Light and Momentary

30 x 15

Happy last day of November, my friends! Thirty days of daily posts, for the fifteenth time. Thanks for reading and I'll see you soon!

Thanksgiving food, ranked

Julie said we should rank Thanksgiving food from most to least important, so here we go:

1. Gravy is the most important Thanksgiving food. This is, I know, a controversial choice, but hear me out. It is the very essence of the festive roasted turkey, combined with stock I made earlier in the week. It tastes like celebration and preparation. I serve it piping hot and it binds together the holiday flavors so that they are harmonious and still distinct. It's also a pain to make, so its presence on the table proclaims THIS IS A SPECIAL DAY.
2. Pie is the other thing that says HI IT'S THANKSGIVING. Pumpkin and pecan, forever and ever, with piles of whipped cream.
3. Mashed potatoes are the most important non-dessert solid food (or, okay, semi-solid). Hot, fluffy, buttery, perfect -- I missed them keenly yesterday. NEVER AGAIN, my friends. Last-minute mashed potatoes or bust.
4. Stuffing is next. I make cornbread stuffing because I am a child of the South, and because my youngest son loves it. "Will there be enough stuffing?" he always asks plaintively. "There's not usually enough stuffing." Don't tell my grandmother, but I have started making my cornbread for stuffing with a leetle bit of white flour. It holds together better when I am combining it with the veggies and herbs.
5. Okay, I guess we have to put turkey somewhere in the top five. If the turkey somehow fell over on the kitchen floor during its resting time, and the dog licked it all over before I noticed, I wouldn't be too very sad. It's fine. It's pretty. I'm no longer intimidated by cooking a turkey (note to Future Jamie: big turkeys are juicier with convection and the faster cooking is useful on a busy day), but the drippings are the bit I'm most attached to. Can't have truly excellent gravy without drippings.
6. Cranberry sauce is next. You need that color on a plate that is mostly ecru/beige/gold/orange, and the tartness is pleasantly bracing. (If you ever have Thanksgiving dinner at our house, be sure you take small bites of the cranberry sauce. It's pretty assertive.)
7. Sweet potatoes have somehow twinned themselves at our house, and now we have a sweet version (pineapple, pecans, warm spices, a little orange juice, and an astonishing amount of butter) and a spicy version (chipotles in adobo, lime juice, whipping cream). 
8. Second-string Thanksgiving desserts: always cranberry cake, usually key lime pie.
9. Everything else can be tied for ninth place. We usually have a couple of green things (often roasted Brussels sprouts, maybe some kind of creamed spinachy thing, maybe some kind of salad), maybe some beets, maybe some kind of bread. This year Pete made the most gorgeous loaves of sourdough AND sourdough rolls. They were beautiful, and at the same time they are not a sine qua non for me at the Thanksgiving table.

Huh, I am still tired from making that much food for that many people yesterday. Maybe tomorrow I'll come back and add some links. Please share your own rankings in comments, or post a link to your own site if you decide to blog about it. Just one more day of NaBloPoMo! 

Lesson Learned

For many years I have done my Thanksgiving mashed potatoes in exactly the same way. But I started to wonder if perhaps I was being a little rigid about it. I saw all these social media posts about people making their mashed potatoes early and leaving them in a crockpot all day and i thought to myself, "Hmm, am I making avoidable trouble for myself?" 

Also Pete told me that Adam Ragusea disagreed with every single thing I said about making mashed potatoes, and Adam Ragusea is the king of pointing out unnecessary rigidity. 

"Guess what, kids," I said, "I'm branching out. We're trying an Instant Pot version this year. I'm going to do them early and keep them warm"

This was a mistake. They weren't, like, dismal. But they were very far from celestial -- kind of funny-colored, kind of dense. When I was fretting beforehand about whether it was a bad idea to branch out, the kids said, "Mom, it will be fine. Potatoes plus butter -- people will eat that." 

I was sitting next to Pete at dinner and we agreed on the inferiority of the Instant Pot version. I asked him about the Adam Ragusea video and his conviction that I had been needlessly emphatic about my approach to mashed potatoes; we had talked about it before he tried the recipe but not afterward. He said, "Adam Ragusea's conclusion that his mashed potatoes were the same as your mashed potatoes was wrong. All of his points were valid. But your mashed potatoes are better."

We might have to make the One True Mashed Potato Recipe later this weekend.

Still reading fat books by men

You might remember that I decided to read a string of hefty books by men, kicking it off with Trollope novel #25. The Claverings tells the story of a woman who marries for money and immediately regrets it. There are lots of people in Trollope novels who are busy weighing up the financial assets of prospective spouses, but Trollope goes all in on the heartlessness of Julia Brabazon's choice to marry Lord Ongar. The book is mostly about the subsequent choices of her spurned lover, Harry Clavering, in an era when breaking an engagement was a much bigger deal than it is these days.

We spend part of our time with Harry's family; his father is a Barsetshire clergyman whose elder nephew is the current Lord Clavering. This elder nephew is distressingly boorish, and his younger brother is comically inept. I've read a lot of Victorian proposals in which a fellow tells his sweetheart that she will make him the happiest man alive if she says yes, or at least the happiest man in all England. Cousin Archie says he'll be the happiest man in London, which seems to say, "I mean, yeah, I like you, but let's be real." (His would-be fiancee declines.)

This book seemed a little unpolished. There are some veiled allusions to the circumstances of Lord Ongar's death and his relationship with a Polish count, and perhaps I was supposed to know more about how to read between the lines. Instead it just felt murky, as if maybe Trollope hadn't wanted to bother with fleshing out that facet of the plot. There's a deus ex machina episode that felt a leetle too tidy. The Kindle edition is full of typos, with a bunch of weird differences in chapter divisions vs. the Project Gutenberg version. But Julia Brabazon is a memorable character, as is her Polish-French friend, and overall the book is a satisfying blend of funny and serious.

***

Now I'm reading Wellness, and I like it. I haven't been completely sucked in, like I was with this author's first novel, The Nix. I was surprised to find that Gladlyville makes a brief and unflattering appearance. So far it's the story of a couple who fell in love as young adults and hit a rough patch twenty years later. Hill's writing voice is engaging and the story is the same kind of mix of funny and sad that I enjoyed in The Nix. I'll keep plugging and tell you more as I get further in.

3/5

Joe and Pete are both home tonight, and planning to stay through the weekend. The two oldest kids will be home on Thursday. The three oldest kids are all bringing their girlfriends to Thanksgiving dinner, and we will have assorted in-laws and friends as well. It will be a busy few days here, but it's so nice to have everybody together.

20%

This is day 9 of my 45 / 45 / 4.5 plan, and it's going all right.

I've gone to three hourlong dance-based fitness classes. On four days I combined brisk walking or elliptical time with yoga. One day I did a 45-minute yoga video. I lifted once.

The fruit is easy to fit in but the vegetable serving sizes are kind of dumb and frustrating. I am sympathetic as to the difficulties of writing usable public health content. You have to speak to a broad audience; you have to be reasonably specific and reasonably flexible. If you're writing for US-based readers, you're writing for people who mostly think kitchen scales are arcane appurtenances. But COME ON, what is a cup of broccoli spears, exactly? I keep thinking about using the Archimedes method -- filling a pint measure halfway with water and then adding broccoli spears until it's full. But that seems ridiculous as well as messy. 

ALSO why does a 2-cup portion of salad greens count as 1 cup of vegetables? I mean, I sort of know but also I find it irritating. If you're going to switch from counting servings of varying sizes to counting allegedly consistent measures of volume, then why are you being inconsistent about the measures of volume? 

I looked at the British guidelines, thinking they would be measured in grams, and in places they are even more annoying. "Three heaped tablespoons" -- pfft, I say. 

There's some utility in measuring because it does highlight for me that my default level of vegetable consumption is lower than the recommended level of vegetable consumption. The recommended level isn't unmanageable, but I do have to pay attention. I've been starting at breakfast, adding a half-cup of spinach to a smoothie or a half-cup of pumpkin puree to a cottage cheese or yogurt bowl. Then it's just a cup of veggies at lunch and another at dinner, which is doable but not my default setting.

And how is working? I am not exactly a wellspring of good cheer and impressive equilibrium, but I'm hanging in there in the face of a substantial grading load, a bunch of lingering around-the-house tasks to catch up on, and an impending holiday dinner for 16. I'll take it, I guess. Onward we go.

Chocolate Cloud Cake

This is a Nigella Lawson recipe that I made for a visiting friend today. It comes together in a trice.

Spray a 9-inch springform pan with nonstick spray and preheat your oven to 350.

If you have a 10-ounce bag of good quality dark chocolate chips, you will need 90% of it for this recipe. Precision is not essential. If I don’t want to weigh them I just pinch off ~10% of the bag and shake the rest into a microwavable bowl. Add a stick of butter and melt them together. I use the 80% power setting but my microwave is old. (Full power could scorch your chocolate.) Stir them together until they are smooth and glossy, and set them aside to cool.

Separate four eggs. Beat the 4 whites until they’re foamy, and then gradually beat in 1/3 c. sugar until they are stiff.  Add two whole eggs and 1/3 c. sugar to your 4 yolks. When your chocolate-butter mixture is cool enough that it won’t scramble your eggs, beat in the yolk mixture until well combined.

Add a healthy dollop of beaten whites to the chocolate mixture to lighten it up. Beat it in vigorously, regarding its deflation with insouciance. Scrape the chocolate mixture into the whites, and fold them together gently but thoroughly.

Pour this mixture into the springform pan and bake for 35 minutes. It should be risen all the way to the center; it might need a few more minutes to get there. Pull it out and let it cool. It will deflate dramatically.

Fill the crater with whipped cream and a delicate dusting of cocoa powder if you like. Or just eat it straight out of the pan with a spoon — baker’s choice.

Productive

Today it dawned on me, after almost 12 years in this bedroom, that it is a terrible use of space to have old letters and pictures on our closet shelves at the same time that we are short on places for clothing, and so I cleared off those shelves and moved the memorabilia to the upstairs bedroom that is going to become a craft space now that its inhabitant has been gone for a while.

I washed and put away a bunch of bedding that had been sitting in empty kids' rooms, even though washing lots of bedding is a pain. (It's so easy to get an unbalanced load when you're washing comforters.)

This week I pulled the trigger on cheerful plates to replace the aging plain dishes we'd been using for our whole marriage, and I spent some time today rearranging the kitchen cabinets.

I finished Trollope novel #25, The Claverings, about which more soon. I also spent some time talking to Pete, who will be home on Tuesday for Thanksgiving. (OH MY, do I love that boy and miss him when he is gone.) 

I have only exercised for 25 minutes of my prescribed 45, though, so I am going to squeeze in a quick yoga video. (Probably a person cannot reasonably spend 20 minutes in savasana and call it exercise, you figure?)

Beauteous Golden Soup

Do you need a quick soup recipe? I have a quick soup recipe.

Coarsely chop an onion and a stalk of celery. Cook them in olive oil over medium-high heat; you want them to get brown. While they are sizzling, peel and seed a small butternut squash, and then cut it into chunks. My chunks were probably in the range of 1.5 inches, and I had about 1.5-2 cups of them. But this is a forgiving recipe, so do what works for you. Toss them in the pot and let them brown while you peel and core and chunk a nice big apple.

Deglaze your pan with a half-glass of white wine. Add the apple and about a pint of stock. Cover and cook on medium heat until you can mash the apples and squash easily with a fork. This won't take a long time; you can check them after 10 minutes, but be advised that they might still need a little more time. Sprinkle in some warm spices -- I added one shake apiece of ginger, allspice, and cardamom, along with some pepper. Add a splash of cream and salt to taste, and hit it with an immersion blender until it is smooth.

If you are feeding this to company, you might want to garnish it with something green, like chives or a sprinkle of parsley.

Snippets of Science: Spit, Strength, SoDs

How's that for an alliterative title? Shall we talk about science, my friends? 

Link #1: Toddlers know that spit-sharing predicts "thick" relationships. One-year-olds can infer reliably that the people we share saliva with are likely to be closer to us. The particpiants observed interactions among human actors and puppets. They expected that the spit-sharing relationships (i.e., people who shared a kiss or "non-partitionable food") would be the ones in which help was available in a distressing situation. Pretty smart, huh? Press release is here, or the study is available here if you want more details.

Link #2: Bronze Age women were stronger than previously suspected. I originally saw this on Upworthy (sorry), which framed the findings as "Bronze Age women were JACKED!!" Farming is hard, and ordinary Bronze Age women appear to have been stronger than contemporary athletes. The actual study is here if you are curious.

Link #3: After posting about my Spiral of Decrepitude last night, I almost cried when I saw this NYT article today about musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause. (That's a gift link, so it should work for you whether or not you're a subscriber.) I have talked to three other women today who have said, "Yes! That's me! I feel seen!" I haven't read their paper but it's here if you're interested. i think SoD (for Spiral of Decrepitude) is a catchier name, with the benefit of capturing women's feelings about that whole pile of nonsense: sod* that! 

*I'm not sure if I have any British readers at the moment, but if so please excuse the vulgarity. I was surprised to learn, when we lived in Scotland, that "sod" was considered especially crude, more obscene than some of the language that's barred from US TV. Here in the US "bugger" means "something small, possibly cute, and mildly annoying," and "sod" mostly makes us think of lawn management. Language is a funny thing.

Spiral of Decrepitude

It started when I was playing with the dog. She was running toward the loveseat; I was standing by the loveseat. I pivoted to avoid a collision with the dog and instead collided with the wooden frame of the loveseat. I bruised the outside of my knee but the whole joint was stiff and cranky for the next week. 

"Well," I said to myself after a week, "I'm not going to loll around any longer waiting for it to get un-stiff. Exercise is anti-inflammatory!" I asked Elwood to pick up a drugstore brace while he was out, and I decided I would work out gently.

I was so careful about deadlifting with a cranky knee and I thought I had nailed it -- it felt medium-hard, in a purely satisfying way, and not painful at all. But I wonder if my tender knee altered my stance or my form in a way I couldn't identify in the moment. The evening after that lifting session my lower back was angry in a way I've never experienced after deadlifting. I couldn't get comfortable in bed that night, and it's still a little twinge-y.

The knee brace Elwood brought me felt exactly right in terms of knee support, and the knee is almost back to normal now. But my skin is launching a rebellion against the brace, in the form of big angry itchy blisters covering a palm-sized area on my thigh. (I thought about posting a picture, but you don't need that image in your feed reader.)

I took off the brace, since the knee is almost all better, and I went for a brisk walk while Stella was at piano. (It is in the 30s here, with wintry mix falling from the sky. Ah, November in the Midwest.) You should skip to the next paragraph if you are squeamish, because all that brisk walking meant that the fabric of my pants rubbed against the big angry itchy blisters and caused a few of them to burst, oozing their exudate all over my nice pants.

So. The blisters are lightly bandaged, the knee is almost better, the back is mostly normal again, and I am gingerly planning some bedtime yoga after I chuck my pants in the washing machine. WHAT'S NEXT, BODY? 

(Maybe it's a bad idea to ask that question.)

Not the man of my dreams

You guys, I had the funniest dream last night. I have been laughing to myself about it all day.

In my dream I was in my own bed with my own husband when suddenly -- poof! -- Elwood was gone and in his place was Brad Pitt. I have never had any desire to get cozy with Brad Pitt, and I guess my indignation showed on my face. He said, "Hey, relax, Dad will be right back." 

I said, "What?!?!" (Background: I HAAAAAATE misused parental titles. Elwood isn't Brad Pitt's dad; he most certainly isn't my dad. I get unreasonably irritated when the people at the vet's office call me "Mommy" instead of taking 3 seconds to look in the chart at my actual name. Why was this RANDOM GUY suddenly lying in my BED and calling my husband DAD?! I was not having it.)

Dream Brad Pitt could see right away that his instructions to relax were not actually spurring me to relax. "Fine," he said, "all right. I'll just go on to my next gig." And poof! He was gone again.

Dream Jamie realized that this was his sad reality: whenever anyone dreams about Brad Pitt, he is magically summoned thither. No matter how much he might prefer to spend a quiet night in his own bed, that's the price of fame for him -- bouncing from dream to dream like a genie unable to settle down peaceably in his own comfy lamp. 

"Huh," Dream Jamie thought to herself as she stretched out luxuriously in her now-empty bed. (Where did Elwood disappear to in this dream reality, and when was he coming back? Who can say?) "Poor Brad Pitt. That sounds exhausting."

Novel, simple, fresh, local, frugal, tasty

For a while now I'd been meaning to try a Crescent Dragonwagon recipe from Bean by Bean. It sounded fairly improbable, but she raved about it so enthusiastically that I thought I'd give it a whirl. She calls it couve a mineira, and she says that in Brazil it is served alongside feijoada.

This is the improbable part: her version is mostly made of raw collard greens. The internet will tell you to saute them lightly, but not Crescent Dragonwagon.

Fifteen years ago I thought the idea of eating raw kale on purpose sounded preposterous. I also thought that massaging raw kale in order to render it edible was ridiculous. But what do you know, these days I eat kale salads regularly and sometimes even make them myself. So I was open to the idea that it might be possible to skip the long cooking time I used to think was required for leafy green consumption.

Her recipe is simplicity itself. Stem your collard greens, roll them up like a fat cigar, and use a sharp knife to cut them in fine fine fine ribbons. Dress with olive oil, fresh lemon juice, and salt/pepper.

We had CSA collards in the fridge and tonight they met their destiny. I swapped in a lime because we were out of lemons, and I added some additional olive oil to ensure that the collards were thoroughly dressed. They were so yummy: fresh and zippy and easy to eat. Definitely recommended.

Feel the fear and lift it anyway

Today at the gym something happened that had frightened me for a long time, and I am okay with it.

When I first started lifting, bench press felt scary. I did not like having heavy things over my face. "What if I drop the dumbbells ON MY FACE?" I wailed to Joe in my first month of lifting. 

"Mom," he said patiently, "you're not going to drop the dumbbells on your face. If you can't do the rep, you'll drop the dumbbells to the side of the bench."

I've posted before about how I don't make a ton of progress on bench when I don't have easy access to a spotter, because I push myself harder when someone is spotting me. I've accepted that I probably won't drop a barbell on my face, but I don't want to have to wriggle out from underneath a barbell that made an unplanned landing on my belly.

Today, though, I had a near miss.

The good bench was open, and I snagged it and moved the brackets down. The person who had used it last must have been, like, 6'5" or perhaps part octopus, because the brackets were way up high. Under ordinary circumstances I might have moved the brackets one spot lower, but it already felt like I was moving them a preposterous distance. 

I did a warmup set and a couple of working sets. At the end of my second working set the bar slid into the bracket with a satisfying thunk and I thought to myself, "That bracket is just a little too high, but it will be all right." [DUN DUN DUUUUUUN, we got your foreshadowing right here, folks.]

I was feeling strong and happy, so I added more weight to the bar. I did another set, being careful to keep it "in the pocket," meaning I was almost but not quite out of gas. And then I misgrooved the last rep, so the right end of the bar wound up in the slightly-too-high bracket and the left end did not.

I did not have enough oomph left in my pecs to get it where it needed to be. A too-heavy thing was suspended over my face in a way I couldn't figure out how to resolve. I said "help!" because I didn't know what else to do.

There was a father-son duo on the next bench and the dad came over. "Do you need help?" he asked. "Yes, please," I said, and he scooted the wayward end of the barbell up into the bracket. I thanked him and took a deep breath.

I said to myself, "ACK!" I said to myself, "YIKES!" I said to myself, "This feels embarrassing but I am sure I am not the first person to need help after a misgrooved bench rep." But I was not feeling philosophical enough to do my planned back-off set, so instead I stepped over to the water fountain to have a calming drink of cold water and text Joe.

I thought about flight but I did not flee. Instead I went back to the weight room, where I stood up tall and put on my game face and finished my accessories. I said to myself, "It is all right for me to be the only woman in this space. I can still belong here." I said to myself, "I'm not going to feel embarrassed about needing help to finish a hard thing," and it mostly worked.

Here's the thing: I need to get back on the horse. I need to go back soon and bench that same weight for that same number of reps, so that I don't psych myself out about doing heavy sets on bench. (Next time, though, I will make sure the bracket is at the optimal height and not at a height that mostly works.) Elwood says he'll go with me on Wednesday. I'm telling you guys so that I actually do get back on the horse instead of just thinking to myself that it would be a good idea.

45, 45, 4.5

OK, friends, there are 45 days left in the year and I have an idea about how to spend them. If you have been around for a while you know that I always, at some point in November or December, say to myself (and to my blog), "What can I DO to stave off the relentless melancholy that accompanies life in the frozen north in November and December? Why do I continue to live here?" (Answer: fewer large bugs in warm weather + proximity to three of my four adult children. Also I like my job most of the time.)

OK! So here is the 2024 version of "let's keep November from melting Jamie's brain." (Why is Jamie's brain melting when it's cold outside? Shouldn't it be setting or gelling or freezing or something along those lines? I don't know, you guys; ask me hard questions when the sunshine comes back.)

What if I-- I'm kind of procrastinating on writing down the things I want to try because they feel a little ambitious. But! A SAD sufferer's reach should exceed her grasp, or what will she lie facedown on the floor and figuratively flagellate herself about afterward?

So here we go, finally. The mood-boosting thing I most want to do is lean in hard on a discovery from 2022: daily exercise is actually easier mentally than irregular exercise. So I am going to shoot for 45 minutes of exercise per day on each of the 45 days remaining in the year. 

The other mood-boosting thing I want to do is hit the produce intake guidelines every day: 2 cups of fruit, 2.5 cups of vegetables. I'm not going to be prescriptive about any other facet of my food intake, but eating plenty of produce is weirdly, annoyingly good for my energy levels and sense of well-being.

(I've been using my SAD light every day; I should be a little more consistent about vitamin D. Today I found myself listening to songs in minor keys and thinking, "Why is there so much SORROW in the world??!?" There are only five weeks until the solstice, though, and there are only 26 days until the sunsets start getting later.)

Overworked and underslept

It's been a full week at work, in which I provided lit review edits to SIX SEPARATE graduate students. So many lit reviews for so many non-overlapping projects, ai yi yi. On the upside, they all worked really hard on their drafts and the task was more pleasant than I feared it might be. It was still a lot of hours of mental effort, and it's not over.

I'm also at the point in one of my classes where I'm supposed to be teaching grad-level material I've never taught before. I'm getting through it, but I've been working late every night.

If you've paid any attention to the time stamps on my nightly blog posts, you may have noticed that I'm writing late, by my usual standards. This is coupled with a time-change hiccup: Stella keeps waking up, every single day, on the outmoded DST schedule. When she gets up to use the bathroom, the dog comes to find me. "Jamie!" she says, "it is morning and you have not petted me for many hours. Rub my belly! Get me breakfast! Is it time for a walk yet?" 

My plan tonight is to go to bed early and sleep late. Will it work? We shall see. 

Mitten season, knittin' season

When I left for work this morning I pulled out my mittens for the first time this fall. "Hm," I thought to myself, "I'd better get cracking on those elephant mittens." 

I used to think of mittens as a quick and easy project, but my last two pairs of mittens have been slow and painful knits. Pair #1 did have a lot going on: an Estonian braided cast-on, a lining, a flip-top, a button loop, a patterned afterthought thumb, so much finishing that I can't even call it a boatload of finishing; it was more like a QE2-load. They were a pain in my butt, I must say. But they are excellent mittens, it turns out, so I'm glad I persevered.

I told myself the ones I cast on for Stella back in January would be easier. While they are unlined with no flip top, they do have a picot cast-on, a Latvian braid, non-intuitive patterning with long floats, and a patterned afterthought thumb. ALSO they're worsted weight yarn worked on size 3 needles, which is not my favorite; ALSO ALSO they're really long so the hassle just keeps grinding on.

But as you can see, I'm getting closer. 

The palm-side patterning is pretty, isn't it? 

I only have five rounds to go before I start decreasing, and then 13 decrease rounds, and then a thumb. And then the finishing, but it should be more of a paddleboat situation than a QE2 situation this time around.

Maybe I'll even see if I can knock out those last five pre-decrease rounds this evening. To be continued...

Habits

Andrea asked me a question back at the beginning of the month that I've thought a lot about: 

1. What habits have you found helpful? Which have you jettisoned?
2. Do you find it easy or hard to establish habits? Do you think that is related to your tendency (a la Gretchen Rubin's 4 tendencies framework)?

Solid habits:

I have tried out and discarded a ton of different habits over the years. My stickiest habits are my prayer habits, which is both good and bad. On the one hand, good things happen if you just keep showing up. On the other, it's easy to go through the motions after many years of observing a habit. For better or for worse, I have worn a deep groove in my brain with this one. I don't start my morning without the Liturgy of the Hours (almost always accompanied by a chunk of the Bible, often topped off with a few pages of my current book on faith); I don't end the day without finishing the rosary.

Other good and reasonably consistent habits: ending the day with a chapter of Trollope, starting the dishwasher every evening and emptying it every morning, starting laundry early on Saturday and putting it away by Saturday evening, observing Sunday as a day free of both work-work and housework.

Habits I miss:

1. When more of my kids were at home with more out-of-the-house activities, I could use their habits to strengthen my habits. The best example was when one of my kids went to the gym three times a week for karate. I didn't use the treadmill 100% of the time, but being at the gym on a predictable schedule meant that I ran much more consistently in those days.
2. I used to be really diligent about clearing out my work email and dealing with stray papers on Friday afternoons.
3. Since we adopted Sandy, it's been harder for me to get to the office early enough to get a writing block in every day before I teach. I am the default dog-walker, which is a situation I keep thinking about addressing without actually addressing it.
4. I miss knitting while reading aloud in the evenings, a habit that generated a lot of FOs and a lot of kid learning and connection. But no one needs to be read aloud to these days.

Habits I have abandoned:

1. I used to be a lot more rigid about housecleaning tasks, and now I am much less attentive. I don't love it but I guess I don't hate it enough to go back to the rigid approach.
2. I used to pray the whole 20-decade rosary every Saturday and every time I drove to the closest college town that's not Gladlyville. I stopped when I read Understanding Scrupulosity.

Habits I am not thrilled about:

1. I should break the habit of finishing the Spelling Bee in the morning. I keep saying I'll give myself 10 minutes to start it and then wrap it up later, but also I like finishing the Spelling Bee in the morning.
2. I'm not entirely sure about my Duolingo habit. My French and German skills have improved markedly, but I might like to feel a little less driven to tick the Duolingo boxes and get the silly awards.
3. I have a habit-fueled struggle with transitions between large-group activities and solitary activities at work. After a meeting or a class, I get back to my office and say, "I'll just take a deep breath and peek at the news or Feedly." It's too easy for it to be more than a peek, though. I really do need something to assist with that shift in energy and focus, but probably it should not involve the internet.

Gretchen Rubin's quiz identifies me as an Upholder, but I have definite Obliger tendencies. In recent years I have felt like less of an Upholder than I used to be, which is the result of a complicated bundle of factors. (A non-trivial contributor: for a while there I was sleeping poorly more often than not, which was terrible in a whole bunch of ways. My drive to do hard things is closely tied to my level of restedness.) Being an Upholder makes it easier to establish new habits, but also easier to be rigid about anything that gets labeled a habit.

Upshot: I'm glad I've learned to be less rigid, but sometimes I miss the 40-something version of me that had a zillion ideas about new things to try. It would be wise for me to invest some time and thought into updating my current habits, with the goals of diminishing internet drift, fitting in more exercise more consistently, and structuring my workdays more fruitfully. 

Please tell me all about your habits, good and bad, and your Gretchen Rubin results, too!

It was a JOKE

Last night after Elwood and I saw our movie, we went to our neighborhood's Irish-ish place. We each ordered a beer and chatted for a while. In the middle of our conversation I was frowning at the sound system. "What's the name of this song?" I asked Elwood. I started reciting the lyrics, because I've heard it a zillion times. (I think this joint has a playlist of approximately 50 songs that they've been looping through on repeat for the whole time the business has been open. We probably heard this same song during our first visit there in 2005.)

"What is it?" I asked him again. "I took out my dog / and him I did shoot. What is it?"

"What?!?!" replied Elwood. "What did you just say?"

"I took out my dog / and him I did shoot," I said again. "It's the song they'll play at Kristi Noem's installation into whatever position she's going to hold in the Trump administration."

It was a joke, a wee bitter joke about a person who had disappeared from my radar entirely after doubling down on her choice to shoot her dog. There was speculation that she had been a contender for the VP slot on the Trump ticket, and there was further speculation that she had disqualified herself with the dog-shooting hullabaloo.

But tonight I looked at the NYT homepage and discovered that she's going to head up the Department of Homeland Security.

Maybe it's true that in Trumpworld the only disqualifying offense is disloyalty.

November snapshots

How about a day-in-the-life post? Can't have NaBloPoMo without a day-in-the-life post, right?

I think of November as bleak and bare and gray, but we had glorious sunshine all day today. As I was walking to work this morning I encountered the fattest squirrel I've ever seen. The oaks and walnuts all bore bumper crops this year, and the squirrels in these parts are mostly looking portly. But this guy-- he could have gone on the squirrel sumo circuit. He appeared to have about three chins, even though I never thought of squirrel chins as being especially conspicuous.

Heading across the quad to my building I saw a student wearing John Lennon-esque sunglasses, only with a third round lens perched above the nosepiece. Maybe his third eye needs some sun protection too? Is this a thing now?

The work habit I should protect most diligently has been a little wobbly this fall, but today I hit the target: before I did anything else in the office, I set a writing timer and worked on my revisions. That paper is almost ready to resubmit. I had hoped to get in a little grading before I headed up to class, but sometimes my hypothetical calendar is more accommodating than my actual calendar. 

I taught back-to-back classes and then scurried over to the office that handles Scantron forms. They've limited their hours and I wanted to be sure to get the most recent forms back before my office hours started. I want to remember the walk across the quad-- the drifted golden ginkgo leaves on the sidewalk, and the graceful old trees in varying degrees of deshabille. The bleak and bare days are coming, but there's plenty of beauty outside if I'm willing to see it.

I had packed a colorful bean salad with hard-boiled eggs for lunch, and I had an even more colorful beet slaw in my office fridge. Over lunch I finished the Spelling Bee and did the Wordle, but there wasn't much time to linger. Office hours were busier than usual, and my afternoon to-do list was never going to fit in my actual afternoon. There are too many tasks I didn't complete, but I was able to get feedback to a grad student on a lengthy literature review, and make an update to the department website, and slash my inbox tally down to 18.

My department chair is teaching a class with some content that's unfamiliar to him, and I volunteered to do a couple of guest lectures. It's at the end of the day, with visibly drooping undergrads. About a third of them seemed genuinely interested in the material; about a third of them seemed totally checked out. These guest lectures have cemented my resolve to preserve the low-technology vibe of my undergrad classrooms for as long as I possibly can. If I had to teach regularly in an environment with that many obviously checked out students, I'd have to quit my job. (Maybe the squirrel sumo circuit could be my next move?)

I left my office feeling pre-gloomy, because I don't love walking home in the dark. But there was still a residual sunset glow along the western horizon, with a few stars emerging overhead. It was quiet and peaceful, and I finished the rosary as I walked. Elwood had been making Festival of Umami Shallot Pasta; I set the table and we ate not long after I got in.

We went to a documentary at our neighborhood theater and had a beer together afterward, and when we got home I said goodnight to Stella and Sandy and finished the dishes lickety-split. Time for me to find my toothbrush and inch a little further forward in The Claverings. See you tomorrow, friends.