Light and Momentary

Death by Breastfeeding

There's a new article out in Nature, looking at breastfeeding habits in the hominin species Austrolopithecus africanus. The researchers measured barium concentrations in fossilized teeth, which allowed them to estimate the importance of breastmilk in the diet across time. Nifty, right? They learned that A. africanus mothers nursed their babies exclusively for about 6-9 months, and then continued to offer breastmilk along with varying quantities of solid food for about 5 years.

So far so unsurprising, at least from my perspective as a hominin mother who is also a breastfeeding researcher and an IBCLC. These days hominin babies also get interested in solid food around the middle of their first year of life, and they often keep going for a while, augmented by varying quantities of solid food. This is old news. Anthropologist Kathy Dettwyler was publishing in the mid-90s on "normal" breastfeeding duration, and her work suggested that a natural age for weaning would range from 2.5, at the earliest, to about 7, at the latest. You can read a nutshell version of her work here, but the core idea is that we can learn from other species about the markers that indicate it's time to wean. For instance, some primates wean at the time of the emergence of the first permanent molars, which corresponds to an age of 5 or 6 in humans. Just like A. africanus!

(Standard disclaimer goes here: let's all do what works for our own families; let's also agree not to mutter darkly about the motivations of women who breastfeed for more or less time than we might find optimal.)

I was more than a little surprised, though, to see the investigator's take on these findings. Breastfeeding is metabolically costly, he says, and so perhaps the species died out BECAUSE the mothers kept nursing their children for so long.

Given what we know about primate nursing duration, this line of thinking suggests to me that the entire global population of primates ought to have died out in a mass extinction event some thousands of years ago. "Well, Pops," I imagine an early hominin mother saying to her grieving husband, "it was nice knowing you but I am PLUMB DONE IN by breastfeeding our offspring. And now I die." She keels over, like Wallace Shawn in The Princess Bride, while her overly breastfed 5-year-old continues to paw at her stiffening mammaries.

The researcher's comments tie in with a cultural narrative that breastfeeding is too draining, both literally and metaphorically, for women to manage. I first encountered this idea in college, when an older friend's father was telling her how much more rested she seemed when she gave the baby a bottle. I bumped up against it in person when I first nursed a toddler. "Oh, that must be very tiring," said a new acquaintance. (Awkwardly, she was my husband's boss's wife and she found it SO ODD for a 21-month-old to be nursing that her customary British reserve evaporated entirely.) The thing that's exhausting, though, is mothering a small child. Once you get past the initial bumps in the road, breastfeeding is more likely to be the shortcut than the hard road. (See the Swiss army knife analogy in this old post.)

You know who profits from pushing that breastfeeding-chews-you-up-and-spits-you-out business? Not mothers, not babies, not young children, but manufacturers of human milk substitutes and complementary foods. I am not aware of scholarly studies that support this idea of breastfeeding as health hazard -- not in human mothers from food-insecure populations, where the question can be of life-or-death import, and not in animal studies. Could it be that these were just normal primate mothers doing a normal primate thing? Could it be that pathologizing long-term breastfeeding -- though "pathologizing" seems an inadequate verb for "suggesting it is to blame for the extinction of an entire species" -- is a bad idea not grounded in actual science?

I told my kids they should keep an eye out to make sure I don't go extinct from breastfeeding.

Incognito

There's a student from my department who works at the rock-climbing gym, and she is going to be taking one of my classes in the fall. I feel awkward about this.

Maybe I should wear a pair of Groucho Marx glasses so she will think she is encountering a different person with wild curly hair at the gym than she is in the classroom. Or perhaps I should adopt an accent. I can do a plausible Scottish accent, and then I will just seem to be a visiting Scot. With Groucho Marx glasses. I hear all the Scots are wearing Groucho Marx glasses these days. Especially for rock-climbing.

Recently I was talking to one of my boys about his reluctance to try new physical activities, and I mentioned an old post in which I said, "Why do I even have a category called Fitness? It would be more accurate to call it 'Jamie Fears That People Will Point And Laugh If She Does Hard Things But Surprise! They Do Not Point Or Laugh.'" This would be an unwieldy name for a blog category, but we believe in accuracy here at Light and Momentary.

My office is right across the street from the student fitness center, and a membership there only costs me $8 per week. But I don't usually have an active membership there, because I feel self-conscious about working out in a place where I am certain to run into my students. Do I wear a bathing suit to class? Absolutely not. Do I want to encounter students in my bathing suit? Absoluteli-est not. 

This is me being unreasonable, I know. She is probably a friendly helpful student, like the rest of the staff at the rock-climbing gym. She is unlikely to point or laugh, or post stealth videos of me being clumsy on YouTube. And yet I still feel the edges of my soul curling in a bit when I think about it -- like, this is the place where I go to do fun hard things with my kids, to strive and fail and strive again. It is not a place where I ever don my professional persona, and I like it that way.

So maybe I will don some Groucho Marx glasses instead.

The Vegetable Project Returns

I am always oscillating in the summer. Should I treat it like a vacation, in which I can take the time to linger over an extra cup of coffee and a 9x9 KenKen? Or should I treat it like the Getting Stuff Done window in which I have enough space in my head to deal with complicated tasks? 

Tuesday was a Getting Stuff Done kind of day, in which I dealt with a dozen different annoyances and loose ends. But then on Wednesday I was tired, and today I was still tired. I have done a bunch of KenKens instead of following up on the annoyances and loose ends.

I have discovered over the years that produce makes me productive. The single biggest determinant of my ability to be happily engaged with the attention-sucking stuff in my life is a diet in which my vegetable consumption dwarfs my simple carb consumption.

Fourteen years ago I blogged about my first Vegetable Project. I had 20 pounds of baby weight to lose and I resolved that I would address the problem with vegetables. It was a pretty simple plan: five servings of vegetables and a gallon of water every day, with no refined sugar. (I was tandem-nursing my two youngest children in a minimally air-conditioned house, which is why my water consumption was so high.) In 30 days I lost 13 pounds and, to my surprise, found myself full of zip and determination.

In the years since then I have tried a whole bunch of different food strategies -- ten rounds of the Whole 30 and a number of variations thereupon. But you know, the original Vegetable Project offered the benefits of simplicity and sustainability; the Whole 30 is neither simple nor sustainable. And here is a weird downside to the Whole 30: it makes me so eager to Get Stuff Done that I become impatient with the people in my life who are less focused on ticking to-do list boxes. So my plan is to Eat All The Vegetables (and none of the sugar), and see what happens.

So many things have changed since I wrote those first Vegetable Project posts. The baby I was snuggling that summer is now a teenager, though he is still curled up right next to me as I write this post. In the middle of that month I wrote a post that got way more attention than expected -- thousands of hits and dozens of comments. In those days I thought I wanted more traffic, but then I got a taste of the wackadoodlery that ensues when you get more traffic. Nooooo thank you on the traffic!

I do miss the way people would read a long post in 2005, and write something thoughtful about it instead of reading the first sentence and posting a .gif in response. I am reading Mark Shea's By What Authority, first written in the late 90s, in which he talks about the potential of the internet to educate and unify. I did not foresee its potential to dumb down and polarize.

Today I got an email that was intended for Melanie of The Wine Dark Sea, complimenting her on her lovely blog but sent to my email address. It made me wonder if the author had some sort of ongoing address/content mismatch-- perhaps she sent an email to Melanie about Mrs. Darwin, and an email to Mrs. Darwin about me. 

Hmm, the later parts of this post don't have much to do with the beginning of this post. I will now tie them together: blogging = GOOD. Vegetables = ALSO GOOD. Refined carbohydrates and mean people on the internet = NOT GOOD. Vegetable updates to follow soon! The end!

Home sweet home

We made it back. It was a stressful drive -- we never did figure out why the car was making loud weird noises on Tuesday, and every time I heard even a tiny noise in that same range I was instantly on edge. We were a couple of hours from my parents' house when a large and alarming wrench appeared on the dashboard display. "Joe," I said, in the calm-calm-oh-so-calm voice that my children have learned to interpret (alas) as an indicator of significant inner tension, "pull out the owner's manual and let me know if that means we need some ordinary maintenance or if it's something more serious." 

"Power train fault," Joe read, and I died a little inside. "Well," I said, even more calmly, "let's see what services are at the next exit." The combination of loud weird mystery noises and a power train fault seemed unlikely to end well. At the next exit there was pretty much nothing: a Dollar General, where I suppose I could have purchased a box of tissues to weep into, and a gas station, and nothing else. I pulled into the gas station parking lot. In Maximum Calm Voice I said, "Here is the plan. I am going to turn the car off, and we are going to pray, and then I am going to turn it back on." And do you know, the wrench went away and did not reappear. 

I stopped at a Ford dealership further up the road, where they were utterly unhelpful. "Everybody's got problems today," snarled the man on duty when I approached the service desk. One might think that a service desk exists because everybody has indeed got problems, but apparently he did not view the matter in the same light. It would be at least a 90-minute wait, he said, and he didn't know whether they could tell me anything useful if the indicator wasn't on. "It could be something really bad, like your transmission failing," he said. (This prospect hurled me from Maximum Calm Voice territory into Never-Before-Observed Levels of Calm Voice territory, a development which struck dread into my children's hearts. Maybe I should just go ahead and freak out?) "Or it could be something like a throttle body. Impossible to say, but if you don't want to wait you can ask them to check it out at the auto parts store down the road."

The guy at the auto parts store was much friendlier, but he couldn't persuade his scanner to talk to my car. I did not know why the car had been making weird bad noises on Tuesday. I did not know why the Wrench of Doom had appeared and disappeared. I could not tell if driving off into the bowels of the rural Midwest was a reasonable risk to take or a terrible decision. But we talked it over and decided to head for home.

The bad noise did not recur; the wrench did not reappear. We weathered the storms and the uncertainty and I am really grateful. It's good to be home.

Roadblogging

We are visiting my family again and I am a little worried about our car. We squeezed into our little Fusion for the trip specifically because it’s newer and healthier than the van, but it is having an attack of — I don’t know of what. Car-catarrh? Would that be cartarrh? It is making a whiny hum at moderate speeds, sometimes but not always when the brakes are engaged. A loud whiny hum.

I heard it once on the way down here and wondered if it was some weird interaction between the new road surface and the wheels. But today I was coming back from taking the kids climbing (of course) and I started hearing it frequently. It got louder and louder. “What is that?” Joe asked. Some kind of tire/wheel thing, I told him. 

I miss my husband keenly when there is car stuff or house stuff that I have to deal with on my own. There is a particular way he says “hm” that lets me know it will all be all right, whatever it is. You would think that “hm” would not be a hard thing to say, but I haven’t had much luck finding a substitute hm-er when we are apart. Left to my own devices it is too easy for me to whip myself into a froth. Perhaps I can unclog the kitchen sink with some help from this banana, I think to myself. 

My father and I drove over I the auto repair place after dinner, and the car didn’t make a peep. This is good news, I suppose, from the perspective that an inconsistent problem is often a less severe problem. This is likely to be bad news, however, from the perspective of the people trying to diagnose the problem in the morning. 

When we were here in January it seemed certain that our van was toast. The transmission seemed to have failed, but it was actually a cheap and easy fix, even on New Year’s Day. I am going to ask for the intercession of St. Thomas the apostle, whose feast day is tomorrow. I am hoping for a quick and accurate diagnosis and a quick and inexpensive fix. Each day has enough trouble of its own, I am telling myself. Borrowing trouble is always a bad idea, I am telling myself.

I still wish my husband were here with his very distinctive hm. 

The Biggest Little Farm

Elwood and I went to see The Biggest Little Farm tonight and I enjoyed it immensely. It's a documentary about a couple who bought a 200-acre farm near Los Angeles and decided they would Live In Harmony With Nature. So it has its eye-roll-y moments -- like, seriously, shoot the damn coyotes already -- but I really liked it. 

They bought a farm that had been neglected, and when they started trying to work the soil it was a little alarming: compacted, dried out, mostly sterile. You see them trying to dig into it with a variety of implements -- they might as well be trying to break into a boulder with hand tools. Somehow they found themselves a traditional farming guru who walked them through the first two or three years. (I want to know more about their traditional farming guru, actually. How does a person acquire that job title?)

We meet their critters. They raise shaggy Highland cows, and sheep, and ducks and chickens and an accidental crop of snails, but my favorite is Emma the pig. Emma is laid up with mastitis not long after her enormous litter of piglets arrives (I loved the pig midwifery scenes!), and I found myself armchair-quarterbacking. Or, you know, armchair cross-species lactation-consulting. "Don't take the piggies away!" I wanted to shout. "Keep the milk moving! Protect the milk supply!" I'm still not sure if Emma got any antibiotics despite her 106 degree fever, but (spoiler alert) she managed to rally. Go Emma! Snort long and prosper!

The cinematography is beautiful: big-picture shots of the surrounding mountains and the skies overhead, and tightly focused shots of birds and bugs and gophers and snakes and all of the beauty that surrounds them on the farm. Big swaths of the beauty involve things a person might not find beautiful up close. I can say with confidence that if there were squirming maggots in my own personal hand I would fling them away, shrieking. But when our farmer scoops up a handful of cow manure teeming with maggots, it's cool to see.

It is a slow-paced film. Elwood and I went out afterward and talked it over. He thinks they could have cut half of the movie; I said a quarter but maybe I only meant a fifth. If you're looking for an action flick, this is not your movie. But if you're looking for an appreciative close-up view of a complex farm ecosystem -- fluffy hawk fledglings and graceful ladybugs in flight and sneaky weasels and luscious nectarines and a sweet snuggly farm-born baby -- check it out.

On Persistence

My arms and hands are aching again. Joe and I went to the rock-climbing gym tonight and I climbed until I couldn't climb any more.

I've been feeling a little discouraged about climbing this week. There's a route I've tried a couple of times unsuccessfully, but I thought it was just a mental barrier keeping me from sending it. Earlier this week I decided I would push through the mental barrier. I thought once I put my mind to it I could zip right to the top. But I just couldn't get it: Could. Not. I could describe the move I needed to do to reach the top, but my arms and legs would not cooperate. Going by the numbers, it shouldn't have been a problem. The route is only rated 5.8+, and these days 5.9 is the difficulty level where I feel reasonably confident about getting a route on the first try. "Lower me," I called down, feeling utterly defeated.

"Maybe I'll just sell my climbing shoes on eBay," I said flouncily.

There are hardly any other middle-aged moms at the climbing gym. I have one friend who climbs pretty regularly with her husband. Earlier this week I saw someone new at the gym, a woman my age who was a few levels ahead of me. But mostly it's teens and 20-somethings, who seem to sail up the wall as if they're wearing anti-gravity boots. 

The last time I posted about climbing I was telling you about a 5.10b. I had to work and work and work to send that route. The video below shows most but not all of the route -- at about 1:04 you can see where the topmost hold is. (I am attempting to reach to the top using only the green holds. The lavender thing dangling from my harness is my chalk bag.) The moves at 0:10-0:16 took me dozens of attempts to perform consistently. Eventually, though, I figured it out.

Tonight I tried a new 5.10a. "Maybe I'll flash it," I said to myself. ["Flash it" = climber-speak for nailing a new route on the first try.] Instead I had to rest for a minute in the middle, and I put one of my feet in the wrong place when I started moving again. I'll get it soon, but not tonight. I was feeling defeated again at the gym. It wasn't until I got home that I realized that I've never before been able to tackle a new 5.10 route and get all the moves on the first try. I couldn't string them all together this time, but I also didn't fall.

It's easier to be persistent when progress is faster. I know it's progress, even when it's slow. I know it's better to make slow progress than to sell my climbing shoes on eBay. It's still a little discouraging to watch the teenagers zipping past me.

Huh, how did it get to be the 20th of June already?

I know the answer to that question, I suppose. In the first week of June I was prepping busily for a retreat. In the second week of June I was catching up on post-retreat sleep and biting my nails about submitting my first NIH grant and prepping for an all-day workshop with my boss and ALSO lining up ducks for last weekend, when Elwood and I were going to be away on separate trips, leaving the teens in charge for a night. (I saw my college roommates in Chicago. SO lovely to spend time with them. He was competing in the finals of a national Settlers of Catan tournament.) And the third week of June has been a bit of a blur, because I needed to upload my grant documents by Wednesday and present all day today. But! Tra-la-laaaa! The grant documents are uploaded and the workshop went well. 

The younger kids have had camps to attend, which has allowed me to spend time in the office without worrying that they are adrift at home. This is a good thing, because it turns out that submitting an NIH grant is not only an exercise in planning a rigorous investigation but also an exercise in following unhelpful directions. Here's an example: there's a big section on human subjects that I knew I needed to complete, but our grants office wasn't very familiar with that portion of the application. (Most applicants for NIH funding from Gladlyville U. are studying mice or turtles or bacteria or tumor cells. Something that can't sign a consent form.) I was trucking along on the human subjects section when I discovered that I had filled in part of the form in error. I googled to figure out a classification and discovered, much to my surprise, that my application would be automatically disqualified if I completed sub-section 4 since I am not proposing a clinical trial. Wouldn't you think that would be useful information to share with applicants? It feels a little like they're saying "If you have to be told how to perform the secret handshake, you can't be in the club."

But my application wended its way through the university routing system today (lots of people have to sign off an external grant application), and I am sending it off tomorrow with low expectations and great gusts of relief.

This feels like the first summer in a while without a blog post on summer goals and summer fun. I've had too many things on the must-do list to focus on the want-to list. But starting tomorrow I have exactly 8 weeks of summer before I have to head back to work, and a plan is always a helpful thing. "Are you going to read Ulysses now?" my 19yo asked me at dinner tonight, and I do believe I will. More soon.

Impostor Syndrome: Activate

I loved the Wonder Twins on Saturday morning cartoons in my childhood. They would reach for each other and say "Wonder Twin powers: ACTIVATE!" And sproing, one of them would be a -- hmm, the memories are blurry, 40+ years on -- maybe a harbor seal, while the other would be a hydroelectric dam, so that the second one could immobilize the bad guy by pouring water on his head while the first one bit him on the ankle. That doesn't sound very plausible now that I have written it down, but I am not going to google it. Am. Not.

This blog post is itself a procrastination, and it would just be too meta to procrastinate further in the middle of my procrastinating.

I am supposed to submit my first NIH grant on the 19th of June, and instead of Wonder Twin powers I am observing the ferocity of untrammeled impostor syndrome. I open the interface and something inside me says "Impostor Syndrome: ACTIVATE!" Impostor syndrome speaks with measured skepticism: you, Jamie Gladly? You are going to submit an NIH grant? For real?

Maybe you should do another KenKen first. 

Maybe you should see if eBay will sell you replacement spice jars for the 1960s spice rack you got from your MIL when you were engaged. (Answer: I can get jars with no lids, or jars plus rack. I just want 5 or 6 jars with lids. Why is this hard? Wait, it is distracting me from the scary grant-writing stuff so I don't actually care if it's hard.)

Or maybe, just maybe, I should write the stupid grant like an actual grownup.

I am going to harness the power of the internet to arrest my procrastination instead of fueling it. I am going to put words in a row until I have a draft personnel justification that I can send off to my contact in the grants office. I'll report back when I've done so.

And maybe then I'll find some spice jars. Impostor Syndrome: DEACTIVATE!

The mission

Do y'all remember that I'm part of a retreat team right now? Some folks from the retreat program at my parish are working with the central office of the national retreat program; five of us will be part of a mission team offering the first retreat to women in a town about 3 hours away.

It's been about 70% more work than I had anticipated.

Some of the additional work was voluntary -- I didn't have to give a talk, but I volunteered to. Some of the additional work was not voluntary -- the music coordinator quit and I was promoted from musical dogsbody to musical co-lead-dog. I was happy to plan Mass music and teach songs as needed but I have been less happy about planning and providing a bunch of recorded music. I'm too middle-aged for all of this Spotify playlisting and downloading and Bluetoothing. (Also, if I were the sole musical lead-dog I could decree "We're not doing that song because it's irredeemably cheesy" instead of saying diplomatically "I would prefer not to do that song." But then I would have even more work, I guess. Life is full of tradeoffs, man.)

Anyway, it will all be over a week from now. I believe it has the potential to bear good fruit in the lives of the women who attend and in their parishes. It's just been kind of painful getting it together.

Every time I go to Mass out of town I am filled with gratitude for our church here in Gladlyville. We visited the town where the retreat will be held three weeks ago and spoke at all the Masses there. They were, I suppose, perfectly ordinary Catholic Masses. We are awfully lucky here, blessed with a pastor who believes with his whole heart that he has been entrusted with good news, who calls us to go deeper in homilies that are full of truth, and almost always thoughtful and witty. Our music directors are faithful and reverent without taking themselves too seriously; they are very clear that our focus is on worship, not performance. Our leadership team is unified; they stand with Pope Francis and the Magisterium in their efforts "to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of [them]."

This morning's Mass left me with a fiery little glow inside, grateful for the gift of the Word and the homily and the Eucharist and also for the power of community. When we go to church these days we are surrounded by friends from the retreat community, people who have encountered Jesus in a new way through the retreats and who are determined to "press on toward the goal," sharing good news as they go.

SO. Maybe I need to stop thinking about all of the (plentiful) annoyances associated with taking this retreat on the road. Maybe I need to do some pressing onward toward the goal myself.

Shoes and Ships and Stripey Socks

Long ago, maybe ten years ago, I picked up a skein of Noro sock yarn on clearance and stashed it in the fingering bin. It sat there for ages. In 2017, when we were taking the train to NYC, I cast on a sock and knitted away as the miles rolled by. I worked the cuff and the heel and the gusset before I realized that something was wrong: it was huge. I had thought I was making a sock but somehow I had accidentally crafted a file cabinet cozy.

I realized belatedly (and disgustedly) that I had chosen size 3 needles instead of size 1 or 2, resulting in this bold new line of outerwear for file cabinets. I stashed the unhappy result in the bottom of a tote bag for many months. It felt like such a hassle to frog the sock and soak the yarn and dry it and rewind it, so for a while I just ignored it. But when I finally did start it over, it caught the eye of my second son. "Who's that for?" he wanted to know. "Do you want it?" I asked him. He did.

I worked big swaths of it on our New Year's trip to my parents' house. (The thing about socks for man-sized feet is that they require only slightly less knitting than an actual file cabinet cozy.) When I reached the end of the first sock, I wasn't quite sure how to start the second one. Noro sock yarn is famous for its long stripe repeats, and this skein had been designed so that a woman's sock would consume about one repeat, with some wiggle room for long cuffs or long feet. A man's sock, though, ate up a little more than a single repeat. This meant I would have to wind a lot of yarn to make the socks match.

But when I consulted my son about his preference for the second one, I learned he didn't care whether the socks matched exactly. We agreed on a plan, and I finished up the second sock yesterday. (They are shown on my feet. They are much less baggy on his.) He is very pleased with them. We both love those yummy pink-shading-to-coral stripes across the mid-foot.

I might take a wee break from knitting man-socks now.

Shoes and Ships and Stripey Snakes

The time has come, the blogger said,
to talk of many things:
of whole-house fans and garter snakes,
of cabbages and kings[1],
of why the sea is boiling hot[2]
and whether pigs have wings[3]

Today I was returning from the office when I paused to admire my happy little herb garden. It's always a bit of a mystery which plants will come back, but it generally does pretty well. This year, I thought to myself, the marjoregano[4] is thriving so hard it's trying to take over the yard[5], the tarragon is standing up tall and proud, the sage is huge and covered in purple flowers, and the lavender is lovely even though I thought it might have died over the winter. I was standing right next to the lavender thinking these thoughts when I noticed a quiver at my feet. Or perhaps a shiver. OR PERHAPS A SLITHER???

There was a garter snake in my herb garden. It tried to hide in the tarragon, but I shook the tarragon leaves and it hopped over the bricks and escaped to the hosta bed. WELL, THAT WAS UNEXPECTED, I said to myself with a certain emphasis. 

We used to have a neighbor across the street whose house had a bounteous garter snake population. In fact, a mama garter snake had apparently nested under her porch, and vast quantities[6] of stripey little snakelets would come slithering out into her yard. Now you guys, I was pretty deep into my earthy-crunchy phase at the time but my brand of "we are gentle with living things" did not extend to NESTS of SERPENTS under my PORCH. This mom, though, took earthy-crunchy to a new level. "They're a sign of a healthy ecosystem," she said chidingly one day when I raised the issue. Okay, then! I mean, so are killer whales! Maybe I should found a killer whale sanctuary under my porch then?

I doubt she would have found the killer whale comparison persuasive. 

So here's my first question for you: where do garter snakes (especially those right down by your own personal feet) fall on your personal scale of shriek-inducing? Are you fascinated and grateful for your healthy ecosystem? Or are you thinking it's a shame you have to set the herb garden on fire now? Do tell.

Here is my second question for you: has anyone ever installed a window-mounted whole-house fan? When I was a girl in West Virginia, my father put a whole-house fan in our attic and it was magic. On summer evenings he would open the windows at each end of the house and switch on the fan, and in minutes all the lovely cool evening air would come pouring in. We didn't need an air conditioner. Gladlyville is hotter and stickier than my childhood home in the mountains, though, and I think we have less of a temperature gradient from midday to evening here in the flatlands -- it's hot at noon and it's still pretty hot at 7pm. But I think every year about a whole-house fan, because our AC doesn't do a great job cooling the upstairs. The installation seems like a total pain, which has always kept me from moving beyond the thinking stage. Just today, though, I learned that there are whole-house fans that can go in a window. We have a nice big window upstairs which could be just the right spot for such a thing. Anybody ever tried it? Any tips or tricks or cautions for me to consider? 

This is my first crack at HTML footnotes and Safari won't let me preview them to see if they work. So I am just going to throw them up untested, because I'm wild and reckless like that. It's kind of a jungle over here in Gladlyville, man: snakes on the loose and renegade footnotes, all in one temeritous post.

[1] We don't actually have to talk about those, though comments are open if you have thoughts on matters brassical or monarchical.

[2] Because the Koch brothers seem to have bought themselves a government, that's why.

[3] That would be a no on the pigs having wings.

[4] Marjoram and oregano look a lot alike. We don't know which one actually came back.

[5] It's another poem: thriving so hard...take over the yard. Perhaps I will become a poetry blogger! (I can hear my husband saying, "Don't quit your day job, Jamie."

[6] Well, no, I don't know exactly how many. But can we agree that more than, say, two[7] is a quantity vaster than one might wish to host under one's porch?

[7] Or perhaps one. Or, you know, zero.

If I were less tired this post would have a better title

Last night I said, "Okay, kids, can you set the table with six placemats like this one and six matching napkins?"

Stella answered, "Who's coming over?"

And we were having a dinner guest, it's true, but I felt a little bit harrumphy that her immediate assumption is matching napkins = company coming.

Today was a long day. I have taken over a 7am Adoration hour on Wednesday for the summer, and shortly afterward was the first session of a course redesign workshop I'm doing. The thing about teaching classes a bunch of times is that you figure out what mostly works, and then inertia becomes a powerful force. Like, it would be better if you used a different textbook, but investigating textbook options is a hassle and the current textbook is okay. It would be better if you reorganized the third unit, but prepping new lectures is a ton of work -- a TON of work -- and the existing lectures aren't so bad.

In the summer there's space to do a little dreaming. What's my GRAND VISION for this course? When students think back on this course in five years' time, what do I want them to remember about it? What might the steps between the first day of class and the achievement of the GRAND VISION look like? There's a huge emphasis right now in higher ed on measurable outcomes: how will you KNOW that your students have achieved what the syllabus said they should be able to achieve? But the overlap between measurable and meaningful is imperfect, and the latter should be a higher priority. Today I had the freedom to think to myself "What do I want my students to understand about the social model of disability?" without having to say in the very next breath "Here is the way I will measure their knowledge of the social model of disability."

As soon as the workshop session was over, I walked down to the repair shop where our limping van was getting its oil changed, and headed out to pick up Joe, who took his last final today. The trip there took longer than planned because of a road closure, and the departure from campus took longer than planned because he has a surprising amount of stuff, but it was an uneventful trip despite its length. Uneventful drives are my favorite kind, especially when the lateness of the hour means a glorious crimson sunset, and lightning playing in the sky -- close enough to enjoy, too far away to slow me down. And now Joe is here, hurray! Four of five Gladly kids are home to stay for a while.

No Cigar

I am typing this post at the rock-climbing gym while my 14yo chats with the staff about the right amount of painful in a good rock-climbing shoe. I didn’t know that planned shoe discomfort was a thing in the world beyond women’s dress shoes, but they are having a lengthy conversation about “aggressive” shoes. 

Tonight I almost leveled up, you guys. I have been working slowly on a route rated 5.10b, and it has been a struggle. There’s a move near the beginning that seemed like a cruel joke for a long time, but now I can do it pretty consistently. On Tuesday I made it three-quarters of the way up and ran out of gas. Tonight I got past that part, all the way to the last hold...and then fell trying to match.

In climber-speak, if you want to send a route, or check it off your list, you have to match: get both hands solidly on the last hold. I'm almost there.

I couldn't get a good picture of the route because I couldn't back up far enough to capture the whole thing. I was going to guess that the route is 40 feet tall; Joe thinks maybe it's a little taller. I'm trying to use just the green holds to get myself from the floor, down by the yellow caution flag at the bottom of the picture, all the way to the ceiling, which is three or four holds above the top of this picture. 

I'm pretty sure I can do it on Saturday, as long as they don't take it down before that. I'm also pretty sure I'll be too sore to tackle it tomorrow.

In which I am once again ambushed by entropy

I have this perpetual idea, you guys, that I could Get It Together if only I applied myself diligently. Inbox zero, empty paper trays, and a tidy dust-free home. But then I buckle down and attempt to apply myself diligently, and entropy fights back like whoa.

For instance: I got it into my head that I would tidy up the music room. I would get rid of the random unloved picture books, keeping only the picture books with sentimental value, and merge the music room bookshelves to create more space in there. Maybe I could even get rid of one of the music room shelves and slide a secondhand prie-dieu into its erstwhile home! Wouldn't that be nice, I thought to myself.

I started culling books and was met with immediate and vocal resistance. You can't get rid of [the horrible Lego story] Mission To The Arctic, they shouted. You can't get rid of The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine: Or, The Hithering Thithering Djinn! (I didn't even try to purge The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine, even though I hate it. Weird things happen when people who write postmodern adult fiction turn their attention to children's books. But the boy-turned-young-adult who loves postmodern fiction has a surprisingly fierce attachment to it, so I think I am stuck with it until he moves out permanently. On that day I will wrap it up as his housewarming gift.) There were consultations with the boys who are not at home, and with each consultation the "keep" pile grew while the "cull" pile dwindled. It was pretty clear that both of the bookshelves would need to stay.

Even diminished, the cull pile required three milk crates. They are in the van now, awaiting their new homes. I am going to give the non-religious books to a charity that redistributes gently used children's books to low-income families, but they ask that you don't send them religious books. So I think I'll try to give those away to friends at church and see how it goes.

One of the music room shelves was crammed with poorly organized music, which is now thinned out and at least loosely organized. I have cleared off the top of the piano and I have sifted through the piano bench. I aspire to make myself a big binder with page protectors, in which all of my sheet music is arranged alphabetically. 

The piano tuner will come next week, and I am going to return the cello to my father-in-law since the boy who once played cello no longer does so (and no longer lives in this time zone). All of the random stuff that had drifted under the loveseat has been re-homed, including a lonely bugle mouthpiece and a children's version of the Ramayana. ("Oh!" said Stella, "I've missed this!") Hm, I looked up the Ramayana at Amazon to see if I could spot the version we have, and I wonder what my targeted ads will look like now. Amazon has been trying to sell me romance novels for weeks now. Dear Amazon: I will never buy a book with a shirtless man on the cover. You could have exclusive rights to a lost Jane Austen novel, and if you put a naked man on the cover I would just have to wait for the copyright to expire. Because no -- just no.

Anyway: I am declaring a tentative victory in this round of Jamie vs. Entropy. Stay tuned for round 2.

In my mailbox

Gladlyville University
Office of the President

May 14, 2019

Dear Dr. Gladly,

Congratulations! As a result of the significant contributions you have made to your discipline and to Gladlyville University, your applications for tenure and for promotion to Associate Professor have been approved and will be effective August 16, 2019.

Best wishes for continued success as a member of the Gladlyville University faculty.

Sincerely,

President McPseudonym

Fast Food

Our dinner is simmering on the stove right now, and while the rice finishes cooking I am going to tell you how to make it. We are having chana masala, chickpeas in a sauce that's slightly tart and slightly spicy. Super-quick, super-tasty, super-cheap, and my kids will all eat it, in welcome contrast to the last meal I cooked for them. (Mother's Day lunch. I was riffing on salade niçoise. They were unenthusiastic.)

I first encountered this recipe in Urvashi Pitre's Indian Instant Pot Cookbook, a slim little volume that is totally worth the shelf space. I have a sour tooth, and so I was immediately intrigued by the description. Her recipe tells you to cook down a bunch of onions before you make the chana masala, but you don't actually have to do it that way unless you want to. The recipe that follows is a hybrid: some of the Urvashi Pitre recipe, some of the recipe from the back of the spice box. No Instant Pot necessary.

Sauté a diced onion in neutral oil. When it begins to brown lightly, add chopped garlic (maybe 3-4 cloves) and minced ginger to taste. You'll add 1/2 t. cumin seeds and 2 T. chana masala spice mix. (Urvashi Pitre says you should not expend a bunch of effort trying to make your own chana masala spice mix. Buy in. The box I linked is not the same one for sale at our Indian grocery, but the ingredients are almost the same and the reviews are good. One box will let you make about half a dozen batches of chana masala.) Toss them around in the fat for a minute, and then add a 15-oz. can of petite diced tomatoes and two cans of chickpeas. Simmer until your rice is cooked. Squeeze the juice of a lemon over it if you, like me, do not keep amchoor in your spice basket. Serve with cilantro.

I made a gelatin salad to go alongside: orange juice, lemon juice, shredded carrots. Will the kids tell me that 1956 called and wants its side dish back? Stay tuned for more riveting updates from Gladlyville.

And they're off

Our graduation reception was yesterday afternoon. I always enjoy them. Our grad students are back on campus after their external placements, pleased and proud and a little disbelieving: it felt like their program would last forever, but now it's done. They want us to meet their families and their fiancés, and hear about the new jobs they've lined up, and we are happy to oblige.

I've known some of this cohort for a long time. Five or six of them took the 100-level anatomy class with me in 2014, and then they took my 300-level classes, and then I taught them across both semesters of their first year in grad school. Along the way I supervised their honors projects and independent studies and symposium presentations. I feel a little nostalgic: when I met them, they didn't even know the larynx had joints. I bet that these days if you woke them out of a sound sleep and said, "Quick, name the joints of the larynx," they would mumble the right answer.

(I mean, that's practically the same as witnessing someone's first steps.)

One of the good things about working in this discipline is that 100% of our students find jobs in the field. They may not land in their preferred setting right off the bat, but we can give them sincere encouragement that their job searches will be fruitful, and that the future offers them varied and interesting work with the potential to make a real difference in the lives of people with disabilities.

Ugly Cars

For a long time I was going to write a blog post called In Praise of Ugly Cars. It was going to be about buying ugly cars on purpose, something we used to do out of necessity and now do voluntarily. Just now I'm keenly aware of the drawbacks of ugly cars, though.

Consumer culture says, "What is the most house (or car) that I can afford?" Voluntary poverty says, "What is the smallest house (or ugliest car) that will meet my needs?" (We are lucky here in Gladlyville to have reasonably priced housing options, so please don't feel this post is aimed at you if you are feeling squeezed by a big-city mortgage.) I had never encountered the idea of voluntary poverty before I became Catholic, but it struck an immediate chord with me. Let me hasten to say it is a practice I engage in only selectively. Dorothy Day would doubtless look askance at our restaurant budget. But I think big-ticket purchases, and especially cars, are a sensible place to think about voluntary poverty. Our strategy has always been to purchase an older no-frills car, often one with some minor cosmetic blemishes.

A few years back I dropped off a kid for a Scout campout, and the volunteer collecting health forms needed to write something on the paper I handed her. She laid it on the trunk of the closest car, on top of a stack of papers, and added a quick note. The car's owner came swooping down on us, furious. It was his prize possession, a Mercedes convertible, and he was incensed that she had used a ballpoint pen on top of his expensive paint job -- even with a pile of 10 papers in between. He whipped out a cleaning cloth and wiped fretfully at the (wholly unremarkable) spot. I thought to myself, "If ever I get that focused on the appearance of an object I own, I should probably throw it into the sea." I can't predict how I would respond to the prospect of damaged paint on a car worth more than the median US income, but I hope I would still be courteous to the well-intentioned person in front of me -- the person whose years of volunteer service to the Scout troop made it possible for my kid to attend camp.

I am typing this post and thinking it's practically a cosmic invitation for me to discover what I would do in a parallel circumstance. Maybe tomorrow the babysitter will overturn a glass of tomato juice on the piano keyboard or something. I would be unhappy about that (although I hope I would still be polite). But that's why I don't keep my piano on the front porch. The thing about cars is that they are uniquely vulnerable to depredations at the hands (or bumpers) of others. All it takes is a moment of absent-mindedness or bad judgment -- one inattentive driver out of the thousands of drivers who will operate their vehicle near mine across its lifespan.

It's easier to cultivate detachment from material things if your car is pre-uglified. If a teenaged driver has an accident in a pre-uglified car, it's likely to be less conspicuous, which makes it easier to say sincerely, "I'm just glad you're okay." It's easier to give generously if you're not working around a hefty car payment. All sensible observations, right?

This has been an expensive year for car repairs, though. Within the past week we've put $1800 into our newer vehicle. Elwood and I have been debating automotive end-of-life issues again. Across all 26 years of our marriage, I've always been the one saying "DNR the car!" while he says, "No, I really think we can nurse her through this crisis." It always works out. In this particular conversation I have been feeling the influence of some wealthy friends, who arrange their budget so they pretty much never have to deal with car repairs. But I've also been thinking tonight about Dorothy Day, and specifically about this quote from a blog post by a woman who interned at a Catholic Worker house: "Dorothy Day writes that though we may attempt poverty, a kind of stripping of ourselves, 'still you will reach out like an octopus to seek your own comfort, your untroubled time, your ease, your refreshment' (Loaves and Fishes, 84)."

Weekend Report

Oh, I think May is my favorite month. The light! The blooms! The demise of drear! I woke up on Saturday morning after 9 hours of sleep to a glorious spring day, full of determination to Get Things Done. The determination to Get Things Done doesn't always turn into the reality of Having Done Things, but on Saturday it did.

I’ve been in a bit of a slump, you guys. I’ve been feeling burned out and uncertain at work. I still have not adjusted to life with only two children at home — mostly because I miss the ones who are far away, but even in practical terms I've been flailing for longer than I would have expected. There is no one who is responsible for emptying the dish drainer every morning, even though I’ve had nine months to figure out the dish drainer situation. But things are looking up.

Joe came home this weekend, which was delightful. We fit in a bunch of rock-climbing along with Pete. Our rock-climbing gym opened its outdoor boulder last weekend, and Joe was excited to try out the new routes. I remain a lot more cautious about trying new things at the gym. I was not optimistic about the outdoor boulder, because Pete had warned me that it was a lot harder than the indoor routes. But do you know, I was able to top out on two routes (that’s what the climbers call it when you haul yourself all the way onto the upper surface and take the steps back down), and reach the last hold of a third route. We will gloss over the fourth route, where I slipped off a not-great hold at the top of the boulder and fell all the way to the ground. (Ouch. But I’ll get it next time.)

Pete and I got in some gardening time, to our mutual satisfaction, and Stella and I took a trip to one of our favorite spots, a nearby nature preserve. Red-wing blackbirds and yellow-bellied something-or-others, peeping frogs and trees for climbing. It’s one of my favorite places to spend a weekend afternoon. 

In an ideal world perhaps I would be less affected by gray skies and wet weather. I guess the upside of Seasonal Affective Disorder is that my November malaise yields reliably to May enthusiasm. If I can't be more even-keeled, at least I can take advantage of the upswing.