that's good.

4. I could have handled the actual interviewy parts of the interview better, probably, if I hadn't spent so much time working on the talk. I wish I had been more prepared for my interview with the dean (who did not follow the scripts for dean interviews that I had read while trying to figure out what to expect! perhaps I should email him and point this out, you think?), but I don't think I did dreadfully there. It's easy to second-guess little things, though, especially when you spend the whole day talking to one person after another, or one group after another, all of whom are watching you closely.

5. I came home after my exit interview wondering if I could just climb into a nice dark closet and rock silently for a while, but instead I changed into different dress clothes and went out to dinner with a different set of search committee members. (I'd had dinner with the other half of the search committee on Tuesday night.) The food was good and there weren't any zinger questions lurking among the appetizers.

6. I think that I might be too tired to come up with seven whole takes tonight.

7. I think, in fact, that I might take a little nap on the couch while I wait for my 16yo to call for a ride home from the basketball game.

More quick takes at Jen's.

Locus of control

I've been discombobulated. Yesterday at dinner one of the boys asked me why I had just sighed, and I said, "I just realized that there is not a single room downstairs that's not in disarray." (Elwood pointed out that nothing had changed in the bathroom, but somehow this felt like cold comfort.") We're getting there, pushing back against the combined chaos of renovations and post-Christmas re-entry, but OH I would love to be able to put everything to rights. I can't, and I won't be able to for a bit longer.

I thought to myself, "Where is your peace? Is Jesus himself your peace? Because if so, you could be content in a war zone. And here you are, off kilter because there are crates of books in the dining room." 

(Pretend Misery Poker has never been an especially effective way for me to kick myself in the pants, but somehow I persist.) (Also, books in the dining room = the tippity-topmost-tip of the iceberg.)

It's not just the house, though. I'm pushing back bigtime interview stress. Thoughts sneak up on me along the lines of "If I don't get a job offer, I will never get over the shame." No pressure, self! I keep waving it away. I keep praying for peace (and an infusion of superduper interview skillz). But it wasn't until this morning at Mass, right before we went up for communion, that I had a flash of insight: if I don't get this job, it is because God has something better for me.

Seconds after I thought it, I could imagine the counterarguments: atheist voices saying, "Yeah, that's what a subpar candidate invested in magical thinking would say." But for a shining moment I knew that it was true and I received communion gratefully, willing to accept whatever came my way. Moments later, in between lines of the Anima Christi, I was back to my involuntary mental Stump The Candidate game, in which I try to think of terrible interview questions I might be asked on Wednesday. Still, I am glad for that moment of clarity.

I have always had a tendency to blame myself when things didn't go my way -- to a ridiculous degree, actually. I remember after the third-grade field day telling my dad, a little tearily, that it was my fault that my team had lost the tug of war. If I had tried harder, we could have won. You guys, I was the smallest person in my class. In the spring of third grade I was still seven years old. And I was a scrawny little 7-year-old at that! I was so ashamed at age 14, when I couldn't keep up with the others on a Girl Scout backpacking trip in Wyoming. The reason I couldn't keep up with them was that I had an undiagnosed cardiac arrhythmia that is reliably triggered by exertion at high altitude (I had never been above 3000 feet before), and yet I was certain the problem was that I hadn't worked hard enough to get in shape beforehand.

So this is my resolve for the week: to keep chipping away at the tasks before me, at home and at work and in preparation for the interview, and to be kind to myself in the process. Preparation only takes you so far, I'm telling myself. Sometimes you have to breathe deep, and try to trust, and wait to see what happens.

Seven Quick Takes: Trapped Under The Mattress Edition

1. Huzzah! Hurray! Our renovation is done. It's really kind of stupid that the delay took me by surprise. I've said for years that it's folly to take construction estimates at face value. Always add 50% to construction estimates  and travel time estimates and you'll be a happier person. On our vacation, even, I was smugly suggesting to the kids that we play a little game in which we would ask the rest of the people on our vacation how long it took to get from Point A to Point B. I was confident that they would all underestimate, even though I would never do such a silly thing. Oh, well, I guess smug goeth before a smackdown. (I think that's in The Message.)

2. Oh, you guys, the room is so much nicer. I posted about the Horrible Office during my big pre-40 push to nicen things up around here (shut up, spellcheck, I decree that nicen is a word), but I don't think the post makes clear how much the ugliness of the room made my soul itch. The acoustic ceiling with several squares of tile missing, like a gaping maw opening straight into the bowels of the house. (And we all know that nothing civilized has a maw that leads straight to its bowels. Anatomy speaks volumes.) The gray-brown paneling striaght from 1972's list of Decorating Options Least Likely To Age Well. Beneath that, the peacock wallpaper from 1945's version of the same list. We didn't learn about the wallpaper until the paneling was stripped away, but I think my itchy soul must have sensed it was there.

I told the guy to do something that won't be to everyone's taste, but I love it. The two outside walls are painted a lovely pale sky blue. The two inside walls are still white, but each has a door, now painted pale blue. The nasty scuffed-up trim is now a gleaming white all around. On one of the walls, over our bed, I want to stencil a crescent moon and stars and a favorite Shakespeare quote: Such harmony is in immortal souls; but whilst this muddy vesture of decay doth grossly close us in, we cannot hear it.

2.5. Elwood has never been entirely sure that he will find it soothing to sleep under a quote about the muddy vesture of decay, but I am assuring him he will like it just fine.

3. The move requires us to find new homes for some of the stuff that lived in the Horrible Office before it became the Lovely New Bedroom, including a case of my cassette tapes. OH the nostalgia! Elwood sent me mix tapes when he was in the navy; my college pals and I swapped mix tapes too. I can't possibly throw them away but they're not in good shape. (They were in the attic during the re-roofing of our old apartment, and the cases are covered with a faint sprinkling of sticky roof debris.) I think turning them into iTunes playlists would probably be expensive. Maybe I could convert one at a time? Any thoughts for me?

4. My second son was sprinting out the door on Wednesday and sprained his ankle when he fell on the ice. Poor guy. I started to say that otherwise people have been pretty healthy here in Sickness Season, but even a person who strives to be un-superstitious is reluctant to tempt fate that aggressively.

5. Part of the reason I really really really hope everyone stays healthy for the next week or so (or, you know, fifteen) is that I have an Interview, a capital-I interview, on Wednedsay. Oh, you guys, would you pray for me? I will be so sad if I don't get this job. I have been working on my job talk this week and it's going s-l-o-w-l-y. I do feel confident that I'll be able to give a good talk, but getting from outline to final version always takes me many hours more than I think it ought to. I'm not so confident about what I'll say to the upper-echelon administrators (yes, plural!) who are on my interview schedule. How about, "Don't you have better things to do than talk to me?" I'm sure that's a winner question. 

6. I walked Stella home today after preschool and we had the nicest time. She was happy to walk, after a recent stretch in which she has wanted to be carried to a ridiculous extent. We went for a hike in the Smokies during which she refused categorically to walk. In case you wondered, 2.6 miles (with a 300-foot climb in the first half) is a long way to carry a 30-pound child who is perfectly capable of self-propulsion. Anyway, today we walked and ran and galloped and jumped together. She found a stick and said, "Mama, is it beautiful or wonderful?" I said, "Yes, it's beautiful and wonderful." We came home for cocoa, and while it was heating I tried to map my recent runs. I turned around to discover that she and I have different ideas about the number of marshmallows that constitutes enough marshmallows.

7. Elwood was unenthusiastic about moving furniture when I spoke to him on the phone, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. I got two dressers and a big desk and a couple of smaller items where I wanted them to be, which emboldened me to tackle the mattress. Unfortunately, it flopped backwards on top of me. On the way down I smacked my head on the desk. It could have been a lot worse, though, and by the time my 13yo answered my calls for help I was giggling. We both cracked up as he set me free. The younger boys came home just as I was getting upright again, and my 10yo asked if he could see what it felt like to have a mattress fall on top of him. No, I said. Joe sighed heavily. He said, "You never let me do anything fun." That's my job, man: Sucker-Upper of Fun.

More quick takes at Jen's. 

Boot camp, the update

Monday was a Scout potluck and Tuesday I went to strength-training class, but last night we started dinner table boot camp. Last night I spread the tablecloth and lit a candle and turned out the overhead lights. Stella did beautifully! She was reluctant to sit in her spot between her brothers, but she was happy to sit on my lap instead. She ate lots of pork roast (no calabacitas, no Brussels sprouts, and no mostly-carrot cole slaw, but hey-- one thing at a time). She was still eating, in fact, when it was time to take Petely to CCD.

It was not, however, an unmitigated success.

Boys: Whyyyyyy is there a tablecloth? Whyyyyyy are the lights off?
Parents: To encourage your sister to eat more at mealtimes and have better manners.
Boys: But I don't liiiiiiike having the lights off. Whyyyyyy are the lights off?
Parents: To encourage your sister to eat more at mealtimes and have better manners.
[repeat, especially if you are the boy who will remain nameless but who tends to be argumentative]

Elwood tells me that I often spring things on the boys without warning -- he was surprised I hadn't told them what was afoot when I told the internet. I don't know, you guys. I used to envision myself as the kind of mom who encouraged input and collaboration and who listened sensitively to my children's ideas. And then I gave birth to five opinionated children. If I say, "Let's go out for ice cream!" they will argue about which ice cream shop to visit. Like, they will fight and give no quarter until I wonder why I ever suggest treats or fun outings and if perhaps I should confine each boy to a quarter of the basement and forbid him to speak to his siblings. Or me. Ever again.

(I am typing this in a hurry or I would probably delete that whole last paragraph.)

Anyway, it's often easier to make an enthusiastic-and-not-up-for-negotiation announcement: We're going to Culver's! We're going to West Virginia for vacation! We're going to eat dinner by candlelight and BY GOLLY you can deal!

Tonight I am making pizza. Perhaps they will be more tolerant of aberrations like tablecloths and candlelight if there are fewer cruciferous vegetables on offer.

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Boot camp, with tablecloths

Orchid Butt

Recent-ish-ly I linked to a long-ago post about my husband that contained these two nuggets:

1. He cranks the heat so high in the van that I think he is secretly raising orchids in there. (Very hardy orchids, that can withstand the freezing temperatures they are subjected to during the other 167 hours in the week.)  He has always liked it to be 158 degrees in the car.  I asked him about this early in our marriage:  How come I'm always hot in the car, when you're cold, and I'm always cold in the house, when you're hot?  He explained:  That's because I'm normal, and you're a space alien.


2. The memory still makes me laugh so hard I have to stop typing for a minute.  I wish I could duplicate the delivery for you, because it doesn't look that funny, I know, but it was hilarious.

In September we acquired a new van. Well, it's a 2004 van but it's new to our family. It has heated seats. Elwood is a fan. Every time I sit where he sat last, I find myself sweating and loosening clothing because he keeps turning on the seat-heater. I think, "WHERE, exactly, does he want those orchids to grow? Down the legs of his PANTS?"

So if you are driving around my town and you see a woman with her head stuck out the window, yodeling "ORCHID BUTT AGAIN!" -- I hope you'll wave.

Boot camp, with tablecloths

I read a really interesting book right before Christmas: French Kids Eat Anything. It has inspired me to put some work into our family dinners in hopes of making things better.

Stella is a terrible eater. Terrible! She has learned that she can pick at dinner and then grab a snack later, and so she doesn't eat much dinner unless cheese pizza is on offer. She eats nothing green.

The book is written by a North American mother, Karen LeBillon, who moved to France for a year with her French husband and their two little girls. It describes her many missteps and the transformation of her girls from uber-picky to accommodating eaters.

There's lots of food for thought in the book, but a few things in particular stood out to me. One is the absurdity of US snack habits. LeBillon offered a snack to a miserable girl in the checkout line at the grocery store one day (and who hasn't?), only to be told that she was going to make her daughter obese. When she visited her younger daughter's daycare, she tasted one of the puff pastry shells sitting on a tray filled with beet, cauliflower, and (I think) spinach puree. The disapproval was palpable: those were for the kids, not the grownups. (Does your preschooler snack on spinach puree? Because mine does not.) She notes that strollers in France do not have cup holders, because eating on the go is a big no-no. Eating deserves attention, the French say.

LeBillon proposes ten rules for better eating, but it's not a book of thou-shalt-nots. She talks about the effort French families make to have special mealtimes, to focus on their food, to teach children to experience food rather than rushing through it.

There is a grown-up in this house who could benefit from less snacking and more experiencing, I tell you what.

We're in a better place with dinner than we were a year ago. That's approximately when we told the boys that they couldn't leave the table just because they were done; they had to wait until everyone was finished. Sometimes this is a fiasco, but more often it stimulates interesting conversations with lots of laughter. It used to sap my will to live to spend half an hour, at a minimum, getting food on the table, only to have my children tear through their meals and expect to be excused in five minutes. Less will-to-live sapping is a good thing, n'est-ce pas?

I need to put a little more forethought into dinner. I don't think I need to spend a whole lot more time cooking, necessarily, but I'm scrambling too often and scrambling is usually avoidable. I'm going to dust off the tablecloths, to set the mood, and try lighting a candle, because I discovered by accident that Stella is more willing to eat green flecks in low light. The combination of tablecloth and candle could, of course, result in a dinnertime conflagration, but we'll keep the fire extinguisher handy.

I can't decide if I need to hide the accessible snacks (of course, at the moment I have nowhere to hide them because my house is full of displaced STUFF (though no more Christmas decorations -- hurray!)) or just teach her that crackers are not for grazing.

Off to make calabacitas. I'll let you know how it goes.

The most wonderful time of the year

Have I posted before about how much I hate the song "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year"? About the choir director who announced enthusiastically (as if I did not hate the song enough already) that we would be doing choreography, because what is schlocky music without bad hand motions from a bunch of embarrassed college students? About how I tried to muster the nerve to raise my hand in rehearsal and say to the director, "Please, please can the stupid choreography, and perhaps the stupid song too"? About how I almost blew off the performance because I hated the song so much? About how we were performing with the primo choral ensemble on campus, who sang a stunning and understated Christmas hymn next to which we sounded like clowns who had drunk too freely of the eggnog?

Wait, what was I talking about?

New Year's resolutions, that's what! I love the idea of an unspotted year in which to make new plans and try new things. I never start them until Epiphany, but here are a couple I wanted to share.

1. Go to bed earlier. No excuses. From this (I hope) will flow a bunch of good things: more productive mornings, less stressed out evenings. Can I teach my kids to wipe down the stovetop as part of kitchen-cleaning? Set up a roster of kitchen-cleaning duties? Set up an evening prayer routine or read-aloud practice that actually sticks? We shall see.

2. Tend the body. Aim for a diet that's about 80% paleo for the next six weeks, and report back on how that works out. Start the half-marathon training program from Train Like A Mother, and see how the long runs feel.

Curfew! Time to hit post. I think I will mostly put my resolutions in Evernote for my own reference, but LMK if you're interested in seeing them here.

Dept. of First World Problems

So I called the guy who is renovating the Previously Horrible Office, and he said a bad word. He said, "Wednesday."

I had never thought of Wednesday as a bad word before. However.

Exhibit A: the dining room. Underneath those stacks of books there is a dining room table. Now I understand that in some houses the dining room table is largely ornamental. In this house, however, where the kitchen is about 7 feet wide by 12 feet long, the dining room table is in use for every meal of every day.

We ate dinner out last night. And lunch today too.

See that bookshelf against the wall? It lived in the Horrible Office. It was mostly reference books and so I have been attempting to purge its contents (see the precarious stack behind the table?). Really, how many hard-copy dictionaries does a family need in the third millennium? If the zombie apocalypse happens and we lose our internet connection, we will have more pressing concerns than the etymology of "inspissate."

Alex came in during the purge (the attempted purge, I should say), and said (of the American Heritage Dictionary, circa 1984), "How can you get rid of this? I spent every day of my childhood reading this book!" He opened to a random page and said dreamily, "Numismatics: the study of coins."

Exhibit B1: the bedroom.

That alarming pile of books came from the south wall of the Horrible Office, where Elwood built shallow, closely spaced shelves to accommodate the largest possible number of paperbacks. They work better on those shelves than piled on that desk, I'm telling you.

Notice the file cabinet in the corner, blocking the door of the closet where the games go. We took two crates of games on our trip and there is just no way to unpack them.

Exhibit B2: the bedroom, continued.

In order to move the office furniture into our bedroom, we moved the bedroom furniture into the traffic pathways. That's my husband's dresser, blocking my closet. I can't unpack, really, because I have to hold my breath and reach in blindly to get anything into or out of the closet. I can get out clean underwear, because it doesn't need to match anything else, but my other wardrobe options will be limited.

Exhibit C (oh, please disregard the battered loveseat -- resolution #1 for 2013 is to reupholster or replace the loveseat): the music room.

Our little music room took the overflow items. It is a small space -- maybe 10 x 12 -- and in the middle of the floor there are a paper shredder, a toolbox, a yoga mat, a laundry hamper, a garbage can, and the giant box for the food processor I broke in September. (Its owner wants it back but we haven't been able to coordinate schedules for me to hand it off.)

This would be less overwhelming in another season, but just now we have all of the Christmas... detritus is not a very good word to use here but I am struggling to come up with another one... STUFF to deal with: our fat tree, dripping needles, and the Advent wreath and the Nativity set and all of the still-homeless gifts.

Next weekend I should have a pretty pale blue bedroom in which I can ensconce myself serenely. Our handyman has ripped out the Horrible Office's flood-damaged ceiling and ripped off the hideous paneling and ripped away the trim that was savaged by the previous owners' dog. Next weekend I will have a dresser and the homeless books should mostly be re-homed and the Christmas things will all be back in their boxes in the basement.

I'm thinking, though, that it could be a long week.

PS! And! How could I forget this part? I am sharing my kitchen, my 7 x 12 kitchen, with a turtle and a gecko.

From amid the teetering stacks of books

I had a Plan, you guys. We were going to be traveling over New Year's and so I said, Hey! Let's get the Horrible Office de-horribilized while we're gone! Then we can move out of the too-small bedroom in which we have been sleeping and make if into a Non-Horrible Office. We returned tonight after a surprisingly nice week away and discovered that the de-horribilization remains a work in progress. Unfortunately, we moved everything out of the Horrible Office thinking we could move it as soon as we got home. I have wiggled myself into bed via a complicated process requiring me to suck in my stomach and hope for the best. When Stella calls me in the night, I hope I can reverse it without tearing a ligament. Lots more to say; not so much patience for iPod posting. Watch this space.