Light and Momentary

And home

Phew, long drives tire me out. I may not be able to tell you much more than that, because Sandy disapproves of my using a hand to type. If I'm going to spend two nights away from home, she thinks, she should be entitled to two-handed petting when I return.

So, briefly: we had a lovely visit, and a smooth trip home, in which I was pretty calm about the traffic around Chicago.

I have the new Katherine Center novel on my Kindle and I am going to read it in bed after I do a few minutes' worth of dishes and a few minutes' worth of stretching. See you tomorrow.

Still on the road

Stella and I were going to make a speedy trip: out on Sunday, back on Monday. But Becky said, "It's such a long way to drive to stay for such a short time. What if you stay over on Monday night too?" So here we are. Becky rearranged her workday on short notice to free up some time, and we've had the nicest day. We drank coffee on the deck in the cool of the morning. We persuaded the slightly standoffish cat to be a little friendlier. We walked around a nearby lake in the afternoon, the two of us and our teenaged daughters, and stopped for ice cream afterward. We toasted marshmallows around the fire this evening and laughed uproariously.

Tomorrow we will head back to Gladlyville, and I will need to get my syllabi and course website finalized for the course that starts on Monday. It's been a lovely little slice of vacation time here, though. Becky and I exchange dozens of texts a day and talk on the phone regularly, but there's just no substitute for in-person time. I am soaking it up.

From the road, briefly

Stella and I had an uneventful trip, my favorite kind, in which we listened to a lot (a lot a lot) of Taylor Swift.

Tonight we saw Becky's firstborn performing in outdoor Shakespeare. We were sitting together on a picnic blanket on the ground and the woman in front of us said, "Watch out for that snake." Yes, friends, it was a SNAKE, watching Shakespeare right next to my own personal feet. He seemed pretty curious about the playgoers -- he slithered over to the person beside us and curled up right next to him -- as in, inches away from him -- flicking his tongue in and out curiously. "Sir," we said, "sir, there's a snake right next to you." 

"Oh," he said blandly, much as if I had told him there was a Beetle next to him (of the Volkswagen variety, not the scarabaeid sort).

I was kind of proud of myself for not flinging myself bodily away from the snake or shrieking disruptively, but that guy was astonishingly chill about having a snake in his personal space.

I watched the last scene while standing up in the back, creating an anti-snake force field by the power of my mind.

 

Summer fun

Tomorrow I’m waking up early and taking Stella to see my dear friend Becky and her family. We’ll report in from the road. 

Hard Times, come again no more

I finished Hard Times today. I'm glad I reread it; I'd still put it in the bottom tier of Dickens novels. 

I think my favorite thing about Dickens is his ability to spin up a complicated plot and tie up the loose ends in improbable but generally agreeable ways. Do I find the plot of Our Mutual Friend plausible? Absolutely not. Do I love it anyway? Yes, I do.

Hard Times offers a smaller canvas, and the ending feels hasty and forced to me. Dickens is the king of the useful coincidence, but the discovery of the missing person is just a leetle too much for me. I might be more tolerant if it contained more likable or amusing characters.

We have now AMDRAL-ed our way through 11 of the 14 completed Dickens novels. The three remaining are all doorstop-sized: Barnaby Rudge, Dombey & Son, and The Old Curiosity Shop. If you have a vote for next May, let me know.

Deceivers, the deceived, agency, helplessness

As I've been reading Hard Times I've been observing the relationship between Louisa and James Harthouse with some dissatisfaction. Dashing deceivers are a thing for Dickens (and in plenty of other 19th-century fiction), but I was musing to myself about the contrast between Louisa and Lydia Bennet. Lydia seems to me to have more agency. Is it a terrible idea to elope with Wickham? Obviously. Is it a freely chosen terrible idea? I think so. Louisa, though, seems to be on a descending escalator rather than a staircase -- not so much choosing her own path as being pulled along it.

So I was already grumbling to myself about female Dickens characters at the moment of crisis for Louisa. You should skip the last sentence in this paragraph if you haven't finished Part Two yet, but what does she do? (Here, I will turn the text yellow because it is an unexpected development. Just highlight it with your mouse if you want to read it.) She throws herself helplessly at the feet of a different man, that's what.

Harrumph, I say. Harrumph!

Same song, different verse

It is better to finish the race at the back of the pack than to sit on the couch and wish you were faster. I have been telling myself this for years. But wow, do I struggle to believe it's really true.

I have been dithering about this August triathlon idea. The one near Joe's new city has a lake swim, and my feelings about lake swims are well documented. There's also an August sprint triathlon about an hour from me with a pool swim, but neither Joe nor my college roommate will be at that one.

Despite the dithering, I've completed (or approximated) the first two workouts in Matt Fitzgerald's basic triathlon training plan. Today was the first time I'd gone for a swim since my June 2021 triathlon, and I would rate the workout as a solid Not Dreadful. Pete asked me to climb with him this evening, and I agreed. I am recording a few modest accomplishments from the climbing session:

1. I finished my first outdoor route of the year, even though topping out is so scary that I always think about climbing down instead. (Topping out = climbing over the edge of the big artificial boulder to the pathway in the middle, so you can walk back down to your starting point.) 
2. I fell off the overhang-y part of the outdoor boulder while attempting a move that was too hard for me. My tendency is to announce that I can't do the move, which is only sometimes true. I don't like falling backwards to the ground, but I lived to tell the tale.
3. I climbed a top-rope slab route for the first time in years. Slab routes are the opposite of overhang -- they tilt a little bit away from the climber. They tend to be reachy and balance-y, and I used to say emphatically that I didn't even want to try them. But I saw one tonight that looked like it might be fun, and Pete offered to belay me. And what do you know? It was totally fun.

There is a friendly little group of middle-aged-lady back-of-the-packers here in town, and I know that if I start showing up to events again they will be welcoming. Telling myself that I need to be in better shape before I can go back is unnecessary and unproductive. And yet-- I keep telling myself that I need to be in better shape before I go back.

The feet with a mind of their own

Does anyone remember when there was a snake living in my sage plant two years ago? I blogged about the morning that something deep inside my brain heard its rustle and propelled me in the opposite direction, and only afterward did I say to myself, "Oh, yes, that was a snake."

Last night I was walking Sandy after dark and a similar thing happened: a snake had draped itself in sigmoid curves across the sidewalk. Sandy didn't even notice it until we were almost on top of it, but I found myself unexpectedly in the street. That same reptile-fearing thing in my primitive brain recognized the shape and whisked me off the sidewalk before I even articulated the thought "that is a snake."

Thankfully there were no cars nearby (and, unlike the last time, no college students to wonder why I was hurling myself violently into the road). It's intriguing to me that my unconscious pattern-recognition system is so tuned in to those particular sights and sounds, and that it has the capacity to move me briskly and involuntarily to a different spot. 

Undecided

One of my college roommates is doing an August triathlon not far from Joe's new city, and I am thinking about registering for it. I am still undecided, though.

Triathlon training is a non-trivial commitment, and I am way out of that groove. Since I started lifting in 2021, I have struggled to be consistent with endurance training. It's one of those self-perpetuating cycles: I don't run very much because I'm in bad running shape, which means I remain in bad running shape. I am discontented with my level of aerobic fitness, and also daunted by the prospect of addressing it in a consistent and systematic way.

This is objectively silly. I think I will be much happier in August if I commit to doing the thing -- showing up for the workouts and rebuilding the fitness -- than if I flail around in anticipatory distress. It is true that the runs will be hot and sweaty; it is true that I will need to adjust my priorities to fit in triathlon training.

I'm not quite ready to pull the trigger. You can probably see me standing on the edge of the pool, worried that it will be too cold if I jump in.

The Manta Ray Shawl

Kate Davies is hosting a summer knitting community: a mystery knit-along, a series of book discussions, and a bunch of new pattern releases, all with a Margery Allingham theme. I had never heard of Margery Allingham, but I am a fan of Golden Age detective fiction and I do love a good summer MKAL. So I jumped in.

I've read and enjoyed the first two books and KD's essays on the books. I made a hat for Joe's girlfriend from one of the new patterns. (There's an announcement tucked into that last sentence: Joe's girlfriend has been deemed knit-worthy.) But I am fretting a bit about my yarn selections for the MKAL shawl. 

Mostly I think it will be fine. I'm making a big stripy diamond in colors I like. Stella thinks it looks pleasingly like a stingray.

As always, the devil is in the details. I was instructed to choose five colors. I was supposed to have a hundred grams each of a light color, a dark color, and a pop color, and 75 grams each of two medium colors that would play nicely with the others.

I chose a pretty aqua for my light color and a deep deep blue-green for my dark color. It probably looks black in the picture, but imagine if navy blue and the deepest forest green had a baby. That's my dark color. I chose a vivid lime green for my pop color. For the medium toned colors I chose a pretty mossy grassy green and a skein of self-striping sock yarn in blues and greens. 

But two things are niggling at me. One is the yarn quantities, which I did exactly backward: I have 100g of the medium colors, and <100g of all three of the dominant colors. Before I cast on I thought to myself, "Oh, I only used a little of my dark color in the Princess Bride shawl. It will be fine." Now I am tearing through it an alarming rate. I knew that I had used a little of the lime green color in my pandemic hat, but I only remembered today that I had used the aqua as the contrast color in Alex's Space Invaders socks. 

This seems like a setup for an un-fun game of yarn chicken later in the summer.

The second niggly thing is that there is a whole lot of lime green. I read "pop color" and thought "occasional accent," but no-- there's a reason I was instructed to acquire >400 yards of it. I am not wild about big blocks of lime green, but big blocks of lime green are about to happen.

Well, that's how it goes, I guess: you buy the MKAL ticket, you take the MKAL ride.

June 1

I think approximately 12 minutes have elapsed since May 31, 2002, but somehow the baby who was born that day is now a college graduate with a fancy new job in a fun city. He came home after finals for a couple of weeks. Yesterday we celebrated his birthday and today he drove off to his empty new apartment.

I asked his girlfriend how she was doing, since they will be dating long-distance. "It's hard to be the one who gets left behind," I said, nodding appreciatively at my own wisdom. And then when he pulled out of the driveway, all of my cheerful enthusiasm evaporated and I started to cry. It IS hard to be the one who gets left behind, my friends; it really is. 

This morning I slumped around feeling sad about how these children keep growing up and leaving me, but this afternoon I went to the climbing gym with Pete and braved the longest routes for the first time in a while. I am out of practice with the mental component of climbing high, but the physical piece of it felt great -- I found myself thinking the very same thoughts I blogged about in this old post. I came home and did some therapeutic gardening, yanking out lily of the valley until I had a colossal heap of it and crescents of dirt under every fingernail. I have been gardening up a storm since the spring semester ended, and I have decreed that the front beds are going to be spare and spacious for a while.

Although it's June now I have not yet finished Hard Times. More than once now, while AMDRALing my way through a Dickens novel, I have discovered that I didn't give it a fair shake the first time I read it. I'm so glad I reread Our Mutual Friend and Martin Chuzzlewit, because I enjoyed them much more the second time through. I'm still waiting for that particular flavor of magic to strike in Hard Times; no dice so far. Nicole the Victorian lit professor and occasional commenter is a Hard Times fan, so perhaps she'll chime in at some point.

This month I will have two weeks in which I am mostly though not entirely off, and two weeks in which I'll be teaching. I'm teaching a long summer class this time around; it will stretch all through July and the beginning of August. We shall see how that schedule works out.

Goals for the month:

1. Blog daily
2. Exercise daily, defining exercise broadly
3. Track produce consumption and see how it feels
4. Write (for work) 4 days a week
5. Finish Hard Times and most of my next Trollope novel

It's the Eleventh Annual May Dickens Read-Along!

Welcome to EAMDRAL, the Eleventh Annual May Dickens Read-ALong. AMDRALing is a spring tradition in these parts, and this will be the quickest one we've ever had. So far we are a small but mighty crew of 3 or 4, but this is the easiest-ever AMDRAL to catch up on if you need a little more Dickens in your life.

In the book's early chapters we meet Mr. Gradgrind, the fact-loving fancy-fearing father of offspring whose numbers include Adam Smith Gradgrind and Malthus Gradgrind. We are more focused on his daughter Louisa, though, whose first appearance in the story makes it clear to the reader that she finds her day-in-day-out diet of just-the-facts-ma'am to be a wearying existence.

We also meet Mr. Bounderby, who reminds me of my most difficult relative. He boasts the most and infers the worst, and he seems determined to keep it that way. When Mr. Gradgrind asks Sissy Jupe, "What's in the bottle you are carrying?" Mr. Bounderby answers immediately and falsely: gin. (Sissy is actually bringing a blend of soothing oils to her father, about whom more soon.)

Jump in and join us! 

It's AMDRAL season again

Finals week starts tomorrow, which means it's the time of year when a middle-aged mom's fancy lightly turns to nice fat Dickens novels. The first AMDRAL was in 2014, believe it or not. That means this year is the Eleventh Annual May Dickens Read-ALong, and we are going to read Hard Times.

Hard Times is the shortest Dickens novel, clocking in at just over 100K words. If you want a nice little snacklet of a Dickens novel, this is your year. I haven't read it since 2009, but in my recollection he has a lot of Emphatic Thoughts about education. As I wind down a semester I'll remember for its student submissions bristling with AI-generated text, I am also having some Emphatic Thoughts about education. I guess I'll see how well our thoughts align.

I am going to dive in on May 15, which will give me time to get all the grades submitted and respond to the inevitable emails complaining about the grades. I'll aim to read two or three chapters a day and finish up in early June. Join me for the quickest-ever AMDRAL!

Clothed with the sun

I dithered for weeks about going to see the eclipse. Mondays are a heavy teaching day for me and it seemed a little self-indulgent to cancel all my classes for personal travel. Midwestern weather is often uncertain in April, and I hated the idea of canceling all my classes, trekking to the totality zone, and then watching it rain.

But I really wanted to see the eclipse.

Elwood took Monday off and procured eclipse glasses. We pulled Stella out of school. I moved two classes online and handed off the third to a pair of TAs. We picked up Joe and his girlfriend, and we took the dog along because I was worried about getting stuck in traffic on the way home. It was a full car. The forecast was iffy, with clouds forecast across the zone we could reasonably drive to.

We weren't entirely in agreement about where we were going. I was happy to be on the edge of the totality zone; Elwood wanted to go deeper in. He prevailed, but I was battling grumpiness about it-- worried that we were driving into heavier clouds, worried that we were going to hit unmanageable traffic.

Through our eclipse glasses we could see the sun disappearing behind the moon. A sizable chunk had vanished when we stopped for lunch, and the moon marched steadily across the sun's face as we drove. When we reached our destination we didn't have long to wait.

We were on a property owned by a congregation of Catholic sisters, with a long-term care facility and a working farm. The residents were out on the lawn in their wheelchairs, eclipse glasses over their faces. There was another gathering, with younger attendees, down at the farm. "Eclipse party this way," the sign said, and so we walked that way. The farmer was unenthusiastic about Sandy's presence near her livestock, though, so I took her back out onto the little road between the farm and the parking lot. I stayed there, alone with Sandy, while the magic happened.

You've already heard a zillion people tell you what it was like. The farm's rooster crowed, the streetlights all kicked on, the temperature dropped. At the moment when the sun slipped entirely behind the moon, the people watching erupted in spontaneous gasps and cheers.

I took off my eclipse glasses, and gazed.

"Clothed with the sun" -- I've heard that phrase more times than I can count. It was unforgettable, though, to see the moon clothed with the sun, the ghostly corona gleaming though the dimness. I loved the Annunciation coincidence, too. Abigail Favale put it beautifully: 

Whenever I see the moon, I think of Mary, she who most perfectly reflects the uncreated light. How incredible to watch a total eclipse on the feast of the Annunciation--that moment when, at her assent, the divine and human touch, becoming one.

— Abigail Favale (@FavaleAbs) April 8, 2024

I prayed; I watched; I stood still in wonder. The sun peeked around the other side of the moon, a dazzling golden-orange. Tears slid down my face as I put my eclipse glasses back on. "That," I thought to myself, "is why the word 'wondrous' exists."

Stella came hurrying toward me. "That," she said, "was the coolest experience of my ENTIRE LIFE!"

Days later, I'm still thinking about it. I've been thinking about the lunar meteorites that have left the moon's surface cratered and pockmarked. I didn't know the reason for the diamond ring effect or for Baily's beads, but I'm still thinking about the metaphor: the way that light and beauty can shine forth from damaged places. I'm thinking about that brief hushed twilight in the middle of the afternoon. I'm glad I was alone during totality, because I don't know if the stillness and the strangeness would have felt quite the same way in a crowd. I'm thinking about all the gifts in my life that I don't always recognize as gifts. A moon that was a slightly different size or a slightly different distance from the earth would mean a world with no eclipses.

I'm grateful for a world in which there are eclipses.

Joyful Noise

One of the musicians at our parish asked Stella and me to sub this weekend, and so we went to their Thursday night rehearsal. It was bigger than expected; he's playing for three of the masses this weekend, which meant there were a bunch of musicians at the rehearsal. 

I'm still thinking about how much fun it was. The pianist is an interesting guy. I would 100% pay money to hear him play and sing if he had a gig in town -- he has a nice voice, and he's a far better pianist than I am. But he cannot -- just cannot -- read music. He's been in this role for many months now, and I keep expecting him to get more comfortable with reading music. But no: someone asked him to play the alto line in the Gloria and he called me over to do it instead. At the same time he has a deeper understanding of music theory than I do, a better intuition for the complex interrelationships of messy jazz chords.

I guess that's my happy spot: in the middle of an enthusiastic crowd of competent amateurs. There was another 15-year-old girl there, happy to see Stella again, and she and I were weaving harmonies above and below the melody line. Her dad sang baritone across from us. Near the end we all sang Sanctuary together and I reveled in the depth of the improvised harmonies.

Sometimes with church volunteering it's easy to let the quibbles interfere with the joy: that one participant who says we shouldn't sing anything social-justice-y (lyrics based on Matthew 25 are right out when she's planning the music), or the older lady who keeps trying to tell Stella what to do in a slightly unkind way. But what I want to remember is our loose circle around the piano, with the tabernacle light flickering on the other side of the church.

"Lord, prepare me," we sang, "to be a sanctuary, pure and holy." We sing this fairly often after communion at our parish, so we slipped easily into harmony -- stretching our voices across the octaves, the accompaniment spare and gentle underneath. "A sanctuary for you," we concluded. The final chord hung in the air and collectively we breathed it in: the goodness and the joy of making music together in that sacred space.

In which I hit a limit

I used to find it really daunting to host holiday dinners for 10 people, and then I got comfortable with it. It's a lot of work, especially because we make everything from scratch, but it's how we do things here and everybody is used to it. I'm accustomed to making special dinners for 12 or 14 people and the kids are great about pitching in. This year, though, we leveled up, and it was A Lot. This year we were planning an Easter meal for 18, and the jump from 14 to 18 is bigger than you might think.

Let me be clear: I am genuinely happy that our kids all wanted to be here and that they like bringing their friends and girlfriends to our house. I love to see my SIL from the West Coast; I don't get enough chances to spend time with her. And yet I was a flaming stressball last week, because we live in a small and crowded house.

I imagined myself venting to my college roommates about my stress, and I knew exactly what they would say in response: go somewhere else, Jamie. So I rented a space owned by the city, and that worked out well. We now had enough tables and chairs and bathroom stalls for the number of guests we were expecting, which alleviated one source of stress. 

But the thing I realized yesterday is that feeding a homemade meal to 18 guests is past the point of diminishing returns for me: the satisfaction I get from cooking for that many people is outweighed by the immense amount of effort (and expense) required to get the meal on the table. It felt like I spent hours browning things: lamb cubes for the main dish, Brussels sprouts to go on the side. We couldn't roast the broccoli and the sweet potatoes at the same time because our oven isn't big enough. I chopped a whole head of garlic for potato salad and it wasn't enough. 

It worked out. My kids enjoyed the food, and there was enough of it. But we didn't do an Easter egg hunt for the first time in many years, because I was too tired to countenance it. It would have been better, I think to outsource some food prep and make the egg hunt happen.

It seems likely that we'll have more big gatherings in the future, as our kids get bigger and bring more friends and (I hope) add grandkids to the mix. I do always want to be welcoming. I also want to record some thoughts about how to make it work better in the future:

1. Buy a ham in addition to the lamb. Ham is cheap and easy, and younger guests who are skeptical about lamb stew may be happier with a ham sandwich. 
2. Ask more people to bring more things, and buy more prepared foods. Potluck is the way to go when the numbers get big.
3. Make desserts in big rectangular pans, so everybody can get a taste of everything. Desserts in round cake pans don't divide nicely into big numbers. If you slice an 8- or 9-inch round cake into rough squares so it yields more pieces, some people will just get crispy edges and some people will just get gooey middle, which is not how it should be.
4. Pay attention to this one, Future Jamie: don't make anything that requires browning, at all, even if you think you don't mind browning things. You don't mind browning things for 10 or 12 or 14 people, but browning things for 18 induces an alarming depletion of your will to live.

I made a version of a Nigella Lawson lamb stew that we all enjoyed. I put four onions, four carrots, a stalk of celery, and a bunch of garlic into the food processor, and then I browned the resulting mush in my Instant Pot in a mix of butter and olive oil. Elwood procured five pounds of cubed lamb stew meat, and I shook it in a bag with flour, paprika, salt, and pepper before I browned it in oil (in a never-ending succession of batches). I deglazed the pot with white wine. and piled in all the browned lamb with its accumulated juices along with the browned veggie mush. On top I added two pounds of small white beans, which I had precooked until they were just tender. For umami I added a big spoonful of tomato paste and a few healthy shakes of Worcestershire sauce. The beans needed a boatload of salt -- we're talking 4 or 5 teaspoons of salt here. I added about three cups of flavorful stock, and cooked it under pressure for 45 minutes. At that point I let the pressure come down naturally, and tasted for salt. I scraped up the browned bits from the bottom of the pot, and stirred them in. 

Pete posted a picture on Instagram, with the caption "don't know what was in this lamb-bean thing but it was exquisite."

We wound up only having 15 people after all -- one of Marie's friends didn't come, and Elwood's parents stayed home because his mother wasn't feeling good. It was a good day. I was grateful for a quiet night afterward.

The Trollope Project Continues

You might remember that I am working my way through the 47 novels of Anthony Trollope, with the goal of reading them all by the time I'm 60. I had planned to read one per season, but I'm on Trollope novel #4 for 2024 and it's only March. Today I attended a virtual meeting of the Trollope Society, and my husband laughed out loud when I told him about it afterward. So maybe I'll tell you all a little bit about it too.

After I read Marion Fay, I turned right around and started reading Cousin Henry. It's about an old man who is torn about where to leave his property, and it has a deeply unlikeable title character. It seems like a pretty bold authorial choice, actually, to name your book after the character whose downfall your readers will all be hoping to see -- as if Dickens had gone with "The Adventures of Fagin" instead of "Oliver Twist." It's only about 200 pages long, which is practically a short story in Trollope's world, and as soon as I finished it I plunged right into Orley Farm.

I loved Orley Farm. It might be the book I'd recommend to someone who wanted to read a standalone Trollope novel. It's much heftier than either Cousin Henry or Marion Fay, but I found that it moved briskly. At one point I texted my family to tell them about an exciting plot development. (They found it less riveting than I did; go figure.) It asks a bunch of interesting questions: how do we balance justice and mercy? What's our reaction when an extraordinarily unsympathetic character demands justice? How much of a court case is about truth, and how much is about lawyerly skill? 

When I finished I thought to myself, "I wish I could talk to a pal about Trollope." And LO, the Trollope Society exists specifically for people who want to talk about Trollope. Their spring book is Lady Anna, and I decided to jump in and read the first chunk of it in preparation for their initial online discussion.

A retired American chemistry teacher spoke for about 25 minutes to a surprising number of attendees (5 screens of them! 5! for a conversation about this totally obscure novel!). She had clearly put a lot of effort into investigating this book's background, and she had also prepped discussion questions for people to chat about in breakout rooms.

This is the part that made my husband burst out laughing: I told him that she said, "Now I know that this book is quite a page-turner, and many of you will have already read ahead. Be sure you don't share any spoilers in your breakout room!"

"A page-turner," he repeated to himself, chortling helplessly. "A page-turner!" 

I had started to think I was being a little nutty about Trollope, as I embarked on novel #21. But after this meeting today it's clear to me that I know nothing -- nothing -- about real Trollope fandom. 

Let them eat cake

We had friends over for dinner last night, and yesterday afternoon I was mostly thinking about what I wanted to make for dinner. (I settled on this NYT chickpea stew, with added cumin/coriander, served over rice -- tasty and easy). But at the last minute I threw a cake in the oven, and it reminded me that homemade cake is a particularly delicious form of alchemy.

First you preheat your oven to 350, and hit your 8-inch round cake pan(s) with non-stick spray. I always cut out a quick untidy circle of parchment paper to line the bottom of the pan, but this is not essential.

The nice thing about a Victoria sponge cake recipe is that it's easy to remember and to scale. For two 8-inch rounds, take two sticks of softened butter and beat them with 225 grams of sugar (this equals one cup if you prefer volume measurements, but I promise it's worthwhile to get comfortable with measuring by weight). When this mixture is fluffy, add in four eggs, and beat the mixture thoroughly. If you want vanilla, or almond extract, or lemon zest, or whatever else, splash some in. If you keep self-raising flour in your house, add in 225 grams; if you don't, you'll want about 5 grams of salt, about 7 grams of baking powder, and about 210 grams of ordinary flour. (This is approximately a cup and three-quarters, but you probably don't need me to tell you that flour is hard to measure accurately by volume. May I suggest an inexpensive kitchen scale?) You'll want a couple of tablespoons of milk as well, just enough to give you a nice ploppable consistency.

Divide this mixture across two pans, and bake for about 25 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. Let the layers cool in the pans for about 10 minutes, and then turn them out onto a cooling rack and leave them alone until they're cool enough not to melt your filling.

If you're in a hurry, slap some lemon curd or good jam in between the layers and dust the top with confectioner's sugar. If you're not in a hurry, I'm partial to this chocolate sour cream frosting.

You can easily scale the recipe up if you want a majestic three-layer cake, or down if you only need a single layer. It's a super-simple formula: for each layer, you need 4 ounces (113g) each of butter, sugar, and self-raising flour, 2 eggs, and a splash of milk. Speedy, fluffy, golden, and more delicious than it has any right to be. Happy baking!

Waiting my whole life

"Your children are not your children," I said to myself very firmly a week ago. Stella and I were talking about whether she wanted to continue piano, and she was not sure that she did. I have tried a bunch of different approaches across the years that Stella has taken piano: I have encouraged and offered space and coaxed and helped with technical details and stepped back to let her figure stuff out. I have done what I could do to support her in learning piano, but this is a true fact: in the end she has to decide if she wants to do the learning.

"I don't understand why Stella doesn't play the piano for fun," I said to Elwood. "You mean like everyone else in this house except for you?" he replied, to which I said "...oh." I have furnished a music room full of instruments and books, a room I would have loved to have access to when I was a kid, but that doesn't mean any of my own kids will want to linger there.

One night I said, "Hey, Stella, you know there are only like 4 chords in most Taylor Swift songs, right? Want to try to figure out some Taylor Swift?" She sat down and sang All Too Well with me, but her heart wasn't really in it.

This was the point at which I got stern with myself: she is under no obligation to play the piano for fun. She is not responsible for my lingering issues about what teenagers should or shouldn't do with their musical abilities. She can quit piano lessons if she chooses to do so.

But maybe she won't quit quite yet. Because yesterday I said, "You know, I was thinking that All Too Well would work better for us if we played it in E instead of C -- want to try it?" And vocally E is probably a better key, but I was fumbling around trying to hit all four sharps. "Maybe D," I said, and moved it down a step.

"Mom," said Stella, watching my hands, "can you show me how to do chords?" 

This baffled me, because her piano teacher pushes her students to learn a ton of technique. Stella has learned the I-IV-V chord sequences for every single key. But here's what I didn't understand until yesterday: she never really knew why she was learning them.

Yesterday her inner lightbulb blinked on with spotlight brilliance. If you want to play All Too Well, all you need is four chords: I - V - VI - IV. The original version is C-G-Am-F, but we like it better as D-A-Bm-G. If you want to play it in G-flat, more power to you. But the sequence is the same the whole way through, so once you've got it in your head you can sail through the whole 10-minute version if you're so inclined. 

We sat together on the piano bench for a little while, but it wasn't long before she was playing it all on her own. "Wait," she said, "Clean uses the same chords in the same sequence?" 

We sang in unison; we sang in harmony. I flung my arms around her and said, "I've been waiting my whole life for this!" I can buy myself instruments and books, and I can find a lot of joy in solitary practice. But there's no joy quite like the joy of making music together, and I can't sing harmony with myself.

She spent a long time at that piano yesterday, much to my delight. I don't know if this newfound interest will last; I'm not going to pressure her, obviously. But I do love to watch a lightbulb flicker on, and I will hold on tightly to the memory of our voices blending together as she learned how to do something new and satisfying.

More about muscles

I am following up on my post about pushups, which made at least two readers say "huh???" Let's see if I can be a little clearer this time around.

You already know that you can accomplish very similar actions using different combinations of muscles. Maybe you've taken voice lessons, and learned that inhalation is much more complicated than you ever suspected. If you use your diaphragm, you can inhale a larger volume of air with less neck tension. This is great for vocal quality and long-term vocal health. But lots of us have to practice for a long time if we want to move our diaphragms and keep our shoulders still when we inhale.

One of the reasons that training programs for runners include recovery runs is that we use our muscles in different ways on different days, even if we're completing the same action. When you run on fatigued legs, you engage different groups of muscle fibers. This process of learning to recruit a wider array of muscle fibers makes you a stronger, more fatigue-resistant runner over time.

When you do a pushup, you can engage different muscles to different extents. You can't do a pushup with zero trunk engagement; you can't do a pushup with zero arm engagement. But your pecs can do more or less of the work, depending on the signals they get from your brain. I don't have EMG results to show that I'm getting more pec activation when I think deliberately about using my pecs, but I know I can do a whole lot more reps with a whole lot less effort when I consciously call on the patterns of movement I learned while bench-pressing.

The next time you're sitting at a desk, try this: hold your arms close to your body, and push yourself away from the desk. Next, imagine that you are a smuggler, and you have a valuable golden orb tucked into each armpit. Squeeze your chest and your arms together tightly so that your hidden cargo doesn't go crashing to the floor, and hold that position while you push yourself away from the desk again. For me, there's a huge difference in the amount of oomph I can generate. Option A is mostly arms, option B is mostly pecs, and pecs exist precisely so you can push heavy things effectively.

Tell me if that makes more sense, please.