Oh. My. God.

Could he be any cuter?

thank God for the vacuum salesman

photo on flickr by Darren Hester

under a Creative Commons license

I had a crying fit today, out of the blue. Life is good: the kids are happy, the weather is beautiful, the garden is growing. (Except for the echinacea and the lilies which were eaten by the deer.) Yesterday my husband had relatively minor surgery (successful), and the reaction didn't hit me till today.

I hate hospitals: the smell, the stress, the officiousness, the waiting. We showed up an hour and a half early, as instructed. We were ushered into the little room with the curtain and the hospital bed and the call button. My husband donned his hospital gown and lay down on the hospital bed. I about had a hissy (internally). When the nurse hooked up his IV line, I wanted my mom.

A procession of nurses and doctors and aides and I-don't-know-who came into the room, all asking the same two questions: Why are you here? Which leg is getting operated on? They knew we knew, and we knew they knew. It was almost comedic except that they were very serious.

When I was a kid in the hospital, I was mistakenly prepped for the wrong operation. My mother just about brought the entire building down to rubble before they listened to her and realized their mistake. Who expects two children with the exact same name to be in the hospital at the same time?

Obviously procedures have improved. Not only did every single person ask those two questions; my husband and his surgeon both had to put identifying marks on the proper knee. It was reassuring, but odd. The redundancy seemed a tad extreme.

What's more important than not operating on the wrong limb (or person)? Not getting sued. Every single employee has to be covered in the event of a mistake. You can't sue the doctor, or the nurse, or anyone who comes in contact with you.

Yes, it's important, potentially a life-and-death situation. But it reminds me of the hoops we now go through to fly. When you are not allowed to bring a banana on the plane because it constitutes more than four ounces of a gel, we call that Security Theater. You'll be safe from terrorists because they won't be able to steal your banana to make a bomb, right? It is technically possible, after all.

More likely, the powers that be are taking steps not to make you safe, but to make you think you're safe. If security guards take away a plain old banana, they obviously found any hidden guns or bombs in suitcases. Didn't they?

Although in the hospital's case, I think protecting themselves was more the point.

But none of that is my point. (Rambling must be another side-effect of stress.) After they wheeled my husband away, I sat in the waiting room for hours. This was the orthopedic wing: people were getting their joints sanded and planed through incisions almost too small to warrant a band-aid. The tension level was not high. And yet, as I sat and waited and tried not to listen to Judge Judy or Sally Jesse Raphael or whoever was on the TV, I worried.

The scenario hit all the cliches bang on the head. We waited, eavesdropping on the employee at the desk as she took phone calls. Maybe it's news about my husband (wife, grandfather, whoever). I had to fight the urge to ask her if my husband was still in surgery or in the recovery room. (She was a volunteer. I doubt they'd give her the responsibility of reporting anything that could be bad.)

We could all hear the surgeon's footsteps as he walked down the hallway to the waiting room to give the news of a person's surgery. And it was a long hallway, with a hard floor. The surgeon's tread was loud and seemed to last forever. It echoed, too.

Usually he would sit down with the relative right there in the waiting room, pulling out charts and pictures and going over follow-up care while in the background Judge Judy presided over people throwing their own hissy fits. Reactions were muted: the knee was good, or maybe not so good. It wasn't open-heart surgery. Lives were not in the balance.

But when the surgeon came to give me my news, he led me out of the waiting room, partway down the echoey hallway, and into a very small consulting room containing only two chairs, a side table, and a box of tissues. We all know that means very bad news. (They should save the surgeon some time and just tape Dr. McCoy's voice saying, "He's dead, Jim.") (Sorry, tasteless joke.) (Rambling again.)

When he pulled out the pictures of ligaments and cartilage and bones and told me about the procedure, I had to stop him. "Is my husband okay? Did he make it?" The surgeon looked at me like I was nuts.

So I went back and sat with my husband until he was pronounced fit to go, and then we got in the car and went to Subway and bought dinner for the kids. He walked into the restaurant and placed the order himself. No problem. All's well.

And then today, I sat in my lawn chair and looked at the green grass and the trees and the fluffy clouds in a perfect blue sky and I cried.

Luckily for all of us a neighbor stopped by to chat and very kindly did not mention my tear-stained face. We talked about houses and the economy while my daughter romped with his dog in the yard.

And then I made dinner, and turned away a door-to-door vacuum salesman, and sat on the couch with my kids to watch The Daily Show, and cleaned the cat box. Just an ordinary day. With a few unexplainable tears.

Holy bloody eyeballs, Batman!

Daily double car-line waits mean small, easy projects get done. Also I now read more books in audio than print. (Weird: I still experience disorientation when switching from audio to print and back.)

I listened to Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book while making this bloody eyeball bag, which is from the pattern "Catch His Eye" by Leathra for the The Anticraft. (Note: The book is charming, not gruesome. I highly recommend it.)

Green and brown yarns for the iris are my approximation of hazel: inner ring of brown, middle ring of green, and thin spike-stitched outer ring of brown.

Alterations: I can’t count so the bag is bigger than planned (about 80 stitches around the outside of the iris). Extra ring in iris (see above). I was free and easy with increases throughout (see “I can’t count” above). Added an extra row of red around the top. I-cord handles, threaded a bit differently (I had the wrong number of loops).

Photo notes: I cheated and stuffed the bag with fiberfill for the photo. Without it, the sides are straighter and the iris puckers around the edge. I think I’m going to make a small padded bottom for the bag to correct the iris puckering. Laser eye surgery, if you will.

I wish my family had eyes in every color so I could make each of them a different eyeball. Ah well, the rest of my tribe have plain brown eyes. (I’m stretching it a bit to call mine hazel.)

I bet my son will want a red-irised eye anyway. And my daughter? Icy-blue like a wolf. Or so I hope, for variety’s sake.

My husband wouldn’t be caught dead with a bag of any type, so maybe I’ll make his violet. Ha.

Cut

photo by Esther17 on flickr under a Creative Commons license

What a thrill ----

My thumb instead of an onion.

The top quite gone

Except for a sort of hinge

Of skin,

A flap like a hat,

Dead white.

Then that red plush.

Sylvia Plath

Well, it wasn't quite that bad; in fact, it was a coin toss whether to go to the doctor or nail it down myself with band-aids. When it kept bleeding after several hours, the doctor came up heads.

A vial of Special Glue Intended Only For Skin was applied*, a band-aid duly wrapped around it, and I was on my way. Well, after having a completely embarrassing adrenalin rush ("I feel faint") in which I was instructed to lie on the floor.

Y'know, I always thought that people who got faint at the sight of blood were just chickens. That the reaction was completely under their control. Well, it isn't.

Which isn't to say I'm not a chicken. But it most definitely was not under my control.

What I did have under my control was the decision to open a stubborn bit of plastic packaging with a dull pair of scissors held like a knife, blade-side up, my hand pressing the plastic bit down onto it. If I had seen one of my kids doing this, I would have screeched at them not to be so stupid, you're going to cut yourself like that.

Well, it was (stupid) and I did (cut myself like that). D'oh!

* Isn't it ironic that the doctor's Special Glue is, in fact, superglue? It really is great at sticking to skin, as anyone who has worked with it knows (sometimes painfully so).

How about a recipe?

This is not a photo of a recipe. It's a vintage picture of my husband and son at Niagara Falls. I wanted to put a picture in this post, but the food wasn't particularly photogenic. My kid is. ;-)

Here's a recipe that my kids and I enjoyed last night  (hubby is in southern Florida visiting his dad). It's based on one by smitten kitchen, blanded down a bit for my kids' taste and my cupboard's  lack of ingredients.

I love the smitten kitchen site. (Until just now I've been misreading it as smitten kitten. Huh.) I made one of her salads the other day, with escarole and hazelnuts, and the whole family gobbled it down. The pickled red onion was kind of like eating firecrackers, but we liked it. (In very small quantities.) Escarole is new to me. It's a pain to prepare, and there seems to be an awful lot of waste, but it tasted pretty good. In a rare move, I followed the recipe exactly, which involved finding the escarole and hazelnuts (and the pecorino romano cheese, for that matter) in the local grocery store. Even an employee didn't know if they had hazelnuts, so I had to search for them. (Baking aisle. Not with nuts in the produce section.)

Anyway, I'm not sharing that recipe, because it's hers, she does it better, and it's only a click away. (Mom, see the underlined word "salads" above? Click on it.) What I made was a bastardized version of  her roasted butternut squash and couscous recipe. I trust that it is delicious, but my pantry doesn't have preserved lemons in it, and while I do have some fresh parsley (rare for me in winter, because I hate to pay for what grows plentifully in my garden), "fresh" doesn't quite describe its condition after a week in the fridge. 

Also my kids have what I'll call a midwestern sense of taste. They love bland. They love spicy-hot. But strong flavors are another thing. The Girl dislikes parsley, and the Boy only recently accepted onions into his repertoire. So I was pretty sure the original recipe wouldn't fly at my table. (Too bad. I would have loved to make it as written.) 

1 3/4 cups Israeli couscous (the large kind) 

a butternut squash 

a large sweet onion 

olive oil 

salt and pepper 

grapes 

Set oven to 475 F (246 C). Put racks on upper and lower thirds of oven. 

Peel and cut the squash into 1/4" dice (standard quilt seam allowance). That's the hardest part.

Cut the onion in the shape/size you want the pieces. I cut it in quarters, then thin slices. 

Cover a baking sheet with foil, the nonstick kind if you have it. Lay out another piece of foil. 

Put some olive oil in a big bowl, just a slosh. Add the squash and toss till coated. Spread the squash on the foil-covered baking sheet. Salt and pepper it. 

Put the onion in the greasy bowl, adding more olive oil if necessary. Spread the onion on the foil sheet. Salt and pepper it. Fold up edges to make an envelope.* 

Put squash on top rack, and tuck onion packet wherever it fits. 

At this point, set a big pot of salted water on to boil. While the vegetables cook, boil the couscous until tender, about 10 minutes. Drain. Also while the vegetables are cooking, wash a handful or two of grapes and cut them in half. They've got to be really tasty grapes, not sour. 

Bake vegetables until squash is soft and sweet but not mushy, about 25 minutes. Turn around the baking pan halfway through if you remember. Turn the foil packet upside down while you're at it. Remove from oven. 

Taste the squash. If it's soft enough but hasn't gotten that roasted sweet flavor (it happens), drizzle a tiny bit of honey over it. 

Combine the couscous, squash, onion, and grapes in a bowl. Toss to mix. Add more salt and pepper if necessary. 

This makes a bland, barely sweet, comforting dish. The original is probably a lot more flavorful. Oh. I was going to squeeze some lemon juice over it, but forgot. 

*I suppose you could put the onion on another sheet, but my oven isn't  big enough for two baking sheets.

Bubbly

photo by malfet_ on flickr

under a Creative Commons license

written by my daughter during her English class:

Dear Shine,

What would I be without you? A clear sphere, obscure and unnoticed. A fragment of nothing, unseen. But with you we are a beautiful, lustrous orb of delicate light, a shimmering rainbow, a glowing sphere of joy. We would float across the world, we would visit the world from Paris to Detroit, we would drift from the bright golden ring, leaving the laughing children far behind and floating high into the sky to pose beside the sun.

I need you, Shine, to be who I am. I am an orb full of bright blue sky, and with you we are a crystal ball of flowing dreams and glittering fantasies. It won't be me and you because "me and you" makes us. 

Merry Kittehs to You

love to all,

Anne

What? It's December already?

For Halloween the Girl was a Sage, or Shaman. She made the mask with plaster, molding it to her face.

The Boy is a pirate, or a pirate/viking (he has a viking hat, not shown here). With identities obscured to protect the innocent, we have (from left to right) a beauty queen, football player, Bill the Prince of Insufficient Light (from Dilbert), pirate, grim reaper, Sage, Roman centurion or knight, and Oracle.

Blame Montessori education for the weird/awesome costume choices.

a wee sewing project

Yesterday my daughter handed me a little blue stuffed animal with one arm off. It belongs to her American history teacher, who uses this stuffed animal instead of the usual card or key as a "get out of the classroom free" token.

The teacher knows I sew, which is why she sent the stuffed animal home with my daughter for repair.

Sewing the arm back on was the work of a moment. I couldn't help adding a little shirt to keep the wee beastie warm.

And I couldn't help injecting a wee bit of political commentary. I do hope the teacher takes it in the gentle spirit in which it was given.

Stirring the Pot

Isn't there something magic about old, stained recipe cards? The worse the condition, the more they were used, I'd guess. 

When my grandmother moved into a nursing home, my mom went through all her stuff, giving much of it away and keeping only the treasures. Bless her, she deemed the recipe box a treasure. 

A couple visits ago, I had a good long sit at the scanner and made copies of some of the recipes. Grandma was a good, utilitarian cook, content to work from printed recipes, mostly from women's magazines and the sides of processed food boxes. I don't know how many copies she had of the same bran muffin recipe, but there were a lot. It probably made finding it in the thick box of recipes an easier task if there were ten or fifteen copies of it seeded around.

I most associate Grandma with two recipes: a fussy and time-consuming but delicious nut torte, and peanut butter cookies. The nut torte is (I assume) a family heirloom and was made only on special occasions. I think I tasted it only once, but I'll never forget the rich, dense cake and buttery frosting. Mmmm, nut torte. The peanut butter cookies were, as most peanut butter cookies are, delicious. What made them special was the addition of orange juice to the recipe. I baked them many times as a kid and grew up assuming that all peanut butter cookies had orange juice in them. Since then, however, I've never come across another. (I should probably write to Cook's Illustrated and ask if they found this odd ingredient in their research on peanut butter cookies.) 

When I discovered the recipe card for the cookies, I was thrilled -- and disconcerted. I'd come to the conclusion, over the years, that the orange juice must have been Grandma's secret addition. But the recipe card was not written in her hand; it was clipped from a magazine. If you'd like to try them, have a go:

Grandpa was a Renaissance man of sorts, interested in every possible subject and probably (he was a man, after all) an authority on them all. (I say that with great fondness, just so you know.) He must have driven Grandma nuts. In Grandma's collection of recipes, I found many that he typed out. (Grandma had a beautiful flowing longhand.) I wonder if he cooked these recipes, too, or gave them to Grandma to make. 

I don't remember much about Grandpa, but I'm willing to bet he cooked Fidel Castro's Black Beans. As a Socialist, how could he not? I can imagine him stirring the pot and discoursing on leftist politics with his dinner guests. Stirring the pot in different ways, now that I think about it.

I did a quick internet search for the origin of this recipe, but I haven't found it yet. Until I do, I'm going to picture Mr. Castro shaking my Grandpa's hand at a political rally and laughing at his jokes. They stand a bit apart from the crowd, smoking cigars, and Fidel gets a secretive look in his eyes. He motions Grandpa closer, then surreptitiously whispers his favorite recipe, handed down through generations of Cuban laborers.

So make some Fidel Castro Black Beans for your next supper, and talk politics (any sort you like) with your dinner guests. And Fidel, if you're reading this, thank you for the marvelous recipe. I hope you don't mind that I'm passing it on.

crafty bits

These were some of the Christmas gifts I made last year. The patterns were gathered from a month-long feature of quick and clever craft tutorials on the fabulous Sew, Mama, Sew! blog.

In the top picture are a tote bag, journal cover, lavender-and-rice heat pillow, zippered pouch, and placemats. They were so much fun to make, and working with fabrics I love made the process a pleasure, even through multiple gift sets under a wee bit of time pressure.

The pins are made with shrinky-dink plastic. I love this stuff, and can't even begin to think of all the things one could do with it. I mean, who would have thought of decorative heads for pins? Not me, that's for sure.

I Love My Computer

Wordle

Click to embiggen. (It's worth it because it links you to a gallery of wordles.)

It proves I truly am nuts. What great poetry, though:

Cat
Repairs household,
Determinedly squishing parts.
Yell, "Sit!"

Or how about this one:

Leopard, turned dwarf,
Bespeaks tipped glauca.

And

Manual old world,
Surprisingly beautiful.


Many thanks to Bad Fortune Cookie for wordling so wonderfully, I had to try it myself.

Now this is a book.

This book bespeaks passion. Why in the world would one write a book about dyeing with lichens if passionate curiosity did not drive you to do it?

I can just picture the author with a still damp handful of lichens, comparing them to some dusty old manual with completely inadequate illustrations. Is it Ochrolechia tartarea? Or perhaps Ochrolechia parella? Would it impart a royal purple hue? The book remains mute, and the library yields no further clues. "But I want to know!" she wails, then sets out determinedly with pencil, sketchbook, and the completely inadequate dusty old manual to do the research herself. After months of tramping through woodlands and rocky shores, sketchbooks filled with such treasures as "Hypogymnia physodes, underside of lobe showing the lower skin ruptured," cooking pots permanently colored odd hues of brown and purple, and reams of notes ("Cetraria glauca has been included as it will give a yellow to the wool with boiling water," and ""Found in Scotland only on trees"), she settles at the typewriter to share what she has found.

I want to be this person.

p.s. Thank you, Lysne, for lending me this book. It is absolutely amazing.

Talk About a Carbon-Based Life Form

This is what happens when you burn a cow.
Fortunately, I wasn't the culprit. Also fortunately, it was cooked outside on the grill, rather than in the house -- that would have smelled awful. Although that's also why it burned -- it's easy to forget there's a pan of hamburger cooking when it's outside on the grill.

we ran out of cat food this morning; or, the glories of a vegetable garden

Yes,  I actually sit in this chair and revel in the abundant greenness of the vegetable garden. I also weed. Check out that corn! Pole beans are climbing in the background, squash are squishing happily at center, and potatoes are rivaling the corn for Top Dog at the right. If I were sitting in that chair, I would have, from my left to my right, dwarf morning glories, zinnias, beets, carrots, and kale growing at my feet. You can't see the last three so you'll have to take my word for it. (And I'm sort of lying about the kale. A rainstorm scattered the seeds so they're growing scattershot up to four feet away from their row.)

In other news, I bring you the Apocalypse, or We Ran Out of Cat Food This Morning. It would not be overstating the case to say the cats are outraged. I am hiding from Spock because he will bite me. (Really.) They took out a bit of their frustration in thumpitting* around the house at high speed, hissing at each other. Now they are pretending to be tired, but I know I have to get to the store before noon or I will lose a couple toes.

*to thumpit: to run about the house at high speed, over furniture and through the fireplace, knocking over the garbage can in passing. "Thumpit" is onomatopoeic, being the surprisingly loud sound little cat feet make when thundering through the house. The fog creeps in on little cat feet, my Aunt Fanny.

safe in her hands

Question: Why does one have children?
Answer: Staff.

The Boy is power-washing the deck. Our house has miles and miles of deck, some of it wobbly, some of it tipped, all of it needing a good scrubbing. Several years ago, the menfolk shored up the weaker parts and fixed the loose boards. With other household repairs, however, and life being what it is, cleaning and staining the deck didn't happen.

But the Boy is now 15 and full of energy. I finally have Staff.

Question: Why does one have children?
Answer: Because they continue to astound you.

A yell from the Boy brought me running to the deck, where he stood with the dripping washer turned off. "What?" I asked. "Did it break? Did you get hurt?" (Gotta love my priorities.)

He had found a beautiful leopard moth. And when my daughter rescued it, cradling it in her hands, her gentle touch and exquisite care with the fragile moth brought one of those rare moments when the world simply stops, and we revel in its beauty.

"Get me the camera!" I yelled. "Hurry! Faster!"

When the Boy resumed power-washing, the hose sprung a leak.

Ah well, it was nice while it lasted.

Are Clotheslines Retro?

photo by tobyleah on flickr under a Creative Commons license

I hope not. I think they're the Next Big Thing.

My mom used to hang out the sheets when I was little. I remember the fresh, clean scent of the fabric and its crisp hand. Why has it taken me so long to put up my own clothesline?

Years ago I took my laundry to the local and extremely crowded laundromat. One had to keep a hawk eye out for machines about to be emptied or for a folding table with an efficient folder. There were lots of dirty looks and pointy elbows at that laundromat.

This was before laundromats began having amenities like a television (although watching Jerry Springer would have made the experience worse), and wi-fi access was probably just a gleam in some engineer's eye. For that matter, so was the internet. I didn't own a Walkman. I didn't know how to sew or knit. Reading a book meant missing out on newly empty machines, which wasn't worth the time lost. I believe I graded papers to pass the time, which made the experience even more dismal.

Those details came back to me only at this writing. What I have always remembered about that laundromat is the sign on the wall extolling the virtues of electric dryers. Dryers are more hygienic -- no more dust, dirt, or (horrors) bird droppings on your clothes. No more clothing faded from the sun. And the heat of the dryer magically eliminates wrinkles, so there is no more ironing. A happy housewife in dress and heels smiled at the shiny appliance. Didn't I want to be like her?

Lord, no. Even though I smirked at the sign and lamented the lost clothesline, it sadly never occurred to me to use one. I want to go back in time and beat myself about the head and shoulders. (And hand myself a sewing needle, thread, and a bit of cloth.)

There is an art to clotheslines. A bit of experimentation, and sneaky looks at other people's clotheslines, taught me to hang shirts from the bottom and pants from the top, unzipped and with pockets pulled out to allow air to circulate inside. Towels and sheets need extra clothespins or you will find them in the perennial garden. (It took me a week to find one of my son's shirts behind the daylilies.) On sunny, breezy days I can put out two loads, but when it's still or humid, there will be damp towels and wet waistbands at the end of the day.

And how on earth does one manage the clothespins? Take a shirt. I pin one side, which twists under the weight of the rest of the shirt, and try to get a clothespin out of my mouth and onto the other edge of the shirt. Then I have to re-pin the first side, which has wrinkled under the pin. Then back to the laundry basket for more pins before wrestling with a towel. The kids have a good laugh when they see me trying to hold the towel to the line with my head while reaching for a clothespin.

Thank heaven for free patterns on the internet. Life is now a bit easier, with a retro-styled clothespin apron:
Tied in with bow:

In keeping with the ideals of conserving time and energy, I tried to make the apron entirely from materials I already had. In the end I did have to buy two dollars' worth of brown fabric at Wal-Mart (I know, I know) for the binding.

The pattern is from Lucy at My Byrd House and I love it. The only changes I made were to simplify the waistband and change fabrics at the bow-end of the ties.

Warning: Cat Butt, Possibly NSFW

We start with flowers because they are beautiful to look at, unlike cat butts.


(Apologies for the lousy picture quality.) Look at how flat Summer is. She melts into the table.


She melts into the table because her legs are not properly tucked under. Summer never tucks anything under. Weren't we all specifically taught not to sit like this?

If you are scarred by the Cat Butt, take another look at the flowers. They are my Unicorn Chaser for you.

Twelve pictures describe me

Twelve pictures describe me, originally uploaded by normanack.

attributions:
1. Queen Anne's Lace - Retro, 2. TV Dinner, 3. Memory Map: Farmington Hills, MI, 4. Dissocactus phylanthoides, 5. peter_weller, 6. Jasmine Tea Jelly, 7. 'So what are you doing this Australia Day ?', 8. three is not a crowd, 9. "Timemachines", 10. Prenent un Bany. Taking a Bath., 11. my private portico, 12. Miss Em leads the pack

I found this exercise on poppalina's blog and just had to give it a whirl. Enter your answers to the following questions in flickr's search box, then choose an image from the first page of results.

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name.

Hey Mom, can you figure out my answers from the pictures? Then you try it!