Light and Momentary

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.

Subtly Apocalyptic. Owlishly Apocalyptic.

Our tree-topper is this blingy star I bought on clearance at Target and have hated ever since. It always sits askew on the topmost branch, causing me vague dissatisfaction. I've thought for years about knitting a felted angel to replace it, and this year I finally sprang into action.

I've always hated our tree-topper and I keep thinking I should knit up a little felted angel. Elwood was on board with this plan until I said I'd need to buy a skein of yarn.

"How can you not have enough yarn?" he wanted to know. "There's so much yarn in our house!"

— Jamie (@mostgladly) December 17, 2018

For Elwood's sake I decided not to felt the angel, so I could use up a stashed skein of cream-colored superwash. I used Elizabeth Zimmermann's angel pattern from Knitter's Almanac and cast on 56 stitches on the 17th of December.

If you are a Catholic person thinking about angels on the 17th of December, especially a Catholic person who is fond of the O Antiphons, you might find inspiration striking you as you work on a project with seven ribbed panels. 

I decided to knit ERO CRAS into the panels of the new angel tree-topper's robe, and so I am googling knitted alphabets while drinking a pumpkin smoothie.

This is pretty much me acting like a caricature of myself.

— Jamie (@mostgladly) December 18, 2018

"That is very on-brand," observed my 19yo, when I told him what I was doing.

I am finishing up my annual read-through of the Bible, which is structured so that I'm spending December reading Revelation and the prophets. This reading schedule does not bring warm cozy angels to mind. The angels in these books are not saying "fear not!" because the world is scary and they've come to make things better. They're saying "fear not!" because they ARE the scary. (I mean, yeah, they've come to make things better. But I myself would need a little fear-not-ing if I encountered an angel with eyes like flaming torches.)

I decided that if I was going apocalyptic I might as well go whole hog, and give my angel eyes like flaming torches. My 16yo suggested a little butane. Elwood thought solid fuel would be a better choice. I decided to go for a subtle array of purl stitches to represent flames, which seemed less likely to send our Christmas tree up in smoke. Sadly, my angel's face now looks more like a mutant owl than like a herald of the almighty God. "You gotta go big, Mom," counseled my 16yo. He is optimistic that we could have actual flaming eyes without an actual flaming tree, but he says that if I am unwilling to go the butane route I should at least break out the red and gold yarn.

I hesitate to dip a toe into embroidery territory, given that Christmas Eve is Monday and this angel still needs arms and wings.

"You'll have to give it six wings, of course," said the 19yo. "I don't think I have time for that," I told Elwood, "although if it's covering its face with one set I wouldn't have to worry about how accurately I had rendered the flaming-torch eyes."

"Maybe," said Elwood, "angels grow a new pair of wings every year. One for this year, one for next year, one for the year after that."

"Like antlers!" I said, and we burst out laughing.

So. I do not love this quirky angel, but OH MY GOODNESS do I enjoy my quirky family.

Ragtag Messiah

You guys, Elwood told me yesterday about the singalong Messiah happening in our very own neighborhood tonight and I signed up and sang and it was SO SO FUN.

I thought I might need a corner to myself somewhere in case the praisiness of that splendid libretto overcame me like so--

via GIPHY

--but I managed to restrain myself. 

This was a volunteer production: volunteer orchestra, volunteer soloists, volunteer organizers, and of course a volunteer chorus. We were rough around the edges. I think one of the first violins needed to pause and tune her E string, maybe, and also there is a reason that Messiah rehearsals spend so much time on the melismata. But oh, you guys, an imperfect performance of astounding music is something well worth doing. It was a most excellent remedy for seasonal blues.

The kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord, hallelujah!

That's a wrap

Thirty days, thirty posts, ten Novembers in a row. Thanks for reading, my friends!

And all flesh shall see it together

A couple of weeks ago I was wrapping up my hour in the Adoration chapel, thinking disgruntled thoughts about Donald Trump (as one does in the Adoration chapel). Suddenly I had this moment of grace, this flash of certainty about how much God loves Donald Trump and desires for him to turn from sin and seek the truth. These are things to which I would have assented intellectually in the past, but the feeling -- the earnest wish for him to know his redemption and to seek salvation -- was 100% new. 

I am pretty certain it wasn't my own brain spinning up that train of thought, because my brain hops right on the ORANGE JUMPSUITS BABY track when left to its own thoughts about DJT.

I believe I have a responsibility to pray for the leadership of our country but I have found it hard to pray for Trump. I do it once a week, on Saturdays, usually grudgingly. In that moment, though, I realized how much he needs prayer. It must be dreadful to have marinated in lies for so long, and to have spewed out so many of them, that you can't even recognize truth reliably any more.

As always, I am grateful for moments of grace. I can still feel an echo of that flash of certainty, but only an echo. In the wake of today's news I sent a text that said ORANGE JUMPSUITS BABY, and I came home and talked over the events of the day with Elwood. It's a lot, right?

• Cohen admits that he lied to Congress
• Money Laundering Central (i.e. Deutsche Bank) gets raided
• office of Trump's former tax attorney gets raided
• all this before lunchtime
• also what is that wild story about Putin and a $50M penthouse in Moscow? real news or not?

So I'm still hoping he finds Jesus, and I believe the angels in heaven would rejoice over his conversion. But maybe...he could convert in prison. I would be A-OK with a prison conversion. 

Pursuers and Distancers

I'm in this Facebook group for academic moms and it is a wild place. I mean, those women are intense. I started to call them "those ladies" but they would not like that one bit.

There is a lot of talk in the group about marriage struggles, and there are a lot of women who are divorced or divorcing. The good news, I guess, is that there's support available for women who are thinking about ending a marriage. Sometimes, though, it feels like people are jumping the gun.

Just yesterday a woman posted anonymously about some friction with her husband. New baby, plummeting libido for mom, ongoing frustration for dad. Normal normal normal, yeah? Except! You wouldn't believe the responses! Get thee to marriage counseling, they said. Your husband needs individual counseling, they said. I'd throw him out, they said. 

Dang, I said.

Back when Alex was a little tiny thing, I read Harriet Lerner's Dance of Anger and it blew my mind. I realized that I was overfunctioning in some important areas, and inadvertently fueling conflict. I realized that we had a pursuer-distancer dynamic going, and I was responding in an extremely unhelpful way. Lerner writes a lot, across all of the books I've read, about how easy it can be to propagate an unhealthy pattern. You get entrenched in your identity as The Responsible One and you never notice that you're cementing your spouse's role as The Irresponsible One. You get stuck on how he never responds to your bids for intimacy, and you don't notice how you're pushing past his requests for space. 

Lerner is a secular Jew who taught me a ton about Catholic marriage.

The dad in question was initiating some physical contact that the mom didn't want, and that's what caused the freakouts. Your body belongs to YOU, they said. Which is true, absolutely, but also that's not the only thing going on here. I felt a little pang of sympathy for that dad, who was asking with his words, and asking with his touch, and hearing no again and again. I would bet you a bunch of money that they're in pursuer-distancer mode. It's a painful place to be; it's also temporary, if you're willing to work at it. So if you happen to know anyone in that situation, I recommend Harriet Lerner. You can buy a used copy of Marriage Rules for a dollar. That's a whole lot cheaper than a divorce attorney.

I once was blind. I guess I still am blind, but now I don't have to see.

At some point across the 14+ years I have been blogging, I must have told you guys about my blind spot for gridded schedules. It doesn't seem that hard to make sense of a gridded schedule, and yet they make my brain freeze up and then do loop-de-loops. When we lived in places where we relied on public transportation more than we currently do, I would check and recheck and umpteenuple-check (because quadruple-checking was sometimes not enough), and still sometimes I would make a silly mistake. I would aver that the #73 bus was stopping in my neighborhood at 10:31, only actually it had rumbled by at 10:13 and I (we) now had to wait for the next one. 

Just this morning I discovered a calendar mistake (calendars being the quintessential gridded schedules). I sent myself a Follow Up Then reminder to pick up the turkey on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving-- except I scheduled it to arrive today at 6am. (Luckily, I did not forget to retrieve the turkey last week.)

Our liturgical schedules come out in six-month blocks, and I laboriously transfer the days/times to the paper calendar and to my Google Calendar as well. Picture me licking my lips anxiously, looking from screen to calendar page and back again, writing a little tentatively because I know how often my brain glitches on tasks like these. Picture me in a state of chronic low-level worry that I miscopied something and will fail to show up as scheduled. And then! Picture me observing today, for the very first time, that there is an "Import to Google Calendar" button on the ministry scheduling site. One click and LO-- all of my remaining commitments are automagically swooshed over to my very own calendar. No anxious lip-licking required!

I have a niggling little concern about the permissions involved in giving a third party access to my Google account, but I almost don't care about potentially hostile third parties if I don't have to deal with gridded schedules.

Reconstructing the timeline

A character in my novel is complaining about George W. Bush in approximately February 2002, and I think her complaints might be a little anachronistic. By January 2005 I was suuuuper-unhappy with GWB, but I don't think I was in full-on-unrelenting-disapproval mode myself in February 2002. 

When he was elected I was willing to see what kind of president he would be, but I will never forget the press conference in August 2001 where he announced that he wasn't actually going to hold the line on embryonic stem cell research as promised. I was extremely disenchanted with him in the run-up to September 11, but it seemed important to preserve our unity as a nation in the wake of the attacks. So I backed off on calling him GWB, the Great Whopping Betrayer.

But then came the war, which was my first experience (not the last!) of watching a politician do something I found appalling and destructive and unjustified. By March 2003 I was permanently over GWB. 

I do not know, though, how much my own experience might generalize. Do you recall the trajectory of your own GWB approval/disapproval?

It's quiet again

Two of the three big kids were home for Thanksgiving. Alex is coming back to the Midwest twice next month, once for Christmas and once for my MIL's 80th birthday, so he stayed in New York for Thanksgiving. 

You guys, it was SO SO good to have big kids home. I just love to spend time with them. And now they're gone. There were only four of us for dinner, and we didn't make much of a dent in the lasagna. If you have leftovers that need eating, I have some teenaged boys you can invite over.

Everybody in my house is asleep except for me, and my three oldest boys are all sleeping under other roofs tonight. It's so quiet. It makes me a little melancholy.

The junior tempters operationalize their scrum outcomes

So you guys, that lunatic Screwtape says we are supposed to ramp up our efforts to convince the hairless bipeds that they should make extravagant purchases to commemorate the event in which the Enemy became poor for their sakes.

-He says what?

--Come on, they're not that stupid.

Well, I tried to tell him that and he just cocked an eyebrow at me. He referred me to some guy called H.L. Mencken. He also says we have a toehold and now we need to press our advantage. If we apply ourselves, he thinks, we can get Christmas trees into the shops by mid-August.

--No, that's when they flip out about buying pumpkin spice deodorant.

-You mean pumpkin spice lattes.

--They probably taste about the same, honestly.

Glossing over the question of why Trenchflake is eating deodorant-- old Screwtape says people used to think it was ridiculous to celebrate overspending at all, and then they started celebrating overspending in mid-November, and now we've pushed it into October. He says we're almost there on supplanting that noxious Incarnation observance with a much more palatable Feast of Consumerism.

Also I think we can get the pumpkin spice season moved to April with a little diligence. 

-So wait, aren't some of them supposed to be contemplating their own deaths in November? Or observing that regrettable feast day where they pretend that the incarnate Enemy has some sort of sovereignty?

--Well, yeah, but would you rather contemplate your mortality or stoke the coals of covetousness? I mean, clearly Option B is better.

Screwtape sent me an email after I told him I thought his whole approach was implausible. This is what he said:

The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present—either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure. Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present.

--Dang, does that guy go on and on.

-Careful, he's probably listening in somehow. But okay. So. We've done pretty well with morphing Advent into pre-celebration celebrating instead of that prayer and penance nonsense. Next steps?

I regret to inform you that at this point in the scrum the human observer who obtained this transcript was propelled by his exponentiating crotchetiness into centipede form, where he remains. 

Pillow Talk

One of the unexpected advantages of having bigger kids is the return of lazy morning conversations with my husband. I have fond memories from the early days of our marriage of unscheduled weekend mornings, when we would just chat in bed until we were ready to get up. I remember one long conversation about epicycles in particular, which is maybe not the topic that a post title like "Pillow Talk" calls to mind.

For years we were rousted out of bed early on weekend mornings by kids and kids' events, but these days all of our kids can entertain themselves for a while if we need to hammer out the particulars of planetary orbital mechanics. This morning the topic was Robert Heinlein.

When I was a teenager I read a lot of Robert Heinlein, as did Elwood. We had both pretty much moved on from science fiction by the time we met in college, so we never dissected his books together. Today he was trying to remember the plot of Glory Road, which I read and re-read in high school. 

It hasn't aged well. FOR INSTANCE: can we talk about the handsome yet self-deprecating hero who is hand-picked by the EMPRESS OF TWENTY UNIVERSES for an intergalactic mission? Oh, and can we talk about how said empress had to have her lady parts decommissioned before taking office because they made her too irrational to function? AND ALSO about the part where their host gets mad because our hero declines to dally with the host's wife and/or daughters, one of whom is 13 YEARS OLD? 

Glory Road is pretty innocuous Heinlein, too. I was strangely relieved when I learned that Heinlein had experienced a neurological event in advanced age, because it seemed to me to explain a lot of the weird sloppy self-referential nonsense he spewed out and slapped between two covers at the end of his career. As a high school student I thought perhaps I needed to be better-read or smarter to connect all of his dots. There was also stuff happening between the lines that I couldn't quite puzzle out. And what do you know? It wasn't that I failed to follow the plot -- he just didn't get around to writing it!

I still have a soft spot for The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, as does Elwood. There will be no Lazarus Long on our shelves, though.

In progress

You guys, I went back to my in-progress novel after months of ignoring it. And do you know, I am very fond of it. It feels a little silly to tell you this, but I am going to tell you anyway: it made me laugh out loud, and then it made me cry. Right now I have 11,999 words drafted, and a powerful urge to write more.

Hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving! 

On the menu

If you have been reading here for a while you know I have One True Thanksgiving menu. It consists of the following:

• roasted fresh turkey (I don't fool around with all that thawing / brining / deep-frying business. Buy it fresh and stick it in the oven. Baste.)
• mashed potatoes with All The Butter
• sweet potatoes mashed with Surprise! More Butter, also pineapple tidbits and orange juice and pecans
• cornbread stuffing (veggies sautéed in yet more butter, natch)
• gravy
• Penitential Cranberry Sauce
• some green vegetable
• maybe an autumnal salad but maybe not
• maybe rolls but probably not (if I make bread dough, man, there will be BUTTER in that bread dough)
• pecan pie (moooore butter!)
• pumpkin pie (even more butter!)

We mix it up around here for Christmas and Easter and birthdays. I am not generally rigid about food. But I do exactly one Thanksgiving menu. Three years ago I made a different kind of cranberry sauce and I had to write a whole blog post about it.

I thought it was a quirk of mine, but it has become a shared quirk. The boys are very insistent about keeping the penitential in Penitential Cranberry Sauce. Today I said I was considering a different sweet potato dish, and Joe said, "WHAT?! Noooo!" He thought for a moment. "Maybe you could make two dishes of sweet potatoes."

6/7 of my family is home tonight and also my knitting is making me happy

Tonight four of my children will be sleeping under my roof, which makes me feel like all's right in the world. They are sitting at the dining room table with Elwood and playing Sheriff of Nottingham, a game in which each player tries to sneak contraband past the crooked sheriff. It stresses me out a little just listening to them play, because it pushes my rule-follower buttons. You mean the RULES say I'm supposed to LIE and SNEAK? That doesn't make ANY SENSE! 

I have been knitting instead. Remember when I told you that the election broke my brain? I tried to start a pretty happy brioche project that night and I just couldn't manage it. Today it was supposed to be a diversion in between stretches of grading, but I wound up not doing a lot of grading. I submitted a manuscript at lunchtime and something in my brain said, "Well, that's probably enough work for one day. It's Thanksgiving break, after all."

So let's talk about brioche stitch instead of grading. Do you know about brioche stitch? It is an unusually pleasant and squooshy way to knit, and it yields a warm pretty fabric. Or at least the fabric is pretty if you do it right. Brioche stitch is much more complex architecturally than plain-vanilla knitting, because you're either wrapping a stitch in a second strand of yarn or working a stitch together with its wrap. Oh, and you have to work each row twice, so that each stitch can get the treatment that it didn't get the first time. In ordinary knitting, dropping a stitch is like dropping a pea into a glass of water at the dinner table. It's mildly annoying, but you can fish it right out. In brioche stitch, dropping a stitch is like-- remember in Fellowship of the Ring when Pippin dropped a stone into a well in the mines of Moria? Kind of like that.

But I found this nifty brioche pattern and I decided to make the two-color version in a pair of luscious Malabrigo yarns. One is a deep velvety saturated purple, and the other is this gently variegated blue-green with pops of lavender and also of gold. It reminds me of the gardens at Giverny. This picture does not do justice to the colors, or to the pattern. 

Oh, HA, I did not know until I went looking for the pattern link that the texture-y bits were inspired by Princess Leia's hairdo. Here I thought they must be something floral.

Another distinctive thing about brioche knitting is that it gives you a reversible fabric. Cool, huh?

This is the third time I've used brioche stitch. I made Stella a hat, and there was a brioche section in the shawl I wound up giving to a friend a couple of years ago. But I've never quite figured out how to sort things out if they go catawampus. Learning to fix knitting mistakes was unexpectedly freeing: you can try anything if you know how to repair your mistakes. Brioche stitch, though-- so far I just stare at the mistakes and think, "Huh, that's not what was supposed to happen." In knitting as in life, the "Maybe I Just Won't Make Any Mistakes" plan is never a sensible tactic. It seems likely that knitting up 200g of fingering weight yarn in brioche stitch is going to offer me some opportunities to figure out what to do when things go catawampus.

We'll see how that works out, I guess.