Light and Momentary

Seven Quick Takes: Birthday Boy Edition

1. My middle son is eleven today. He says, "It's my first palindromic age!" I wished him ten more palindrome birthdays, thinking that would take him to 111, but my 13yo pointed out that 101 is actually a palindrome too. 

2. For his birthday Joe asked for a replacement factorial T-shirt. He wore the original until I told him it was too ragged for school, and now he wears it to bed.

3. He is not as ubergeeky as these first two takes might make him sound. He's the child who eroded my ban on toy guns. He is the proud owner of 15ish Nerf guns, and is forever hoping for more. His thoughts on circumventing silly snacktime rules, obtaining cool toys, using bad language, and dealing with unimaginative deacons are all favorite family stories. 

4. On the menu: blueberry oven pancake for breakfast, subs for lunch, potato-cheese pie with green beans and chocolate cake for dinner. On the schedule: minor league baseball tonight, paintball with pals on Sunday.

5. No matter how many things I forget when I am an elderly lady with an uncertain memory, I think I will always remember the joy of his birth -- my first at home.

6. He is a kid to be proud of: hard-working, independent, conscientious. He won the 5th-grade citizenship award, the first of our kids to do so.

7. Recently he found himself in need of some comfort after a sticky situation at a friend's house. He had handled it beautifully -- you couldn't have asked for a better response -- but the memory lingered. He asked if I would read Esther to him -- he thinks this bit is a hoot. Before you get to chapter 6, though, there's a fair amount of story to get through. I lay beside him, trying to pour all the love and consolation I could into the reading. "Hammedatha the Agagite" isn't what one usually thinks of as a soothing phrase, but any port in a storm, I guess. His eyelids fluttered closed as I read about satraps and eunuchs and gibbets and genocide averted, until his breathing was peaceful and I eased away slowly.

The thing about 11 is that you turn around and blink and they're teenagers already, and they don't ask you to stay with them while they fall asleep any longer. I am remembering the days when he was very small, the way his dark blue eyes studied my face as we got to know each other. It's been such a pleasure to watch him unfurl.

More quick takes at Jen's. And phew! Thirty days, thirty posts. Thanks for reading.

Maybe I won't kick it in the ribs

After my overly dramatic post last night, it dawned on me that I was needlessly stressed about the seaming. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to get the ear pieces to fit in their spots because of row gauge issues, and after multiple readings I had not been able to figure out what the snout seaming instructions were telling me to do. I'm still not sure I understand what the designer intended, but I have a plan that will work. And after I posted, I put on a Call The Midwife episode and started seaming the first ear piece. Which, mysteriously, slotted right into place with a minimum of fuss.

This discovery caused me to realize that I probably would not die of tentacles, and end-weaving hasn't killed me yet. Drama-- I started to say "drama over," but let's be realistic here: drama damped down for the time being.

If there were one trait I could uproot forever in myself, it might be my tendency to think hyperventilate-y thoughts about how I won't be able to do whatever it is that I am hoping to do. Tomorrow is my third son's birthday, and I was reminiscing with him tonight about his arrival. I'll never know if it was experience or environment (it was my first homebirth) or a combination, but for the first time I was able to lean in when the contractions struck, instead of holding back in fear that I wouldn't have what it took to get through. (Maybe Our Lady of the VIsitation, whose intercession I had sought for weeks before the birth while simultaneously thinking "But surely the baby will have arrived by the feast day," made a difference too.)

I've been using the Run Less, Run Faster intermediate training plan in recent weeks, and the mid-tempo runs are kicking my butt. I'm enjoying the intervals; the short-tempo runs are hard but satisfying. But I've made three attempts to do the 3.5-mile mid-tempo run, and each time I get tangled up in my own mind games. It's not that I'm about to throw up. It's not that I'm about to fall over. I just get worried that I won't be able to do it and then I can't do it any longer.

Maybe I need to watch a Call The Midwife episode at the gym. Or get over myself, maybe.

In My Sights

This post title does not mean "in my sights" in the sense of "an inspiring goal I can see in the distance." It means "in my sights" in the sense of "I am going to shoot this sucker down with my imaginary rifle and kick its corpse in the ribs."

I told my son I'd make him a Cthulhuclava, but I have never been so weary of knitting something. There's normal "ready-to-be-done" knitting ennui and then there's "I-might-never-wear-this-because-I'm-so-tired-of-the-feel-and-smell-of-this-yarn" knitting enervation and then there's "if-I-gouged-my-own-liver-with-this-damned-DPN-maybe-Prometheus-and-his-vulture-would-come-and-finish-this-project-and-if-not-the-ensuing-hospitalization-would-seem-like-a-pleasant-respite-from-the-guilt-that-it's-not-yet-finished" knitting misery.

There's only a bit of knitting left, in objective terms: 4.5 of the 10 tentacles. The seaming will probably not take me a horribly long time (she said wearily). Then I'll only have to weave in a duotrigintillion ends and I'll be done! Dead and buried and decomposed, it's true, but done! 

No. Wait. I will still have to stuff the tentacles and the brow and close them up. Here's hoping I can knit from beyond the grave.

CSA Tuesday

Our first CSA pickup was tonight. We weren't quite sure whether we'd sign up again, because the kids did not love all the greens and radishes we got last year. (I am still, actually, grimacing at the memory of the huge piles of thick-skinned radishes we got toward the end of the season. I'm fine with the little spring ones, though.) I'm glad we're doing it, though. I love that I can talk to the actual person who grew my actual food about how the season is treating him so far. There's a sense of community at the pickups that is just not there in the produce aisle of the grocery store. I think I may blog more about the CSA veggies this year, since it requires some creativity to prepare them in kid-friendly ways, and some commitment to use them all. Suggestions are most welcome.

This week we have (1) overwintered Jerusalem artichokes. I love Jerusalem artichokes but they're hard to find and usually pricey, so we never have them in the house. I might have one with my breakfast tomorrow. I'm wondering if there are enough to make soup. I'm excited about this.

We also have (2) a bunch of gorgeous beets the size of ping-pong balls. I couldn't decide between the red and the orange -- they were just beautiful. (I confess I am less enthusiastic about the greens. Beet greens have a funny texture, I think -- a little gritty even when they're clean. Know what I mean?)

Also on offer this evening: bunches of (3) sorrel. I've never had sorrel in my kitchen before and I am especially excited to use it. It's delicous raw. If I can scare up some frozen zucchini from the depths of the freezer, I think I'll try a Crescent Dragonwagon recipe that calls for zucchini and sorrel and potatoes and kale, bound with egg and milk and Parmesan. I don't have any kale but I do have a giant bunch of (4) spinach.

Fifth on the list: radishes, vibrantly pink. They might feature in my breakfast tomorrow also. I am more excited about the radishes than about their greens.

Sixth: lovely plump scallions, with greens that were probably knee-high before they were harvested.

Last of all, there's a bag of mixed baby greens. The family advised us to stir-fry them. I am thinking about taking all of the greens and making a batch of Crescent Dragonwagon's gumbo. It's one of the best things to emanate from my kitchen and most of the kids will eat it happily, but the hassle factor is really high. It requires more chopping than I usually do in a week, and the last time I made it I burned my roux twice and then burned myself on the third iteration. I do love to have a vat of gumbo in the freezer, though. 

Uncertainty about how best to use my profusion of organic vegetables is probably the very definiton of a first-world problem, huh?

Recently finished

For ages I'd been planning to make myself a felted French press cozy, but it was not a happy project. I couldn't figure out quite what I wanted it to look like, and while I was deciding I lost my original gauge swatch. I was worried about making the opening at the top too small, since you never know quite how felting will change the finished product, and it wound up a bit too big. So do you know what I did? I took a purple felted flower I'd had lying around since 2010, cut out its center, and hot-glued that sucker to the top of the cozy. In the picture you see my pale yellow French press cozy in my pale yellow kitchen. This might be the first project I figured out entirely on my own, without leaning on anybody else's pattern at all, and I am pleased with it despite its imperfections. It also makes an awesome hat, according to my children.

When I posted about my lost knitting mojo, I mentioned the frustrations of these socks I'd been making for my mother. I spent the whole first sock wondering why I couldn't memorize the 8-row chart. Near the cuff (this is a toe-up sock) it dawned on me: there were multiple mistakes in the chart, places where the purl symbol had been omitted. There wasn't some mysterious pattern of knits and purls that I couldn't manage to penetrate; there was sloppy editing! I made the second sock the right way, and memorized the chart in a trice. The difference is minor enough that only an eagle-eyed knitter would notice. I don't think my mother will have many eagle-eyed knitters near her feet. And really, if they complain that her socks offend their aquiline eyes, I'll tell them to take it up with the Knitty tech editor.

My friend Amanda requested purple yarn when I offered to make her a pair of socks, but she said I should pick whatever pattern appealed to me. I made the Errant Socks from the second Mason-Dixon Knitting book. I'm pleased with the finished project, even though they were long and slow. Well, the first sock was long and slow. The second one I banged out in less than ten days. I took the finished first sock to coffee and doughnuts last week, and Amanda seemed very pleased. She marched around in one shoe and one purple sock, waving her foot in the air and saying, "Look at my purple sock!" I hope she is equally pleased with the second.

\ Tonight I wove in the ends on my rabbit hole project. It was so much fun. I pared down the scale of the pattern a bit, after reading lots of Rav comments about how enormous the finished product was. I think I'll make a second out of laceweight, using leftovers from these two projects together with a skein of cream merino/silk. I'll call it a Creamsicle shawl, I think. I have a few other pictures that give a better idea of its slightly unusual shape; I'll get them into my Rav notebook tomorrow for anyone who's curious. (I'm mostgladly on Rav, if you'd like to be friends there.) I'm not sure exactly how to wear it. I keep coming back to something that looks like a caterpillar-striped version of a Girl Scout's badge sash, but I can't think that's really a good look. 

Chinese Puzzle, Mostly Solved

You know those little 4x4 grids that have 15 tiles in them, and you have to slide them one by one to make a picture? Organizing anything in our house is like doing one of those puzzles.

For one of the Eagle-required merit badges, my Alex has to do a family project and an individual project around the house. He decided that he wanted to take the little room in the northeast corner of our basement and turn it into a listening room. This was the idea my husband had when we first moved in eight years ago, but like many of the ideas we had when we bought this house, it was still just an idea.

In fact, it seemed pretty far from reality. When it's rainy or cold, the kids have Nerf battles in the basement. Joe had taken over that room with his Nerf gun collection; various costumes had been ferried down to that room from upstairs; someone had broken a beaded necklace on the floor without bothering to pick up the resulting mess.

Elwood said, "There's no way we can get that room in shape in a weekend."

It looks like he was wrong.

Alex has done a fantastic job today. He enlisted all of his brothers to help, and they sorted and organized and purged together. There were no silly quarrels and there was no slacking off. Getting the kids' stuff out of there took less than an hour. There was an unexpected spillover effect, too, so the rest of the basement is tidier than it was.

This was the room where purged books went to molder. We now have four crates of books in the back of the van, awaiting the judgment of the used bookstore guy (who knows my husband well, you guys, as the person who always says, "Store credit would be great!"), and the Harvard Classics have found a new home atop a duct. (I find this a creative but slightly worrying solution. Is it going to cause problems for the seam between that bit of duct and the next? Elwood and Alex think not but I am not 100% convinced.)

This was also the room where my husband had been storing his vinyl collection in crates. I'm not even sure how many linear feet of vinyl he has, but it's in the double digits. After we got rid of all the stuff that didn't belong in there, Alex and Elwood put the records on the empty shelves. Of his own volition, Alex tackled the cobwebs (and egg sacs! ick!) in the beams overhead and vacuumed the carpet. Tomorrow they're going to hook up the stereo equipment.

It hasn't been a particularly restful Sunday. I emptied sweaters out of a chest so Joe could have it for his displaced Nerf guns, which meant the sweaters needed a new home (a new storage bin that slides under my bed). My 13yo is trying to figure out exactly which furniture belongs in his room. At the moment he is trying to fit in a desk and a little dresser from the basement; I don't think they can both stay there. (And the bookshelf from that room -- where did it go? I don't even know.) It's been a good Sunday, though.

I'm excited to kick back in the recliner and listen to U2's October on vinyl for the first time in...I don't even know. More than 25 years, I'm guessing. I might have to wait my turn, though. We're all excited to make better use of that space.

10 reasons to love confession

On Saturday afternoons, confessions at my parish run from 3:00 to 3:45. We got to church at 3:02 and found 12 people ahead of us in line. I stepped into the confessional at 3:44, but the priest said, "I'm sorry, I have to prepare for Mass." I was so disappointed. This is why.

1. Because Jesus is there. From St. Faustina's diary: When you approach the confessional, know this, that I Myself am waiting there for you.  I am only hidden by the priest, but I Myself act in your soul.

2. Because there is wisdom and perspective waiting for you, from someone who hears all about human failings. I have been offered so much good advice in the confessional, running the gamut from easy and practical all the way to really hard but worth the struggle.

3. Because you might be approaching things backwards without even suspecting it. For about a year, I kept hearing a consistent but puzzling message in the confessional. I bet four or five different priests told me the same thing. Once after confession I told Elwood how exasperated I was that I kept getting the same message. "Jamie," he said, "that's because they're right." 

4. Because God can use even a cold or distant priest as an agent of mercy. It isn't always magical, but it's always worthwhile. Three times in 21 years confession has left me feeling worse rather than better, but in each case there was something important I needed to learn from that interaction.

5. Because forgiveness transcends language, culture, and emotional barriers. Once a Vietnamese priest who was trying to be especially quiet heard my confession. I have no idea what counsel he gave me, and I probably had to ask him to repeat my penance. The grace, regardless, was tangible.

6. Because knowing that you'll have to sit down with another human being and tell him exactly what stupid thing you decided to do can make you less likely to do that stupid thing. I mean, it would be better if I did the right thing out of pure-hearted love for God, but sometimes the unwillingness to confess a particular sin to my pastor yet again keeps me on track.

7. Because in a world that increasingly allows you to buff your image, confession prompts humility. I don't post it on Facebook when I lose my temper, but I lose my temper too often. The freedom to present a tidier version of ourselves online can feed the sin of pride. Settling onto my knees and acknowledging the ways I have fallen short is exactly the antidote I need.

8. Because mercy is life-changing. Pride and fear can serve as short-term spurs to act and think in a particular way, but a daily choice to walk in redemption and freedom can come only from experiencing God's great mercy.

9. Because grace is real. I think it's in David Currie's book-- he talks about asking his wife not long after the family's conversion from evangelicalism whether she thought the sacraments were making a difference in him. She said, "Oooohhh, yes." No question about it.

10. Because the more you go, the better it gets. I tell my younger kids that saying "I don't want to go to confession" is like saying "I don't want to take a bath." You get in the bathtub and you're like, "Oh, yeah, this is great! Warm water! Rubber ducks! Bubbles!" Confession is just the same, minus the warm water/rubber ducks/bubbles. The longer it's been, the greater the resistance. But I'm always glad I went.

1, reprised. Because -- this one bears repeating -- Jesus is there, waiting for you. I went looking for a quote I heard a long time ago and was surprised to discover that it came from Ven. Fulton Sheen: When the priest raises his hands in absolution over you, the blood of Christ is dripping from his fingers. We priests are hardly conscious of this great power. I think we would almost be shocked to death if we ever really realized it. But that is how the sin is absolved, by this blood of Christ.

In my search for the Sheen quote I came across this great post from a priest's perspective.

Seven Quick Takes: Field Day Edition

1. The battle against sunburn has begun. My husband never burns; I never tan. Guess whose genes the kids have? Today was field day for the elementary kids and pool day for the junior high kid (their teeth were chattering), and they all came home sunburned. I am not a fan of sunscreen for myself, even though I know: red hair + a couple of serious childhood sunburns + family history of melanoma = very stupid to be careless about sunscreen. I just hate the feel and the smell of it. Any favorite un-ooky un-smelly sunscreens?

2. I have been slaving away on my poster this week. I always think, "Oh, a poster isn't too much work." Then I sit down to make the poster. It's less work than a manuscript, but it's a project. Note to future Jamie: the R strategy for which you hunted high and low? It's right there in your R folder -- a function you wrote two years ago, sensibly called "Rsq." Here's hoping 2015 Jamie will not waste as much time trying to find it as 2013 Jamie did.

3. I was going to write a post or three about things I used to find intimidating. For years I thought I ought to compost, for instance, but I was nervous about getting started. I'm glad I finally jumped in. One of the posts on my mental list was going to be about homegrown sprouts. When my oldest was little, I often had a jugful of sprouts in progress in a kitchen cupboard-- alfalfa, of course, but also lentil and sunflower. I thought I'd germinate my sunflower seeds indoors before I put them in the garden, since the weeds have a foothold at the moment. I thought to myself, "Everybody should know how easy and satisfying it is to watch sprouts grow in the kitchen!"

Then all of the sunflower sprouts died. 

4. For weeks Stella has been asking to visit a little friend from preschool. I don't know the mom at all, and I'm less assertive than I used to be about introducing myself and arranging get-togethers with people I don't know. I finally bit the bullet and worked it out. The two little girls were thrilled to be playing together -- it was pretty cute to see.

5. If I could make one permanent change in our family's habits this summer, it would be establishing a better evening routine. It is so SO hard to be consistent about it at the end of the day. Maybe a first step is to think about what's essential and what's negotiable. It would be swell if we had family read-alouds in which we wound our way through the complete works of Dickens, but it's more of a priority to make sure that Stella gets her pajamas on consistently. The perfect is the enemy of the good, and all that.

6. For Lent I gave up sugar and staying up late. I would get into bed at 10 (pretty much), read a bit, and say compline. It was such a good discipline. One day I caught myself looking forward to bedtime at 11:30 in the morning.

Have I kept it up? No. I have not.

7. Are you doing anything memorable this weekend? I think we are cleaning out part of our basement. I'd love to get the house cleaned, the paper organized, and put in some time on picture organizing, but what was I just saying about short to-do lists? 

More quick takes at Jen's.

How to eat 5 servings of vegetables a day

Melanie asked about the practicalities of eating five servings of vegetables per day. Most often I eat one for breakfast, two for lunch, and two for dinner. 

About five days a week I have a pumpkin smoothie for breakfast. You can find a lot of frou-frou pumpkin smoothie recipes if you go looking, recipes that tell you to add three kinds of spices and whipped cream on top. Before breakfast? I think not. My recipe is easy and delicious: half a cup of pumpkin, one frozen banana (or an equivalent amount of whatever fruit we have in the freezer, or a fresh banana with some ice cubes), plain yogurt, and coconut milk to blend. It fills me up until lunchtime and it is not overtly vegetable-y. My daughter enjoys it, and she is the queen of picky eaters. 

At lunch I'll often eat a big salad with some protein. A serving of lettuce and other raw leafy greens is one cup. A cup of lettuce topped with various other veggies (tomatoes, carrots, peppers, cukes) and something meaty makes for a satisfying lunch. I'll also often scavenge in the fridge and reprise our dinner from the night before.

At dinnertime we usually have something salad-y (sometimes green salad, sometimes slaw, sometimes carrot salad or broccoli salad or similar) and something steamed. It's not hard to eat a cup of salad and a half-cup of steamed veggies along with something main-dish-y. We often incorporate veggies into our main dishes-- the broccoli thing I mentioned last night, or the pasta bake with red sauce we had tonight, or a speedy soup made from greens and potatoes. If I pay attention to the greens/potatoes ratio and offer bread for dipping, everyone but Stella will eat green potato soup.

If I'm running behind on the servings count, we usually have snackable veggies in the fridge. Baby carrots are our standby (my husband buys pounds and pounds of carrots every week-- babies for snacking and full-sized for cooking and salads, but olives are good too. This one is kind of quirky, but a favorite snack at our house is frozen peas. Not microwaved, just straight out of the freezer and into a bowl. Weird, but it works. 

I use the USDA portion size info, but I don't worry about counting the occasional serving of fries (like, once a month or so). Potatoes are vegetables too, and I'm not fussed about fat.

Tasty, easy, vegetarian

I was going to cook a version of this last night, but we were out of chickpeas. (We are never out of chickpeas. No matter how bare the cupboards may be, we have chickpeas.) I roasted the broccoli (smallish florets, drizzle/toss with olive oil/salt/pepper, 25 minutes at 375), subbed in feta for the absent chickpeas, and added a couple of chopped scallions. I kept my dressing really simple, just extra-virgin olive oil and the juice of half a lemon, because 5:00 sneaks right up on a person. 

Last night I served it warm over bulgur. The grownups liked it a lot; the kids were not enthused. Tonight the leftovers were purely delicious as part of a green salad.

Six days into the S Scheme and it's going fine so far, except I wish 5:00 came a little later in the day. Eating 5 servings of vegetables per day has become much easier for me than it was 8 years ago. (Note to my brother: I owe you a post about sugar.)

In the archives

It is not uncommon for me to read through bits of my archives. It always makes me think I should blog more, because it is such fun (usually) to remember the way things were. Lately the posts I've been going back to most often are the posts that probably inspired the biggest yawns when they were written. 

If you've been reading here for a while, you might remember that I used terrifically unfriendly statistics software to complete my dissertation analyses. From time to time I blogged about things I had been learning. I use those posts all the time. I wish I had written ten more. I have no idea -- none -- how I did the factor analysis for my dissertation, because I didn't blog about it. This week I am kicking myself for not writing a post about calculating the variance explained in hierarchical linear modeling. Almost certainly, all of you are like, "Thank the Lord that post never appeared in my Google Reader feed, because I might have fallen asleep and injured my face on my desk in the time it took to scroll through something so boring." I'm still a little rueful.

 

Funny Girl

1. Tonight I was taking the kids to a kickoff dinner for our local summer theater program. We were crossing an intersection that always makes me a little nervous -- cars come sailing around that corner too quickly for my comfort. I said what I always say, "Briskly, briskly!" (I don't know where that came from but I've said it for years.) I had to remind one of the boys that "briskly" means something other than "amblingly." Stella said, with the merest whiff of sanctimony, "I was briskling, Mama." 

2. I've watched four boys learn to play chess, and not a one of them has ever paired up the queens and kings by color and interrupted the game so they could kiss.

3. We saw a very kid-friendly mashup of three Shakespeare plays after dinner tonight. Serendipitously, Stella is way into the Marcia Williams Shakespeare books lately. Her favorite plays are Romeo & Juliet and Midsummer Night's Dream, both of which made it into the mashup. When the Capulets were introduced she sighed longingly, "Oh, is that Juliet?"

It's a good thing she's cute, because she's still awake. Off to see what I can do about that...

Before and After

I was digging in a closet on Friday and I pulled down some letters I wrote my husband -- then my boyfriend -- in the fall of 1990. He was in the Navy, stationed in sunny San Diego, and I was in my last year of undergrad in the wintry Midwest. We wrote a lot of letters.

In more than one of the letters I was writing about my faith-- the BIble study I was leading, my thoughts on Catholic teaching about sex. If you had told me as I was writing those letters that I would actually be Catholic in less than 18 months, I would have thought you were out of your mind. It would have seemed as implausible to me in 1990 as if someone today told me I'd be Buddhist in the fall of 2014.

This morning at Mass I was thinking about all the gifts I didn't know were waiting for me. Lots of life's transitions are gradual, but that one is a bright line. Life with and without the Eucharist, life with and without reconciliation. I never even suspected what I was missing.

I didn't know how much I would appreciate the sense of continuity that the Catholic Church offers us. We don't have to get back to the purity of the church in Acts, any more than we have to return to our own infancy. I would have told you I believed in the communion of the saints, but the reality of real people who lived through real struggles and who really have our backs in tight spots was a gift I had not begun to open.

And this last one will sound weird to people who are not Catholic, but the word on my heart this morning as I listened to that beautiful description of the Holy Spirit's descent was "inclusive." It's not just Pamphylians and Phrygians these days: it's people around the world, in every station in life. The Church offers me role models who have been married, who have been mothers, who have been scholars. Many forms of service, one Lord to serve.

It's my 22nd Pentecost as a Catholic. I hope to be delighting in the red vestments and the lovely words of the Sequence -- and in the incredible reality of the indwelling Holy Spirit -- for many more.

Scipio Speaks

We have a reel mower. We bought it for environmental reasons and we keep it because we're not really fussy about our lawn. It always looks like it was mowed by teenagers, because -- guess what? -- it was.

However.

We've had a lot of rain followed by lovely warm days, and the grass has gone berserk. Like, if all of its little seed heads were eyes, each one would be gleaming with hegemonious thoughts. (Google says hegemonious is not a word, but I scoff at Google.) Reel mowers don't work very well on grass that is plotting its takeover of the Western hemisphere.

Lately our grass has been looking like it was mowed by a pair of drunken gibbons. Make that amputee drunken gibbons. It was a mess out there. Elwood and I agreed that it was out of control, even for people who are not fussy about the lawn.

I went out to forestall the coup, and I am here to tell you it was a near thing. Picture the grass winding around my ankles, trying to pull me down. (That poem seems a little more sinister now. Let you work -- harrumph.) Picture me stopping again and again to untangle the tall grass from the mower workings. Picture me having John Deere fantasies. A giant riding mower of my very own would show this yard who's boss, I thought. (To appreciate the preposterousness of this fantasy, you should know that our yard is maaaybe 50 feet wide and not much deeper.)

By the time I was done I was beyond cranky. I wanted to salt the lawn, like Scipio at Carthage. I wanted to stand on the front porch and bellow "Carthago delenda est," except with grass in place of Carthage.

Just as I finished that paragraph, a nearby neighbor fired up a lawnmower. I was the one who pushed to buy the reel mower in the first place (cleaner! greener! safer!) but I have to say, right in this moment I'm having some motor envy.

Seven Quick Takes: Blooming Viburnum Edition

1. This morning I couldn't find my iPod so I pulled the breviary down from the shelf. (I know! That's so 2008!) Stella pulled out a Bible and sat down beside me on the couch, murmuring snippets of prayers and various other bits and pieces. At one point she said, "You're the sparkliest pig I ever seened." Part of my brain detached itself from Morning Prayer for a minute to think about where you might find that in the Bible. There aren't a whole lot of pig moments in the Bible, are there? Did one of the Gadarene swine say it to another on their fateful jog? Did the prodigal son overhear it at the feeding trough? I glanced over and saw that she was flipping the pages in Psalms. I'm don't know of any pigs in Psalms.

2. I had another the-internet-is-eating-my-brain moment while I was trying to remember the right adjective for those possessed pigs. I wanted them to be the Gennesaret swine, but I wasn't quite convinced. If you ask Google about Gennesaret pigs, it will suggest that you might mean Gadarene swine. I mean, I'm glad to have found the modifier I was seeking, but what is Google doing inside my brain?

3. Just recently I was reading a book in which a character talked about the deaths of the gabardine swine, a moment that made me say, "Hey, that's funny!" Alas, I cannot remember who or where-- I think it must have been either Dorothy Sayers or G.K. Chesterton. Google is coming up with Jack Aubrey, but that's not where I saw it. That's kind of a tangle, isn't it? My memory lapse reminds me of someone else's slip of the tongue which turns into another memory lapse. UGH, my memory is not as sharp as it once was.

4. I am binding off the Color Affection that I started earlier this week. It's been totally fun. The color combination reminds me of a big stripey caterpillar, which is perhaps not an effect I would usually aim for. Of course, my usual fashion choices run more along the lines of "faded rust-colored T-shirt or really old and battered public library T-shirt?"

5. I'd like to do some kind of edging around the Color Affection, but I'm not sure what. I thought about applied I-cord, but I am not sure I have the stamina for that. I'm pretty sure no one has ever died of applied I-cord, but I'd hate to be the first. Aside from the painful factor, I'm concerned about the impact of I-cord on the drape of the piece. Crochet also seems like it might be too firm. Any thoughts?

6. My husband bought Petely an ant farm and it is surprisingly hypnotic, watching them go about their business. Pete and I can just sit and admire them, which is not what I expected when I first heard the words "ant farm."

7. The end-of-year paper inundation is beginning. Hold me. Or else bring your snow shovel. I've been trying to get on top of the clutter this week, but I've also been working on the poster I'm presenting next month (and, okay, all those miles of caterpillar-esque garter stitch). The clutter is not actually diminishing very much, which makes me crazy. "I am going to pile it all in a laundry basket," I mouth-frothed in Elwood's direction, "and haul it into the front yard and SET IT ON FIRE." He cast about desperately for something to say to his would-be arsonist wife. "Here, Jamie," he said, "sit down and look at the ants."

You probably had to be there, but it still cracks me up.

More quick takes at Jen's. 

Game ON

You guys, I have a Plan. It's my S Scheme: Sixty-three dayS of Sanity and Salutariness (with Scads of Strengthening and poSSibly Some Slenderizing).

Eight years ago I found myself twenty years over my pre-pregnancy weight when Petely was two months old. I embarked on The Vegetable Project: 30 days in which I consumed 5 servings of vegetables and a gallon of water every day while giving up sugar. I lost 13 pounds in 30 days, and took off the remaining 7 in the following 2 or 3 months.

Something weird has happened to my body over the past year or so. I am eating well and exercising often, but my set point seems to have shifted. At the moment I weigh almost what I did when I started the first Vegetable Project. It's easy to be a little crazy about weight gain. (Exhibit A: when my SIL asked me to sing at my BIL's funeral in March, I thought, "I am too fat to appear in public.")

I am pushing back against the crazy. The goal of the S Scheme is not to lose a particular amount of weight. It's to work on good habits here in the summer while I have a little more space in my head. It's to tend the body that I hope will carry me into old age, and to accept that its shape is going to change over time.

The details:

1. Vegetables! Five servings a day, no excuses. 

2. Water! (Not a gallon a day, because I am not feeding a 2-month-old these days. We'll say 3 quarts, to cut down on the nibbliness that is actually thirst in disguise.)

3. Planning! Dinner on the table at 5:00 sharp, and no snacking afterward.

4. Sugar! Give it up entirely for the next nine weeks, and then re-evaluate. 

5. Exercise! At least four hours per week of moderate intensity exercise, plus daily bursts of lower-intensity movement-- walking to the library instead of taking the car, even when it's hot. Biking to the pool.

Recently I was thinking about how much more fit I am than I was ten years ago when I weighed less. I thought to myself, "If I could be that skinny and that out of shape or this weight and this level of fitness, which would I rather be?" The answer came immediately: skinny. But that's a stupid answer. I am pushing back against that nonsense. If I eat sensible portions of nutritious tasty foods, and push my body to be stronger and faster, I need to relax about the scale. This is me giving myself permission to be the shape I am right now.

Book Snob

Pete brought home a flyer a couple of weeks ago about an author visiting the school. We could buy her book, an inspirational rhyming book, for only $20. And! It came with an accessory -- a very girly accessory. Call it a pink hair ribbon. 

"Please can we buy a signed copy, Mom?" Pete implored, his gray eyes earnest. "My teacher says it's a really good book." 

I said, "Oh, honey, I don't think so. 'Inspirational' is one strike and 'rhyming' is two strikes and the presence of not one but two dangling modifiers in the author's bio makes three. And what would you do with a pink hair ribbon anyway?"

"But Mom," he said, disappointed, "my teacher says it's a really good book and she knows about good books."

At this point I wondered if the school got a slice of the proceeds, because really? Twenty bucks for a children's book (with hair ribbon)? I kept my cynicism to myself. I said, "We should choose our books carefully because we don't have a lot of shelf space. We can get it from the library and see if we really want to own it."

I felt a little dissatisfied with myself after the conversation. It sounds arrogant, refusing to buy a book based on a hunch that its scansion will be suboptimal. Was this a Charlotte Mason No Twaddle kind of proclamation, or just a surfeit of intellectual pride? For better or for worse, I have decided that life is too short to read terrible books to my children. This means I will never again read anything written by Stan and Jan Berenstain (or at least nothing from the past 35 years -- Spooky Old Tree gets a pass). I guess it also means that sometimes I say no to my favorite pair of earnest gray eyes.

A couple of days ago I came home to find a worried neighborhood grandma on the front porch. Joe had seen the pink hair ribbon in her grandson's backpack. "Dude," he said, "why do you have a pink hair ribbon?" In his version of the story, the kid said, "I don't know. You want it?" Joe took it from him and looked it over, but quickly realized he had no need for a pink hair ribbon. He turned to a classmate. "Want a pink hair ribbon?" he asked. The classmate took it and Joe thought no more about it.

In the grandson's version of the story, he said, "You can look at it if you want to, but you'll have to give it back to me because my grandma bought it as a gift for someone else." In the grandson's version of the story, he had been very clear about the importance of the pink hair ribbon. I admit to a certain curiosity about the story the grandson might tell without an irate grandma standing by, but in the moment we had reached an impasse. I said I'd call the other kid's parents. I said I hoped the ribbon could be recovered.

I wound up leaving a message in an anonymous voice mailbox, which was not encouraging. I imagined the grandma telling me that Joe should chip in for the lost book/ribbon set. 

I thought it would be the height of irony if I wound up buying (part of) the book I had so loftily declined to pay for a few weeks earlier. 

I was relieved when the ribbon turned up. I'm still thinking about intellectual snobbery and children's books. I still can't deal with rhyming books that don't scan.

What books do you hate to read your kids? And will you read them if asked nicely? Will you buy a book you hate? What about a book you only suspect you will hate?

Rabbit Holed

One of my online pals was complaining about knitting a really boring Color Affection. Her email started the wheels turning in my head. In my sock yarn tub I had a beautiful skein of Madelinetosh that I'd been saving for something special. I had a skein of Sockotta that I'd been thinking I should give away: too much cotton for pleasant knitting. I had a skein of semisolid black that I'd bought with these socks in mind, but then my enthusiasm cooled.

Yesterday it dawned on me that the three of them would go together nicely and I've been knitting ever since. Pictures soon...

Ugh

It's been a complicated mothering day.

That's not my favorite kind.

The end.

Fallow

Bonnie asked about my vegetable garden: I've decided to let it rest this year. I'm going to put sunflowers in the full-sun part of it and mustard greens in the part-sun part of it, a plan I pulled straight out of the comments on this post. (Thanks, you guys!) I have no idea if this strategy will work on soil that may be contaminated with dioxin and its cousins, but I have contact information for a lab that will test for toxin levels. I think I'll do that next winter and decide what to do from there. We've been eating our asparagus, since it is further from the neighbors' house than anything else, but that's it. I have radishes and frisee that self-seeded, and garlic greens standing up tall and proud, and a lovely thyme plant that came back as well. Unfortunately, they're all right in the potential hot zone.

We signed up again for the CSA we joined last year. I really enjoyed the vegetables, but the trouble with a local CSA is that the stuff that's ready in their fields is the same stuff that's ready in my garden. In a non-drought year it could get pretty overwhelming-- there is only so much chard I can put on the dinner table. (Last year I was determined to use every.single.scrap of CSA produce. I might have been a wee bit obsessive about it.)

The thing I will miss most is my herb garden. We do get CSA herbs, but I love wandering out in the late afternoon to luxuriant basil and sage plants and cutting off couldn't-be-fresher piles of herbs for dinner. Pesto! Browned sage leaves! Oh, so delicious!

I think I might plant a new herb garden along the sidewalk that runs up to the front door. I'm not entirely sure this is a good idea. Will it attract too many bees? Will it look too jungle-y? If I plant mint, will it take over the joint? I'm not especially worried about that last one because I seem to have a talent for killing mint plants. I think I'm going to do it: parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme along one side (probably also cilantro, tarragon, lavender, and chervil), and on the other side a veritable forest of basil along with oregano and marjoram. And maybe mint, unless you guys tell me it's a bad idea.

My husband just read the words "veritable forest" and said to himself, "Oh, dear, this is not my favorite idea..."