Light and Momentary

Further travels

The quickest way to Duolingo progress is to take tests. Until recently, you could take tests for free. In the summer of 2018 I finished the German and French courses in this way, taking test after test after test. A test allows you to move on to the next segment of material after about 20 questions. Completing the individual lessons means you answer 20 questions 3 or 5 or 10 times over. 

These days tests are not free, alas. You can take as many as you'd like if you are a Plus user, but I am not committed enough to Duolingo to pay for Plus. Instead I click the "pay 5 lingots" button, and my lingots somehow replenish themselves often enough that this seems to work for now.

This feels like the ubergeekiest of ubergeek admissions, but I also love to take placement tests in languages I do not know. I haven't yet attempted this for any language in which I have absolutely zero background, but a person who has some background in German will not be entirely at sea in Dutch. In fact, such a person is likely to be able to place out of a number of Dutch lessons, starting closer to the middle of the course than the beginning.

In the summer of 2018 I was avoiding all social media, and Duolingo filled the void. I did spend a fair amount of time on it in July and August of that summer, but I had enough German and French under my belt going in that I could pass the first-level tests on the first try with a little review. This was much, much faster than completing one lesson at a time. The French course has been substantially expanded since then, and they don't even have tests for all of the new material. So I had completed the French course, but now it's incomplete again. 

The courses vary a lot in length. The Latin course is really short, for instance. It's also kind of dumb. I don't recommend it as a tool for learning much actual Latin, but it won't take long to complete if you like that sort of thing. The Esperanto course is also short. I was not highly motivated to learn Esperanto, but Marie really, really wanted me to do it and so I finished that one too.

Last summer I watched the movie Becoming Astrid and found it so compelling that I whipped through the Swedish course. (I could not pass the Swedish tests consistently on the first try, but it was still quicker and less repetitive to take the tests two or three times than to work through all of the lessons.) I also experimented with telling Gmail to translate my incoming messages into Swedish, which was interesting but had deleterious effects on my email comprehension.

My Duolingo usage tends to fluctuate with my social media usage: if I'm avoiding Twitter, I am more likely to be studying Italian. At this point I am in a fairly minimalist Duolingo mode, aiming for at least 20 points a day but rarely exceeding 40. I find the Greek materials to be a little slower going than the other languages I've tackled, so I'll usually work through a couple of lessons and then take a test.

Usually I feel no qualms about letting my geek flag fly in this space, but this is a pretty geeky post even for me. It's just-- language is my Thing, my Number One Thing. There is something immensely appealing about looking at the puzzle of a sentence in an unfamiliar language, putting the pieces together in a way that makes sense, and discovering across the weeks that the mysterious code has reassembled itself into something familiar and interpretable.

Travels inside my computer

Who else does Duolingo?

I posted about Duolingo in the summer of 2018, when my mother and sister introduced me to it. I finished the German and French courses that summer, I think, and then I took a long break from it. But I went back to it last spring when the pandemic narrowed everybody's entertainment options, and I currently have a 372-day streak going. I am working most often on Greek these days, and thinking idly that it would be really cool to buy a plane ticket to Greece once I finish the course. (This course of action is extremely unlikely, but still fun to contemplate.)

When I was in college I wanted to take all of the language courses I could possibly take, but a person can't really get a degree that way. So I took some French and some German and some Latin and some classical Greek. Duolingo allows me to flit from one language to another in exactly the way that my college self longed to do. Dutch? Sure! Esperanto? Finished that course too! How different are Swedish and Danish? Let's check it out!

A person could direct plenty of valid criticisms at the Duolingo program, but I'm not really looking for optimal language pedagogy. I'm looking for language play, I guess, and Duolingo offers that in abundance.

A few more thoughts about Little Dorrit

I found Little Dorrit unexpectedly painful to read, because the society scenes left me wincing every time. "Save yourselves!" I wanted to shout at the characters, but of course they could not hear me and would not have heeded me even if they could. It reminded me strongly of Our Mutual Friend -- I feel certain that the Veneerings would have frequented the Merdles' dinner parties.

In my last post about the book I said I must have skipped over a 5-page chunk of text inadvertently in my hugely pregnant state, but it was actually a bigger block than that. There are two chapters that I do not remember at all, not in the slightest. And they're important chapters. The good news is that I finished the book with far fewer questions this time around, but the bad news is that I'm still scratching my head about what happened in 2002. Maybe I moved the bookmark to my target page, nodded off in the first of the two forgotten chapters, and thought the next day that I should start reading at the bookmark? Maybe I was so tired at the end of one day that my eyes passed over the words but my oh-so-pregnant brain failed to comprehend them? I will never know, I guess. But! I'm glad I filled in those gaps! Sometimes Dickens is elliptical, but two chapters' worth of big revelations would be a lot to elide.

I found the book's portrayal of the costs of wealth to be unexpectedly timely. We still don't believe that the love of money is the root of all evil, right? Maybe we ask ourselves: who could help loving money? Money buys freedom! I still shudder a little, though, thinking about the the ways that money imprisons some of the Little Dorrit characters. After I finished the book I felt an urgent need to catch up on charitable giving for the year. I got everything all squared away through the end of May and still felt unsettled, so I proceeded with the June giving as well.

Generally I've found that I uncover more to enjoy in a Dickens novel the second time through. Even though I'm glad I read Little Dorrit last month, I wouldn't really say that I enjoyed it. Lots to think about, less to delight in. Not my favorite May Dickens Read-Along, but at least I know now what Mr. Clennam wanted to remember!

Persist

I was going to run 6 miles this morning, but I miscalculated. I didn't take any water along, and the water fountains on the trail are all shut off, and my fingers were doing their dehydration tingle by the 2-mile mark. I decided I'd run 5.5 instead, and I told myself I could take a walk break at the halfway point.

The stretch of trail right around the 2-mile mark on this route is one of my favorite spots. It follows a pleasant little creek, and there's lots of shade. But then a big chunk of the third mile is painful. The shade disappears, and as you leave the water behind you run uphill for a good half-mile. "2.75," I kept telling myself. "Walk break at 2.75." A middle-aged man passed me, running up the hill and breathing raggedly, but I passed him back shortly afterward; he had shifted into a walk.

I ran to the top of the hill and kept going, with an eagle eye on my watch. At 2.75 I turned around and walked for a minute, in which I encountered the man for a third time. He was running again. "I was hoping you'd be running all the way to the end of the trail," he said. "It was inspiring to see you go!"

Now you guys, if I had to pick an adjective for that stretch of my run, it would not be "inspiring." No one would be playing the Rocky theme song -- maybe instead there is a theme song for Limpy, Slow-Moving Middle-Aged Lady Whose Entire Triathlon Goal Is "Finish, Don't Be Last." Now as I am describing the encounter I am wondering what else might have spurred him to say that -- was he hitting on me? was he thinking to himself, "c'mon, man, you can go faster than that!"? But sometimes on the trail people are just plain kind and encouraging to each other, and that's the spirit in which I took it.

"Inspiring?" I thought to myself as I headed back through the broiling shadeless section of trail, downhill this time. "Inspiring," I thought to myself, as I inched toward my house. "Inspiring!" I thought to myself, for longer than I would ordinarily think about a 20-second exchange with a stranger.

So this is a reminder, if you needed one, that sometimes when you do hard things imperfectly but persistently it is an encouragement to people who are struggling to do the same things. Go forth! Persist!

Line of Sight

I mentioned a week ago that my parish is doing something really sensible in the wake of the new CDC guidance, and I thought it was explained clearly and compassionately. Two of the Masses are retaining the COVID protocols, and two are loosening things up. If you're vaccinated or if you've had COVID, you don't have to wear a mask at the loosened-up Masses. My usual Mass, the vigil, falls into this latter category. When they were introducing the new plan we heard that guidance from the CDF multiple times: if you choose not to get vaccinated, then take special precautions to protect the vulnerable.

Last week an acquaintance was sitting in my line of sight, and I was surprised to see her young daughter with a bare face. Maybe their whole family had COVID, I said to myself. This week a woman was sitting right in front of me with her 5-year-old -- no masks in sight. MAYBE HE HAD COVID OR MAYBE HE HAS AUTISM AND CAN'T WEAR A MASK, I said to myself over the creaking and groaning of my inner Benefit-of-the-Doubt Extender.

I turned my head (did you see Bearing's post on custody of the eyes? good advice there) and my eyes fell on yet another acquaintance with yet another bare-faced small child. Acrid smoke began to billow from my short-circuited Benefit-of-the-Doubt Extender. NOT THAT MANY KIDS IN THIS TOWN HAVE HAD COVID, I said to myself skeptically.

I do not want to sit at Mass and pass judgment on my neighbors. It would not be good for my soul or my community for me to do that. And at the same time I am having trouble letting go of my frustration with the folks who blew off mask requirements and downplayed the risks of COVID WHILE ALSO rhapsodizing about the importance of being open to life. I mean, I agree that human life is precious and deserves to be safeguarded! So let's take reasonable precautions to avoid spreading a deeply unpleasant disease that has ended a lot of precious human lives!

Do I need a pair of horse blinkers so I am only ever looking at my music stand or the altar? Do I need to ask the music directors to change up the schedule so I can play for a cautious Mass? (This would not be an immediate solution because their baby is due any minute now, and I agreed to help with the vigil for the next several weeks while they are on leave.) I do not know the answer to that question. 

Desperation Soup

We've had four kids here for a week, and HOO BOY the grocery consumption is something to behold. Last night the cupboards were looking pretty bare, so I made this quick and easy soup. I've posted similar recipes before, but if you need something fast and cheap this post is just for you.

Coarsely chop an onion and cook it in a big pot in hot fat. Once it has begun to brown, add a couple of smashed garlic cloves. Add coarsely chopped peeled potatoes to your pot (say 6 medium-sized potatoes if you are feeding a crowd the size of mine) and all of the stray greens lying in your crisper drawer, facing an uncertain future. I used a generous bunch of beet greens, the radish greens, and a handful of spinach. They must be very clean (grit in soup = THE VERY WORST) but you don't have to chop them. Add stock to cover. If you're out of stock, add water and a spoonful of something to give it some oomph and umami (oomphmami?), like miso or Marmite. Season, remembering that potatoes take a lot of salt. 

When the potatoes are tender, add sour cream and attack the pot with an immersion blender. (I had less sour cream than expected, so I pitched in some cream cheese instead and it had the same effect.) Beet greens turned this a striking bronzy-green color, so be advised if you are feeding people with strong preferences about food colors.

We served it with popovers and I think everybody had seconds.

Just finished

I finished a book today that I found totally charming: Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts. A blogger recommended another of her books (can't remember who, unfortunately), but the library suggested Tuesday Mooney as an alternate when the recommended title was unavailable. "Why not?" I said to myself on page 495 or so of Little Dorrit, and in I dove once I was done with Dickens. It's an interesting book to read right after Little Dorrit, because they both raise some questions about family secrets and structural integrity in big old spooky houses. But in most ways it couldn't be more dissimilar. Tuesday Mooney is a very different flavor of heroine: whip-smart and funny and not at all little.

It's partially about a gimmicky treasure hunt and the associated media circus, but it's more about grief and loss and being left behind, and the soap-bubble fragility of life, and the way that our connections with others are both tenuous and durable.

The ending ties things up pretty neatly, but there are some loose ends that leave me wondering if a follow-up is planned. I would be happy to read a follow-up novel. Even though I just finished Tuesday Mooney this afternoon, I am jumping right into another book by the same author.

Still some distance from normal

Tonight after dinner we all walked downtown to sit in the pleasant little grassy circle by the train station and listen to live music. It was a perfect early summer evening, with roses and irises and yarrow in bloom all around us, and the musician was pretty good. I haven't listened to live music, other than at church, since February 2020. I was looking forward to it.

After 15 minutes I was totally overstimulated. It wasn't crowded, and it wasn't that loud. The volume was reasonable and the music was -- if not up my personal alley, at least in my zip code. Weirdly, though, it felt like Too Much. Suddenly I was getting irritated about stupid things. I walked Pete and Stella a half-block over to get ice cream and every last thing about the ice cream shop rubbed me the wrong way. It wasn't until we were walking home that I identified the problem: overstimulated. I could feel the irritation melting away as we headed down the block and into the quiet.

I have to say, I did not identify the "Less Overstimulation" pandemic silver lining until tonight.

June, she'll change her tune

Happy June, friends! I have a resolution for this month: every time I pick up an internet-connected device, I am going to say to myself "What is my purpose? How long should it take?"

This is not a perfect system. Earlier today I said to myself "I am going to confirm that the email I used for the Scout troop's treasurer earlier today was the correct email, since she has not responded." Instead I opened up my email and -- who even knows what happened. The gravitational field of that particular black hole seized hold of my sad middle-aged brain and flattened it out like a glacier-juggernaut-steamroller.

(I did eventually remember to check on the treasurer email situation.)

My hope is that this will cut down on the moments of drift, when I could be going outside or talking to another human or reading a book or whatever else, but instead I am just idling on the internet. I'll let you know how it works out.

Baking = Love

Way back when we first found Great British Bake-Off, the Schichttorte caught Joe's eye. I would be writing my to-do list for Thanksgiving day and he would sneak over while I peeled potatoes to add SCHICHTTORTE at the bottom. Whenever I was thinking about what kind of cake to make for a special occasion, he'd say "Schichttorte?"

A Schichttorte is a many-layered cake that you build up under the broiler, adding a few spoonfuls of batter at a time. I've made teeny-tiny skinny layers before for Dobos torte, but this recipe directs you to make 20 layers. Twenty is a lot of layers, my friends.

Joe wasn't sure what kind of cake he wanted for his birthday today, but it hit me: I could make him a Schichttorte while he was working. He would be so surprised! He would feel so loved!

I used the BBC recipe but it is kind of frustrating. You have to combine a thick paste with egg whites beaten to soft peaks, which is an excellent strategy for deflating your egg whites. If I ever wanted to make another one, I would try this recipe instead, which seems less likely to yield a lumpy batter.

My first layer went into the garbage can, because my broiler seems to have more oomph than the one in the BBC test kitchen. I wound up with 18 layers rather than 20, and after scorching the first one I was less aggressive about broiling the rest of them. So my layers aren't as visible as the ones in the BBC picture, but trust me: they're there.

Here's the before picture:

And here's the after:

The finished product was a little dense, which I suppose is an unsurprising outcome if you keep piling new layers on top of old ones when your only leavening is beaten egg. Although I added some salt, it could have used a little more. (What is it with European desserts and salt?) It was not the most delicious cake I've ever made, but it was a fun experiment anyway.

Joe, who was newly 2 when I started blogging, is now 19. 

One mystery revealed

Near the end of Little Dorrit there is an unusually long chapter in which some of the secrets that have puzzled us from the beginning are uncovered. And you guys, I don't know exactly what happened when I read this book in 2002, but I seem to have skipped over a key 5-page section. I must have thought I was on p. 757 when I heaved my hugely pregnant self up to resolve that poorly-timed sibling squabble, but I was actually on p. 752. "This looks right," I must have said to myself when I sat back down later that day, but it was NOT RIGHT, not at all.

I remember finishing the book and thinking, "Huh, there are a lot of things that still seem unclear here," because I DIDN'T READ pp. 752-757!

The more Dickens I have read, the more I have seen that his books reward careful attention. I have been meticulous this time through -- when did Character A talk to Character B? How does Character C know Character D? I didn't want to get to the end and feel uncertain this time. But I didn't need to be taking notes on their offhand conversations in 2021 -- I just needed a bookmark in 2002!

To the list of tips I have shared in the past for enjoying Dickens, I can now add another: it's better if you read all of the pages. So helpful, I know.

Another post about moving toward normal

Four of the kids are home this weekend and it's so nice to be together. One of the best things about having big kids is watching the sibling relationships.

We met friends at the farmers' market this morning, where we chatted in the sunshine and enjoyed another taste of normal life. I did not know that my husband is a total farmers' market softie. Dad, can we get cheese curds? Dad, can we get some goat meat? Sure, he says, sure we can. 

My church is splitting the masses up, so that half of them will have strict COVID protocols and half will have relaxed COVID protocols. The vigil is one of the relaxed masses, and I wasn't quite sure what it would be like. It was fine, I guess? I played with a musician I hadn't seen in more than a year, back in my corner next to the big amp. That has been a pandemic gift, for sure -- I'm glad I said yes when they asked me to learn how to play the bass last summer. 

Today my friend Becky turned 50 and celebrated by running 50 kilometers, which is 31 miles. Fifty! kilometers! is a lot of kilometers. 

Heading toward normal

My campus has a monthly writing get-together for faculty, and today was my first time joining the group in more than a year. It feels good to be back in the library, good to be immersed in our separate projects at the same long tables, good to look around me and see the thoughtful faces striving slowly to expand the sum total of human knowledge. It's why I love working at a university.

We broke for lunch at noon, gathering at a single table and eating our meal together. It felt weird, honestly, but it was a good flavor of weird.

My county's number of active COVID cases is the lowest it's been since last August. What a relief to be moving in this direction, huh?

Breaking

News Flash!

Hot off the presses!

Little Dorrit is very long.

Strength training with Joe

I've been lifting weights with Joe. Last summer I was working on strength training at home, but the combination of upper-body workouts and knitting did a number on my right elbow, and I decided to back off on the strength training. But this summer I decided to back off on the knitting, and I'm going to see how the strength training goes. 

Joe says, "You're stronger than you think you are," which is an encouraging thing to hear. He said it in the context of a discussion about dumbbell bench press, which left me worried that I was going to drop a dumbbell on my face. Today he spotted me with a barbell instead, and it went better than I thought it would.

Weight training is such an unfamiliar world for me that I just googled to confirm: barbell is the thing I was using at the gym today; a barbel is the thing sprouting from a catfish's face. It is not a very female milieu. I'd say the man:woman ratio in that section of the gym runs at least 4:1, or maybe 5:1. Joe sends me videos with titles like "How to do a perfect Romanian deadlift" (my Romanian deadlift is pretty imperfect), and they are hosted on channels with names like Beefy Buff Bros or Dudes And Their Delts. If you're calling a video "Get Massive Hamstrings!" you are not aiming it at the average American woman, who is probably balancing a mild interest in working her rear delts against the certainty that her sleeveless blouses will not fit if her shoulders get bigger.

Will Jamie manage to pull off a pull-up this summer? Will she turn into a Beefy Buff Babe? (One of those outcomes is more likely than the other.) Stay tuned!

Biting my nails on page 568

Do you ever re-read a book and ask yourself, "Did I notice that before?" This is happening to me with Little Dorrit.

Dickens is making a particular point, it seems to me, of saying that you don't have to be incarcerated to be imprisoned: age and debility are their own prison for Mrs. Clennam; unforgiveness, ditto, for Mrs. C and for Miss Wade. The "surfaces" that Mrs. General implores Little Dorrit to create will become a cage, if she succeeds in heeding her companion's advice; we see it in every society scene. Even Mr. Merdle looks in vain for a place in his home to be out of the butler-warden's view. But I am not sure I connected those dots last time.

I joked in my first post about the first chapter's warning regarding Blandois/Rigaud's villainy, but it seems to me this time through that Dickens is pulling out all of the stops: this guy is a really-for-real seriously bad dude, he says. Beware, gentle reader! I am certain I did not have as much sympathy for Gowan's dog on my first reading, but this time through I am making horrified faces even as I remember enough to write this post.

"Why are you making that face?" Joe asked me as I was reading earlier this evening, and it was another horrified sympathy face. I did not remember how many of our friends were drawn into the scam that will shortly be exposed. I am already anticipating the shock and the loss that they will experience. Perhaps this time it is more resonant because there is such a prominent real-world example in recent memory.

Little Dorrit is the Dickens novel which left me with the most questions, but I did not go searching for answers because I was 7,654,238 months pregnant when I finished it and greatly distracted by the sensation of having accidentally swallowed a hippopotamus bent on kicking his way out of my abdomen. I'm curious about whether this time through will leave me with a clearer sense of where he was trying to take us. I'll let you know if I have more insight this time around. Or if I accidentally swallow a hippopotamus.

"The living expression of God's kindness"

We have a crabby neighbor. She's in her 60s with a little yappy dog. She lives alone and it's been years, as far as I know, since she's had visitors other than her lawn service. She has disliked our children since we moved in.

On one side of her house there is a little strip of land owned by the town of Gladlyville. She mows it, but it's not her property. Kids play there sometimes, since it's public property in a neighborhood of tiny lots, and she is always unhappy about it. Once when Alex was 10 or 11 he was out there at dusk on a June evening. He was standing on the edge of the lot, trying to catch a firefly in his hands. "Don't touch my flowers," she snapped at him.

(He was not touching her flowers.)

I have tried periodically to be neighborly. I sometimes wave or say hello when I see her, because my mama taught me that neighbors acknowledge each other, but she doesn't respond. Once I gave her a bag of beautiful homegrown tomatoes. We had a brief not-unpleasant conversation about one of the foster dogs, and I wondered if it might open a door to a more cordial relationship, but it has not done so. One night she attended a Zoom Bible study on her porch and I prayed sincerely for her to find love and freedom.

I might need to pray some more.

Tonight I met a friend for a long chatty walk. It was delightful, you guys -- a leisurely bare-faced conversation with one of my favorite people. I got home right as we were sitting down to dinner, and the kids told me the following tale:

They set up a mini-badminton net in the empty lot, and were batting a shuttlecock back and forth. Our neighbor came home, and put her yappy dog on its line. The line, however, allows the dog to run off the neighbor's property and onto the the empty lot, where it charged at Stella, scratching her leg and trying to bite her.

The neighbor's response: "I'm sorry that your parents can't afford more yard space for you." 

I MEAN. I cannot EVEN. My EVENER is incapacitated and may not recover for some time.

Pete said, "It's probably good that Mom's not home, because she would go marching right over there." Elwood says we should give her 24 hours to see if she thinks better of it and apologizes. Part of me wants to say, sure, let's give it 24 hours and see if her house spontaneously turns fuchsia and starts spewing rainbow paisley unicorns out the chimney too. 

And yet.

I believe that Jesus looks with tenderness on her lonely scowly life, and he is not asking me to muster the zingiest possible response here. I am not sure, though, what he might be asking me to do.

I googled her after dinner. I wanted to check the county records to make sure that she hadn't bought the empty lot, and I was also curious about what kind of online footprint she might have. I wasn't certain that her Facebook page was definitely hers, because she is smiling broadly in her profile picture and I have never once seen her smile, not in 16 years of living across the street from her.

She is active in the altar guild at her Lutheran church. She went on a mission trip to Kenya with them in 2016. She posted a picture of Mother Teresa with the following advice: "Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God's kindness: kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile."

It's good advice, huh?

There is a line I have often thought about in the letter to the Romans. It says, "As far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone." The thing I didn't see clearly when I was younger is that the absence of conflict isn't always the same as peace. Stella is uninjured aside from a light bruise, so I don't see a need for vigorous follow-up (though you can be certain that I'll be taking a picture and saving it, just in case). There is something to be said for a sober conversation -- or a note might allow for more reflection -- in which we say "It is deeply un-neighborly to respond to a child whom your dog has injured by casting unwarranted aspersions on her parents' financial decisions. We trust you will keep both your dog and your tongue under tighter control in the future." But does that just make it into a Thing when it doesn't really need to be a Thing?

The thing I am chewing on as I wrap up this post is the sneakiness of hypocrisy. She must think of herself as a Good Christian, right? She is posting on FB about the importance of in-person church and the enduring truth of the gospel and going to Kenya to share the love of God, even as she is reluctant to aim a sprinkle of the love of God at the kids across the street. And I am not quite sure what comes next in our relationship, but I am praying earnestly for eyes to see where I need to do better myself.

Pentecost report

It has been the nicest day. This morning I woke up early but not stupid-early, which is often a problem for me as we creep closer to the solstice, and I had a lovely solitary start to the day. I had been planning to do a reverse-brick workout today, running first and then biking. My last run, on Thursday, was ridiculously unpleasant-- SO SO unpleasant. I headed out today with low expectations, but my run went well. I've posted about this before, the way that you have to keep showing up when workouts feel stupid-hard and eventually they feel easier, but it continues to surprise me.

I was only planning to bike about 5 miles, but you guys, they were the BEST 5 miles. Say, I have a question for you: what is your response when a stranger greets you on a multi-use trail? I was raised in the South, and my parents taught me that good manners meant offering a brief greeting to the people you see while walking. I don't do it on city sidewalks, but it feels weird to me to ignore the people who are using the trail with me. If I am running I will offer a quick wave or nod, but on my bike I almost always speak to the people I am passing. I say "on your left!" because when I'm on foot I don't like it when people just zoom around me without a word, and I almost always append "good morning!" Most of the time I get no response. Sometimes when I wave at people walking toward me I can see them studiously looking past me, like, "I will pretend I cannot see that this weird stranger is greeting me, because that is better than waving or nodding in return." 

I know that norms re: greeting strangers vary a lot with region and population density, but it's interesting to see how often people seem put off by the definition of good manners that I grew up with. 

This morning I was feeling so cheerful that I not only wished everyone I saw a good morning, I even burst into song at one point. (I made sure that I was alone. I myself might give a wide berth to someone who was cruising down the trail belting out a Jesus-y song at the top of her lungs.) But it was such a perfect morning, and there was a gentle little downhill and a gentle little tailwind that let me push my bike past 20 miles per hour almost effortlessly. The song just came streaming out of me: let the glory of the Lord endure forever, let the Lord be glad in his works!

In honor of Pentecost we had chili-marinated chicken (because fire) cooked on the grill (because more fire). I have thought for a long time that the eating of an artichoke offers a useful metaphor for the Christian life; it reminds me of the way that our prickly outer bits are stripped away over time, slowly exposing a sweet and tender heart. I love artichokes so much, but we hardly ever buy them. Pete is my artichoke buddy and we exclaimed together as we ate, admiring the purple-shaded inner petals and the Fibonacci-patterned upper surface of the heart. For dessert I made chocolate lava cakes (because still more fire) in heart-shaped dishes with the hope that the sweetness of the love of God will always be evident to my children. 

And now I am off to bed, because a reasonable bedtime is the best buffer against the unpleasant consequences of waking up stupid-early. 

Driving lessons, round #4

I have been teaching Pete to drive. We're not very far into the process, because our DMV was closed for a while and then crowded for a while and also I hate teaching people to drive so I was not in a hurry to get to the DMV after it reopened. But here we are, inching our way up the learning curve.

There are a lot of parenting skills that improve with practice, but I just don't know if teaching kids to drive is one of those skills for me. I have never been an especially calm driver. My parents were very, very clear -- maybe a little too clear -- about the hazards. YOU COULD DIE OR KILL SOMEONE OR BOTH! PERMANENT DISABILITY IS ALSO A POSSIBILITY! That message came through loud and clear. I have to remind myself, deliberately and repeatedly, that the large majority of car trips will be uneventful.

Pete is unusually sensitive to my state of mind, so he picks up on every mildly stressed exhalation when we are in the car together. This is not an ideal combination.  

More about Bailey

Bailey is a little 2-year-old rat terrier mix, and she has appointed herself Queen of the Neighborhood. You need to get off her lawn already. I know you thought that it was your lawn, but it's actually Bailey's lawn. And your neighbor's house? It's on Bailey's lawn too.

She is at least as reactive as Champ was, but she's so little that it is more hilarious than stressful. If you scoop her up and tuck her under an arm (not an option with Champ), she stops barking. But if you wait for her to calm down on her own, you might be waiting for a while. This afternoon the little dog across the street was outside when we went for a walk, and Bailey danced on her hind legs, spewing threats and pirouetting in rage, until she clocked her head on a street sign. She shook herself off and got right back to her Danse de la Colère. We encountered a pair of 50-pound dogs a couple of blocks later, and she flung herself at them like a Spartan soldier defending the gap at Thermopylae. She might die in the attempt, but by GOD she was going to go down fighting hard for King Leonidas. You should have heard her barking at their backs. The big dogs were like, "Is that a mosquito? What is that annoying noise?" Bailey was saying, "Get back here! I can take you with one paw tied behind my back!!"

I read that terriers tend to be wary of strangers, and that was certainly our experience yesterday. She hates the shelter and was very unhappy to be taken back there, and the whole time she was in the building she was loudly demanding to speak to the manager. "Whose idea was THIS?!" she wanted to know. I walked her over to our car and she was happy to hop in, but not so happy for anyone else to join her. "Lady," she said to me in no uncertain terms, "I don't know what you think you're doing, climbing in my vehicle like that."

But then overnight she decided that we were awesome. She can't contain her enthusiasm in her tail when she sees one of us -- she has to wag her entire hind end.

She is so sweet and affectionate inside our house that we're all pretty fond of her already, but phew, I would not want to deal with that reactivity for very long. I talked to the woman who wants to adopt her, and I tried to be honest without being discouraging. (It was easy to make it sound funny on the phone. It might seem less amusing in two weeks.) The woman was undeterred by my description, so the current plan is for her to be adopted on Saturday. We'll see how it works out, I guess.