Minnow Peck

Bacon Jam Is My New Jam

2014-09-27T15:30:00.001-07:00

Hello, Bacon Jam Enthusiasts and Experimenters (Mostly Jen--hey, Jen :)),

Here's the recipe I used for Bacon Onion Apple Jam!

You'll probably need:

Some bacon; like if you put your two hands together, that much bacon (a little more than a cup?). Mine was applewood.
Some caramelized onions, like a cup, or enough to cover the bottom of stew pot evenly, which is probably more than a cup. Note that mine were already caramelized, because my CSA box was on an insane onion kick this summer, and hell to me is a place where they cook onions all the time, so I knock it out once and then freeze them.
1 honeycrisp apple, diced small (I have one of those corerslicerpeeler things. It's great!)
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar, plus more to taste
1/4 brown sugar, plus more to taste
1/4 cup maple syrup, plus more to taste
1/4 cup brewed coffee, plus more to taste
cumin to taste (three pinches for me)
salt and pepper to taste (a pinch each)
chili powder to taste (two pinches for me)
garlic powder to taste (or fresh garlic to taste) (four shakes for me)

Cut up the bacon small. Fry it. Drain it! Leave one tablespoon of bacon fat in the pan.

Add the caramelized onions. You could add regular onions and wait too, I'm sure.

Add all the rest of the ingredients, resting assured that if the ensuing jam tastes off, you can fix it by adding more of any of the ingredients. I found that adjusting the sweetness with maple syrup or brown sugar or adjusting the acidity with the vinegar were the two things that brought the jam to the right place.

Put it on low, cook it till it looks like runny jam, turn off the heat, and let it sit there a while. It should really start to look like jam then. Honeycrisp apples will NOT break down. Then put it in a jar or something! It lasts in the fridge for two weeks. It makes two little mason jars--I don't know how many ounces that is because I don't pay attention to stuff like that. They're cute though!

Wheat crackers and white cheddar. Burgers. Grilled cheese probably. It's rich; you don't need a lot.

Bye, Jen!

An Open Letter to my Blood Donors

2013-04-16T09:18:00.001-07:00

Dear You,

I’m writing to thank you for the blood you gave me.

I wasn’t dying—for some reason I feel like I need to apologize for this. Maybe you were hoping you would actually save a life, like the commercials and print ads always say you will, but you didn’t this time. I’m sorry. I was awake and talking, and I wouldn’t have gone into the light if your bag of blood hadn’t been available.

But, man, things would have suuuuuuuuuuucked.

I don’t even want to think about what those weeks after my daughter’s birth would have been like without you. I have friends who didn’t get blood tranfusions after hemorrhaging, but they’re superheroes, and I’m pretty lame. I got your blood two days after a c-section and the day after the nurses asked me to walk to the bathroom and I nearly passed out upon sitting up. The only reason I didn’t black out was because there was a siren going off in my brain and some version of myself screaming, “If you pass out and fall, WHAT HAPPENS TO YOUR STITCHES??”

As it turned out, I made it back down flat onto the bed without popping open, and then the oldest nurse in America held one of my legs up in the air and my husband held the other, to get my leg-blood to fall into my brain. My mom sat on a chair nearby, held her new granddaughter, and cried. I didn’t cry, because blood loss makes you too stupid to realize that you should be super-embarrassed about lying flat in a hospital gown with your legs in the air while the leg-holders discuss what they’re going to do with pitiful you.

When the nurses came in and took the bag of saline off the hook-pole-thingy and put your bag up there, I read the label.

“HUMAN BLOOD.”

Then under that: “A, Rh-POSITIVE.”

Then under that: “VOLUNTEER DONOR.”

That’s when I turned my head and started to cry. When I got to “VOLUNTEER DONOR.” Because all I could think of was you, and I didn’t have a face or a name or anything. But it was like you were right there. In the last few months I’ve made up a hundred versions of you: the stay-at-home mom with three boys. A bus driver. In one version of you, you earned a Ph.D. in literature while serving out a prison sentence for a crime I couldn't decide on. I wonder about you constantly.

I made sure my husband took a picture of me with your blood, like it was a celebrity. My mom rolled her eyes.

Two units took all day, but the bags have four tubes that can run out of them, for people who need it faster. They gave me the slow drip, and I got to chat with my husband and my mom and my new wee babe and eat as many Oreos as I wanted. They take the locks off the Oreos when you get blood! That part was awesome. My baby was allowed to nurse during the whole thing, which is kind of amazing when you think about it: I needed you and she needed me. She needed you.

So your blood made many people feel better. I got a transfusion because I wasn’t able to manage basic functions, and my worried mom got to see me kind of wake up, as it were, and be able to sit up, and eventually I even peed. Your blood made that possible. You helped me be able to breastfeed. And you comforted my older daughter, who looked at me on her sister’s birthday and had been afraid of what she saw. Two days later, she could crawl into bed with me, and we could snuggle. You did that for her.

Maybe you’ll also want to know that they didn’t give me your donation willy-nilly. It’s not a buffet in Bon Temps. 2 liters drained out during surgery, or 30% of my blood, and what I got from you and the other donor bumped me up to about 20% down. I didn’t get to go all the way back up to normal, which was fine with me. I was okay, and I’m glad those other bags went to other people. By the end of the second bag (of blood, not of Oreos), I felt so much better.

Because I was awake the whole time, not like a lot of people who get blood transfusions in surgery or in cases of trauma, or babies who are too young to say, I want to try to explain what it feels like. Forgive me, but there’s no way to explain it literally, and I wish I could separate out the physiological result from the spiritual and emotional part I found pretty overwhelming, but I can’t. This kind of difficulty may be one of the reasons figurative language exists.

Receiving blood over the course of an eight-hour day is like having thousands of tiny flowers in your body—pick any flower you like, but pick a small one and think of that (for whatever it’s worth, in my mind they are tiny, white, bell-shaped flowers)—and then having them open and look up at the sun, one at a time, one bloom every second, for a whole day. That’s what it felt like.

It felt like being light. Light as in lighter. Light as in some faint illumination. Before your blood, my body felt stony, heavy. If someone told me your red cells had a little helium in them, that would seem about right.

I’m guessing it didn’t feel like being high—that comparison would be too extreme.

It felt like eating after starving for two days.

It felt like being loved deeply. That sounds so cheesy, and I don’t care. It felt like you loved me, and like humanity, who made this human-run system—draw blood, refrigerate blood, drip blood as needed—loved me. Like everyone got together and said, “Let’s not let people go bloodless. That would be good. We will include Ginny.” This paragraph is not figurative. But this system is mind-blowing. You may disagree about whether what we have in place is mind-blowing, but that may be because you have given blood and have not needed to receive it.

VOLUNTEER DONOR, I don’t know who you are. I don’t know if you’re a man or a woman, if you’re 17 or 87. I don’t know if you’re a sharp dresser or if you care about sports or manicures or if we would laugh at the same jokes or if you voted like I did in the last election or think like I do about anything or would find me a pretty big waste of your blood.

I wonder if I would be disappointing to you somehow. If you’d be bummed that your donation didn’t go to someone caught in some dramatic circumstance or terrible event, but to a woman whose blood slipped perfectly silently out of her and into a waiting container, under the most strictly controlled conditions possible, in a small hospital no one has heard of.

And then I think, you gave your blood away.

What kind of person does that?

You gave your blood away.

And you got nothing but a cookie and a sticker that said, “Be Nice to Me. I Gave Blood.”

VOLUNTEER DONOR, if I ever met you, I would cover you in those stickers like a scaly sticker-mummy. I would hug you until it just got so awkward, and I would cry on your sticker-crusted collar because I weep really easily except apparently when I’m low on RBC’s.

Your blood, and the blood of another volunteer donor, helped move oxygen around in my body for 120 days.

For the eight months I carried my daughter, my heart beat blood for two people. For four months after that, my heart beat the blood of three people.

I thought of you every hour of every one of those days, and at the end of the 120 days, I actually said, out loud like a lunatic, Good-bye and thank you. Not because you saved my life, for we have already established that you did not (sorry again), but because in a year of my life, April to April, that saw thousands of human cruelties worldwide, you still remain here, in my heart, long after your red blood cells have withered and gone away. The celebrity photo of your donation is a stunning reminder of humanity’s nearly inexplicable capacity for kindness at the level of Giving a Part of One’s Own Body Away to a Stranger One Will Never Meet.

A few years ago, Tina Fey wrote “A Mother’s Prayer for Her Daughter.” The ending goes like this:

And should she choose to be a Mother one day, be my eyes, Lord,

That I may see her, lying on a blanket on the floor at 4:50 a.m., all-at-once exhausted, bored, and in love with the little creature whose poop is leaking up its back.

“My mother did this for me once,” she will realize as she cleans feces off her baby’s neck.

“My mother did this for me.” And the delayed gratitude will wash over her as it does each generation and she will make a mental note to call me. And she will forget.

But I’ll know, because I peeped it with Your God eyes.

Amen.

You let me be that exhausted mom who had just enough strength and energy to clean poop off her baby at four in the morning. I can’t donate blood until September, but when I do, I won’t forget. Someone did this for me once.

And I hope God gives you, for even a brief, fleeting, flickering moment that you may not fully understand, a chance to peek in with His God eyes and see a part of your generous heart beating forward yet again.

Love Always,

Me

ps: My friend Erin asked me to tack on her daughter Kate's name to this letter. Kate is four and became a blood recipient when she was six months old. She and her mama thank you as well. :)

pps: And TwynMawrMom thanks you on behalf of her daughter, Baby A. :) :)

Treehuggers

2013-03-28T14:43:00.000-07:00

Hurricane Irene has come and gone through Currituck County, washing away a few stretches of road and flooding plenty of low-lying land. It happens a lot in that region, and many locals, especially those whose families have lived in the county long before The Weather Channel could tell them to evacuate, just stay put and weather the storm, literally.

Damage is measured in soaking wet garages, buckled hardwood floors, missing screens, broken glass, and fallen trees. It’s measured too, of course, in lives, but no one goes there unless they're forced to.

I remember one year after a season of hurricanes, my cousins’ grandparents (the set we didn’t share) finally decided that the few pines left in their yard just needed to go before they fell through the house. We drove by their home, and I remember looking at the yard, which used to be as shaded as the woods even though it was waterfront property, and thinking, “It’s BALD!” The yard looked different, but stranger still, the house looked different—a little awkward, spookily tall, too scantily clad. I felt sorry for it.

There’s a hierarchy of tree loss, it seems. Pine and cypress go, and that’s just life. If they fall onto open ground without shearing off part of a house or crunching a car, they’re removed like any other debris. Fat trees are different. The thick branch of an oak, severed in a storm, is met with a kind of grief that glimmers with what we’d normally reserve for animals or people. Even if the tree survives, we say to each other, “But it’s lopsided now. It looks crooked. Hope it grows full again…” It’s not an arm, but we act as if it is.

When they topple, well, that’s just its own thing. There’s no other way of talking about it. A tree fell. A big tree, a good one.

Irene’s rains and the wind that sent the sound’s waves up over the bulkhead of my mother’s backyard softened the earth enough that at some point, the gusts of the massive storm shoved her only pecan tree to the ground. The tree fell whole, roots still holding onto the soil like a clenched fist, and she took a bowlful of mushy earth up with her in the falling. She landed toward the house, but my mother’s yard is long and wide and the pecan landed in the empty space like it was a bed.

I married Mark under that tree, about a decade after I decided I was going to marry someone under that tree, if I ever got married. My friend and bridesmaid Liz, whose own wedding was a fabulous affair at one of Washington, D.C.’s best hotels, gave a toast at the reception and said, “Ginny told me after my wedding, ‘I’m just getting married under Mom’s pecan tree.’ And now, here we are. The day is here.”

And so was the tree.

We had protected the pecan for as long as she was ours. I swear if we could have brought that tree inside during storms, we would have, with the lawn chairs. When Hurricane Isabel barreled through in 2003, the tree began to lean southward. She was staked, the metal cable anchored about six feet away into the lawn. When I returned from Thailand, I brought with me the brightly colored strips of cloth used to decorate Bo trees and the longboats. The Bo tree is sacred to Buddhists; there were trees in Thailand that could barely be seen under their adornments. The longboats sailed with the fabric tied around their bows like scarves, for protection from harm. I loved the bright colors and the sentiment, and I tied each strip around the pecan tree and just asked the universe to let her stand until I got married. I was single at the time. Very single.

When my mom called to tell me that the pecan tree had fallen, I posted a picture of her from our wedding onto my Facebook wall, letting everyone know what happened. I thought a few people would comment and say that they were sorry to hear it, that they were glad everyone was safe, and go on with their day.

To my surprise, people were truly moved. They seemed genuinely grieved the way I was. My friend Mike, who is Liz’s husband, sent articles on how to right a fallen tree, hopeful that it could be done. I wrote to him and thanked him, but said that since the pecan tree is so big, so top-heavy, I didn’t think she had a chance.

The reaction reminded me of the poisoning of Toomer's Oaks at Auburn University, when a rabid Alabama football fan took a powerful herbicide to the rival campus’s 130-year old oaks. People were outraged. Auburn fans brought gifts to the trees and placed them at their trunks. One reporter even called the poisoning an “assassination.” It became a commentary on football, on sportsmanship, on the dignity of life, and mostly on cruelty. Ironically, humans do worse to humans, grant less dignity and freedom to each other, and it doesn’t become a lesson the way it does when the victims are plants. The act either becomes something less, or as in the case of the Auburn oaks, something much more.

I don’t know why this is; I only know that it is. Trees, I think, and flowers, have a kind of dual existence; they are both living and yet mostly still. It’s something we have trouble being ourselves. It’s no wonder that the Buddha, upon reaching enlightenment, stared unblinking at the Bo tree in gratitude. Trees can be touchstones of perspective. I dare you to find a big uncrowded tree, surrounded only by land or a bit of water, and tell me it hasn’t made you a little happier. It’s just nice. And trees are timeless, too—unless you’re a landscaper, or one of those fashionable people who believes that every thing on earth can have its "moment," there really are no trendy trees. Buildings, streets, cars, and clothes change. Trees grow a bit each year, or die, but their kind is not the one dating years and decades. The pecan tree did not look much different on my wedding day than it did the ten years before when I decided I would get married under it. All that changing I did—the tree didn’t need it. How lucky for her.

Johnny, my mom’s neighbor and a man that just seems always to be a great help in these kinds of situations, told my mom yesterday that he thought the tree could be righted. Johnny’s home is a working farm where he keeps horses and cows, and in a thunderstorm a few months back, one of those horses was struck by lightning and died instantly. In my heart I wonder if he saw the pecan tree as a life that could be saved, something not so far gone it couldn’t maybe come back.

There is a line. It’s gray sometimes though…

He did say that it would be a lot of work, and that the job might be cost-prohibitive.

To which Mom said, “Or not.”

So, one Johnny, two helpers, one backhoe, two chainsaws, and one steel cable--running from her trunk to an anchoring post in the Currituck Sound--and she’s back, just a little worse for the wear. If she stays a while, lovely. If she decides it’s time to go, that’s okay too. We just wanted to give her a little more time to stand by the water and think about it.

Near to Us Once More

2011-12-21T16:17:00.001-08:00

I called my dad the other day to check in. He was preparing for our restaurant's annual Christmas party, and he was cooking. He said to me, "Well, I wish you were here..." I thought Oh, how sweet; he misses me... Then he continued, "I've made all your favorites: key lime cheesecake, pumpkin cake, crab au gratin..." So what he meant was, "I wish you were here...to help eat all this food because I know you wouldn't let any of it go to waste." And I wouldn't have, because my father is the king of food and I am very much his daughter.

This will be our first Christmas in California, just Mark, Ellie, and me. It's made me a little sad. And while the last twelve months have been good to us, overall, many of our friends have lost very dear members of their families, far, far more than in any year of my life. Why we've been lucky, even in the face of serious illness, escapes me, and I am grateful.

One of the ways I've reacted to being away from home is by trying to fill in the gaps in my recipe collection. My 95-year-old grandma Jessie gave each of her grandkids a copy of her best recipes years ago, so I have those. I have the ones I need from my dad, and ones that belonged to my maternal grandmother, Virginia. It's so nice to have those lists and directions and histories, some in the original handwriting.

But every time Christmas comes around, I miss my Aunt Lizzie. She's Ellie's namesake and a woman who seemed, at least in my young little mind, to cook for our whole extended family every day, though in later years, she got a very generous chunk of help from her housekeeper, Peggy.

Aunt Lizzie made the best cornbread in the whole world and in the history of it. It was somewhere between thin cornbread and spoon bread, and I was the luckiest kid in the family because unlike everyone else, I loved the middle. To this day, I pass on edges--of brownies, cakes, bread, anything. Philosophically, I'd rather not eat the corners of Rice Krispie treats, even though they're not baked. That curve in the corner just seems imperfect and potentially unpleasant to me. Everyone else in the family loved the edges and left those soft, dense, and savory middle squares to me.

My great-aunt cooked fried chicken, chocolate chip Bundt cake, sweet potato pie, lima beans, you name it. I don't have a single clear memory of watching her cook, but I did hear that she cooked each and every combination of ingredients, on the stove or in the oven, on HIGH. This seems as reasonable as driving 85 miles an hour everywhere, whether you're on a Montana highway or in a hospital parking structure, since the laws of thermodynamics do indicate that you might want to cook lots of dishes at temperatures other than "Scorch." Whatever she did, it worked. There was always food on her dinner table, it was always very, very good, and there were always people around to eat it.

When Aunt Lizzie passed away 23 years ago, so did her dishes. Whether her recipes and eccentric cooking techniques were never passed down, or if simply no one could safely replicate them with success, what with every appliance in the kitchen being at its highest setting, I don't know. I do know that there are some I have yet to eat since.

One of them is coconut pie.

photo from LucilleKitchen

It's not coconut cream pie, it's this Southern coconut pie that's thin and has no whipped cream or meringue on top. It reminds me of the inside of a Mounds bar. According to food.com, where I found the recipe for a pie that seems hopefully similar, a twelfth of this pie, in spite of its lack of topping, will provide 63% of the daily fat you need to be American. And who eats a twelfth of a pie? A twelfth of pie is what's left stuck on the knife after you've cut a regular slice out. Sigh. Portions.

Another recipe I've been trolling the internet for is coconut cake. Not every dessert in North Carolina is coconut-based, just the ones I miss I guess. Paula Deen calls it coconut poke cake, because you poke a bunch of holes in it and let a sticky, delicious mess of coconut cream and other ingredients soak in, for up to several days.

photo from all recipes.com

That's how Miss Clara Reese did it, I know. She baked a coconut cake and a carrot cake for my wedding, and besides the whole pig my brother and father cooked for our rehearsal dinner, her cakes made the celebration homemade and handmade and lovely and real. I was clumsy in asking her to bake them for us, a fact my mother's cousin made sure I wouldn't forget, but she herself was generous and gracious, and she came to the wedding representing to me the best of Currituck's old guard. When our adorable little "wedding butler" came to the bridal party's table and asked what I wanted for dessert, I told him, "Go hack off a big piece of the coconut cake before somebody else gets it!"

Miss Clara Reese passed away in the spring, and sometime in the summer, my Aunt Madeline relayed her cake recipe, which I've half-forgotten because it seemed simple enough that I didn't write it down. A few recipes (here, particularly) online look about right, though I'm not sure about how much whipped topping to mix into the icing; the icing I love seems too rich to have very much of anything mixed in.

Cooking to me is often therapy for absence. Especially if what I'm making has a history with someone else. My hands become their hands, my dish tries to be their dish, something like that.

To all our friends who will be missing someone this holiday season, we hold you lovingly in the light. Pies and cakes won't fill the hole in your hearts, but in times like these, a little sugar, and 63% of your daily fat, can be a help. I hope you have a recipe, coconutty or not, waiting for you. Happy Everything, everybody. :)

Big Batch Cookin'

2011-10-26T12:50:00.000-07:00

About three times a month, I turn our kitchen into a crazy mess and knock out huge batches of meals that I freeze for later. Our family is small, so these recipes last us longer than they would otherwise, but all the recipes are easily doubled, or even tripled, if you have the right pots. They're also great if you're single. I cooked the spaghetti sauce and stew when I was single and just put them in smaller freezer containers.

I generally cook and prep from one huge metal bowl (about 8 inches deep and 15 inches wide), one stew pot, one crock pot, and Pyrex for microwaving. I do steam veggies in the microwave without water. I know some people don't like to do that and will roast them in the oven instead, but I've found for some things, it's just easier and makes the house less hot. For example, I'll cut a spaghetti squash in half, microwave each half for 15 minutes, and let the oven roast all the sweet potatoes instead.

Here are the recipes I promised some of my Facebook peeps, with links and suggestions for tweaking. All but one recipe are other people's, but I've used most of them for years (the granola and cookies are an exception). Hope someone gets some good meals out of them!

Soup

"Jewel's Favorite Soup Jill Makes" is a white kidney bean and chicken broth-based soup that we LOVE. I make it with two boxes of chicken broth, three cans of white kidney beans, one big can of diced tomatoes with nothing added, and one container of mire poix from Trader Joe's (you can cut up a cup each of onion, celery, and carrots yourself; I just love a shortcut!). The secret is to add the rind of a parmesan wedge and let it cook for an hour. Take the rind out for serving, but don't forget it. It's frickin' magical. Just dump it all in and walk away. Coddling the veggies beforehand by sautéing doesn't make much difference.

If you like a thicker soup, let the soup cook at a rolling boil for a bit to break apart the beans and let the starch out, but watch it so it doesn't scorch. If you like a thinner, clearer soup, set the simmer to low and don't cook it more than an hour. I like this soup thicker, so it gets a good rowdy roll in the pot and sits there for hours. If I need to leave the house, I turn off the heat and leave the soup until I get back. Then I'll turn the heat back on.

Serve with crusty bread and olive oil. And white wine!

Stew

This beef stew is old school. There's nothing hippie about it, and I haven't tweaked it in 15 years. You just have to accept that some great things are still based on two cans of Campbell's mushroom soup and one packet of Lipton Onion Soup mix. But it's EASY, and there are no real measurements. The cream of mushroom soup doesn't make it "creamy" at all, but it makes a really good gravy. This stew is probably the only red meat we eat inside our home. If you don't care for too much beef, add less. If you go grass-fed, make sure it's decently marbled, because you need it all to get tender.

I don't add potatoes to this because I like to serve it over mashed sweet potatoes, which sounds wrong but is oh so right. You could also serve it over regular potatoes, egg noodles, or nothing.

You can go heavy on the veggies. The stew tolerates them very well.

Here's the general list:

--Some chuck roast, fat-trimmed and silver-skin-trimmed and cubed, or "beef for stew" at the supermarket. We buy ours at Costco right now, and it makes two batches.

--Two cans cream of mushroom soup, low fat is totally fine and is what I use.

--One packet of Lipton onion soup mix.

--One chopped onion.

--One bag baby carrots

--One bag frozen peas (or fresh, but not canned because they'll go mushy)

--Whatever else you want (think leftovers). I've added leftover rice (white, brown, and wild) before; celery; wine; garlic; anything you like.

Spaghetti Sauce with Chicken Sausage and Ground Turkey

I love this sauce. Probably because it's mine. :) It's rich and meaty like other sauces, but the chicken and turkey keep it leaner. I use canned marinara because it's faster, but if you have a recipe you like, use it! Again, put the rind of a parm wedge into it and let it simmer for as long as you have time for. This is great with spaghetti squash.

--One container of mire poix at Trader Joe's (or one cup each carrots, onion, celery)

--One package sweet (or spicy) Italian chicken sausage, casings removed, broken up and cooked in a pan

--One package super-low-fat ground turkey, cooked

--One little can of tomato paste

--Garlic to taste

--Two or three cans of your favorite marinara (I like Trader Joe's, of course, and Rao's is lovely if you've got money to burn)

--Red, green, and/or yellow bell peppers, any kind. You can used fresh, jarred, or frozen (and may want to set your preferences in that order :))

--Leftovers, whatever you like. Zucchini works well.

Add olive oil to stew pot. Let it get hot. Dump in veggies. Let them get hot. Dump in everything else. Set to simmer. Walk away. Come back hungry. DONE.

Cauliflower Puree

Sounds decidedly not awesome, but is. The recipe is here. No tweaks; just eat. Could be good with the stew, but I haven't tried that yet.

Baked Sweet Potatoes

There's obviously not much to this recipe, but I do have some hints that will make it less annoying:

1) Cook as many as you can cram into your oven, but space them at least two inches apart so they cook evenly. 15 pounds of potatoes (the crate at Costco) fit into my standard oven.

2) Put aluminum foil over your baking sheet. All over it. Sweet potato juice is a nightmare to clean.

3) Oil your foil if you want to retain the skins. If all you want is the delicious inside, then it doesn't matter.

4) Clean off the skins, then place the potatoes on two baking sheets: one for skinny potatoes, one for fat ones.

5) Bake at 400 degrees. One hour to one hour and fifteen minutes for the skinny ones. An hour and a half for the fats. Make sure a knife runs all the way through each potato, easily and with NO RESISTANCE! If it tugs, the tater ain't done. It's hard to overcook them, so err on that side. Undercooked potatoes taste raw and yucky.

6) Store the insides in Pyrex or Ziploc bags, whichever you prefer. The plastic bags peel away from the frozen potatoes easily, and then you can microwave them from frozen (cook on high until warm, but stir often, about ten minutes depending on chunk size). You can also let them thaw in the fridge, which could seriously take DAYS (though we keep our fridge pretty cold), then cook on the stovetop in a pot.

Granola

My friend Katie makes her own granola because she lives in Northern California and she's a total cliche. But I now I live here, and I want to fit in. So I started making my own granola. I will never go back. It's that good. And like my favorite recipes, you can play with it. Example: I use almonds instead of walnuts.

The recipe calls for baking the granola for one hour at 275. I found this too much. I think the problem isn't the temperature, but the time. Be sure to watch your batch starting at about 45 minutes. My batch is wonderfully edible, but I'll probably take it out at 50 minutes next time. I also recommend almond slices instead of slivers (the little sticks), because the slivers, counter-intuitively, didn't handle the heat as well. I used rolled oats from Trader Joe's because they're FAT. Fat oats are GOOD. There are plenty of other fat oats, but Quaker's are a bit thin.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Classic Betty Crocker recipe. I doubled the recipe and used my big-ass bowl. Prep took 30 minutes (the recipe says 55 minutes. What??). These are seriously loaded with butter, which can be a good thing and a bad thing. If you're worried about dying instantly from a Western disease, cut the butter by a 1/4, and the sugar by a 1/4 too, or use something like agave instead, though I don't know the amount. The butter isn't great if you like to eat your cookies right out of the oven, but if you're serving them later, the butter makes them delightfully crispy on the outside, and rich, so that if you listen to your body, you won't eat more than two. Because of the insane amount of butter.

I plopped the dough onto six sheets of parchment paper and rolled them up, wrapped them in foil, and put them in the freezer. Thaw and slice (you may have to reassemble broken bits--the oatmeal makes them a little crumbly) and bake, but change the cook time to 14-16 minutes, more if you like crunchy cookies.

Show up at the potluck. Be a hero. :)

The Mamas

2011-10-06T12:43:00.000-07:00

Note: Posts like this one don't get written alone, and I don't want anyone thinking it was. I made sure that any Mama about whom I wrote very personal information knew I was going to write it, and they read it and approved it before it ever got here. Motherhood is a deep, deep river, and I could not be more grateful to these women, who all said to me, "Say whatever you want about us. We're open books, and we're okay." This was especially true of Cristina, who told me, "It's okay if you tell them I was contemplating suicide. It won't offend my delicate sensibilities!" I've chosen to leave out a lot of the nitty-gritty, but just trust that it's there, from serious illness (for mother or child) to depression and anxiety to infertility to lost pregnancies, for one or more of us Mamas, and I speak for all of us when I say that if you're feeling alone in any part of motherhood, there are other moms and dads out there who are waiting to say, "It's okay if you don't have anything good to say today. Come sit by me anyway."

* * *

I never joined a sorority. I never had a deb ball, and I’m pretty sure I’d rather saw both my legs off than be in something like Junior League. So after my daughter was born and I could walk again and meaningfully look at a clock, I hauled both of us to the local women’s wellness center to the new moms’ group and thought, “This is going to suck and I am going to hate it.”

It was, I freely admit, a really crappy attitude to have, but I had moved in the middle of my pregnancy, across the country, from a place where I had lots of support every day to a place where I had none but that of my then-boyfriend-now-husband, who spent most of the day at work at his medical residency and wasn’t able to attend any of my prenatal appointments even when my pregnancy became what the chief of OB at Penn called, “Not ‘high-risk,’ but not ‘regular risk’ either.” He followed that with, “We don’t know what to do with you.” It was awesome, and I went to lots of ultrasounds and lay in the dark rooms by myself while radiologists and nephrologists and maternal-fetal medicine people figured out “what to do with me.” Everything turned out fine, but it was pretty lonely, so I should have been psyched to meet all these women, but I wasn’t.

I was afraid it would be a sorority. I envisioned smiling and laughter, cute outfits, cooing, and chanting “B-R-E-A-S-T-M-I-L-K!!” while we all clapped. Mostly, I was afraid that I would be the only person in the room who loved her baby but thought that making her, and getting her out, and feeding her were all a grueling bad dream from which I couldn’t wait to wake. I thought I’d be the only one who desperately missed her job and wanted to go back.

So when Cristina walked in 40 minutes late, wearing yoga pants, a long-sleeve tee and a fleece vest, with her daughter’s bucket seat hooked over the crook of her elbow and a diaper bag trailing somewhere behind her, I thought, “She looks absolutely awful—like a zombie, but with more anxiety and a kangaroo pouch. We will be best friends.”

I loved her immediately, in direct proportion to the amount of dread that seeped out of her.

Cristina took her place in the circle, where we were all going around, saying our names; our baby’s, or babies’, names; their birthdays; and how much they weighed. This process was how it all started, each one of us in the circle giving the minimum information, and probably adding some bit of info by which the others might start to remember us. It was a little AA-ish. “Hi, I’m So-and-So, and I have inverted nipples. I’ve been using a nipple shield for four weeks now.” Hi, So-and-So-With-The-Nipple-Shield….

I was Ginny, who vaginally delivered a 10-pound baby. It turns out that this is not uncommon among my Mamas, even if it is globally. There was Cristina, who got post-partum depression about twelve minutes after delivering Sofia, and who couldn’t nurse because she had had breast surgery years before. There was Jen, whose daughter Zoey was born on the same day as Ellie, so they became "twins." And Erin, who pushed for three hours then had to have a c-section to deliver Kate, who was born with a fused suture in her skull and needed surgery at six months. Tiffany, who was already in jeans with a real zipper, but whose son wouldn’t latch, so she pumped all day, every day. Alaina, who made it to the group just four weeks after her twin daughters were born. Her uterus didn’t contract after delivery and she bled a lot, so even four weeks later, she was very pale. Liz, whose husband left three-week-old Bailey in her crib alone in the house while he ran down their street to get meds for a peanut butter allergy that we’re not sure he actually has. We think it just makes him really thirsty, and that’s not the same thing. Kristin, whose son Micah was a miracle baby and whose husband Kent would eventually join our group when she went back to work as a teacher and he took a sabbatical from his ministry. Brooke, whose son Brenden was her second child (a rare find in a new mom’s group), and a devoutly Christian woman who never swears nor drinks, a way of motherly life I still don’t think is possible, even now after witnessing three years of Brooke’s wholesome existence.

The group was a revolving door of women, their babies, and their stories; some visited each and every Monday, and some came when they could, until they went back to work at 6 weeks or 12 or 16 or never. For me, it was five months of meetings, listening to each woman talk about whatever she needed help with that week and talking about my own stuff.

Eventually, we all started planning things outside of the meetings: playdates at the park, brunches at someone’s house, and our biggest monthly event, MamaDinner. MamaDinner was a treasure because it was so hard to make happen; each woman had to check with her husband, because he would have to watch the kids (which is not “babysitting”; it’s parenting). It would have to be timed so that breastfeeding moms could feed, then put their kid to bed, then leave, then get back for the next nightfeeding, which meant reservations were made on the late side, around 8 or 8:30. But, man, once we all got there. What a time.

MamaDinner was the first time many of us got a glimpse of what we might have looked like pre-baby. It was a revelation.

We’d say things like, “Are you wearing a DRESS?”

“Yes, I am! It’s from before…I’m pretty sure I’m not fat anymore!”

“Are those your eyelashes?”

“Uh-huh! There’s mascaaaara on them!”

“Oh, GET OUT!”

“And holy crap, you’re gorgeous!”

“Thank you! I dress up more for MamaDinner than I do for my husband!”

That part seemed strange but true. I’m not sure what the other Mamas would say, but I have my own theory. For however much our husbands or partners loved us, and for however much we loved them, there were a lot of ways in which they didn’t—couldn’t, even—help us. We got dressed up and made ourselves beautiful for the people who made us feel really, really good and bright and happy. We wanted each other to see on the outside the way we made each other feel on the inside. It’s cheesy, but all the typical girl talk was paid for in long conversations about cracked nipples and lochia and Kate’s surgery and painful sex and forgetting to buckle the five-point harness because we were so sleep-deprived. MamaDinner was the chance to have a martini and laugh until our mascara ran down our faces and onto our beforetime outfits.

Besides all the talking, we helped each other out. Cristina watched Ellie while I went for a job interview at a community college. I watched Matty when Tiffany and John went to their anniversary dinner. And Ally, who is hands-down the most inspired stay-at-home mom I know, watched everyone, often all at once. Katie took family portraits for me and for Erin, and Brooke photographed Glenna’s family and Michelle’s. I copyedited Glenna’s master’s thesis in sustainable interior design, and she designed a nursery for Tiffany. Jen and I did a “spring cleanse” together—we’d go to the meetings and learn to make sandwich bread out of nothing but spinach and chia seeds and then text each other the next day, “My screeching child won’t let go of my sweatpants or take a nap so I ate a box of Cheez-Its. Don’t rat me out.”

Our lives together started to have a Red Tent kind of quality. In Anita Diamante’s retelling of the biblical story of Leah and Rachel, she focuses sharply on the physical and social red tent—the place where women were to go during menstruation and childbirth, but a place also for childrearing and gossip and bonding. Our playdates and dinners with kids started to have the same feel.

It makes for stupid math, but it’s true just the same: I’d rather go to a museum with all my Mamas and all their kids and know that I’m partly responsible for everyone in the bunch than to go with Ellie alone. It’s easier and more fun. One mom getting her one child through a cafeteria-style lunchline is torture, but nine moms doing that for ten kids is magic. And I was grateful to hear about others’ homelives. Glenna couldn’t understand what was so hard about a putting a dish in a dishwasher, and I felt better knowing that Alaina, who had been married for years and tried very hard to have her girls, had some of the same struggles that I did in my jerry-rigged life.

Life doesn't always let you tie things up in a pretty bow, but stories can, and like many good tales, this one will end with a wedding.

My jerry-rigged life became a little less jerry-rigged in February of 2010, when Mark and I got tied the knot…um, three times. The last of these was the grand affair with our families, and the first one did make us “legal.” But the middle one was a special one just for our Philadelphia friends, the ones who had helped us day-in and day-out with our first experiences of parenthood. A blizzard rolled over the East Coast that Friday morning, but the Mamas donned their puffer coats, put the babes in sleds and trekked to our favorite indoor playplace—The Little Treehouse—for another ceremony.

Kristin’s husband Kent officiated, as he had two days earlier in his living room when we signed the papers (after Mark investigated Micah’s butt rash and both babies got diaper changes), but this time there was a bit more ritual. Kent asked all the babies to blow us kisses to wish us luck and happiness. Ellie clapped like a crazy little person when it was her turn to be a part of the ceremony. Katie photographed the day, Erin made the cupcakes, Cristina read Khalil Gibran, and afterward, everyone played on the floor in their socks and drank champagne (or milk). I never expected this, but even the husbands and partners came.

There are lots of people whose heads cock to the side when Mark and I tell them we were married thrice, after a long period of remaining unwed. I just shrug. We had our reasons. And while when I hear the word “wedding,” I go to our June one on the lawn in my mom’s backyard, I’m grateful to have celebrated with the women in the room at the Wellness Center, because I know a little too keenly what might have been had I not had them to lean on for those years. Again, it’s cliché, but those first months were like finding myself in a fog, with a baby, and having a bunch of awesome women call out, “We’re over here! It’s not exactly paradise, but there’s a swingset, and snacks! Hurry!”

So that is, I think, how I joined my first sorority. But we don’t squeal and chant, and they’re not my sisters; they’re so much better than that.

They’re my Mamas.

photo by alex trimm (alextrimmphotography.com)

Saturday Night Lights

2011-10-05T15:23:00.000-07:00

Stanford vs. UCLA, October 1st

My old student Tyler wrote to me two weekends ago and offered me three of his player’s tickets to the Stanford-UCLA game this past Saturday. I jumped. I love a good football game and had told his mom a few weeks before that it would be great to go. I knew that seeing Tyler play again after five years was just going to be so fun. We decided to make a weekend of it, since the game didn’t start until 7:30 at night and we live two and a half hours from Palo Alto.

We stayed at the W in Newark, in a very nice and yet reasonably priced suite, and of course, we took full advantage of everything there, including the pool, which thrilled Ellie to bits since our community pool in Davis closed a month ago. She was also amazed at what was, as she put it, its “no car, just walking?” proximity…it nearly confused her. But she had a blast splashing around. The only thing that was a little iffy was that the pool is encircled in sand (outside of a sidewalk-like ring around the lip of the pool itself), so it was out of the water and into the sand. She was pretty much breaded after a minute or two. That wasn’t fun.

This is an old movie theater. The university is open. :)

About a mile from the stadium, we had dinner for free at CPK because they were having a training night! All we had to do was fill out a survey at the end, and our $65 meal was covered by the restaurant. Score!! I’d have paid $65 just for the four distracting crayons they gave Ellie while she waited for her pasta, but to have our own meals and a glass of wine, too? That’s pretty much winning the dinner lottery.

Then we drove the world’s longest mile to the game. It turns out Stanford football gets a lot of love. It took a while to find parking, but I had fun admiring all the gorgeous trees that surround the stadium. They make it look like the South; you could have told me we were going to an Alabama game and between all the fans and the huge, droopy trees, I would have believed you. Thank goodness for the “pin drop” feature on our phones or we never would have found our car again.

The pom-poms were breast-cancer-pink!

The trees really shroud the stadium, so it kind of creeps up like a quiet giant. We made it around to the player’s will call, signed for our tickets and then went through the Special Tunnel, which is what we called the family entrance to the stadium. Mark asked Ellie if she felt like a rock star. She nodded. He said, “Good, you should!” It was very cool. (It’s obviously the little things for us. We're not ashamed.) We sat next to Tyler’s lovely stepsister, her husband, and her in-laws in what is clearly a whole section for players’ families. I can’t think of a more awesome place to be, especially in a stadium that holds 50,000 fans. It reminded me of watching my brother play at Muhlenberg, a tiny college with a handsome, but miniature, stadium. There, everyone was invested in the individual players, not just the outcome of the game, and in section 134 at Stanford Stadium, it was the same way. It was so endearing to see moms and dads and sisters jump up and wave their pom poms, wearing their family names on the backs of jerseys. It made me think of all the journeys it took, for whole families, to get that one player to a school like this. I’m sure there are some really compelling tales.

It probably goes without saying that the seats were amazing too. I could have thrown Ellie’s shoe at a Bruin. But I didn’t.

The girl loves sports. Yay!

Of course, I wasn’t sure at all that Ellie, who isn’t even three, would appreciate all the awesomeness of the evening. I apparently didn’t need to worry, since she had way more fun at the football game than she did even at the pool. She loved the music, the cheering, and the fancy camera they have hovering over the field to catch every play. She told me repeatedly that she wanted the camera and was annoyed when I explained that it didn’t belong to us.

She also clearly understood that we were there to see Tyler. “Mama, where’s Tyler? Oh! Go, Tyler!” “Tyler went away? Good job, Tyler!” She stood on her seat so she could see, and when everyone stood up, blocking her view, she’d yell, “Up, Mama! I can’t SEE!!” She even did the wave, thrice. She really is our daughter.

I'm six feet tall. Just FYI.

She did lean over about two minutes before halftime and say, “Mom, I’m all done with this soccer game…” I told her that that was okay, but that we were going to stay just a little longer. Then the marching bands came out, first UCLA’s, then Stanford’s. She watched with her huge eyes, rapt, took a five-minute rest on a little pillow we brought for her, and made it clapping and cheering to the end of the game. She was even awake when Tyler came out to see everyone.

The next morning, we all slept in until room service came. We figured we had saved our dinner budget, so we might as well have a picnic breakfast on the floor of our hotel room. It was such a memorable family weekend, and I’m so grateful to Tyler and his mom for thinking of us. I’ve always been very proud of him. He’s such a good 6’6”, 300-pound “kid.” J

Crap, I Left my Heart in San Francisco Again.

2011-10-03T14:36:00.000-07:00

I love San Francisco. If it weren’t for the land- and life-destroying potential of the Big One, it would just be the perfect city. It’s literate and foodie-y and odd as all get-out in places, and I’m always thrilled to stupidity to be in any part of it, even the weird bits. I personally don’t see anything wrong with deciding it’s a good day to take your television out for a walk on a busy sidewalk and using its power cord as a leash. I’m just sorry I didn’t think of it first.

So when I got a postcard in the mail letting me know that David Molesky, one of my friends from high school and the creator of one of the only “real” pieces of art I have in my home, was having an opening reception for his latest exhibit, I looked at the family schedule, got a babysitter, and called my friend Laura to see if she’d want to go…and let me crash at her place after. It worked, and I got to go!

My absolute favorites of David’s paintings are waterscapes. He doesn't paint the horizon into them, so you’re really invested in the water itself. I think I love them so much because when I swim, before I get in, I’m only looking down at the water. Sailors might care about the horizon, but swimmers don’t. It’s just about the water. David’s paintings make you feel like there’s nothing else in the world but foam and waves, and that that’s a beautiful thing. I just love them, and the gallery they were in, ArtSpace 712, was just perfect…lots of exposed brick, huge old windows, worn wood floors. Plus, there were some old high school friends there too, and wine! What could be better?

Dinner wasn’t really better, but it was pretty close. Laura is lucky enough to live in a part of the Marina where she can walk to a dozen lovely, fun restaurants. Our favorite is Mamacita. Thursday night, we ordered two margaritas, the butter-smooth guac, the mahi fish tacos with pickled red cabbage, and the chicken enchiladas. We also had a side of elote, a spicy, spicy, spicy corn dish that was absolutely worth the burn, and baked chocolate pudding that turned out to be something more like mushy brownie, and let’s face it, either of those is worth eating. It came with dulce de leche ice cream and pralines. Die, die, die.

The next morning, we were scheduled to burn off all our calories at something horrible called The Bar Method, where you can only work out if you wear black stretchy pants below your knee. I’m not joking. But we decided we had had too many calories the night before to tolerate such an elitist, fancy-pants calorie-burning activity, and besides, my yoga pants were navy blue.

So we went to a diner instead. It was awesome. It’s Bechelli’s, and if you’re ever in that part of SF, get the blueberry pancakes and the eggs, which are like the ones my grandma fries up in Kansas. Kansas eggs should be the only way eggs are allowed to be cooked, but I guess it takes all kinds. The coffee at Bechelli’s is only so-so, so-so get a Coke instead and tell Laura you did. She doesn’t believe I sometimes drink Coke in the morning, but she goes to an exercise class that has, like, a pants bouncer at the door, so, there’s that. I won’t be judged.

Before I had to go, we watched one episode of Downton Abbey. It was, and I’m totally serious here, riveting. Laura’s already done with it, and as soon as I’m done writing this, and doing laundry, and cleaning the kitchen, and grocery shopping and cooking dinner, I will be too.

Tomorrow, part two of my Bay Area Weekend Extravaganza… J

This Mother Runs on Caffeine

2011-09-26T16:51:00.000-07:00

I've been needing and wanting to post lately, but I've been thwarted by really nice things, like gettin' myself a little job and having to fill out grant proposals. Yay! I'm working on a longer essay-type piece, but I want to make sure I get it right, so it's taking me longer than most posts. I also was "hired" by my friend Catie to make a bespoke dog fleece for her awesome Frenchie, Twyla, and I've been taking pics to make a little tutorial, but while sewing today, I realized I did the math wrong on the pattern and now have a dog fleece...for a dog much bigger than Twyla. Catie gave me the awesome idea of donating it to a shelter, so I will! I still have more than enough fleece to make a properly fitting coat for Miss Twyla, but there's a shivering dog somewhere who's gonna score some sweet duds!

In the meantime, I thought I'd post quickly (sort of quickly) on my new daily ritual: homemade iced coffee. I spend an embarrassing amount of money at coffee shops, but until recently I hadn't found a way to make acceptable iced vanilla coffee at home. I read about cold brewing in (I'm waiting for my friends to smile knowingly or laugh) Martha Stewart Living, and since I'd follow Martha into the ocean with rocks in my pockets, I thought I'd try it. It's not a Peet's iced latte, but it's very good even if you're a snob, and it costs a fraction of what Peet's does. Follow me into the rich, dark, delicious ocean:

I bought a French press for cold coffee. We tossed our old one in the move, and this one was on sale for $24. My friend Katie says you can do all this without one, but I like the ease of this. I got the syrup at Whole Foods (with a Groupon!) for $10, which is ridiculous, but it's organic, and $10 is still only two lattes. That's how I justify it. The coffee is Peet's New Guinea Highlands, and it ran me $8 for a half a pound, which makes a surprising amount of coffee, I have to say. I've been doing this for a week and getting two big iced coffees out of it each day, and I still have plenty left.

Start by filling the carafe with two cups of water. I marked two cups with a Sharpie, because if there are two things I hate, they're measuring and thinking.

I use an ice cream scoop for the grinds. Iced coffee needs really strong coffee, about doubly as strong as hot coffee. Here's a silly and inaccurate way to figure out how many scoops to use: Decide how many scoops of ice cream you'd want if you were having that, and then double it. I call those "poet measurements." If you want doctor measurements, like my husband usually does, then I would say two or three scoops per cup. It's a lot. But it's better than wasting your beans and your time by making weak coffee that leaves you with weird-tasting beige milk.

Stir until it looks like...something you'd never drink.

Put it in the fridge overnight, at least 12 hours. It'll hang for a while there. It doesn't get bitter like hot coffee. I've made iced coffee from coffee that's been in the fridge for almost 24 hours. It's still good.

This French press has a separate lid for brewing in the fridge. I plunge down with the other lid. Maybe it keeps your coffee from tasting like metal. Who knows.

Then get a glass, and fill it this much with vanilla syrup:

Then coffee:

Then whatever milk you like. I use 2%:

Then ICE! And then you drink it! And there's enough to make one or two more in the course of your grant-proposal-form-filling, dog-fleece-sewing, blogpost-writing day!

NOTE: If you don't like twitching, maybe don't make a third one. Save it for tomorrow, and let me know if it's still good 36 hours later. I'm all for squeezing every drop out of my orange press. :)

Jealous of Alaska

2011-09-19T14:02:00.000-07:00

Everyone keeps telling me how jealous they are of our trip north, and I understand why--it was so fun and so beautiful. So here are more pictures! I won't caption each one; I think most of them don't need explication, except for the eagle shot, which was shot at dusk on a cloudy day with such low light that my camera jacked the ISO to 5000 and turned out a compositionally lovely photo made from dots of color the size of golf balls. I Photoshopped it (by posterizing), but it's obviously included just to show you the eagle. :) I'll share stories soon; I just have to figure out how I want to write them...

Mushrooms of Alaska's Great RV Parks

2011-09-15T16:01:00.000-07:00

We got back from Alaska on Monday night. It was great in almost every way (the RV camper's battery--batteries, actually--dying in the middle of the night was decidedly not great). Everyone keeps asking if we saw a moose, or a bear. No, I didn't, but the mushrooms blew my fuh-rickin' MIND, y'all! They were all over one campground on Cooper Lake, and I fell deeply in love, quickly. I mean, look at them. How can you not love them??

Some were fat and twirly like skirts.

Some were so delicate and pale, like little forest ghosts.

Some were hot and flashy. And probably deadly.

Some looked they were in the middle of a fireworks display.

Some were shy...

Some were lonely.

Some looked like they'd be bullies, shovin' all the poor dirt around.

Some were huge and weird and huggy with each other.

Look how crazy this is! Have you ever seen anything like it?? Screw moose!

But this one, this one, was my absolute favorite. I got three shots of him before Ellie kicked him right in the face. He fell over, but I put him back, like the pecan tree. :)

I know these aren't the photos you probably wanted to see first, but too bad. This is what you get! Obligatory nature, family and camper shots to follow soon, after you have had time to fully absorb the incredible awesomeness of the mushrooms of Alaska.

Notes from my Photography Classes...

2011-09-05T19:16:00.000-07:00

My foray into photography continues, people! Besides following the blog Katie Evans Photography, I also have her e-book. I'm also two classes into my four-class Groupon photo class extravaganza! The first, one of two with Anfinson Photography, was a review of basic photography followed by a walking tour of Old Folsom (no, that's not where the prison is). I took a few decent shots, like this one:

But for most of them, I forgot to adjust the manual settings, so the good photos were taken in the shade, and the blown-out photos were taken in the sun. The only way to save them was to Photoshop them into sub-par pop art:

And this, which I think could be kind of interesting in the right context, like a postcard:

The next class was an advanced portrait class, which I found hard for a lot of reasons. One, I continued to shoot on manual while most of class, I learned later, shot on aperture priority, which is easier. Two, it's really awkward telling people how to pose, and I don't really like posed shots because they look posed. It's a bit too catch-22 for awkward little me. But my partner, Cassey, is gorgeous and looked so nice in every shot! And she was really good at posing herself, which would be awesome if I weren't trying to learn how to tell people to pose. I found myself just saying, "Yeah, so, pretty much just sit down. You look perfect. Maybe I'm just brilliant at this."

Cassey was great, but my photos needed some tweaking. Like this one, where a column grows out of her head...

Or this one, where holding the sun reflector thingy makes her look like she has the world's worst spray tan. Yikes.

Here, I cut off her hands...

And then her feet...

We both really wanted to try to do sun flare shots. The instructor told us both to pose this way. Her photo of me looks so nice--she turned it black-and-white. I didn't think to put it in here...oh, well. Anyway, mine of her looks like she has sunshine coming out of a stoma in her neck:

I do also want to Photoshop out that tree coming out of her chest. The next day, I watched Katie's son Andy for a little. I asked him if he wanted to be a model, and he smiled like this:

The pics are a little yellower than I wanted, but I think I had my camera on the wrong white balance setting ("shade"). I've since turned it to "auto" just for ease. It's what the instructor told me to do. I like this next one because this to me is just who Andy is, happy and interested in everything, though the photo itself is a wee bit out of focus (babies move a lot!). The instructor told us to put ourselves between the light source (in my case, the bedroom windows) and the baby, and do everything you can to make the baby look at you, and hopefully smile!

That's all for now. I'll be in Alaska for a week with my mom, dad, brother, and Ellie, giving Mark a chance to come home every night and stare at the wall in peaceful, silent bliss. Peace out, and see you in a week!

Trader Joe's Honor Roll

2011-08-30T11:41:00.000-07:00

After all the tree drama, today's post is just a light, fun list of food I love to buy at Trader Joe's. If you don't have a Trader Joe's near you, I am so sorry. They're not everywhere, which is stupid. When we were deciding areas of the country we'd be willing to move to for his job, I told Mark that I wouldn't live anywhere more than 20 minutes from a Trader Joe's. Part of that is cultural, part of it is addiction.

Here's the stuff I get nearly every visit. I put the prices on things I bought today and have the price for; others have been in my pantry, so I don't have the receipts anymore. These are more staples, but I'll post a list of some of their packaged meals soon. They're delicious, though we've had some misses I'll warn you about.

First up, olive oil. I'm as snobby about olive oil as I am about wine. Eight years (going on nine!) in California can do that do a girl. The big bottle on the left is great for cooking--I used to saute veggies, get a sauce ready, whatever. The bottle on the right is for lovers, baby. It's about $6 a bottle, but it tastes like it should cost $25, and I hate to admit it, but I have paid $25 for a bottle of olive oil (I was single and had more disposable income--rolling in that teacher dough...). I could drink this out of a cabernet glass. Lordy. Pour it on a plate, sprinkle a pinch of kosher salt from up high, crack fresh pepper next, then dredge through it with hot bread. You'll die. Just totally die.

Here's another little side: Pour a can or two of these black beans into a pan, shovel two or three or four tablespoons of peach salsa, cook until it boils then let it simmer until whenever (but not forever or it'll brick up). Add chicken or ground turkey or carnitas or carne asada or fish if you're feeling it, some shredded colby jack, sour cream, jalapenos, and eat!! If you don't have any fancy fixin's, this is excellent straight up, and CHEAP!!

I have a love/hate relationship with the minced onion/shallot/garlic mix ($1.69). It's awesome because I'm a crier who hates the smell of raw members of the Allium family (and there's your fun fact for the day! What's up genus??), but it's awful because it reeks!! I literally had to roll down my windows driving home from the grocery store this morning.

I double seal the stank in my awesome Pyrex containers with rubber seals. I'll use this mix right quick. It's important to confront difficulty head-on. Take the reigns and drive these onions directly into pasta sauce and tequila lime marinade pronto.

I love these when we get a craving for Mexican, Thai, or Indian. The taco seasoning needs major salt though, so be ready with the shaker. The chutney is lovely, but too spicy for kids even though it's sweet too. I dump a jar onto chicken, tilapia or cod and bake it in the oven for however many minutes I should. Serve it over rice with sauteed red and yellow peppers. Yummers. The satay sauce is perfect. Use it for classic chicken satay or pra ram with broccoli and spinach and jasmine rice. Use it for a crudite dip. Paint some on your wrist and wear it like a watch that you can eat, I don't care. Just get it, crack it open, and live life to the peanutty fullest, people! (When I start writing like this, it's usually because of low blood sugar. Lunchtime is upon me.)

Agave is awesome. Because of my Southern and Midwestern heritage, I am almost angrily suspicious of sugar substitutes. Agave won me over. It's mild, not like honey, which I don't particularly care for. Put your favorite fruit in a saute pan, cook it down a bit, pour some of this in (1/4 to a 1/2 cup), and maybe a tiny pinch of salt (I only ever use kosher, btw, because it is perfect in every way and because iodized salt tastes like metal). Pour the fruit over ice cream or Greek yogurt. I cook peaches this way and put them over roasted pork tenderloin, which usually almost makes up for the pork not being cooked by my dad or my brother. Almost.

Don't let the name fool you. This is fruity crack sugar ($2.49/bag), but holy pajamas. Mark can eat a bag in four minutes.

I struggle with chocolate. I need it every day, happily and sadly, but obviously I can't have too much. Snacky-sized ones are usually too small, so I end of eating a big-bar equivalent of snackies. That is because I lack what is apparently called "portion control." These ($1.99/box), however, are the perfect size. I have to sit down and really savor it, but just one makes me happy, and I don't go back for more. Unless it's been one of those really bad days. Then I have two. But never three. I don't need three.

So there's the staple list. I love knowing what other people like, because I'm afraid to try things cold. Post in the comments if you've got some TJ's love to share. :)

Red Dirt Girl...

2011-08-25T22:55:00.000-07:00

This is just to say that I'm still here! I'm just mired in a rat infestation in our attic. I was able to escape today after Mark got home and drove out of town--it doesn't take long--to practice shooting my camera on manual. I took this, on manual, but then messed with it in Photoshop, which kind of defeats the purpose?

Special thanks to Liz and Mike, who kinda talked me down from the rat-infested ledge today. Hearts.

It's Time for School; It's Time for School...

2011-08-22T12:06:00.001-07:00

Today is the first day of school for lots of people in my life, so I thought I'd write a little about my favorite memories of being a teacher. It's really just a list of students, and what you see here is pathetically incomplete. I could go on and on, but you'd get bored.

I'm so lucky to be in the first generation of teachers who get to friend their students on Facebook (after graduation) and watch them go on in their lives. It's wonderful.

If you're a teacher and you love what you do, I hope you have a shiny, happy year. If you're a teacher and you don't love it, and I say this with all appreciation of money and the recession and obligation and everything, but GET OUT. If you're a parent of a student, I wish you easy drop-offs and a year free of worrisome mid-quarter reports. And if you're a student, make good choices!!

Here is my highlight reel:

The one who showed up one morning with one shoe on. He said he just forgot the other one.

The one who had no inner monologue. Everything came out of her mouth. I pitied her because I’m the same way.

The one whose mother bullied him about not being smart enough. He was the same one who used to say the most beautiful, most humane things in class. He struggled with details, but he saw the universe clearly.

The one who brought a “bomb” to class and put it in my hands when I asked him what was in his sweatshirt pocket. It was calculator he had modified heavily, so much so we called the bomb squad.

The tall, gorgeous one who was teased constantly for being tall and gorgeous.

The first period class that made me a coffee mug for my birthday…with all their pictures on it. Every single face.

The twins I always mixed up.

The one who nicknamed me VRob. It stuck. For. Ever.

How they all used to write about how much they loved their families--their mothers and their fathers and their brothers and sisters. They would write it in class like a secret they didn’t want anyone to know.

The one who read the Polish poem in the original Polish, even though he wasn’t Polish and had no idea what he was doing. I cried I laughed so hard. It wasn’t disrespectful. He just wanted to try and he went with it.

The one who grew a foot in eight months.

The one who didn’t grow at all in four years.

The one who had a strong preference for my black plastic-rimmed reading glasses and not the wire-rimmed ones and would be audibly disappointed anytime the wire ones were on my face.

The one who broke up the fight.

The one who, when I asked if anyone had any questions about the pronoun lesson, raised her hand and said, “Did you wax your eyebrows yesterday? They look different.”

The veteran at my community college who needed synonyms for “bullshit.” He had a hard time writing about his deployment without using “bullshit” at least twice in every sentence.

The one who ate Styrofoam out of a shipping box and explained in detail that it was totally fine to do so.

The one who came to my empty room during lunch and came out of the closet.

The one who came to my empty room about seven weeks into my pregnancy and said, “We know something’s wrong.” I had thrown up every morning, sometimes in between classes, and I was trying so hard not to let it show. I think they thought I had cancer or something and wasn't telling them, the little sweethearts.

The one who asked, "Did you buy that sweater . . . like that?"

The CC student who came to class reeking of pot and could write only about dealing drugs. He used to explain little things to me, like this: “So, Ms. R, my friend wanted an Infiniti, but he wanted a pick-up truck. Now, Inifiniti doesn’t make a pick-up, but money talks…”

The one who indignantly yelled, “I didn’t say anything!!” and then said, “Well . . . I might have said something.”

The one who photographed my wedding.

The one who sang “Billie Jean” at my wedding!

The one who played a violin in class. A violin she had made herself.

The one who hid in the storage closet three minutes after class started, for the rest of the entire period, just to see if I would notice. I did not.

The one who sent an email pleading with me to recommend him for Honors English. The subject of the email: “Honos English.”

The one who said, “I love this class. It’s like we’re a family. Only we like each other.”

The football players who sported the kiddie-sized Disney backpacks.

The one in the van in South Africa who began to choke—really choke—on a piece of fruit, and the one who, after the first one coughed up the fruit, started to cry and yelled, “Why do you always do this to me???”

The one who did a backflip off a desk when I wasn’t looking and broke his wrist. Great.

The one whose mom passed away that year.

The one whose dad passed away that year.

The one who danced and sang and made everyone happy and joyful no matter what . . . he was the same one who had lost his mom.

All the ones who awaited Ellie’s arrival as if she were their baby sister, and showered her with little gifts and cards and all sorts of love. All of that treasure has been kept for her in a special box, so that when she's older, she'll know how much she was loved by the kids I had before her.

The one who said, "Ms. Robinson, I could never be a teacher. We drive me crazy."

. . .

To a gloriously funny, lively, sweet and lovely school year, for everybody!

Red Bed, Fried Carbs, and One Grainy Turkey

2011-08-20T20:26:00.000-07:00

Happy Saturday! Here's Red Bed! The guard thingy takes away some of the glory of the finished bed, and of course it's drowning in stuffed animals, but there you go. The snake is made from sweater sleeves after Ellie went through a snake phase. She got to hold one at school, and this is the one we have at home.

Family dinner tonight was lovely. Two of the few things I need to be soulfully happy are a farmer's market bouquet from the hubs, and sweet potato fries from Trader Joe's.

Ellie doesn't care about the flowers.

This is totally random, but I wanted to share this. This turkey is technically wild but has adopted our friend Katie's neighborhood. Sometimes in the evening when we drive home from hanging out with Katie's family, we spot this turkey (always) on top of this Toyota. It's awesome! Apparently, she had a son, who was really aggressive and one time showed up in Katie's backyard like a serial killer trying to get at her son, and eventually that same turkey slashed a horse to bits just outside of town with its crazy turkey talons. They had to put it down it was so bloodthirsty. But the Mama Turkey isn't murderous, she's just cute, and sad about her son probably. Ellie is obsessed with her. And I wanted you to see her.

Friday Morning (and into the Afternoooooon...)

2011-08-19T12:23:00.000-07:00

Ellie woke up a bit early this morning and was insistent that we go to school to see her friends. I nearly cried. This transition has been rough on the little trooper, and today was the first day she popped out of bed and was like, "Let's go already!!" Rock on, lady!

This meant that I got about 45 extra minutes of morning. I needed them. Everything is taking longer than I thought today.

I found out yesterday that I have been offered a reading at a local gallery here in Davis. My professor and publisher Sandy McPherson made it happen, and I'm so, so grateful. I haven't read in five years, so it's a big deal, and I think it will be the last time I read the Carrier poems as a group. It just feels time to move on from them, and the timing is strangely appropriate. Even though it's perfectly understandable, I don't like that my poems are tied to September 11th, and I can't believe it's been a decade since then. I also think because of what happened two weeks ago, I'd like to read them one more time and not tack on newer poems (not that I have many anyway). Read the greatest hits, so to speak, and then be done. There are plenty of other things to write about or read to people. Those things just happen to be in my head and nowhere else right now.

So, the problem this morning was that the gallery needed a recent author photo and bio. The bio is easy enough, but the photo was a little trickier. Back in Philly, I would have called up Brooke, one of my awesome Mamas from my Mama group, and she would have worked her magic. I was missing her this morning! I do have my new camera, and it has a timer, but getting it to focus properly and then for me to sit in the right place and make a nice face--all that was kind of hard! I don't like smiling for author photos, especially for anything Carrier-related, because the poems are kind of sad and I don't want to smile widely and sell a feeling people aren't really going to get at a reading or in the book. But it's tough to look unsmiley and pleasant. I end up looking confused and sedated. It took a lot of tries.

I got a slightly-out-of-focus picture that will have to work because the camera battery was dying and I was sick of the tripod and at some point it's just time to get on with the day. When I get the details of the reading, I'll post the link.

After that, I got started on the projects for the day: Red Bed and the Blue Comforter.

Red Bed was easy.

Before: black bed. $30 including slats and kiddy mattress, craigslist.

(All the photos today are iPhone ones. The Nikon needed to recharge.)

After: Red Bed!

This took exactly one can of spraypaint.

The Blue Comforter was harder:

Before: old, white Ikea comforter from college:

During:

This is when I started to get nervous:

Shoving the comforter into the blue gave me corpse hands.

Good to know for Halloween.

The dyeing process means three runs of the washing machine:

1) With the dye and the comforter.

2) With detergent and the comforter.

3) With bleach and detergent and nothing.

The comforter is in the dryer now, and it turned out just as the lady in the fabric store said it would: looking like bad tie-dye. I told her it was a what-the-heck kind of project, and I'll cover what I can with fabric paint polka dots (BIG ONES). For a potentially cute-ish bedspread at the cost of a bottle of dye and some paint I already have, we'll just see how it goes. Ellie's potty training right now, and it'll be nice for her to pee all over stuff we're not too invested in. Silver linings!

Anyway, after all those cycles, and one in the dryer, here's the comforter. It's not too bad:

But it does have blotches:

So this is how I did the polka dots. The bucket is just for tracing circles, the top for big circles and the bottom for smaller ones. The pen is a disappearing ink pen I use for tracing sewing patterns onto fabric.

My stash o'paint.

I strategically placed polka dots over blotches.

The ink will disappear on its own, and if it doesn't, I can just steam it out with an iron.

Freehand circles aren't as hard as I thought, and it was easier not to use a stencil. This one was in-process and looks better now. :)

Repeat about 16 times while listening to Brett Dennen radio on Pandora, and done! Four hours in the sun should set everything. Or fade it. That's life, ain't it?

The finished bed in Elo's room will post tomorrow if nothing goes awry. Hooray! I'm gonna go get the Ellicus and take her out for a snack. :)

Why I Sew

2011-08-18T13:36:00.000-07:00

Note: I came to love blogs, and to realize how spectacularly beautiful some of them are, through sewing blogs. Grosgrain is a favorite of mine, and so is Made. Dana, the author of Made, has a section in her blog about why she sews. I thought I'd answer the question too, since some of what I'll be posting here is stuff I've sewn.

. . .

A few months back, I started to post a lot of my little sewn things on Facebook. I liked showing my friends what I had made, since sewing is a pretty solitary activity (at least the kind I do is), and it was fun to get some props for making something on my own.

After I posted a photo of a felted wool owl I had handstitched, a friend of mine (you know who you are and you know you're reading this!!) wrote to me and basically said, "You should be writing more and sewing less. You're a writer."

I responded to the sentiment by sewing another owl.

I should write more because I'm good at it. I sew because I'm not good at it, and that's why I like it and why it's meaningful to me.

My grandmother was 89 when she taught me to embroider. I was 29. This is not the usual image people have of a grandmother teaching her granddaughter to stitch, but there we were, in the kitchen of her little ranch house in Newton, Kansas, in the retirement community where she and my grandpa lived (and she still does, at 94, God bless her every day). She still has that classic midcentury furniture and the little square breakfast table (think blue-collar Mad Men!), and that's where we sat while she held the hoop and told me what to do with the thread and cloth. My embroidery looked loose and wobbly, fluffy almost. Grandma's embroidery--the embroidery she did that day, a decade after having a stroke that affected her arm--was straight and tight and efficient and gorgeous. I said to her, "Grandma, mine doesn't look like yours!" To which she replied, in her frank, Kansas way, "Well, I've had more time to practice." Uh, yes.

I love it that my grandma can still school me in sewing. I have always prized book-learning and conceptual understanding; you can't get a master's degree in sewing. It took me a long time to really appreciate that that didn't mean it wasn't really hard or didn't take a lot of critical thinking. I stood in the fabric store today, awed by a older woman's quilt for her grandchild. She'd done the whole thing by hand. It was a heaping dose of "You can't do that, so shut up about yourself," a medicinal moment that helps prevent The Smug and also comes in "Car Repair," "18-Wheeler Driving," and "Aircraft Carrier Propeller-Welding" flavors.

I sew because some of my problems stem from not doing enough on my own. See the yard sale post. Would that much stuff be in our house if I had to make it all? Oh most definitely not. I would have four skirts, maybe one dress, and for shirts, I would wear pillowcases with armholes cut out of them (Shirts are crazy to make. I don't think it can be done without magic.)

That my grandmother or my mom or anyone else can look at a bunch of 2D shapes on tissue paper and figure out how to turn them into something that flatters a 3D person is an insane feat of cognition and engineering. I'm not good at that part. I think I made a skirt upside-down once, and I know that I sewed the top part of a dress inside-out to the bottom part, which was inside-in, and you can't fix that without taking a blade to it. The pattern drawers at fabric stores should be labelled "shirts," "dresses," "pants," and "despondent insanity." Then people would know.

The machines break, the needles break, the fabric tears or pulls or won't feed through, the thread is too strong or too weak or not the right color even though you thought it was the right color, the presser foot is the wrong kind and is now eating your owl, the felt won't stitch together, you have to do it by hand. You have to stop and do it over. Or you have to keep it, and live with it. You have to decide what you're going to do. It's harder than it sounds.

I made a skirt once and the zipper pinched a tiny bit of my backside every time I zipped it up. I'm not redoing that zipper, ever, but I sure am going to wear that skirt. Even if it makes me bleed.

Why would I still sew?

Partly, I sew as a lesson in economics, a field my husband will tell you I clearly know nothing about. So it's my kinetic education in labor and cost and profit. I continue to be amazed that it is cheaper to buy a toddler dress at Target than to make one, but of course I'm not surprised that it's less risky too. If Ellie doesn't like it, I just take it back and no one's feelings are hurt. High-end quilts can become attractively priced when the alternative is (even machine-)stitching them yourself. On the whole, I have found that I'm more thoughtful of the people behind the making of the clothes I buy, be they in factories if I'm buying something at a warehouse store, or those artisans from whom I might buy something handmade. That little doll at the craft fair I didn't want to pay $50 for probably took 3 hours to make, plus material. What's my time worth to me? What is someone else's time worth to them? This consideration is especially real when I buy shirts, because I hate making them and can't imagine spending all day, every day doing just that. That would be a circle of hell. I've tried more and more to buy used things of every sort, to eliminate the worry about labor (and, let's face it, cost). Much of the fabric I use comes from the thrift store, usually from men's shirts and sweaters, since they can be so large. When I buy yardage from a fabric store, I tend to feel it's out of laziness or lack of patience ("I didn't check the thrift store first. I should have browsed fabric lots on eBay..."). But sometimes I just need wide, flat yardage right now, which is its own lesson in time and energy and money. I know it sounds a little Michael-Pollan-meets-Martha-Stewart, and I get that. But there it is anyway.

Mostly, though, I sew because of what happened just before and just after I put that owl on Facebook.

Before I put it online, I finished it. That's it, that's the "it." I just sat there, knowing that I got my project to "work," and it felt disproportionately exhilarating to what I had actually done. I just sat there at my table, thinking, "It's not exploding. It's not melting. It actually looks cute! I did it! I'm calling Grandma!"

Right after the photo went on Facebook, I gave the owl to Ellie, who was right around 2. I asked her if she liked it, and she looked at it, really considered the question, shook her head solemnly and said, "No."

Then I told her I made it.

She made this puzzled face like, "I don't know what you're saying to me right now. Please hold on." And then a smile came over her and she lit up and grabbed the owl and hugged it. It's on her bed right now. Even if it's not perfect, and even if its creation meant swallowing a tablespoon of growling frustration, there's a deep, lasting sweetness to something handmade.

I hope that the things I make for her will help her understand, even as a toddler, that people can make things (and not just out of Play-Doh). My dad made her 180 blocks for Christmas, and the box to put them in. He also made her a wooden duck that waddles when she pulls it. She asks regularly if something was made by someone she loves. That's pretty awesome, even if she quickly follows up by asking, "...Or is it just Target?"

I'll be turning the fabric in the first photo into two skirts over the next few days. They're really easy to make, and the tutorial is here, on Made. I'll also be dyeing and fabric-painting a comforter for Ellie's new bed, and painting the bedframe, so that the bed she calls "Red Bed" because of the flannel sheets will actually be a red bed. I'll post pictures. :)

Tales from a Yard Sale or Two

2011-08-15T16:40:00.000-07:00

We had two yard sales in two Sundays.

The reason is because, even though the math says that this house is only 10% smaller than our old house, it is rejecting about 30-35% of our stuff. Perhaps this new house has moral reasons. I would probably nod knowingly if you told me that our new house--in its California, hippie-ish town with its less-is-more way of life--is offended that we moved a billion pounds of crap here and wanted to shove all that crap through its adorable stuccoed face.

Take, for example, the rocks. I realized when we got here and started unpacking that we had shipped--across the entire country--ten or eleven softball-sized stones I had collected over the years, usually from beaches. They weigh about eight pounds each, totalling about three toddlers' worth of geological debris. We made the struggling public university system of the brokest state in the union pay to move our (um, my) ROCKS. I don't want to set an ugly precedent here and curse, so I'm just going to say that yes, we know we are a word that starts with "a" and ends with "holes."

We also have kept all of the trappings of any Future Baby. We'd like to have another kid, most days, so we've schlepped one giant trash bag filled with clothes for each clothing size, and a kid goes through four sizes in the first year, and Ellie's two and a half, and big, so we have sizes up to 4T. So, in a way, Future Baby currently lives in our garage, and her name is Ridiculous Mountain O'Babygear. If she's turns out to be a boy, 80% of Ridiculous's stuff will have been pointless to move, so please refer back to the last sentence of the previous paragraph.

Finally, one of our rooms at our new house is doing double-duty as an office and sewing room, rooms that in our house were separate. This is the room I wish were a black hole, where matter could co-exist with other matter, only I would need to be able to reach in to this place of infinite storage and pull sewing notions out. Whether Mark could reach into our black hole room and extract Target receipts to enter into Quicken is of little interest to me. Actually, it'd be nice if he couldn't so that. Sometimes stuff is on sale and I can't help it.

But alas, our "sewing office" is nothing like a black hole, and the matter in it can't share space with other matter, and it can't share that space with Ridiculous Mountain O'Babygear, who lives in our garage, or with the three toddlers' worth of rocks, so some things had to go, y'all. Like, about 30% of our things.

The easiest stuff to get rid of was clothing. I just had to look in my closet, ask myself what I actually wear in the course of my actual life, and then prune. I pruned like an axe-murderer got trapped in my closet. No one needs 20 pairs of jeans (this is not the actual number--I'm trying to make a point), even if 4 of them are maternity and 4 of them are post-maternity, and 4 of them are for the moderately fat phase you go through about four months after you lose all your pregnancy weight (by the way, what the hell???). And no one needs clothes for a job they haven't had in three years and won't have for another three. For me, that meant high school teacher clothes, which made me sad, but this house isn't a black hole, and I can't keep everything. Pale blue khakis aren't going to make a job I loved dearly come back to me. They're just not.

Linens and blankets were bulky and easy to give away provided no one we knew made them. Unfortunately, I collect quilts. Hrmph.

Kitchen stuff: super easy! I do not give a crap about that seventh wooden spoon! Sell it!!

Pregnancy pillow that looked great on the web but made me feel like I was trapped in quicksand: just don't tell the hugely pregnant woman who stops by for all the baby stuff. You know, maybe she won't feel that way. Maybe she's nimble and spry....at eight months.

Once everything was organized into shallow, wide boxes for easy display or on shelves in the garage, we posted on craigslist and let the magic happen. There were four or five things that we put price tags on, but mostly everything was "pay what's fair." We had a very, very flexible definition of "fair." After all, we wanted all this stuff gone, so what's "fair" when you'd put it on the curb the next day anyway? Curb alert people will not be leaving us a quarter for that painting, so we might as well take it from the elderly woman who keeps offering a quarter for every single thing in our garage, even items with, say, a hard drive, or fifty years' worth of gorgeous patina.

On the first Sunday, we got about five people, but two of them were Mary Louise and Inez, who managed to mutually convince each other that they needed about 25% of what we had. They were lovely and funny and lively and hungry for our junk. I wanted to invite them over for dinner because we all had such a nice time that morning, but I refrained. Of the $186 we made that day, $110 of it was theirs. I also met a sweet neighbor and her son, who kept calling me "auntie" in Chinese. I saw her today while I was driving and we waved happily at each other.

On the second Sunday, during which we sold leftovers from the first Sunday and newfound junk from the week between, we got a better crowd. Reuben came and scored all the electronics to ship to his son who's starting university in Mexico. Three Japanese women came and tested everything in the garage, from oven mitts to hot rollers to children's toys. They laughed so much I couldn't help but laugh with them, a trait I tend to have regardless of the situation, but maybe more when three women are test-driving a ceramic pitcher and pouring imaginary beverages onto my garage floor. Dan showed up last. He owns an antique store in town and he asked me about poetry (there were books of mine) and Mark's time in the Navy (there were military items), but he made the mistake of telling me most of my vintage stuff was overpriced and that I should sell it all to him at a crazy discount so he could take it back to his store and sell it for what I was asking. Um, no. This woman eBays, sir. I did sell him $25 worth of stuff I didn't want to deal with, and he put it all in the back of his truck, with a broken guitar and a rocking chair and some brass fixtures he got at another sale, gave me his number, and told me to tell my ex-flight-surgeon husband that if he ever wanted to go up in a fixed-wing to call him, since he was retired Air Force and had a plane at a regional airport nearby. That was cool.

What didn't sell in the yard sales will be picked up by one of the many roving trucks dispersed by various charities in Northern California. Unlike those in Philadelphia, these charities make their rounds once or twice a month instead of once a year, leaving postcards with dates and instructions and asking for everything from electronics to household items to clothing. On Wednesday, a cancer charity will come to our street, see our seven boxes and five garbage bags of stuff we don't need in this chapter of our lives, and take them away. Hopefully they will help two sets of people in the process.

I'm happy with our house now, and while I thought that getting rid of that much stuff would leave me feeling naked, I feel delightfully content. I will wear the clothes in my closet, stir soup with each of the spoons in my kitchen (not one soup with all the spoons...you know what I mean), sew with the notions that fit unobtrusively in the sewing office I share with the hubby. What we have, we want and need. What we will no longer have after Wednesday, well that was only giving us anxiety. None of it was helpful anymore and ridding ourselves of it feels good.

I did, incidentally, keep the rocks. I'll find a place where they can be round and smooth, and beautiful again. I decided that they need to do a little community service and make amends for their embarrassing joyride.

New Camera, New House

2011-08-12T16:13:00.001-07:00

I got a new camera, and it's superfancy. I'm slowly learning all of its ins and outs, and I thought it might be fun to chronicle my evolution as a superfancy photographer here. So we might as well start with the new house. I love peeking in other people's homes, and the sneaky thing about a new camera is that I only have to show the places that look good. There will be no garage photos. Ever.

I got a 50mm prime lens to supplement the lenses that came in the kit, and I'm still getting used to the whole no-zoom thing. The result is a collection of photos that look either boring or self-consciously artsy. Alas. I'm learning!

Enjoy . . .

Our $50 china cabinet, with my paper bouquet from our Treehouse wedding...

Ball jars from a Pennsylvania flea market...

The horse that was Mark's and now is Ellie's...

Oh, fabric, my fabric! For the record, I do not consider this photo pretty. It's just...indicative. Also, I don't know what I was thinking when I bought two yards of asparagus print (center).

If you can get my daughter to brush her teeth happily, regularly, I will give you a million dollars as soon as we have it.

This is why our movers hated us.

I feel better about the dishes in our sink when I see the dishes in hers...

And finally, the art studio...

Happy Weekend!

Gentle on My Mind

2011-08-11T15:16:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to find a way to acknowledge the SEALs who died Friday in a Chinook crash in Afghanistan. I knew two of those men well enough to be shocked and grieved by seeing their names in the paper. I thought, after nearly a decade of survival, all of the Navy men and women I knew would be lucky enough to make it to the end of this and go on growing old like I get to do.

Those friendships have their story in other places, but it's been a long time (seven years), and I haven't wanted to say much about it since. However, these last few days have churned my memory, and while I tried to write about remembering, I wasn't satisfied with what you would have read here.

I will say that knowing each of the men who lived in the big house in Ocean Beach, and the additional men who came to visit and party and sleep there, shaped who I have become in my adult life.

I have been a more patient and forgiving teacher, particularly to boys, and most particularly to hyperactive boys. I'm better at letting go of inhibitions and admitting that no one cares if I embarrass myself in the name of a good time. I dance more at weddings and embrace the folly of pratfalls. I'm friendlier, more open, braver, and more adventurous. I probably curse more than I should and have far less patience for cowardice.

I have a special attachment to times spent eating in big groups with people I love.

I'm a better mother for having taken care of them in whatever little ways came up.

For all of the instances in which knowing them made me incredibly, at times unbearably, sad, I am, in fact, probably happier.

For what more could I have asked?

I realized the other day that a lot of what I remember was the music we listened to, in the car and at their houses. There is plenty that reminds me of them, but Johnny Cash's version of "Gentle on My Mind" fits best now. Have a listen.

Exchanging Money for a Pen

2011-08-09T14:04:00.000-07:00

Given my druthers, I’d probably be doing something else. Definitely.

I grew up with a single mom who worked herself tirelessly up a crazy corporate ladder to become an international business consultant for IBM. Yeah, I hold myself up against that. Staying at home and writing for zero money while my kid goes to preschool isn’t cutting it. I feel bad about that, but then there’s the dull fact that to be a writer, to get anyone interested in your writing, you have to first sit down, ignore everything else including your kid, and write something. Anything!

I’ve applied for tens of jobs, of all kinds (teaching, writing, unpaid internships with publications…), and no one is interested. That by itself is okay; the economy is bad, the school year is very close at hand, I’m old for an intern. What to do after it is the problem. Apply for more jobs? I will. Yank Ellie out of preschool after she just started? We won’t. Work at Starbucks? I hate standing, and after having Ellie, I can’t do that for very long anyway.

At some point, you look at the scales, and at your own strengths, and say that they tipped in favor of this. It is better for me to make no money writing and wait for fruit to bear later, than to work an odd job that I don’t really care about, just to say that I’m working to justify Ellie’s being in preschool or to supplement, however modestly, my husband’s dwarfing salary.

I’m lucky (and always have been, really) to have friends, family, and now a husband who think that my writing is worthwhile, outside of any stabs at moneymaking. What a crazy gift. For a long time, I didn’t consider a waste of anything not to write, especially because my circumstances were so different from what they are now. Now, however, if I’m going to justify the way we are living, and what I’m doing with my life and the life of my family, I have to do something I’m good at.

Minnow Peck

2011-07-29T14:06:00.000-07:00

So, I told my friend Katie that I started a new blog.

"What's it called?"

"Minnow Peck."

"Um, why??"

Here's why. Because a long time ago, I wrote a poem that ended up being the last poem in a small collection of poetry. One of the lines is about being in the Currituck Sound and feeling minnows taking little bites of my back. The poem is about change and the line itself is, "The minnows peck—maybe they are eating the skin,/making everything worse. " About a year later, my brother Paul and I were swimming in the sound off my mother's dock, and at some point he felt a minnow peck. Then, in the manner of a Shakespearean actor, he stood up with his full 6-foot-2, 240-pound frame, stretched his arms out and proclaimed, "They are minnows!! Eating skin, CHANGING WORLDS!!" And then he laughed like a crazy person.

There's no one in the world who will bust your balls more than a sibling. No one. And there are few more vulnerable to this kind of ball-busting than a poet, who, perhaps rightfully so, is reminded regularly that for most people, poetry is about as reflective of real life as my brother's parody is to the banal biological fact that minnows will eat your skin if you get into the sound and let them.

I haven't written very much in a long time for a few reasons. One, I got the unbelievable privilege of being published at 27, a tiny run of a tinier book, and I wasn't ready for the understandable little invasions of privacy that come with waiving my right to privacy through publishing. Tricky little thing, writing about real life. Two, I fell in love with teaching and thought it a better use of my time and energy than writing poems. And three, I had a kid, which under many other circumstances would have been awesome fodder for writing, but my girl came here on her own terms and on her own time, so a lot of that experience felt completely out of my control, and since I was gun-shy about sharing anything anymore, I didn't exactly take a lot of notes.

I'm writing this blog to see if I've healed from all that, to see if I can write and not get nervous. To see if I can be a writer again because it has become a lie to say that that's one of the things I am. It'll be lighter stuff this time, not so much war and sadness. Maybe I will write about making curtains, and about taking pictures with my new camera, and about my love of quality thick-cut bacon, but also now and then about having Ellie, and a marriage, and a total lack of employment thanks to this excellent, never-ending recession!

So, "Minnow Peck" is my concession that maybe this will be as silly as writing a dramatic, melancholy poem about little sea creatures who eat your buttcheeks. It's also an admission that the blogosphere is huge, and I'm just one little thing in it. Writing publicly stems, in part, from a potentially delusional belief that people give a crap about what you have to say. You have to believe that even to do it. Otherwise, we'd all be keeping locked-up Hello Kitty diaries.

"Minnow Peck" is the apology. I've said it. And I mean it.