Light and Momentary

#SAMDRAL

Every year in May I host a Dickens read-along. This will be its seventh year, if you can believe it -- thus the hashtag, Seventh Annual May Dickens Read-ALong. Here's what we've read so far.

2019: Tale of Two Cities
2018: Pickwick Papers
2017: Martin Chuzzlewit
2016: David Copperfield
2015: Our Mutual Friend
2014: Bleak House

I'm thinking about maybe reading The Old Curiosity Shop this year. But I'm also thinking about Oliver Twist, which is shorter with less bathos. Little Nell is not my favorite heroine, and this is not the year in which I want to haul myself through a book I don't really like. But Mr. Quilp! He might be the best Dickens villain of them all. So tell me: want to read a Dickens novel with me in May this year? Do you have a preference between Old Curiosity Shop and Oliver Twist? I will start after finals, on approximately May 8, and read about 30 pages a day. You are of course welcome to start whenever you'd like and read at a pace that works for you. Every year I aim to be done by the beginning of June, but it doesn't always work out that way.

Between now and then I have a little deck-clearing to do. I have one more chapter in Anne Tyler's newest book, Redhead by the Side of the Road. I borrowed Dear Edward from the e-library based on a friend's recommendation. I was rereading Blackout/All Clear but I got bogged down about a hundred pages from the end -- I'd like to finish instead of just re-shelving it, even though I know what happens. And I bought Jen Fulwiler's new book. I started to say, "I can get those read between now and the 8th of May, don't you think?" -- but probably three out of four is more realistic. If my lone leisure-time activity right now were reading, I could finish them all, no problem. But the kids and I are doing lots of logic puzzles together and I am back in the Duolingo groove and also I am hoping to finish knitting a blanket before the weather gets too hot. So let's say three out of four.

And then! To London! Squalor and heartbreak and poverty and hopeful glimpses of the countryside and pollution and uncertainty and mysterious death but always, always redemption in the end. Whenever I am tempted to get impatient with Dickens over his implausible plot twists and one-dimensional female characters, I remember the redemption in the end and sigh a happy sigh.

They're terribly comfortable

My husband has been asking me for a while to make a mask for him. I had gotten as far as googling "mask patterns" and whimpering faintly at the multiplicity of results, but today I bit the bobbin and whipped* one up.

*if in your idiolect "whipped" means "spent an uninterrupted 80 minutes completing while growing increasingly exasperated."

I read a blog post this afternoon from someone who has so far donated 300 masks. Three! hundred! masks! 

If you have also been googling "mask patterns" and whimpering faintly at the multiplicity of results, I can recommend this one. I used ordinary cotton broadcloth from my fabric stash. At my husband's request I also added a nose support. I made a small casing at the bridge of the nose. I took some fine wire from the craft shelf, and recruited a kid to get the electrical tape and make me a small bundle with the ends carefully secured.

A big chunk of the reason it took me 80 minutes is that I don't have a dedicated sewing space. Usually my sewing machine lives on the back steps. Have we talked about the back steps recently? Long ago our house had a separate apartment upstairs, and they used a separate staircase and entrance. These days I store yarn, sewing supplies, and wrong-sized kids' clothes on one side of the back steps, with the other side kept clear so we could use the stairs in an emergency. But it is not very convenient to collect the sewing machine, the iron, the pincushion, the shears, the thread, the elastic, and the fabric, bringing them up one staircase and down the other and clearing a spot for them in the dining room. If I am going to be making a bunch of masks, I would prefer to find a better system.

I have sometimes thought that when our nest gets a little emptier I might turn the smallest upstairs bedroom into a crafting space, but our nest is SO FULL right now, SO SO FULL.

We have robins nesting in a spot I can see from this seat and I am going to be grateful that I did not have to build this nest with a beak and no thumbs. We have considerably more square footage per resident than the robins do, and no rain falling on the occupants.

Wait, I just had an idea. MAYBE if I move a stack of notebooks out of the server in the dining room, then MAYBE my sewing machine could fit in that space temporarily. AND THEN it would be out of sight when I wasn't sewing masks, and convenient when I decided to sew. But the sewing machine might also be too tall.

I will report back. I am sure the suspense will be weighing on you.

Grimometers

One of the silver linings of the pandemic: my college roommates and I have been talking via Zoom every weekend. We have an ongoing text chat, and we get together in various combinations as often as we can manage it, but it's rare for all of us to see each other's faces this regularly.

Today we were talking about the perils of sifting through the news, and I think part of the problem is that we're all having some trouble calibrating our grimometers. How bad is this? We have no frame of reference; we have no crystal ball. We can all agree, I expect, that it is exhausting and inappropriate to keep our collective grimometer needles in the red zone. This is not a Station Eleven situation; there will be a lot of pieces to pick up afterward, but the large majority of us will be here to help with the reassembly. We can all agree, I expect, about the delusions or mendacity of those who are arguing to keep the needle in the the green zone. The people who are still saying it's all been overhyped are not reading this blog. But I am doing a daily seesaw from yellow to orange and back again. "Remdesivir!" chirps my inner optimist, nudging the needle downward. "Dialysis overload and NYC healthcare provider infection rates and reagent shortages!" groans the pessimist in me, and that needle sproings right up again.

But I believe in a God who is present when we suffer, and so I keep reminding myself that I need to think hopefully and give generously even as I act cautiously. That this bizarre blur of blank days is temporary. 

Grimness sells, I think, and so the clickbait headlines abound. I have seen some hand-wringing stories about the long-term impact of school closures on kids' math skills, but the reality is that kids are generally wired for learning things, math included. I am finding that I need to turn the page instead of reading the very grimmest stories about the economy. My worry cannot add a hair to my head or a dollar to my IRA, but it surely can change the flavor of a glorious spring day. This is me reminding myself that allowing the grimometer needle to slide toward the red zone is not just a bad idea in an abstract sense; it is actively damaging to the climate of my home.

Green-zone grimometer needles are also actively damaging; I remain troubled by the politically motivated bright-siding that seems to be multiplying like malevolent mushrooms as the lockdowns lengthen. I read a profoundly disturbing blog post written by a man who identifies as staunchly pro-life, in which he devoted hundreds of words to arguing that we don't need to get too exercised about all these nursing home deaths because people in nursing homes are mostly there to die. I was contracted to a bunch of different nursing homes in the early years of my career, and part of my job now is preparing students who will work in long-term care themselves. I have been thinking all weekend about the climate of a good long-term care facility: the protective affection that the staff shows the residents, their attempts to compensate for the confusion and other indignities that old age heaps on the people they are committed to caring for.

I am trying to imagine 70 deaths inside a month in one facility. It's apocalyptic. It's unimaginable.

To anyone who might say "Where is your Jesus in this mess?" I would say he is right there with those nursing home residents. The ones who cannot understand why they cannot breathe and why they are in the hospital and why they are all alone -- he is holding them close. He is right there with their relatives as they grieve and worry. He is right there with the women who are wondering how they can possibly continue a pregnancy right now, right there with the single mom who is wondering how she will arrange care for her preschooler if her cough lands her in the hospital. And even though my own personal worries are much less pressing (it's pretty meta to be worrying about whether you're worrying the right amount), he is with me too.

In today's gospel Jesus invites Thomas to feel his wounds, a story that always reminds me of a line in Crown Him With Many Crowns: his wounds, yet visible above, in beauty glorified. The grimometer challenge isn't just a COVID thing: we will always need to strike a balance between minimizing temporal suffering (especially others' temporal suffering) and getting stuck on temporal suffering, failing to see the big picture. I hope for a day when that line will echo for us, too: our wounds, yet visible above, forever sanctified.

Dear Jamie, what do you do with all that washi tape?

Melanie asked me what I did with my rolls and rolls of washi tape, and I thought about writing a goofy post in response because the real answer is kind of boring.

Maybe, I thought to myself, a person could use washi tape in lieu of waxing strips. Nobody's getting her brows done these days; desperate times, desperate measures, etc. (Today was the day of the pandemic on which I cut my husband's hair. It went much better than the last time I cut his hair, which was a sad day in 1999.) Or hey -- maybe a person could create cosmetic effects with washi tape. Instead of ripping the hair from her upper lip, maybe she could just make a nice washi tape mustache. She could even use some rainbow mustache washi tape to create a mustache-mustache. I wonder if there is a market for washi tape adorned with pictures of people who have given themselves washi tape mustaches? If you gave yourself a mustache with some of that tape it would be like those three-way dressing room mirrors -- mustache echoes in every direction.

Have you ever had one of those bras where the straps keep sliding down your shoulders? A person could make a sort of washi tape bra strap sling and tape them to her neck. (She could also buy better-fitting bras, but that option doesn't require any washi tape.)

The trouble with using washi tape in lieu of an actual adhesive is that washi tape isn't very sticky. It adheres nicely to paper, but you can almost always peel it right back up again. Miriel lets her kids apply washi tape to the walls, which is an idea I would totally steal if I had small children.

The actual (boring) answer to Melanie's question is that I stick my washi tape to paper. I use my bullet journal almost daily and I almost always bedeck its pages with some washi tape. It is a pleasing morning ritual, one that helps me keep track of things. Hardcore bullet journalers say that you must maintain your index, so you have a record of which pages are where. But maintaining an index is very boring and I am not consistent about it. However! If I give each page a different appearance, it's a visual cue that helps me remember where I wrote that note to myself about whatever topic. My January-February workout schedule was framed in sunshiny yellow-flowered washi tape, so I could find it easily across the four weeks it covered. My spring semester research goals (mostly scuppered now, alas) have a stripe of peacock-feather washi tape at the left edge of the page. If I am feeling glum about all the grading I have to do, I will enclose the list of grading tasks in a frame made of happy echidna washi tape, and feel a little less glum. If I have a to-do list that I really have to coax myself to complete, I will sometimes even affix a small and pleasant square of washi tape next to each finished task. I mean, sure, I could just make a checkmark, but wouldn't you rather have a tiny cheerful picture of a colorful summer beverage?

Today's page is pretty typical: vaguely floral borders that echo the colors of the hyacinths currently blooming in my neighborhood, with a thin stripe in a harmonious color to divide work from play.

I also have a journal-journal that often gets a little decorative washi tape action, just a quick stripe under the date. I have a journaling Bible with space for notes in the margin, and I sometimes set my notes off with washi tape. (That idea came from a student who noticed the basket of washi tape on my desk during office hours. "I love washi tape!" she said. "I use it in my Bible!")

Some washi tape is for sharing. I let Stella choose her own stash, which she uses occasionally to gussy up crafts and mark her notebooks as her own. In one of my packages of washi tape there were a couple of rolls that were too girly for Stella (she feels we should all just say no to rainbow unicorns), so I took it to work and asked a colleague with many daughters if it might find a home in their craft supplies. 

Huh, did I really just write almost 750 MORE words about washi tape? I appear to have done so.

Awash-i

A little more than a year ago I posted about my first foray into washi tape. Rainbow mustaches, I exclaimed. Echidnas!

I bought a package of slightly fatter washi tape, and then a further package of even fatter washi tape. Then I announced that I did not need any more washi tape. When Amazon tried to lure me deeper into the rabbit hole with this fun package containing jellyfish washi tape, I resisted the temptation. Well, mostly. I added it to my wish list and moved on.

December came and I thought about how a package of Christmas washi tape would brighten those bleak December days. (Reader, I was right about that.) On about December 26 I thought to myself, "I bet I could get GOLD FOIL Christmas washi tape for cheap now that secular Christmas is over, and then I could have GOLD FOIL happiness." (Reader, I was right about that too.)

But then-- I opened my Christmas gift from my mother-in-law on December 27, and I discovered that she had thought to herself, "If 12 rolls of washi tape are good, then 48 rolls of washi tape will be EVEN BETTER!!" This brought the number of rolls of washi tape in my possession to a rather alarming level. I did not conduct a formal washi tape census, but it was obvious that my washi tape needs should be fulfilled for the foreseeable future.

Except-- I kept thinking about the jellyfish. Can we admire these beauteous jellyfish, friends? Also mushrooms? And summery cocktails?

I clicked the BUY NOW button. Sadly, the package got lost on its way to me. "I am OFFERING IT UP for the souls in Purgatory," I told my family as I waited for the package to get un-lost. "I'm sure it's doing them a lot of good," Elwood said dryly. Amazon offered me a refund in lieu of jellyfish. I didn't want a refund, though; I wanted jellyfish washi tape.

The week when I thought I might have a teeny washi tape problem was the week when I bought a replacement package of jellyfish washi tape AND ALSO a package of gold foil washi tape AND ALSO a washi tape organizer.

It turns out that all of my washi tape fits neatly in my dowel + plastic organizer system, with a bit left over to sit decoratively in a pretty little basket on my desk, as shown at right. "You have enough washi tape to mummify someone," said Elwood. "Well, maybe a very small person," I said, with the merest hint of defensiveness.

"No," said Elwood. "You have enough washi tape to mummify, like, Shaquille O'Neal."

If egg salad is not your fave

If you have a bunch of hard-boiled eggs lurking in your fridge awaiting their destiny, I have a recipe approximation for you. This is an adaptation of a Madhur Jaffrey recipe in the cookbook that was my go-to* before I bought an Instant Pot.

In the original recipe, you cook onion, garlic, ginger, a chili pepper, cumin, cayenne, lemon juice, and garam masala together with tomato paste, cream, and chicken stock. Then you simmer halved hard-boiled eggs in the sauce until they are heated through, and serve over rice with cilantro or parsley on top. But as I told you recently, these days I am in the habit of keeping onion masala on hand, and onion masala does most of the heavy lifting if you would like to make a version of that meal.

The reason I am calling it a "recipe approximation" and not a recipe is that we had leftover tomato soup from Good Friday in the fridge (to make tomato soup: brown onion, celery, carrot; add garlic, tomatoes, stock, cream; cook until tender and apply immersion blender; serve with grilled cheese sandwiches, natch). I used a pint of soup leftovers and a half-cup of onion masala, and added about eight halved hard-boiled eggs, arranged cut side up in a single layer. 

I just went digging in my archives for a post I wrote years ago that reminds me of this one -- look, I made something yummy with the leftovers from my specific fridge on this specific day. Maybe it's unlikely that you also have leftover tomato soup in your fridge, but maybe you would rather improvise your own version of leftover hard-boiled eggs in creamy Indian-spiced tomato sauce than goldenrod eggs** or whatever else.

*That's an affiliate link; if you click through and make a purchase, Amazon will give me a few cents toward the purchase of my next Indian cookbook.

**My grade-school Girl Scout leader taught us to make goldenrod eggs along with creamed chipped beef, billing them as dishes every girl should know how to prepare. But you know, if I could only pick one thing to do with hard-boiled eggs for the rest of my life, it would NOT be goldenrod eggs. Such a pretty name, such a sad gloopy reality. There is not enough hot sauce in the world to redeem goldenrod eggs. And creamed chipped beef! I guess my Girl Scout leader was old enough to be nostalgic about reconstituted dried beef, but I? Am not.

I have been making some things that are silver and black

Sometimes it takes me a long time to get from "oh, that looks like an interesting knit" to "hey, I have finished knitting that thing." Kate Davies published her Sheep Carousel tea cozy pattern way back in 2012. She offered a free pattern to newsletter subscribers a few years later, and I picked that one as my freebie. But I didn't cast it on until June of last year, and I am still not quite finished. 

I've done all the knitting, but I still have to tack down my steek facings and weave in the ends. The picture shows the unblocked version. Those sheep are already less wonky as I type this post. 

I found the fun:drudgery ratio fairly unfavorable for this project. I wanted to learn how to work those Latvian braids, but they are a pain. I don't love stranded colorwork with long floats, but you can probably tell just by looking that there are a bunch of long floats in this project. And applied I-cord is the most boring form of knitting. You have to pay attention, so you can't, like, read to a child at the same time because she will complain that you are paying too much attention to your knitting. But it's so slow and repetitive that if you're not careful your brain might melt and slide out of your skull, like that guy at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark only internally and without the ideological concerns.

The third of my three Colourwork Club parcels landed in my mailbox at the beginning of the month. This project is mittens, but not just any mittens. They have a tricky Estonian braided cast-on (I was a little worried when Ysolda herself said the cast-on took her a few tries), an afterthought thumb, an optional flip-top, and an I-cord button loop. Oh, and a contrasting lining! 

As with the other club projects, the yarn is really nice. It's a toothy Norwegian yarn, DK weight for the exterior of the mittens and light fingering for the lining. The opportunity to play with new Norwegian yarns has been one of the most fun parts of the club membership. I wasn't expecting to enjoy the colors and textures quite as much as I have. Even in this kit, the neutral kit, I find the colors deeply pleasing -- the golden brown in particular is a rich toasty color, like pumpkin bread. I almost want to eat it (ed. note: but maybe that's just because I was drafting this paragraph at 10:25pm on Good Friday). 

There was a glitch somewhere in the pattern-writing, and it caused the color-coding to be reversed across most but not all of the print pattern. So technically I was supposed to make the mittens with a silver background for the palm and a black background for the back of the hand, but I did it the other way around. I am not too worried that the knitting police will smite me for failing to read the fine print.

It seems a little less pressing to finish these mittens as the temperatures rise, but on the other hand it's nice to have a portable project for warmer days. The last time I made a pair of Ysolda mitts it took me months to finish them because there were so many stinking details there at the end. So here's hoping that either these are less fiddly or that my level of motivation is higher. So far my experience of the pandemic is not characterized by an abundance of motivation, but I suppose we'll see how it goes.

Untitled

Hello, friends, and a blessed Holy Thursday to you.

This week I learned that my summer class will be online. This is sensible and unsurprising and also a bummer. I'm teaching research methods, which is rarely a class that our students approach with enthusiasm. They want to learn how to assess and treat, and research methods feels like a distraction from their real purpose. I used to joke about it when I taught the class in an actual classroom. I'd say, "No one comes into this program saying, 'You know which class I'm really looking forward to? Research methods!'  So I figure the bar is set pretty low -- my goal is for you all to finish this semester saying, 'Hey, that was much less boring than I expected it to be!'" And it always worked out -- in an in-person class.

When I am teaching I rely a ton on facial cues. Once I get to know my students I'll often pause and check in with them if people look confused. It's not unusual for me to say to an individual frowning student, "Hey, [Name], do you have a question I can help with or are you just thinking hard?" That is a zillion times harder in an online class -- both reading the faces and building the trust, so they know it's perfectly fine either to ask a question, any question, or to say "Nope, no questions here." I'm not delighted about the combination of a class that students don't really want to take and a setting that makes it harder to foster community. But hey, I'm also not delighted about the prospect of spreading a potentially fatal disease to vulnerable members of my community, so I guess I'll need to make the best of it.

This morning we got a delivery from Target for the first time. It was mostly fine, but they made a couple of substitutions, swapping in two medium-sized chocolate bunnies in lieu of a box of small chocolate bunnies and a box of hazelnut chocolates. This is a teeny tiny problem in the grand scheme of this particular week, I know, but I had a small pang at the thought of dividing two chocolate bunnies across four Easter baskets and a larger pang at the thought of going to Target to figure out my own Easter candy situation in person. (Is the acquisition of additional Easter candy truly an essential errand, given that the jellybeans and the caramel eggs AND the Reese's eggs all made it into the Target order? Probably not.) But! My 20yo heard me mumbling about this and said, "I don't need a chocolate bunny in my Easter basket," and then the 14yo chimed in, "Neither do I." Later in the day my 17yo heard about the bunny situation and said, "Oh, no, I don't need a bunny; it's perfectly fine," and Stella said in a brave voice, "I don't mind if someone else has a bunny and I don't." I don't think I would have believed, back in the days when everyone was small (and feral), that at some point in our future 100% of the children in the house would offer, freely and cheerfully, to go without a chocolate bunny so a sibling could have one instead.

There's a little echo of Gift of the Magi in that story, is there not, in the way everybody is willing to sacrifice in order to give to others? If nobody wants a chocolate bunny, maybe I'll have to eat them both. [She said piously, heading into Good Friday with her priorities 100% in order.]

[Also, lest you envision us floating on a golden cloud of Good Catholic Family-ness, I should tell you that when someone asked "So how will we decide who gets the bunnies?" the deadpan answer was "Fight to the death."]

Friday Miscellany

Maybe it's going to be a season of ups and downs. I had been feeling SO MUCH BETTER all this week, but then today I have been a little weepy and worried again. The church music director texted me to say "We love you and miss you and we are praying for you every day!" and I teared up. The dean of students got right back to me to say they followed up with the student I am worried about it, the one who hasn't responded to my email, and I teared up. The dean of my college sent out a beautiful email to all of the faculty -- just exactly the right mix of serious and hopeful -- and I teared up every dang time I read it. (Four times. It was a really good email.) I'm rereading Blackout and in the face of all that loss and bravery I keep tearing up.

"DO YOU THINK WEEPINESS IS A COVID-19 SYMPTOM?" I asked Elwood in an all-caps voice this afternoon.

"No," he said. "I do not."

My mother's birthday was this week and after some dithering I gave her a copy of Doomsday Book. I love the Oxford time travel universe, and I love the author's certainty that you can do your bit wherever (and whenever) you find yourself -- that people of good will must work together for the greater good. Such a big truth, expressed in such a gentle, funny, slightly meandering voice. I do not think it will be exactly my mother's cup of tea, but I suppose we'll see.

Tonight we had a quick and easy saag paneer, made with the last of the onion masala I mentioned in last Friday's blog post. Elwood heated up about a cupful of onion masala together with two bags of frozen spinach, and when the spinach was hot and tender he added about a cup of sour cream and applied the immersion blender with vigor and determination. He fried up the cubes of paneer so they would be lightly browned and slightly crispy, but you could skip the frying if you happened to be feeling either rushed or deflated. Serve over rice with cilantro on top -- it's a Gladly family favorite. A spoonful of butterfat makes the leafy greens go down, just like Mary Poppins always said.

This afternoon one of my children asked me to explain German relative pronouns and I was like "I WAS BORN FOR THIS MOMENT LET US DISCUSS THE MIRACLE OF RECURSION." But then...I proceeded to explain relative pronouns with such enthusiasm that I thought for a moment he might cry. So maybe I was not born for that moment? It was pretty clear that the kid in question much preferred the following moment, the one where I said "Let me slow down and try again," and no actual tears were shed.

Huh, this post is entirely free of narrative arc. Here are some things I have been thinking about today, with lots of capital letters. Hope you are all doing well, friends.