Light and Momentary

The party planner

I must have posted about half-birthdays before, yes? My oldest son was due on Christmas Eve, and through the entire pregnancy people vented their pent-up frustration at me. "When are you due?" "Christmas Eve." "Oh, you're kidding, that's the worst day to be born. When I was a kid I never got any birthday presents..." During that pregnancy I started saying, "Well, we'll just have a half-birthday party in June." So we do. 

Stella will be 4.5 tomorrow and she is expecting three or four little friends for a princess half-birthday party. They'll be here for two hours. This is my plan:

1. Right when they arrive, I'm going to have them help me mix up ice cream. They can dump and stir and pour it in the machine. It can churn for half an hour and then ripen up for another hour; we'll eat it at the end with sliced strawberries on top.

2. Next we'll make paper plate masks. I have some silver sparkle craft foam from which I will cut out crowns and I'll cut yarn strands for hair in yellow and orange and brown and black. (And maybe pink. Princesses might like pink streaks in their hair, you think?) I also have beads for them to string as earrings. My job is to cut out eyes and draw noses; I'll have them draw eyelashes and brows and a smile (or a scowl, for the Goth princesses), and glue on hair and a crown. I think the earrings and the ribbon fastener can share a hole that will be hidden under the hair, but I'll have to do a test run.

3. When the masks are made-- oh, wait. I was going to have them put the masks on, but that's just asking for a trail of glue-covered yarn across the carpet. Maybe we'll play Pin The Crown On The Princess while the glue dries. 

4. Next up: masks on, music on, cue dancing princesses. Any suggestions to encourage gentle princess dancing that will not result in any fan kicks through the French doors?

5. I'm going to have them make popsicle stick princesses: marker-drawn faces, felt dresses and shoes in their choice of pink or purple, little sparkly flower stickers to festoon the dresses, crowns of silver pipe cleaner. I should cut out dresses tonight too.

6. We have a set of wooden castle blocks, so I'll suggest that they build a castle in the living room floor and pretend with their popsicle stick princesses. Do you think the castle-building will give the glue enough time to dry? My boys could build forever with wooden blocks but Stella finds them less compelling.

7. If we haven't hit the 90-minute mark by the time they're done pretending, I'll send them outside to play Your Highness, May I? For past birthdays I've sent kids across the front yard for Mother May I?, but my new herb garden is going to interfere. Probably no one will break an ankle if we do it in the back.

8. I was planning to make an enormous fluffy white cake tonight: my recipe makes three layers, and I was going to split and fill them with raspberry cream in preparation for covering it all with piles of white icing and arranging 4.5 candles atop. That will be a boatload of cake for five little girls, though. Maybe cupcakes are a better bet. Must decide quickly. Ice cream and strawberries will go alongside.

9. If they need additional entertaining (though SURELY NOT), I can unroll butcher paper for drawing while I recruit some boys to tell one-sentence-at-a-time princess stories with each other. These stories are guaranteed to be unconventional (the dragon is more likely to eat the princess than to be vanquished by her beauty and delicacy), but I didn't say it was going to be a conventional princess party, did I?

10. Does anyone else think party favors are kind of a useless convention? I am going to wrap up baby-sized meringues in pink tissue paper and tie them with ribbon. A bag with a sparkly ring or a princess eraser might be more conventional, but what was I just saying about conventional?

11. After they have all been picked up I am going to have a glass of wine. It will not be rosé, because I am going to be totally pinked out.

I have nothing for them to drink except milk. Hm. Perhaps we can pick up some lemonade (Stella calls it lem'ade) tomorrow. And decorations will be limited to crepe paper and balloons. But I think they'll have fun. I hope so, at any rate.

Five weeks in

Remember my S Scheme? Today marks five weeks in, so I am posting an update.

1. Vegetables: This one is going well. Some days I don't quite hit five servings, but four is pretty good by my lights.

2. Water: This one is harder and I haven't been tracking it as faithfully.

3. Planning: This is the hardest of all. FIve o'clock feels really early for dinner, especially if there's evening stuff going on.

4. Sugar: I was very careful at first, and then I got tired of being careful. (I haven't forgotten that I said I'd write a sugar post.) I'd say I'm being very temperate, but I'm not abstaining.

5. Exercise: This one is going really well. I've hit the goal every week-- 4 hours of moderate exercise. If you look closely you can see the faint outlines of what might be muscle in my upper arm. (Or maybe it's an Alien-esque thing that's going to hatch out when I least suspect it.)

You guys, I didn't tell you the reason for this Plan because it is so SO shallow. How shallow is it? I have to go get my driver's license renewed in four weeks. When I started this plan, I was 20 pounds over the weight on my license. I thought to myself, "Let's have a little truth in advertising here. Your driver's license should reflect your actual weight, or at least something close to it." And then I thought to myself, "I cannot possibly put this weight on my driver's license, so it's going to have to change."

Now I am 14 pounds over the weight on my driver's license, and I bet I could drop a quick five if my baby aliens decide to hatch out between now and then. But I keep reminding myself: the number on the scale is not the goal. Good habits are the goal. I figured out some reasons why I'd been overeating (perhaps the topic of another post), and I stopped. I'm loving this exercise regimen and feeling inordinately, embarrassingly pleased about my baby aliens. That's what matters, right?

Queries

1. What should I use in place of Google Reader? [sob]
2. Why do my feet get sore when my weekly mileage heads into double digits, and what can I do about it?
3. What are your favorite tricks for getting yourself to bed at a reasonable hour? I am doing that craving quiet/staying up late/regretting it the next day thing that I hate.

Seven Quick Takes: One-Third Edition

1. My summer runs from May 15 to August 15, contractually speaking, meaning that the first third is over today. I'm looking back at my list of summer ideas and trying to figure out how to make the most of the weeks that remain. 

2. I got the best email today, you guys: my manuscript was accepted for publication. Accepted! Huzzah! For those of you keeping track at home, this was my early research project, the one I've written about off and on in this space since 2006. I defended it successfully in June of 2008, and then tabled it for a while to work on the dissertation. During my postdoc I submitted it to the flagship journal of my professional organization, from which it was rejected despite promising initial reviews. It sat on the back burner for my first insane year of teaching. Last September it was rejected again (I was aiming awfully high, so I can't complain), and although I got it resubmitted shortly afterward I was worried that one of the reviewers was going to torpedo my chances. But! He didn't! My first first-author publication finally has a home and I am so relieved.

3. Remember the balaclava that has been tormenting me? I told my son I'd do my level best to get it finished before he left for Scout camp on Sunday, and that deadline has been exactly what I needed. I am finished with the knitting and the seaming, and now I just (just!) have to weave in 7,592 ends. The rule for knitted garments is that they have to spend as many hours wearing them as I spend making them. I totally get it that it's easy to lose track of a hat. As long as it gets a reasonable amount of wear, there's no need to haul around excess guilt about it. For this balaclava, man, he's going to be wearing it every day until he's 35 to get those hours in. I'm going to have to write a note to his teachers in the fall: please allow my son to wear his tentacled balaclava in class, because he has to keep it on his face for as many hours as I spent making it and that's a really large number of hours.

I'm sure that would make a great first impression.

Isn't it a little funny that he's excited to take a wool balaclava to camp in June?

4. I watched Braveheart on Amazon while grinding out the last of the knitting and seaming. I'd never seen it before and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it -- surprised, too, at its Catholic flavor. It's too bad Mel Gibson lost his mind, huh? One little detail that stood out to me was when the priest shriving soldiers before battle said "Ego vos absolvo..." That "vos" made me jerk my head up from my knitting and pay attention: general absolution means there's serious business at hand.

I would have been just as happy reading a synopsis of the battle scenes, though. I am bad at gore.

5. My Edinburgh-born son would love the movie, but he's only 13. We have been a little surprised at how early some of our acquaintances allow their kids to watch R-rated movies. My 11-yo has been asking me almost daily to watch various PG-13 movies. It's a tricky thing, isn't it? 

6. One of my boys had a tetanus booster yesterday and his arm is swollen and red and sore today. Any tips other than OTC pain reliever? The last time I had a tetanus shot my arm was sore for weeks afterward, so I'm hoping his reaction is milder than mine was.

7. If I encourage the use of Super Soakers, watering my little herb garden is a task they're happy to do.

More quick takes at Jen's.

Gored

So I am in a seize-the-bull-by-the-horns mood, which might be a good thing if there weren't so many dang bulls that all need seizing at the same time.

I drop off Joe and Pete at camp and stop at the hardware store on the way home to pick up bricks for edging my little herb garden. Remember how I was going to plant herbs along the front walk? I dug up the grass and got most of the herbs in, but I wanted an edging and little signs. Today I resolve to buy the bricks and lay them out, expecting to feel some satisfaction. I hadn't noticed from afar, though, that the grass wasn't willing to give up its erstwhile space. It's having a disagreement with the herbs about who should be growing there -- a literal turf war. Stella tries to pull some of it up and concluded, "That is a mama job, not a little girl job." I think it might be a Pete job, actually, because that boy loves to dig. I decide to send him out later with his spade.

Inside I tackle the toilet, which I had left soaking in bleachy cleaning solution before I left. The nasty stuff under the rim has been threatening to take over the bowl and thence the known universe, and in valiant defense of the free world I roll up my sleeves and set to scrubbing. I scrub for a while and then apply a second coat of bleachy cleaning solution. "I know," I think to myself, "I'll bleach the seat too. It's totally nasty underneath, even though it supposedly gets wiped down every day." I leave it to stew and go in search of craft sticks to make little calligraphied herb garden signs.

You guys, I used to own a package of craft sticks. I clearly remember its presence in the downstairs craft closet, but they seem to have disappeared in the Great Room Switch of 2012. They are nowhere to be found on the upstairs craft shelf. It is possible that I threw them out, thinking, "I am just not a person who will ever use up a bag of craft sticks." (Which is true.) It is also possible that they are in a secret hiding place, from which they will emerge immediately after I purchase a replacement stock of craft sticks to taunt me with the fact that I am really, really not a person who will ever use up two bags of craft sticks. The whole craft shelf, actually, reeks of guilt and failure. Or maybe it's the bleach fumes. I go back downstairs.

I scrub the second coat of bleachy stuff until the colonies of nastiness are beaten back. A person could still see them if she stuck her head upside down in the toilet to look under the rim, but I have to think that a person who sticks her head in a toilet deserves what she gets. Then I attack the seat. In addition to bleaching the festering nest of nasty that lurked underneath the seat, it has also bleached a stripe on the upper surface. "That's okay!" I tell myself determinedly. "We'll just get the top of the seat nice and clean too!" Except we won't. While I was upstairs waving away Shrinky-Dink-induced tristesse, the bleach was eating away the finish on the toilet seat. My efforts to clean the toilet have yielded a brownish streak across the seat which is quite a bit more conspicuous than the original under-the-rim conquering armies. Nothing makes a bathroom look as clean and welcoming as brownish smears across the toilet seat, am I right?

Is the moral of this story that you should never scrub your toilet? Because I'm having trouble thinking of another moral to this story.

Complete Works, Completed

When I started the Crazy Shakespeare Project, I planned to read everything in my Complete Works that I'd never read before. At some point that year I found out about Two Noble Kinsmen, and decided I should add it to my list. I also wanted to go back to Othello and Hamlet. Both of them were assigned to me during my sophomore year of college, but I read them in haste and they deserve more attention. 

The bad thing about the Crazy Shakespeare Project was that I was mostly reading the dregs. There is a reason you don't see Henry VIII staged very often, my friends. Shakespeare's dregs hold more treasures than most people's first pressings, or whatever the opposite of dregs might be, but still: it took me a long time to tackle Two Noble Kinsmen. A co-authored version of the Knight's Tale sounded like a snore.

To my surprise, I really enjoyed it. Fletcher and Shakespeare worked together much more smoothly than Shakespeare and P.T. Hack. Sometimes you can hear their voices interleaving, but it's a much more pleasant experience than Pericles, in which the scribblings of Mr. Hack made me want to say, "Put down your pen and get back to your day job! Enough!" Parts of Two Noble Kinsmen are fairly direct about sex, which surprised me. Shakespeare is full of innuendo, but this isn't subtle. I checked the table in the intro and found that sure enough, those scenes are Fletcher's.

That's the best thing about these long-haul read-it-all-warts-and-all projects: getting to know an author's voice across his writing life, seeing the connections across works. As I was nearing the end of the project I came across the same image in two very different works -- Venus & Adonis and Coriolanus. In each of them Shakespeare describes a snail, shyly and curiously making its way about the world, unfurling a tentative horn after a fright. I imagine Shakespeare at home, watching the snails slowly oozing their way across his garden and remembering the sight when he sat down to write. I think of it whenever I see slugs waving their miniature horns in my own garden these days (and that alone, you guys, is reason enough to undertake a Crazy Shakespeare Project, because I used to think UGH and SHUDDER and nothing else). Almost 400 years after his death, Shakespeare's voice echoes in my head when I look out at the world. How cool is that?

The Report

Abridged version: I did it! 

The question of which group to run with had taken on outsize significance in my head. I'd been evaluating every single run -- every single one -- by the metric of group-3-worthiness. On the walk over to the trail I was all tied up in knots -- so much so that I couldn't even pray. 

This part is a little weird, but I felt God telling me to stop, right there in the middle of the sidewalk. I slowed down, uncertain, and then stopped. I remembered Jesus saying "Peace, be still" to the ocean, and the torrent of "what if what if what if" quieted. I felt suddenly certain that I could run with the faster group tonight. 

Possible TMI warning: about a mile into the run I needed a bathroom badly. This rarely happens to me these days, but probability is cold comfort when there's no plumbing available. The group leader estimated that there was a portable toilet a quarter-mile away, but it was actually quite a bit further. Under other circumstances I might have been busy playing mind games with myself ("we're not even halfway how will I make it back am I too slow for them no one else is breathing so loudly") but my need for the facilities was a surprisingly welcome distraction. I was more than happy to push the pace, actually. And then on the way back I thought, "Hey, now I just have to run instead of running and clenching!" At the end I was glad to be done, but in a happy endorphin-buzzy way. Throwing up was never a worry.

I had completely forgotten how much nicer it is to have other people to run with when you're flagging. In my mind I'd been seeing them all as better runners whom I'd be holding back. Instead of bringing up the rear I spent most of the run comfortably in the middle of the pack and then finished strong. 

It might not have been my best idea to do 30-Day Shred plus a Pilates/yoga class yesterday, because my thighs feel like the fighting Uruk-hai have been using them for ironing boards. (All you people thinking that the fighting Uruk-hai probably don't do much ironing can just take your picky-picky high standards to somebody else's blog now. I bet Sauron assigned lazy or cowardly Uruk-hai to iron his foul and vomitous sheets. Wait, were the Uruk-hai in Saruman's service? His sheets were probably not much of an improvement over Sauron's. ANYWAY. Moving on.) I was doing a little tree pose in the kitchen* and was unpleasantly surprised at the soreness in whatever muscle my foot was resting on. (What muscle is that, anyway? Inner thigh but down low, just above the knee. I blame the Pilates sidelying leg exercises.)

*I am not sure when I turned into a person who does spontaneous yoga poses. 

Thank you for your encouraging comments! I appreciated both the ones that told me to go for it and the ones that said you'd understand if I didn't. Now it's time for a nice hot bath and an act of Othello. Coming soon: a bit more Shakespeare blogging.

Decisions

Hi, I'm back! Did you miss me? 

My running group starts up tomorrow and I have been spending an unreasonable amount of time thinking about it. I am feeling like there's a big jump between the group I ran with last summer and the next group up. I've moved past the easier group, but I'm not sure I'm ready for the faster one. I can run their mileage, or I can run their distance, but not both at the same time.

Elwood says, "Sounds like you should go with the faster group. Somebody's got to be the slowest person in the group." 

The woman who led my group last year says, "I think you will be fine. If you don't like it or you're having an off week, you can always drop back to the other group."

I suppose the worst that can happen is that I can't keep up with them tomorrow and they tell me I'd be better off in the slower group. It's not as if they'll laugh at me while I throw up. (Right?)

What's your preference? Would you rather attempt something you weren't sure you could do, or stick with something on the easy side?