Light and Momentary

Eeyore is today's guest blogger, apparently

Brr, it's cold. It's cold and our quiet little street has too many icy patches for my taste and more snow has been falling and I am feeling a little glum about the whole weather situation.

Really the thing I am feeling most glum about -- and it is a pervasive creeping flavor of glum -- is that substance abuse is stupidly relentless in the way it sinks its claws into people. I would like my Hollywood happy ending now, please. You know where the person sees the folly of her ways and resolves tearfully not to be an addict any longer? I would even prefer that plot development to a Time Turner, which would be a pretty useful gadget to have on hand.

I could use a Time Turner for the grad class I am currently teaching, which is also a part of the glum: too much to do, not enough time in which to do it.

Tonight I was going to make a yummy Instant Pot dinner from this cookbook, which has never once let me down in a year of fairly consistent use, and it was the worst Instant Pot meal I've ever made. Shrimp! Curried in coconut milk! What could go wrong with such a delicious plan? Well, I'll tell you: the shrimp could emerge from their cooking time mostly raw, that's what. It occurs to me that perhaps my shrimp were bigger than the shrimp in the recipe? But I was steaming them inside a bowl nested within the pot, per the recipe. Wouldn't you expect a pound of shrimp to steam in about the same time if they were all stirred into in one bowl? In a single layer it would take longer to cook a bigger shrimp all the way through, but that's not what was happening here.

Oh and do you know what else? We were out of aluminum foil with which to cover the smaller bowl, and so I used wax paper. It left a light waxy residue on the inside of my pot, grumble grumble.

Okay, so these are the good things to which I am directing my attention:

1. Joe is coming home tonight.
2. I have our YNAB account up and running and the process was less intimidating than it first appeared. Perhaps now I will be able to determine where all of our money goes.
3. I am near the end of the bind-off on the Free and Fair Elections Forever brioche shawl, and it's making me happy. They say that brioche stitch grows a lot in the blocking and I hope they're right. At this point it's like a little mini-shawlette for an undersized leprechaun. A well-dressed undersized leprechaun.

Inbox Fatigue

I have a night class this semester, and I am finding once again that the time required for me to coast down after class does not quiiiite fit into the time available between my arrival at home and my preferred bedtime. So I am throwing up a quick blog post in hopes that it will de-froth my brain a little further.

Did you read that millennial burnout article? Did you react by saying to yourself "I sympathize with a lot of this" and also "Why can we not pull up our socks and get on with adult life these days"? Part of my trouble is the sheer number of input channels I am expected to respond to these days. Electronic messages make it quick and easy to communicate, but now we have all of this extra communication to deal with.

It might be most conspicuous at work, where email frees students up to ask me questions that I would never have asked a professor back in the days when the options were (a) go to office hours and ask in person or (b) make a phone call and hope to catch her in the office. Almost all of the time I am glad students have a frictionless means of asking me questions. I wonder sometimes what my working hours would have looked like if I had pursued a PhD and an academic career as a young woman. It would have been annoying to send off manuscripts and grant applications by US mail, for sure. But all of the stuff -- notifications and reminders and reply-all oversights -- must have been a much smaller part of the workday.

I used to be really guarded about giving out my cell number, but these days everybody and his pet gecko asks for it and sometimes I just say yes. It's easy to lose track of stuff in the text inbox, especially as more dumb notifications pile up. (Do I need three reminders for that appointment? No, I emphatically do not.) I deliberately set my Messenger notifications so that the app is not allowed to disturb me, which is mostly good but also means that stuff gets lost in there. Ditto for the Group Me app -- I don't let it buzz at me, but then I need to keep an occasional eye on what's going on in there.

When my kids first started getting involved in activities there was no expectation that every parent would have an email account. Communication was more of a pain in the days when you had to call everybody's landline to relay information, so there was less of it. If it was 40 degrees on the morning of a soccer game, the coach would assume you knew your kid needed to dress warmly. Our last soccer coach would send out messages tagged URGENT via both email and text. WARM LAYERS, he would say. I'm okay with the warm-layers-for-cold-days piece of adult life, thanks, but not so much with the inbox management.

I don't really think life was easier in the 80s, but there's something to be said for having a mailbox and a landline (and probably not even an answering machine) as your sole sources of Stuff That People Outside My House Need Me To Accomplish.

Twenty things you can do with little kids when it is snowing a ton

What is the largest amount of time you can spend outside? It will cheer them up and wear them out.

1. Build things in the snow: snow monsters and snow forts if your kids have the stamina for it, or snow possums if they have short attention spans. If a snowman is too hard you can make a snow squid: make one big blob for the head, and then use sand toys to carve out legs curling around it.
2. Sledding is super-fun on the way down, and those trips uphill will make for excellent naps afterward. Pro tip: promise them hot cocoa at home and leave 15 minutes before they think it's time to leave. If you wait until they think it's time to go, you might be in meltdown territory.
3. Kids love to move snow. Give them each a shovel and set them to work, man. (Keep your expectations very low -- any snow removal they manage to complete is snow removal you don't have to do. Even if they move snow back onto the walk you just shoveled-- hey, they are not squabbling inside.)
4. Make snow cream! I have such happy childhood memories of snow cream. In my recollection it works better to make snow cream outside.
5. Go on a polar explorer walk. Be Amundsen! Or Shackleton! (Just not Scott.) Take binoculars or a camera and take note of the signs of life that you encounter: footprints, scat, birdsong, actual critters. If you see a penguin, he might need a map.
6. It's true that snowball fights are only fun until somebody loses an eye (or takes a snowball square in the face), but they're really really fun up until that point. You can level the playing field if your kids are different ages by requiring big kids to throw with their non-dominant hand, or letting the littler kids start with twice as many snowballs, or something along those lines. 

When you get cold, go inside and pretend you're still outside.

7. Every big snowstorm, in my opinion, requires a fort. Possible materials: couch cushions, blankets, towels, clothespins, clamps. Folding chairs are useful because their frames are sturdy enough to provide some height but narrow enough for clamping. Also needed: materials for making "no grownups allowed" signs. If you can let them take over the living room to make their polar exploration station, they may hang out in it peaceably for a surprisingly long time.
8. Read about cold weather trials inside your warm cozy house. My kids have been riveted by the story of the Titanic. Shackleton's story has a happier ending, but what a heart-pounding story it is. Dust off Andersen's fairy tales and read about the Snow Queen. Oh, and I also love the story of Snowflake Bentley. And The Mitten! I might have to read The Mitten tomorrow even though my youngest child is 10.
9. Make your own snowstorm. Here's a how-to for the snowflakes I made when I was a kid; I never saw this kind until I was an adult but they're pretty nifty.

Snow day food offers lots of opportunities for creating lovely memories and scoring big Fun Mom points.

10. Muffins are pretty painless to make with small children and they can signal "it's a special day!" starting with breakfast. And if you say, "Guess what, kids, frosting for breakfast!" -- even though your "frosting" is lightly sweetened cream cheese thinned out with a little milk, you will still be a hero.
11. All-day hot cocoa is a favorite snow day thing. If I'm making a mugful, I stir together a spoonful of cocoa, a spoonful of sugar, and a tiny sprinkle of salt. I add a splash of milk to make a lump-free paste, and then add milk up to the brim. Microwave until hot. More often on a snowy day I would mix it up in my two-quart saucepan, for which I would need about a third of a cup of cocoa and the same amount of sugar, with a tiny pinch of salt. Here again you need to make a cocoa paste instead of pouring in all the milk at once. You can add vanilla when it's hot, but the kids won't complain if you leave it out.
12. If you are bringing cocoa to the table you can also put marshmallows into an empty sugar bowl and shift into your best snooty waiter accent. "Does Mademoiselle wish to add any marshmallows? Pairhaps she would like ze tongs to transfair ze marshmallows?"
13. Even a small thing presented enthusiastically can be a happy memory in what might otherwise be a long blank bickery day. "I know! Let's get the popcorn popper! Who wants to be my salt sprinkler?! And then! After it's popped! Would you like to eat popcorn...IN THE FORT?!" (I might designate a Fort Popcorn Eating Towel to cut down on the popcorn bits in the living room carpet, and shake it out in the back yard afterward for the squirrels.)
14. If you're a person who likes to spend time in the kitchen, it might be an excellent day for multi-step projects: make cookie dough in the morning (whoever volunteers to wash the mixing bowl gets to lick the beaters!); roll it out, cut out your snowflake cookies, and bake them after lunch; eat a few while they're hot but save the rest for after naptime, when you'll drizzle them with simple snowy frosting (confectioner's sugar + water + vanilla).
15. If you're a person who does not like to spend time in the kitchen (or a person who burned herself out while making cutout cookies with small children), simple comfort food is a perfect way to end a snowy day. Grilled cheese and tomato soup, or macaroni and cheese, or something like that.

Some fighting is inevitable if you have small kids thrown together for a long snowy day. If they get grumpy:

16. Don't try to logic them out of it. Sibling squabbles are generally impervious to logic in the moment. Brief brisk sympathy followed by distraction is your winning strategy here. "Oh, that sounds frustrating. Let's do XYZ instead."
17. XYZ might be a collaborative game like Forbidden Island. (It says 10 and up but you do not have to be 10 to play Forbidden Island.)
18. Another fun non-competitive game is Telestrations. I love it so so much. If your kids can read and write a little, you can have a blast with Telestrations. (We never score it; we just trace the mangled words through their permutations and lie on the floor laughing helplessly.)
19. A brief distraction could be a winter song like The Frozen Logger.
20. (If you become truly desperate, you could send a kid out with instructions to see what happens if he licks the downspout.)

Please share your own ideas in the comments!

Hot Bananas

"The first day of the semester," I said to myself this evening, "always feels like hot bananas."

"Wait, what??" I said back to myself, before I realized that I must have mashed up "feels like hot garbage" and "is bananas." The first day of the semester has not left me feeling like hot garbage, thankfully, but I must have needed an intensifier there, because just regular old bananas were not adequately descriptive. I do not usually live a life in which I get 50 work emails a day; that's how it always is during the first week of the semester.

A few of you asked to see a picture of the weekly page I mentioned in my last post, so here you go:

You guys, if you need your own pineapple washi tape, the set I've been linking to will only cost you $0.17 per 5-meter roll. It's a whole lot of fun for the low low price of $8. (Periodic reminder: most Amazon links that appear here are affiliate links. If you click that link and buy yourself some hedgehog/pineapple/rainbow mustache washi tape after you read this post, Amazon will give me a nickel or so with which to buy myself more washi tape.)

When I drafted that last post I included a picture of my then-current daily log page, but it left me feeling unexpectedly vulnerable. It was a little weird, actually: I would totally blog an observation like "Mood: cloudy with a chance of meltdown" but I didn't want to post a picture of that observation. Some of the reluctance was more sensible, because there are some real names and other identifying information on that page. The idea that someone has waded through years of rambly quirky posts in order to seize with nefarious intent upon the one moment in which I mention my kid's school by name, or to use my course numbers to determine when my house is likely to be empty-- that's a wacky idea, I know. And yet I didn't post the picture.

One of the keys to marching through all those tasks cheerfully is to be disciplined about getting to bed on time, so I will keep this post brief and head off to bed with Edwin Drood. Good night, all. Wish me luck with my hot bananas, please.

I announce with trembling pleasure

Oh, man, no post could ever live up to a title like that one, but especially not this post. The title comes from a London Times review of Watership Down, which was quoted in the copy of Watership Down that I checked out from my junior high library over and over again. The reviewer said something like "I announce with trembling pleasure the appearance of a great story," which could not be more different from the book reviews I mostly read these days. I am reading Watership Down to Stella these days, and thinking as always about the reasons why I love it. She is totally into it, and Pete is listening in some of the time too. So that's a happy January thing.

Although it sparked the title of this post, it has nothing to do with the planned content of this post, which is: I announce with trembling pleasure that I have devised an excellent washi tape storage solution. I mean, they're practically the same thing, right? Adams wrote 450 pages describing a fictional world with its own language and folklore; my husband went to Hobby Lobby. Six of one, etc.

Here is what I did: I bought a plastic pencil case at Walgreens that was big enough to hold the stencils. (Oh my word, you guys, the stencils came on Monday and I realized that I had failed to read the fine print. There are twenty sheets of stencils. I have a leaning tower of Pisa stencil, for all my Italian-engineering-fail stenciling needs. I have a Google Plus logo stencil, just in case I have an urgent need to stencil my feelings about a defunct social media platform, I guess? Anyway: stencils in the bottom. Pens and highlighters on top. Elwood brought me a 5/8" dowel and a little bag of dowel caps. I sawed the dowel into appropriately sized lengths and TADA!

Even Blackberry would find it clever, I expect.

So now I have a portable toolbox that will allow me to make more log pages, adorned with rainbow mustache washi tape. And stencils. I did not perceive a need for rainbow mustache washi tape in my life before 2019 came along, but here in the new year it is definitely taking up some space in my head.

The trouble with bullet-journaling, as with any planning system, is that it's entirely possible to spend more time deciding whether you want to adorn your to-do list with the white tape that has russet hearts OR the salmon tape with gilt hearts than you do actually accomplishing the tasks upon it. But I've been pretty motivated to clear the decks this week. I'll head into the new semester with the laundry caught up, flat surfaces cleared off, email inboxes empty, paper inbox in good shape. And tomorrow when I make a new weekly log page in an attempt to corral the chaos, I will be able to select a roll of washi tape without sending five other rolls flying every which way. Will lit be pineapples or tiny gold stars? 

I'm sure the suspense is crushing you.

DOMS of the Will

Over the weekend I was trying to get back in the exercise groove. I ran on Saturday and Sunday. I did yoga on Saturday; I went rock-climbing with Joe on Sunday. And, perhaps predictably, by Monday afternoon I was too sore to reach up and scratch my head. I needed, like, a robot hairstylist to assist me. 

In this week where the kids are in school and I am not, I have been trying to Get Stuff Done. I did so many things on Tuesday in particular -- phone calls and emails and errands. On Wednesday I spent part of the day at a big noisy symposium, and part of the day trying to do more things, and by Wednesday night I needed, like, a robot hairstylist except for routine brain tasks. They call it DOMS when it's in your body -- delayed onset muscle soreness. I was feeling something DOMS-like in my brain. 

Up to a point this is part and parcel of being a person who loves new year's resolutions. If you always resolve to push your body a little farther in the new year, you're always going to be a little bit sore in January. It would have been smarter if I had preserved my ability to apply conditioner without assistance, I know, but a little muscle soreness can be a pleasant reminder of a happy productive workout. Generally, I think, I am able to read my body's cues about how hard to push and when to back off. (Rock-climbing is a different kind of workout, with shorter bursts of high intensity.)

The thing that causes me perpetual perplexity is how hard to push and when to back off when it comes to matters of the brain. I have a problematic tendency to measure my value in terms of my output. Sometimes when I feel myself getting brain-tired I pause and say to myself, "What would feel restorative right now?" Often the answer is "Finding a different kind of box to check!"

I have arranged my life so that doing things I enjoy often gives me boxes to check: when I finish the cowl I am binding off for my 19yo, I will check it off my knitting list. When I read a Watership Down chapter to Stella tonight (the story of the king's lettuce!) it meant not only that we enjoyed the mysterious doctor describing the perils of the festering Lousepedoodle but also that I had a box to fill in on my habits page. Sometimes I say to myself, "Do you really want to do this thing or are you actually trying to please someone else and check a box in the process?"

Sometimes I'm not sure what the answer is.

Pushing back against the peculiar longevity

Our new fridge has been leaking. It started right after we got it in November: we'd wake up in the morning and there would be an ominous puddle in the floor. At first we weren't sure if it was an ominous dishwasher puddle or an ominous refrigerator puddle, because we have a tiny galley kitchen in a 1923 house where none of the floors are quite level. "Argh," one of us would say to the other, "there is a puddle in the floor." "Argh indeed," the other would say, wiping it up. I cannot in good conscience recommend the "argh at it and see if it goes away" management strategy for minor appliance malfunctions, but in this case it worked for a while. After about a week, the puddles disappeared. But we started seeing puddles again shortly after Christmas, sometimes twice a day. 

I called to schedule a repair visit. That's the kind of thing I often put off, because I expect it will be annoying, and lo it was annoying. The person at the call center kept calling me Mr. Gladly, and didn't seem to register that we have no plumbing attached to the fridge-- no ice maker, no water dispenser. Note to Future Jamie, though: it is much better to bite the bullet and get the 10 minutes of annoying out of the way. They scheduled a visit for the next day; the repair guy showed up within the promised window; the fix is easy.

Our fridge is supposed to have a plastic pan underneath it to catch the water generated by its self-defrosting mechanism. This pan is easy to break, apparently, because it's plastic. If you load it on a dolly, you have to do it just so or you'll crack the pan. Maybe the third-party delivery folks accidentally cracked it and thought we wouldn't notice the absence of a pan? Who can say? The repair guy, an extremely nice fellow named Phil, showed me how to slide the pan in when it arrives in the mail. "If you have trouble," he assured me, "it's under warranty. We'll come out and do it." I'm pretty sure we can handle a part installation that requires only two screws, but it's always good to have a backup plan. For now he has slipped a spare jelly roll pan into that spot, so we should be puddle-free until the new part arrives.

We are almost 14 years into owning this house, and I am finding that we work around a number of low-level annoyances instead of resolving them. Have you ever read the paper called The Peculiar Longevity of Things Not So Bad? It's about the outsize impact of low-level annoyances, CONFIRMED BY SCIENCE. So I am writing this post in case you have your own "thing not so bad" niggling at you today. Probably it's not your fridge; probably you have not been saying to yourself every morning "what if it's not water what if it's coolant what if the whole thing is breaking dying and Sears won't replace it because they've gone out of business alas what if" (because probably your brain is less likely to loop repeatedly through worst-case scenarios than mine), but I bet you have an annoying ten-minute phone call on your list that could make your life more pleasant once you suffered through the annoying part. This is a gentle nudge from me to you: go for it!

All The Things

"All The Things!" I exclaim every January.

"All The Things?" I ask a week later.

Don't mind me; I am just doing my usual January expectations dance. If dances still had names (what was the Watusi, anyway?) you could call it the Washing Machine: throw a bunch of stuff in there, shake it around, see what you get on the way back out. This year it is the Washing Machine With Added Washi Tape. (I bought a package of 48 tiny rolls from Amazon and my family is a little mystified by how much fun I am having with it. Well, to be honest I am also a little mystified by it, having long been baffled by the appeal of washi tape. But you guys: I have hedgehog washi tape. And pineapples. Also there are some stencils landing in my mailbox on Monday.)

Every year I go back to my resolutions post from the year before, and see what needs to be tweaked, or rebooted, or discarded with a wry and knowing chuckle. I had thought that it would be a little painful to walk through that process this year, because I kept thinking about the stuff I had resolved to do that just didn't get done. I had planned to read a bunch of Victorian literature and only read a little; I had resolved to do some adulting that remained un-adulted or only preliminarily adulted. (Is "adult" a transitive verb? I am not sure it can appear in a passive voice construction. But I suppose if I am going to verb that particular noun I can bend it all the way to my will.) It wasn't actually that bad, but there are some places where I'll need to try try again. That tenure packet, you guys, coupled with the bananapants state of the world in 2018, was not good for my resolver. 

I usually make Epiphany resolutions rather than new year's resolutions. The first week of January is a good time for me to think about possibilities and try some things out, and we're almost always on the road near the first of the year. To stick with that plan I'll have to fill in some blanks tomorrow, figuring out how much to emphasize habits vs. goals, and how high to aim. As Robert Browning wrote, a mom's reach should exceed her grasp, or how else will she manufacture a painful mid-February crash with spasms of self-loathing and a side of despair? (I kid! I kid!)

One of the lines on my shiny new habit grid says "L&M (3/wk)" and another says "in bed @ 9:45." Tonight I could only pick one of those things. Sometimes that's how it goes, I guess.

A rabbit hole lined with washi tape

i was given a Leuchtturm notebook for Christmas and I fear I have fallen down the bullet-journaling rabbit hole. Hit me with your favorite bullet journal resources, please, especially tricks for organizing miniature rolls of washi tape. The washi tape situation could get unmanageable. 

Travel Adventures

Hi, happy new year! We returned this evening from a visit to my parents' house and I am glad to be safely home. Last night I helped to start a fire in my mother's oven, and today we thought for the better part of two hours that our van was toast. I am hoping for a quieter tomorrow.

I made a cake for Alex's 22nd birthday in my mother's kitchen on Sunday. I put it in a springform pan, with a foil-covered tray on the rack below it. It didn't leak at all, which is not my usual experience with springform pans of a certain age. So last night, when I went to make a cake for our New Year's Eve celebration, I left out the foil-covered tray.

Surprise! Ten minutes after I slid it into the oven I smelled burning cake batter. It had oozed out of the pan in big buttery globs and plopped down onto the element. We slipped a foil-covered tray onto the rack below it to prevent further drips, and planned to clean it up after dinner was over and the oven was cool.

Except! Surprise, part deux! My mother jacked up the oven temperature to 450 after the cake was out so she could brown up some frozen Texas toast. 

"There is a fire in the oven," I said.

The cake batter which had contented itself with quietly blackening at 325 was actively burning at 450. There was a line of butter-fueled flames, lighting up the oven from the inside. They continued to flame after the oven was off. "Should I put flour on it?" my mother asked as she dumped a scoop of flour on it.

"Flour is a combustible powder," said my brother. 

We all watched with interest as the flour began to burn.

My brother smothered the flames with a saucepan. I put the Texas toast back in the freezer. After dinner my mother vacuumed up the flour. No harm, no foul. (No harm, no flou...r?) A tip from me to you: don't attempt to extinguish an oven fire with a scoop of flour. Maybe my mother's half-remembered tip is for grease fires, where the flour might absorb the grease and make it less available for burning. Or maybe it was 1950s-era Russian propaganda, designed to burn down the maximum number of American houses. Who can say?

***

This morning I rousted everybody out of bed early. We drank our coffee and packed our bags and loaded our van and said our goodbyes and zipped off to Mass. We headed toward home. Less than an hour into the trip the check-engine light clicked on and the van declined to drive at highway speed. It could go a labored 60mph, but it was clearly unhappy doing so. 

This seemed unlikely to work out smoothly on New Year's Day. We stopped in a tiny town to see if we could find an open auto repair shop, and after about 20 calls we found a place that could assess the car. To get there we had to drive back to the city.

I was doing my best to pray and trust, and I was remembering all the times that we have seen the kindness of strangers when unexpected events have slowed us down, but it was a stressful drive. The car was stuttering and complaining, struggling with any acceleration and especially with hills. "Seems like it's the transmission," said Elwood, as we listened to it working to reach its top gear.

Eventually we limped our way to our destination, where they told us they'd update us in about an hour. We walked to a Shoney's and started planning for the worst. Thankfully, through a sheer gift of grace, we were both really calm about the whole thing. The most likely explanation seemed to be something big: a serious engine problem or a transmission failure. After we finished eating we started looking for one-way rentals that could hold six people. We wondered if my dad would be willing to help us sell it for parts, or if we should try to figure it out on our own. It just doesn't make a ton of sense to put big repair dollars into a ten-year-old vehicle.

But! You guys! On the solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, the Blessed Mother came through for us in a big big way: the whole problem was that an oil pressure valve had failed, causing the van to run on just three cylinders. That's why it couldn't accelerate except in a sad half-hearted quarter-hearted eighth-hearted way. That's why it couldn't get to its highest gear-- not because of a transmission problem, but because of a power problem. An EASILY FIXED power problem. They had the part in stock and the repair was straightforward. We walked back from lunch expecting a terminal diagnosis and instead found a fully operational vehicle.

It makes me a little wobbly with gratitude, just typing it out.