Philosophy of Housekeeping

What the widows know

2012-01-21T08:39:00.002-07:00

Since working in the D.C. temple every Friday for the past couple of years, I probably know more widows than I'd ever known before in my life, but I think I had noticed this before. Sometimes, they seem... extra-serene. It is sort of odd, since you would think that they would have more cause to go through life saddened by all its unexpected nastiness than a lot of other people.

But this is what I've recently noticed, and this time from personal experience. When something truly unimaginably awful happens, it can come to you with more force than ever before how much of life you really, really can't control. And that's freeing! It's strange to think that perhaps much of our sadness in life may be due to our worrying that somehow we're supposed to stop bad things from happening when we truly can't, but perhaps it is so.

In short: I am, in certain ways, doing better than ever in my life. I've caught a glimpse of the widows' serenity. I can't say I would recommend this method (for finding peace of mind) to anyone-- waaay too much pain not to try to find a different way-- but, in the end, I cannot help but feel deeply thankful for all of my life's experiences. (But try to remind me of this the next time I am in the middle of an awful crisis, and I may just slug you. I doubt I've gained that much perspective.)

I agree

2011-11-12T16:51:00.002-07:00

A statement from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints about the Utah Compact

2011-10-30T21:32:00.006-06:00

I was slowly walking along one day last spring, neck craned way back to catch the full glory of the newly-beleafed Tulip trees, as a couple walked towards me from the other direction. "What, are you stargazing?" the husband asked, laughing.

"No," I said. "Treegazing."

But it all worked out

2011-10-30T20:20:00.019-06:00

I did flunk my Differential Equations test on Tuesday, but a) I flunked it with a 20% higher grade than I had been expecting, and b) the exact problem my tutor and I had worked on for an hour and a half the night before was problem #6 (of 7) on the test. Which without a doubt contributed to a). Also, when my teacher handed the test back to me on Thursday, he said that he thought I could make a 90% or even 100% on the next one, and I do believe he is correct. While we're on the subject, any of my Differential-Equations-knowing-relatives who has time and feels like discussing LaPlace Transforms is welcome to call tomorrow (Halloween) morning, any time before 10:30 Eastern Standard time.

My car died, like, REALLY dead, about three quarters of an hour in to Thursday morning, but it did so within easy walking distance of my friends' house that I had just left. Ha! So I went back and stayed the night, and spent most of the rest of Thursday with said friend and felt much less crazy afterward.

You were feeling crazy, you ask? Well, yes...

The food for yesterday's service activity was making me feel crazy because I was in charge of it (the food, not the whole activity, thank goodness)--but, as per the title of this post, it worked out. I ordered (in case you were wondering) 72 pieces of fried chicken from the deli at the grocery store which is close to our house; bought 12 lbs. of potato salad and 6 lbs. of cole slaw (which were both on sale! for 1/4 the price they would normally have been), from that same deli; and looked at the expiration dates on the cookies and the brownies I bought, feeling very clever in buying ones that were the freshest. And my sweet roommate, who was able to make it to the activity, said that there was exactly one piece of fried chicken left over afterward. Whew! I had been so worried! Because, the chicken was the biggest per-item expense, and also is more difficult to send home with people safely*, but heaven forbid you actually be skimpy on how much chicken you serve--so it's important (=stressful) to guess well both how many people are coming and how much they will eat. Silly though it sounds, I do feel like I got some help from Heavenly Father on that decision.

(And next time I will try harder to get more people involved. I was just really short on working brain cells this week, notwithstanding my claims of having done comparatively fabulously well on both tests I took this week.)

(Also, the next student who tells me that they hate story problems-- I'm just going to make them imaginarily Mormon for a moment, and let them be in charge of figuring out how much food of which kind to get for the next ward party. After that, they will (I am sure) BEG me to be allowed to go back to the nice, simple problems they have in their books.)

I "najahht" (suceeded) on my Linear Algebra test on Friday. (Some words are just better in Arabic.) It's true that I didn't answer one of the questions, but I felt completely confident on the vast majority of the others. Also, I did so poorly on the first test of the semester that it would actually be difficult not to improve on it. Heh.

I have to preface this next story with an explanation. My esteemed brother-in-law, Dr. Weathercolour, is 1/3 Maori and while he says that his dad claimed that their tribal group were not among those that participated in certain practices which I shall not spell lest they bring people searching for them to my blog, Mr. Weathercolour himself says that he is not so sure. Thus, his jokes about the fact that the Maori word for white folks (which would include all of his wife's immediate family) is "long pig". Also, his children have picked up on this strain of humor. Also, we (the Pale Ones) have maybe picked up on it a bit ourselves. I can certainly tell you that Mr. Weathercolour is solely responsible for the fact that I now always invite friends to come "to dinner" rather than "for dinner".

Long explanation for a short story. Sorry.

Papa was watching the younger members of the Weathercolour set so that Dr. and Mrs. Weathercolour could go to a fireside this evening. "What shall we do?" he asked them. "You want to tie me to a stake and burn me?"

Sroon: "Bor-ing." But later, he proposed that Grandpa would taste good with Barbecue sauce, so perhaps they shall have some fun tonight...

*It's not that I expect the dead-and-fried chicken to get up and start trying to hijack anyone's car or something, but I do expect people to perhaps forget and leave it on the counter for a little too long before putting it in the fridge.

Miss Forgiveness, part II

2011-10-25T07:26:00.012-06:00

A few thoughts:

I would still be extremely interested in an advice column focused on how to forgive. (I would put a link in to Miss Forgiveness part I, but Blogger doesn't seem to want me to do that right now. So sorry.)

I went to a murder trial in August. The jury found the man guilty (first-degree); sentencing is next Tuesday. I had thought I might go, but am feeling now like it would be better to stay home. I have work; I'm not sure how much more closure I would get from going to the sentencing hearing; the benefits don't seem to outweigh the cost. I do wish that I could send someone for me, to report back, but I have no idea whom I could ask. The majority of my closest friends in this area have young children, so attending a sentencing hearing on my behalf just wouldn't be practical for them.

Why is it that I feel a sense of genuine-- as far as I can tell-- forgiveness, or at least of leaving it in God's hands-- for this murderer, but then lie in my bed and cry over the little slights I perceive from the people around me? What is it about little things that makes me think God can't handle them, too?

I've read/skimmed a couple of books-- one a few months ago, the other just last night-- which seem to exude a genuine sense of mercy. (I've put their covers up to illustrate this post, though I'm unskilled enough that they aren't really where I want them to be.) The first was called I Shall Not Hate, by a Palestinian doctor-- the first who served a medical residency in the state of Israel-- who had two daughters who were killed by an Israeli rocket attack on his town. The second, from last night, is Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy. I would be interested if anyone wanted to read them and discuss with me.

It isn't just that I have work. It's that the emotional cost for the trial was pretty hefty: I wanted to lie in my bed and cry, and not about anything in particular-- just a general misery-- and never get up again. I do feel that the trial was worth that cost; I gained a lot of "closure," which is a word I would still have a hard time defining, but which still seems to suit the experience I had. But I believe that the sentencing hearing may be different.

I think that this is a dogwood tree. Caught it last Spring. Extra credit to anyone who can tell me why I thought this might even tangentially be related to this post.

I just had to go on a walk this morning

2011-09-27T10:29:00.000-06:00

And I'm so glad I brought my camera!

Family obsessions collide

2011-09-19T19:49:00.004-06:00

Math and fairy tales (in ads, true enough, but still, weren't those advertising people clever?):

http://surlalunefairytales.blogspot.com/2011/09/advertising-fairy-tale-posters-for.html

ASPCSHA

2011-06-25T09:30:00.000-06:00

As I am blending the last of the flour in to my cookie dough with our small hand mixer, which is getting hot and groaning as it goes: "I know there doesn't exist an Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Small Household Appliances, but every time I make these cookies, I worry that they're going to come after me."

Mom: "Well, next time you could use the food processor."

Myself: "I was kinda thinking that."

From the Weathercolours' front yard

2011-05-04T22:00:00.003-06:00

These pictures are courtesy of Princess M, who (politely, with permission) pretty much first thing stole my camera and went out and took some truly lovely shots of the view out of the front yard.

This tree, by the way, is the only one on the street that is anything like its size (the branches stretch thirty feet in diameter or so, would you say?) Just yesterday, I was taking my walk and reveling in the fact that I get to be around trees that size-- and that they occur every few feet, along many of the trails around here.

I do love how snow looks on the mountains. That sky is a color that I tend to think of as "Utah blue"-- the color itself is almost piercing, let alone the sun behind it.

And, yes, we do like tulips. Probably more of them in the next post.

The Wrong Tool For the Job

2011-04-20T07:41:00.008-06:00

He's trying to take his shoe off with a screwdriver.

His father calls this one Sextus, but I rather like "Piglet" (like from Winnie-the-Pooh) because I always identified with Piglet's smallness and general confusion about what was going on, and I sometimes see that expression on this kid's face, too. We did eventually take away the screwdriver, but only after I'd gotten a couple of pictures.

A few more pictures from the Provo trip shall follow (I hope).

Wintertrees

2011-02-06T16:10:00.002-07:00

From today!

As promised, lots of trees... I like the curly bits.

Also, the hint of light of the setting sun (like you are shocked that I would like that...)

I caught a little more light, down the road a bit.

Small Update

2011-02-05T20:07:00.003-07:00

So sorry to be such a dingbat about updating when stressful things are going down. I believe--hopefully-- most of you who are closest already know about this (Dad's health issues, not the dingbattiness-- you knew about that before).

Papa had a massive brain hemorrhage nearly a month ago.

Right now, he is doing so much better physically that they couldn't keep him in rehab, and the doctors said that, since he started walking again so soon, chances are good that he will recover fully. He was out in Utah, helping the Weathercolours move, when it happened, so that is where he is still; Mom is out there with him, and they are both staying in the Weathercolours' beautiful new house.

Good things DO happen to me-- really they do-- I just need to blog about them more, so that people can know. More on this soon.

Spiderweb and Path (near our house)

2010-12-30T11:01:00.002-07:00

I DO understand that some people prefer deserts, such as the one I was born in and mostly raised in. I'm actually pretty happy about that fact, because it means that not everyone gets crowded into the places with trees..

These are from a couple of months ago; I just now got around to downloading them. (But it was worth the wait, right?)

A Story from Papa

2010-12-20T07:44:00.001-07:00

"I don't even remember what class it was, but I remember the teacher had left. And [another kid, a boy] was kicking and picking on this girl. She was kind of retarded, and certainly not pretty-- certainly the opposite of pretty, I guess, pretty much-- and had always been kind of a despised one. And right now, my time traveling Walter Mitty [daydream] is that I go back and stand up to him. And my guess is that probably if I had hauled off and hit him one, he was into fighting enough that he would have pounded me into a pulp. Which is probably why I was too afraid to fight him then. And it probably wouldn't have hurt that much-- but I was afraid. Maybe if I'd just said something, I'm certain most of the class-- and frankly, especially the pretty girls-- would have been immediately on my side and I would have been much more impressive to them. But instead, I sat like everybody else, and said nothing. And as I think about it, maybe that's part of why I think of all of these issues of our modern society, being afraid of other people is not a good trait. Right is right."

Kitchen Failure at Elijah Kitchen

2010-12-07T20:41:00.002-07:00

Erm. A couple of sisters and I decided-- back in March? I think?-- to start a food blog. And we finally got tired of waiting, so it went live on Thanksgiving Day, but I am such a slacker that you didn't find out about it until today.

But! Probably one of the funniest essays I have written in my life goes live today. So.. if you are interested in reading about Kitchen Failure.. go ahead and click through.

Oh. The blog's name is Elijah Kitchen. You know, like the Elijah plate at passover, the extra one you set just in case a miraculous (or even non-miraculous) extra guest happens by? Only, you know, instead of a plate, it's the whole kitchen. We explain it better in the first post, maybe-- you can read about it on the blog.

In Which Cornelia Solves a Logistical Problem For Herself

2010-11-23T20:59:00.010-07:00

YOU know how it is, dear reader. You get nominated as tooth fairy. You accept with as much grace as you can muster. You slowly collect your costume: orange slippers (at the request of one of your fairy-ees); one sparkly green and one fancy blue dress (you let the loser-of-the-tooth decide which one you are going to wear when you come over for a sleepover); a wand (gift from a niece who feels that you CANNOT be a proper fairy without a wand); and a light-up tiara (from a roommate who is certain that you have better use for it than she does).

At said sleepover, you exchange gold (= sacajawea dollars) for teeth beneath the pillow of an only nominally asleep child (I decided shortly after starting this job that letting them be awake but making them pretend to be asleep is the most fun, and if you aren't in Tooth Fairying for the fun, I can tell you the teeth just don't-- ahem-- cut it, as far as pay is concerned).

Then, you move away, so that these sorts of sleepovers are no longer possible, but you do what you can: you encourage the neeflings to mail the teeth to you, promising that you will get you them dollars when you can. But here's the problem: I am a forgetful woman, and teeth are not exactly flat-- they are not easy to file or, in short, to keep track of. I found one just the other day that Papa had brought back from his last trip to Utah, and I realized how badly I am falling behind in my duties. I'm really not sure how many dollars I owe to whom; also, I'm not completely sure which of the teeth in my possession have already been paid for

But I came up with a solution: Tooth Receipts. Mailed as postcards.

I reprinted the back side with our "blog names" so that my general readership could see the wording there, too.

I mailed the first one today. It made me pretty darn happy.

Still fun on the first of November

2010-11-01T16:52:00.000-06:00

In case you're still in the mood for carving pumpkins (but don't feel like cleaning up the mess).

Faith, Hope, Love

2010-10-28T23:20:00.006-06:00

You are going to laugh at this (or, if you aren't, you should) but Jane and I had "crashed" a funeral just a couple of months before Jane's unexpected death. My reasoning went something like this: Mormon churches, like churches of many other faiths, are basically open to the general public, for whatever functions may be held there. (This would be "church" as in where we meet to worship on the Sabbath, as distinct from "the temple," which is not even open on the Sabbath.) And I was going anyway-- I knew the husband of the woman who had died well enough to feel like I ought to attend the funeral no matter what, so this was really just a matter of whether or not to bring Jane with. And I knew that a good Mormon funeral is actually a great way to get a feel for the best bits of Mormon family life, and I wanted very much for Jane to get that feel-- I felt like she would learn things from attending that funeral that she wouldn't be able to get in any other way.

It turned out that I was right. The funeral WAS wonderful-- I nearly blogged about it as "the best funeral I have ever attended," but I wanted to respect the privacy of the family, and decided against it. I will say this much: it was the funeral of a woman who had lived approximately twenty years beyond expectation: she had been diagnosed with a disease, shortly after the birth of her first (and, as it happened, only) child, and she had been told that the disease could take her life within that year. But it did not. Though she was not able to have more children, and from that time forward lived in nearly constant, severe pain, she was able to live long enough to raise her son, see him graduate from high school, and send him on a mission. He was not at the funeral-- he was in his assigned field of labor-- but as it happened, the assigned field of labor was very close to his mother's ancestral home (where she was buried), and he received special permission to go to her grave site and be the one to dedicate the grave.

And the words spoken at her funeral! Her mother spoke-- she spoke too long, and had to be asked to sit down, but it turned out OK. Her sister spoke, describing a sister-mother who had sacrificed much for her. Her husband spoke, and this was one of the most moving talks I have ever been witness to. He quoted poetry, first in German and then in English, and he wept as he described how their "dream deferred" of having a large family had caused a sadness between them-- but how in the end they decided (somehow-- I'm describing this badly) to let the sadness go, and let hope flare up again.

The funeral went a little long, and as I drove her home, Jane was on the phone with a friend of hers whose daughter was having difficulty, and whom Jane was trying to help out. She was still on the phone as she was getting out of the car. I asked: how was it? She told her friend on the phone to wait a minute as she talked to me. "I want a man who loves me like that," she said. I agreed, and agree.

There is a part of me that wants to shout: But what happened? The man who killed you-- why did you let him back into your house, into your life? Why didn't you tell me you had a restraining order against him, way back last spring when you first mentioned him to me? Was it too embarrassing? Was I-- was my manner such that you just couldn't, that I was judgmental, that I'm just not a person who can handle that information? Dear God, O God, how I wish I could turn back time and look into your eyes again and say one more time: you are worth being treated well. You are worthy of love, even unemployed, even dark-black as you sometimes thought so poorly of yourself for being, even with imperfect children and an imperfect church attendance record and with so many people surrounding you who questioned your every decision.

Oh, how I miss you. I have been buoyed up by the love of God in a remarkable way which is far above and beyond anything I have ever experienced in my life before, and I know that it has been in direct response to my need for comfort over your death-- but, beloved sister, I wish every day, EVERY DAY, that you were not dead. I miss you terribly. The girls miss you terribly. Your baby-- I pray for all of your family, but I pray especially for him. No seven-year-old should have to bear the burdens he is compelled to bear. And when I keep thinking in a loop about how I wish I could do over-- wish I could persuade more persuasively, ask peskier questions, something-- the one thing I never regret is listening to every inclination to be friends with you. What a comfort you were to me, what a true friend.

Setting for the Eulogy, Part the First

2010-10-09T22:22:00.006-06:00

Miss Ruby said it best, and she said something like this: "I don't want to be racist or anything, but I'm going to say it how it was. All of us-- all of Jane's friends and family who were at the funeral-- we're black. And it's at this white [as in the race of the majority of the congregation is white] church, and we're thinking: can they deliver like we're used to being delivered to [in, say, a Black church]?"

I felt that. I was aware that the congregation was going to be mostly black, and I think that I was a little less shocked than, say, Bishop Smith, at how large that congregation was; I had been a regular visitor at Jane's house and had seen first hand how many people besides me loved to be near her. The ward had run off 150 programs on the nice, colored paper; then, when they saw so many people there, 75 more on the black-and-white copier available at the church. By the bishop's estimation, there were about three hundred people in attendance. The members of the ward who came sat mostly in the seats in the back section of the chapel; the front of the chapel was full of black, black, wherever the eye turned, and-- as Miss Ruby so candidly put it-- they were wondering (as was I, quite frankly) if the funeral speakers could "deliver".

There were a few things on my side. First and foremost is my love for Jane, my feeling I've had since I first began visiting her that she is truly my sister, that it is a privilege to have known her. Also, there is the fact that absolutely everyone in that congregation was praying for me, as were more people than I've ever been aware of before, in other locations. It didn't hurt at all that, for me, black people I don't know are much safer, emotionally, than white people I don't know; this is residual from my having attended Jr. High in Alabama, where the black kids were just much, much kinder to me than were the white kids, on average. Then there is the fact that somehow, the way I get nervous when I'm speaking sometimes comes across as being confident and collected to the people I am addressing, whether that is at an oral linguistics final or giving a talk at a Black Mormon Funeral.

Most of all, it is my opinion that it was simply the will of God for it to go well. When Miss Ruby started out by saying that they weren't sure if we could deliver, I said, "I was worried..." and she interrupted: "But you showed us you didn't have to deliver how we are used to. You captured her essence-- it was just so beautiful."

"Well, I prayed," I said, "and I think that God helped me."

"God was with you."

Which was a beautiful compliment, and symbolic of how I've taken all of the compliments (of which there have been many) so far: they are a validation, not that I of myself did such a great job, but that I was able to follow the Holy Ghost and do what was expected of me.

Squirrel!

2010-10-06T19:17:00.005-06:00

Papa is now contributing photos to the blog, thus:

In the spring, Papa tried to run the squirrels off from eating the birdseed which he puts out on the balcony for-- er-- the birds-- but once he realized that he could get good shots of the squirrels from the other side of the patio-door (which looks on to the balcony) he forgave them and let them eat in peace.

I wondered, at first, why the squirrel-on-the-seat picture came first, but then I realized that this is a very ground-centric view; of course the squirrel landed on the seat before it landed on anything else.

This is the same bike which has been on the balcony since last winter.

I wasn't going to include this one, but Mom liked it so much that I decided to post it anyway.

The plant which our visitor is exploring in this photo is my lovely basil which Papa rooted from some we got last winter.

In which Cornelia slowly begins to live again

2010-10-05T23:18:00.011-06:00

I have chosen a pseudonym for my friend who just died: she shall be called Jane. After, in part, Jane Manning James, but also because it rhymes with the name she had chosen for herself to be called, since she disliked the very old-fashioned one her mother had chosen for her.

It occurs to me that I've set a precedent before now of calling the dead by their own real names, under the theory that really nothing worse can happen to them at this point; but, a) my brain still can't quite process the fact that she's dead; and, b) there has been enough internet-searchable local news coverage of her death that it would definitely break any sort of anonymity I have remaining on this blog to not give her a pseudonym.

This is what I need to tell you: there had been a part of my soul which had slowly been dying of bitterness. It felt like I had been to so many funerals, and I was tired of it, and tired of being poor and having nothing even remotely resembling a decent career and not having a husband and blah blah blah. But: my soul is reviving again, and this fact is directly related to Jane's death.

I will try to explain.

It is true that my day-to-day emotional resilience is at low ebb; that, on a regular basis, I find myself crying for no particularly good reason, and that my back (which is highly responsive to my emotional state) isn't doing as well as it sometimes has. But it is also true that somehow this death, which is taking up elephant-sized space in my emotional living room, has at least temporarily sloshed out any capacity I used to have for grudge-holding or bitterness or resentment. I cry because my feelings are hurt on the kind of regular basis I haven't experienced since I was a teenager (or younger?), but when I am done crying, I have no energy left to dislike the hurter.

Is it bad for good to come of evil? But I think it cannot be. I do not plan, would never plan-- or, in other words, wish for-- evil as dark and loathsome as this. And I say most emphatically that God does not, could not do such a thing either. But I am sure as the day is long that God has planned for evil, for this particular evil especially, and I am everlastingly grateful to Him for that. Strange? To me strange. But still true.

I will try to write up the eulogy I gave, very soon.

Could I audit?

2010-10-05T22:16:00.001-06:00

Some situations are on the more extreme end of unlikely to occur in my life. Such as my becoming a first lady of an African country (or even becoming a chief-of-staff for one). But wouldn't it be cool to sit in on a class being run for them?

First ladies of Africa take page out of US book

Pictures taken in the early(ish) morning, when the mosquitoes are out

2010-09-23T17:08:00.003-06:00

I think I fed at least ten mosquitoes from this photo-run. Either that, or I was so delicious that some of them kept coming back for more.

The above is the sidewalk one walks down as one is going towards the library.

An this is along one of the paths behind the house. I finally got the flash to shut up when I figured out to use the "landscape" setting. The only problem with that is that my camera then wanted me to have a tripod. I compromised by steadying it on my knee or a nearby tree (don't remember which, for this shot). But-- isn't it lovely? Even if it is shakier than it would be if I'd had a tripod?

As I came up the rise and saw this view, I thought: this lamppost looks triumphant. Now why is that? And then I realized: it's because it is bathed in the glory of the rising sun, whilst all around it has yet to feel its rays.

2010-09-12T07:20:00.000-06:00

I've had several people reassure me that I was a good influence in my friend's life, which is not at all bad, but at the same time, I want to cry out: "But she was a good influence in mine!"

I realized yesterday-- or perhaps it was the day before; my time sense has gone funny-- that I have a dual problem at the moment. Firstly, I have a friend who died in a violent way. And, secondly, the friend whom I would have visited with to debrief, the woman at whose kitchen table I would have sat and on whose shoulder I would have cried, whose fridge I would have raided and whom I would have asked for, and from whom I would have received, many, many hugs, is gone. She is not my Very Best Friend Of All time, and I really don't think she would have characterized me that way for her, either-- but she was like a sister to me, and in that way a wonderful, wonderful influence on my life. There is a part of my brain which does not comprehend the fact of her gone-ness yet, which refuses to believe. Yet surely there is a part of me which does understand, because I have cried some part of every day since Tuesday, and I spent basically all of Wednesday and Thursday moving at something like 1/4 speed and feeling really tired and numb. Numb, that is, except for the upset and anguish which was so huge that it got through anyway.

And now I am (mostly) back. I am determined to work as much as I can; I think that both body and soul heal better and more quickly when they are given the opportunity to work, so work is what I seek. Good work, that is to say; work which feels genuinely helpful to others. Curiously, one of the kindest things anyone has done for me so far was to call me up and ask if I could come over and help clean her children's rooms. She and I already have a warm relationship; I already hold her baby during the third hour of church sometimes. What this means is that it was very easy for me to pop on over, help the boy-child with room-cleaning, hold the baby to prevent Lego-consumption, and then believe her when she told me that I had been helpful that day.

And, just in case I haven't said it recently enough, to my family, to my friends: I love you. I am thankful to you. That last post-- if it hurts you in any way, just don't read it. I am surrounded by love, and I become more and more aware of this fact all the time.

In praise of the not-completely-natural reaction to bad news

2010-09-11T23:53:00.003-06:00

I also started this blog so that I could say the things I felt like saying, but which I didn't want to inflict on particular people without their permission. The thing is, a blog does not HAVE to be read. Which is my way of apologizing if the following post seems out of character or upsetting to you.

So. Without further ado.

I have a close friend who was killed on Tuesday. The police are charging a man (whom I have met, though only briefly) with her death. I do not feel at all like discussing the details, but I don't mind everyone else's knowing them. If you want to know what happened, email or call me and I'll tell you my friend's name so that you can find what you can on your own.

I apologize for grieving you. I do not-- I cannot-- I am trying very hard not to focus on the violence inherent in this situation, but almost every time I tell someone else, I get this very natural response of shock and horror, and I have to say that I have gotten very much more firmly on the side of Miss Manners and King Benjamin: a natural response is not the best.

What do these natural responses sound like? "Oh, my GOSH! HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?!" and "Are you sure it wasn't accidental?" (Yes, I am, and I'm also really sure that I don't want to explain why. I wasn't there, but I've heard enough of the police report to know that they have good reason to have that man in custody.) Also on my least-favorite list: "How are you? Are you OK?" I know I've said this one myself-- I've probably said all of these myself, and it isn't like I'm mad at the people who say these things, but it is true at the same time that I am discovering that they just aren't the greatest things to say.

Anyway, the problem with asking if someone is OK is that there does not exist a good answer to this question. For something this horrible, you can just assume that the answer is no: no, she probably isn't OK. It also doesn't really help her be more OK to keep having to figure out how to state her mental/emotional condition without overwhelming her listener (and possibly provoking more shouting, which was painful enough the first time around) while still being even remotely accurate. I have figured this one out, though: for a couple of days, I said either "I am sad,." or "I feel very sad," and now I'm saying "I'm OK," which is true at the moment.

And not-natural reactions? They are the ones where my interlocutor gently says something along the lines of, "Oh, I'm so very sorry." "Please tell me if I can do anything for you." "Call me if you need to talk." Or (only if it's accurate), "I had something like that happen to me once."

If You are Good

2010-09-06T21:33:00.022-06:00

My calling in church right now is to be a ward missionary. Yesterday, what that meant is that I went to the home of a newly baptized member to help her learn more about our church.

We were teaching this young woman about, among other things, temple marriage. The gist of this part of the lesson is: temple marriage is a good thing, and you should do what you can to be married in the temple when that time comes. Then the woman who was helping me teach said something like, "If you are good, God will give you a husband so that you can be married in the temple."

The kind of funny(/horrible/deeply hilarious) thing about this is that I had written, not two nights earlier, about how tempting it is to wonder if I have somehow invisibly offended God (meaning, an offense invisible to me), and that THAT is why I am husband-less. On most days, and even most nights, I know that this must not be true, but it is easy on dark nights after lonely days to slip into the temptation of believing such a thing.

And yes: I did jump in almost before she had finished the sentence, correcting her. I explained that I had had chances to marry, outside of the temple, but I had chosen not to take them. I said that it is still worth it to wait, unmarried and faithful-- to me it is worth it. And afterward, outside, my teaching companion apologized for having been thoughtless.

I am still thinking about this. I do not depend on God in the way I would expect to depend on, say, a decent car. Or, worse, a slot machine with much-better-than-average odds. To me-- and here, I speak very personally-- God is a person, not a machine. God is, furthermore, a person I trust. I will certainly mess up, because I am a person, and people do that; but the God whom I worship is always willing to forgive when I genuinely ask forgiveness. People-- good people, trustworthy people-- do give forgiveness when it is genuinely sought, and do not arbitrarily withhold good things from others because they are invisibly offended.

I believe that if some part of the "if you're good, then good things will happen to you" equation appears to be unfulfilled, it isn't because God is undependable, but because not enough time has passed. I also believe in the power of God to transform not only death to life, but suffering to empathy; and when one is in the midst of a life-long project to become like an infinitely loving and compassionate God, this looks like a very good deal indeed.

Overheard: Mother-to-child interaction

2010-08-28T22:19:00.003-06:00

"... so don't complain to me. Daddy is the designated whine-ee."

Still catching up: a little from the family reunion in New Hampshire

2010-08-27T22:30:00.010-06:00

for my mother's side of the family.

On the right: Susie (Mom's/Nana's first cousin, so my first cousin once removed); on the left is her husband, Frank. Both are black powder rifle champions, and both are retired teachers. Susie said that at one of the black powder rifle championships, someone asked her what her profession in "real life" was. She said, "Oh, I'm a home ec. teacher". Her competitor looked surprised. "Well, what'd you expect a home ec. teacher to look like?" Susie asked, because clearly, what one actually looks like is: this. (Yes, I'm sensing a theme with the last two posts, too.)

Both are lovely people. They let me sleep in their very comfy camper-trailer, the night before the reunion-proper started.

This is what the tent/pavilion for the reunion looked like, the night before. Um, with some background, because with a background like that it would be practically criminal to leave it out. I have to say, the scenery in New Hampshire was SPECTACULAR. I would go every summer, if I could, but they only hold the reunion every three years (I think?) and at any rate they don't hold it in the same place every time.

And this is how they got the Official Photographer high enough to get everyone in her viewfinder for the BIG family photo. She covered her eyes on the way down. Heights, evidently, scare her.

2010-08-23T08:06:00.003-06:00

So, Mom was the one who told us about how she kept getting thanked for the flower arrangements that Papa had done. Papa is the one who has told the following story several times in my hearing:

When my mother (Nana to the neeflings) first got hired at BYU, she and Papa were invited to a New Faculty and Spouses breakfast, held at what was then the president's residence-- not the White House, but the residence of the president of BYU. This building is a sort of half-timbered-look building on the eastern edge of Maser Hill where, at the time, Jeffrey R. Holland and his wife lived.

One of the male attendees at the breakfast asked my father, "So, what do you teach?"

"Oh, no, it's not me. My wife is teaching in the Math department."

Papa, with flowers

2010-08-20T20:36:00.005-06:00

Seeing as how they owned a flower shop for ten years, it isn't that surprising that my parents were asked to do floral arrangements to sit at the front of the chapel during our most recent Stake Conference. Mom was feeling sort of migrane-y when the day arrived to actually put the arrangements together, so she asked Dad to do them-- and he happily obliged. He enjoys flower arranging.

Very promptly (less than a week) after the conference, a note arrived from our new stake president, thanking Mom for doing the flowers. The following Sunday, someone else thanked her again. We keep meaning to tell them who it really was, but we're all a bit forgetful, so it hasn't happened yet.

Hooray for technology!

2010-08-18T09:06:00.002-06:00

Ivy started it, but I've finally followed her example: I read aloud to the neeflings over the phone-- either books checked out of the library or ones from our own collections. I know it sounds silly that I hadn't thought of this solution before, but I have to say that it is much less exhausting to read someone else's story aloud than to be making up your own all the time. (Also, beyond that, there's this sort of happiness that comes from making a kid happy, and this is one of the most easily accessible ways for me to get to that.)

The story I'm reading at any given time may be truly age-appropriate for only one kid (sometimes two), but frequently several of them will listen in, via speakerphone. I hadn't realized quite how popular this was until the other day when I called to read to Sroon, and his younger brother Quarto shouted, "SPEAK-er-phoooooone!" with the last part getting more faint as he ran off to the bedroom to tell the others what was about to commence.

Assateague

2010-08-10T22:27:00.009-06:00

I am trying to catch up with myself. I suppose that this means that I should post more.

Assateague is a barrier island on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, just a few miles south of the ever-crowded-and-commercial Ocean City. We visited just before school let out, and it was very, very lovely (and sparse enough to be fun).

Yes, it's true that it's just a beach; but it is also true that this was my first true view of the Atlantic Ocean, and it was QUITE exciting to me.

All three of my pictures are from rather late in the day. I guess that this could be explained by the fact that we didn't get out the door until ten or so, and didn't get there until after noon, and didn't actually get to the beach until around five. That is, indeed, Papa; neither he nor Mom went swimming that day, but I had a nice dip in the Atlantic, and did a bit of shell collecting to boot. Papa just collected pictures with his camera (there were dolphins! If only one of us had had a telephoto lens and a tripod...) and Mom collected the sun's rays and chapters from the book she was reading.

While we were driving, Mom mentioned that they usually go to a beach in Delaware. I said that it was fine with me if we went to Delaware; I just wanted to go to the ocean. But she kept driving towards Assateague. Finally, she explained that she wanted to see the horses on Assateague. Ah-hah! And we saw some, literally as we were driving away. I got two shots (Mom asked me to); I chose to post the one I thought was more interesting.

One Friday morning a couple of months ago, my mother knocked on my bedroom door and said, "How would you like to go to Assateague today?" I promptly agreed. We had planned-- sort-of planned-- to go to Assateague a month before that but were waylaid by medical problems on Mom's part. I have to say that this experience is the only time in my entire life that I remember my mother spontaneously deciding to take a trip. (No vacation with Mom would be a vacation with Mom without her spontaneously deciding to change plans mid-stream; but actually deciding to go and then leaving the same morning is unheard-of, in my experience with her.)

Forgetting isn't everything

2010-08-07T16:21:00.004-06:00

Stuff I've managed to forget/misplace, which affected me today:

my regular ring of keys
the spare car key
the other spare car key
the time of C and B's wedding
the key to my (usual, permanent) locker at the temple
because of the above, my name tag which identifies me as a worker at the temple
that it is a good idea to wear, ahem, *appropriately-colored undergarments when one is attending the temple
the time that prayer meeting for my shift starts
my little hand-sewing project which I thought I had packed just in case I ended up waiting around for a while, for a ride

Stuff I've managed to do anyway:

Talk my astonishingly patient mother into both dropping me off and picking me up
Borrow needed items of clothing
Get a temporary name tag, and
Just get a locker in the regular locker room instead of the worker room
Be on time to the aforementioned wedding (I was two hours early; whew!)
Help out the swamped, morning shift of the temple staff, because I happened to have an hour to kill, because I was two hours early to a wedding being held there
Let my shift supervisor know that I'd be missing the prayer meeting because of said wedding (I was there early! so I left a note)
Be practically on time to start working on my shift
Be a patron at the temple; I skipped being a patron early in the day because they needed me as a worker, but at the end of my own shift it was very, very quiet, so (with permission) I left my post and went up to another very, very quiet office where they were most happy to have me as a patron in the hour before my mother was able to pick me up
Find the second spare car key! Now if only my memory would show up as well...

*Just in case you didn't know: one walks into the temple in "street clothes," which means Sunday Best. Once inside, one enters a locker room (with individual booths for privacy when changing) and switches to "temple whites," which, as the name indicates, are all white. Since white doesn't tend to be terribly opaque, if one happens to be forgetful about what color of under-layers one has worn, it WILL show through.

Note to Self: Remember Eisenhower's Advice

2010-08-06T09:37:00.002-06:00

This is from a letter written to Lucius Clay, who at the time (1947) was the military governor for Germany. He tried to resign his post (officially) at least eleven times; unofficially, the count was even higher. Eisenhower had been his good friend for a long time, and in this letter, he was trying to talk him out of one of the threatened resignations. I found it quoted in The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America's Finest Hour, by Andrei Cherny.

"...please remember that now abide Faith, Hope, and Charity, these three, and greater than any is a sense of humor."

Turtles, Ducks and a Heron

2010-07-24T07:58:00.002-06:00

From that one day a couple of months ago when I was so trigger-happy with my camera. But it was really cool-looking!

There were more turtles out than I have ever seen at the same time, before or since, and it seemed like they were all sunning themselves.

These were sitting on the tubing which is somehow connected to the dredging of the lake-- a LOT of turtles were on the tubing that day.

The ducks and the turtles didn't seem to mind each other much.

And this is as close as I could get to the heron I saw. I was afraid you wouldn't be able to see it at all, but this picture came out OK.

Blogessence

2010-07-21T10:33:00.003-06:00

I started this blog for a couple of reasons. For one, I had dreams of Becoming A Writer, and I figured that if I had a(n at least nominally) public forum in which I expected myself to express ideas in a comprehensible format on a regular basis, then I would be forced to work on my writing on an equally regular basis. I wasn’t exactly sure what kind of writer I wanted to be, so the first blog descriptor lines that I used (“whatever I feel like writing at the time”) made perfect sense.

And yet, there was a further sense of purpose, even from the beginning. My first posting was about the death of one of my uncles, and how I mourned not just his passing but the passing of my chance to become closer to a man who had taken it upon himself to connect me more firmly to an extended family which—reflecting the attitudes of my own parents—wasn’t quite sure what to do with its first old maid in a generation. I wanted to express, even though in most senses it was too late, my appreciation for his making me feel even a little more at home with my family. As I continued to write, I found myself gravitating to subjects which help me figure out how to make myself feel at home even in the unexpected--you may laugh, and I actually don't mind, but it's still true-- as I say, the unexpected circumstance of being a grownup who needs a home, but who has neither of the most usual prerequisites in my home culture: a husband or a house of my own.

I come from quite the line of wanderers; I feel a keen wanderlust myself; and yet I feel equally a keen pang of longing for a true sense of home, which in some ways I have assuaged by blogging about what I think a Proper Home could and/or should be like. And realizing that I was doing this is partly what led me to my current blog descriptor, which (to finally answer N’s question) comes from the eleventh chapter of the book of Hebrews, in the New Testament, and is one of my favorite scriptures ever.

[And I would love to blog about being an Incredibly Mormon (not to mention More Than Faintly Victorian) person and living in a larger society which "gets" me, in some ways, better than my Mormon subculture does, but that will have to wait. This posting that you're reading right now, since I promised it in the last posting, caused a long-ish, unplanned pause in my blogging, which I do not wish to repeat.]

And this is why Cornelia Philosophene

2010-06-11T10:49:00.005-06:00

I wrote this in an email to a friend a while back, and I kept meaning to post something similar here; I've finally just taken the cheat-y way and cut-and-pasted from that email. I have made (as usual) slight editorial revisions. I named my blog after my email address-- despite the fact that it's dastardly difficult to spell, I do still love my email address-- but, as you shall see in my next post (chronologically), it turned out to be a good name for the blog in and of itself.

Your last question is the easiest to answer, as well as the longest. The first part of my email address came from a First Presidency Message that President Hinkley wrote in the December 2007 Ensign. I double checked it before I actually used the name, because I didn't want to be wrong and be all embarrassed and be stuck with a weird email address that I would have to start explaining by saying that I had been mistaken.

Anyway, in the article, he told a story about these Roman ladies who got to talking and decided to pull out their jewels to show off to each other, and they asked their friend, Cornelia, where her jewels were, and she called in her two sons and said they were her jewels. And then they grew up to be famous and good, or something like that.

I liked the story so much that I thought it would be great to name a kid Cornelia, (mmm... or something...), but never knowing if/when I would have kids, and also knowing that whoever I married might want a say in what we named our kids, I decided to go for it for the email address. I was completely sure that any variation of my actual first, middle, and last names was going to be very crowded in the email address market, and I really didn't want any numbers in my address.

Also, there's a small reference to a character in one of the Anne of Green Gables books; the lady is Cornelia Bryant, and she's this super opinionated, very kind, frighteningly competent old maid who is Anne's neighbor during Anne's first couple of years of marriage, and who takes Anne under her wing and encourages Anne to be friends with their other neighbor who isn't very friendly but desperately needs true friends. I felt that, as I head in to old maindenhood myself, I don't mind having her as a -- I'm not sure what the inverse of a namesake is. At any rate, I could do much worse than to turn out like Cornelia Bryant.

I had just declared my philosophy major when I was choosing my gmail account name, and since I'm a girl, I picked "philosophene." When I found the Philosophy Department at BYU, I felt-- and looking back, it still has this same feeling for me-- like Harry Potter at Hogwarts: suddenly, all of my weird academic quirks and interests made more sense than they ever had, were welcomed, even became useful! I have no idea if I'll ever be able to go back (um, flunking Aristotle certainly didn't help much for that prospect), but I will never regret having graduated in philosophy. My addiction to thinking in general, and particularly to wondering about the "why" of practically everything-- that which finally landed me in philosophy at the end of my somewhat extended undergraduate career-- remains a major part of my character, and I hope it always will.

Chickens Playing Bongos

2010-06-09T17:27:00.001-06:00

You know when you've already shown a youtube video to every member of the household you currently live in, and have called other people for no other purpose than to try to get them to look it up, it's time to blog about it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPkrin2g-7E

I don't feel like Writing (or at least, not on this blog)

2010-06-07T14:27:00.007-06:00

But luckily I took some pictures a couple of months ago which I feel like sharing.

Cherry tree at sunset

Looking up at a different cherry tree, around the corner from our row of townhouses

I kept trying to get a shot of this from my room-- then you'd have had a chance to see it from the top, which is the angle from which it brought loads of happiness into my life-- but the light would never quite cooperate. It was worth taking the picture from different perspective, though; doesn't the streetlight remind you, just a little, of the lamp-post you first meet at the beginning of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? And I would never have even realized the possibility if I hadn't come around the other side.

And the same tree from closer by. I love the contrast between the creamy-white blossoms and the red and blue of the child's toy. This shot comes closer to showing what bliss awaited me whenever I looked out my window, down on this tree, in those heady few weeks of spring.

:)

Summer Squash and Sweet Potatoes

2010-06-04T10:49:00.002-06:00

Remember in Prince Caspian (umm... I think not the movie, but I've only seen it once-- but definitely it is in the book) when it says that Trumpkin has "marvelous ideas about cookery," and they take their apples and wrap bear meat around them and spear them on sticks and then roast the whole kebab over the fire? Right. I just knew you did.

So, I told a couple of different people about how I cooked the summer squash we were getting from our produce co-op, and both of them immediately said, "I should do that!" This is when I thought that perhaps I should blog the recipe-- if it could even be called a recipe. It's a little too simple to feel like a proper recipe to me. It is, you could say, an idea.

summer squash
oil (I always use olive oil)
salt

Slice the summer squash thin. Mix it with, like, half a cup of oil for every summer squash? And then spread it out over a large, heavy pan (I used the large pyrex pan we still have left after I exploded that one last summer), sprinkle it with salt, and put it in the oven for, like, an hour, at 350 degrees F.

Notes:
A lighter-weight pan will produce more uneven results (found this out by testing it). I find that it doesn't take that long to arrange my slices in a sort of French-looking way-- you know, all overlapping and even-- and that this helps it to bake more evenly. Of course, you CAN use less oil, but of course that will make it harder for the natural sugars of the squash to come out and caramelize and get all delicious-like. Also, the slices reduce in size considerably while they're cooking, so it's OK to really pack them in there, side-to-side-wise.

Also. This can be done with sweet potatoes, which we did last night and they really are pretty good. I must admit that our household is having a bit of a craze for thin-sliced vegetables at the moment, since Mom got a food processor for me herself for Mother's day; if you don't have one available, the sweet potatoes are still pretty good when they are more thickly sliced.

At the National Aroboretum

2010-06-01T15:42:00.003-06:00

I visited The National Arboretum yesterday because I was looking for something cheap, preferably free, to do between working in the temple in the morning and going to a cookout in Virginia in the evening (because Virginia is the other direction from the temple than my house, so going home in between seemed like a waste of an hour and a half and a quarter tank of gas).

So. Admission to the National Arboretum is free! So is admission to the National Zoo, but at the National Arboretum, parking is free, too! And it was QUITE beautiful. Among the rules listed in their little pamphlet were that wedding and commercial photography would only be allowed if you asked permission ahead of time, and that in some instances you would have to pay a fee. I could see their point. It was beautiful enough to warrant lots of wedding photography being done there, and clearly they aren't making a lot of money off of their visitors in other ways.

I wandered through for only a short time (I didn't have as much down time as I had anticipated), thinking about how this place would be the perfect date place for my parents. One of the delights of my life is to be in a car with both of my parents and have them identify some roadside flora, planted there by humans or not, and have them identify both its common name and its Latin name. "Oh, there's some something-or-other-flower!" one will say; and the other will say, "Yeah, something-or-other-i-cum; we used to sell a lot of those in the shop around Mother's Day," and then the conversation will be over and my life will be that much richer. An herb garden, bonsai exhibit, and native-fern planting-- just for starters-- seem PERFECT for them.

As I wandered through the clearly European-inspired (perhaps Tuscan-inspired, but I hesitate to pin down influences which I'm just not sure about) anyway, the inspired (and it was!) herb garden, I noticed a sign by the pathway of the variety which, often, warns visitors to keep off the grass, or in a horticultural garden may inform them of the name of a nearby specimen; in this case it announced a "free cell phone tour." It gave a number which would, indeed, use up minutes to call, but which would give one a free-other-than-that audio tour of the garden.

And, being the low-picture blogger that I am, I don't have pictures. I haven't even posted the ones yet that I took of the really cute turtles that came out one morning by the lake, nor have I taken the ones I wanted to of the log-over-the-stream-which-again-reminds-me-of-a-fantasy-novel-because-I-grew-up-in-a-desert-and-that-much-green-still-seems-fantastic-to-me. I have, however, uploaded a picture that one of my weathercolour nieces uploaded for me as my avatar. She called it "Victorian Lady," and it looks--mm-- at least a little bit like me. My hair is brown, at least. And I am certainly rather Victorian. Isn't it beautiful? (You can see the full-sized version at her blog, www.e.m.agination.blogspot.com)

The Virtues of the Grandparents

2010-05-27T06:48:00.006-06:00

Last night we were talking about this and that, and Papa mentioned that when he was working at Davis, in California (before he got married), his boss had a mother-in-law who was addicted to gambling. Then he said, "Well, she wasn't the only one... I remember one night when he [the boss] and some other guys offered to take me down to the 'cat patch;' I told them that in our religion, we would consider it to be better to lose our life than to lose our virtue, and they said that they guessed that they had better not take me."

In a world where frequently religious people, and even (especially in the past) non-religious folks have held a double-standard of virtue for men and women, I deeply appreciated his commitment, long before he met my mother, to being pure for her. This is the first time I have heard this story about Papa, but it reminded me of a story he has told me a couple of times before about his dad [story redacted because I just told him I posted it and he just told me that I was getting him mixed up with his dad. Grngh. I never forget things! That's Papa's job! Oh, well. I shall write up the alternate story he suggested at some other time.]

And THAT reminded me of a conversation I had with my mother the other day-- again, a story I had never heard before. She said that the reason why she had never cheated in school was because of the stories her dad had told her about navigators during WWII who had cheated their way through navigator school and then died. The part she did not say, because we both know it so well, is that Grandpa got a distinguished flying cross because he most certainly did not cheat his way through navigator school, and in fact knew his job so well that he was able to do it under truly trying circumstances. The other part she didn't say, because we both know, is that one of the few things Grandpa was willing to say about his WWII experience is that he stopped making friends, because you'd make friends with a guy at breakfast and he'd be dead by dinner. I am guessing that he didn't look too kindly on those who made this sort of thing more likely to happen.

Which in turn reminded me of the times I have been tempted to study on Sundays-- not that I'm saying it's a terrible thing to study on Sundays, but... my mother, Nana to the neeflings, has told me more than once that she got all the way through her PhD without ever studying on a Sunday. I decided to try it. It isn't that I had been studying on Sundays and stopped, but I had wondered if there would come a point when I just had to because I had so much work to do. I guess you could say that I decided to keep the commandment in faith-- not doing it out of habit, but to see if there were any blessings I might catch by doing so. I have never regretted that decision. I now have a Bachelor's degree and a Graduate Certificate (which is to a Master's sort of as an Associate's degree is to a Bachelor's), and what vestiges of sanity I have left after all that school were definitely preserved by having a day off every week. And on a more serious note: I honestly believe that my ability to retain and process information has been greatly enhanced, both by my Sunday-rest-keeping habits and by my scripture study habits. Maybe it's just that a rested brain is less likely to be sieve-like; I'm not really sure of the mechanism; but it is a family tradition which I have every intention of carrying on.

A Very Abbreviated List of my Favorite (Board) Books

2010-05-24T11:51:00.005-06:00

Maria Tatar asked some time back for a list of peoples' top ten picture books. After brainstorming, I found that my list was more than half board books. So, I filled out the rest of the list with board books and decided to do other kinds of books later.

Wibbly Pig Likes Bananas, by Nick Butterworth
Goodnight, Gorilla, by Peggy Rathman
almost anything by Helen Oxenbury
Dinosaur’s Binkit (and many, many things by Sandra Boynton; any of her later books will be excellent)
Gossie (and other books in this series), by Olivier Dunrea
Mole and the Baby Bird, by Marjorie Newman
Max's Bedtime, by Rosemary Wells
Freight Train, by Donald Crews
Piggies, by Don and Audrey Wood (as well as many of their other books, most of which are not sold as board books)
the Maisy books, by Lucy Cousins

Now We Can Do Story Problems In Our Head*

2010-05-23T15:24:00.000-06:00

Sparker (my 7-year-old penguinnephew) recently learned to make his own oatmeal. The other morning, he was taking forever at it; he just kept staring into the measuring cup drawer. Finally, he asked where the one-sixth-cup measuring cup was. He had already put in one third of a cup of whatever it was, and what he needed was one-half cup, so he was looking for the one-sixth cup measure to fill out his amount.

*You know, kind of like A.A. Milne's "Now We Are Six"?

Bibliotards In Good Company

2010-05-21T19:47:00.010-06:00

I remember once when my brother-in-law, Mr. Weathercolour, announced that he had found a word for "people like us." "It combines Greek and Latin roots," he said, apologetically.

"People like us?"

"People who check out way too many library books and then turn them in late and rack up huge library fines. We're bibliotards."

And, unfortunately, I can't really deny that that title is pretty apt for me. You know you are an unusual patron when the librarian is shocked that you aren't shocked at the size of your library fine.

One friend was telling me the other day that during a recent discussion with her children, they offered to give up their allowances if that would allow the family finances to stretch so that they could get in to a bigger house-- but she had to inform them that reducing the amount they paid monthly in library fines would actually help more. (Though, this story could also-- correctly-- be read as a commentary on how small said allowances are more than how large the library fines are.)

Several years after that initial "bibliotard" conversation with Mr. Weathercolour, I was lamenting a huge (seemingly un-pay-able, at the time) library fine to my bishop at the time (since I'm a Latter-Day-Saint, this means that my interlocutor was a leader of a local congregation, somewhat like a pastor, rather than of anything larger). In response, he told me this wonderful story about when he was living in a little teeny town in Michigan, decades earlier-- before the library had become computerized. Under the Old Regime, your library card was a 3x5 card with your name on the top and the titles of the books you had checked out running down the long side of the card, with their due dates next to them. You crossed out the title of a book once it was returned. On one occasion, when he went to check out a book, the fierce-as-a-dragon-little-old-lady-librarian said, "You see this?!?" She was pointing to his card, which had, at that point, racked up a sizable fine. "I'm not going to check anything out to you until you pay that fine!"

His wife's response was, "Good for her! Someone needs to stand up to you!"

So he sheepishly paid the fine.

And then, several months later (we all joke about this happening, but you knew that it actually had to have happened somewhere, at some time, right? ("we" meaning bibliotards, of course)) the library was going through its records and sending out invitations to a black-tie dinner being held for people who had contributed over a certain amount to the fund for the new library, and guess who got an invite to the fancy dinner? With his wife, of course.

And now-- I'm sure you've seen the article, but just in case you hadn't, I had to post it-- now I believe we've been officially joined by the most illustrious member of the club yet. George Washington himself failed to return a couple of books to the New York Public Library within his lifetime, though one of them has recently been returned by the nice people now running his estate. (What this second article does not make clear is whether the book returned was the one originally checked out, or just the same edition of the same title. I'll let you know if I find out.) I will say, if they'd been raising funds for a library addition, I might have rooted for them to hold out for the $300,000 fine to be paid-- it could have been an excellent start for such a fundraiser-- and then again, in New York, maybe it wouldn't have paid for more than an extra couple of square feet anyway.

French-Style Green Beans

2010-05-21T16:32:00.000-06:00

All I can say is that I have paid exorbitant amounts of money per pound for green beans, just so that I could have these. They're worth at least a try, is what I say.

1 lb.* green beans
1 oz. butter**
1 medium onion
salt

Put a pot of water on to boil that is big enough to hold the beans and a plate (if you decide to do the plate part.)

Chop the onion fine, and put it on to fry, with the butter, on "low." Put a lid on the pan, and raise it now and again to make sure that the onions aren't getting done too much in one spot as compared to the others. If they are, stir them with a spatula or a wooden spoon.

Rinse the beans, then cut off their tops and tails. Dump them in the boiling water. If you want to, put a plate over them (I've actually only done this step once, but the beans were, indeed yummier when I did); I must say that that tongs are pretty helpful for getting the plate out when the time comes. Boil the beans for 8-10 minutes. When the beans are done, strain out the water and then put the beans back in the pan and toss them over dry heat.

The onions are done when they are light brown. Serve the beans on a plate with the onions on top-- or, if you want, to the side (this is so that everyone can get their fair share of onion topping-- it can sort of clump, otherwise--but at any rate, going without topping is NOT done. Or at least, not in my family).

*I almost always estimate all of the amounts for this recipe. It's pretty forgiving.

**If you are concerned about the butter, you can indeed substitute oil, but if you can have any butter at all, I would add a little in at the end for flavoring-- it really adds a lot to the recipe.

I got this recipe from The Complete Illustrated Step-By-Step Cookbook, which was compiled by Judith Ferguson and published in 1989 and is my Favorite Cookbook Of All Time (so far), but I'll talk about that later.

When Bad Things Happen to... People. Just People.

2010-05-19T10:21:00.003-06:00

Most of the stuff I post is pretty child-friendly, but: the last article is PG. Just so you know.(And the note about the note: already I have feedback that there is nothing too shocking about that article. My personal rating system goes something like this: if I wouldn't want to have to explain something to a kid without at least a little warning ahead of time, I think a thing is PG.)

I'm always so interested in what happens to the regular people who end up being caught in conflict zones. I am well aware that each side will paint the other in black-and-white terms, but that the reality is much more complicated than that. A couple of BBC articles have illustrated this for me recently.

In the first, we learn of a Palestinian man who works to build those illegal Jewish Settlements in the (occupied) West Bank. We know that everyone but a few radical Israelis acknowledge that the settlements are illegal and need to be disbanded before a peace agreement can be reached, right? However, this man has a large family, and he cares more about feeding them than about the broader political implications of his work. What really caught me, though, was what the Israeli construction manager said about using Palestinian labor: "Even if they weren't so cheap, we'd still want to use them because they work so hard."

Here's the article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8647487.stm

There was also an article yesterday about a Palestinian lady who would just like to be allowed to return to her childhood home, please. She doesn't care if Israelis live there; she'd just like to live there, too.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8687623.stm

Another article from yesterday was about a woman from Vietnam who had been the subject of an iconic photograph. The woman had been badly injured, as a child, during the Vietnam war. It was interesting to me that she was used by the Vietnamese government to show how horrible the Americans were (it was an American attack that hurt her), but she didn't want the attention, and ran away from it, literally, more than once. She wanted to be a Just Plain Person, rather than the woman who was once the girl who had been in that photograph. Unfortunately for her, the press (from all over) kept tracking her down. In the end, she decided that she could do something else with all that famous-ness. "[She] establish[ed] the Kim Phuc Foundation, which provides medical and psychological assistance to child victims of war."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8678478.stm

Peach Cake Filling

2010-05-17T19:42:00.003-06:00

WARNING: Under normal circumstances, I try to share only recipes which I have tried time and again under varying circumstances, and which I know are winners for the crowd I cook for. That is not the case with this recipe. I have cooked it exactly once, and that time was on Mother's Day. I am posting it because Mrs. Weathercolour asked me to share it with her, and I felt that a) blogging it was an efficient means of getting it to her, and b) if anyone else wants to try it and give me feedback (it is so rich that we won't be doing it too often around here, so it may take a long time to perfect) I would be very pleased.

1 29-oz can sliced peaches in syrup
about* 1/4 cup corn starch
1/2 c. vanilla sugar
1/4 t. salt
1/2 t. almond extract (yes, this is almost the limit of how much it can take)
2 T butter

Dump the peaches into a saucepan. Combine the sugar and the salt with the cornstarch, and mix it well enough that the cornstarch won't be lumpy after you add it to the peaches. Then add the sugar mixture to the peaches. Cook all this, stirring "constantly" (meaning, just like lemon meringue pie filling and white sauce, you can get away with neglecting it for small periods of time, especially if you have a wire whisk on time) until it comes to a boil; let it boil for 1 minute; then take it off the heat. Add the butter and the almond extract, and stir them in. Mine ended up a little soupy, but then I'm not sure I added a full quarter cup of cornstarch. But I'm not completely sure I didn't. *sigh*

The cake I put this on/in was a regular box-mix yellow cake. Nothing too exciting. I baked it in two 8-inch rounds, and put the filling in between the layers, on top, and then spooned a little more on to each slice. I knew I had gotten the balance of flavors just right when it became difficult to stop snitching it. If only I could be sure that I've recreated that mix in the proportions of this recipe. Do please let me know.

*The truth about the measurements is that ALL of them are approximate (even the size of the can of peaches-- I compared to a can upstairs, but I used one from downstairs, which might have been an ounce or so different?), but the cornstarch measurement is particularly approximate.

I frogot to mention: a little Twain Trivia

2010-04-26T20:08:00.002-06:00

From the Wikipedia article on Mark Twain:

In 1909, Twain is quoted as saying:^[40]

I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'

His prediction was accurate – Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut, one day after the comet's closest approach to Earth.

^ Albert Bigelow Paine. "Mark Twain, a Biography". http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/t/twain/mark/paine/. Retrieved 2006-11-01.

(All of the above is directly from Wikipedia. I'm really unsure of how to do a double-block-quote, so I'm just letting you know and leaving it at that.)

Also, just before this in the Wikipedia article:

Twain formed a club in 1906 for girls he viewed as surrogate granddaughters, the Angel Fish and Aquarium Club. The dozen or so members ranged in age from 10 to 16. Twain exchanged letters with his "Angel Fish" girls and invited them to concerts and the theatre and to play games. Twain wrote in 1908 that the club was his "life's chief delight."^[39]

^ LeMaster J. R., The Mark Twain Encyclopedia, Taylor & Francis, 1993 page 28

And, from a biography I was browsing in the library today (Mark Twain: Man in White: The Grand Adventure of His Final Years, by Michael Sheldon)-- which brought this all to mind-- I found out that he started a free public library in his adopted home town: Redding, Connecticut. To this he contributed many volumes from his own library, among which were Hawthorne, which he thought was boring, and some history book (working from memory, here) of which he said that any library that contained it could not justly be called dull.

No, now that I think of it, this quote (which was quoted at the beginning of the biography, but which I had heard before) was what set my memory off, because we were discussing something to do with what Papa was going to wear: "Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society."

Dear Children (mostly neeflings-not-visiting-me-at-the-moment),

2010-04-21T10:48:00.004-06:00

As I am sure you are aware, your cousins, the Penguin Children, are visiting. Both of them have asked me what I want for my birthday, and I told BOTH of them that I LOVE stories and pictures drawn and written by children.

So, I am sort of asking for birthday presents here, but in return I am going to follow the Hobbit custom and post a story for you on the blog today. It's a bit long, so I will post part I today and part II -- um-- very soon. It really is mostly written. Unfortunately for your curiosity, there are three parts (so far), and I haven't even started part III yet. Also unfortunately for your curiosity, my motivation has never grown larger from nagging, so continually asking when I will finish is probably not the best strategy for getting me to do so. Telling me that you enjoyed the story might work, though. And if you are bored, you can write your own stories, right? Right.

Annabel and the Gorgon, part I: Magical Corrective Lenses

The week after Alexander met the gorgon on the way to his grandmother’s house, their Grandmother Hildegaard came to visit them. Alexander and his siblings, as usual, were delighted to have their grandmother for a visit, and they were very persistent about asking questions about her friend, the gorgon. Grandmother Hildegaard was not particularly forthcoming, however. She kept on putting them off and putting them off until finally, at dinnertime, she said,

“Children, I have decided that I cannot really tell you about the Gorgon myself. Her life story is very sad, and I do not have permission from her to tell it. As I think about this problem, I am coming to the conclusion that the only thing for it is for you children to make friends with the Gorgon yourselves.”

Alexander felt alarmed, and the rest of the children looked at each other nervously; but Annabel had been extremely curious about the Gorgon ever since Alexander had had his run-in with her, so she spoke up. "I think that's a lovely idea, Grandmother. When can we meet her?"

"Well, first off, anyone who wants to be friends with a Gorgon is going to have to get a pair of Magical Corrective Lenses.”

The children’s parents exchanged glances at this announcement, but the children did not notice this.

“What are Magical Corrective Lenses please, Grandmother?” asked Annabel.

“They are a kind of lens which allows you to see certain things as they truly are. My own reading spectacles are a variety of Magical Corrective Lenses, though normally I just use them for reading the fine print on medicine bottles and so on.”

Several children started talking at once, but Annabel had learned at school that raising your hand can get a grownup’s attention when nothing else seems to be able to, so she did this now. “Yes, Annabel?” asked her grandmother.

“Why couldn’t we just borrow your magical corrective lenses?” asked Annabel.

“Because the magical part only works for the person for whom the Corrective Lenses have been made,” said grandmother.

Now Annabel turned to her parents, pleading. “Couldn’t I get a pair? Pleease?”

Her parents looked grave. “It isn’t just a matter of going down to the grocery store and getting a pair,” said Griselda, her mother. “I don’t even know if there is anyone around who makes them anymore. And even if there is someone around, it can be quite expensive to get a pair.”

“If Grandmother thinks it would be worth it to be friends with a gorgon, and if getting magical corrective lenses is what we have to do to make friends with the gorgon, then I am willing to spend all of my Birthday money and all of my Christmas money on it,” said Annabel.

The other children were pretty amazed by this. Making friends with the gorgon did seem like an interesting project, but they weren’t sure that it would be worth spending good Christmas and Easter money on.

“If that’s how you feel, I’ll start looking on the Internet tomorrow for a shop,” said their mother.

And that was what she did. She found one the next morning, and it wasn’t even that far away. It was a little shop that was tucked between the book shop they liked to frequent and a cobbler’s shop they always hurried past as fast as they could, because the cobbler didn’t like children very much (especially vampire children), and would yell at them if they got too close to his shoes (and this wasn’t very close).

As they pushed through the front door, a little bell dinged. A few seconds later, Annabel could see something—a tuft of hair?—coming out from the back of the shop; but she couldn’t see much more, because whoever it was was hidden by a counter which was almost taller than Annabel.

Finally he was close enough that the tuft had turned in to a face. “Mr. Rufus Ferner, at your service; and with whom do I have the pleasure of speaking this afternoon?”

“Griselda the Witch, and my daughter, Annabel,” said Annabel’s mother.

Annabel was a very well-raised child, and she knew very well the rules of politeness, but she wasn’t sure which one applied here: the pair of spectacles he was wearing was so extraordinary looking that she wanted to stare at it, but she knew that staring was rude. On the other hand, she knew that it was also rude not to look someone in the eye when you were meeting them. She felt frustrated as she realized she had already stared for several seconds, so then she made up her mind immediately, and stared at the floor.

"What do you want?" asked Mr. Ferner.

"I would like to get a pair of Magical Corrective Lenses for myself, please," she said.

"YOU want to get Magical Corrective Lenses?" he asked Annabel, sounding very shocked. "WHY?" And he came around the counter to see her face to face.

"My grandmother is friends with a gorgon and I want to make friends with the gorgon too, and grandmother said that I should get Magical Corrective Lenses so that I can."

"Hmph. They're very expensive, you know."

"Yes, I know. I have all of my allowance here, and I am willing to bring in all of my allowance all summer so that I can get them."

They looked at each other for a moment.

"Well. I appreciate the offer, but magical corrective lenses are a great deal more expensive than THAT." He shuffled back around the counter and struggled for a moment to pull open a drawer. "Ah! Here it is." He held up what looked like a seed packet; it had a picture of a red flower on front, and the bottom of it bulged out a little. "This is my second-to-last fire-flower seed. Fire-flowers are extremely rare and valuable. If you will grow this seed in to a grown-up fireflower, then the fire-flower will produce two seeds. You may keep one for yourself, but bring the other one back to me, and I will make you the magical corrective lenses. I warn you, it will be very difficult."

"I would like to try anyway, thank you. I will ask my Grandmother Hildegaard for help."

"Hmph. Well. You're one of Hildegaard's grandchildren then, are you? Them there is some chance you will succeed." He studied her face very carefully for several seconds, and she tried not to squirm. "Would you like to have a look at mine?” he asked.

Annabel looked up with a huge grin on her face that said, “yes,” and Mr. Ferner took the spectacles off and handed them to her. “You can put them on if you’d like,” he said.

And by now you are really wondering what those spectacles looked like, and I am going to tell you, if I can manage. If anyone can draw me a picture, that would be most handy. At any rate, the spectacles looked a little bit like a carnival mask, if you have ever seen one, only instead of fancy glittery mask, the part that was spread out was made of lenses. All of the lenses were attached to hinges, so that they could be slid down in to place in front of the wearer’s eyes, or slid out of place, as the wearer wished.

Annabel put on the spectacles and looked up at her mother. At the moment, only the basic, first-level lenses were in place, but her mother looked pretty much like she always did. Annabel slid a set of lenses in to place; her mother now looked quite glowy, and Mr. Ferner’s hair had turned black instead of the white it was in real life. When she looked around the room, she saw-- well, I am getting distracted from the real story. Perhaps someone could draw a before-and-after picture of the shop, too.

Annabel took the Magical Corrective lenses off and handed them back very carefully to the Magical Corrective Lens Maker. "Thank you," she said.

"You're welcome," he replied, and then he said "good luck," and Annabel knew that this was his way of saying that she should leave, so she carefully tucked the seed packet in to her coat pocket, and then went outside with her mother.

And Now, Spring

2010-04-03T16:36:00.010-06:00

Moss on the roots of the neighbors' cherry tree:

And a bush, whose name I should know but don't, at the corner of our property:

The poor, snowed-upon hedge by the front walk has been rejuvenated (I was going to take an "after" shot from the same angle that I took that one during the snow storm, but then I realized that only a full-on side view could do justice to the beauty of the new growth. It's almost like a teenager, it's so leggy.)

And finally, an only slightly blurry shot of the walk up the side of the house-- it doesn't normally look quite this ethereal, but I happened to be out at the right time of day to make it seem like Galadriel was going to make an appearance at ANY MOMENT. (Though you may notice that the "Galadriel Effect" is somewhat dampened with the realization that the boxy thing at the top of the hill is in fact our (communal) mailbox.)

And now my camera card has properly been dumped, and I'm off for an evening walk.

Maybe tomorrow, if I can, I will get a shot of the cardinal which has been frequenting the deck. Wish me luck.

2010-04-02T21:18:00.008-06:00

When my Grandma Cox was little, her father used to tell her that the call of the meadowlark was "El-ner's a pretty little girl! El-ner's a pretty little girl!" (Elner being Grandma's first name.)

My own Papa told me this last night as we were chatting; he was talking about how he had just found out that day that a Killdeer is the same thing as a Plover, and he and Mom went on for a bit about how they used to see Killdeer all of the time in their respective rural homes-of-origin (Mom in Northern California, Dad in Southeast Idaho), and then they got on to how they would see Meadowlarks fairly frequently, too. For some reason I asked what the call of the Meadowlark was, and that is when he told me what his mother told him. (I have been thinking (non-continuously) for about twenty-four hours about how I was going to tell this story without using the expression "he told me that she told him that her father used to tell her, and now I'm telling you..." but here now I've just gone and done it. Oh, well.)

Here is a link to a web page-- scroll down a bit-- with a video-with-audio of a Western Meadowlark (it is helpfully labeled "Youtube"). Evidently one of the few things which makes them truly distinguishable from the Eastern variety is their call. The third call on the video is the one which I think fits best with the rhythm of the chant/tune that Dad told me about, but the fact that they don't match up exactly makes me wonder: do we have our birds mixed up? Is there a bird which isn't a meadowlark, whose song more closely resembles the one Dad sang to me? If anyone knows anything about this, please comment away! http://www.thebirdersreport.com/wild-birds/bird-sightings/which-bird-has-the-most-melodious-song

Things I Love About My Sisters

2010-03-30T21:32:00.005-06:00

Did I mention that I had four sisters? I have four sisters. And a brother-- not to forget him! But it is sisters of whom I speak today. Here are the things I love about them:

1. We sound alike, which means that we sound really quite lovely when we sing together.

2. We make each other smarter. We each have different, yet overlapping interests, and we all love telling each other the coolest things about our respective fields. Because of me, my sisters can recognize a greeting in Arabic (Ahalan wiSahalan!) and because of them I know: the name for the body of a penguin (fusiform), what Simone de Bauvoir's undergraduate majors were (mathematics and philosophy), why you can find a typewriter in the Refrigeration subclass of the Patent Office (because subclasses used to be divided according to what each examiner covered), and why October 31 is more than a worn-out, warped, pagan-then-Christian holiday to the Girl Scouts (it is the birthday of Julia Ward Howe, who was the founder of the Girl Scouts).

3. We are loyal to each other. If I complain to one sister about another, she takes that as a cue to help me realize that the other sister is under stress, or that I misunderstood her, or that I need a good night's sleep and will feel better about it in the morning. Gossip is not an option; even when I forget, my sisters do not.

4. We make each other know that we are not alone. Or let each other know, perhaps, but I think it may be stronger than letting. We remind each other of famous/successful people who were also forgetful, jobless, under-respected, close to giving up, and/or very, very poor, at least at some point in their lives. We help each other laugh, and announce how we have moved the furniture around, and change topics of conversation at a speed which, to outsiders, can be dizzying. We rejoice to each other about the younger generation-- the neeflings, as they are known on this blog-- both in announcing their accomplishments and laughing over the hilarious, child-like things they do.

5. We teach each other how to be friends. All of the things which I have listed here are true of my four "real" sisters; but from number 2 on, they have also often been true of the excellent friends I have picked up along the way. I'm not sure how prepared I would have been to actually form good friendships like that if I hadn't had sisters to train me first in the arts of friendship.

(also)

2010-03-24T13:11:00.002-06:00

If you haven't read the post just below this one, you might want to, just so this one will make sense.

I also know that the landscape of mathematics is not so much like a Savings and Loan or like Citibank nearly so much as it is like some sort of magnificent nature preserve with mountains and rivers and lakes and so on. And I know that it is my very ability to recognize the beauty of this landscape which allows me to keep exploring it for fun, which in turn is what has allowed me to become actually good at navigating through it.

Our (metaphorical) patch of land

2010-03-17T14:39:00.003-06:00

I'm taking a math class.

It's turning out to be-- erm-- ah-- easy. Too easy.

Yes, I DO hear your screams of frustration even through my computer screen.

This is the thing. In this modern day and age, one still needs an inheritance-- but not a patch of land, like the Ancient Israelites got, or even like my more recent ancestors-in-Manti got. These days, rather than land to make a living, one needs a profession. (Not my ideas for this part; they are from/through my brother-in-law, the esteemed Mr. Weathercolour, and his (also) esteemed friend, *Mr. Werner Woodworth, who works at the BYU business school.) So. In a broader societal context, this means that we give young people good chances for vocational/technical and/or academic training, and in particular contexts that means that particular young people are encouraged to take advantage of these opportunities.

And what is this patch of land of which I spoke in the title of this post? Well. Mom has a PhD in Math. She works as a professional mathematician by day, but has often supplemented it by tutoring nights and weekends; at the moment she is tutoring the next-door-neighbor for free, because that is just the way she is. Mr. Weathercolour has his PhD in Physics but is teaching math, at the moment, at the university level. Ivy has a bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering and got through her degree by tutoring math; and Klari has her bachelor's in Math, has been tutoring for years, and is looking to be a math teacher in the public schools. And the truly silly thing is (I am telling you really, really I am not boasting) that this math class of mine is easy not even because I have so many tutors available to me, but because it makes sense to me shortly after the teacher explains it (or after I read it in the book).

I do REALIZE that this is a prime piece of real estate on which my family has its flag planted. (We would like it to be more crowded, actually. We are, to a woman-- er, so to speak-- all math teachers of one variety or another.) But what I am saying is, I had wanted to try something different: my bachelor's is in Philosophy. I have a degree in English as a Second Language Teaching. I TRIED to find a job as an English teacher. But I am finding myself drawn back to the homeland, almost against my will, because math is something I can move forward in easily and I have become so incredibly discouraged that I have to do something that doesn't take that much effort.

OK, go ahead and be sick about it. I didn't ask for this ability-- not in this life, at least. It isn't exactly that I would trade it to you-- but-- at the moment, I'm feeling a bit George-Bailey-esque. And guilty at the same time, because the little Savings and Loan that I've inherited (from my perspective) looks a lot more like Citibank, to a lot of other people. Meaning, as an institution it is nice to the people who already have lots of their currency, and kind of mean to the ones who don't. I am already committed to sharing the wealth; but won't you come, bring your children, and become rich for yourselves so that I can go travel the world for a while?

*His real name

Snow: check.

2010-02-08T13:38:00.013-07:00

I took pictures and meant to post about last December's 18-inch-deep blizzard, but never got around to it. Then, a couple of days ago, we got 33 inches in 24 hours or so. On Thursday night, the library looked like Grand Central Station (or, to use my mother's inimitable expression about the grocery store just before the December storm, like the Post Office on April 15th). Friday afternoon was when the storm was scheduled to begin; I got home around noon-ish, feeling like it was Christmas or something. On Saturday afternoon, I finally got around to taking a few pictures:

The above is our "deck;" it's more like a balcony, and often we keep plants on it. In the summer, for instance. For your information, there are no plants on it in this picture; the snow really is up to the railings like that. Here, you can see it better in this one (those plant silhouettes are from plants on the inside of the building):

I wasn't sure if you could get the idea just from the pictures of the back, so I took a couple of pictures out the front door:

This really doesn't give you a good idea at all of how deep it is on the cars, but a photographer with a nearly-full card can only do so much. Now that I've uploaded these, I can take some more. That snow bank at the back of the parking lot, below the fir tree, is approximately as high as an SUV. No, come to think of it, actually a little higher.

I really do love the snow. Can't tell you why, other than that when I was a little girl in Idaho, I loved walking through the snow that was as deep as my thighs (remember, I was short-- also, it snowed more then) and I still kind of miss it. I especially love how bright it is.

We did have a bit of drama when my sister got sick on Saturday night and couldn't really talk and Mom got super-worried and called an ambulance (because, we were clearly NOT going to be able to just drive her to the doctor's office); she is fine now, but quite tired, and no, we have no idea what was wrong. She was going to go to her regular doctor's office today, to get checked out, but-- surprise!-- they're closed. As is the Federal Government, which means that she doesn't have to take sick leave, being sick. Blessings abound! Also, since the ambulance came with a snow-plough in tow, we have one of the few ploughed streets in the area. Which is nice. And also means that several of the folks who live down the hill from us, whose road hasn't been ploughed, chose to park in our lot rather than risk going down hill again. That's why we had SUVs randomly sitting next to the snowbank, next to the fir tree, handily giving me a basis for comparison so that I can impress you all with how deep the snow REALLY is. (Oh, and to answer the question I'm sure you will ask: Ivy is hoping to go to the doctor's office tomorrow. She has announced that, snow day or not, she isn't going back to work until she's been checked out. Most sensible of her, I say.)

Also, tomorrow we are getting another light storm, originally predicted to be 6 inches-- now they're saying 8. Ivy (my sister) and I are kind of thinking that it's possible we'll get another snow day. No telling for sure.

Now I must needs get down and help Dad again. Because of the ambulance emergency, we do have one car dug out, and (more blessings!) Mom already left for a work trip and Dad is going out to Utah for a family thing tomorrow, which means (this is the blessing part) we don't really need that much in terms of car-age. Still, it would be nice if Ivy and I didn't have to coordinate to try to get us both to and from work and, for me, school, so Dad and I are trying to get Mom's car out. Dad decided to just gamble and try to drive it over the snow which hadn't been removed yet. He lost. We're now trying to dig out under the car. Also, Ivy suggested that I might walk to the grocery store for more peanut butter chips (being good Mormons-- meaning, in this instance, that we keep enough food stored to last several months-- that's the only thing we don't have on hand for a Perfectly Delightful Winter Storm Snow-in). Wish me luck.

I can call Repentance with a song

2010-01-21T19:39:00.006-07:00

In a household where I regularly visit lives a cat named Repentance (acquired, so I am told, at a time when the owner had a dog whose name was Faith). I am, miraculously, not allergic to this cat, which is pretty nice-- I even tried petting him the other day, which went fairly non-sneezingly.

I decided to try something that used to work on my mom's cat, and also (though I wasn't doing it intentionally) worked on the cows that live near my grandma's house: I sang to it to call it. Sure enough, it came. The first song we tried (myself and the small child who was with me) worked pretty well-- "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star"-- but the second one, one of my favorites from my childhood, worked even better. The version I learned as a child was adapted for the Primary Children's songbook from a longer piece (which I learned during voice lessons I took a couple of summers ago) by Felix Mendelssohn, from his oratorio Elijah. The words go like this: "If with all your hearts, ye truly seek me, Ye shall ever surely find me, Thus saith our God. Ye shall ever surely find me; Thus saith our God.

First, the heartwarming; also, amusing

2010-01-07T12:51:00.004-07:00

(also, happy 100th post to Cornelia Philosophene as a blog)

I was cleaning out old posts, and found that I had mostly put this one together but hadn't actually put it up, and since I still love these articles, I decided to put them up. People I talk to on the phone all the time have probably heard all of them, but do check out the hippo-tortoise video; it's pretty cool.

Heartwarming:

A woman in Texas is teaching prisoners how to run their own businesses. While the national recidivism (going back to a life of crime) rate for ex-convicts is 50-70%, the rate for her program is 5%. It's true that they are very selective about who they let in, but as far as I'm concerned, that's a sign that they're doing something right.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7839957.stm

A man in India, the sixth son of his parents, got polio when he was six months old and still sometimes has to crawl up stairs. He was selected to be in a documentary about polio in India, called The Final Inch. The heartwarming part is that his older brothers would carry him to school, sometimes on their bicycles, sometimes on their backs, and he was eventually able to complete a college education. Wow! Here's the link for the whole thing:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7898858.stm

As a transition, a story which is both hilarious and heartwarming (the video doesn't show enough, but still it's pretty cool): an orphaned baby hippo who makes friends with a giant tortoise. It's true that I have a fascination with odd adoptions; I have no explanation for this, other than to say that it does seem to have some gospel foundation.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7715931.stm

Next: Two nuclear submarines collide!!!???!! Excuse me? One was British, the other was French; they both were using sonar and both were using anti-sonar cloaking. Perhaps there's such a thing as being too invisible? On the bright side, no one was seriously hurt.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7892294.stm

Also, the "mystery of Ireland's worst driver" is solved. This story just goes to show how sometimes even a little bit of foreign-language skill can go a long way.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/7899171.stm

A Short Story that was brought to Nana's mind by a video clip that Papa found on the Purina Website

2009-12-03T21:43:00.005-07:00

(But which now, alas and alack, cannot be found again, or at least not by yours truly. But the story is still worth telling.)

Nana's mother-- who is my only living Grandmother, so I'll call her Grandmother here-- was born in 1926, and grew up during the depths of the depression. They ate a lot of inexpensive foods, including what her older brother could shoot with his '22*.

One day, Harry shot a squirrel, but he didn't realize that it was a mama squirrel and that there was a baby still in the nest. When he realized what he had done, he brought the baby squirrel home to take care of it. The only trouble was, they had a cat, and baby squirrels are enough like mice that they were sure that the cat would eat it. They tried and tried to keep the cat and the baby squirrel separated, but finally they gave up. It was just too hard.

Well, the cat had had kittens recently, and she was still nursing them; and she let that baby squirrel come up and nurse right along side them!

The video in question was of a bunch of different odd animal adoptions, including a mama cat nursing a couple of squirrels. If anyone finds it and wants to put it in the comments, please have at!

*Evidently, Grandmother still has that gun. But, if you know Grandmother's attitudes about getting rid of things, you will be 100% not surprised by this fact. I almost wonder if it's the one that my uncle used to shoot that rattlesnake that one night, but that's a different story...

Pumpkin Soup

2009-11-21T17:48:00.033-07:00

First, the backstory for why this pumpkin--er, I mean, recipe-- had to be done today. I mean, why I had to blog about it today.

A few years ago, I moved in to a house that my Dad had just moved out of, and to my continually increasing gratitude, I inherited the garden he had planted. Besides discovering that I LOVED Juliet tomatoes (the kind he had planted), I also discovered the joys of fresh-baked home-grown pumpkin. That fall was when I came up with this recipe, which is darn quick and easy, and eminently edible.

Which is just the kind of recipe one needs when one's mother gets a 60-lb supposed-to-be-decorative (and it was, in its past life) pumpkin from freecycle with the intent of processing and, over the course of time, consuming said pumpkin.

"I'm going to get a very big pumpkin from freecycle," she says. "I'm bringing your dad along to help carry it."

I deeply regret to tell you that I didn't get a shot of this thing when it was whole. In fact, I was thinking of calling this posting "The Slaughter of the Great Pumpkin: A Photo Essay," but that seemed to be over-promising without the "before" pictures; I hope that the ones I have here will give at least some sense of the scale of the thing.

When I came downstairs this morning, these four pieces were all that was left of the once-great pumpkin; three similarly sized pieces had already been chopped even smaller and then distributed in such a way as to take advantage of every large cooking apparatus available in our teensy kitchen: two baking trays in the oven, both two-quart cooking pots simmering on the stove, and the one-and-a-half quart crockpot on "hi" on the counter. Needless to say, the house was suffused with the smell of baking-and-boiling hard winter squash. Which, I am very thankful to report, is a very happy smell for me.

You aren't getting tired of this yet, are you?

We had discussed whether or not Dad might have to use a chainsaw or, since he doesn't personally own one (a chain saw), perhaps he might use an axe (which he does own). In the end, a trusty kitchen knife worked out just fine. The pumpkin was surprisingly soft, which isn't necessarily a good sign-- Mom ended up cutting out bits which she felt were too dodgy for non-starving humans to eat.

This last shot is for the sheer pleasure of showing off my mother's beautiful, strong, capable hand(s-- not much of the second one showing). When I was growing up, she was always the one who opened stuck jars. She had been a pianist and a clarinetist before she married, and hadn't given either of them up yet when I was small; even now, the fact that she types so much in her job means that she hasn't lost much strength. I also love the fact that her palms are slightly plump, like Yo-Yo Ma's. Being a cellist-- specifically, going to many concerts and paying close attention to where the action was-- has made me a bit of a hand conniseur. Aren't hers beautiful?

And now for the recipe section:

Pumpkin Soup (makes approximately 1/2 gallon?)

Ingredients and instructions:

1 T or so fresh slivered ginger (if you hate the recipe because you used powdered, don't blame me)
1 T or so fresh chopped OR bottled garlic
1 T or so olive oil or other preferred cooking oil

Get the oil spitting hot in a skillet, then fry the garlic and ginger until the garlic is getting brown. Remove these from the skillet and put them in the big pot you're planning to cook the soup in.

1 c (more or less, depending on taste) sliced onion
2 T or so oil

Fry the onion until it is both soft and brown; when these have been achieved, put it in the soup pot, too.

5-6 cups cooked pumpkin
1 can coconut milk
1 1/2 t nutmeg, if desired (adjust according to taste)
2 t salt (yes, you can definitely add more-- I tend to cook low sodium)
2 T sugar, according to taste
garnish of cashews or peanut butter, if desired

Dump these in the pot; heat everything through. If you have an immersion blender, you can use it, but if I were you I definitely wouldn't put it, in batches, through a regular blender. Maybe use a potato masher if you have one handy. I just used a spatula tonight. The goal of blending/mashing/sorta-chopping-with-a-spatula is to get the pumpkin in to small enough chunks that the other ingredients/flavorings have a chance to do their jobs.

A Good Halloween Costume

2009-10-29T22:12:00.011-06:00

My sister Klari called me this morning to tell me about her seven-year-old's Halloween costume. His first choice was to be a vampire cow. I told her that a couple of his cousins, the youngest two Weathercolour boys, wanted to be a vampire cat and a vampire wolf (I think) respectively. She wondered if maybe he had been talking to them (my alternative theories include possible exposure to the Bunnicula series or else that vampires in general are so popular in our wider culture that both households have picked up on it and then simply combined it with the general young-person love of being an animal for Halloween). I thought that it was a great idea, but Klari said that she didn't have the resources to pull together a vampire cow costume in the time available. (Mrs. Weathercolour happens to have fake blood at the ready, so it was relatively easy for her.)

Klari offered her son a choice of costumes which were within her power to create. He picked to be a stoplight, just like our mother (his Nana) had years before: black garbage bag with a hole in it for your head, three construction-paper circles, and some tape to hold the circles on will do it. He walked around all day feeling very pleased with his costume, and expressed his happiness by saying numerous times that he was dee-liiigh-ted.

A Little Translation

2009-10-17T13:59:00.006-06:00

I've noticed how the translation stage in a child's life, unlike the unrolling stage (which can strain familial relationships) can bring closeness as families work through it together. The moment of translation is an ah-hah moment, the magical event of: someone really understands me. Even if it was only for a single word, if that word was very difficult to remember or pronounce, then the understanding becomes precious.

The first time I visited Germany, a little more than a year and a half ago, was the first time I had ever set foot in any country in which English was not the primary language. I was a little bit afraid to go in to town by myself-- not that I was afraid for my safety at all, but I was afraid that no one would understand my High School German, or that I would commit some sort of huge cultural faux paux, or something would happen that was so horrible or embarrassing that I hadn't even thought to worry about it. But I took a deep breath and went in to the old town on a tram, and I sketched a little at the gate to the old town, and then I wandered around window-shopping until dusk-- it was quite pretty. I hardly talked at all, and hardly needed to, and it was just right.

Right about the time I decided to head back to my friend's apartment, I heard a small child's voice behind me. "Licht," it said. ("Light," in German.) I glanced behind me.

"Ja, Licht," said the man who was holding the child. (Yes, [that's right,] light.)

In that moment, I was pulled in to the warmth of the interaction-- and, let's be honest, it was also that time of day when the light of the setting sun makes everything glow in that certain way and (this is strange but true) I somehow find it easier to believe in the Innate Goodness of Human Nature in such a light-- but suddenly I knew, rather than just believing, that even Germans who only spoke German were as completely human as I.

Almost made me cry

2009-10-13T21:46:00.003-06:00

Just a couple, from my ol' favorite, the BBC website:

The first is about a British minister who was in Russia, doing a call-in show, when this old lady calls and says that she is a long-lost relative. The folks running the show cut her off, because they thought she was probably a crackpot, but he ran off right after the show was over to find her-- turns out that they're relatives after all, and she had thought she was the last one in their family.

The full article doesn't tell you much more than that, but here's the link to it anyway:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8295394.stm

And here's a link to another article about the same thing, but this one has a picture of his grandfather, who was the relative's father's cousin. I think.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1218838/Shock-Ed-Miliband-Moscow-radio-phone-long-lost-relative-makes-contact.html

OK. Next one was titled "Youngest Headmaster in the World," and I thought it was going to be about a kid who was super-smart-- but it turned out not quite how I had expected. Turns out that this young man, from India, began to teach some of his friends school lessons, as a game when he was nine; but over time, the game grew more serious, and now every day after school he runs a free school for the kids in his village who can't afford to come to regular school. He's sixteen now. Eight hundred kids show up every day. He has nine fellow teachers, all of whom are also volunteers and also either high school or college students.

Anyway, in this case you really should read the whole article, and yes, it really did make me cry. So there.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8299780.stm

Scouting at Bear Lake and Tell Gubler

2009-10-05T11:33:00.002-06:00

I mentioned before that my dad has told me that one of the funnest things he had ever done was be a camp commissioner at a Boy Scout camp at Bear Lake, which straddles the Utah-Idaho border. I asked him the other day about how he got involved in this job, and here is some of the story he told me. I am assuming that Tell Gubler has long since gone the way of all the earth, so I am using his real name here.

During Papa's freshman year at BYU, he worked at the Cannon Center Cafeteria, where, because at that time they did not wear earplugs, he believes (and who will disagree?) that he got a good start on his adult hearing loss. After his mission, he worked for the BYU press, which was a job he enjoyed because he wasn't stuck all the time in one place; he got to go all around campus, delivering printing jobs. One day towards the end of the school year, he delivered a job down at the Richards Building--one of two P.E. buildings on campus, and the one that housed (and still houses) what is now the RMYL major-- Recreation Management/Youth Leadership. On one of the bulletin boards, he saw an advertisement for a job as a truck driver and canoe guide for a boy scout camp, the following summer. He thought that sounded pretty interesting, so he went up to Salt Lake City, where the Great Salt Lake Council Boy Scout Offices were, in order to apply. While he was talking to the guy who was in charge of the canoe job, he heard an old voice behind him. "You don't want to do that. You want to come down to Bear Lake and work for me."

[This begins the part of the story where I typed almost as fast as Papa talked, making him wait every couple of sentences while I caught up. I have rearranged and added bits at will, but I read the finished product to Papa and had him approve it. The italicized parts are where I was talking.]

The voice belonged to a man named Tell Gubler. He was slow of speech. That may have been his last year-- he was just a couple of years before retirement. There was nothing about him that would make him seem exciting, I guess would be the word. He really came across as dull. He just kind of emanated a feeling of-- what's the word?-- I guess old school? Do you know what I'm saying?

No.

It was almost like he came out of a previous generation-- well, he WAS out a previous generation, he very much was. Part of this was colored by what I learned about him later. He didn't tell me that he knew my parents, that he had made a life of Boy Scouting.

Of course, you couldn't get more Swiss than Tell Gubler (name-wise-- William Tell and all). He hired me as camp commissioner.

What did that mean?

Hmm. It sorta meant I did oddball jobs. I taught rope-tying, and orienteering, and helped with the canoe trek sometimes, kind of. I guess it was quite a help when that storm came in. [Another story for another day...] Killed rattlesnakes. Played Risk.

So, if you were the camp commissioner, what was Tell Gubler?

Camp director. And there was B---- -- can't remember his last name-- and, oh, what was the other guy's name? His wife was D----... can't remember. They were the assistant directors. The assistants were also professional scouters.

I did tell you what Mom said when she found out?

Your mom?

Yes.

When I went home between that time that I signed on with him and when camp began, my mother, finding out where I was going to work and who I was going to work with, said "Your dad and I don't know anybody we love and respect more than Tell Gubler." You don't get anything more shiny than that. [Dear siblings and relatives, I must tell you: Papa got a little choked up at this point in the story.] Before the year was out, I understood. And agreed. That was what was so profound about Tell. There was nothing immediately impressive about him, that I could see.

Tell was the professional scouter of the Teton Peaks council when Lloyd and C------ and Grandpa Cox got their Eagle Scouts (and G---- got his Life Scout that night). It was our last Sunday in Shelly, before we moved to Moreland. I think it may have been in sacrament meeting that they did the court of honor. So, Tell knew Grandpa Cox, and I think that the family connection gave him a lot of confidence in me, at least in the scout camp. He had no idea that I had never gotten past tenderfoot.

But you did hold up your end of the deal.

Yeah, there was one day at the end of the camp when he and his two assistants cornered me-- all three professional scouters-- and tried to talk me in to going in to professional scouting. I thought about it, but I knew that when you're a professional scout, you spend at least two thirds of your life fundraising, and it just didn't seem worth it to me. Well, not all of your life is fundraising, but only a couple of months of it would be at camp, and overall it just didn't seem that fun to me.

I suppose that part of the reason why the camp was so good was because I felt so successful at what I was doing.

Did I tell you that the thing that impressed me the most was digging the trench? It was a couple of weeks before camp actually began, and we had a two-day retreat for all of the scout camps, all of the professionals and all of the staff for the scout camps, at the Bear Lake camp.

So what area did this encompass? How many camps did they come from?

I imagine that there were at least three, if not six, camps in the Bear Lake region.

So, yours wasn't THE Bear Lake scout camp, it was one of them.

Yes. There were at least a couple of others on the other side of the lake. Our side was on the west side, and it was very barren. They had planted trees, and I was in charge of moving the water lines. I think that the trees eventually died, which is really sad, because I think it would have been really nice to have had them there.

Oh! the thing that impressed me. They needed a trench built for a water line. I remember Tell didn't say anything about it. I mean, he was old enough that he looked kinda fragile. So, he went out without saying anything to anybody, and started digging this trench line. Here's a couple of dozen scouters, maybe more, and it's pretty clear that he's the oldest of anybody. And within, oh, I'd say fifteen minutes, there were at least half a dozen, maybe a dozen scouters, that were manning pick and shovel on the line, because it made us feel guilty to see him working without anybody to help him.

It reminds me of something he said at one of our campfires to the scouts. He talked about when he was younger, he worked on a Turkey farm, and he could tell when he fed the turkeys and took care of them, their chirp was a little different. It was a sort of an idealistic thing, that even turkeys can tell when they're being taken care of.

[Note on how I have told this story: the first paragraph is my retelling of what I remembered of a coversation about how this all went down; much of the rest came from a conversation which started as me trying to verify the details of what I had written, but ended up being a recollection session about Tell Gubler, with Papa mostly talking and me interspersing questions. In the interest of full disclosure, I must tell you that the one piece of dialogue with quotation marks around it is made up-- it happened mostly like that, but not exactly.]

Nonfiction Books For Grownups

2009-09-28T21:47:00.010-06:00

These are books which have stood the test of time for me. They are books which I wish I had had when I first started to set up housekeeping for myself, when I moved away from home at eighteen years old. Actually, no, I wish I had started reading them when I was twelve, because by eighteen I would (hopefully) have been able to absorb the necessary lessons, and have some idea of what I was trying to do when I started in. Although, come to think of it, one of these books wasn't even written until I was in my mid-twenties (but it late is WAY better than never, in books as well as Bachelor's degrees).

As I wrote this post, I realized that the common thread among these books is that they make me feel like doing things that I know I should do, but which seem so boring and/or awful that I never quite find the time to get to them. For this reason, I consider the first two to be sort of like oatmeal pancakes of the nonfiction book world: difficult to get people to try, but most people are glad to come back for more once they've had a sample. The third has such an intriguing title that most people will read it with a little less "selling" on my part.

Organizing From the Inside Out, by Julie Morgenstern-- Ms. Morgenstern has a pretty good handle on the reasons why people have a hard time keeping their stuff organized, and she spends the first little chunk of the book helping you figure out where, exactly, your difficulty might lie. Examples might be that you grew up feeling a lack of abundance and can't stand to give/throw anything away (no reference to present company), or that you are simply living in a space that is too small for your stuff (REALLY no reference to present company). She then goes on to explain that organizing is a teachable skill, and proceeds to teach it.

She has a seven-step process for getting your stuff organized; the most valuable thing I got from this is that you sort first, THEN purge, so that you have a clear picture of what you're doing when you purge. She tells you to keep the parts of your current system that are working, even if they seem illogical. (Logic, in its perfect Platonic Form, does not live at your house. Or, if He or She does, then you can tell Logic to lay off so that you can actually organize, whether it makes Logical sense or not. The person it has to make sense for is the person who has to use the system.) The last part of the book is devoted to various spaces in your house and ideas on how to organize them.

I liked this book so much that not only have I read it several times, I have actually bought the thing, thus giving up some of my precious, hard-won space for it.

There is also a set of videos she did for PBS, which so far is available at all libraries I have ever checked at (two of 'em, but still, two for two isn't bad, right?).

You Don't Have to be Rich, by Joan Chatsky

I didn't actually get the premise of this book (meaning, the question she set out to answer in writing it) the first time that I read it, but the book itself was so great that I read it a second time. Which premise is: Joan Chatsky wanted to know about the relationship of money to happiness. Rather than pontificating about her own ideas (she is, after all, a professional and nationally known financial consultant) she actually went out and did research about how money and happiness go together (or not).

Most interesting/useful for me: we get most happiness from things we experience, rather than things we own; and there are ten financial habits which, when a family has at least seven of them, make a $25,000 a year difference in the financial happiness of the family. The three habits that come to mind off the top of my head are that you keep track of your cash; you pay your bills as they come in rather than all at once; and you keep a budget. And, yes, the answer to her original question is that you don't have to be rich to be financially happy, but it's a lot more interesting ans slightly more complicated than just that. And, again, she has research to back her up. Short of prophetic insight, I trust research a heck of a lot more than most other ways of getting to knowledge, so I really like this book. I also own it, because not only does it make me feel like keeping a budget, it just plain cheers me up to read it.

How to Hug a Porcupine: Dealing With Toxic and Difficult to Love Personalities, by John Lund

Disclaimer: John Lund was my very first Institute teacher that I had, my freshman year of college. He taught Isaiah. I loved that class. And I loved Brother Lund, who was both funny and kind and never once acted like I was too young to participate in a serious discussion about what Isaiah might mean. (But really, I mostly listened. The stories he told were quite wonderful.)

The basic premise of this book (according to me) is that you really aren't crazy: there really do exist people who are emotionally toxic to be around, and Dr. Lund gives you extremely practical tools for dealing with these people. What makes this OK (and not an excuse for a blame-fest) is his very matter-of-fact way of pointing out that toxicity rubs off easily, so a major part of dealing with toxic people has to do with becoming non-toxic yourself. Of course he's not dead on about how to deal with every single problem, but I do find that, similar to how You Don't Have to Be Rich makes me feel happy and excited about taking control of my financial life, How To Hug a Porcupine helps me feel happy and excited about becoming a more emotionally healthy, firm-yet-kind-boundaries kind of woman. I also LOVE For All Eternity, which Dr. Lund also wrote; I think that it may actually be better, but I haven't sat down and done a direct comparison.

I don't own this one yet. I would, indeed, like to. (Just letting you, the approximately half of my reading audience who might think about getting me a Christmas present (because you are close blood relatives), know.)

Nana on the Train, Part I: The Cornflakes Episode

2009-09-21T09:53:00.005-06:00

Edit: I realized that the first draft of this post violated my privacy policy, which is that NO ONE (except my Aunt Joyce and cousin Becky, who post under their real names anyway-- hi, guys!) gets called by their correct names on my blog unless I have their express permission. I have now edited out the name of the friend that Mom(/Nana) tried to drive to California with.

Nana was born in California and she grew up there, but about a year after she joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, she moved to Utah to go to school at BYU. Once she married Papa, they lived in Utah for a little while, but after that they moved up to Idaho, where most of Papa's family lived. Nana and Papa were pretty poor, so it was difficult for her to go to see her family as often as she wanted to.

One day, Nana was excited to find out that a friend of hers, Johanna Red, was planning to drive to California in her Volkswagen Beetle. Nana asked if she could come along. Sister Red said that of course she could! On the day they planned to leave, they started to drive from Blackfoot, where they lived, towards California. Unfortunately, just before they reached Pocatello (which was the first big city along the way--about 25 or 30 miles from Blackfoot), Sister Red forgot to shift in to high gear when she needed to, and the transmission in her car was damaged. Sister Red had a friend in Pocatello, so they drove to the friend's house; Sister Red was afraid to drive any further before the Beetle was checked out by a mechanic. (Remember, this was in the days before cell phones, so going somewhere in a maybe-broken car was a bigger deal than it would be now; you couldn't just call someone if you broke down at the side of the road.)

Sister Red called her husband, Ben, from the friend's house in Pocatello, to come get her. He came down from Blackfoot to get her and arrange to have the car fixed. Nana, however, still wanted to go see her family. She remembered that there was a special deal going on with Amtrak (the train company) and Kellog's Cornflakes. She called Amtrak from Sister Red's friend's house to find out what the details were. The deal was for reduced price tickets for children if you had a certain number of cupons from cornflakes boxes. Nana can't remember for sure, but she thinks that Auntie Weathercolour was about two years old at that time and that I, Auntie Cornelia, was a babe in arms (meaning, a baby small enough that she had to carry me everywhere). Nana found out from Amtrak that there was only one train per day that left from Pocatello to Salt Lake City, which was where she needed to go in order to get to California. That train was leaving in about an hour and a half from when Nana called, so Nana decided to hurry to get the things she needed to done in time!

Sister Red's friend drove Nana to the grocery store. Nana remembers buying six boxes of cornflakes and carefully cutting the coupons off the backs of the boxes. She didn't want to tear the inner liner that contained the cornflakes. She couldn't afford to just throw the boxes of cornflakes away, and she didn't want them to be stale when our family ate them. The friend loaned her some scissors (or it might have been a razor blade) so that she could do the job. Nana sent the cornflakes back to Blackfoot with Sister Red and her husband, who dropped them off at the Oak Street Apartments, which is where Nana and Papa lived. Nana says that they ate cornflakes from boxes that had holes in the backs of them for about a year after this happened.

By the time Nana was done getting the cornflakes boxes and cutting the coupons from them, there was only a little time left, so Sister Red's friend drove her over to the train station. Nana isn't sure how she juggled her luggage and two children, but she figures that she couldn't have had very much luggage, because they had been traveling in a Bug to start with.

I asked Nana: was it a good visit? And she said, Oh, yeah. The only trip she remembers that wasn't a good visit was right after Auntie Day was born, when she wanted to visit her grandmother. I will write that story another time.

This story somehow illustrates a kind of quintessential my-mom-ness, though I'm not quite sure exactly how. Maybe my siblings can help me track it down as they comment.

(When I asked her, Mom said that she thinks it's because she really wanted this thing, and she figured out how to do it in a way that they could afford. She thinks that she's probably pretty good at logistics.)

(To me, this story illustrates two things about my mom. First, she is very ingenious when it comes to finding ways to see her family, and particularly when she doesn't have a lot of money to accomplish her task. Second, Nana really likes coupons.)

What does it say to you about Nana?

Three things I've liked in the last couple of days

2009-09-01T16:37:00.004-06:00

First, just for Sroon (who is always begging for vampire jellyfish stories), a jellyfish slide show over at BBC news. They really are quite lovely:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8231000/8231553.stm

Next, a story about when things just work out (involving a Christmas card and potentially dishonest Polish postal workers):

http://segullah.org/daily-special/ward-envy-part-ii/

And finally, a talk about creative genius and finding a little bit of mental space apart from creative work (it's a video, just so that you are prepared):

http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html

It's just a stage

2009-08-31T12:28:00.005-06:00

The last time I moved within Provo, my sister, Mrs. Weathercolour, came over with her children to help. At one point, she left to run an errand, but left her youngest sons, Sroon and Quarto, with me. I thought about how I might entertain the boys while I kept packing. I remembered recent incidents in which Quarto had engaged in toilet-paper-roll-unrolling (in to the household toilet). I had comforted my sister at the time by reminding her that this is a normal stage for kids to go through, and wasn't she lucky that she hadn't had to call a plumber? I remembered that I had a roll of athletic tape lying around which was about ten years old, which was getting a bit un-sticky. I said, "would you like to unroll this roll of tape?" and the boys enthusiastically agreed. The only hitch in this plan happened after my sister got back with her older two children; they were very disappointed to have missed out on such a treat as being allowed to deliberately unroll an entire half-roll of tape.

(My grandfather, on the other hand, would not have made this mistake. Grandma once left him to watch their four kids-- I take it that this wasn't a terribly common arrangement for them, but he was willing enough in this instance-- and he sat calmly reading the newspaper while the kids (all ages) unrolled an entire four-pack of toilet paper around the inside walls of the house. You know how you can sometimes walk an entire circuit inside of a house, almost like a track? They just walked around the track, unrolling toilet paper as they went. And every time Grandma tells this story, she mentions in tones of amazement that they never once broke the toilet paper. And then she chuckles.)

Or, there is also the butter-or-margarine-eating stage, which actually comes around the same time as the unrolling stage. When my oldest nephew ate an entire cube of margarine by himself while his mother wasn't looking, my sister, who wasn't yet aware that this was a stage, called her neighbor-friend who already had several children. "Oh, yes, it's just a stage. I still remember when my younger brother's hands were so covered with butter that he couldn't get the bedroom door open. He'll grow out of it." And he did.

Another stage I've been thinking about lately is the must-be-translated stage. One of the reasons why kids with perfectly good pronunciation sometimes ask repeatedly for confirmation that you have heard what they have said is because not so long ago, their pronunciation was anything but perfect, and a grownup's wild guess as to the kid's meaning was that kid's only pathway to communication.

Such as: the other day, the youngest Weathercolour child was trying to pull her sister's hair clip out of her sister's hair. I suggested to Mrs. Weathercolour that she offer a hair clip to the child who was trying to take one.

"Would you like a hair clip?" she asked.

"Bra-brie."

"Strawberry?" Clearly there had been a breakdown in communication. My sister tried again: "Would you like a hair clip?"

"Bra-brie."

"Probably?"

Vigorous nodding confirmed that my sister's second guess had, indeed, been correct. The kid got a hair clip.

What's the funnest thing you've ever done?

2009-08-30T15:28:00.003-06:00

For me: learning Arabic. I had a teacher who was SO not a micro-manager; he told us to just work on what we knew we needed to work on, and that was exactly what I did. And it turns out that I'm pretty good at it-- or, at least, I thought that I was for long enough to get me off the ground. Think of it this way: if there is something that many, many people view as insanely difficult, but you just find it to be hard but enjoyable work, wouldn't that make it really, really fun?

For Mom: the summers she was a fire lookout in California. She had a dog named "Cat" for a companion and a '22 for taking care of rattlers and other intruders, and she was in radio contact with headquarters; but she was physically alone for most of the time, in charge of watching for smoke which would indicate a forest fire in the making. I'll try to blog some of her fire lookout stories soon.

For Dad: the summers he was a boy scout camp counselor up at Camp Bear Lake, on the Utah-Idaho border. One of his younger brothers (six years younger) was also working there, and the kids would ask all the time if they were twins-- the grownups knew that they weren't, but they would mix them up anyway. The camp had a great spirit of camaraderie, respect, and competence, not to mention that they got to be outdoors a lot.

Is it any wonder that my parents' preferred summer vacation activity for our family was camping? Or that I became a language teacher?

That title was also a genuine question: I would really like to know. What IS the funnest thing you've ever done? (Or, since this question is really just a conversation starter and I'm not going to hold you to your answers at any rate: what would the top three contenders be?)

Three reasons why I feel loved

2009-08-20T22:17:00.005-06:00

First: My sister Klari called to tell me that she isn't ignoring me; it's just that school is starting this week, and she is crazy-busy getting ready to teach, on top of coordinating her kids' schedules, and so on.

Second: My mom usually does the grocery shopping for our household at this point. I've requested that we get not just tomatoes, but good tomatoes. Yesterday she got some particularly delicious ones, and today I was thanking her for them. She told me that she had not only gone by sight and feel, but she had smelled the tomatoes to pick them out. I had never even thought of smelling tomatoes to pick them, but maybe that is because my sniffer isn't so good. I shall, however, change my methods henceforth. Every time I bite in to tomato goodness, I get a taste of Mother-love.

Third: And then this evening, Patent Office Babe (though I'm considering renaming her The Evil Plot-tress, because she really is the greatest person in the world to discuss up-and-coming novel plots with-- and, you know, Evil is the new "bad," or at least with me it is) out of the blue asked me if I get to the bank very often. I have gone exactly twice since coming to this state. She said that she had a check from an online survey company that needed to be cashed, and the last one had been for three dollars and she never did get around to cashing it before it expired, and how would I feel about getting an extra fifteen dollars?

"It would be a fortune to me," I said, smiling brilliantly and straightening up. (This offer meant more to me than I would like it to, given my current employment situation). I considered. "But I'm not sure how I feel about you randomly giving me fifteen dollars." I try not to be a leech.

"Well, you randomly cook totally delicious things for me," she said.

I thought about the fact that on Monday, the dinner I fixed was completely edible but definitely nothing more, but that on Tuesday it was snarfable and on Wednesday darn good. "You're right," I said. "I would like for it to be non-random, but it is sort of random, isn't it?"

She laughed. A little later in the conversation, she told me that seeing my happy reaction was worth more than anything else she could have bought with the fifteen dollars.

What's not to feel loved?

Dang!

2009-08-15T20:15:00.006-06:00

I really do try to have quality control. Really. Truly. Even though no one's going to believe me after this post.

Did anyone who tried that oatmeal pancake recipe find the batter to be a bit... dry?

Yes?

Please, for the love of yumminess, do not give up on oatmeal pancakes because of the flakiness of she who introduced you to them. Just add an extra half-cup of water (or milk) to the batter. Or more, as needed, to make it the proper consistency (which is what I had to do tonight, and I'm in ever-humid Summertime Maryland).

I've now fixed the original recipe.

So sorry. I'll try really hard not to do that again. Stay tuned for Samosas. Oh, wait, but we have to talk about fried onions first. We'll get there.

SAC

A sign I have been thinking about putting up in the bathroom

2009-08-12T20:46:00.014-06:00

IT WOULD BE GREATLY APPRECIATED IF, WHEN KILLING ANTS WHILE SHOWERING, YOU WOULD FLUSH THEM DOWN THE DRAIN. ANT CORPSES DO NOT MAKE HAPPY BATHING COMPANIONS.

I had thought about putting in something about "your fellow bathers would appreciate," but that would seem to imply that my family employs a Roman-style bathing arrangement, which we most certainly do not. Come to think of it, our distaste for such an arrangement would be one of the main reasons for why we kill our unwelcome six-legged visitors in the first place. The other reason being that some day (? I hope?) the ants will figure out that all of their friends die when they come in here, and thus decide that coming here is a bad idea. The problem with this, of course, is that they don't all die, since our bathroom is not continuously inhabited with ant-killing humans.

Diatomaceous earth, my friend, diatomaceous earth. We will be spreading it soon over the surmised inbound path of our exoskeleton-possessing visitors, and very shortly thereafter my killing-ants-in-the-bathtub days will be over.

On the bright side, these are not biting ants. It could be way worse.

How My Dad Proposed to My Mom

2009-08-12T13:45:00.002-06:00

They told me this story in May, though I have been picking their brains for extra details ever since then.

Dad was living with Uncle Lloyd at the time. Lloyd and Leona were in the upper part of this house, and Dad was living in the basement. Dad said the other day that he was not as close to Charlie, but he had spent some time with Lloyd when Lloyd was living in California, and when they came out to Utah, they invited him to live in their basement-- so he did, and that's where he was living when he proposed to Nana.

First of all, Mom remembered that Grandma (my dad's mom) had come down from Idaho and had given Dad this ring which was in a ring box, inside of a sock. Mom remembers Grandma handing it to Dad. It was a ring which had belonged to Grandma, on to which Grandma's dad (my dad's Grandpa Taylor) had superglued a beautiful polished rock which they called an apache tear. Grandpa Taylor had collected rocks like that for years, and polished them, and Mom has several now which she got when Grandma died and which she plans to pass on to the kids and grandkids sometime.

So, Mom knew that Dad had this heirloom ring which had belonged to his mom, and they were in the kitchen at that house that he and Lloyd were sharing-- no wait, Dad thought it was on the steps outside. Mom was sure it was in the kitchen. At any rate, it was in the place he was sharing with Lloyd at the time, and he handed her the ring box...

"Did you take it out of the sock?" I asked. And they both had to think about it.

Yes. They did both stop to think about it, but they were both sure. He definitely took it out of the sock. And he asked her if she would keep it for him, and she knew that this was his way of asking her to marry him.

And that was the end of the story. "Did you say yes?" I asked her. Of course she agreed to, but she didn't know the exact words she used. She said that she didn't wear that ring much, because the setting was a little loose and she didn't want the other stones in it to fall out.

Later, I asked them about the "real" engagement ring. I knew that there was a diamond ring involved somewhere. They said that there were a couple of brothers in their ward (literally, these guys were brothers, not just in the "in the ward" sense) who had gone to Belgium on their missions, and they had decided to start up a diamond business. They had a guy in Belgium who could send them diamonds, and they had a diamond safe in their apartment. My parents went and picked out the stone they wanted (my parents being, like, their third customer ever), and then sent the stone to Salt Lake, to the O.C. Tanner Company, to be set in to a ring.

And the name of the brothers? They were the Wilsons, of Wilson Diamond (as far as I can tell, as prosperous a diamond company as any in the Provo area).

Since the time when my parents became engaged, my family has become much more aware of the issue of how much blood is on the hands of diamond companies, and several of us are just fine with dispensing with the "tradition" of diamond-giving which has been carefully built by advertising; but it is kind of nice to know that we were part of the beginning of a local company.

Oatmeal Pancakes

2009-08-05T21:45:00.004-06:00

About all the food these days: I'm trying to finish up a wedding present for my brother and his bride-to-be. Also, if you really mind, you could comment! Or, you could comment anyway, because I love comments.

ON to oatmeal pancakes, which I wrote up a few weeks ago and hadn't gotten around to posting yet.

No thank you, you say. I like regular pancakes quite well enough (or not) without gussying them up with a nearly tasteless food like oatmeal, you say. And I will not stop you from saying it; I have gotten many such reactions from many roommates and other persons who were observing me in the process of oatmeal pancake production, and I am well aware of the futility of trying to talk people out of their right to such a reaction.

However.

I will point out that many-- definitely more than half-- of the people who have had the "meh" reaction to the idea of oatmeal pancakes have actually liked the pancakes themselves, enough that they expressed interest in my making them again. I will point out that a fair number of those persons have asked for the recipe at some point. I will point out that I, myself, being without my little cookbook with all of my handwritten recipes in it for several months, finally just got around to figuring out the recipe again, because I needed it that much.

This recipe meets all of my basic requirements for a really good recipe: cheap, nourishing/healthy, reasonably high on the deliciousness scale, and pretty fast to make. It is also fairly environmentally friendly, if you care about that sort of thing. I have lived on this recipe for-- ok, it probably won't help my cause to admit how long at a time this has constituted a major part of my diet, but I will say that it's a poor graduate student's best friend. Also, when I would get those rare phone calls from my sister-with-five-children, saying that they had a family member who needed to go to the emergency room, and could I come watch everyone else for a few hours? I would always whip up a quadruple batch of these to take along to the house (to be cooked once I got there), and they were always well-received.

The following is a "one person" batch. I find that it works for a couple of meals for me, or a meal for me and one other person, sometimes with leftovers.

The Recipe:

First:

3/4 c. oatmeal
1 1/2 c. milk

Let these soak for half an hour.

{Mom asked me: do you have to soak them? And I said, when I tried it without the soaking time, at the beginning of the frying process the batter was too liquid, so I added more flour, and then by the time I was cooking the last pancake, a lot more of the liquid had been absorbed by the dry oatmeal and the batter was not liquid enough. So I soak my oatmeal now.}

You can mix the dry ingredients at the same time as the oatmeal (I usually do this), and that will mean that when it comes time to cook them, you just combine the contents of the two bowls, and then add your egg and your oil, and you are set to go. I sometimes put the oatmeal on the night before, and then breakfast is lovely-easy.

Dry Ingredients

1 c. flour (you can substitute whole wheat for white for all of this without too much consequence, though I prefer half and half, because it gives a little lighter texture)
1/2 T sugar
1/2 T baking powder (Heh, heh, almost spelled that "baking power;" be sure to reduce this to 1 t in high altitude regions)
1/4 t salt

Last of the wet ingredients:

1 egg
1 T oil (or, of course, melted polysaturated fat product of your choice)

Mix well, but don't overmix. I like to crack the egg into a separate bowl before dumping it in the main bowl. I do this to make sure that I don't inadvertently let in any shell bits; it's also really nice to be able to beat the egg in its own space, because then I know there aren't going to be large glommy bits of egg which are not evenly distributed through the batter. Not that it's the end of the world if that happens; but I think I sort of overbeat the batter when I forget to beat my egg separately first.

I also never over-explain anything. Nor do I indulge in sarcasm.

Fry 'em up! They're delicious! (Especially hot off the griddle.)

Substitutions:

Being poor, and also having various undesirable reactions to milk products, so that I often end up using the more expensive soymilk, I have discovered by trial and error that you can replace up to about half of the milk with water; more than that, and the texture of the batter gets funny-- the pancakes stop holding together very well, and that is difficult on the flipping side of things.

If you want to use already-cooked oatmeal (and I suspect that this may be the original form of this recipe; there is almost no other edible use for cold, already-cooked oatmeal) then cut the milk/water in half (so, for this size of batch, use half a cup); and then use one whole cup of cooked oatmeal per batch. You can fudge on the amounts here, especially if you are good at eyeballing the consistency of the batter. The upshot of this is that if you are REALLY craving oatmeal pancakes (and trust me, sometimes I do), and you have pancake mix on hand, then you can just mix up a batch of pancake mix and then add wet oatmeal until the consistency looks right. Doesn't that sound nice? (But it really is, once the pancakes have finished cooking.)

Egg substitution-- this could, and probably should, be a posting all its own, but who wants to read an entire post about that? Anyway, I have a bro-in-law who is allergic to eggs, SO here is what works: a tablespoon of cornstarch per egg, if you are just trying to replace its binding power. I have also used garbonzo bean powder with some success (1 T per replaced egg, plus maybe a third of a cup of water); I don't care for the taste, personally, but my younger sister and her children prefer it to the regular kind. I use GB powder on the theory that the egg also gives some protein, which I will want to replace. Using the same logic, I have also used the GB powder to substitute for soymilk, on occasion; if I remember right, about 1 T per cup of water made the texture come out OK when I was out of soymilk on a Sunday or whatever.

Oh, yes, and there is also the Classic Mayo Replacement for when you aren't allergic to but just out of eggs, but I try to avoid that one, since I think it tastes funny. I'd put in about 2 T of Mayo per missing egg, personally, because even though you aren't replacing the whole egg, it will get the job done and keep your pancakes from tasting just too much like pasta salad.

Funny/ Cross Cultural Recipe-Related Story:
I'm not quite sure what it is about me and cultural differences, but so far in my life I tend not to find as many as I am expecting. Is it just that I expect the rest of the world to be exotically different, and they are only mildly different? Is it the McDonald's effect, wherein everything really is how I expect it, because my country's culture has taken over everyone else's? Or is it that I just put things down to different personalities or in other ways don't notice them, when they are really cultural differences? Possibly it's a combination of all three. In Germany, I found the food to be, um, pretty normal. Some of it was darn fantastic, and I collected a couple of recipes, but the Ferrars and I did a great job of not shocking each other over food issues.

When it came to pancakes, however, it was different! I was really craving them about three weeks in, so I tried to make them. When I asked for baking powder (which, by the way, is "Backpulver" in German, in case you ever need to know), Elinor gave me a funny look. "You put baking powder? in something you cook on top of the stove?!" I was able to assure her that while there are plenty of idiosyncratic things about me which may not apply to all Americans, there is no doubt in my mind that the vast majority of my countrymen are familiar with the concept of baking powder being used for pancakes. Which are cooked in a skillet, on top of a stove.

Ta-da! Genuine cultural difference! I was so proud.

Since I didn't have the recipe with me and also I hear that European flour is quite different from what I'm used to, my results that time round were not spectacular, but at least I got a good story out of it.

Beauty as a Gift of the Spirit

2009-08-04T14:21:00.005-06:00

I have been thinking about this for a while.

I used to pray that I would be beautiful.

I believe that my prayers were answered (in the affirmative).

I am the same height that I used to be. I am, come to think of it, about seven pounds heavier than I used to be. I don't spend a whole lot more time, effort, or worry than I used to. In fact, I spend a LOT less worry on it.

I am thinking about how that happened. Part of it is that I kept my eyes peeled: what do I think is beautiful? (I still do this.) Part of it is that I developed a wonderful friendship with a best friend who was utterly confident of her own fashion sense, and who was willing to share some of her knowledge with me. Part of it was being careful about what I buy: I only get things that I feel really pretty in. I am a pain to shop with, because I am darn picky. But that means that I don't have to worry about whether or not I'm going to wear my "ugly shirt" today, because I don't have any of those, and I feel that it's worth a lot more effort at the store (which I don't go to that often anyway) and a lot less in the morning when I'm getting dressed.

Part of it is that I realized that a certain amount of being beautiful is confidence. Confidence that you are as good as other people, confidence that you are worth talking to, confidence that you have done your best to look your best on a given day. And all this, despite having current pimples, many scars from past pimple wars, a chin I don't like, and a figure that doesn't always fit tidily in to store-bought clothes (which, I keep telling myself, no one has anyway).

But there is also confidence in the fact that most people are so self-absorbed that they aren't going to notice me anyway, and confidence that as I do my best to bring out the best in them, it wouldn't really matter if I looked like Gollum; they would think I was wonderful, and they might even think I was pretty. And despite the fact that I have just insulted the rest of the human race by calling them self-absorbed, the fact of the matter is that self-absorbed is exactly what I am on those days when I am not able to pull myself together enough to get out of my own shell, and I am always deeply grateful to the people around me who are willing and able to help me out.

I realize that not everyone feels this way about beauty. I realize that there will always be biddy-gossips who walk around judging the rest of the world as too fat, too saggy, too wrinkly, too dark or too light. I don't like that fact, but it is a fact. I do feel, however, that the beauty I contribute to the world-- yes, with my physical appearance, but also in every other way I have to contribute it-- is my gift to them, and they can take it or leave it as they please. It was God's gift to me first, and I choose to pass it on, and the ungracious receiver hurts only herself.

I am always looking for God in others. I am looking for the mark of the master's hand, the miracle which is the human being He created. OK, well, maybe I am not ALWAYS looking, but it is one of my major goals in life, a goal which I always have even when I forget it for a brief while. I find human minds to be amazing and spectacular and beautiful, even when their owners think that they are insignificant and not worth being interested in. I think that this is not an uncommon trait in teachers, and even for people who are not teachers, it is not difficult to imagine a person who is intersted in others in this way. Could we not begin doing this with our physical bodies? Not to say: oh, yes, you are perfect, no more work to be done! But to say: Wow! that's an amazing machine you've got there! Even to smile, to walk, to breathe, are spectacular and incredible and not insignificant.

I think we can do this, but it seems, lately, like the cultural pressure to do the opposite (to notice only the disgusting and broken parts of ourselves) is getting more intense. But we can do it-- can't we?

How I Decide What To Cook For Dinner, Part II: Nutritional Categories

2009-07-31T18:29:00.004-06:00

So sorry. I am still in the process of learning to be on time and so on. I do have other accomplishments under my belt; I can read and write, for example; but the basic skill of being dependable is one I'm still working with myself to develop more fully.

All right. Simplified nutrition next. How simplified? Umm, well, for starters, I only have three food groups.

When I am trying to decide what to fix for dinner, I want to have something starchy, something vegetable-y, and something protein-y.

Why no fruits? Because I love fruit so much and eat so much of it during the rest of the day that I don't worry about it when I'm planning for dinner. (And I KNOW that that is an example not everyone would be well-advised to follow, but I already wrote my disclaimer for that.) Oh, yes, and dairy: I will just say that I and various family members have various non-lovely reactions to dairy, so it gets lumped with "protein-y" and those of us who worry about osteoporosis try to get our calcium in other ways. The nutritional level is the one I think about on a day-to-day basis (versus a "recipe repertoire" or "when I'm going shopping" basis, though of course it comes in to play there, too, mostly in trying hard to help my yummy vegetable recipes keep up with my delumptious dessert recipes). I (theoretically) already have my pantry stocked with pretty healthy stuff, so I just try to figure out what strikes my fancy on a given day and then build a balanced meal from that point.

So, this is what my pantry and recipe book think like (I mean, how they appear to my brain) from a nutritional standpoint (yes, I really do have my recipe book divided out this way-- you can come over and check):

Starchy:

potatoes: (cheap and nourishing, not everyone loves)
rice: (same as potatoes)
bread: (takes a long time, but home-made bread makes a meal Fancy)
pasta: best if you can make this whole-wheat pasta
corn or corn-on-the-cob
tortillas

Vegetable-y:

Stir-fry (also encompasses protein-y, depending on how you fix it)
baked spinach with cheese on it (not a centerpiece, but fills out a meal nicely)
green salad with yummies in it (you know, almonds, cheese, craisins, mandarin oranges, etc.)
a baked winter squash
ratatoullie (for a Mediterranean-inspired meal)
green beans with fried onions (SOO yummy-- but then, it's French)
stir-fried broccoli

Protein-y (you don't really need my help in this area since it seems like every cookbook from The Dawn of Time is divided in to "fish, veal, beef, pork, chicken, other forms of dead animal you've never heard of or thought of eating, etc." but for what it's worth, here's my partial list):

curried chicken
curried chicken salad
store-bought rotisserie chicken
pork chops
pork roast
beef roast
hummus
refried beans, burritos, enchiladas
lentils
tofu! (I will share a yummy recipe... soon... relatively soon...)

Mixed Category:

Pizza
Soup
Stir Fry
Tacos
Hawaiian Haystacks
Sandwiches

Desserts:
Absolutely you are not getting my help on this one. You and I both know that our recipe boxes have at least ten times as many excellent dessert recipes as we could ever, ever healthily make in a hundred years. My main defense against getting fat from eating desserts is a combination of laziness and cheapness: I don't buy them at the store because I figure that mine taste so much better that I'd rather make them myself, but once I'm home, I am too lazy to make them except on very rare occasions. I do not count fruit as dessert. That's cheating. Fruit is food, and I treat it as such. (But if it works for you, go for it.)

An extra note on shooting for delicious

2009-07-28T12:52:00.013-06:00

(This is a footnote to the last post, as opposed to its sequel, which I have half-typed in preparedness for Thursday.)

I find it helpful to remember what so few food critics, professional and otherwise, seem to forget: taste is individual. If I make something that not everyone likes, well, that doesn't mean I am a bad cook or that it is a bad recipe. I TRY to find recipes that everyone likes-- I spend significant amounts of time in this endeavor-- but in the end, my "eaters" also have responsibilities: if they want to like their dinner, they should at least know what they like (you would be surprised...) and then they need to let me know their prefrences, not assuming that any decent cook is going to be able to mind-read. Also, if I like something and you don't (grapefruit, anyone?) I am truly not sad: that really does mean that there is more for me, which does make me happy.

Going back to the French Toast story: my current policy is that I do not knowingly fix any food that a person who will be eating it actively dislikes. (No, I have never had to cook for a picky four-year-old on a regular basis, so there is no way that I would put judgment on someone who did.) I often ask what people think of dinner-- yes, because I'm fishing for compliments (sometimes), but also because I want to know how a given recipe has gone over for a particular crowd. I am always looking for more recipes that have universal appeal, that are easy, cheap, and healthy, and also recipes which appeal to me personally. Most of the recipes I post on this blog are "universal appeal" recipes, though I also post recipes which have gotten a strong enough good reaction from a large enough number of people that I feel they will have high value to others.

I do NOT think that someone who doesn't take my approach (food=love) is a bad person, a bad mother (fathers tend not to worry about that sort of thing so much), or a bad cook. If one of my recipes flops, I don't feel like a bad person or a bad cook. Well, except for that time when I melted a hot pad so bad that it stank up the house for weeks and the soup turned out inedible, and then the very next night a pyrex pan exploded in my (hot-pad protected) hand because I stupidly tilted some water from one spot to another, extra-heated spot, but then I was worrying that it was my brain itself that was going bad on me, rather than that I as a whole was bad. But I didn't fret too much. A little failure is good for you: it keeps you humble and lets you know that you are pushing the boundaries of your abilities, which is generally a good thing.

How I decide what to cook for dinner, Part I: Basic Principles

2009-07-28T11:01:00.017-06:00

I have mentioned that I started learning to cook when I was ten. Those times were pretty fun. When you are ten, basically you make what you want to make, like a zigguraut-shaped cake on which may be used not one but two whole cans of chocolate frosting. From my vantage point now, I'm not even sure how we fit that much frosting ON to the cake, let alone ate it afterwards. Like I say, good times.

When I was fifteen, however, I graduated to cooking for the entire family on a regular basis, and it suddenly got a lot harder. I remember the first time I plunked some French Toast in front of one of my younger sisters: she said, "but I don't LIKE French Toast," and I started in to the well-known "you WILL eat what is set before you" speech, but luckily my dad saved me from it. Meaning, my sister and I quite possibly have a much better relationship today because I was never allowed to make that speech. I do still try to balance the needs of the cook with the needs of the eaters, but I have also come to feel that cooking something to the best of your ability, with an eye to both nourishing and delighting the person(s) who consume the food, is truly and deeply an act of love. It's all a matter of balance.

As with all advice at all times, please take what you need from the following and huck the rest. But, especially, really-- you will see that my methods are particularly particularized for me especially, which I am well aware of, so I'm saying--well, I said it.

The first thing I figured out was which principles I wanted/needed to balance. I tend to apply these to individual recipes which are auditioning for my recipe reperitoire. A good/great recipe maximizes deliciousness and nutritiousness, while minimizing the time and expense involved in making it. Basically, I want recipes which give me good output for what I put in to them.

I am, believe me, WELL aware of how difficult it is to get all of these things in one recipe, but think of it this way: it isn't that hard to imagine a recipe from a mediocre cookbook which takes forever to make, has expensive ingredients, doesn't taste that great once it's done, and isn't even good for you. If THAT is possible, why not the reverse? Well, OK, so lots of reasons, but I'm digressing here.

When I am fixing dinner, I try to average out which categories my recipes fall in to. Here are a couple of examples:

If I am fixing stir-fry, which is mildly expensive (fresh produce) and tends to take forever (chopping-- I just don't have those mad knife skills, but Mom is talking about buying a food processor) but is very healthy and delicious to boot, then I take it easy for the rest of the meal and fix just plain rice for the starch. Or, on days when I fix home-made bread or rolls, the stuff that goes in them is likely to be leftover meat and maybe some lettuce and tomatoes; the bread took long enough to make, already.

The principles of balance also come in to play when I am planning menus and going shopping. Only one example here: at Thanksgiving, when deliciousness is at a premium, I figure out which dishes I want to invest some time in (like curried chicken and lemon meringue pie) and which ones I want to not spend as much time on, but may spend more money on (pre-washed spinach salad with Craisins, or basmati rice).

Whew! Got that? If you don't, I hereby forbid you from reading the next post (coming on Thursday) until your brain has had a chance to absorb. It only took mine about five years.

Snarfable (grown local)

2009-07-17T09:39:00.016-06:00

(The picture: blueberries; my feet; one-half of my summer garden (a potted parsley plant-- the other one is basil); and parts of two Pothos plants, all hanging out on the balcony at my parents' house, because inside there isn't enough light for my camera to want to take a picture without a flash, and fruit this gorgeous deserves to be photographed in 100% natural light anyway.)

Today, a meditation on the snarfable fruits of summer.

You know how to pick a watermelon, right? You go around thunking on them (some people flip them with their fingers, but that hurts my fingers, so I just knock and it works fine for me) and listen for one with a nice, low tone. I personally feel that my success in the field of watermelon picking is partially due to my years playing cello under a strict teacher who made me listen carefully to the pitch I was making; it isn't so hard to transfer the skill to a pitch played on melons instead of strings.

Then you take it home and wash it off and cut it in half and then cut off an entire circular slice and cut off the rind and snarf it. Then, unless you were foolish and already ate some other kind of lunch, you eat another entire slice. (Also, please forgive the junior-high-ness of this, but part of the joy of this experience comes from the fact that watermelon burps are some of the best.)

This sort of event (specifically, melon-snarfing) has been repeated throughout my childhood, teenager-hood, and adulthood. I have also experienced heaven in the form of peaches the size of grapefruit, grown on the tree next to our front door, with skin so thick and sturdy and unattached that you just peel it off with a knife. Also, of course, are the lazy summer days when you wake up and think, "I'm starving and I just don't feel like fixing breakfast," and then you remember that the apricots are on, so you stumble out to the apricot tree (it's between the front and back yards, so it's a little further than the peach tree) and pick four or five ripe ones, and take them inside and rinse them off (just in case of-- um, diseased ants walking on them, or something) and by the time you are done eating them, you feel quite human.

And what has put me in mind of all these things? Well, a few weeks ago a woman from church emailed people at church and said that her family gets fresh blueberries from an Amish farm nearby every year-- $35 for a 20 pound box-- and if anyone wanted the same deal, she would be happy to pick them up for us. Long story short, the process ended up being more frustrating than I was expecting, and by the end of it I felt like it just wasn't worth the trouble. Not that I'm going to even be in the area next year.

However. I then TRIED the blueberries. Now, I knew that I liked blueberries, because I am willing to pay exorbitant prices for them (frozen, usually-- fresh are too expensive to be worth it) in Utah now and again. However. These blueberries turn out to be on a different existential plane than any I had ever tried in Utah, or even out here for that matter. They were picked-- all of them-- at the peak of ripeness. The first few seem perfectly normal, but then after a bit you realize that there aren't any sour or moldy surprises; they are ALL delicious, and that is when you end up snarfing two colanderfuls of blueberries within the space of half an hour. And this is also when you start thinking to yourself: maybe there really is something to this "eat local" schtick. I realized as I thought about it that probably all of the watermelons I have snarfed in Utah were grown in Utah, and that most of the blueberries I have eaten before now have traveled hundreds, if not thousands of miles to get to me.

The funny part about all this is that my parents-- and I can say this with absolute certainty-- did not intend to raise me as a food snob. When they grew their own tomatoes and ground their whole wheat as they needed the flour and planted fruit trees, they were following the teachings of the latter-day prophets to be self-sufficient-- they weren't even thinking about how things tasted. I have been a student for so long, SO long, that I only daydream about having hundreds of pounds of wheat in storage and being able to grow a little garden patch, let alone being in one spot long enough to plant a fruit tree (or bush) and being around to harvest it the next year. But as I look forward to a new, slightly more stable, slightly less poor phase of my life, I have motivation for doing as my parents did from two sources: one, my devotion to following the teachings of the prophets; and, two, my ever-growing epicurean streak. Well, that, and blueberry burps.

And That's What We Think of Them

2009-07-14T15:18:00.004-06:00

Last night for Family Home Evening, my younger sister, Patent Office Babe, volunteered to teach us how to use Access, a computer program for managing databases. For the opening song we sang "For Thy Bounteous Blessings," which is nice and slow and easy to follow for my not-as-musically-trained father. It also happens to be in a minor key.

My sister commented, as she was starting in on the lesson, that "I guess it's appropriate to start a lesson about a Microsoft product with a dirge-like song of thanks."

P.S.: My younger sister, Patent Office Babe, has told me that she is "not sure about" being called Patent Office Babe. Quite frankly, I'm not sure how I would feel about it if I were in her place. However, we are both fresh out of ideas. Suggestions?

List of ESL classes I've taught

2009-07-05T17:17:00.003-06:00

I had to do this for a job application. I thought it was interesting and informative-- a little more detailed than my resume about what kind of professional work I've done. OK, well, it was interesting and informative for ME, anyway, to have to write it out like this. Of course, the resume lists the tutoring job and the TA job and the test-question-writing job, but my main Chosen Profession at the moment is being a classroom teacher, so here is the list (just in case you wanted to know):

All courses were taught at Brigham Young University’s English Language Center.

TTTC (TESOL Teacher Training Class, also called student teaching)—community-based, team-taught English class. After four weeks teaching one class, teachers were switched so that they could have experience teaching at two different levels. The students remained in the classes in which they had been assigned; it was just the teachers who changed. During the first half, I taught BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills), or “survival English” (e.g. how to do job interviews; how to write checks; how to make reservations). For the second half, I was assigned to the highest-proficiency-level class and we focused more on CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency); in particular, on developing writing skills and cultural understanding of more academic subjects, such as American History and Economics.

After student teaching, I was invited to teach at the ELC proper, where there were five levels. Level 1 was the very lowest level, though it was rare for us to get any true beginners; level 5 was the highest level, in which courses paralleled University courses and were taught in a specially supported ESL environment. Students sometimes left for University studies straight from Level 4; other students decided to study at level 5 before going on to University. Each of these courses ran for 13 weeks.

Grammar 4—Students learned skills from the text Grammar Dimensions 3, by Stephen H. Thewlis and supervised by Diane Larson Freeman. At this level, many students mostly know the rules, but need help remembering to apply them consistently. Because of this, after a skill had been introduced or reviewed, we spent a lot of class time practicing in pairs or small groups and discussing student-generated questions.

Reading 4— Class time was divided evenly between working on intensive and extensive reading skills. For intensive reading skills, we relied largely on Neil Anderson’s ACTIVE Skills for Reading. For extensive reading, we read the campus newspaper during class time, then discussed it; and we read, then discussed novels written mainly for children or young adults. These novels were: Amos Fortune Free Man, by Elizabeth Yates; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis; Walk Two Moons, by Sharon Creech; The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho; and one book which the students got to choose themselves from a list of acceptable alternatives.

Grammar 1— Taught skills from Focus on Grammar, by Irene E. Schoenberg. Because of the limited vocabulary of these students, as well as their newness to the city we lived in, I linked our lessons as much as possible to what was immediately relevant to their lives. For instance, in teaching and testing about place prepositions and giving directions, I used a map of the city we were in. When we needed to learn about count and non-count nouns, I brought in many pictures of individual food items, and the next week when we were learning about asking for things, I used the same pictures.

I LOVE lentilburgers!

2009-06-30T14:44:00.008-06:00

Truth be told, I'm not really sure why. I used to hate lentils, and I think I kept that one up a lot longer than I kept up the hatred of onions.

So. Normally I try to only blog about recipes that I have tried on multiple people, on multiple occasions, which said people on said occasions liked well enough that I had confidence that my culinary offering would be at least palatable to the general public. Lentilburgers, however, I just made up (my version of) last week-- but I love them so much that I just had to share. I'll try to blog something better soon, but meanwhile you can just shake your head and chuckle at my craziness, and, if you've lost your job recently and are living on food storage, TRY them. Or even if you haven't and aren't, you could do it so that you can call me up and tell me you loved me so much that you tried this recipe, despite the fact that its main ingredient is lentils.

Ingredients:
1/4 cup of dehydrated onions, covered with
1/4 cup of water (let it soak while you measure the other stuff)
1/2 cup of cooked lentils (I forgot to mention their "cooked-ness" to my sister the first time I gave her the recipe, and about the time I said to put the burgers in the skillet, she asked, "Uh, is there a point at which we soften these lentils up with some water? And I said, "Oh, yes. Before you begin.")
1/4 cup of bread crumbs or cracker crumbs
1 squirt (about a tablespoon?) of ketchup
a few drops of Worstchestershire sauce (not sure how much of a difference for taste this makes, but it makes me feel fancy and we have it on hand, so I do it)
1 egg

Put everything in a bowl. Mix it up. It will sort of be like super gloppy pancake mixture, or like Haroset with egg in it, if you've ever made Haroset. (I'll get around to blogging that recipe some time). Heat up your skillet, put a little bit of oil or butter or nonstick spray in it-- whatever you fancy-- and cook up some LENTILBURGERS! Yum!

For whatever weird reason, lentilburger on a toasted sandwich with a thin slice of tomato and some dijon mustard fills the spot in my cravings which used to be reserved for McDonald's Hamburgers. Of course, you may be thinking, the very fact that I even HAD a spot reserved for McDonald's Hamburgers might explain why I would like something as weird as lentilburgers, and I may agree with you. However, I will be that much richer, or at least less poor, because while McDonald's Hamburgers cost 89 cents a pop, lentils, UNcooked, are about $2.00 a pound (I just looked it up online and saw some that were organic for $2.51), and the rest of the ingredients aren't exactly expensive either.

I would like to do and see more of this

2009-06-21T08:02:00.002-06:00

This is in Pasadena, California.

I've wanted to participate in something like it for a long time.

http://www.ldsphilanthropies.org/humanitarian-services/multimedia/lds-muslims-aid-iraq.html

A Few Good Books (For Grownups and Mostly-Grownups)

2009-06-09T20:07:00.019-06:00

You have heard of L.M. Montgomery because of Anne of Green Gables, and I admit that the work everyone knows her for is perfectly fine; however, Anne's House of Dreams is the best book she ever wrote. It is, incidentally, the fifth book of the Anne series (which series L. M. Montgomery had not wanted to write even book two of, but had to because of popular demand). My theory is that maybe she had learned her craft well by the time she got to book five? I dunno. But it is truly her best, in my opinion and that of my old cello teacher, and you believe us, don't you?

For very nice romantic comedy fiction, you don't get much better than The Blue Castle, also by the esteemed Ms. Montgomery. I warn you that the romance doesn't start until literally half way through the book, but it is still very rewarding.

The Chosen, by Chaim Potok, had a profound influence on me when I was in high school, and even now I think about its themes a lot. Set in 1940's Brooklyn, it's about a friendship between an orthodox Jewish boy and an ultra-orthodox one. The ultra-orthodox kid is not super easy to be friends with, but the other kid's dad encourages the friendship, so he tries, but he doesn't really get why it's so important at the time. But who does, in high school? Or even later, sometimes. The time period this book covers includes the end of WWII and the holocaust, and a major question which crops up is about what it means to be "chosen" and how much pain can be involved with that. Along with some possibilities for redemption. I can't say that I have read almost all of Dr. Potok's other work, as I have with L.M. Montgomery's, but so far in my opinion The Chosen was his best (which is a little scary to me as an aspiring writer, since it was also his first).

A brief warning about Terry Pratchett: PLEASE beware of picking up stray British swear words that seem oh-so-innocent to you as an American but which really are deeply offensive in a number of principalities (which speak British English). But. Mr. Pratchett is really, really good at writing fiction which is: 1) deeply, profoundly silly; and 2) deeply profound. I may have higher needs for zaniness in my intellectual diet than other people do; I haven't done a comparative study; but I really do think that these books are lovely and worth trying.

Reaper Man-- perhaps my favorite Terry Pratchett of all time. About when Death (the anthropomorphic personification; the guy who is a skeleton and walks around with a scythe) looses his job.

Night Watch-- about good police work versus bad, and about-- oh, sheesh. I don't know how to describe it. Also about how to be true to what is true when it is for sure going to cost you your job and might just cost you your life. Also, just to drive the point home, it is profoundly silly, at least in spots.

The Tiffany Aching Series: Wee Free Men; A Hat Full of Sky; and Wintersmith. These combine a coming-of-age story with a very clear explication of what Relief Society is all about (if we were witches, living on Discworld). Also, as with the other Terry Pratchett books that I like so much, about death in one way or another.

Stir Fried Broccoli: A More Than Completely Edible Vegetable

2009-06-06T08:25:00.006-06:00

Note: I got this technique from one of my favorite cookbooks of all time, called The Complete Illustrated Step-by-Step Cookbook, by Judith Ferguson. My copy came from a thrift store, years ago; I bought it because it has full-color, full-page pictures EVERY OTHER PAGE (which I was impressed with because I had long since given in to the Alice-in-wonderland philosophy: '...what is the use of a book,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversation?'), but I soon began to appreciate it for its other qualities. These include extremely clear directions, not too expensive ingredients (er, at least, not for the recipes I choose to cook), and of course consistently yummy end results. The sort of book, in short, that I would like to write some day.

The recipe is part of a larger recipe for Broccoli-Beef stir fry, but several years ago I realized that it could be fixed, with satisfyingly delicious results, on its own. It is not a knock-you-socks-off, people-beg-you-for-the-recipe, fix-for-Thanksgiving-for-sure kind of food, which in my personal rating system would count as "quite good;" it is, however, the sort of recipe that makes people say, "Gosh, I didn't know that I liked stir-fried broccoli this much," and that counts as "More than Completely Edible." In fact, I myself do not normally fix broccoli in any other way, and when I am fixing dinner and think to myself: crud! I forgot to plan a vegetable! this recipe often comes to my rescue. Try it. You'll like it. Really.

One head of broccoli
Some vegetable oil (a tablespoon or so)

Wash the broccoli and cut it in to "even sized pieces." They should be the size of pieces that you would normally see in stir-fry.

Heat the oil in the skillet. For various reasons, I normally use a nine-or-ten-inch cast iron skillet, so I put the skillet on to heat (medium high heat) approximately ten minutes before I put the broccoli in to it. I think it's ten minutes. I'll check this week and get back to you, because even though I am sure our stoves will be different, it is good to know this sort of thing. Five minutes definitely works when you have a gas stove, but I'm working with an electric these days, which heats more slowly. The reason why I am going on and on about this, besides the fact that I have difficulty ceasing speech in general, is that the hotness of the skillet when the broccoli hits it so happens to be the only thing which is fiddly about this recipe, and if you get it wrong, you may incorrectly believe that there was something wrong with the recipe itself. (Just below, I'll tell you how I use the oil in the skillet to tell how hot it is.)

So. Put a tablespoon or two of oil in to the skillet. I always use olive oil, but corn oil or canola oil or whatever it is you like to use are also perfectly acceptable. Now, for judging hotness: if, when you pour it in, it sort of spreads out slowly, then the skillet isn't hot enough; if this is the case, then do something else for a minute or so, then come back and tilt the skillet to see how things are coming along. If it spreads out quickly/ runs quickly, it is probably just right. A very little smoke is OK (but throw in the broccoli IMMEDIATELY), but a lot of smoke means that the skillet is too hot, and you should let it cool down a bit and clean it out so that you don't get the carcinogenic (=cancer causing) effect of burnt oil in your diet. This on top of the fact that it doesn't taste great. N.B.: different oils spread in different ways, but I'm not familiar with all of the variations (nor did you really want to read about them this very moment, did you?), so I'll just have to say get to know your skillet, your stove, and your preferred oil well enough to gauge this accurately. The basic principles remain the same.

Once the skillet is hot enough but not too hot, throw in your broccoli and start stirring. Especially if the broccoli hasn't drained all the way from when you washed it, the oil has the potential to spatter, so be careful. I either use a wooden spoon or a spatula to push the broccoli around. You can leave the skillet for long enough to go set a timer for two minutes, but you probably shouldn't be gone much longer; you should keep stirring pretty much constantly until it is done. Once it is bright green, which may take as long as two and a half minutes, it is ready. Sometimes you will get a little bit of browning on the edges, which is PERFECT. Serve hot, if you can.

Birthday Celebration

2009-05-14T17:25:00.000-06:00

I was born the day my mom graduated from college with her Bachelor's degree. Not the week or the month, but the day. (Luckily-- for her, I guess, since I evidently didn't care so much about inconveniencing people-- not the hour.)

I once asked her about how she decided, at nine months and three days pregnant, to drive the then-at-least-six hour drive from Blackfoot, Idaho, to Provo, Utah so that she could participate in her graduation ceremony. Her reply was typical Mom: "I worked hard for that degree; I wasn't going to miss it!"

So she drove down, and she went through the first day of graduation, and then on the second day of the graduation, there was a big snowstorm and I started to come. Mom claims that there are home movies of her in labor and walking across the Madsen Recital Hall stage to receive her diploma, though I've never seen them. 56 babies were born in the Utah Valley Regional Medical Center, including me. She said that a couple of women didn't even make it out of their caps and gowns, though she did. She also said once that I was her easiest labor, because she was distracted during it. I am unreasonably proud of that.

I found it particularly appropriate that this last birthday, I was back in Provo for my own graduation. I spent much of the morning of my birthday and some of the afternoon standing in line for my cap and gown, with two nephews and a niece in tow. After the second hour in line, I let them each go get a second cookie from the spread which The Powers That Be had laid out, but even without the cookies to sustain them, they were being as good as gold. After that, we walked to the park and met their mother and had a picnic. It seemed like a peculiarly fitting way to mark my coming in to the world.

Neefling Stories

2009-04-21T17:01:00.001-06:00

E (age 6; has just walked in from outside): I just made an octopus with two legs!

In his hand he is holding a dandelion with the stem split in to two relatively even pieces, still attached to the head.

H (age 10, given to smart remarks): That's a du-pus (pronounced "dew-puss")

M (age 8, also quite clever): Or a bi-pus.

Earlier, my sister had told me about how they took the children up to the School District place where they test the kids to see if they are extra-smart. (Hers are, which none of us are terribly surprised about.) As they were leaving the building, H stopped and said, in his monotone robot-voice: "Kinetic energy overload imminent," and then ran to the doors and burst through them. But not literally.

Nine-year-old niece, who is using a puppet-clad hand to open the office door (she is talking for the puppet): "I sure hope that this tastes good."

And finally, for Family Home Evening last night, my sister got out Behold Your Little Ones, the new church manual for one-and-a-half-to-four-year-old children, and asked my youngest nephew to talk about a picture he liked. That was the lesson. He liked this so much that he said, "Now another lesson!" and flipped to another picture, and did it all over again.

Cream Cheese Won Tons

2009-04-17T19:32:00.008-06:00

They used to serve these at a restauraunt in Provo called The Red Lantern (which is now defunct, but this was one of the best parts of eating there anyway). My entire family loves them, as did the Arabic house when I decided to try to figure out the recipe and served them for dessert one day when I was living there. I have always winged this recipe, and it has always turned out well, and that is the kind of recipe I like, so I'm sharing.

I am completely sure that you will want to make a larger batch of these at some point, but I’m giving the recipe as I made it yesterday, and that means a super-tiny batch.

1 scallion (green onion)

2-3 oz. cream cheese (between a quarter of a package and 3/8 of a package) OR Neufchatel cheese

1 t sugar

9 wonton skins

oil for frying

Chop the scallion into little teeny slices (about 1/4 inch thick). Mix the scallion, the cream cheese, and the sugar together with a fork in a small bowl (like, the size you would eat breakfast cereal out of).

Pour some water in to a saucer. Dip one edge of the first won ton skin in to the water, as though you were dunking a piece of paper in a pool of ink so that one edge of the paper would be black. Now dip the other edges, the same way. Holding the won ton wrapper in one hand, use a spoon to put somewhere between a half tablespoon and a whole tablespoon of filling in to the wrapper. Now, fold it in half kitty-corner so that it makes a 45 degree right triangle. Finish all of the rest of the won tons the same way.

Heat your oil in your skillet. I do not deep-fat-fry mine, but if you are up for it, go for it. Fry the won tons until they are golden-brown on each side.

Do not, I repeat not, become so excited to eat your won tons that you burn your mouth on the hot filling. Not that I have personally experienced a burnt tongue recently. About five minutes seems to be long enough to wait.

Miss Forgiveness

2009-04-14T13:59:00.000-06:00

I have been reading a bit of Miss Manners lately, and what I have been realizing is that she gives people permission to be offended sometimes. I often like her advice, but I choose to live my life in such a way that when I get a chance to be offended, I choose to fight that chance off. I read Miss Manners partly to give me tools in my arsenal for not giving offense (I realize what a horribly mangled metaphor that is, but I’m not going back to fix it, lest I get hurt), but if I take everything she says as Gospel Truth, I am going to be offended more often than I want to.

Which got me thinking. What if everyone (or at least enough people) recognized that when you are offended, you need to forgive? And since I was in advice-columnist mode, (and as you have undoubtedly already guessed from the title of this posting), I thought: we should have a column called “Dear Miss Forgiveness”.

Then I started thinking of all kinds of other advice columns you could have: Dear Miss Frugal, for example. But then I was thinking about how hard it can sometimes be to be frugal without cutting yourself off from the joy of living (for some of us, anyway), so then I thought maybe it should be: Dear Miss Frugal But Not Miserly. But then I realized that this is already (kind of) covered by the Tightwad Gazette and like publications, and who wants a name that long anyway? Also, what about “Dear Miss Neat and Comely But Not Obsessed With Her Looks”? but that breaks the long-name rule by a mile, so never mind. I would also personally love to see something along the lines of “Dear Miss Loving And Kind But Not A Doormat,” but perhaps that was what I was looking for in “Miss Forgiveness” in the first place.

Perhaps this Miss mania has been sparked not just by Miss Manners, but by my thinking about moral philosophical writing in general, lately. What I have been thinking, specifically, is that I personally need less rules and more examples. I mean, we all know the Golden Rule, but we all know about misapplications of every rule, such as the time when my then-two-year-old nephew tried to put shoes on the feet of a visiting baby because HE loved wearing shoes so much. Letters about particular situations provide an over-time-and-many-different-circumstances type of instruction. I feel pleased, as I think about this, to notice that Jesus himself used stories quite frequently to teach, and answed questions on a very frequent basis.

Just Watch

2009-04-14T13:06:00.006-06:00

JUST in case you haven't seen it.

My dad emailed me this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

I apologize if you go to BYU and can't get Youtube on campus and can't see it.

Notes on the last posting (i.e. the one below this)

2009-04-07T20:04:00.005-06:00

I believe that the pickled peppers are my mom's.

For my non-native-English-speaking readers, the following "tongue twister" (which I, and just about everyone I knew as a child, learned as children) may help illuminate why my last posting makes any sense at all:

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, where are the pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

(A peck is an amount, or in other words a volume you can pick, like a cup or a bushel or a liter. No, you can't really pick pickled peppers; the whole point of the sentence is that it's hard to say fast, and makes little children giggle when they try to do so.)

Peter Piper has Paid a visit to our fridge

2009-04-07T08:18:00.006-06:00

When I was cleaning it out yesterday, I found four jars of pickled peppers.

How I make Bread (French, 2/3 whole wheat; my standard recipe)

2009-03-31T21:08:00.016-06:00

I am not explaining why, mostly. It would take too long. But this is my basic bread recipe at the moment.

For one batch (but I always make a double, even if it's only for one person):

1 t yeast (For most beginners, I recommend starting with 1 T; I explain this below)
1 c. water
1 T sugar
3/4 t salt
1-2 T olive oil

Combine the above ingredients. I usually use cold water. Let them sit for anywhere from ten minutes to a couple of hours (but you might want to make closer to ten minutes if you're using a whole tablespoon of yeast).

Add:

2 c. whole wheat flour
1 c. white flour

and knead it in. You don't have to knead it for any longer than it takes to get the flour in. Pour a little (one tablespoon or less) oil in the bottom of the bowl, roll the whole lump around in it, and then cover it with plastic wrap so that it doesn't get nasty-crusty while it rises. Let it sit for oh, about five or six or eight hours, maybe overnight. Punch it down. Let it rise again (covered, again, though oiling isn't usually necessary the second time), and punch it down again (or, you can skip this if you only want to take two days instead of three to make bread). At this point, form it into either one loaf or two, depending on your fancy.

Oil a cookie sheet or pan, or else use parchment paper (my preferred method) as your bottom layer instead of oil. Sprinkle it with a grainy product which in the U.S. is known by the brand name of Cream of Wheat, but in Australia is known as Farina or Semolina. Put the loaf on the prepared surface. Cover it with plastic wrap again and let it rise one last time.

When it is time to cook it: put one rack on the bottom position in the oven, and another in the middle. Put an empty Pyrex or other casserole-type pan on the bottom rack as the oven is preheating to 350 Celsius and then put a pot of water on to boil on top of the stove (today when I did this, the water boiled just as the oven finished preheating, so it worked out perfect). Pour the boiling water into the pan by pouring it through the higher rack (easier and safer than sliding the rack out and then back in again), and then immediately put the bread on the upper rack and close the oven. The steam gives the bread an AMAZING crusty French-bread texture. Cook it for approximately forty minutes, or until the crust looks the right shade of golden-brown.

NOTES:

In Utah, I keep all of the proportions the same except the flour, which I put less in of because the climate there is much drier, and therefore the flour there is much drier, and as it absorbs the water the bread itself becomes more dry and not as tasty.

I always eyeball the salt amount. As long as there is less than a whole teaspoon and more than half a teaspoon, it works out fine. Please, do not let me ever find you fiddling with a half teaspoon measure and a quarter-teaspoon measure on this, when there are better ways you could be using your time, such as doing practically anything else.

The yeast amount kind of doesn't matter so much. The original recipe called for a whole tablespoon, and if you choose to do that, your bread will be completely edible and even tasty, and will also probably take less than three days to be done. On the other hand, slower rising bread does taste better, to me, and that is why I do it the way I do it. I just wait for as many hours as it takes for the bread to be risen as much as it needs to be.

Another way to speed up the rising of your bread, if you want it to be ready to bake in, say, six hours from the time you started it: turn the oven on warm. Get the steam ready as directed for when you are actually going to bake it. When all is preheated and steamy, turn the oven off, put the bread dough in, and leave the oven door slightly ajar. Check it after a couple of hours, and then, say, every half hour after that (depending on how fast it seems to be rising).

This steaming method is 100% taken from the back of the Rhodes Rolls frozen bread dough package, except that they don't specify to use a pyrex pan and to preheat it with the oven. I like the pyrex because it is much less likely to tip than, say, a cake pan or a pie pan, and it is also much easier to clean hard water spots off of with some vinegar and/or scrubbie. In the past I tried other methods, but after discovering this one I have not gone back.

Julia Child's husband, Paul, used to put a red-hot brick in to a pan of water in her oven for her, and I once had a bishop who was teaching himself to make fancy French bread who tried using a regular rock, heated up on the stovetop; when one of his daughter's friends walked by and saw it, he shouted, "Emily, you dad's cookin' granite!" They also have extra-fancy steam injection ovens made specifically for this very purpose, but I don't even daydream about those. I'd like my own oven, first.

Also, you can pop loaves of not-quite-risen bread into the oven as it is preheating for baking, and let that heat finish rising (raising?) the bread at the same time it gets hot enough to bake it. I don't do this unless I have to, though, because the results are somewhat unreliable.

There are lots of random factors which influence how fast bread rises, so I have learned to just enjoy the time it takes. Bread, like washing machines and dishwashers, should be started and then left to work its magic on its own (if at all possible).

Fastest way to form loaves (if you even care, since you already waited two days to get to this point):

set the lump on the table. Use a sharp knife to slash it lengthwise, top to bottom, with two parallel slashes, but only have the knife penetrate to about half of the thickness of the lump. Roll it out until the slashes are just interesting lines, rather than forming dramatic peaks and valleys. Leave it at least an inch thick, maybe more. Make sure that at least one measurement (I try to make it the top-to-bottom, but side-to-side or diagonal is fine) is as long as you want the finished loaf to be. Now, roll it up, starting with a side which is parallel to your desired-measurement side. For instance, if I've met my goal and made the top-to-bottom measurement the one which is the ideal length, I start rolling from one of the sides, so that my top-to-bottom measurement comes out as the longest one after I have finished rolling. Gosh, but this is complicated to explain. Let me know if you have any trouble or if (I hope) you come up with a better way to explain it.

At any rate, do not take too much trouble with the whole process, since the point in the first place is to save yourself trouble. When you are done rolling, you can turn the loaf right side up, meaning the seam is down, and you can tuck the ends under, and, if you are like me, it is one of the evenest-looking loaves you have formed in your entire life, AND it took less than 45 seconds to do (that is, if you didn't have to walk to the knife block and back to fetch the aforementioned sharp knife).

YUMMINESS ALERT: butter, applied as though the butter were sidewalk chalk and the bread were sidewalk and you were coloring the whole thing solid, is most delicious. Wait-- less pressure should be applied than if the butter were sidewalk chalk, but I think you'll be able to figure it out. Oil isn't bad either (use a pastry brush for this). I would do this after it finishes baking, because that is when it melts in nicely.

Health: This kind of bread is, as far as I can tell, one of the healthiest things possible to make, even if you do add the oil on top at the end, and this is because it is made with two-thirds whole wheat. By the way, I have experimented with 3/4 whole wheat, and while this is only a 1/12 proportion of difference, that much more whole wheat totally changes the texture of the bread; at that point, you need to start adding gluten back in (which you can buy at a grocery store or natural food store, but I have never bothered). Also, as no doubt most of my readers are aware, if you go from a mostly refined-starch diet to a more whole-grain-based diet, and especially if the change is sudden, the digestive system can rebel. These are my personal reasons for sticking to this particular proportion set (and besides which, it is pretty easy, since the original recipe measures the flour in exactly three cups).

There is only one problem with this. If anyone remembers my "food snob" posting, they will remember that I hate any but the freshest-ground whole wheat flour. Store bought pre-ground flour is often old enough that the oil is off-- or, that is my diagnosis; at any rate, it is awful-tasting, and it gives whole wheat in general an undeserved name for disgustingness. Therefore, when I am living in a household without a wheat grinder, I usually make my bread with two and a half cups of white flour, but put in a cup of overcooked brown basmati rice (organic, of course), and it adds a nice texture as well as being a whole grain. (Overcooked, because when it isn't then the grains that end up on the outside get hard enough that you worry your teeth are going to crack on them when you bite down). I reduce the water by half a cup as well, because the rice already has water in it. I think that's what I do. I am feeling unsure of my proportions. Sheesh! I will seek to clarify. Sometime. That's why I blogged this recipe today, with the whole wheat, because I made it (baked it) today and it was fresh in my memory, and I knew I wouldn't mess this version up. But at least you have this much for now, which is not inconsiderable.

Bon Appetit! Or, as they would say in Germany (where this recipe would not work, as far as I know, because their flour is different) Guten Appetit! If anyone makes this, please give me feedback so that may I know what I left out or garbled in the instructions. It is one thing to make bread that is darn good; it is another to describe what you have done in such a way that others can actually repeat what you do.

Magical Method For Keeping Kids in Line

2009-03-19T15:28:00.004-06:00

This is a sequel to "Failure," a posting I wrote-- I think-- about a month ago. (Just checked. Friday, February 6th is when I wrote it.) In it I told the story of my worst day of substitute teaching, ever, which ended up with me having a much clearer (and more effective) classroom management strategy. In that posting I did not answer the question which always comes up, which is: what is that strategy? so I am doing it now, finally.

Caveats: This works best for the short term, and was developed specifically for Junior High. I change what I do with different ages (I have taught people from preschool through retirement age), and it is a whole different ball game, with a LOT more relationship building, when you have a class of your own over a longer period of time.

I explain all of the stuff in the following two paragraphs at the beginning of the class, which may surprise some vetran teachers, but it works well for me. What I learned that day boils down to the fact that I have two different levels of discipline. I explain that for small stuff I am very lenient, because I really don't care about small stuff that much. Small includes lateness, talking quitely when you aren't supposed to, not raising your hand, passing notes, and asking questions in such a way as to show that you were completely not paying attention the first time I explained something. It isn't like I'm not count you late when you were or whatever, but I am not personally going to get bent out of shape over it, and the same goes for the other stuff. If you engage in these activities, I will ask politely for you to change what you are doing, and I will thank you once you have changed, but that's as far as it goes.

Big stuff I take very seriously, and you will go straight to the office if any of it occurs. Big stuff basically comes down to swearing or hurting other people, including with words. (As a substitute teacher, I rarely administered tests, but cheating is also on my "big stuff" list, and instead of going to the office they just get a zero on that particular test or assignment, with a warning that they will get a zero in the class if it happens again.) On big stuff, I will listen to arguments that you didn't do it, because I don't consider my perception to be infalliable, but if it is clear that you have actually done one of these things, no amount of crying, arguing, temper tantrum throwing, etc., is going to get you out of the previously announced consequence.

My other two secret weapons for short-term discipline are profusely thanking people who are for doing what I have asked, never mentioning that other people aren't on task (works for absolutely everyone); and physical proximity. Misbehavior goes waay down when the teacher is three feet away, although I myself have forgotten this fact more than once and had to relearn it.

Comments! Please! Also, thank you for liking the photos. Hopefully I can get more up soon.

Pictures at Grandma's House

2009-03-08T18:29:00.004-06:00

The gate to the driveway

My hand and a wildflower, slightly out of focus

My friend Brandy, going over a rise in the road (near the gate)

The Eiffel Tower at 7:00 in the morning, with snow

2009-03-08T18:25:00.002-06:00

Animals in the Pseudo-Tuscan Wilderness

2009-03-06T17:53:00.003-07:00

I only have about fifteen minutes to write this, so I apologize in advance about any poor writing/editing which may trip you up.

Did I mention that when I was talking to Mom about how gorgeous I am finding the home of her childhood, she said that it is a classic Mediterranean climate? Mild winters; rainy, sometimes short Spring; hot summers. And the more I look at the space around me, the more it seems to match up with picutres I've seen of Italy. I may just have to visit Italy anyway, though, because while Northern California may have an external landscape like Italy's, inside we are missing some essential frescoes.

Animals.

A few days ago, we had a cow wander in to the pasture. Grandma said that she figured that it belonged to the folks who were renting from the neighbors, and she was glad that someone was getting good use from their land, since they aren't running any cattle on it right now. When I told Mom this, she mentioned that she thought that they should run cattle. I thought at first that this was silly -- after all, Grandma is 82 and only one uncle is home most of the time-- but then I remembered that the uncle who is home is the uncle is the one who hunts, so it wouldn't be such a wild idea to suppose that after a cow had been raised to maturity on the pasture, he could turn it in to freezer meat without too much trouble. It's a moot point, since I won't be here anyway (I think). But it's interesting to think about. (The cow is now gone, but we haven't gone and fixed any holes in our fence, so there is some chance that it will come back.)

I hear about half of the animals that I perceive: frogs (or is it toads?) in the neighbor's pond when I take my walks at night, and at least five different kinds of birds, whose calls I stop to listen to (against the faint background noise of the distant highway) when I take my walks during the day. I have heard the mice Grandma has complained about. I thought: we have mice because we have killed the rattlesnakes, who used to keep the mouse population down. And then I thought: I still don't want rattlesnakes right next to OR in the house. Not sure what I think would be the best solution for this, but again it's moot, since it isn't my house and I don't REALLY live here.

I do see things, too: a rabbit hopped right past me on the road yesterday, and I saw a tiny lizard in the rose garden on my way into the house today. I thought: no wonder Mom was never worried about picking up salamanders in her bare hands when I was little! She was used to stuff like that from her house.

This is exactly the sort of description I generally skip in a book or essay, since it is a lot more boring to read than to write about and remember. I do apologize, but it is the coolest thing going on in my life right now. Or, perhaps, most peaceful. Second most peaceful. Looking at the landscape is the most peaceful. I'll try to figure out that photo thing soon, but I must say that it isn't looking promising.

Finally, there is the Kitchen Sink Tree Frog report. I remember my cousin Troy telling me once that one of the coolest things about my grandma (and, by the way, she isn't the one I'm related to him through) is the fact that she has tree frogs that live in her kitchen sink. "It's like she has this whole little ecosystem in there," I remember him saying. Evidently the tree frogs are the most memorable thing about Grandma's house to most people, because my almost-nine-year-old niece asked about them the other day when she called, as did her mother. T (the niece) had tried to catch them when they visited, but they were too fast for her. Alas and alack, I had to report that I hand't seen any. When I told Grandma about it, she said that she will have to tell the girls who do the cleaning to leave them alone, since that is their rightful home. I'll let you know if I see a resurgence in the population. Also, come to think of it, I have not looked under the tubs that sit in the left-hand side of the sink. Next post, I'll try to remember to give another report.

(YES, I exceeded fifteen minutes, but not by that much. Gotta go email, now.)

At Grandmother's House

2009-02-28T13:59:00.004-07:00

Not much time for this one. I just spent way too long composing an email to Edward and Elinor (the pseudonyms I gave to the family I stayed with in Germany), and then translating it because I wanted to be fair to both of them, not making Edward translate and not making Elinor wait until he was up to it. (I think that he will still have plenty to do with straightening out the bits I messed up, though.)

I am staying with my Grandmother, who has been sick and in and out of the hospital for the past couple of months. I believe that they think it is a herniated disk, but there have been complications. I'm somewhat unclear on all of the details. Her body is doing minutely better each day--I think-- but her mind is still sharp as anything, which is a great comfort to me. She needs her walker to get anywhere on foot, and has to be driven to doctor's appointments and shopping and so on, but she seems to have more energy now than even three days ago, which again is a very good sign.

I had not been to her house for about fourteen years. She has come to blessings, graduations, baptisms, and Christmas, so I have seen HER a fair bit; I just haven't seen her house, and

I LOVE being at the house.

The landscape around here, most of the year, is pretty brown-- mostly dried vegetation-- and since I have usually visited on Christmas vacations, that is how I remember it. At the moment, however, it is spring, and that means that the rain has been coming down and the grass is coming up, so there is a lot more green than I have ever seen before. The roads are red, which makes a beautiful contrast to the grass. (Our tap water, from the well my grandfather dug fifty years ago when he was building the house, is plentiful, but it tastes a little funny and dyes the bathtubs rust-colored for the same reason the roads are red: there is lots of iron in it.) I need not tell you that the sky is blue, and it is impossible to tell you how gorgeous the moon and, I believe it was, Jupiter, were last night right after the sun had set. I was outside, gazing at them, and just did not want to come back to the house. I was just soaking in the glory of God, in these things that please the eye and gladden the heart and make the soul sing for joy.

I will take pictures and try, someday, to get them up, but since I keep running in to technical difficulties (such as losing the cable to connect my camera to the computer, only to find I had left it in the box it had come in) I will refrain from making any more rash promises about how soon I will post my own photographs.

The dog and I have made friends. He spent part of yesterday evening's TV-watching with his head in my lap, which I tolerated because I figure that it is good to have friends wherever you are. OK, OK, so I LIKE the dog, but I am allergic to him, and now I have to remember not to sit on my own bed until I wash these pants.

And now I've spent a long time on this, too, but it feels good to be writing again, and it especially feels good to be finicky about my writing. After all, what else is a blog for?

Tooth Fairy-ing by mail

2009-02-19T19:31:00.003-07:00

No, not tooth ferry-ing by mail, although it involves that, too.

With me in Maryland (at the moment) and my beloved fairy-ees in Utah, my normal tooth fairying activities have been, of a necessity, interrupted. For the Weathercolour household, I deputized replacement fairys before I left, but I hadn't planned on needing to (don't know where my brain was) for Klari's kids.

Sure enough, The Great Event happened in Klari's almost-six-year-old's life: he lost his first tooth. They called as soon as it was in danger (after all, when you not only know who your tooth fairy is, but have your tooth fairy's phone number, calling is only the natural step to take when you feel that first wiggling). The next day, it actually fell out, and said nephew was very concerned that he get his due sleepover, so he called again.

I explained as gently as I could that I wouldn't be able to come out any time soon. Then, I had a (probable) Stroke of Brilliance. I suggested that he mail the tooth to me, and I would mail the money to him. I am deeply hoping that the coolness of getting a real, live letter in the mail from your auntie/tooth fairy will somehow be close enough to the coolness of having her sleep over.

There is one small glitch, which is that I am going to my grandmother Tommy's house in California for a month, quite soon. She has been ill and I am currently unemployed and am therefore have the freedom to make a visit. I told my nephew that if I happened to leave before his tooth got here, I would have Nana or Papa forward it to me. He was, perhaps, concerned that I would forget to mention it to them.

"Can I talk to Papa?"

"No, I'm sorry, he's on a walk."

"What about Nana?"

"I'm sorry, darling, but she's at work. Shall I have Papa call you later when he gets in?"

"Yes."

So I nagged my father until he called, but by then my nephew seemed to have forgotten about it, so I also didn't worry about it any more.

However, last Saturday, I got a call from Klari, informing me that they had just mailed off the tooth. (Incidentally, she shares my feelings about how gross teeth are, and therefore, unlike my older sister, has no desire to get her childrens' teeth back after I have traded them for Sacagawea (had to look that spelling up) gold dollars.)

After she told me to expect the envelope some time this week, she informed me that my niece, T, also wanted to talk to me.

T wanted reassurance that I would not mix her teeth up with her brother's. I didn't think that this was a big deal, and reassured her that I would not. She asked again. I told her again that I didn't think this would happen. When she asked the third time, I remembered (should have remembered this the first time) that my entire tooth-fairy kit is in Utah (including her collected-but-not-returned teeth), and if I am receiving her brother's teeth here or in California, there is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY that I could get them mixed up.

Whew. Glad that's clear. Now I have to figure how much in postage it is going to cost to mail a $1 coin. Life gets more expensive all the time, I tell you, but at least I'll be doing my part to support our sagging economy.

Failure

2009-02-06T13:22:00.007-07:00

It's an ugly fact of life, but not only do most people fail from time to time; we also take comfort in the fact that other people also fail. Maybe it's not an ugly fact. Maybe it's just keeping it real.

I was reminded of this yesterday when I was talking to one of my younger sisters about her (relatively new) job as a math teacher. She is having a rough time of it, and I have to say that I have never known of a first-year teacher who hasn't. I remembered last year-- my first real year of teaching-- and I remembered one conversation with my mom, in which I was bemoaning my many inadequacies as a teacher, and finally she shared one of the more embarrassing moments of her teaching career: her first semester of teaching, as a graduate student, she put an unsolvable problem on the final (math) exam. She did not discover the fact that it was unsolvable until was grading the exam, and at that point all she could do about it was give everyone full credit (which she did).

When I told Klari about this, she laughed really hard and said, "I should talk to Mom more." I agree.

On a more personal note, my worst moment teaching (so far) was when I was substitute teaching at a Jr. High in the Utah Valley region. A math class, now that I think about it. The teacher had left a note that I should be really strict, not allow any talking, and call the principal's office if the kids gave me any cheek whatsoever. I sort of raised my eyebrows, because I am personally a little more laid back than all that, but I tried to follow instructions. By third period, if I recall correctly, I had called them something like five times. Fourth period I called again, and they said that I was going to have to learn how to handle discipline problems myself, because they just couldn't handle that many kids. I turned red. I did not eat lunch in the teacher's lunch room because I was so embarrassed and sure that everyone would know that I was the stupid substitute teacher who had called the principal's office so many times that they had to tell her to stop.

By the end of the day, I had developed my own method of classroom management (or maybe I had just developed trust in the method I pretty much had at that point anyway). This method, if it could be called that, worked so well that almost every single time I have been observed teaching since then, I have gotten comments on the positive rapport in my classroom and/or how willing my students are to do what I ask them to. My students also frequently comment on how nice I am. I sometimes worry that this means I'm a pushover, but I'll take what I can get.

I know I'm always begging for comments, but especially here: I would love to have any extra, validating stories about failures that did not end the world and even are pretty funny at this point in time.