Category: life

the eleven-o’clock salad

lettuce.jpgIt’s just past 11:00 p.m., and I just ate a big salad. I realized that before you know it, it will be time for my next CSA pick-up, and I still had 3 heads of lettuce, plus lots of other greens, onions, and kohlrabi. You will be proud of me to know that I opted to make and eat salad rather than going right to the freezer to get out the ice cream which we bought earlier this evening. (Note that I have not yet forgotten the ice cream. Its time will come.)

The salad was good. I do like salad. Especially when it’s been tossed with the dressing in a bowl, so that the dressing is all evenly spread around. An equal distribution of wealth, as it were. (I like to eat a good helping of socialist metaphors.) And by the way: boy-oh-boy has our salad spinner been seeing a lot of action lately.

I keep feeling like I want to record more of my life, of our life. I’m not sure why, exactly. Part of it is that I like my life, and imagine that some day I’ll look back fondly on this time, and feel a bit sad if I don’t remember what my day to day life was like. My future self will think things like: “Back when I was a new mother, did I eat enough vegetables?” or “Did I get enough sleep when I was a grad student?” or “I wonder what I thought about pants when I was in my 30s?”

I keep meaning to update the Phoebe Blog more frequently. Phoebe keeps growing and changing, and well, doing things. Again, things that I feel like I’ll want to remember. My memory fades so quickly, and the days blur together. Hell, the weeks and months blur together. I just managed to post a bit to the Phoebe Blog last night, but there are gaps. It’s strange this feeling that I need to record all of it. I don’t think my parents recorded too much about me, or even my sister (the first-born). I wonder if it’s partially my packrat tendencies making me want to store things away. (The packrat in me badgers me to squirrel things away? Can I fit a rabbit into this somewhere?)

The trip plans are coming along moderately well. I have squared away an apartment in Paris. I have filled out the form from the conference organizers to get a hotel room in Saarbrucken, who seem to have reserved every last hotel room in the town so that you must go through them. (Which means you may not actually get a choice about which hotel you’re going to stay in. Which may lead to some difficulties, as we have special public transportation and crib needs due to travelling with a toddler. I sent an email. I think I’ll be known as a troublemaker to the conference organizers. Because I also questioned their request to have a letter faxed from “the head of my institution” stating that I am a student in order to get the student discount for registration, in addition to sending a scan of the student ID. They claim that such a letter should only take “2 minutes” and is standard procedure. Which is a load of hooey.) I also still have to look more into trains.

And I keep thinking it would be nice to watch a movie. It’s possibly been weeks since I watched a movie. Oh yeah, and I’m supposed to be doing work. Oh wait. Now I’m supposed to be sleeping. Crap.

And you know how I felt compelled to write more 7 lists? Well, as I anticipated, I didn’t have much time. Phoebe’s nap ended, followed by needing to get her a meal, and get her dressed, and who knows what all, resulting in a time lapse of two hours. Then we went out a shopping excursion to get a birthday present for John’s aunt. (We’re going to her 80th birthday party tomorrow. Possibly not the 80th such party that she’s had.) We didn’t get home till 8 or so, then it was time for Phoebe to get a bath and get to bed. It was 9 by the time she was in bed. (Way past her bedtime, but she seems to have her parents’ night owl proclivities.) So, no time to work on lists. But since I don’t want to throw them away, or toss them into the compost pile with the beet greens, I’ll lay them on you here.

So, here are some sevens (and sevenths) I thought about incorporating into some lists.

More than seven more seven things.

books:

  • The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. (I haven’t read it, but it seems to have a Phoebe.)
  • The Seven Dials Mystery, by Agatha Christie
  • The 7 habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey (Not that I’ve read it. I have a low tolerance for self-help books)
  • Seven Spiders Spinning, by Gregory Maguire (one of his kids’ books)
  • Seven Daughters and Seven Sons, a young adult novel by Barbara Cohen, based on an Iraqi folktale.

    • music:

  • Seven and the Ragged Tiger, an album by Duran Duran
  • “lucky number 7 passed me by,” a line from Cracker’s “Lonesome Johnny Blues”
  • “Love is the seventh wave,” a song by Sting
  • A line from “Monkey Gone to Heaven” by the Pixies:

    • If man is five (if man is five…)
    and the devil is six (and the devil is six…)
    then god is heaven (then god is heaven…)
    this monkey’s gone to heaven

  • There are also seven days in a week, seven deadly sins and seven wonders of the world. You can be in seventh heaven, you can get seven years of bad luck if you break a mirror, or you can sail the seven seas. Agent 007 is Bond. (James Bond.)

    • If you’ve got more 7s for me, toss them my way. Toss them like a salad.

    vegetables are kicking my ass

    I’m running a bit behind in the vegetable preparation and consumption. The fridge is loaded to the brim with lettuce, greens, beets, scallions and such. (There’s lots of lettuce again, but due to a ninja woodchuck who did in the lettuce seedlings a while back, there won’t be lettuce again for a bit. I swear I didn’t pay him to do it.) We got to pick our own peas (snow peas and snap peas) this week and last, which was fun.

    Tonight I cooked up 3 heads of bok choi, and made a ginger cashew sauce to go with it. The sauce came out moderately well, in spite of my scorching many of the cashews in an attempt to multitask. (Did you know that cooking involves lots of swearing and shouting? It’s long been the case with me. I love cooking, but you wouldn’t know it to hear me at work. If I had a cooking show, it would either be rated R or would have lots of bleeping. Bok fucking choi. Bleep bleep cashews.)

    One reason I’m behind in my veggies is that things have been hectic the past week or so. One major thing that’s been eating up extra time is planning this trip. We are definitely going. We bought air tickets. (The prices are outrageous, and shot up hundreds of dollars over the course of days. Effectively ending the debate over whether to get Phoebe her own seat on the plane. A lap baby she will be. Which, by the way, still costs over $300.) I’ve registered for the conference in Saarbrucken, Germany. My mother will be meeting us in Paris. Phoebe now has her passport. (Hurray!) Still to do is to square away lodgings for both Paris (we’re planning to rent an apartment) and Saarbrucken (we’ll do a hotel room). Also train reservations.

    I continue to be wiped out, sleep-deprived, and behind in many things besides the vegetables. (Commenting, for example. I have not had much chance to comment on other people’s blogs. If you’ve noticed my absence, please know that I’m still reading, though!)

    I find myself resenting the 4th of July, as it means that Phoebe will not be in daycare. (She goes there 3 days a week, and I commute 2 days a week. Wednesdays are my non-commute work-at-home day.) But with Phoebe at home, I won’t be able to get any work or much of anything else done until she’s in bed. If I am lucky, she will have a long nap, and I will have a couple of hours to either sleep or be productive. (Does sleep count as being productive?) I feel like perhaps we should do some sort of fun family thing for the 4th, and forget that I have lots of work to do. And just enjoy the extra day together. I’ll work on it, but I’m too tired to figure out something to do just now. Perhaps we will have a fun and festive Independence Day salad toss. Or maybe beet bowling. Anyone know of a craft project using kale and baby onions?

    have toddler, will travel

    We’ve headed down to the in-laws again for a few days. John’s Dad is doing pretty well, and has been in a rehabilitation place for the past few weeks. We managed to arrive there at mid-afternoon yesterday, a remarkable accomplishment. Our plan was to leave home at 10:00 a.m. (It always drives me crazy when I end a sentence with “a.m.” or “p.m.” What do I do with the punctuation? “a.m..”?). Our plan was to leave at 10 in the morning. And we were out the door by 10:59 sharp!

    I’ve been wiped out the past couple of days. Can’t stay awake at night. (And no, I’m not pregnant. Just tired.) I think my schedule and ongoing lack of sleep are catching up with me. I had several days this week that were scheduled up the wazoo. And I spent most of Wednesday (my unscheduled day) doing research, not school or job research, but research about a trip to Europe this summer. I’m planning/hoping to go to a conference in Germany at the beginning of August to present a poster that I’ve co-authored with a couple of professors I work with. John and Phoebe would go with me, but probably not help with the poster presentation. (Though Phoebe is good at pointing, and could perhaps Vanna for me.) It turns out that the venue is in a city that is not terribly close to any major international airports, so we will need to plan on a train trip as well as the flight. And it turns out that it’s just as quick to get there from Paris by a newly opened TGV line than it is to get there from Frankfurt. So, we’re thinking a holiday in Paris would be great.

    But.

    The idea of travelling with a toddler is Daunting™. (Funny how I feel too tired to deal with footnotes, and yet I just felt compelled to hunt down that ™ symbol.) I did find somebody’s post on travelling with small children that looks helpful. Though things look no less daunting. (cf. other tales of toddler travel.)

    We have to decide about whether or not to take the car seat, for one. We will be taking public transportation, so we will need to lug everything around with us onto subways and trains, and possibly busses. We need to figure out sleeping arrangements. We’ll probably need a crib in our hotel room. We may rent an apartment in Paris.

    We need to decide all of this very soon. We did apply for Phoebe’s passport, but actually getting her passport may lead to more stress, as I’ve heard that things take much, much longer these days. (There are new regulations requiring passports for travel to Canada and Mexico, leading to many, many more people needing them. Passports, that is. I’m not sure that people need Canada and Mexico in greater rates than previously.)

    the farmin’ life

    It’s week 3 of my CSA adventure. The farm had a “volunteer day” yesterday, and Phoebe and I stopped by to lend a hand with some weeding. I actually managed to pull up a few weeds and chatted a bit with the farmer and the one other volunteer who was there before Phoebe decided that she was ready to go.

    Here’s a photo of Phoebe, picking clover flowers. In the background are the farm’s fields, which have row after row of lettuce. Did I mention there’s been a lot of lettuce?

    farm_phoebe1.jpg

    This week’s pick-up was again heavy on the lettuce. We were supposed to get 5 heads of lettuce. (Yes, 5.) Plus a half pound of mixed loose salad greens. I traded in some of my lettuce for some extra kohlrabi and kale. I also got beets (we got the beets!), bok choi, chard, scallions and garlic scapes. I’m intrigued by the garlic scapes, which are shoots that grow up from the garlic bulbs.

    And I really should be in bed now, as I have to get up early and go to work tomorrow. I think I’ll pack a lunch. I’m thinking maybe a lettuce sandwich.

    entertaining tips from American Hovel Magazine

    American Hovel Magazine, April 2007 cover A few months ago, I shared the news that our home was featured on the cover of American Hovel Magazine‘s April edition, following our interview with that magazine earlier this year. Well, readers were so impressed by the chaotic state of our home that AHM has asked me to write some features myself as a guest author. Here is a draft of the article I’m working on, inspired by having recently had guests staying overnight.

    Preparing for Overnight Guests, an American Hovel Magazine feature by guest writer alejna

    When you know that guests will be staying over, it always helps to be prepared. If you have a guest room, or believe that you may have one lying around somewhere, it is a good start to find and prep this room. Here are some steps to follow to accomplish this goal.

  • Step 1: Find the guest room
    The first step is to locate and identify your own guest room. A guest room is a room in your house that may or may not have a door. Often, this room will be the place that you have found convenient to set aside items for “temporary” storage: boxes of clothing to be packed up or donated, piles of books and papers, small items of furniture or sundry toys that your child may have outgrown, odds and ends of obsolete technology, mysterious cables, miscellaneous repair or creative projects in various stages of completion, seasonal decor items given to you by your mother-in-law, holiday presents sent by various out-of-state relatives, holiday presents you never got around to mailing to various out-of-state relatives, and/or out-of-state relatives that you forgot were visiting. (Actual contents of guest rooms may vary.)
  • Step 2: find the sleeping surface
    Guest rooms typically feature some sort of bed or convertible sofa-type piece of furniture that allows your guests to sleep in relative comfort. (Many guests find that kitchen floors, front lawns or bathtubs are not terribly comfortable as sleeping arrangements. However, in a pinch, these will do. Make sure to offer a blanket or tarp.) You are likely to find that the bed (or other sleeping surface) can be found under the largest pile of items listed in Step 1.
  • Step 3: clear the bed or other sleeping surface
    Once you have identified the bed (or other sleeping surface, hereafter called simply, “the Bed”), it is time to undertake the most challenging task: “clearing” the Bed. This daunting task may take many hours, and will most likely be attempted when the arrival of your guests is imminent. Be prepared by having ready the proper tools for the job: rakes, shovels, forklifts and hard liquor. You may also find it helpful to have a phone nearby, so that you may call a sympathetic friend or relative to help ease the emotional burden of the task.

    One of the seemingly impossible aspects of “clearing” the Bed is to find places to put those items that have so long been inhabiting the Bed space. The ideal way to deal with this is to carefully sort through all the items, give away or discard those items that are no longer in use, and find appropriate permanent storage solutions for the rest. You will not have the time or energy for the ideal way, because your guests are almost here, and if you could so easily deal with things in the ideal way, you wouldn’t be reading this magazine, because you are neat and organized and you have in the past been likened to Martha Stewart. You will instead need to follow the more expedient method: move the items from the Bed to other spaces around the house that your guests will not see. Suggestions include: your own bedroom, office, car, back yard (depending on the season), neighbor’s yard, or if you have more than one bathroom, in a bathtub or shower.

  • Step 4: Prepare the Bed
    You will find that many guests will expect to find some sort of bed linens in place on the Bed, and that further, the expectation is that such linens will be clean. However, few guests will actually ask if the bed linens are fresh. Therefore, if time is short, and the sheets are not visibly soiled by any previous guests or nesting animals, you may find that a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy is helpful.¹

    • That is all for this installment of hints for preparing for overnight guests. There are other preparation considerations that may be helpful, however, I believe that your own guests are now pulling into your driveway anyhow, so you will just have to wing it this time.

    ————-

    ¹ For those guests who may have recently visited my own home: I put clean sheets on the bed. Seriously.

    loose ends

    Here I sit on my couch. Watching one of my favorite kick-ass women movies, laptop on my lap so I can jot down notes about a fight scene and look up the term “pigtails,” and eating a bowl of raw turnips.

    Isn’t that what most people do on a Sunday night?

    I’m hoping to have a post together for the blog event I mentioned yesterday. I’m also hoping to get some sleep. It’s been a rough week. Phoebe was sick most of the week, and not sleeping so well. She had to stay home from daycare on Tuesday, and some of Wednesday and Thursday. Also have a bit of a cold myself. Overall, I’m behind in both my work and my sleep. Which of course explains why I’m sitting here watching a movie and blogging at roughly eleven at night.

    Tomorrow I go pick up my second load of veggies from the farm. As might be expected, I have not quite finished the first load. However, I have not done too terribly.

    Here’s what I’ve made (prepared/cooked/eaten/served) of last monday’s crop:

  • a bunch of radishes and accompanying greens, sautéed with garlic and chives (first time eating cooked radishes. They were tasty.)
  • a head of bok choi, sautéed with sunflower seeds
  • a bunch of turnip greens, sautéed (the ones plucked off the turnips I’m now snacking on)
  • a bunch of dinosaur kale (again, sautéed)
  • a small bunch of something called Tat Soi, a dark green leafy vegetable that tasted a bit like arugula, and seems to be a relative of broccoli.
  • a salad of baby lettuce (which I did not sautée. Ha! See how creative I am?)

    • Here’s what I have left:

  • lots of flowering chives (which I’ll freeze for later)
  • a bunch of Red Russian Kale. Which is actually not red. But perhaps it is communist.
  • sitting here next to me in the bowl, two small turnips.
  • 2 and a half heads of lettuce. (I even gave one away)

    • Here are some recipes I’m considering for this week’s remaining lettuce:

  • curried lettuce stew
  • grilled marinated lettuce
  • lettuce kabobs
  • Cajun blackened lettuce
  • deep fried lettuce
  • lettuce popsicles
  • lettuce cake with whipped lettuce frosting
  • compost

    • revenge of the teeth

    Last night I posted a list of things teeth-oriented. Yes, a silly list. But I should have realized that teeth are no laughing matter. Now teeth want revenge, and they have launched a full-blown attack.

    Phoebe has been showing some signs of teething this week. Fairly minor. A tendency to drool, and bite and chew on things. Habits which she’s largely outgrown. There has been some tugging on the ears, and our 15-month check-up confirmed that there are no ear infections. So, teething it is. No big deal. Right?

    That is until last night.

    I hadn’t been prepared for an attack of “vicious canines.”

    Phoebe is a good sleeper. A phenomenal night-time sleeper. (Not so great with naps.) She rarely wakes up in the night, and when she does, she can usually get back to sleep pretty quickly. But last night, just as I was going to bed, at 1:00 a.m., Phoebe woke up screaming. The long and short of it is that she just would not settle down. Did not want to be put down. At 3:00, I finally decided to just hold her, and take her into bed with me. We slept fitfully, and she woke up at 6:00. Full of energy.

    I spent most of the morning lying on various floors as she played nearby. She’s been in a great mood except when she’s expected to sleep. We tried a morning nap. She was very tired, and went down in her crib with no argument. Relieved, I stumbled back to bed, and collapsed.

    She slept in her crib for 25 minutes.

    At this point, I threw myself on John’s mercy, who has work he needs to do today, to let me get just a little more sleep. So, happily, I am now at least partially functional.

    What scares me is that the offending teeth are not even visible yet. How long will this go on?

    unceremonious

    Lots of folks are graduating around now here in the US. From middle schools, high schools, colleges. My nephew even just graduated from high school. (No, not the one that was born in January. He’s barely in kindergarten!) All the stuff in the air about graduations has me thinking. About graduations I haven’t had.

    No, no, I’m not lamenting the fact that I’m still in school. This prolonged incarceration educational endeavor is largely by choice. And I’m making progress on the schemes for tunneling my way out.

    The graduations I’m recalling, or not recalling as the case may be, are ones from my past. Or that weren’t in my past. Here’s a weird thing I realized about myself that I hadn’t disclosed in my recent confessional of weirdness: I don’t have a high school diploma.

    However, in spite of not actually having technically “graduated” from high school, I have both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. Ha! How’s that for weirdness?

    Okay, here’s the story. My family moved around a lot when I was growing up. I actually went to 4 different high schools. The first was in Colorado, the second in Hawaii and the third in California. When I was a junior in high school, which was while we were living in California, my mother remarried. And my mother and I moved in with my new stepfather. In France.

    So, high school number 4 was in France. It was an international, bilingual school on the IB system. I was due to be a senior. The last two years of the IB (International Baccalaureate) program were actually cumulative. But starting in the last year of the program (terminal) would have had me going in a year behind in all my courses. So they put in me première, basically junior year. I had just finished 3 years of American high school, and didn’t want to wind up in high school for a total of 5 years. However, the powers that be assured me that completing my 4th year of high school at the new school would suffice for finishing my high school education, at least as far as American universities were concerned. I could get some sort of stamp on my transcript saying I’d finished 4 years of high school.

    So that’s what happened. I finished that last year of high school, and apparently got that stamp on my transcript. I never even saw the thing. But it was enough to get me admitted into the American university of my choice. (Brown, if you were wondering.)

    But there was no high school graduation. I was never a senior. All my school friends in France were just finishing their penultimate year of secondary school.

    Another 4 years went by, and I was scheduled to graduate from Brown. Except for the fact that I took a semester off along the way. (Following extreme burnout from working 3 jobs and raising 6 puppies. Another story.) So, in May of 1993, I did not graduate from college. However, this time, I went through the ceremony. (Hey, all my friends were doing it.) I was scheduled to finish in December, 1993 anyhow, and it wasn’t uncommon for folks to attend the commencement ceremony a semester ahead.

    And yes, I did finish Brown in December of ’93, as scheduled. There was some sort of ceremony that December for the midyear grads, but really it was more of a gathering in a hall. No diplomas. Because they only got awarded in May. So hey, I got to have the graduation ceremony all over again in May of ’94. And this time, I got my diploma. Well, actually, that’s not exactly true, either. What I got was a formal-looking roll of paper with a note inside saying that my actually diploma was being “engrossed” and would be sent to me in the mail. (Yes, it the paper actually did say “engrossed.”) (And yes, I did get that diploma in the mail at some point. In fact, I just found it tonight, stumbling across it while trying to find an old journal. It’s been sitting, gathering dust, on the bookshelf next to my bed for probably several years. I had no idea it was there.)

    Fast forward 10 years . I finally finished my master’s project at my current school in August of 2004, making me eligible for September graduation. I’m not even sure if they had a September ceremony. (Again, I could have “walked” in the May 2004 ceremony, but this time I opted not to. For one thing, my program doesn’t have a department, so you have to leech yourself on to some other department’s ceremony.) September came, and nothing much happened. As far as I knew, the completion of the degree had gone through: master’s project submitted, paperwork submitted, official admittance to the PhD program. But no actual evidence of a degree.

    And then at some point that fall, I checked my online transcript, and the magical words had appeared:

    DEGREE AWARDED
    Master of Arts
    Major: Applied Linguistics
    September 25, 2004

    Woohoo! Call me master, baby! But still no diploma.

    And then finally, on October 23rd, 2004, a tube appeared in my mailbox. I remember the day well, as it was the day before my wedding. (My second wedding to John.) My mother and sister were visiting. And I had gone out to walk the dog and check the mail. In my pajamas. Flannel polar bear pajamas. And I came back in with that tube. Still wearing my pajamas, I gathered my mother, my sister and my husband (who I was about to remarry), and I sang a wordless (dooooo doo doo doo doooo doo) version of “Pomp and Circumstance.”

    I opened my red cardboard tube.

    I had been awarded a master’s degree.

    all roads don’t lead to Ikea

    We had grand plans for the day: to go to Ikea and buy a kitchen table and an itty-bitty table for Phoebe. It’s a bit of a trek to get there, so that was pretty much the agenda for the day.

    We planned to leave home by 10:00 a.m., and were happy to make it out of the house around noon.

    Before leaving, I checked the directions online, and they looked pretty straightforward. We’d been there twice before, after all, so I didn’t bother to write them down. As you can guess, things were not as straightforward as I remembered. We didn’t get “lost,” exactly. We just had some difficulty finding what we expected to find. At one point, we drove down a street that looked vaguely familiar and I ever-so-briefly saw the Ikea sign poking its head up above a large building. But the end of the street came, with no sign of Ikea (or sign of the sign, for that matter). So we looped. We explored. We meandered and roamed for a bit. We marvelled at how so large a thing as an Ikea store could be so very thoroughly hidden in a rather small Massachusetts town.

    Eventually, I realized that we had a road atlas in the car, and as I attempted to get us back to the main drag, we passed a street sign (an unusual thing to see in many parts of Massachusetts) that said “Ikea Way.” We took this to be a very good sign.

    Soon after, we found our hidden prize. It was as if we found that Easter egg, albeit one the size of several city blocks. Our cheaply manufactured blue and yellow pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. This felt like accomplishment. It was as if we had completed a quest. I ask you, can one feel such a sense of accomplishment by merely following directions? Pshaw.

    (Oh, and we did get a kitchen table. And a table and 2 chairs for Phoebe that are really frickin’ cute, and that John’s already taken over for his laptop. Plus a kitchen clock. And a basket for the laundry room. Oh, and some tongs. And a huge stuffed orca, 2 rats, 4 bats, a crab, a turtle, some finger puppets, a wooden gear toy and really, we did try to show some restraint. We could at least fit all our purchases in the car at the end of the trip. Without even resorting to strapping Phoebe’s car seat to the roof of the car.)