Light and Momentary

Phew

I spent most of the day drawing a big triangle with my car: I took Joe back to his college rental house so he could pack his things up, and then I drove him to Chicago, where he will start an internship tomorrow, and then after he was all moved in I drove myself home.

That was a lot of driving, friends. I miss that boy when he's away.

A birthday cake

Joe is 20 today, which means I will never again be the mother of three teenagers. I was so worried about having three teens at once but I did not need to be worried. (<- The Jamie Story -- same song, different verse)

I made an almond cake that is a particular favorite of his: moist and fluffy, flavorful and easy. I used a slightly different recipe and I will stick with it going forward, because it requires a smidge less butter and sugar than the one I had made in the past. You can knock it together in the food processor with lightning speed. This is all you do:

Preheat the oven to 325 and hit a 9-inch springform pan with nonstick spray. Take a 7- or 8-ounce package of almond paste (we can find this brand at Gladlyville grocery stores) and process it with 1.25 c. sugar. (This will prevent chunks of almond paste in your finished cake.) Blend in 2 sticks of softened butter with 1/8 t. almond extract and 1 t. vanilla. Next, add in 6 eggs. Finally, add 1/4 t. salt, 1.5 t. baking powder, and 1 c. flour. Pulse just until combined. It will be a fairly liquid batter. Bake for an hour and peek at it; it might need as much as 75 minutes. You want it to be risen all the way to the center, and a skewer should come out clean.

It will be delicious plain, or you can dress it up. I made a speedy berry fool and piled it on top with some pretty shards from a failed caramel cage.

Discerning

In June of 2019 I was part of a mission retreat team: our goal was to take our retreat program and establish it in another community. Originally, the plan was to go back a year later and lead a second retreat with team members who had participated on the first one, so that they could get the program up and running in their town.

June 2020 was not a great time for retreats, though.

I agreed to be on the second retreat team, and then had second thoughts. It will be in November, the weekend before my professional organization has its convention. I told a friend that I'd go back to the convention this year -- in the past we've had a lot of fun rooming together at these conventions.

It's going to be a busier-than-average fall in terms of time spent on teaching, because I'm teaching a class I last taught in 2015 and prepping a new class. I'll be starting from scratch with the new prep; the retiring instructor is unlikely to share many of her materials with me.

All of this was swirling around in my brain, making me wonder if I should back out of doing the retreat team altogether. And then yesterday I got a call from the director, asking me to be the team's spiritual director.

I filled this role in 2018 for a local retreat, and I loved doing it. It remains one of my favorite things I've ever done. I had more time available in the run-up to that retreat, though, since most of our meetings happened after my summer class ended and before the fall semester started. And the director was my friend Veronica, who encouraged me to do whatever seemed right to me and was willing to roll with just about anything I suggested. Neither of those things will be true this time.

I told the director that I would take it to adoration tomorrow and get back to her. I'm definitely leaning toward yes. I'm just not sure it's a prudent yes.

NAMDRAL, Day 11

In Nicholas NIckleby Dickens gives many of his characters a trait that identifies them to the reader as they loop back in and out of the action. Mr. Mantalini enters the room saying "Demnition!" (and perhaps threatening to do away with himself), Lord Frederick Verisopht always finds a reason to invoke the devil, rendered "deyvle," and Mrs. Nickleby gets bogged down in the irrelevant details of her tangential and muddled stories.

In the section I read tonight, Mrs. Nickleby talks about her mother's run-in with a hairdresser who was escaping from a bear. Or was it a bear escaping from a hairdresser? 

I read this and thought, "Ah, yes, Mrs. Nickleby is being quirkier than usual." But then I checked the endnote.

Apparently, there was a late 18th-century English hairdresser named Gillingwater, who kept bears in the basement of his shop because bear grease was a popular hair tonic. Periodically he would post a sign out front saying that a bear had just been killed, so everyone would know that the bear grease was nice and fresh.

I suppose if a person keeps bears in the basement, it is entirely plausible that one's neighbors might have the occasional run-in with a proprietor being chased by a bear -- or a bear being chased by a proprietor.

Who knew the England of yore was such an exciting place to live?

Happy Camper

I've just come back from writing camp, and it was fabulous. I didn't go very far afield, but I spent three days on the shore of a nearby lake, alternating writing blitzes with quiet time for reading and thinking and social time with other faculty. I ate good food that other people cooked, and I washed zero dishes. There were leaping fish and all kinds of birds (ruby-throated hummingbird, owl, red-bellied woodpecker, heron, goldfinch, fluffy goslings!), and pleasant evening bonfires.

On my list of "papers I would like to write someday" I have had a tentative idea for a while now. I've been hoping to write a paper based on a lecture I've given a bunch of times, even though it's outside my primary area. Because it's different from my previous work it has felt a little speculative, a little uncertain. But when I applied for a spot at camp I told them I was going to draft this paper if I was selected. And I did: I took all of my ideas and wrote them down. Because I've been thinking about it for so long it just streamed right out of me, in reasonable first-draft form. In 72 hours I wrote a little more than 7500 words. It was so much fun.

I am not sure what its destiny will be. It reminds me a bit of the Heartbreak Paper: I believe my discipline needs this paper, but I'm not sure it knows that it needs this paper. The Heartbreak Paper required an AWFUL LOT of perseverance and then it bore a lot of good fruit. So I don't know exactly when this new manuscript will see the light of day, but I'm okay with that. Now that I have a completed first draft I'm going to let it marinate for a bit while I figure out my next steps.

I wasn't sure if I would be able to go to writing camp because of jury duty, but it worked out swimmingly. I spent a couple of hours waiting around the courthouse on Monday morning, and then I was dismissed for the week. I am feeling happy and grateful, and also a bit like someone wrung out my brain, soggy sponge style.

A knitting post

You know what we haven't talked about in a long time? Knitting, that's what. This is because knitting has not been bringing me very much joy lately.

Let me show you the things I have been stuck on, and perhaps it will get me unstuck.I can't remember -- did I show you the rectangularized pandemic blanket? Google tells me that I did, back before the ends were woven in. The thing I have been stuck on is deciding whether it needs a border. It has been niggling at me. But as of this weekend I have officially decided that it does not need a border, or at least not in this stage of its existence. We will call it finished, though it may be a temporary flavor of finished. It is so cozy and hefty and pleasing on chilly days. It is less useful in the 90-degree weather we have been having recently.

Here is another pandemic project, which I am going to rename the Make The Best Of It stole. I bought the kit during my fall 2020 sabbatical, right after I submitted paper #2.

I was hoping it would be a fluffy cloud of medium-challenging lacy goodness. I loved the idea of subtle striping and interspersed stockinette panels and two different lace patterns, because all of those things break up the monotony that is baked into a sizable lace stole. But there are a bunch of unsatisfactory things about it:

1. a chart with mistakes in it
2. sections of true lace knitting (i.e., pattern on both sides) with directional decreases. BLEH, SSPs are the WORST decrease and they ABOUND in this stole.
3. an unpredictable pattern in the easier lace sections
4. colors that aren't quite me and that don't quiiiiite work with each other (to my admittedly picky eye) because of pandemic supply chain issues
5. instructions from the designer to do the hardest parts in the yarns with halo -- a recipe for eyestrain for this middle-aged knitter
6. a lace pattern that looks like marching ladybugs, in a creepy-crawly way and not in a charming way
7. failure on the designer's part to throw in any right-side purl stitches, so it is going to curl like nobody's business after I am done investing all these hours in it

So for...hm...20 months now I have been working on it grumpily for a while and then stuffing it into the Timeout Bag when the eyestrain gets too annoying. But I am only 150 rows from the end. I will feel happier if it is done than if it is wadded up in the Timeout Bag, so I will keep nibbling away at it.

Here is still another pandemic project, because this stinking pandemic has been going on for so long that all of my current knitting is pandemic knitting:

This was the third project in Ysolda Teague's 2020 Colourwork Club, and it is a pain. So much finishing. I never get Second Sock Syndrome but I have a whopping case of Second Mitten Syndrome going on here. Maybe it's First Mitten Syndrome, because I keep picking up the first mitten, thinking about how little I want to deal with the finishing (the lining + flip-top combo (shown below) is a nice idea, but it's going to mean a bunch of annoying tidying up), and setting it back down again. Maybe I will take the first mitten to jury duty tomorrow, where they say I cannot have knitting needles but make no mention of tapestry needles.

Next up there are these socks, which have been waiting for a month to have their four ends woven in after spending more than a year on the needles. That is a long time to procrastinate on a 10-minute task.

There is one not-knitting project, a little crocheted amigurumi fox. My niece picked out an amigurumi kit for me a few Christmases ago, and in August of 2020 (again with the lingering projects from the early months of the pandemic!) I made its head and nose and one ear. The trouble with crocheting is that I do it so infrequently that I always have to restart slowly and painstakingly, giving it my full attention. In the past few days I have added a body and a tail to my small collection of fox parts. We shall see how it goes. The jury duty guidelines don't say anything about crochet hooks either.

And then there is the last project, the Extremely Nascent Sweater Back Laden With Sad Memories. It is also from the fall semester of 2020, when Marie's roommate got COVID and I was overflowing with mom worry. I could not speed up vaccine production, I could not make either of their immune systems work any more efficiently, but BY GUM I could plan to swathe my child in Scottish wool.

And then Marie's roommate got better and Marie did not come down with COVID and I thought to myself, "Do I really want to knit an entire sweater on size 3 needles? And does Marie really want a sweater that will have to be hand-washed or dry-cleaned?" And now, 20 months later, I do not remember exactly where I was going with this sweater back. I was using Ann Budd's book of top-down sweaters, but there will be a fair amount of face-scrunching and head-scratching required if I am going to pick up where I left off, or perhaps switch it over into a sweater for me, since I don't mind hand-washing hand-knits and these colors suit me better than they suit Marie. 

Maybe I'll just frog it, huh? What's your vote -- frog pond or face-scrunching?

The rustle is coming from inside the walls

So! I have had a bunch of snake encounters today, my friends. I mowed the grass this morning, using the gas-powered mower because I wanted that noisy pollution-spewing two-stroke motor to tell the snakes to get the heck out of my way. Which they did, thankfully. I only spotted one, slithering away into the tiger lilies, but I suspect he was not the only one I startled.

(My neighbor is so fed up with all these snakes, you guys. We were chatting outside the other night while she let her pet turtle wander around the yard. She told me that she will run after them with the lawnmower if she spots them while she's cutting the grass. I have to laugh when I picture this 60-year-old lady with a fearsome light in her eyes, veering around her yard at top speed to chase down a 12-inch garter snake.)

I went outside to do some weeding later, and I was pretty jumpy. I heard but did not see the sage plant snake, and then I had three separate sightings of the snake I keep spotting in the lambs' ears. I started to call him "the snake that lives in the lambs' ears," but I am sorry to tell you that he does not actually live in the lambs' ears. No-- apparently he lives in the foundation. OF MY HOUSE.

Pete and I were picking up dinner (takeout tonight, in celebration of his successful completion of three AP exams -- go, Pete!) when I said, "Oh, look, there he is." We watched him slither up the wall, assuming he was confused, and then -- AND THEN -- we watched him slither INTO the wall. There is a small hole in the mortar beneath one of the bricks. You would never, you guys, but NEVER look at that small hole and say to yourself, "Well, that looks like a four-alarm situation right there." But somehow -- SOMEHOW -- there is enough of a tunnel in there that an ENTIRE GARTER SNAKE can fit himself inside it.

I gasped. Pete was also taken aback. We got in the car and drove to get the food. "What if he tunnels all the way through into the basement?" he asked as I pulled into a parking spot at the restaurant. "LALALALALAAAA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!" I said, so loudly that he jumped.

But of course, much of my brain was occupied with the same question: what if he tunnels (or HAS TUNNELED) all the way through into the basement?

Calm and methodical person that I am, I set to work immediately making a list of possible responses. Here are all the ideas I had:

1. Burn the house to the ground and flee, never to return.
2.  
3.  
4.  
5.  
6.  
7.  

I think the insurance company will understand, don't you? 

We were coming back home and Pete said, "So now we have snakes inside our house?!" 

"No," I said very emphatically, "we do not. They're not inside the actual walls of our house."

"Mom," Pete replied, "that one is literally inside the actual wall of our house."

I mean, what can a person say to that? I can't think of anything, except, "Nice knowing you, Gladlyville friends; we're moving to Ireland."

P.S. I can call a mason on Monday about the mortar; I can rake out some of the dead leaves in the lambs' ears so there's less cover; everything looks intact from inside the basement. I know I have options. It's just that I also have the shudders. AND CAN YOU BLAME ME? 

Habits are hard

Do you remember that I was all fired up after I read Younger Next Year for Women, and that one of my new year's resolutions was to exercise six days a week?

I am finding it difficult.

I am trying to be patient with myself, because building habits takes time, but not too patient with myself, because inertia will not do me any favors in the long run.

When I was a young adult I would get really frustrated with myself about trying to build disciplined prayer habits. This is the reality: it takes practice to do hard things consistently. Probably some of the things I learned in that process will be useful here. For instance, if you start first thing in the morning, other stuff doesn't interfere. The Liturgy of the Hours is a non-negotiable part of the first 30 minutes of my day. It might not happen in the first 10 minutes, but I am definitely feeling a little itchy if I haven't started by then. I can't do aerobic exercise immediately after waking up because I have to take a beta-blocker first, but I can take the beta-blocker right away and exercise once it kicks in. This strategy is probably especially useful as the weather heats up and the cool(-ish) part of the day ends more quickly.

ALSO: breaking hard things into pieces is helpful. I almost never sit down and pray the whole rosary all at once, but I never go to sleep without finishing it either. This works for exercise too, right? Actually doing a 10-minute sun salutation is better than imagining the 45-minute yoga session I might get to later, when I feel motivated, which -- oops, maybe I'll be motivated tomorrow. (Related: another useful strategy is tying chunks of the rosary to things I must do every day, like walking to work or washing dishes. Don't know quite how to do that with exercise, though -- get a dog so I have to walk it?)

ALSO ALSO: a certain amount of box-ticking is motivating for me, like with this Bible-in-a-year plan that I'm doing for the seventh time. The timing would be just about perfect for me to sign up for an August triathlon, and then I'd have boxes to tick and an event on the calendar spurring me to tick them.

ALSO ALSO ALSO: it's mostly about showing up. In my prayer life there are transcendent moments and there are ordinary moments. You can't force transcendence; the ordinary moments outnumber the transcendent moments by a wide margin. At the same time, you (probably) don't get to transcendent if you don't show up. Maybe with exercise I need more consistency and lower expectations.

ALSO ALSO ALSO ALSO: it's generally easier to make time on weekends than on weekdays -- my weekends always include Mass and an hour in the adoration chapel; my weekdays usually do not. It might be helpful if I can reframe my thinking about weekend days as "opportunities for bonus exercise time" rather than "opportunities to sit at the dining room table and do extra puzzles in between catching up on stuff around the house."

#NAMDRAL, day 1

Today begins the Ninth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong, and you are cordially invited to snag yourself a copy of Nicholas Nickleby and join us. We'd be delighted to read with you if you are so inclined!

We've got your brothers with sharply divergent priorities, your death by broken heart, your villain pretending to care deeply about looking out for children's best interests, and of course we've got a naive young hero heading off for what he hopes will be a future full of promise. And that's just on Day 1!

Nicholas Nickleby is an early Dickens novel, and it is more lighthearted than some of his later offerings. It has the wit and zing of his early writing, but in it he's moving away from the episodic style of Sketches and Pickwick and beginning to demonstrate his flair for complex plot maneuvers. What awaits our hero in Yorkshire? You know you want to know!

Don't mind me, I'm just flailing around in my diverse ecosystem

Recently Stella and I were talking about birdcalls-- the way that you can't not hear them once you know them. "Red-winged blackbird!" says your brain. "Mourning dove!" It filters out the signal from the noise and interprets it for you, just like that.

This morning my brain interpreted a different signal for me. I was standing on the front walk watering our new herbs when it said, "Snake! Snake slithering right by your own personal feet!" In hindsight it's interesting -- I didn't see it, I didn't consciously register that the rustle in the dry leaves was something worthy of attention. But my body of its own accord did this weird sudden arms-looping legs-leaping maneuver, swinging me away from the snake that was indeed slithering right by my own personal feet.

There was a college-aged guy walking up the sidewalk at that very moment, and he looked at me as if to say, "Lady, are you having a seizure over there?" I'm sure he would have understood if I had pointed and said, "Snake!" But I did not; I just let him think I was having an interpretive dance moment there on the front walk.

I texted Pete this picture of the stripey body curled up under our big sage plant, and did my best to shake it off. He texted right back to tell me he had just seen a snake in a different bed. Later in the day I headed down the front sidewalk again and had another up-close snake encounter by the sage plant. "He is going to eat all the grubs and maybe some mice," I told myself. "You are bigger than he is," I told myself. Even though I know these things are correct, it still took a little while for the adrenaline to disperse.

This is the time of year when our garter snakes are most active; I know that. They get all excited about the first hot days, as do we, and we run into each other in the yard to our mutual chagrin. THIS TOO SHALL PASS -- I know it's true. Let's just hope I don't sprain any ankles the next time my brain tries to sweep me out of harm's way.

#NAMDRAL starts tomorrow!

I have finished the grading, tralaLAAAA! I have submitted the grades, tralaLAAAA!

This means it is time for a nice fat Dickens novel. The Ninth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong begins tomorrow. Get yourself a copy of Nicholas Nickleby and jump on in.

As always, I'm aiming to finish in about three weeks. It might take four; some years it's even more. Everybody is welcome -- jump on in!

Sunday night report

Today we took a picnic lunch to one of my favorite spots, where we watched birds and took a muddy hike and had a brief garter snake encounter on the trail. Pete and I went to the garden store afterward, where we bought six kinds of basil (African blue basil? it was new to me, but Pete thought we should give it a try*), along with rosemary** and lemongrass and lemon verbena** and some flowers.

*Huh, African blue basil is apparently a perennial. I will be pretty shocked if it comes back next year, but gardening is an endless succession of surprises.

**I always think that the rosemary and the lemon verbena look like they ought to come back. Rosemary looks so prickly and imposing, but it always shrivels away to nothing in the face of a Gladlyville winter. Lemon verbena gets huge here. I had to deploy deadlift technique to get last year's dead lemon verbena out of its spot! But it can't hack the winters either. I guess I'm not surprised that lemongrass gets huge and then dies, but I suppose I think of it as a more tropical plant. 

We had the second snake encounter of the day at home. I've been keeping my eye out for garter snakes every time we've been out in the garden, but we just spotted our first homegrown snake of the year: a little guy with bright orange stripes who was curled up under the bricks encircling one of the flowerbeds. They seem to like those bricks: sun-warmed above, with cool dirt below. I didn't even shriek. (This was probably because Pete was the one who moved the brick and then called me over so we could watch him together: tongue flicking, eyes bright, clearly a little puzzled about what had just happened to his roof.)

Liftoff! (almost)

This is the time of the year when I am most energetic, most excited about doing difficult things. I am not especially excited about doing the first difficult thing on my list, which is finals week and the associated end-of-year admin stuff. But do it I shall, and then! And then! So many possibilities.

I am thinking as always about realistic goals. It would be possible to finish The Duke's Children (the last of the six Palliser chronicles!) before the Ninth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong starts on May 10 (Nicholas Nickleby this year! you know you want to), but it would also be a stretch. Perhaps it's wiser to stick with my original plan and take a Trollope break while we are NAMDRAL-ing. 

My college roommate Amy and I are thinking about doing the late June triathlon that we did last year, but that is not really enough time for me to get into triathlon shape. Could I finish? Sure. Would it light a fire under me to be consistent about working out? Absolutely. Would I enjoy the process and the race? Less clear.

The roommates are also talking about doing an August triathlon with a swim leg in an actual lake. We all know how I feel about putting my face in water I can't see through. (You know, I bet I am the internet's leading kraken blogger as well as its leading bunyip blogger.) There's a race that same weekend that's a lot closer to me, with a 300m pool swim instead of a 500m kraken-wrestling event. But it would be much more fun to do a tri with the roommates, aside from the kraken part.

So-- the short-term goal is a low-drama finals week [...wonders superstitiously if it is a bad idea to type that out loud, having survived some DOOZIES...], and then figure out some more fun goals from there. I love May. It makes me want to sing anachronistically: It's the hap- happiest season of all!