Light and Momentary

Your backup vocalist awaits, Jamie

I told the Alpha coordinator that I was happy to lead music when we got to that point. (Alpha eases its participants in: leaders don't pray at all with the participants until week 5, and then it's a quick and casual "Thank you for the snow, God" kind of prayer. They don't want anybody to do a U-turn on the first night because the expectation that we're all going to sing worship songs comes as an unhappy surprise, so that comes later.) 

Tonight he said, "I found someone to be a backup guitarist and singer for you!"

    "Oh?"

"Yeah," he said, "Tim McGraw."

    [I say nothing, because I am too baffled to speak. Megastar Tim McGraw is making the trek to Gladlyville so...he can provide rhythm guitar and harmony vocals at Alpha???]

"Wait," he said. "It's actually [parishioner who has one of those two names but not the other]."

**

I shouldn't tease him about the confusion, I suppose. There's another parishioner whose last name is Hopper, and even though I've known him for more than a decade I still have to say to myself "Not Dennis" when I greet him. I've never actually called him Dennis, but the name is always lurking there at the tip of my tongue.

It's Catholic Schools Week again.

Always during Catholic Schools Week there's a bulletin article about the Gladlyville Catholic high school. It always includes the students' average ACT score, with the suggestion that these higher-than-average scores are the result of the Catholic education.

Can we talk about that? There are two things that bother me here.

First: kids with more affluent, more educated parents score higher on the ACT. The discrepancies start early: they were more likely to receive good prenatal care, more likely to be born at full term, more likely to receive the neurodevelopmental advantages conferred by human milk, more likely to live in houses full of books and opportunities to be read to, more likely to be comfortable with the unspoken rules about how to behave in the classroom that can influence teacher-student relationships and student identity from the get-go.

Who sends their kids to Catholic high school? Parents who prize education, and parents who can afford the tuition. It may be true that your kids will learn things in a Catholic high school that will help them on the ACT. It is also true that many kids whose parents send them to Catholic high school are predisposed to score higher on the ACT. Although the bulletin articles suggest that the Catholic education drives the ACT scores, the actual causal relationships are more complicated.

Second: Catholic schools can't offer as much in the way of special ed services. Kids in the US are entitled to a free and appropriate public education. Private schools don't have to worry about the free part, and they also don't have to worry about the appropriate part: they can decline admission to a child who needs more supports than they can offer. Public school ACT scores include the kids with severe ADD, or the kids with low-normal cognitive skills who are hoping maybe they'll score high enough to get admitted to college, or the kids with ODD who bubble in the wrong answers deliberately.

If your fee structure means you're attracting kids more likely to score well, and you're not providing a suitable environment for the kids most likely to score poorly, maybe it's not actually newsworthy when your ACT scores are higher than average.

This XKCD is evergreen.

Aqb U zcjq mbp oudtqfg

One fine day in late 1989, a letter arrived in my mailbox. It was written in cipher, which I found a bit surprising, but I sat down and began decoding it. The surprises continued: it was a rather irritated letter, with very peculiar diction, and although I knew it had come from Elwood, the name signed at the bottom had eight letters. It took me a while to figure out that he had encoded and mailed off a letter from Napoleon to Josephine, in which he was saying that she ought to write him more letters.

So that was decidedly quirky, right? That could be a little snippet on the forthcoming reality show When Geeks Marry, am I right?

But wait! There's more! In 2003 my brother sent us a postcard from a conference. In cipher.

I'm pretty sure I'd never mentioned the Elwood story to my kids, and I doubt any of them remember the 2003 postcard. But yesterday I went to the mailbox and discovered an envelope from my firstborn. I'd asked him to send me a postcard from his conference in Zürich, and my postcard was sealed up inside the envelope. Behold:

Okay, so he did give me D E A R M O L V right off the bat. But astute readers will note that two of the phrases are in German. That caused me a little face-scrunching, as you might imagine. And once I got the postcard deciphered I did a little more face-scrunching: how weird is it that three of my favorite men have sent me correspondence in cipher, just for the fun of it?

The RTFM Hat

I am almost done with the hat I've been making, but I've been scratching my head about it for a while. I wondered why it was made to fit so closely. I mean, I know I have a giant head, but I still thought it was a little weird that an adult hat would be so snug on me. I also wondered, as I looked at the finished products flitting across my Ravelry feed, how the math could possibly work out for their crown stars to have six points.

Today, finally, about a hundred stitches from the end of this hat it occurred to me that those two points of puzzlement were closely related to each other. Today I went back to the pattern and realized I missed a step. In between "cast on 120 stitches for the ribbing" and "work the chart," there was a round in which I was supposed to increase my stitch count by 20%.

Well! Oops!

It's been more than a decade since Elwood introduced me to the internet abbreviation RTFM. "Read The Fine Manual," he told me it meant, and I took him at his word because when Elwood P. Gladly says a thing it is virtually certain that the thing is so. A few years later I learned that actually not everyone's manuals are fine. In our house, though, it's still Read The Fine Manual.

So. This is the hat for which I failed to RTFM. I will finish the crown tomorrow when I am slightly less disgusted. It will never fall off my head, not even once.

Should I say or should I flow?

I'm helping out again with our parish's Alpha program. I love Alpha. This time around I'm leading with a guy who gets under my skin and I'm not sure what the best approach is.

One slice of it is the PERIL factor, in which PERIL stands for Phone Encroachment: Really Irritating and Long-Lasting. Every single year phones get a little more ubiquitous. I do not remember, in the first session of Alpha that I helped with, that people would pull out their phones and scroll through them for chunks of time during dinner, or during small-group discussions. But it happens these days, even with someone who is supposed to be leading discussion. 

Another piece of it is the politically sensitive nuggets that he drops into our conversations. In my view Alpha is just not the place for a conversation about the Mueller investigation, or about gun control legislation. 

The thing is, I don't know this guy well at all. It would feel weird for me to address it directly with him. It would feel weird for me to bring it up with the coordinator, too, but maybe that's the sensible thing to do. It doesn't have to be a tattle-y message-- I can send a low-key email that says "Maybe before our next meeting it's worth issuing a reminder about xyz."

The good news is that I'm really enjoying everybody else at my table, and we had a lovely balanced conversation tonight about a terrific video.

Nom nom nom

One night a couple of weeks ago I followed a New Yorker link from Twitter to read an article about Urvashi Pitre, the Butter Chicken Lady. The blog version of her internet-famous butter chicken recipe is here.

I love butter chicken with a deep and abiding love, and I have a recipe for it that everybody likes. The trouble is that it tells me to string my cardamom pods on a length of thread so I can fish them out more easily later. Which...no. But biting down on a whole cardamom pod is a rather bracing experience. And 15 cardamom pods is too many cardamom pods to retrieve with confidence. So I've mostly been ordering in the butter chicken I've eaten over the past few years, and my ears pricked right up at the idea of a better option. An Instant Pot option! A speedy option!

I tend to dither over cookbook purchases because I have so little space for cookbook storage. But I read some reviews and snapped this one right up. Tonight I made butter chicken. The cookbook recipe diverges just slightly from the blog recipe: more cayenne (1 t.), more ginger (1 T.). You guys, it was SO yummy, and fast, and easy. I got everything into the IP in approximately the time it would have taken me to string together 15 stupid cardamom pods on a length of thread. I am going to eat some of the leftover sauce on my scrambled eggs tomorrow morning, and the leftover chicken for lunch. Definitely worth a try.

Oven Magic

Bearing asked for my roasted celeriac recipe, and I am posting it even though it is not much of a recipe: fat, salt, heat.

You want a moderately hot oven but you have some flexibility in case you're cooking something else at the same time: 375 or 400 is about right. (I am having a moment of nostalgia for the cookbooks of my grandmother's era, which would often enjoin the reader to put something in a slow oven (or a moderate oven, or a hot oven) rather than specifying a particular temperature. Probably I would not feel nostalgia for those days if I had suffered through fallen cakes or crunchy-in-the-middle baked potatoes after making a faulty guess at the right oven temperature, but oh well.)

Peel yourself as many root veggies as your eaters would like, bearing in mind that leftovers will be a treat. Mix it up: celeriac was especially nice last night mixed in with the potato and sweet potato bites, but rutabaga is a favorite of mine and roasted sunchokes, if you can find them, will make you burst into song. Chunk them up into roughly equal pieces; there's no need for precision measurement here. Spread them in a single layer in a foil-lined jelly roll pan. Drizzle generously with olive oil, making sure each piece gets a light coating. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and slide into the oven.

Peek at them after 20 minutes. You may want to flip them over for even browning. You may think that's too much hassle. Stick a fork experimentally into a fat chunk and see how much resistance it meets. I would estimate that you'll need 40 minutes for pieces on the bigger end of bite-sized, but ovens vary, as do vegetables.

An option I use sometimes is to parboil the veggies first. There's a simple method I use that comes from Crescent Dragonwagon's Passionate Vegetarian: parboil small but not teeny potatoes for 6 or 8 minutes and carrots for 4-6 minutes depending on size. (For celeriac I'd cut it into potato-sized pieces and treat like potato.) Rub them with olive oil and roast them for about 45-50 minutes, drizzling them with soy sauce in the middle of that cooking time. She calls these Roasty-Toasty Potatoes & Carrots; my copy of Passionate Vegetarian opens to that page.

There's a more complicated Nigella Lawson method that I use for special occasions and dream about in between. I've never made it with celeriac but I expect it would be fabulous. Cut 5 or 6 pounds of medium-sized potatoes in thirds and boil them for four minutes. Drain them and put them back in the pot, where you will sprinkle them with 2 T. flour, clap on the lid, and shake it like fury. This floury coating will give them a fabulous crisp crust. You can leave them at this stage for a while if you are cooking a fancy holiday dinner with multiple moving parts.

When you're ready for your potatoes to fulfill their glorious destiny, get your oven nice and hot. She says to crank it as high as it will go, but I wouldn't exceed 475, personally. I'd be doing battle with my smoke alarm the whole time if I cranked it up all the way. I usually divide them between two pans: a 9 x 13 pan with vegetarian potatoes cooked in olive oil, and an 11 x 15 pan for the meat-eaters (not a jelly roll pan, though; you need taller sides to prevent a conflagration), in which I use duck or goose fat. Heat the fat of your choosing in the pans until it is sizzling hot, and carefully tip in your potatoes. Nigella recommends 640g of goose fat for this recipe, which is a little less fat than you'd find in six sticks of butter. (I'd be cautious about using actual butter at that oven temperature, though. Seems like you could scorch the milk solids.) Cook for 25 minutes; turn and cook for 25 minutes more. The next time I make these I will keep some back to ensure that I have leftovers. You wouldn't think you'd need to worry about leftovers with 6 pounds of potatoes, but people will eat an awful lot of these.

The Crowded Kindnesses

You guys, it was the nicest day. I had been feeling a little blarghy this week but today has left me more optimistic.

I resubmitted the Heartbreak Paper, which -- I can't believe I didn't tell you! -- got a "minor revisions" decision at the end of December. When I saw the email I whooped loudly and got up from the couch, still whooping, to jump in big circles around the room. "When I saw your reaction," said Joe at the time, "I thought Donald Trump must have been impeached." The editor emailed me last night to ask if I might be able to submit the revisions earlier than her original deadline, and in a surge of Whole-30-fueled efficiency I got it out the door today. 

My 18yo didn't go to school today, so I took him out for lunch. He's my quietest kid, and I'm always glad when we spend one-on-one time together and I can hear what he's been thinking.

This week I've been calling and calling a Texas publisher about getting permission to use an image from one of their tests in a journal article. That came through at last today, and they're not charging us the modest fee that they originally said we would owe.

This afternoon I had a college-level service responsibility that had been billed as "really fun," but I was skeptical. I was part of a panel of judges for a thesis competition, and do you know, it actually was really fun. We finished at 3:45 or so, and it occurred to me that I could do my last 15 minutes' worth of email at home. Whole-30 Brain prompted me to run a little errand I'd been procrastinating on the way, but I still got to my neighborhood just as Pete was getting off the bus. "Mom!" he yelled, shuffling after me with his trombone case and his laptop bag bouncing around. 

I plunked some dinner in the Instant Pot and finished up my work. I had to take Pete to his Klondike campout tonight, and I was a little worried about getting lost on the way to the campground. The roads are poorly lit out in the country, and my night vision is not what it used to be. "I know exactly where we are," he crowed, just as we got to the part of the route where I was uncertain. So that worked out nicely.

I was a little worried about timing (drop-off took me longer than expected), because I was supposed to get from the campsite to church in 17 minutes and it's really more like a 20-minute drive. Except-- I got a text right as I was leaving, saying the music meeting was happening at the directors' house and not the church. That's more like a 30-minute drive, I thought, so I texted back hastily to explain that I'd be late.

The rehearsal was SO fun, you guys. I replaced my 1978 Bundy flute this week. Seven years ago I got new pads for it when one of the boys decided to learn to play the flute, but the instrument isn't working at all these days. I thought about the cost of another pad job, and I thought about how I've always wished vaguely for a nicer-sounding flute, and I watched eBay intermittently for a couple of months to get a sense of flute prices. And lo, I found an intermediate flute in good condition at a price that didn't make my frugal Scottish heart fibrillate. I've been practicing since it arrived on Tuesday, and I love it. Tonight was the first time I'd played flute in public in, like, decades, but it was a blast. The director asked me to play the baritone part instead of the melody. (I was sure I'd be stuck on the melody. Flute = stuck on the melody, world almost without end.) Instead I was playing a bass-clef part I'd never heard before, which was a fun little puzzle. I had already agreed to sing for Mass this weekend, but if I can get a little more practice time in I'll play flute for the Mass parts and sing the hymns.

From the rehearsal I went straight to a play for which Elwood and I had free tickets. I wasn't entirely looking forward to it. We saw a play created by this same team last weekend, and it was decidedly mediocre. Turns out, though, that the professionals do a much better job with their oeuvre than the amateurs, or at least than these particular amateurs. Tonight's performance was funny and fast-paced (and free, sings the frugal Scottish heart).

I have been eating a late and ambrosial dinner -- a 9:30 dinnertime will make almost anything taste ambrosial, but roasted celeriac gets two thumbs up from me -- and I am going to call it a day. Good night, all.

Audeamus, valeamus

I like reading the Pope's tweets in Latin because it slows me down a bit. This morning he said:

Rogemus Deum ut veniam petere audeamus et audire quae Ipse nobis dicit discere valeamus.

— Papa Franciscus (@Pontifex_ln) January 16, 2018

At first, skimming through, I thought his audeamus was telling us to listen, but then I realized I had the wrong verb altogether: audeo is different from audio. What he actually says is, "Let us ask God that we might dare to seek his mercy." I love that phrasing: the reminder that we cannot approach the throne of grace on our own merits, but we can do so confidently, with holy boldness, in the name of Jesus.

The Twitter English translation of the second half begins "...and to learn how to listen..." But oh, there's another lovely verb tucked in the Latin: that valeamus means "that we might be strong [or, alternatively, "that we might be well," or "that we might be healthy"] to learn to listen to what He Himself says to us." It reminds me that a habit of listening to God requires spiritual health and strength. It needs to be nurtured.

Bits & Pieces

It's freezing. Single-digit temperatures, big ugly wind that's pushing the "Real Feel" index way down. I was driving home this evening when I thought, "I am ready for winter to be over." And then I laughed bitterly.

In my defense, I had enough of winter today to last me for a while. I got a text late Friday afternoon from a Gladlyville mom whose son goes to school with Joe. We've carpooled before; she was making a last-minute trip to pick her son up. Would Joe like to come home too? If I had paid attention to the forecast I would have probably said "No, thank you!" instead of "Sure, and I can drive them back!" But that's what I said, so that's what I did. The scary chunk of the drive was across a section of state highway that's still showing up as "mostly covered with snow and ice" in our department of transportation's website. Blech. I get super-tense about driving my kids around in bad weather, and it is magnified when I am also driving someone else's kid around. Mercifully, we are all unscathed. I think I'll have to break out the Dr. Stay-Puft leggings for my walk to campus tomorrow.

Tomorrow is the first day of spring semester classes. ("Spring" semester. Brrr.) I've posted before about professor anxiety dreams, yes? It's been years since I had that dream where I show up to the final but I've never been to class. Now I dream that I show up to the final and I forgot to write it. Or I drafted the first four questions and failed to copy them. All the students are staring at me as I walk in empty-handed. This doesn't even make sense, right? In the real world I could just set them a quick essay question and it would be fine -- if I somehow forgot to write an exam, which is approximately as likely as forgetting to put my pants on and heading out to the office. (Oh! Last semester I had a professor anxiety dream in which I showed up to teach with no pants on. "This must be a nightmare," said my dream self, only in my dream it was not a dream.)

This semester's professor anxiety dream takes the cake, though. My actual undergrad class this semester is full of students I enjoy. I've taught about two-thirds of them before and it was a delight to scroll through the roster. With my actual conscious brain I'm really looking forward to it. But Anxious Brain has other ideas. Anxious Brain spun me up a dream in which I walked into class on the first day and discovered that it was full of strangers, mostly male. (My field is so heavily female that I have taught a single-digit number of male students across the past seven years.) That's not the scary part, though: the scary part came when I realized that half of them were vampires. 

In strode the vampire slayer, with a tangle of barbecue skewers jangling at her hip (stakes, you see). She was heavily armed. Carnage ensued. I woke up saying "OKAY OKAY OKAY maybe next time you could rerun the one where I neglect to write the syllabus?!?!"

Let's talk about something more pleasant, shall we? Last night I cast on a happy soothing knit. Kate Davies has launched a new yarn, and I have a delectable little sampler pack that has been waiting for the pattern release. It's a yummy wool-mohair tweed, fingering weight with some pleasing variability and even more pleasing neps*. I am making a hat in stranded colorwork, with the added fillip of occasional purl stitches. 

*Neps are the things that make tweed tweedy: those little flecks of color you can see in this picture.

In traditional stranded colorwork there's no purling, just a long lovely spiral of two-handed knitting. I'm only familiar with purls in colorwork as part of the Swedish Bohus tradition, which is its own Thing, distinct from the Fair Isle/Icelandic/Norwegian traditions. If you're not a knitter you will be a little puzzled when I tell you I looked at the chart and said "...whoa..." but that's what I did. I'll share a picture when I'm a little farther along. (The suspense is killing you, I know. "The purl stitches, Jamie," you are saying, "show us the purl stitches!")

On that tantalizing note, I'll say goodnight.

It gets easier

Miriel left me a comment on my last post, saying (nicely), "Isn't this a little over the top?" And, yeah, it probably is. 

It's a temperament thing.

In Gretchen Rubin's framework I am an Upholder with Obliger leanings, which means that I am hard-wired to set goals for myself (Upholder) and greatly assisted by creating some accountability (Obliger). So mostly these resolution posts are just me being me. I have been making new year's resolutions for almost 40 years, and I have learned a lot about what works for me and what doesn't. In most of these resolutions I am building on things that are already working. I was already going to read a bunch of books this year; that's a baked-in habit. I'm just reminding myself to focus some of my reading time on things that require a bit more focus than my most recent Amazon recommendations. I was already going to work out this year; I'm giving myself short-term goals (i.e., finish the race; don't be last) to motivate the workouts.

I used to get stressed out about doing All The Things but these days I give myself permission in advance to adjust as I go, which means some of them won't happen or won't stick. (I posted an example of this in early August. I flossed the heck out of July and now I am back to my usual slacker standards.) I am happiest when I'm working on a mix of habits and goals, which makes for a long post. Habits don't give a person boxes to tick in the same way the goals do, and I LOVE ticking boxes with a passion that is, frankly, kind of weird. But habits make it possible to hit goals repeatedly. Every sustained advance I have ever made in personal discipline is the result of habit formation.

It's a stage-of-life thing.

I sleep through the night almost every night these days, after more than 16 years of frequently interrupted sleep. THERE IS HOPE, mothers of small children; I promise there is hope. When I sit down to dinner with my family, we have pleasant conversations while people (mostly) eat the food I serve them. When I go to Mass, I issue occasional minor reminders about fidgeting. Nobody bites me. Nobody bites anybody! Nobody yells, "But I-I-I-I-I-I wanna cookie too!" in the communion line.

If I remind my kids to be kind to their siblings, they say, "Oh, sorry," with genuine contrition, and strive to do better. I never hear unexpected banging noises from other parts of the house that turn out to be a 4-year-old pounding together two things that really should never have been pounded together. (I still have the marks in my piano bench left there by the bottom of a purloined spice jar. It made an awesome hammer for the 30 seconds it took me to sprint across the house. Why the spice jar? I'll never know.) I am not responsible for anyone else's hygiene or toileting needs. 

This changes everything.

I had no "spiritual output" section for a long time, because all of my spiritual output (except for a tiny music ministry role) was directed toward de-feralizing my own children. It was hard to be alone for an evening, because dinner was a struggle, and bedtime was a struggle, and the in-between times with boys beaning each other upside the head for no apparent reason could be soul-sucking. Even when we were first involved with this parish retreat program 5 or 6 years ago, it was still a sacrifice to have the other person away for three nights.

The load gets lighter. It feels lighter because my children are generally helpful pleasant people these days; it also feels lighter because those years made me stronger. In any case, I can direct some energy elsewhere without shortchanging my family. I still have to plan it: I only said yes to Alpha because it will end in early March just before my teaching load picks up. I will have to choose a fall half-marathon carefully, because I'll have to work around the fall retreat and that could get to be too much. Six or seven years ago I couldn't have done either of those things comfortably, let alone think about doing them simultaneously.

December is coming anyway.

I've had years when I felt blah about making resolutions, but I am usually highly motivated by this true fact: I will pass through this year but once. If I aim at nothing, I will probably hit it. If I aim at lots of things, I will miss some of them. But I'll usually be happy about having made the attempt.

Year of Grace

I am getting a slow start on the resolutions front. It's better to start a little late, I figure, than not to start at all.

Some of what I am working on is the same old stuff: I'm kicking off the year with the Whole 30, hoping for better focus, a more even keel, and the departure of those post-election pounds. I'm planning to use races to keep me focused on the fitness front: April 10K, June triathlon, September half-marathon (probably), November 10K.

This year I am also thinking about my mental health. Over the break I've been thinking about some unresolved baggage that I would prefer to leave behind me this year, so I am planning to seek out counseling to address it. I also want to set up -- and maintain! -- a YNAB account so that we can be more disciplined about money. (And more in tune with each other. You can't make a new year's resolution for anybody else, but Elwood asked me a question about our bank account last month that made me say, "Hm, we need better communication here.") Another logistical kind of task: we need a will that reflects our current family situation.

I have a few specific reading goals: I'm going to read Dance to the Music of Time, Mystery of Edwin Drood, and two Trollope novels. (I'm planning another May Dickens read-along -- almost certainly Pickwick this year -- but that doesn't really require a resolution because I find it so much fun.)

Our house would benefit from some attention and I'd like to seize that particular bull by the horns: our kitchen and downstairs bathroom need some love; I want to get an estimate for some interior painting; once the weather warms up I need to find a mason. (I made a bunch of phone calls last year in search of a mason. A BUNCH. No joy.)

Spiritual input: I want to cultivate the habit of asking daily for St. Joseph's intercession with the specific hope of addressing some long-term frustrations. There's a Greg Popcak book I've been reading f-o-r-e-v-e-r and I am going to finish that up. During the early part of the semester, I would like to be consistent about attending the noon Mass at the Newman Center, though that might need to change once we get to March. And I'm re-reading the Bible and the CCC again this year, though that habit feels pretty solid at this point.

Spiritual output: I'm helping out with Alpha in the early part of the year, and another parish retreat in the fall. I would really like to find a way for our family to get involved with service to the poor and marginalized in Gladlyville, but I'm not quite sure what that looks like. And I am preparing Pete for confirmation at home, so I would like to be systematic about that.

Hm, this post is getting a little mishmashy as I move goals out of my journal and into the text box. I'd like to work on the habit of strength training, with the specific goal of being able to do a pull-up in December. (I am NOWHERE on this goal, my friends. This one is a reach.) And I'd like to be more consistent about volunteering with the music ministry, specifically by limbering up my fingers and playing the flute.

The last area I am thinking about is work, and here I feel a little overwhelmed thinking about goals. I have six papers I want to write at this exact moment, along with two projects that are still in their embryonic stages. And I feel like I need to make plans for the Next Thing-- I have a clear idea but zero direction about how to pursue it. Huh, maybe it's not surprising that I feel overwhelmed. So. I am going to cultivate the habit of getting in at 8 every morning and spending the first 45 minutes of my day on research. I am also going to cultivate the habit of a late-afternoon triage session in which I set priorities for the next day. In this area, at this point, I think habits are likely to be more fruitful than targets. OH AND ALSO: submit an awesome tenure dossier while pushing back relentlessly against impostor syndrome.

I might need more days in this year.

It's all in the marketing

"You'll never guess what my meeting this afternoon is called," said my husband this morning. He was right. It wasn't called "Poinsettias on the Blockchain," but it wasn't much less improbable. He rolled his eyes about the trendy title. "All you have to do to sell shares these days is add 'blockchain' to your publicity materials," he grumbled.

When he came home this afternoon I said, "I've been waiting ALL DAY to hear about poinsettias on the blockchain!" He laughed, and we talked for a few minutes while I worked on dinner. I was going to make bubble and squeak, but I forgot the cabbage. When we sat down he asked me about it. "Isn't it the cabbage that makes it squeak? What would you call this?"

I had my answer at the ready: "Bubble and Squeakless...on the Blockchain!"

Reader, they scarfed it down. If the blockchain label boosts sales to the finance types, it should also work for selling an idea to the family, right? Give it a try: leftovers on the blockchain will vanish as if they've been Scourgified. Liver and onions? All you need is to say is that they're on the blockchain. 

News you can use

If you haven't had a child with braces, you may not know just how much of a pain braces are. Everybody already knows that braces are physically uncomfortable -- even if you didn't have them yourself as a kid, your friends complained to you about having their braces tightened. But you may not be aware of the extent of the financial pain (five years ago we paid >$4K for a straightforward case, here in low cost-of-living Gladlyville). The biggest surprise for me was the time commitment. If I had a job where they were counting my use of PTO, I would have burned through something like 50 hours of it taking my kid with braces to the orthodontist every month.

So. Best to avoid the whole scene if possible, right? Strategy A I knew about: breastfeed. (Breastfeeding can protect against malocclusion; long-term use of artificial nipples can promote it.) Strategy B was completely new to me: consider a lower lingual arch if the issue is crowding.

Teeth like to touch each other. If there's a gap in the gumline, teeth will shift slowly along it so they are closer to each other. But if you have a kid with crowding, you want to push back against this tendency. Preserve the space, and the lower teeth may be able to untangle themselves.

I assumed we were looking at extractions + braces for my third son because his lower teeth were all squished together and overlapping and strangely angled. Instead we paid $300 for a lower lingual arch and got most of the money back from our dental insurance. When his eyeteeth fell out in junior high, his incisors began a slow mysterious dance in which they eased themselves into a lovely straight line. No braces needed, no extractions needed.

I had no idea that such a thing was possible, but it worked beautifully. A+++ would lower lingual arch again.

Today

Today I am going to write a quick blog post, entirely because this is the last day of the December writing challenge. (For a while I didn't count blogging toward the challenge, but I decided to be flexible about that across Christmas and New Year's.)

Today is the feast of St. André Bessette, who spent his life telling people, "Hey, St. Joseph can help you out with that." We also always celebrate the Three Kings on January 6, instead of whichever random date the Sunday falls on. So after I fold a load of laundry we are going to embark on some family fun: a trip to see The Last Jedi, followed by pizza (Whole 30 starts tomorrow; gather ye breadcrumbs while ye may), followed by little presents, followed by the ritual Getting The Tree The Heck Out Of My Living Room. This year I think we will institute a fun new ritual, Betting On Whether The Robot Vacuum Will Pick Up Your Personal Pine Needle, like the third millennium version of Pooh-Sticks.

Oh! Speaking of betting: I have been getting a bunch of solicitation emails lately. Hi, Jamie! We'd like to write a high-quality post for your awesome blog at mostgladly.net! Usually they have some loose connection to something I've actually written about, but most recently I got one from a "leading gaming and sports betting site." I would have to screw up my face and think a bit to come up with topics less likely to fly here. A Celebration of Cigars? Winning Band-Saw Hacks? I don't even know.

Speaking of the robot vacuum: it's working pretty well. It's a little alarming to see how much crud it sucks up from floors that didn't actually seem to be all that crud-covered. It is interjecting fewer Chinese comments as it goes about its business, though it still seems perplexed by the number of chairs in our dining room. It is strangely fascinating: we get the floor ready for it and then sit with our feet drawn up, watching it feel its way blindly around our space. "Ching shao," it seems to say with a falling intonation, and I wonder to myself whether that's a word-level falling intonation or a sentence-level falling intonation. So far it has not unleashed any robot overlords on Gladlyville, but watch this space for updates. And if you see any posts on sports betting strategies, maybe let Typepad know that I've been hacked.

Happy Epiphany! May your January be free of pine needles on the carpet.

Obsolescence is actually overrated

Shortly before my oldest son started eighth grade, I wrote a wistful post prompted by two friends who were each sending their oldest daughters off to college. Isn't it strange how quickly they change, I mused.

I am writing this post shortly after my oldest son finished college. (No, you didn't lose track of time there. He finished on an unusually speedy schedule, assisted by college math classes taken as a high school junior and senior along with a bunch of AP credit.) He spent a couple of weeks with us over Christmas, and last night I took him back to his apartment.

The NYC internship from last summer has turned into a full-time job. He'll be traveling for all of January -- a birthday trip with friends, a work trip to Switzerland, a work trip to Canada -- and then settling down in New York City at the beginning of February. I've known this for a while now. This is a great next step for him. It is exactly what he wants: they will compensate him well to do work he loves in his favorite city. Who could ask for anything more?

Well, me. That's who.

I got out of the car last night to hug him. I said, "I hope your adventures..." And then my voice stopped working. 

He's been leaving for a while now, my Alex has. The summer after I wrote that post he CIT'd at Scout camp, and then he worked there during the following two summers. He hasn't really lived in our house since May of 2015. He had already started talking about returning to his apartment as "going home." And yet-- it's different now. It was weird having him in NYC last summer, but it was temporary. Most of the time we could pop over to campus and bring him home for a sibling's birthday. He never needed me to bring him chicken soup when he was sick, but the option existed. I was still the person who sent him to the dentist.

IT IS SILLY TO BE WEEPY ABOUT MAKING ONE LESS DENTIST APPOINTMENT, JAMIE. SUPER SUPER SILLY.

[pauses to find a Kleenex]

While he was home he spent hours and hours helping his brother with college applications, nudging my 18yo through multiple revisions until he wound up with an essay to be proud of. Late one night he came to Stella's aid, fetching her water and Tylenol and rinsing out a puked-in trash can without ever waking me up. I slipped out to feed the meter quickly while we were having lunch one day, and he picked up the check while I was gone.

And he's just so funny -- so funny. [makes a valiant effort not to say "WHO WILL MAKE ME LAUGH NOW?!?!"]

On the morning he was born, 21 years ago, things looked bleak initially. His initial APGAR was 1; after urgent resuscitation efforts he spent a day on a ventilator and a few more days recovering. When the midwife was narrating the NICU staff's resuscitation efforts she said to me, "He has your cleft in his chin, Jamie." I thought about that moment when we were at my parents' house for his birthday weekend; I could see that cleft clearly in silhouette, covered with red stubble. I look at that chin, that red stubble, and I think, "That's my boy."

The nature of that possessive pronoun has been changing across his whole life. He was wholly mine as an infant, less so as a toddler, less and less so as the years stole by. He is still mine, and also no longer mine. It is fitting and appropriate, and also kind of painful.

So here you go, New York; we are sending you our brilliant generous hilarious handsome firstborn. Please treat him kindly.

A high bar to clear

The NYT Dining section includes a feature called "Front Burner," which describes a variety of foodie items available for purchase. I always skim it slowly, because I can only glance at the paragraphs in between eye rolls. Sometimes the eye rolls are about the expense of the food for sale. I mean, seriously, why would I pay $60 for a cheesecake? Why would I do that? Sometimes the eye rolls are about the preposterousness of the food for sale. If I wanted to make inedible ice cream, I could add my own dill pickles. I don't need to order miso/black truffle sorbet with exorbitant shipping. But today, my friends, my eyes gleamed rather than rolling. Today Florence Fabricant is writing about pumpkin preserves.

The Anne Shirley fans among you have probably skipped away, eyes also agleam, in search of the article. In Anne of Windy Poplars, our heroine discovers pumpkin preserves. They are the most delicious food she has ever consumed. Eating pumpkin preserves is like eating sunshine, she writes to Gilbert.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite things about reading books from long ago was the food descriptions. I was a very picky kid, so it wasn't necessarily that I wanted to eat the foods described. But I liked thinking about them. Watermelon rind preserves! Who knew such a thing existed? Rye 'n' Injun bread-- what could that even be? --wondered the girl who subsisted chiefly on a bland and puffy brand of white bread known to late 70s New Orleans shoppers as Bunny Bread. (My school toured the factory when I was in second or third grade, and I was a loyal customer until we moved away.)

The very idea of pumpkin preserves struck me as implausible. How could you turn...a pumpkin...into something like jam? And how could it be delicious? And what was this world in which people ate jam-like things with a fork, at dinnertime? And yet I knew Anne Shirley would never lie to me.

In today's NYT there is a little blurb about pumpkin preserves, a new product available from Murray's Cheese Shop. When we went to NYC last summer my husband was especially pleased to visit Murray's. Cheese is one of his favorite indulgences, the smellier the better. If I suggest to him that we should place an order from Murray's he will almost certainly say YES YES OF COURSE!

In Windy Poplars the pumpkin preserves episode has an unfortunate ending: so many people feed Anne pumpkin preserves that it begins to taste like death march rather than sunshine. 

But we could probably avoid that if we served it out by careful (and occasional) spoonfuls. How often does a person have the opportunity to eat the food of her imagined childhood? What are the odds that it will indeed taste like sunshine?

(Maybe don't answer that last question.)

Holding pattern

Around Christmas the youngest kids were fighting a virus that left them feverish, lethargic, and coughing. "My eyes hurt," said poor Stella on Christmas night. She was sick enough that she and I didn't make the trip to the grandparents' house the next day. Last night after we got home from our trip to the other grandparents' house I found myself weirdly achy and chilled. Was it just the 7-hour car trip and the return to our chilly house? I hopped in the shower to try to warm up, and found myself crying over a possibility too preposterous to record. (Do you do that too-- imagine improbable worst-case scenarios when you're sick? It's like getting sick incapacitates the part of my brain that would normally keep the nonsense in check.)

Today I am also feverish, lethargic, and coughing. "My eyes hurt," I said this morning. I am optimistic that another quiet day will bring me most of the way back to normal, but I've been pretty subdued today.

I was going to start another round of the Whole 30 on New Year's Day, but we stopped at the Waffle House and I said, "Hmm, I'll start tomorrow." Today, it turns out, was a comfort-eating kind of day. We'll see about tomorrow, but I'm pretty sure there are no Whole-30-compliant cough drops in existence.

This might be a good year for Epiphany resolutions.

**

'Tis the season for predictable blogging angst. I started this blog with the specific goal of maintaining a site I could share in a Christmas letter-- not too personal, not too navel-gaze-y, just a happy record of family life and funny kid sayings. It turns out, however, that I am put together as a navel-gaze-y kind of person. Give me a channel in which to broadcast a summary of observations from my navel, and I will do so. So every year since 2007 I've gone through the same sequence of thoughts:

1. Should I put the blog in the Christmas letter? It's so navel-gaze-y.
2. Yes, I will put the blog in the Christmas letter. People don't have to read it if they don't like it.
3. I should write some cheerful soccer mom posts, to disguise the true navel-gaze-y nature of the blog.
4. Except it's December, and I am never cheerful in December and also it's not soccer season so am I even a soccer mom?
5. OH AND ALSO it's December and we're visiting extended family, and I am having SO MANY THOUGHTS about the complexities of extended family relationships.
6. I cannot really post about those relationships in a soccer-mom Christmas-letter kind of blog. AND YET how can I process them if I don't blog about them?
7. Maybe I shouldn't put the blog in the Christmas letter next year.

Oh, goodness, it has taken me longer than expected to squeeze this blog post out of my virus-addled brain. Time to slurp down the last of my tea with honey in hopes of keeping the coughing at bay overnight.