InsomniMom

Pass the Puffs

2012-01-17T20:44:00.003-05:00

Once a winter, I get that kind of cold where I lose my voice. Not a total loss; just enough to make me speak in something between a breathy murmur (which bears no resemblance to the smoky purr of Marilyn Monroe when she sang the happy birthday song to John F. Kennedy) and a strangled squeak. My throat hurts when I talk, but that doesn't stop me because when you're a mother, when does something like a lousy cold stop you from doing ANYTHING, up to and including giving birth, hauling yourself out of the house to drive various children to various activities and baking a pan of hopefully un-coughed-upon brownies for the church chili supper.

Naturally, this is one of my family's favorite times of the year, the time when they can, in all truthfulness, say that they didn't hear me calling them twenty-five times for dinner. Or telling them to take the dogs out. Or telling them to...oh, never mind. They just love it, that's all. And they never cease talking about how delighted they are that I've been reduced to a series of eye rolls, scowls, gestures and emphatic huffing sighs. It reminds me of the Buffy episode titled "Hush," where the entire town of Sunnydale lost their voices due to the influence of the super-scary Gentlemen, and Giles was forced to communicate with the Scoobies with plastic overlays on an overhead projector.

So, like all mothers everywhere who will catch a bad cold or the flu this winter, I'm still patrolling, just like you. We're all still patrolling. I'm just thankful that I don't have to stake anything more resistant than the baking potatoes I'm getting ready to put into the oven.

Forecast: snow and wind, then more snow. With wind.

2012-01-12T20:43:00.002-05:00

I don't know who made this "AccuWeather" map, but whoever it was is my personal hero. Not only for being funny, but also for making sure my area of the country is designated as part of the group that needs to hit the liquor store. Because I found out last year when the snow lay on the ground like a big fleece blanket with a deceptive three inch layer of ice underneath, you can get through the winter without the whiskey to make a hot toddy, but why would you want to?

Maid service(Or how to make money in your spare time without ever leaving your home)

2012-01-11T16:42:00.005-05:00

Let's say I have this....friend.

My...friend....has several friends who employ people to come in and clean their homes: these people are called "cleaners." People who clean the house but also answer the telephone and the front door are "maids." People who live in residence and supervise the cleaning are "housekeepers." In this economy, the job my....friend... inadvertently fell into, much like Alice fell down that rabbit hole, was a job as a maid.

The house she currently works in, she already answered the phone and the front door bell, as well as letting the dogs in and out all day long. She also does almost all the laundry, cooks all the food, and loads and unloads the dishwasher about a hundred times a day, it seems. All in all, it keeps me her pretty busy, considering that she also has several part-time jobs, a husband and two teenage daughters.

This is how she came to be a maid, and how you may also find yourself with a calling to do as she has done.

This friend....she couldn't help but notice however much she ordered, begged, wheedled, cajoled, demanded, implored or nagged, those two teenage daughters - and lovely young ladies they are - were still inclined to leave their dirty unmentionables strung across the bathroom floor, abandon cruddy plates adorned with a half-eaten turkey sandwich and a banana peel on any available kitchen counter when the sink, and moreover, THE DISHWASHER, were sitting right there in plain view, not to mention various high-heeled shoes, schoolbooks, hoodies, volleyballs, earrings, iPods and other miscellaneous STUFF lying around everywhere until my friend was nearly distracted with the yuck of it all.

One time, she says that she left a coupon for 40-percent-off-your-purchase-of-50-dollars-or-more from Ulta Beauty on her dining room floor for three days, just to see when one of the girls would pick it up. Even though they daintily stepped over it day after day on their way from the living room to the kitchen and back again, neither girl so much as stooped over to lift the rectangular piece of paper from the floor, even though this coupon was much coveted by both daughters, who had planned to each spend $25 at Ulta and garner that whopping forty percent discount. Finally, on that third day, my friend cracked. She leaned over, picked up that coupon with trembling fingers, and took it to the kitchen wastebasket, where she defiantly tore it into tiny shreds and then flipped the switch to MASH IT MASH IT MASH IT with the rest of the trash.

She swears that not five minutes later, both girls were on her like weasels in a hen coop, demanding to know where their precious Ulta Beauty coupon was. She pressed her fingertips to her forehead, prayed a silent Hail Mary to the Blessed Mother with the plea that heaven's angels would hold her back from killing these two gifts from God standing before her with their accusatory stares and screechy voices and said, "Ladies, the coupon is gone. Yes, that's right. GONE. And do you know why? Because it laid there on the dining room floor, right where the two of you walk a hundred times every day, a bright pink and green coupon on our pale taupe carpet, and IF IT WAS THAT FRIGGING PRECIOUS, ONE OF YOU SHOULD HAVE BENT DOWN AND PICKED IT UP!"

Both girls sniffed disdainfully. "I always have to pick EVERYTHING up, " said the older girl, whose propensity for leaving a clump of soggy hair in the shower drain after each shampoo was driving her poor mother to the chardonnay as early as 5:05 p.m.

"You do not!" the younger one countered furiously. "I always have to pick everything up, EVERYTHING!" In spite of the fact that one of those "magic" bottles for feeding orange juice to baby dolls had been lying on the floor of her closet since she was seven.

My friend, that poor woman, shouldered past the two of them and went upstairs to her bedroom, where she sank into the comfy chair, that chair in which she used to nurse her sweet babies before they were ambulatory and able to scatter bright plastic pieces of Fisher-Price throughout the entire house. "Back then, it was easy," she muttered. "And then when they learned to walk, we made cleanup a game. They'd bring me the little toys and put them in the pretty willow laundry basket and we'd clap after they threw each thing in....But now, here they are, old enough to DRIVE, one of them old enough to VOTE, both of them nearly out of high school, and it's like they think their hands can no longer be used to pinch and grasp and their spines no longer curve to pick up coupons or dirty laundry or HAIR from the DRAIN.

"I feel like the maid around here, because both those stinkers know I can't stand a mess and if they leave something long enough, I'll just do it for them. But I am NOT the maid, I am the MOTHER, goshdarnit! I'd be getting PAID if I were a MAID, but I'm NOT, so...."

And then a little light bulb went on over my friend's rumpled head.

She could get paid for the little cleaning services she provided, doing it just the way a maid would: quietly, efficiently and steadily. No more shouting, no more nagging, just diligently getting the job done and then presenting her employers with a bill for services rendered. In this case, she thought, a dollar per service would be plenty. Both girls had the ability to hold onto their money more tightly than Lady Gaga holds onto a microphone, so even a meager little dollar would give them both a kick in the pants that would hopefully wake them up to the fact that piggish and slatternly behavior is rude and selfish in the family home, but even worse in adult life, when living, say, in a dorm. Or in a bachelor girl apartment with a roommate. Or with a brand new husband, who might be dismayed to find that his beautiful bride, with her sparkling eyes and sunshiny smile actually had the home management skills of a crack whore.

So that's how ~~I've~~ she's made a nice little sum of money over the past few weeks, and frankly, it looks like she's found a cash cow, because both girls just keep on leaving empty milk cartons in the fridge and pencil sharpener shavings spilled on the desk and coats draped over the newel post on the staircase. Both of them are naturally indignant at being charged for their familial misdemeanors, but my friend is adamant: either pick it up yourselves, darlings, or pay to have it picked up for you.

The house is tidy and my friend has been able to cut back on the chardonnay, and if her girls keep it up for a few more weeks, she may have enough money saved up to buy those really cute boots she saw at Macy's.

Ununderstable

2012-01-09T17:40:00.002-05:00

Today I was standing in front of the stove, grilling a hot ham and cheese sandwich for Aisling, when the smoke detector took umbrage with my method of sandwich-making and began to shriek in loud, long paroxysms of rage that made me want to grab the broom and knock it off the ceiling so I could stamp it to death.

Would you like to know why the smoke detector moved me to such extremes? It's because last Thursday, my British Literature class came over for an evening of pizza and David Copperfield, and my husband went out to Pizza Hut and fetched the pizzas, putting them in the oven upon his return because I wasn't quite finished babbling about characters and point of view and genres and - one of my favorite topics - the Timeline of British Literature. As I was nattering on and on, talking about bildungsroman and child labor and how Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, died of typhus, I started to smell something burning.

But, you know, the smoke detector wasn't going off. It was completely silent. Knowing how it gets that urge to scream its head off if a biscuit so much as turns golden-brown, I decided that I was imagining things and kept on talking.

A moment later, my eyes felt all itchy and watery, and the burny smell was stronger. "Excuse me," I said to my students, "but I think my kitchen is on fire."

I went through the swing door from the dining room and went into the kitchen, which was full of smoke. Smoke, I'd like to add, that was going completely undetected by the SMOKE DETECTOR on the ceiling.

Nervously, I yanked open the oven door and pulled out the pizza box on the lower rack which was, yes indeedy, BURNING on the bottom. I made haste with a dish towel and stifled it before it actually burst into flames, but it was darned scary. Which why I am holding a bitter grudge against the stupid smoke alarm, squealing up there above my head today over a grilled sandwich that wasn't even burning.

Which is also why, if the Machine Apocalypse that takes place in the Terminator movie franchise ever happens, I am going to be the sharpshooter in charge of going around and shooting all the smoke detectors.

Reversing the Bucket

2012-01-07T15:17:00.003-05:00

No, it isn't what you might be thinking and has nothing to do with the stomach flu my family was passing around two weeks ago. At Christmas, which is the BEST TIME EVER to be puking sick. But I digress.

I was scouting around the internets yesterday, catching up on reading at some of my favorite news sites and blogs, and it seems that the latest craze to hit the blogging world - now that the nosy, intrusive and self-indulgent meme seems to finally be over, thanks all the holy saints and angels - is the reverse bucket list, the ten things you NEVER want to do before you die.

Some of the things I read were pretty darned funny. Others weren't so much funny as they were relatable, making me shiver in sympathetic horror. "Live alone in a huge mansion with only my life-sized Victorian doll collection to comfort me," was an item on one person's list, and I can spot a person who read Stephen King's The Tommyknockers twenty-five years ago and never, ever, ever forgot about that room full of dolls: I can spot that person from a thousand yards.

The only stipulation is that the list has to include things you could actually do.

So here's my Reverse Bucket List. Do you have one you'd like to share?

Things I Never Want to Do Before I Die

1. Remove 1970s groovy gold flocked wall paper from a room with ten foot ceilings. Again.

2. Stick my hand into the back of a baby's diaper while thinking, "I wonder if she pooped?" (I found out later that it's much easier to determine this status if you just hold the baby's diapered butt in front of your face and take a deep sniff.)

3. Be on Survivor. Because being hot and being hungry are never a good combination with me, plus I'd have to participate in all of those gym-class-from-hell challenges. It's not for me to be the plucky middle-aged mother figure who bosses everyone around and gets voted out either first or second and no one can even remember her ever being there after episode three.

4. Go to a Mass where all the music is the guitar-strummed kind and where we all stand around the altar holding hands during the consecration. And where there's a liturgical dancer. My experiences with being on the viewing end of liturgical dances? Negative, every last one of them.

5. Be a liturgical dancer. Even though I do fit the demographic, which is middle-aged, lumpy, and not necessarily a great genius in the art of dance.

6. And continuing on with the performing arts thing, EVER EVER AGAIN play the piano for a friend's event, no matter how wheedling her voice, how hopeful her puppy eyes. See Item #4 from this post if you'd like to know why.

7. Eat another raw oyster. Grandad once told me, when I was about ten, that he'd give me five dollars if I'd eat a raw oyster. He spoke to me of the horseradishy deliciousness of cocktail sauce, and how oysters were just fishy enough to lend a piquant air of the seaside to the sauce. He pointed out quite reasonably that he himself was eating an appetizer of a dozen oysters on the half shell, which he considered to be a particularly delightful treat. He would, he pressed, be happy to share one with me.

I should have known that there was something behind all this urgency because he was a prankster, a ruthless cutthroat gin rummy player and a twister of fairy tales, where the witch ended up eating Hansel and signing Gretel on as her apprentice. Anyway, I put the oyster in my mouth, which was not piquant at all, but tasted more like something that had washed up on the shore at high tide last week; it immediately grew to the size of a wadded up gym sock in my mouth, and UGH, so slimy. Grandad was laughing so hard, he couldn't even make noise. I promptly went to the ladies' room and threw up, which made me throw up more, because regurgitated oyster? Looks even worse than it did before, which was pretty bad.

Grandad apologized, tried to reassure me that his motives had been as pure as the water off the beaches in Bermuda, and gave me twenty dollars. I allowed myself to be only slightly mollified.

8. Learn to like football. It would make the previous forty-something years of my life, years I have spent telling people, "Look. SHUT UP," whenever they've tried to explain the game of football to me, such a waste of time. I plan to carry on being massively bored by football - and baseball, basketball, hockey and every other sport you care to name - for the remainder of my life.

9. Become a member of a certain political party, which I won't name because I don't want to hurt any reader's feelings or tick anyone off, but my mind just doesn't work that way and I wouldn't want it to if it could.

10. Go to the Indiana State Fair and leave without visiting the horses, the goats, the pigs, the cows and most of all, the zonkey. I don't care how stinky everyone thinks the animal barns are. I don't care if the whole family heads back home without me. I don't even care, much, if I step in something icky. I don't feel like I've had the whole State Fair experience unless I've gone to see the animals and petted the zonkey and remarked on how big the hooves on the draft horses are and how fat the pigs. Some people go for the food, some people go for the midway, but I like the farm animals and I'm tired of having to apologize for that. So YEE-HAW! Wilbur, here I come!

RECIPE: Crustless Quiche Muffins

2012-01-07T09:52:00.006-05:00

This recipe for crustless quiche muffins is one I've been working on for several months, ever since the girls and I fell in love with the ones from Paradise Cafe and Bakery. What we didn't fall in love with was the enormous calorie and fat count, because the quiche muffins from Paradise, while completely cheesy and delicious, are practically the nutritional equivalent of a 6-ounce prime rib. I thought it would be nice to have a quiche muffin for breakfast that was full of protein, low in calories and fat and reasonably portable for busy mornings; also one that didn't require me to skip lunch because I'd already consumed a jillion calories.

These muffins are a good size and they're nice and dense. Eat one with a banana or an orange or even a container of yogurt and you've got a nice, sustaining breakfast that will stick with you. Or, heck, these things are so light in terms of calories and fat, you could have one for a quick snack in the afternoon when you need a jolt of energy-revving protein to carry you through the remainder of the work day and on into that dinner prep-homework-bath-and-bed-time routine.

In spite of the long ingredient list, these muffins mix up in a big hurry: It's mostly just a matter of opening packages and dumping ingredients into a mixing bowl.

CRUSTLESS QUICHE MUFFINS

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups Egg Beaters refrigerated egg
2 whole eggs, beaten
1 cup skim milk
2 cups Bisquick Heart-Smart baking mix (or the regular kind, if you'd prefer)
1 7-oz package reduced-fat sharp cheddar cheese
1 cup reduced-fat grated parmesan cheese (or, again, the regular kind, your pref)
1 1/2 cups chopped onion
1 16-oz package frozen spinach
2 teaspoons salt, or to taste (you can always use less in the recipe and add more to each portion)
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes, optional

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Thaw spinach by emptying bag into a colander and running lukewarm water over it until soaked; allow to drain while you put everything else together. In a medium mixing bowl, combine all other ingredients and stir. Squeeze out the drained spinach in the colander, pressing it to remove as much water as possible (I always use the edge of a plastic measuring cup.) Add the spinach to the egg mixture, stirring to make sure all the spinach gets un-clumped.

Take two regular muffin pans and spray them thoroughly with non-stick spray. Then spray them again. And again. Why, you ask? Because I learned from painful experience that if you don't make those muffin cups as non-stick-able as possible, you will be prying your little crustless quiches out with a chisel, leaving half of them adhering firmly to your pan.

Fill the muffin cups all the way full - they will pouf up a bit into the traditional domed muffin shape - and you will get a yield of about 21 muffins. If you fill them slightly less full, your muffins will be appreciably smaller, but you can get a full two dozen out of your quiche mixture. Really, it's whatever you prefer.

Bake muffins for 35-40 minutes, until set and a toothpick inserted in a center muffin comes out clean. Allow muffins to cool completely before removing from pan. You may need to gently go around each one with a knife to loosen them. Store in the fridge (we put ours in gallon-sized plastic bags) and reheat by microwaving for about a minute per muffin. Delicious!

Nutritional Information:
Servings: 21 muffins as prepared with lower calorie/fat ingredients
Total Calories: 136.7; Total Fat: 5.5g (Saturated: 1.3g; Polyunsatured: 0.3g; Monounsaturated: 0.6); Cholesterol: 36.1mg; Sodium: 623.6mg; Potassium: 145.5mg; Total Carbohydrates: 13.9g (Dietary Fiber: 0.5g; Sugars: 1.6g); Protein: 8.7g
Weight Watchers Points Plus: 3 per muffin

On the first day of Christmas, or Why I Have Neglected My Blog for a Month

2012-01-03T21:32:00.003-05:00

December is a busy month and a difficult time for blogging, what with all the other insane holiday crap women are called upon to do, so the next time you're wondering if the glass ceiling has been well and truly broken, look around and ask yourself: Who bought the gifts? Who wrapped them? Who planned the menu, did the shopping and cooked enough food to feed an army? Who cleaned (I noted that my last post here was the one outlining instructions on how to spiff up the house in case of an unexpected guest emergency)? Oh, I'm not saying that my husband did nothing. He's actually a great help and sexily muscled in our nine-and-a-half-foot Christmas tree into the house on his shoulder, which, if it were left to me, would have still been lashed to the top of the van. I think the problem is that, when it comes to household organization, particularly holiday household organization, the women are the quarterbacks and the men are special teams.

So you know what I did in the few weeks leading up to Christmas, and I know what you did because we were all doing the same thing, right?

But you don't know what I was doing on the actual Twenty-Fifth of December, and BOY IS IT WORTH THE TELLING.

Here's a rundown, and I hope as you read it, you will see absolutely nothing in it similar to your own merry holiday.

1. Christmas Eve - presents were all wrapped, except for the $#@% stocking presents, which I always forget to wrap until about 1:30 a.m. The house was pristine, all items for Christmas dinner were set out and ready for cooking, all systems go. Mass was at 6:30 p.m. and I even remembered to set out the Baby Jesus in both nativities.

2. Christmas Morning - Up and opening gifts at 7:00; on the road to New Castle to open gifts at Mom and Dad's at 9:15. Arrival at 10:00, Mom had brunch underway, family sat down to open presents. Merriment ensued.

3. Mom put breakfast out on the beautifully-laid dining room table. Poppy said a prayer and everyone tucked in. Two minutes later, my husband said, "I don't feel well. I think I'll go lie down."

4. Everything went to hell from there. Let me take you through the next 24 hours with my husband:

barfing feverishness saltine crackers tea with honey more puking headache and....other unmentionable agony, bathroom-related, more barfing, puking, heaving, hurling and heaving

5. On Monday morning, the poor guy was better and able to sit upright, albeit remaining as white as salt, occasionally overtaken by violent shivering.

6. On Monday afternoon, I was coming down the stairs with a basket of laundry and got to the landing, stepped down too many steps, and ended up hurtling down to the foyer floor, landing in a crumpled heap and surrounded by dirty socks and underwear.

7. It hurt.

8. A lot.

9. I ached all over until very, very early on Wednesday morning, when I awoke from an uneasy slumber -- nothing like that "long winter's nap" spoken about so blithely in Clement Moore's poem -- with the certain conviction that I was getting ready to experience

barfing feverishness saltine crackers tea with honey more puking headache and....other unmentionable agony, bathroom-related, more barfing, puking, heaving, hurling and heaving

10. Which I did, worse than my husband, and up until New Year's Eve, spent my days sitting in grey-faced languor on the couch, nursing my bruised ankle, shoulder, knee and hip and occasionally twitching.

11. Meelyn and Aisling managed to avoid the horrible stomach virus, but caught a bad cold that required gallons of orange juice, Ny-Quil and hot tea to treat.

11. On New Year's Eve, the four of us went to the Outback so that we could at least say we'd done something fun. We had a good time, but were back home by 9:00, changed into our pajamas and sat back down on the couch, me still twitching and both girls coughing, sneezing and blowing their noses. My husband said that he was still feeling kind of rocky, six days after the onset of the stomach virus.

12. I concurred.

13. We went to bed rather early, bemoaning the fact that, while our entire year has been really amazing and positive, the last week of it was so awful, we all wanted to salute it with a great, big, wet raspberry and yell "GOOD RIDDANCE!" out the front door.

So! That's what I've been doing for the last month and the last week of that month.

As I said before, I hope you experienced nothing like it.

Keep it to yourself, sonny boy

2011-12-18T12:05:00.002-05:00

My office-away-from-home is the Paradise Bakery and Cafe at Hamilton Town Center on the Noblesville/Fishers border. I can be found there several days a week, hopefully at that one four-top table with the handy plug in for my laptop, surrounded by various sorts of Shakespeare stuff -- currently Othello, Much Ado About Nothing and King Lear, but also a with a copy of Beowulf and another of The Canterbury Tales and sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't have been easier, when all was said and done, to have become a fortune-teller or a traveling hobo, both of which are occupations that strike me as being less likely to drown one in a sudden avalanche of books -- and lapping up a cup of coffee. So I'm sort of a regular and I see the same people there all the time, which isn't that surprising when it comes to the counter staff, but maybe a bit more so when it comes to the clientele, who are obviously people using the restaurant with its cozy and cheerful atmosphere as their own offices.

The two people who man the bakery counter where I order my sesame bagel are a couple of guys in their twenties who are always very polite and friendly and say, "Hi, nice to see you! How are you today?" Only the other day, one of them, the one with the glasses, made a misstep that embarrassed all three of us and reminded me of the many times when I have had to get the tire iron out of the trunk of my van to pry my foot out of my mouth.

Through the doors the other day, laden down with my giant purse, the laptop bag and a satchel full of books, happy to see that I was the only person in line, since I felt very certain that my shoulder was about to be dislocated. I staggered to the glass counter and set down the satchel at my feet with an "Ooof!" and looked up to find both men smiling at me in their how-can-I-help-you sort of way.

"Well, hello, young lady," the one with the glasses said jovially. "Sesame bagel? Cup of coffee?"

For some reason, his greeting took me aback and made me goggle at him slightly. Which I'm sure led to an attractive facial expression. It's just that I decided right then that there are times when someone my age can be addressed as "young lady," and those times, specifically, are times when I'm being spoken to by an elderly person. Because to them, I am a young lady.

But being addressed as "young lady" by a guy who obviously just graduated from high school - or more to the point, graduated from a bottle to a sippy cup -- within the past couple of years, well. It seemed cheeky and condescending, as if he was actually saying, "I am acknowledging the fact that you are two weeks older than dirt, but trying to assure you, through the medium of humor, that you look every day of your advanced years, plus a decade." And for me to reply, "I'd like a sesame bagel and a medium coffee, old gaffer," didn't have quite the same zing to it. Since, you know, Cary Grant.

It was awkward. I didn't really want it to be awkward because I don't think the young man was intentionally trying to be boorish in his behavior. But, you know, awkward nonetheless. The other guy sprang into action at the register, rang in my order and gave me my total; I handed over my debit card. The bold one with the glasses cleared his throat nervously and grabbed my bagel from the display case, turning his back to slice it and send it through the toaster. His very back seemed to be saying WhydidIsaythatWhydidIsaythatWHYDIDISAYTHAT?

"Would it help," the other young man whispered, returning my debit card to me, "if I told you that he's on a work release program from an institution for the socially inept?"

I laughed good-naturedly. "I'm sorry, I can't hear you. Because I am very, very old."

But Young Glasses wasn't done yet. "Can I carry your bags to a table for you?" he gabbled, turning around with a tray holding my toasted bagel and a mug.

I fixed him with a look, only slightly truculent. "Are you asking because you make a habit of helping ladies to their tables, or is this more a matter of you assisting the feeble octogenarians who come through the door?"

Then we all had a good chuckle and he manfully shouldered my laptop bag and satchel - I carried my purse and the tray with my bagel and coffee cup - and when he set everything down at the table I indicated, I resisted the urge to pinch his cheek and say, "Aren't you just the sweetest boy? I bet your mommy is very proud of you!"

RED ALERT! (How to make your house presentable for unexpected guests)

2011-12-04T21:31:00.003-05:00

My high-school friend Cathy had a very clever mother. Mrs. Watt designed a system for doing an inst-tidy on the house in the event of unexpected guests that she called the "red alert." If Mrs. Watt hung up the telephone right after saying, "Oh, it will just be so lovely to see all of you!" depending on the state of the household at that moment, her next words, addressed to the family were "RED ALERT!"

This was the signal for everyone to hastily drop whatever they were doing and go to whatever station in the house had been assigned to them and start cleaning like they'd just heard that Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and the Pope were coming over to discuss the defeat on communism. (Yes, this was the 1980s.) I don't remember specifically what Mrs. Watt had everyone do, but I was reminded of the red alert when I was reading a magazine article titled "How to Get Your House Ready for Guests." I won't name the magazine because I generally like it very much, but this particular article was just all kinds of bogus.

First of all, the piece laid out plans for what to do if you had two hours to prepare, one half-hour to prepare and fifteen minutes to prepare and one of the suggestion for the half-hour scenario was "Wipe down the kitchen cabinets."

Huh? So I should wipe down the kitchen cabinets to impress my guests, but ignore the skillet with cooked-on scrambled eggs soaking in the sink? If unexpected guests are coming over to my place and I've got a bare thirty minutes to prepare for their arrival, wiping down the fronts of my cabinets is about the last thing on my list, coming right before "Wax the mailbox" and "Paint the house."

There were a few other boneheaded instructions, one of them being "Change the sheets on the guest room bed." Now, listen to me. I've been keeping house since I was twenty-two years old, for five years as a single lady and twenty as a wife, and never once in all that time have I had an unanticipated overnight guest. I don't know: maybe word has gotten around about the comfort level of the mattress on that bed. But anyway, of all the overnight guests we've had, I knew about them enough in advance to change the sheets well before the two-hours-til-arrival stage. I might not wipe down the fronts of my kitchen cabinets more than a couple times a year, but I know what's what when it comes to having a freshly-sheeted bed ready for guests, and I bet you do too.

So I made my own list. Here it is:

FOR GUESTS ARRIVING IN 15 MINUTES:

If your house has that lived-in look ours invariably gets -- magazines and newspapers and books flung higgledy-piggledy on every available horizontal surface, a few dishes in the sink, crumbs on the counter, offensive globs of toothpaste clinging to the interior surface of the bathroom sinks, a light layer of dust, an empty toilet paper spindle on the holder -- here's my advice in one simple step:

1. Go to the shed out back and retrieve the can of gasoline you have stashed there - you can tell the fire chief later that it was meant for the lawn mower -- and after all family members and pets are safely out of your home, douse the downstairs in gas and set the place ablaze. When your inconsiderate guests arrive, they'll find you weeping and wringing your hands on the sidewalk in front of your residence, and be forced to take you to the Olive Garden for a sympathy meal. Because we all know that, unless your family consists of fourteen Navy Seals, there's no way the place is going to be presentable to guests who have the temerity to give you only fifteen minutes' notice of their arrival.

You can sort everything out with your insurance agent later, at a time when you're expecting no company.

FOR GUESTS ARRIVING IN HALF AN HOUR:

1. Grab a laundry basket and tear through the house, picking up clutter and tossing it in. Don't forget your desk. Put the laundry basket in the laundry room and SHUT THE DOOR FIRMLY. Put a gun in the waistband of your pants at the small of your back so that you can sweetly threaten to shoot any non-immediate family member who tries to go in there. Dead guests tell no tales.

Dirty dishes in the sink? My advice is to obtain RIGHT NOW one of those Rubbermaid plastic dishpans. Use it to stack dirty dishes in. Carry it to the laundry room, put it on the washer or wherever. If you want to, cover it up with a dish towel. Shut the laundry room door.

2. Grab the duster - I have ones made of that lamb fluff because I think they work the best - and give it a spritz with Endust, which is a miracle product equaled only by the Swiffer line of housekeeping products. At a brisk pace, go through the downstairs and run that duster over all tables, the fireplace mantel, the piano, the bookshelves.

3. Light some scented candles. Because that's what they're for, after all: to remove your funky family smell. Did you think they were designed to create a homey ambiance in your home? Well, that too, but trust me: Yankee can cover up a multitude of stinkiness.

4. Fluff up the sofa cushions and throw pillows. Either neatly re-fold any sloppy-looking throw blankets or take them back to the laundry room and dump them in the basket.

5. Go to the classical music channel on your cable and turn on something erudite yet soothing. It will make you seem cultured and unflappable. Who would ever dream that the same woman who has Mozart or Debussy playing ebulliently through the speakers is the same woman who, mere moments before, was galloping around her house shrieking, "PICK UP THOSE SHOES RIGHT NOW OR YOU ARE DEAD!"

6. Go to the guest bathroom. Put out a fresh hand towel. Empty the wastebasket. Get that container of disinfectant wipes out and wipe down the toilet and the sink. Get out a Windex wipe and go over the mirror, any under-glass artwork on the walls and the faucets. The back of the toilet tank is a dust-magnet: wipe it down too. Note that when you have to do something fast, those containers of wipes are a fabulous thing to have on hand. Got a nice candle for the bathroom? Light it.

7. If you can manage it, run the vacuum in the living room and entry way if you have carpet. If you have "hardwoods," as the House Hunters so often say, get out your Swiffer dust mop, attach one of those cling-sheet thingies to it and go over the floors fast.

8. Don't forget yourself. Take a look at your hair, your top, the state of your makeup. Do whatever you can do as quickly as you can do it.

9. Because it bears repeating: DO NOT LET ANYONE IN THE LAUNDRY ROOM.

Naturally, all this will go faster if you have family members to pitch in and help, but I have proved that these things can be accomplished by one woman in one half hour, and I even managed to look moderately sane when the doorbell rang.

FOR GUESTS ARRIVING IN AN HOUR:

1. Do everything on the above list, except at a slightly slower pace.

2. If you haven't made your bed, go make it. Unless your bedroom is upstairs, in which case, keep everyone on the first floor.

3. Here's a new thing I just learned: Keep some of these cute little hors d'oeuvres from Nancy's on hand in the freezer. They are delish and so easy: Just pop them on a baking sheet and put them in the oven. I try to have a couple of bottles of white wine available ( always Barefoot, always chardonnay or Moscato ) for my drinking friends and some two-liter bottles of Sprite and Sprite Zero for the teetotalers. That always seems a little classier than plunking a can of Coke down on a coaster beside a visitor. You will look like some kind of Martha Stewart whiz-kid, and it won't be any trouble at all.

4. Still don't let anyone in that laundry room. Keep that gun ready.

Why I have a splitting headache

2011-12-04T06:02:00.003-05:00

I woke up in the middle of the night last night and couldn't go back to sleep because that's just what I do, and a maddening thing it is. Getting up in the small hours does afford me the opportunity to see some really quality television programming -- who doesn't enjoy a gripping infomercial touting the many benefits of wearing that new permutation (emphasis on the mutation) of the Snuggie, the Forever Lazy. The primo advantage of wearing the Forever Lazy, a garment which appears to have been manufactured by Satan's minions in the lower realms of hell, is that it features a drop seat. To, you know, allow you to stay warm and cozy and un-pee-soaked. This attribute is spoken of in glowing terms in that commercial I linked to above. Lucky us!

That commercial itself is freakish and awkward and only funny if you can quickly put yourself in an ironic frame of mind. The most awful scene, in my jaded view, is the one where the three couples are having a tailgate party, drinking beers and passing around the snacks, every last one of them attired in the Forever Lazy. I just have to say right here that if my husband ever made a triumphant appearance from the front seat of our van dressed in one of these....things....my first question wouldn't be "Who's lookin' awesome?" but "I wonder if the Forever Lazy is flame retardant?" But not to worry. My husband wouldn't wear one of those things, even if it came in the combined colors of Notre Dame, the Bengals and the Reds.

The second as-seen-on-TV item I saw wasn't clothing-related, thank the holy saints and angels, but instead a piece of jewelry. It is called the Titanic Coal Necklace, and the commercial made me goggle at the television screen in horror, all my irony leaking out of my toes and into my furry slippers.

"Commemorate the legacy of Titanic's tragic voyage with the 100th Anniversary Collector's Edition Necklace," the ad burbles. I sat there numbly thinking, Legacy? You mean the legacy of all those people drowning and/or freezing in the North Atlantic? The legacy where there weren't enough lifeboats, so the people in steerage were locked in to face their doom? Fun! I'd like four! Where's the phone number and my credit card!

So this necklace is apparently crafted out of actual coal retrieved from the murky ocean floor, encased in "ocean blue glass." "When you wear the 100th Anniversary Collection Necklace, you're preserving and commemorating the memory of Titanic." Scrumptious!

The fact that this necklace is made of that ocean-blue glass makes me very suspicious that the makers, the R.M.S. Titanic Inc. have been curled up in front of the television with some popcorn and a box of tissues, undoubtedly frocked out in their Forever Lazies, watching that execrable movie starring Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet as the passionate and soggy lovers, instead of reading the real history of the ship. That movie featured a huge, heart-shaped sapphire and diamond necklace that Kate's abusive fiance was going to give her as a wedding gift and Jack, Leonardo's character, drew an erotic sketch of a saucy Rose (Winslet), reclining on a chaise and wearing nothing but that piece of jewelry, her Forever Lazy lying crumpled on the floor at Jack's feet. It was fiction. FICTION.

All this brings me to my weary question, my thought processes addled by lack of sleep: Why would anyone buy a Forever Lazy and would that person actually use that back flap? And why would anyone want to wear a necklace commemorating an underwater mausoleum?

These are the existential things I ask myself in the middle of the night, bringing on an ennui that can only be cured by breakfast at Bob Evans.

How was that again?

2011-11-29T13:10:00.002-05:00

I was driving Aisling to her piano lesson today and she spent most of the twenty minute ride telling me about a boy she likes and bewailing the fact that the males of the species are just so difficult to understand.

"Doesn't it make you feel so lucky that you're old and have been married for a million years so that you don't have to worry about this stuff anymore?" she asked me with great seriousness.

I turned my head to give her a long, appraising look. "You might want to re-phrase that, dear."

She sat and thought for a moment, her brow furrowed. "You mean 'married for a thousand years'?" she asked.

12 things I always buy at Dollar Tree

2011-11-22T16:01:00.003-05:00

Dollar Tree is, like, one of my favorite stores ever. Barnes & Noble is a strong contender; Ulta Beauty is definitely in the running. I deeply enjoy Hobby Lobby and Bed, Bath and Beyond. And I can always find time to go in Kohl's or Macy's. But Dollar Tree has a different vibe from any of those other places. It is homey, low-market (well, obviously, since everything costs a dollar), and the place where I will ONLY buy a number of commonly used household items, as follows:

1. Dish towels - If it's your thing, you can buy dish towels at Dollar Tree that are printed with wine bottles or latte cups or Santa: those things are at Dollar Tree in abundance. But they also have a large selection of neutral cotton dish towels in blues, greens and taupes that will go with anyone's kitchen and I just dare you to prove that you didn't spend $5 per towel on them at Williams-Sonoma. The towels do the job you bought them to do, and the moment they start looking ugly, you can either toss them in the wastebasket or delegate them to dusting duty.

2. Tea lights - We seem to have a number of ornamental candle-y arrangements around the place that require tea lights, which are those teeny candles that come in their own little aluminum holder. I find these little candles to be much more easy to deal with than votive candles, which, while bigger, have that annoying habit of leaking wax all over, say, the china cabinet in the dining room or the fireplace mantel. At Dollar Tree, you can get a plastic bag of sixteen tea lights for $1, each of which burns for about 2-3 hours. A total steal, especially when you compare that price to Hobby Lobby's, which is significantly more.

3. Tooth flossers - In this house, none of us like just plain old dental floss. We like those plastic doohickeys with the little piece of floss stretched on them. I don't want to get into a big (gross) thing about how all of us enjoy sparkling dental health due to the daily flossing our pearly teeth receive, but I will tell you that you can get a big bag of these handy flossers for $1 at the Dollar Tree. Compare that to the $2.89 you'd be spending on these very same things at Kroger, and even a math-impaired dork like me can figure out that you can get twice the flossing power at your friendly neighborhood DT.

4. Gift bags and tissue paper - Okay, some of the gift bags are ugly. But not all of them are. In fact, there are a good many cute ones available for any holiday you'd care to name. Well, except maybe ones like Arbor Day. And Columbus Day; I don't recall seeing any gift bags printed with the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria last month. But, okay: Christmas, birthdays, weddings, graduations, Easter and Valentine's Day, the Dollar Tree has them. Plus, they have a wide assortment of tissue paper, a really generous amount, and you can even buy brights and pastels along with the typical white. You will never be able to spend $4.95 on a gift bag from Wal-Mart again.

5. Movie candy - Going to the cinema? Need Milk Duds, Junior Mints, Charleston Chews, Raisinets, Starbursts, M&Ms, Goobers, Mike & Ikes, Laffy Taffy, Gummi Bears or any of a dozen other candies you can find behind the glass at the Loew's concession stand? Go to the Dollar Tree before your show and stuff your purse and pockets with $1 candy to avoid spending $5 per box on the very same candy. That'll leave you enough money left over to buy some popcorn, which the Dollar Tree also sells, but only in un-popped form. The ushers will give you the stink eye if you try to find an outlet to plug in a microwave.

6. Basic OTC medicines - Pain killers like ibuprofen, acetaminophen and plain ol' aspirin can be found at the Dollar Tree, along with their store brand of meds like cold tablets, decongestants, cough syrup, anti-diarrheal medication, allergy tablets, triple anti-biotic ointment, you name it. I keep a first aid kit in my car stocked with items from the Dollar Tree, as well as the medicine cabinets in the house. I also use Dollar Tree medications to stock a little kit for my husband to keep in his desk at work. You can also buy stick-on bandages, peroxide, isopropyl alcohol and other little items of that nature.

7. Little Debbie snack cakes - My husband has a terrible weakness for Little Debbie cakes, a fondness that is not shared by anyone else in our home except for the dogs. Dollar Tree has a wide selection of snack cakes at $1 per box, all the regular kinds: Sonic Brownies, Swiss Rolls, Oatmeal Pies, Zebra Cakes, Fancy Cakes, Honey Buns, Fudge Rounds and Nutty Bars are yours for the purchasing. They even have seasonal cakes like Christmas trees and those cute (but inedible) little heart-shaped ones for Valentine's Day. After paying $1 a box, I can't bring myself to spend the $1.89-$2.09 per box elsewhere. And no, these aren't old, stale, nasty cakes. They're just as fresh as the ones you'd buy at the grocery, just like the candy.

8. Paper product staples - Paper napkins, paper plates, paper towels, tissues, coffee filters and, if you're in a pinch, toilet paper. Just your basic white stuff, but it works great and it's cheap.

9. Party balloons - Dollar Tree has a big selection of both Mylar and latex balloons for a number of celebrations. Some of their balloons are pre-filled with helium, but if you want something special, a clerk will fill them for you, free. That'll make you think twice before going to Balloons, Etc. and paying $1.50-$3.00 per balloon. Dollar Tree also has a bunch of those cute little balloon weights to hold down your bouquet and keep it from taking off for the moon.

10. Wine glasses - I have to admit, my false pride makes it a bit hard to say, "Yes, I buy all my wine glasses at the Dollar Tree," but that's only because I'm an awful snob and need to be brought down a peg or two. But. But, but, but. Dollar Tree's wine glasses are virtually indistinguishable from a wine glass bought anywhere else, and I have to say that the time I've spent serving wine to my guests, I've never once had one smash their glass to the floor and say, "That does it! I am never coming here again and drinking your cheap wine out of your cheap glasses." So I buy the glasses and they're pretty and they're big -- *hiccup!* -- and if you serve enough wine and some nice little crackers with some cheese and olives and a bowl of smoked almonds, who the heck is going to care where the wine glass came from? All that matters is that it stays filled, right?

11. Disposable cooking containers - You know how nice it is to take food to people, right? A lasagna, a pie or cake, some cookies on a platter, a loaf of banana bread - gifts like that are always welcome for hostesses or the ailing or whoever you know who needs some home cooking. But I don't have to tell you what a pain it is for the recipient to make sure you get your Pyrex baking dish back, right? Especially if the person you're taking food to is a new mother or a post-op patient: those folks don't have the time to wash your casserole dish or your platter and make sure it's returned to you. So go to the Dollar Tree and spend one hundred pennies on a disposable aluminum baking pan and don't even think of going to the grocery store and spending FIVE DOLLARS -- no, I am not kidding -- on the very same pan. The only difference is that some of the grocery store aluminum-ware come with those "lifter" contraptions that don't really work anyway, so why bother? The giftee will be so happy to not have to wash and return your container, and you won't have to spend months afterwards thinking to yourself, I know I have a nine-inch Anchor pie plate around here somewhere before remembering that you used it to take an apple pie to your child's piano teacher. True story.

12. Christmas cookie tins - Speaking of containers, if you are a Christmas-cookie-baker, you can find adorable little festive tins in about three or four different sizes at the Dollar Tree. Line them with some of that above-mentioned tissue paper and you've got the sweetest and cheapest little vehicle ever for gifting someone with your homemade goodies. We stock up every year.

Signs that the Apocalypse is Upon Us

2011-11-21T18:15:00.006-05:00

Today I was at the laundromat washing the duvet from our bed and an absolutely riveting episode of Matlock was playing at high volume on every single one of the flat-screen televisions hanging over the washing machines.

Matlock is one of those television shows that, to me, is so incredibly boring, I can feel myself dying a little each and every second it is being broadcast in my presence, but I suddenly snapped to attention when a commercial break shifted us out of whatever hell dimension Andy Griffith and his band of do-gooder cronies inhabit when I heard the unmistakeable opening guitar riff of AC/DC's "Back in Black." This is a song that never fails to make me smile, and I'm often overwhelmed with the urge to bust out some major air guitar. Which I didn't do. Because, dignity? I don't have much, but the little bit I have left to me, I cling to like frozen pizza remnants cling to an oven rack.

So I'm smiling, bobbing my head and mentally singing along with the lyrics, when all of a sudden I realize that I'm watching a FREAKING WAL-MART COMMERCIAL advertising their upcoming after-Thanksgiving Black Friday sales.

I seriously wanted to just fall to the floor and scream "NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!" Lead singer Brian Johnson has nothing on me when it comes to anguished howling.

AC/DC. And flipping WAL-MART! Can you believe it?

I know. Me either.

Because I'm weak

2011-11-15T15:55:00.002-05:00

I don't think it speaks well for my character that I blow right past the dry cleaning establishment that's four blocks from my house, but where you have to park in their lot and haul your sweaters and your dressy wool coat and your husband's autumn sport coat, while on my way to a rival dry cleaning establishment that has a drive-thru window. Where, you know, everything can just be bundled through the hatch while sitting in the comfort of your car and listening to the radio.

The Creature from the Madge Lagoon

2011-11-11T21:52:00.002-05:00

You just knew it wasn't all over with Madge, didn't you?

I scared her off the other day with my Teacher Look, but she must have been feeling under the weather, not quite her usual hideous self. Maybe she had a sniffle, a headache, or a sudden smiting with fire and brimstone from above. Who knows? Anyway, we had another encounter in the pool today and the old bat was in rare form.

So I was in the pool, naturally, doing my usual routine. I'd been there for about twenty-five minutes and was deep into cardio and feeling good, which was, incidentally, a feeling that was going to be leaving me shortly.

Madge came in - she's recognizable because she always comes in wearing a yellow bathrobe with a duck on the back - and I didn't worry about her because there were three open lanes. I was in my usual "step lane," the lane I always use because the lap swimmers don't like to use it: the set of steps that the handicapped use to get into the pool descends into the lane and shortens it by about six feet. So imagine my surprise when Madge came down the steps into the pool and hollered at me, "I'm swimming in this lane now, so MOVE."

The aquatics director happened to be walking by on the pool deck just about then and her head whipped around, her mouth and eyes open in astonishment. Me, I wasn't really much surprised. So I was ready for her.

I looked her square in the eye. "Can you say 'please'?" I asked with a tight smile.

"No," she said shortly. "This is lap swim time and you're not swimming laps, so move."

"I'm not moving because you are so incredibly rude. You can't come in here and demand that people move," I said determinedly. Because, listen: I don't want to start things with people. I don't. I'm not that kind of person. However, I'm no stranger to the fact that some people don't respond to either niceness or reason, which leaves standing up for yourself in a dignified yet rock-solid manner. I'd never scream curse words at anyone, especially an ancient old lady who looks like a manatee. But I'll be squizzled if I'm going to let some pushy old harridan order me around like she's Catherine-the-Freakin-Great, either.

The aquatic director spoke up: "Madge, this is not just lap swim time. This is lap swim and water jog time and you can't tell people to move."

"THIS HAS ALWAYS BEEN LAP SWIM TIME," Madge trumpeted, whirling about in the water like a hippopotamus preparing to charge.

"Well, it isn't anymore," said the director, frowning and putting her hands on her hips.

"I'VE BEEN SWIMMING HERE FOR SEVEN YEARS AND I AM SWIMMING IN THIS LANE," Madge shouted.

I drew a deep breath and looked her straight in the eye, feeling like I was getting ready to draw my revolver to fire the first shot at the OK corral. "No, you're not, you big bully."

Madge recoiled in shock. "You," she spluttered, "are MEAN." Which seemed a bit of the pot calling the kettle dirty bottom, but Madge is obviously one of those old folks who is more than willing to use her advanced age into manipulating people into doing her bidding.

"MADGE," bellowed the aquatics director, looking like she was fixin' to jump into the pool and drag Madge out by her hair, "either move to another lane or GET OUT OF THE POOL."

"You're not really swimming," Madge said bitterly, looking at me hatefully. "What you're doing doesn't count." (Like that floating-on-the-back and using her hands as paddles maneuver she does is equal to a 500 meter freestyle at the Olympic trials.)

"Maybe not," I said evenly. "But whatever it is or isn't, I'm doing it in this lane."

Because Wonder Woman is for realz, and she is me

2011-11-08T20:36:00.004-05:00

Today I got home from Fishers at ten minutes 'til noon. I had exactly one hour before I had to be in yoga class at the YMCA, making my body bend and stretch in ways it doesn't necessarily want to. Unless, of course, I'm stretching to remove a bag of Hershey's Kisses from the top shelf of the cabinet where I hid them from myself last week, and then drop them on the floor, necessitating a bend-over to pick them up. Wait. Where was I?

Okay, anyway, I had an hour. And in that hour, I changed my clothes, ate some lunch, fussed at Aisling for leaving her crap lying around all over the house, made a meatloaf, stirred up some honey-oatmeal dough for the bread machine to bake, took a load of clean towels out of the washer and put them in the dryer, started a second load of towels in the washer, collected a stack of library books that are coming due, packed up my gym back and hopped into the van at 12:58 to make the six-block drive to the Y. Add to all that the fact that I'd put in a good, solid two hours of prep work for the Brit Lit final I am administering to a happy group of students on Thursday, and I'd say, "So who do you know who is a busy little Amazon and has two thumbs?"

The answer is "Me!"

And you were supposed to picture me pointing at myself with my thumbs.

Oh, never mind.

Reprise and Reprisals: Madge-at-the-swimming-pool

2011-11-07T13:19:00.002-05:00

I'm kind of proud of that title. I flatter myself that it sounds like something Jane Austen might have come up with. Er, something with which Jane Austen might have come up. Up with something Jane Austen might have come?

Shut up.

Anyhoo, Madge, the elderly woman I encountered at the YMCA pool a few weeks ago, the one who told me, obnoxiously, that she was going to swim in my lane? I met her again today in the clear, chlorinated waters of the shallow end. All the lanes were in use by lap-swimmers; I myself was moving into my fortieth minute of high-cardio aqua aerobics and was feeling particularly sassy.

So when Madge came down the steps into the pool, she didn't look in my direction. But she did start moving toward me with a purposeful stride and it was pretty obvious that she was going to come up to me and attempt to commandeer my lane in her imperious way. I was all, like, grimly, "Hells to the no!" and was ready to square off with her, if I needed to. Because remember, I am both a mother and a teacher, which means that I am possibly one of the bossiest people alive, except for maybe Hugo Chavez. And one of the mores of a peaceful and prosperous planet is that people need to learn to wait their turns. Old or young, poor or wealthy, people need to stop being so freaking pushy and acting like the axis of the world runs through the middle of their ridiculous heads. For heaven's sake, just BE POLITE.

So I left her approach me, and when she got within six feet, I turned the ol' laser eye on her, that look which clearly says Do Not Frigging Mess With Me. It's not so much an entire facial expression as it is a dangerous glint in the eye, that same one Mel Gibson had in the Franco Zeffirelli-directed Hamlet, when he put some manners on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. It's the same look I give to whisperers, note-passers, eye-rollers and sigh-heavers. And it works.

Madge stopped short and looked around, nonplussed, probably searching for someone else to persecute. Seeing that there was no option, she turned and went back to the steps, climbing out to sit on the bench, just like everyone else does when they're waiting for a lane to open. And while her head was turned away, the lifeguard caught my eye across the splashing of four swimmers and gave me a double thumbs-up.

Victory!

Lies your friends will tell you

2011-11-06T19:40:00.003-05:00

I have a confession to make.

I have been known to speak in encouraging tones of bright confidence to my friends who have small chirren, telling them how someday, the little buggers will sleep past the crack of dawn; indeed, they'll sleep so long, you won't be required to feed them either breakfast or lunch. They'll just stagger, grumbling, down to the kitchen in flannel pajama bottoms and big, lumpy sweatshirts and raid the cupboards and the fridge, eating up several key ingredients you bought to use in making various recipes through the week.

I've also told my friends, the mothers of young kids and desperate for sleep and the desire to pee without an audience, that things are just so much easier when all the little ones are all out of diapers and able to pour themselves a drink without flooding the floor in a sticky sea of cran-apple juice.

Oh, these things are true, they really are. But I've been shamefully negligent in sharing the other side of the story, which is that somehow, you'll find you're busier with your teenagers than you ever were with your babies. Looking back on it, I fondly recall the days I spent at home with Meelyn-the-toddler and Aisling-the-infant. I was babysitting back then for my longtime friend Beth's toddler, Allison, and another little girl as well, the daughter of one of my brother's high school friends. The five of us were a jolly little fivesome: we finger-painted and sang songs along with the Raffi cassettes and read stories (especially Madeline stories) and swung on the swings; I cooked carefully balanced lunches and set up a little Montessori preschool in our playroom. It was utterly lovely, all four of them in diapers at one point, and everyone went down for a nap at precisely 12:30. They were all champion sleepers and I got a blessed two hours to myself every single day.

When I think about "bad days" back then, the only thing I can remember with eye-bugging clarity is the time when I found a crate of eighty-five library books in the trunk of my car, books I'd meant to return, every single one of them overdue by two weeks. The money I paid for that fine financed the complete renovation of the New Castle-Henry County Public Library, including furniture and computers.

But now we're at these days, the days when Meelyn and Aisling can pretty much fend for themselves in the closet, the bathroom and the kitchen - although Aisling frequently claims that she can't boil water and needs me to make her a grilled cheese sandwich immediately, if not sooner. But somehow, we're busier. Both girls have jobs; I have several part-time teaching jobs. My husband has a different job that is thankfully closer to home and demands less hours of him. But it's still retail and there is still a lot of time involved. We're busy, busier than we've been before, yet somehow clutching every moment to us as precious as we get ready to set our little chicks free from the comfortable and comforting nest.

All this is to say that there are reasons why I haven't updated my blog in almost three weeks.

It wouldn't be because I'm, like, lazy or anything. Or playing a really addictive online backgammon. No, no, nothing to do with anything like that.

What's that you're cooking?

2011-10-18T16:13:00.002-05:00

When I find recipes I like on the internet, I generally scrawl them down on a piece of scrap paper, using whatever writing tool comes to hand: an ink pen, a stubby pencil, a highlighter marker. The other day, I was looking for a recipe for a potato crust (using instant potato flakes) for the tilapia filets we're having for dinner tonight, and I scribbled down this list on a Post-It, using a purple highlighter:

1/2 cup flour

1 egg, beaten

1 cup pot flakes

seasonings

I was going over that recipe just now to get ready to do some cooking when I gave it a second glance and realized that, for anyone who doesn't know what a strait-laced little goody-two-shoes I am, that "1 cup pot flakes" might seem a bit, I don't know, naughty.

And expensive.

Respect thy elders, and I mean NOW

2011-10-17T10:41:00.005-05:00

I swim five or six days a week at our local YMCA, appearing poolside in bathing suit and flip flops, toting a towel, a water bottle and some four pound Styrofoam water weights, searching for an open lane. I get there anywhere between six o'clock in the morning and six o'clock in the evening, depending on the day. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are the busiest days, the ones in which the hard-core lap swimmers come and shame me with their flip turns and their butterflies and, apparently, their fully functioning gills.

I combine my laps with water aerobics because there's just no way I can swim laps for an entire hour like some of them do. Because the pool schedule designates the hours I'm there as LAP SWIM, I made sure to check with the aquatics director before just blithely taking up an entire lane so that I can occupy one small part of it with my Aquacise; I don't want to annoy anyone who comes in to swim laps, being one of those people who is hopeful of getting along nicely with others, although sometimes I wonder why I bother.

Today, for instance. Today, I got to the pool at 7:30, which is usually a good time to find an open lane. Unfortunately, every lane was full -- and this pool is enormous -- and some of the lanes had two swimmers. On days like this, there's nothing to do but just take a seat on the bench outside the ladies' locker room door and wait. Which I did. Patiently. Although I have to admit, I wish the YMCA, which has wi-fi, would set up some desks so that people could get some work done while they're waiting. I found myself thinking longingly of my laptop and all I could be getting accomplished instead of staring alternately at the clock and the pool, back and forth, again and again.

It took about fifteen minutes for one of the lanes to open. The lifeguard, who'd come over to sit beside me and chat, said, "Looks like you can go ahead and jump on in. Have a good workout!" The man who was climbing out gave me a nod and said, "Good morning! Feels great in there!" and I swam my first couple of laps with a light heart and a feeling of goodwill for everyone, embarking on my aerobics program with vigor about fifteen minutes later.

Thirty minutes later, I was still flailing away like a little trooper, having moved over to what we all call the "step lane," which, quite simply, is the lane that is shorter than the others because of the set of steps with two handrails that descends into the water to a distance of about four feet from the wall. The lap swimmers don't like to swim in that lane, obviously because it's painful to glide headlong into a set of steps. That kind of thing can really mess with your stroke. I use that lane a lot and have grown to feel that it's my special place in the pool, not only right there by those steps (which I need to get in and out of the pool due to my handicap) but also in easy view of both clocks, the one that marks the hours, and the one that marks the seconds.

So I'm doing my thing, right? And I've been there doing it for about forty-five minutes, having a pretty good workout. Heart rate up, burning fat, taking in air IN through my nose and OUT through my mouth and moving that water, when....

...what? What?

Ladies were starting to gather in the water at the other side of the pool for the nine o'clock water aerobics class and both dedicated lap lanes still had swimmers in them, so there were people around. But out of nowhere, someone's finger tapped me on the shoulder, and not in that "Hey, hi! Remember me from the bank/grocery/post office?" kind of way. It was more of a stabby kind of thing. Startled, I turned my head as I was jogging and saw an elderly lady standing there, far enough away that I wasn't going to nail her with an elbow, but still pretty darned close, considering we had an entire giant pool at our disposal.

I gave her an inquiring look, bemused at the fact that she was scowling at me under her white swim cap like she'd just found out I was a secret pool-pee-er.

"I'M GOING TO SWIM HERE NOW," she shouted at me, indicating the lane I was exercising in.

"Oh?" I replied politely, bringing my jog down to a light bounce.

"THERE AREN'T ANY OTHER LANES OPEN," she trumpeted.

"This lane isn't open," I pointed out.

"WELL, I HAVE TO HAVE SOMEPLACE TO SWIM," she yelled and grimly began to paddle toward the deep end, doing some kind of weird back stroke that involved using her hands like flippers. She lifted her head out of the water and gave me one last glare before making a "Hmmmph!" sound and putting her head defiantly back in the water. She looked like a great big old grouchy manatee.

So what was I supposed to do? She was an elderly lady, and I was brought up to respect my elders, to treat them with courtesy and gentleness, not to shout, "BRING IT ON, MAMAW!" and hold them under water. I mean, I could do that because I was at least thirty years younger than her, plus I was armed with those Styrofoam weights and I could have clocked her right in the side of her old grey head. But I didn't.

I did, however, do the next best thing: I ratted her out to the lifeguard. So ha, ha, HA.

"Oh, that's Madge," sighed Tara, the guard. "She's nasty like that to everyone. Just ignore her."

So we'll see how that goes, won't we? I seriously do not want to start anything with anyone, particularly an elderly woman. On the other hand, I don't think that either the elderly or the very young should be encouraged in their bad behavior because no one is brave enough to confront them. Like the three-year-old whom I observed throwing a huge fit in a restaurant the other day while his hapless mother dithered around saying, "Brandon, stop that. Stop that, honey! Get up off that dirty floor, sweetie, and Mommy will give you a piece of gum," I don't think Madge should be allowed to bully her way into other people's swimming lanes because people, namely me, will allow themselves to be run off from the lane they had to wait fifteen minutes to claim.

It remains to be seen if Madge will allow herself to be ignored.

Menu Plan Monday

2011-10-10T07:38:00.005-05:00

I usually write my menu plan for the week on a piece of paper, a hard copy, menu on one side, grocery list on the other. I don't have any kind of fancy plan for either side; if it's a good week, I'll write things down in the order they appear on the shelves at the supermarket as we follow our typical path through the aisles. On bad weeks, I lose the list, either before or after I've done the shopping. Losing it before the groceries have been bought is by far the worst, because then I have no clue what I'm supposed to be shopping for. I may have a vague memory of someone's telling me we need more dental floss. Unfortunately, dental floss is not an ingredient in any of the foods I make, although I suppose you could use it to truss up a chicken for roasting. But if I forget to buy the chicken, where are we then? I'll tell you where we are: We're going through the stack of take-out menus we keep on the side of the fridge, fastened there by a number of magnets. And we argue endlessly over what we want. Pizza? Chinese? Italian? Burgers? Nobody agrees with anyone else and my husband shoots me narrow-eyed looks and mumbles things about "grocery money" and "why bother."

So I try to enter the grocery list into the phone app called Catch, and that would probably work better if I didn't either have to keep expanding the text to make it big enough to read, or taking off and putting on my glasses. Annoying!

By the time I get around to posting my menu plan, I may or may not have a kitchen full of groceries, and if I do, I may or may not have any idea what dishes the various foods are supposed to be assembled into, if you see what I mean.

Happily, this was not one of those weeks, but for all I know, next week might be.
Menu Plan for the Week of October 10, 2011

Monday - Sloppy Joes and potato puffs, at my husband's request

Tuesday - Layered Mexican Casserole, courtesy of my friends Todd and Cecile. Cecile found this recipe on the Weight Watchers site and she and Todd made it and loved it. Todd, knowing that I like t0 try new recipes, sent it to me on Facebook. I made it tonight (because I am actually typing this on Tuesday, not Monday, because I'm a big cheater) and it was fabulous, one of those recipes that makes you say, "This is diet food?"

Wednesday - Italian Wedding Soup and homemade bread

Thursday - Jalapeno cheeseburgers and pan-roasted potatoes

Friday - Meatloaf, mashed potatoes, some kind of veg and cherry cobbler

Lazy Sundays

2011-10-09T16:33:00.002-05:00

The best times of the year for Lazy Sundays are in the autumn and the winter. In the spring, you're so sick of the cold and snow - at least you are if you live where I live, and if you live somewhere that has summer-like weather all year 'round, just hush up because no one likes a bragger - that you're itching to get outdoors and just roll around on your back in the grass like a horse. In the summer, it seems like there's always something going on, even if it's something as simple as getting up off the couch to make the hamburger patties and set the pot of water on the stove to boil for the sweet corn.

But in the autumn...and the winter...things are delightfully different, aren't they? It feels like a duty, almost, to put something on the stove, or in the oven or the slow-cooker, that will have to simmer and fill the house full of savory smells. And then, naturally, once that business is seen to, you proceed directly to the couch with a book, preferably wearing, if not your actual bathrobe, clothing that is more suited to indoor warmth and comfy-ness, like fleece apparel. You never see anyone doing her Sunday lounging while wearing a J.C. Penney power suit, do you? If you ever do see such a thing, please tell her to get up and go change and stop being such an uptight dork.

Slippers are a requirement, an absolute must. There will be no arguing this point: Slippers. On your feet. All afternoon. Wear socks with them so they won't get stinky.

I put a pot of chili on the stove today, somewhere around noon. While it was doing its thing, I threw a package of shredded cheddar on the kitchen table, got out the jalapeno peppers and stuck a fork in the open jar (because honestly, you wouldn't believe some of the barbaric behavior I've seen around here, such as licking off a fork that has already been used to eat taco casserole and sticking it back into that jar to spear a few pepper slices), some mini-packages of goldfish crackers and a stack of saltines. I filled my great-grandmother's burl bowl with a couple of handfuls of snack-sized candy bars. Bowls, napkins, spoons. I went to the kitchen doorway and stood there overlooking the dining room and living room and said to the assembled family members and a friend of my husband's who was here helping us solve some IT issues with our Netflix video streaming queue, "Chili's ready on the stove, so go grab a bowl and help yourselves."

Everyone wandered in as the mood struck them, and it was very pleasant hearing the fridge open and close, spoons clinking against bowls, and an occasional howl of either rage or joy from the men, depending on which way the football game was going. I sank into my seat on the couch and looked at my be-slippered toes, contemplating the fact that it's really a bit too warm on this particular Sunday for socks and slippers, but knowing I'd regret it if I took off the socks.

One 45-minute nap later, I woke to find the whole rest of the long, slow happy day stretching in front of me; Sunday bliss.

How I know it's fall

2011-10-05T09:37:00.002-05:00

I always know when fall arrives because, first of all, my husband insists that we no longer need the central air to cool the house. Generally, he's right about this, but there are those times when an Indian summer day sneaks in and I find myself gasping and sweating while engaging in a strenuous activity like typing a handout on the life of George Orwell. I have no qualms about turning the AC back on, because I've managed to convince him that a Cool Wife is a Happy Wife. Being too hot makes me mean.

The other way I know it's fall is because we sleep with the bedroom windows open at night, just a crack. This is my favorite way to sleep, in a slightly chilly room with the sound of the wind rustling the leaves in the tree right outside our west window, and the milk truck going by early in the morning. Occasionally, I can hear the train whistle from ten blocks up the street, and that is my favorite middle-of-the-night sound ever.

As much as I like sleeping with the bedroom windows open, I have to be very wary of my husband, keeping a watchful eye on both him and the overnight weather forecast. Comes a day when he says, "I opened the windows and, hey - we don't really need this big blanket on the bed, do we?"

I sighed and carried on slathering moisturizer onto my face. We go through this same conversation at least three times a week during early-to-mid October, and it always happens in the evening when my defenses are down and my last available nerve has been worn down to a nubbin by the events of the day. "I think we need to close the windows a little bit because they're both wide open and it's supposed to get down in the low forties tonight. And yes, we will need that blanket."

"You may need it on you," he said, kicking vigorously at the blanket in a manner that always makes me want to clock him - I prefer to have the blanket neatly folded, accordion-style, at the foot of the bed, not thrashed down there in an untidy heap - "but I don't need it on me. I'm too warm."

"You won't be later," I remarked, putting the lid back onto my bottle of moisturizer. I went to the south window, which is nine feet tall, sash-style, and opens up to half that length, which exposes us to almost as much night air as a sleeping bag placed on the lawn under the stars would. I pulled it down to a height of about two inches and went to the other window, identical in height, and closed it altogether.

My husband immediately began gasping. "It is SO HOT in here," he complained. "No air at ALL." (This, in spite of the fact that a pedestal floor fan was on the medium setting and pointed straight at him.) "I feel like I'm going to suffocate." He slapped his paperback novel onto his bedside table and grumpily fell back onto his pillows, huffing.

"You won't think that later when it gets really cold in here, somewhere around four o'clock this morning."

"I don't think I'm going to last that long. It feels like a sauna in here."

I sighed again and switched out my lamp, settling myself back onto my own pillows and silently complimenting myself on my virtuous restraint from holding one over his face.

Later on that night, I woke up shivering, so cold that it was hard to bend my fingers. I was curled into shrimp-shape, huddled up with a light Arctic breeze ruffling the exposed right sleeve of my nightgown. I turned over in bed to find an edge of the sheet to pull over myself so that I could ward off hypothermia, and as I did so, the expected sight met my eyes through the darkness: that of my husband rolled snugly in ALL the sheet and ALL the thick, fleecy blanket, peacefully snoring his head off while I chipped ice particles off my eyelashes.

Three seconds later, he came back to consciousness with a yelp of surprise and surrendered my share of the bedding. See, one of the reasons why I like having long fingernails is because you can use one of them to make a swift, silent point and make it seem like an accident.

"Sorry, honey," I murmured, turning back over in the bed and pulling the warm covers up to my ears. "Sleep tight."

Menu Plan Monday (on Tuesday, but it's already been a long week)

2011-10-04T19:53:00.004-05:00

You know those Thursday mornings when you wake up and open your eyes and then realize that it's really only Tuesday? You know how you DON'T just leap out of bed with your arms in the air shouting, "Yippee!!! I thought this week was almost over, but I've actually still got more than half of it yet to go!"

Yeah.

So times like these make me really happy to be participating with a whole bunch of other mommy bloggers in Laura's Menu Plan Monday feature at her blog, I'm An Organizing Junkie.com. Because all that you see below was planned out last Thursday and purchased last Friday, back in the good old days when I still had my wits about me. Because if I were trying to plan menus, say, yesterday? We'd be out in the front yard eating the fallen leaves off the tree.

MENU PLAN FOR WEEK OF OCTOBER 3, 2011

Monday - I looked in the refrigerators -- both refrigerators, the one in the kitchen and the one in the utility room that is generally known as the Beer Fridge -- on Sunday afternoon and realized that we had enough leftovers from last week to create a perfectly respectable sort of buffet dinner. We had a bowl of brown rice left from the stir-fry, some spaghetti sauce from Friday's jaunt to New Castle, meatloaf from last Monday and lentil soup from whatever day we ate that. I made a baked spaghetti casserole with the rice, the spaghetti sauce and some mozzarella and turkey pepperoni I found in the fridge, heated up the meatloaf, sliced thin, topped it with a slice of cheddar and plunked it on squares of homemade bread, added a little cubed ham to the lentil soup and told everybody to jump right in.

They told me it was the best meal they'd had in weeks.

I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Tuesday - Aisling's dinner request for tonight was homemade biscuits and gravy with scrambled eggs, so I made that for her and my husband. Meelyn and I, however, have reached that point in life where we don't feel called upon to consume vast amounts of calories, fat and carbs that we really don't enjoy all that much, so we each had a Weight Watchers Smart Ones microwaveable meal, both of which were very good.

Wednesday - Roasted chicken breast with balsamic vinegar glaze, sweet potatoes and one of those yummy Green Giant Steamers veggies, although I can't quite remember which variety I chose.

Thursday - Meelyn and I are experimenting with a breakfast casserole, trying to see how much of the fat and cholesterol we can remove before all the taste goes along with it. I haven't decided if I'm going to go the route of my mother's Christmas Day Breakfast Casserole (although it really frosts her doughnuts when I make this out-of-season) or a crustless quiche. If the recipe I choose is successful, I'll post it. All I know right now is that it will include some nice lean ham instead of sausage, have some egg whites substituted for at least half the amount of whole egg called for, and also....

Also.

Fat-free cheese.

Heaven help me.

Friday - I think I'm going to have to go to a restaurant. I can just feel it. It may be Wendy's, for all I know, but I am deeply hoping for Chili's.

NUNDAY: Picky, picky, picky

2011-09-26T13:57:00.003-05:00

I love this picture of Benedictine nuns picking apples. They all look so happy, and there was probably no complaining about who was going to climb the ladder and no speculation as to whether Sister Scholastica intends to let that branch go on purpose and Sister Mary is not groaning, "Mother Abbess says we have to fill another bushel." We hope.

Menu Plan Monday

2011-09-26T13:28:00.003-05:00

This week, I'm debuting a new fall soup. It sounds delicious and I hope I'm not wrong! To see more Monday menu plans from around the country, visit Laura at her blog, I'm an Organizing Junkie.com.

Menu Plan for the Week of September 26, 2011

Monday - Mom's Best Easy Meatloaf, garlic mashed potatoes and steamed vegetables (baby carrots, zucchini, butternut squash)

Tuesday - Chicken quesadillas (made with whole-wheat tortillas, chicken, refried beans and reduced-calorie cheddar-jack cheese, plus spicy seasonings galore) and Green Giant Steamers Buttery Rice and Vegetables

Wednesday - Chunky Split Pea Soup, homemade honey-whole wheat bread

Thursday - Thai Broccoli-Chicken Stir fry with brown rice

Friday - My husband and I are going to Beth and Jim's house to meet them and Jeff and Julie for dinner. Helen (Beth's mother-in-law, Jeff's mother-in-law and Jim and Julie's mother) will also be there, and various friends and family members will undoubtedly be in and out. To that end, Beth, Julie and I are collaborating on a spaghetti dinner, to which I am contributing a big pot of Ragù Americana to go with Beth's homemade meatballs and Julie's garlic bread, which she always butters lovingly on both sides.

Creepy old perv or innocent grandpa?

2011-09-25T21:31:00.003-05:00

I was at the grocery store with Meelyn on Friday and we'd filled our cart and finally made our way to the check-out. We had to wait just a little bit, but when it was our turn to start unloading all our food onto the conveyor belt, we did so with great dexterity, having practiced this maneuver many, many times before.

I was unloading the small part, the part where a child can sit, so my back was to the people in line behind me. Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a problem at all -- I am not noted for my paranoia -- but there was a problem. With "but" being the operative word, only add another "t" to the end of it.

As I was removing items from the cart and placing them on the belt, I couldn't help but feel something? someone? touch my bottom. I sort of froze for a split second, evaluating the situation. I mean, I've been to Italy before and I don't know if things have changed over there in the past thirty years, but my bottom got touched, like, all the time. It was great. I'm kidding. Sort of. Anyway, I was only fifteen at the time and my bottom was, well....different than it is now. I glanced quickly back over my shoulder and noticed that the old gent who was behind us in the line was actually BEHIND us. It was his behind touching my bottom.

I murmured, "Excuse me," and pushed our cart a little bit forward so that I'd be out of his way and continued piling groceries on the belt. A few seconds later, there it was again: a gentle but insistent pressure on my backside. Another quick glance confirmed that it was that man again, standing back to back with me, pressing his rear against mine.

Flustered, I moved the cart a bit forward again, deciding not to say "excuse me" again because it was just kind of embarrassing, you know? I mean, the dude was old, right? And because he was so old, it just didn't right to imply that he was engaged in some kind of pervy shenanigans that might have gotten his face slapped if he'd done such a thing forty years previously.

Because old men don't think nasty thoughts, do they?

So, back to the groceries. Back to the unloading. We were almost finished, and Meelyn, oblivious to my plight, was standing in such a manner that I couldn't push the cart forward any further without mowing her down. Which is why, when the elderly man pushed his keister into my derriere for the THIRD TIME and just left it there, touching me, I had no good way to escape.

Let me just go off on a rabbit trail here. American women, for all our Virginia Slims and equality and freedom and such, are often just too freaking nice. We are so nice that we let people get away with doing stuff that they shouldn't ought to be doing because we don't want to make a fuss, don't want to cause a commotion, don't want to embarrass anyone or draw undue attention to ourselves or whatever. So we let people carry on doing something that is clearly wrong - or perhaps maybe....not so clear? When you're in a situation that's hard to define, what exactly can you do to define it?

For instance, should I have turned around and said to the old codger, "Sir, I can't help but notice that you've pressed your backside rather firmly against mine three different times now and I'd like to know just what you're doing? I mean, are you just in a hurry and needing to get your groceries unloaded quickly and are therefore being heedless of my personal space? Or do you have some other intent? I need to know so that I can decide whether I should hit you with my purse, or threaten to have my husband hunt you down or just give you the Miss Manners patented glacial stare-and-thin-lipped-smile combo."

Instead, I just turned all the way around so that I was facing him. He must have sensed my breath on the back of his neck, because all of a sudden, he pulled his bum in and, casting a furtive look over his shoulder, suddenly busied himself with re-arranging all the boxes and cans in his own cart.

He wouldn't look me in the face, wouldn't meet my eyes.

I didn't say anything. How could I? I mean, maybe he was mortified that he'd run into me three different times. Sadly, my bottom does stick out a good bit. On the other hand, if you were an elderly clandestine bottom-rubber, mine does make an easy and visible target. It's just all RIGHT THERE, hard to miss.

I didn't want to hurt his feelings. I didn't want to call him out in front of all those people. I was second-guessing myself like crazy by that point, anyway. Surely it was just my imagination that led me to think that my rear end was not only being touched, but pressed against?

No. It wasn't my imagination. I felt all weird and twitchy about that incident for the rest of the afternoon, wondering what I would have done and how I would have felt if it had been Meelyn's bottom he'd touched. Because I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt when it came to my hiney, but discovered that I was totally and completely unable to summon any feelings of "Aw, the poor old thing...he probably didn't even realize," when it came to Meelyn's hiney.

I would have jumped over the cart full of groceries and gone all Matrix on him.

Later that evening, when my husband and I were at dinner, I recounted my touchy tale to him. When I explained the first incident, he just nodded his head to acknowledge his agreement that it was probably nothing, but raised his eyebrows when I got to the second episode. By the time I was getting to the third moment of the old man pressing against me, my husband laid down his fork.

"Did you say something to him?" my husband asked.

I shrugged and swallowed a bite of salad. "What could I say that wouldn't make me look like some freakishly high-strung individual?"

My husband gave me a long look and then replied, "A lot of the time, that's probably what people like him count on. That no woman is going to want to accuse some nice old fart in a Mister Rogers cardigan of touching her for fear that she's going to seem hysterical and bizarre. Because what could be more harmless-looking than a guy who looks like he could be your granddad? That just gives men like that a green light to go ahead and touch a few more ladies. Never in a way that seems on purpose, like just reaching out and grabbing. But in a more subtle way, pressing against a butt in a grocery check-out line, 'accidentally' getting some side-boob action with his elbow when he reaches across you as we pass the collection plate at church...."

I gulped and glanced around nervously, doing a quick Spot-the-Pervert check amongst my fellow diners. "You're freaking me out. Like there's this whole world of dirty old men out there, prowling around trying to cop a feel."

It was his turn to shrug. "Well, that stereotype got started somehow. We can't blame it all on Benny Hill." He picked his fork back up and speared some lettuce on it.

"So, if this sort of thing should happen again? I should?...."

My husband smiled his lop-sided smile, the same one that melted my heart when we first met. "You look at him and say, in a very quiet voice, 'If you don't stop touching me, I am going to break you in half, motherfu.....'"

"Okay. Gotcha," I interrupted hastily.

Next time....

Observations (admittedly mundane)

2011-09-22T19:18:00.002-05:00

I think it's a real shame, here in my city, that none of the plumbing companies -- and I just Googled eight of them -- saw fit to locate their businesses on John Street. That seems like a regrettable oversight.

If you're at the doctor's office and you're sitting there in an exam room waiting, bored, and decide to sneak your book out of your handbag to read a bit and then the doctor comes in right afterwards and says, "Oh! What are you reading?" why is it always some book like a Sookie Stackhouse novel instead of, say, A History of Western Philosophy?

Life would be so much easier if butter tasted like castor oil.

A dog who just came in from the rain is exponentially more likely to want to sit on your lap than a dog who just got home from a good, long spell at the groomer's.

Menu Plan Monday

2011-09-19T11:28:00.003-05:00

Ah, a rainy Monday. Although I've always been very fond of Karen Carpenter (a secret I guarded close to me during my teenage years, when my friends had no idea that I was singing "Superstar" and "Close to You" into my hairbrush in front of my vanity mirror in my bedroom), I've always liked rainy days, although I am as meh about Mondays as she was. Since rainy days are okay but Mondays are less so, it's always nice to have the week's menu planned out ahead of time.

I have Laura over at her blog, I'm an Organizing Junkie, to thank for this weekly kick in the hiney. It makes everything so much easier when Wednesday rolls around and my wits are totally scattered because of a million things going on and the last thing I want to be thinking is, "Oh, noooo, I forgot about dinnerrrrrrrrrrrr!" Because believe me, I used to try that on my husband in a bid to get a mid-week Applebee's outing, but now that we're in this recession, it would be more like a mid-week fast food drive-thru run, and frankly, I'd just rather cook.

Menu Plan for the Week of September 18, 2011

Monday - This meal has come up more than several time in the past couple of months because we all love it: Jalapeno Cheeseburgers made with Morningstar Farms Grillers, grilled onions, sliced jalapeno peppers, pepper-jack cheese and that Onion Blossom Sauce you can find right here on InsomniMom. I like to pair it with skillet-roasted potatoes and a simple veg like seasoned green beans.

Tuesday - Broccoli-Chicken Thai Stir-Fry, which is actually a "diet" recipe, but so help me, if anyone eating this concoction can tell that it is low-calorie and low-fat, they've got more evolved taste buds than I do. I should put that recipe up on the site. It's so good and fresh and easy.

Wednesday - Gorton's Grilled Tilapia filets, baked sweet potatoes, Green Giant Healthy Colors veggie blend

Thursday - a good, old-fashioned taste of fall: Chicken Pot Pie, that delicious recipe from, I believe, the 1950s? With the Bisquick crust that just melts in your mouth? It is fabulous and easy, made these days with reduced-fat Bisquick and (don't look, Kayte) the same old cream of chicken soup it's always been made with. Comfort food supreme, crammed with vegetables and delicious chunks of chicken breast.

If you're interested, we had that Game Day Taco Dip (recipe here at the site under Recipes for Appetizers) on Sunday, which was a fun dinner, and on Saturday, my husband, who is a big poophead, ordered himself a pizza from a local pizza place, while I made a delicious homemade deep dish pizza with a yeasty whole wheat crust for me and the girls. It was absolutely loaded with turkey pepperoni, mozzarella, mushrooms, onions and green pepper and it was fabulous. His greasy pizza later gave him indigestion. Not that I thought it served him right or anything.

A serving of thoughts on the side

2011-09-18T11:15:00.003-05:00

Around here, because we generally go to church on Saturday evening, Sundays aren't the organized days they were when I was a child and we had to be sitting in Sunday School, turned out in our best and in a Jesus state of mind by nine-flipping-thirty a.m., despite the fact that my dad was grumpy because he hadn't had a second cup of coffee and the chance to read the sports section of the Sunday Indianapolis Star as thoroughly as he wished, and my brother was grumpy because he had to stop running little cars down that orange Hotwheels track laid across the living room furniture so that the cars could crash into the fireplace hearth and I was grumpy because that's just who I've always been.

My mother was grumpy because it was her job to make sure we were all ready to head out the door by nine-twenty, plus put a roast covered with Lipton onion soup mix into the Crock-Pot, and we all fought her every inch of the way, including the meat and the little foil packet the soup mix came in.

So these days, things are much calmer and there's plenty of coffee and no one cares about the Sunday newspaper and dinner is a much more laid-back affair notable for its lack of silver flatware, good dishes and nice glasses, which all sensibly stay where they're supposed to, which is in the china cabinet. They make grudging cameo appearances on Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter because they can't be put in the dishwasher.

Here are some of the thoughts swirling around in the calm of the day:

1. The annual argument that pits my husband against me and the girls began today, with opposing sides voicing strident opinions on on whether or not the furnace should be turned on. My husband contends that it is mid-September and mid-September is too early to have the heat on. The girls and I offer rebuttal by pointing out that it is rainy and chilly outside, a weather pattern more common to mid-October, which is a perfectly reasonable time to employ the use of central heating.

2. Today is the first Sunday for making a snack to accompany the afternoon's football, so we are having Game Day Taco Dip with tortilla chips. I really like this dip because it's easy to throw together, can be served warm or cold, and it a relatively sensible snack if you make it with neufchatel cream cheese, nonfat refried beans and reduced-calorie shredded cheese - and these little fixes happily are unnoticeable and the dip tastes the same as it does when all the fattening stuff is used. SCORE!

3. I bought a new top yesterday because the hanger on the store's rack had one of those little plastic bead-type things with my size printed on it, but when I got the blouse home, it turned out that it was a size smaller than the size noted on the hanger. Thankfully, I still have the receipt, but wouldn't you know that the store is one out-of-town?

4. Aisling found a piece of piano sheet music in the piano bench today, a copy of Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water," and said, "Where did you get this?" I sat for a moment, looking at the music, bemused. That sheet music brought back one of my worst memories, a memory of the night when my friend Lori was being installed as the leader of the Rainbow Girls in New Castle's Masonic lodge. She'd asked me to play this music, which had great personal meaning to her, to accompany another friend of ours, Dave, who had a gorgeous tenor voice.

It was a very dressy affair and I was wearing an outfit of my mother's, one in the late-seventies peasant style, but made with a gorgeous satiny blouse in watercolored lavender, turquoise and lapis, slightly off-the-shoulder and paired with a long, gauzy tiered cream skirt, the tiers banded with the same satiny fabric as the blouse. It was very, very Stevie Nicks. I felt like a fairy princess in that outfit and my mom even let me wear her little diamond stud earrings.

I had practiced on that music for weeks and weeks, both with my piano teacher and with Dave and everything went really well until that night, when even the confidence I'd gained from wearing that beautiful outfit leaked out through my toes once I saw the lodge's ballroom, with chandeliers and lots of chairs set up and a grand piano, all surrounding a highly polished dance floor.

I had a moment of choking stage-fright, worsened by the fact that, in a moment of pee pee-nerves, I somehow managed to flush the entire back of that gauzy skirt down the toilet. I hauled it, hand-over-hand, out of the potty, frantically picking pieces of wet toilet paper out of the hem. There was no time to take a breath and regain my composure because I was due to be sitting on that piano bench in about half a minute. So I wrung out the skirt, which then showed a distressing tendency to cling to the backs of my legs, and tearfully exited the bathroom, only to find that in my absence, all the seats had filled up. I had to walk across that entire huge room under the inquisitive gaze of a big herd of people, all by myself, the heels of my taupe suede Candie's mules click-clacking on the dance floor and my skirt billowing gracefully in the front, but stuck to me in the back from my bottom down to my ankles.

Do I even need to tell you how "Bridge Over Troubled Water" went?

Let's just say that Dave intrepidly sang "Bridge Over Troubled Water," but I was playing something totally different, like maybe a tuneless rendition of "Cecilia" or even "Scarborough Fair." It should have been more along the lines of "The Sound of Silence." Huh.

I was utterly mortified, Dave was nonplussed, and poor Lori. Poor Lori. Here was her shining moment of becoming the rainbowiest Rainbow Girl of them all and there I was, a piano student of TEN YEARS, whacking and thumping desperately around on the keyboard like a possum trying to get out of a cage.

That was in 1978 and here today, thirty-three years later, I still felt a miserable sense of "Dear God, if you love me, please kill me right now," only this time, my undies weren't wet.

What a terrible memory. I wish I'd never brought it up.

5. If you are a lady who goes to a gym to work out, and if you shower there after you work out, but haven't yet taken that small moment of time required to stop at the front desk and rent a locker, be aware that there is going to come a reckoning, a time not specified, when either your shampoo, conditioner or body wash will come open in your gym bag and make a hellish mess that will convince you that it might just be better to pitch the whole mess into the garbage bin and start over, with new sneakers and everything.

6. I love Sundays when you can do things just because you want to, rather than because you have to. Which is why I just put together a loaf of oatmeal bread with sunflower seeds and diced apricots (excellent for ham sandwiches) and am sitting here typing a blog post....instead of working on lesson plans for my Shakespeare and Brit Lit classes. Which I have to do. Right now. So goodbye, and enjoy the rest of your day.

I'm blaming it on the recession

2011-09-17T07:50:00.002-05:00

I have long since stopped apologizing for being the kind of person who takes great pleasure in girly things; like jewelry (real is good, but fake will work) makeup (fake, but hopefully not as fake as, say, Disco Party 1979) and manicured fingernails (the faker, the better.) The job I have is one where people see my hands a lot - or at least my perception is that my hands can be seen a lot - and I have the world's worst fingernails, despite the fact that the only mammal that drinks more dairy than I do is a baby calf. I'm practically out there in the fields and meadows, skulking around and wresting calves away from their mothers, but do I have good fingernails? No, I do not. And I also eat yogurt every day, so if you really needed any more proof that life is not fair, there you have it.

Before the recession, I completely enjoyed being able to go to the salon to get my nails done. I've always favored a discreet french manicure and it was such a satisfying feeling to look down at my hands and see fresh, pretty nails instead of the dull, scraggly and prone-to-splitting things that God favored me with.

Then the recession happened and life changed.

[Pausing for a moment of piteous sobbing]

So now I do my own nails, mostly successfully because of my friend Juju. Juju does her own nails too and you would never know, they look so beautiful and professional. She claims that she finds life dismal and grey without manicured finger- and toenails, hardly worth getting out of bed for. So she gave me some tips (haha...a little nail-related humor there for those of us in the biz) and I got started and I've been ever so pleased with the results.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday, I broke a nail. So aggravating, but luckily I was headed back home anyway, so I stopped off at the Sally's in town to replenish my nail stash (I even craftily bought a packet of nails and a teeny glue bottle to keep in my purse just in case; I don't know why I've never thought of that before) and then drove home hurriedly. My husband was due home from work at about 5:15 and we were going out to dinner. Observing myself in the bathroom mirror, it was perfectly apparent that I needed to do a major overhaul before I was going to consider myself presentable at Applebee's or Ruby Tuesday's or Bob Evans or wherever we were going to end up. I needed to change my clothes, trowel on some makeup over the old makeup I'd put on at eight o'clock that morning, do something to control the mad frizz that had become my hair....and

fix that nail.

The nail, I determined, was the easiest part. Just open the packet, choose the nail that fits, apply a dab of glue to your actual fingernail, press on the fake one and hold for ten seconds, et voila! A perfect fingernail, all shiny and pretty.

At least that's what you'd think. But remember, you're not reading Gwyneth Paltrow's blog about how your life can be just as perfect as hers if you had her fame and her money, you poor thing. Nor are you reading something by Michelle Phan, who is to the YouTube world of cosmetics what Martha Stewart is to doing crafts and putting sheets on your bed with properly mitered corners.

No, you're reading my blog, and you know something bad is getting ready to happen, right?

Well, you know me: always thinking of others, that's me. I wouldn't want to disappoint you, so I'll tell you -- and oh, is it ever true -- that I squeezed the glue bottle a little too hard because I was in a hurry, right? And the squeezing led that glue, which is a very liquidy liquid, to gush out all over my fingers. A LOT of my fingers.

In spite of (or perhaps because of?) its lack of viscosity, that glue dries fast. So in spite of the fact that my fingers were liberally bathed in wash of extremely liquid and fast-drying glue, I managed to grab that fingernail, press it on and hold it down.

If I'd just been able to continue holding that nail down for, say, another week or so, I think everything would have been okay. But there came a time, about thirty seconds later, when I needed to use my hands for the aforementioned clothes-changing, makeup-reapplying and hair-fixing. That was when I discovered that I'd glued about four of my fingers together.

I gasped and did the natural, yet so very stupid thing, which was try to pull my fingers apart. It hurt quite a bit, so I did the next thing I could think of: I went out the the upstairs hallway and yelled down the stairs, "GIRRRRRRRRRRLLLLLS!!! I NEED YOUR HELP!!!"

They were occupied with their own interests, the first and second of which were making their own dinner in the kitchen and listening to really loud music. I waited impatiently for the song they were listening to to end and then bawled out again, "GIRRRRRRRRRLSSSSSS! C'MERE!!! HURRY!"

"WHY?!?" they both yelled.

"BECAUSE I'M THE MOM AND I SAID TO COME HERE!" I hollered, agitated. If my fingers were all permanently glued together, how was I going to live life as I once knew it? My immediate worry, that of changing clothes, repairing my makeup and fixing my hair, wasn't a problem anymore because I knew quite well that there was no way I could go to a restaurant: I couldn't hold a fork.

Grumbling, the girls came up the stairs and met me in the hallway.

"Why are you wringing your hands?" Meelyn asked after looking me over.

"You'd better hurry up and get ready," Aisling advised helpfully. "I think I just heard Daddy's car pull in the driveway."

"Listen," I said. "I do not have time to explain. Just listen, because I need your help."

"If this is about rubbing that cream on your heels again, I am so out of here," Meelyn said, turning to go back downstairs.

"It's not my heels! It's my hands!" I said tightly.

"Can I see your phone?" asked Aisling. "I want to look up movie times."

"FORGET THE PHONE! FORGET MY HEELS!" I shouted. "MY FINGERS ARE GLUED TOGETHER!"

Meelyn said blankly, "How on earth did you manage to do that?"

Aisling said angrily, "You said I could go to the movies!"

I shot her the Ice Cold Glare of Maternal Displeasure and then turned to Meelyn and summarized the situation: "I was fixing a broken fingernail. I squeezed the glue bottle a little too hard. Glue came out everywhere. My fingers are stuck together."

Meelyn, as the take-charge and competent first-born, said, "Oh, that's bad. What do we need to do to unstick you?"

Aisling, the baby, for whom life is just one big party waiting to happen, doubled over laughing until a sudden thought struck her: "Hey, since you can't, like, use your hands anymore, can I have your phone?"

The next ten minutes weren't a lot of fun. They involved me putting my gluey hands into the sink and the girls pouring acetone-based fingernail polish remover, which dissolves this type of glue, over my hands again and again until I could finally work my fingers loose, unfortunately leaving a bit of skin behind in the process. It hurt. It still hurts, both on my hands and in my soul. Because you know what? I blame the recession.

If it weren't for the recession, I'd be at a nail salon, where any reasonable person would be, getting my nails done by an actual professional. If I broke a nail, I'd be able to swing by the salon, hold out the affected finger, and sit in a comfy chair sipping a Diet Coke while the technician tut-tutted over the damage, fixing it in a jiffy and maybe even giving me a coat of polish to match my outfit. I wouldn't have to be juggling packets of fake fingernails and tiny little obstreperous glue bottles in my bathroom, trying to give myself that ladylike and well-groomed appearance I enjoy.

RECESSSSSSSSSION!!! I HAAAAAATE YOUUUUUUU!!!!

Later on at the restaurant, I was holding a menu and my husband, who is such a gentleman for noticing little niceties like this, said gruffly, "Your fingernails look so pretty, honey."

I glanced down at my nails, which looked pristine, and thoughtfully considered the other side of my fingers, which were gouged and scraped and a little bloody. "Thanks, sweetie."

RECESSSSSSIOOOOONNNNNN!!!!!

Because I have That Kind of Face

2011-09-15T16:16:00.004-05:00

Do you have that kind of face, a face like mine? A face that beckons every weirdo in a thirty mile radius and says, without your lips even moving, "Tell me something about your scary life. GIVE ME DETAILS." A face that convinces people that you should be the recipient of their most personal information which they will tell you and tell you and tell you, even though you're actively backing away while looking at your watch and saying, "OH LOOK AT THE TIME! I'M LATE FOR MY LOBOTOMY APPOINTMENT."

Listen, I am a nice person. Fairly nice. Say, not nearly as nice as my grandmothers (they both had That Face too) or as nice as my mother, but one heck of a lot nicer than Kim Jong Il. I'm not insensible to the needs of others to unburden themselves of painful experiences, or find a shoulder to cry on. I understand that, I really do. And I'm not actively opposed to being the person who holds the burden or offers the shoulder. At least until last Monday, I wasn't.

People have told me stuff ever since I was sentient enough to sit up straight and say, "What happened next?" (Note: It is ALWAYS a mistake to ask this question. A better question to ask might be, "Do you hear that tornado siren?") One time I remember in particular was when I was a Ball State student and a fellow co-ed from a class on modern poetry followed me to the student center, talking. And talking. I bought a Tab, she bought a Tab. I went to sit in a booth, she accompanied me. And while we were sitting in the booth drinking our Tabs, she confided in me, "When I was in high school, my acne got so bad, I tried to dry out my skin by soaking cotton balls in lighter fluid and using it on my face."

Yeah.

I told the world's record for the fastest speed at which one can exit a booth while babbling, ""I'msosorrybutIhavetogo.IjustrememberedIhavetocatchaplanetoMadrid.BecauseIjustdecidedto

bea foreignexchangestudent."

Episodes like this have continued to happen over the years since I received my diploma, which was for English literature, but maybe should have been for psychology. But one of the worst in recent memory happened last Monday.

I was at the YMCA, in the swimming pool, getting ready to start the hour-long water aerobics class I attend. It's a pretty big class, about twenty-five people, so we're all crowded into the water like a school of little fishies. It makes it easy - FAR too easy - to strike up a conversation with people nearby. Now, listen, when I go to the gym, I don't mind trading pleasantries with people, but I go there to work, and my feeling is that if I'm in the pool conversing with my fellow splashers, I'm not really giving my all to the cardio, know what I mean? So I try not to get involved with the talkers.

Try as one might not to get involved, sometimes the talkers will just HAVE YOU. As I was warming up for the workout, one of them made her way over to me and said, innocuously, "So how are you this morning?"

I smiled at her, swishing my arms back and forth through the water, warming up those muscles. "I'm great! How are you?"

MISTAKE! MISTAKE! BAD MISTAKE!

If you get the vibe that someone might tell you a bunch of personal stuff about themselves you definitely do not want to hear, it is a very, very bad idea to ask them, even out of social politeness (the kind where you don't really care how they are, but ask anyway because that's just what we DO) how they're doing. You know why?

THEY'LL TELL YOU.

The water aerobics instructor, Becca, waded through all the people in the pool and started the class, saying, "Let's start with a jog. Move those arms and get your knees up high!"

"Well," my pool friend said confidingly over the splashy noises going on around us and the sound of Bachman-Turner Overdrive singing "Takin' Care of Business" in the background, "You might have wondered why I don't have any teeth."

Honestly, what do you say when someone says something like this to you? I mean, you have to be nice to people. Yes, you do. Don't argue with me. The world is bad enough as it is without people like you and me responding with something like, "No, I can truly say to you that I have never even once wondered why you have no teeth and I don't want to think about it right now, so move on, sister."

Becca yelled out, "Jumping jacks! Arms UP! MOVE that water, ladies!"

I said, "Uhhhhh.....welll....err......"

"I don't have any teeth because I used to do crack," my pool friend said at high volume.

"Oh, I'm sorry," I said, hoping that was the right thing to say. It hardly seemed appropriate to say something reassuring like, "That's okay. I know a lot of people wholost their teeth because they did crack" because I don't. Thank goodness.

"Yeah, me too," she bellowed. Becca looked inquiringly over her shoulder and then said to the class, "Back to a JOG, high knees! PUMP those arms!"

"Yeah, the guy I live with did too, but we quit."

"Oh, good!" I offered plaintively, wishing that Becca would tell us to do the remaining forty-five minutes of the class under water.

"It was bad," my friend hollered, shaking her head dismally. "I have four kids, and they had to go live with my mother."

"I'm so sorry!" I yelled back, splashing. I tried to put a little distance between us by craftily moving back in the water, but she caught on to me right away and followed.

"Boy, you really move around in the water!" she observed. "Well, anyway, where was I?"

"I have no idea," I said firmly, but she'd already recalled that she'd left off at the part where her kids were with her mom because she and her live-in boyfriend were both doing crack.

"So anyway, they're pretty much grown up now and I wanted to get some teeth, but now I have TMJ and osteo-arthritis in my jaw, so it isn't going to work out," she said, confusing me with her slightly garbled story.

"Oh, I'm sorry...."

"So my son? The one that's twenty-one? He came over to our place the other night and he stole about eighty vicodin pills out of our bathroom medicine cabinet."

At that point, I nearly just stopped in defeat and drowned myself. I mean, what the heck? Who was this woman? The other ladies in the class are retired teachers. Retired nurses. Current nurses who work non-day shifts. Ladies who serve Meals-on-Wheels and volunteer at St. Vincent de Paul. Ladies who finish the water aerobics class and shower and go to bridge club together. I'm familiar with and comfortable with all those people, and most definitely out of my sheltered league when dealing with former crack addicts and the toothless mothers of pill-stealers. Not that I don't totally applaud her for being able to beat the crack thing, and not that I'm not sorry that her life took such a bad turn that she couldn't even raise her own children - that's a tragedy no matter what. But....but...why can't I just do my exercise? WHY?

"Cross-country SKIS, ladies! Get those arms and legs MOVING!" shouted Becca. The other members of the class obediently began thrashing around in the manner of skiers on an open field of snow. I felt like I'd just been hit in the side of the head with one of their poles.

"He's probably gonna sell them," she predicted gloomily. "And my arthritis is going to be kicking my butt tonight."

"I'm...so sorry," I offered inadequately. "Listen, I need to get out of the pool. I have to pee." It was a frantic bid for escape and a total lie. But at this point, WHATEVER it took to get away, anywhere.

"Oh, me too!" she exclaimed brightly. "I'll go with you!"

Unable to maintain my Zen-like serenity

2011-09-13T23:01:00.003-05:00

So I was in a yoga class this morning and feeling pleased with myself because it was the first time I'd been able to maintain my balance nearly perfectly in a very respectably executed vriksha-asana, or tree posture.

The person closest to me, a woman who just recently began coming to the class, whispered "Hey!" in a quiet voice. Being me and so full of myself that I'm in danger of choking on my own eyebrows, I turned my head, ready to graciously accept her expressed hope that she, with many weeks of arduous practice, would be able to do a graceful and balanced tree like mine.

Instead, she pointed at my left ankle. "Hon, you've got a panty liner coming out of your pant leg."

I physically felt my face change. My mother and I both have a problem with this. While trying to express an outward attitude of calm and generous tolerance, it's often perfectly obvious that what we're really thinking inwardly is, "Oh, shut up, dirtbag." I tried to rearrange my features into a gentle smile while bending over to remove the DRYER SHEET from my pant leg. I crumpled it up and dropped it into my gym bag and briefly considered interrupting the class so that I could whack that woman in the side of the head with my water bottle. Just as a helpful measure to correct her faulty vision, you understand.

Panty liner, indeed. I am never standing by that hag again.

Menu Plan Monday

2011-09-12T14:48:00.005-05:00

We've had some autumn-like weather in the past few days. Then we had some summery weather. Then it got all fall-y for a few days so that we couldn't go to the pool and missed those final moments, unreclaimable until next summer. Now it's hotter than hob of hell again and the central air is going full-tilt even when I get up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water. Whatever. I am cooking fall food and that's all there is to it: slow-cooker, bread machine, soups and stews, casseroles in the oven. Game on.

Menu Plan for the Week of September 12, 2011

Monday - Vegetable soup (simmering on the stove right now and smelling so delicious I just want to, like, eat the air) and homemade whole wheat bread

Tuesday - Roasted chicken (not a Julia chicken; just seasoned boneless, skinless breasts), rice pilaf, green beans

Wednesday - Parmesan-crusted tilapia (the recipe for which I got off the back of the box the tilapia filets came packaged in), sweet potato "fries" and green beans

Thursday - Poured-Crust Pizza, Hawaiian-style, which means topped with spicy barbecue sauce, Canadian bacon, onions and pineapple chunks.

Friday - Mom's Best Easy Meatloaf, oven-roasted potatoes and carrots, apple cobbler

Remembering

2011-09-11T08:21:00.003-05:00

Like most people across the United States, I suppose, my first recollection of the morning of September 11, 2011 is that it was the most perfectly beautiful day - sunny and warm, without a cloud in the sky. Which seems like the ultimate irony.

Meelyn was eight and Aisling was six and they were both sitting at their little tables in the living room doing their schoolwork. I'd just finished teaching Aisling a math lesson when my husband had to leave for work. We kissed him goodbye and he cheerfully drove off, waving at the three of us as he drove off down the street. I turned on the television to put it on the cable channel that plays the classical music and the screen automatically came up to FoxNews. One of the anchors, with a grim face, was just announcing that the first tower had been hit by a plane, and of course it was being portrayed as a tragic accident, some kind of terrible pilot error, maybe. As I was standing there in front of the TV taking in that bad news, my husband's SUV came screeching back into the driveway.

"Something bad has happened," he said as he crashed back into the house.

"I know," I said soberly, indicating the television and keeping my voice low so that the girls wouldn't hear. "I just turned it on and saw the news. What happened? They're saying on Fox that a plane hit one of the twin towers."

My husband was looking at the television, at the smoke pouring from the side of what we now know was WTC one. "It wasn't just a plane. They're saying it was a jet."

I was shocked. "How can that be? A jet wouldn't be flying low enough to crash into a building in the city."

We both turned our attention to the television just in time to see the footage of the second jet, looking huge and surreal and so very wrong there among the skyscrapers, like seeing a rattlesnake curled up in your baby's crib, go crashing into the second tower, triggering a huge explosion that sent a massive fireball bursting out of the wounded building. Both towers were on fire, blazing, smoking. It looked like something out of a movie - how could something so shocking be real? - something that couldn't possibly happen on such a beautiful day.

A day without a cloud in the sky, until now.

"That was no accident," my husband said as the news anchor on Fox gabbled, "Another plane has just flown into the second tower! The second tower has also been hit! This can't be an accident!"

"I have to go to work," my husband said. He hugged me long and hard. "I'll call you later."

I nodded wordlessly and turned my attention back to the television. I felt very alone. All my friends were at work. My parents were vacationing on Prince Edward Island in Canada. But my friend Cato, who had just moved to Cincinnati with her family, was a stay-at-home mom. I called her and she answered with a trembling voice. Her TV was on FoxNews too, so we sat together while Mee and Aisling did their school work and her daughter Rebecca played on the floor at her feet. We sat there for about four hours, sometimes talking, but mostly just sitting in silence, but we were there together.

Here are the memories that stand out for me.

1. The worst part was seeing the people jumping out of the buildings. That image of the man and woman climbing together out of the building onto that windowsill and then jumping, hands clasped, was the worst thing I have ever seen. Ever. The news anchor said in a strangled, agonized voice, "People are jumping. They're jumping from the upper floors." Cato and I sat and sobbed, unable to even speak.

"Mommy, why are you crying?" Aisling came and asked me, her face scrunched with worry. "Are you sick?"

"Mommy's sad," I told her. "This is a sad day today."

2. The second worst thing I remember seeing was that camera shot from the harbor after the towers fell, where the entire skyline of New York City was obscured by smoke and dust. I've never been to New York City, but like a million other movie-goers, I'd seen that famous view a thousand times. Like the harbor view of the Sydney Opera House and the view of the bridge in the San Francisco harbor, it's probably one of the most easily identifiable landmark views in the world. But not covered up. Not obscured. I kept having to remind myself that this was happening, right now. It was real, not some apocalyptic movie scene.

3. The third thing I remember is the horror of watching that same cloud of ash, smoke, dust and debris roll like a massive freight train down the streets of Manhattan, hungry and malevolent. Watching the people run, screaming in raw terror. "Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God," Cato said from her end of the phone. "Oh, God. It's going to kill them."

We heard that clip from a young woman, a reporter maybe? The one who'd been standing on the sidewalk with a camera, filming, when the cloud started rolling toward her. She began screaming,.and a man threw open the door to a shop and pulled her inside, slamming the door as the cloud went past. "You saved my life!" she gabbled. "You saved my life!"

4. Another horrible, horrible thing was watching the people in the streets after the buildings had collapsed and the cloud had passed. People staggering around in a critical state of shock, many of them with blood smeared in the ash and dirt on their faces. Some of them sat on curbs, their heads clutched in their hands. You couldn't see them without wanting to take each one of them by the hand and lead them somewhere safe, somewhere clean and peaceful. You couldn't see them without wanting to just hold them and rock them in your arms, wash their faces, find bandages for their wounds. You wanted to tell them that everything would be all right, but that was something nobody knew. With the horrors piling up by the moment, who knew if this was the worst, if something even more awful was going to happen?

5. "Let's roll."

In some ways, it's hard to imagine that it's been ten years. On the other hand, those memories are so clear, it could have all happened just last week. I know that there are going to be a lot of memorial services televised today. I know that the cable news channels will be having all day coverage of the camera footage of that day. I probably won't watch any of it. It brings back too many memories of grief and fear and that awful feeling of helplessness that there was just nothing to do but sit and wait and watch.

I don't want to have all those feelings and images brought back to me today. But then again, I know I'll never forget.

Songs that make me cry (hopefully you have some too?)

2011-09-08T20:40:00.000-05:00

Aisling just played this song, Taylor Swift's "The Best Day," for me on the piano and I am seriously thinking about lying down on the floor and crying until my eyes fall out. I cannot listen to songs like Stevie Nicks' "Landslide" or Joni Mitchell's "The Circle Game" or any songs about people getting older and children growing up; it's just ridiculous. I even cry over that absolutely STUPID "Butterfly Kisses" song, which just enrages me but I can't help it. That person who sings it, whose name I can't even remember, gets to the part about his daughter in her wedding dress and I am just a face full of bubbles and snot.

Once I was crying quietly to myself in a store while looking at handbags and some lady asked me in a concerned voice if I was okay. I said yes, I was fine and tried to get rid of her but she said persistently "Are you sure?" and then offered me a tissue and I was tempted to tell her that I just found out that I'd lost my job so that I wouldn't have to tell her that I was crying because Alanis Morisette's "Head Over Feet" was playing and it always reminds me of when my husband and I were first married. In the end, I couldn't lie and couldn't tell the truth, so I left her mystified, that nosey thing, thinking that I was weeping sadly over the fact that the Nine West bag I coveted was $110.

I used to cry a lot over "Cat's in the Cradle" but it has that really distinctive opening bar and I generally can make it to the radio in time to quickquickquick switch the station, unless I'm in a store and then I just leave, abandoning entire carts full of groceries or once, an Ann Taylor Loft 100% wool gorgeous winter coat priced at a steep post-season markdown and WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?!? Please tell me I'm not the only one who spontaneously starts leaking tears whenever certain songs start playing.

RECIPE: Outback Steakhouse Onion Blossom Sauce

2011-09-07T05:17:00.000-05:00

For those of us who really like spicy food, the sauce that comes with the Awesome Blossom at the Outback (or at Chili's or Lone Star or wherever - the onion blossom has several permutations) is better than the actual blossomed onion. The saddest day I ever experienced at a restaurant was the day when my husband decided that he liked the sauce better than the ketchup he'd been using to dip his blossom petals into. This sauce doesn't just have to be reserved for battered and deep-fried onions, however: we've found that it is good on a number of different things, including the jalapeno cheeseburgers we ate for dinner last Monday, and even the "fried" potatoes I cook in my great-grandmother's cast-iron skillet.

I've had this recipe written on a sticky-note for about five months, so I'd say it's high time to get it recorded here where I won't lose it. This recipe makes a good portion of sauce - the serving size is two tablespoons, which is plenty - so I hope you can forgive the eensy-weensy measurements. It's worth it.

Blossom Sauce

Directions: Combine all ingredients together in a small mixing bowl; cover and refrigerate for about two hours before serving to allow the flavors to blend. Store leftovers in fridge, if there are any.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup mayonnaise
2 tablespoons horseradish (I like to use horseradish sauce because it's smoother and more blendable)
2 teaspoons ketchup (adjust amount according to taste; I always use a teaspoon or two more)
1/4 teaspoon paprika
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon garlic powder
1/8 teaspoon dried oregano, crushed between fingers
dash black pepper
dash cayenne pepper

Menu Plan Monday (on Tuesday)

2011-09-06T16:23:00.005-05:00

Sometimes, like on Labor Day, life gets away from you and you spend that vacation Monday thinking it's Sunday and then you wake up the next morning and confusion reigns all day. I feel that today - TUESDAY, goshdangit! - is successful because 1) I remembered to take Aisling to piano lessons, and 2) I remembered about Menu Plan Tuesday. Uh, Monday. Whatever.

Anyway, here's the inaugural post of the new school year.To read other people's weekly menus (it may give you some ideas if you've announced "It's chili night!" for the fourth time this month and here it is, only September 6) go visit Laura at her blog I'm an Organizing Junkie by clicking this link.

Menu Plan for the Week of September 5, 2011

Monday - Ahhh, what's past is past, so let's not dwell on it. But on the slim chance that you're interested, we ate jalapeno cheeseburgers on grilled buns with pepper-jack cheese, jalapeno pepper slices and Blossom Sauce, an awesome dupe recipe from the Outback Steakhouse - I'll post the recipe here after I post this article because it is a keeper. Instead of actual ground beef, I grilled some MorningStar Farms® Grillers® Originals because they are just delicious, full of protein and very low in fat.

Tuesday - Err, it's chili night! Grade School Chili, to be exact, with both chili beans (which are red beans in chili sauce) and black beans, plus lean ground beef and about half a cup of chili powder because we like it spicy. If I'm feeling fancy, I cook some diced green pepper and onions to throw in the pot, and my husband always insists on spaghetti noodles, just the way they served it at Connersville Elementary School back in the early 1970s. I cheat and use whole-wheat pasta.

Wednesday - Gorton's Grilled Tilapia (if you're thinking that I'm relying heavily on some frozen convenience foods this week, you're absolutely right), oven-roasted potatoes, peas

Thursday - Patty melts, made with those MorningStar Farms® Grillers® again, but this is a totally different type of sandwich. I think everybody in Indiana knows what a patty melt is - and hopefully, they've had a chance to eat one at Willow Springs Restaurant in Hagerstown because theirs are the best, no argument. I make a lower fat sissy version that doesn't even come close to the real deal, but they're still pretty good, smothered with grilled onions and served with good ol' American cheese on grilled bread. I use olive oil for the grilling instead of butter, which makes me want to just sit down and cry over my Paula Deen cookbook, but we all have to make some sacrifices, right? - plus corn on the cob and maybe a green salad on the side.

Friday - We're having company on Friday - a friend of Aisling's is spending the night - so it's going to be Poured Crust pizzas, I'm thinking a 12-inch with sausage, mushrooms and onions and a 10-inch made Hawaiian-style with barbecue sauce, Canadian bacon, pineapple chunks and onions. Yummer!

A dentist's office rant and poll

2011-09-01T12:57:00.003-05:00

I just went to the dentist's office for my regular six-month check-up, filled out some paperwork that needed to updated, read a copy of Redbook from cover to cover, played around on the internet on my phone, counted the ceiling tiles, mentally rearranged the furniture and added a couple of plants and more side tables, rehearsed every swear word I've ever heard, invented some new ones and finally, after forty-five minutes, got up, walked back over to the reception desk with steam coming out of my ears and nostrils, and informed the receptionist that there were places I had to be, things I needed to be doing and a LIFE I NEEDED TO BE LIVING, and re-scheduled for next Thursday at 1:00.

I'm tempted to show up at 1:45 and innocently say, "What? You mean I'm late? Like you were last week? Oh, sorry. It sucks when people frack around with your schedule, doesn't it?"

I understand that doctors and dentists and optometrists in all their many permutations have emergencies that throw off their schedules. Don't we all? Sometimes something as mundane as a slow freight train can make you ten minutes late for an appointment and send you screeching into the parking lot with your hair on fire. I understand those things.

But if a doctor's office is running more than fifteen minutes behind schedule, the front desk people need to start making some calls (that's one of the reasons we have to give them our home and mobile phone numbers, right?) instead of just casually allowing hapless patients to trail in and then sit there, cooling their heels. It's just bad form. It says, "I am a doctor and my time is more important than your time because, well, I am a doctor and I care nothing for you and your substandard master's degree from an inferior university or the child you have to pick up at school or the fact that you were due back at work for a meeting - SIT STILL AND KEEP QUIET, humble peasant. I will see you when I see you."

It also says that, emergencies barred, patients are being scheduled too close together. And that the office is run inefficiently. And it makes me really mad.

What do you do when you're kept waiting? Comment here on on Facebook, either one. Answer any or all. No fair telling me that I'm a grouchy old bat: I already know.

1. How long a wait do you feel is too long?

2. Do you sit there fuming in silence or do you inform the receptionist that you can't wait?

3. Have you ever considered biting your dentist on the thumb to revenge yourself?

4. If your doctor's office is one of the ones with the sign that reads "Appointments canceled less than 24 hours in advance will be billed our regular fee," have you ever considered billing them for your time for making you wait longer than fifteen minutes?

Some random thoughts of randomness

2011-08-30T19:04:00.003-05:00

1. My dad bought a new bike recently. He's always been a big walker, and goes around the White Estates neighborhood where I grew up, picking up trash with his grabbin-claw or whatever that thing is called and a Wal-Mart sack. He enjoys biking around now too, although I don't think he can still pick up trash, because wouldn't that be kind of hard? You might have to pedal in circles around, say, a cast-off paper McDonald's bag, before you could actually pick it up. ANYWAY, my mom was talking about getting a bike for herself so that she could join him, and I brightly suggested, "Why don't you get a bicycle built for two?"

My dad, who was sitting in an armchair with his eyes fixed intently on SportsCenter, snorted. Mom cast him a brief glance and said, "The last time we rode on a two-person bike, on Mackinac Island? He said he had to do all the work."

"I did," my father said emphatically, his focus on the television unwavering.

"Well, maybe you could promise to pedal really hard," I said soothingly.

My mother sat thinking for a moment and then announced, "I think I'd rather just get a rickshaw. We've been married forty-nine years. Why bother with pretense?"

2. Our new school year starts this Thursday, September 1. Meelyn will be a senior and Aisling will be a junior. I AM STARING DOWN THE TWIGS OF AN EMPTY NEST, PEOPLE.

3. Since school is starting up, I think I'll start Menu Plan Monday next Monday, which is Labor Day, so maybe I'll start next Tuesday. Just keepin' it real.

4. Dobby was barking at the people across the street, who were doing nothing more threatening than sitting on their front porch, talking and drinking iced tea. I know, I can't believe the nerve of those trolls either. Dobby barked at them so violently, he fell off the back of the couch onto the floor. Epic fail.

5. I'm teaching a class in British literature this first semester, plus my usual Shakespeare class. The Shakespeare play for this semester is Julius Caesar, and by some amazing happenstance, because I promise I did not know about this earlier, the Indiana Repertory Theater is doing Julius Caesar this fall! I am very excited, because although I have the three extant copies of Julius Caesar on DVD (one starring Marlon Brando as Mark Antony and the other starring Charlton Heston as Marc Antony and the other one starring no one I've heard of before and ALL THREE OF THEM SUCK LIKE A SHOP VAC.

6. This morning in water aerobics class, the music of the day was the greatest hits of Elton John and I knew the lyrics to every single song. Did some great in-pool jumping jacks to "Philadelphia Freedom."

7. I've been accused by several people of shamefully neglecting my blog. It's been a very busy summer - that's the only excuse I have. I'll try to do better.

As the mother of teenaged daughters, I'd like to say to God:

2011-08-21T20:09:00.004-05:00

Dear God, it would be really helpful if all the crappy, nasty, jerkface teenaged boys could be ugly mutts, while all the honest, nice and honorable boys could look like Greek gods. That would cut down on a lot of confusion for the girls in our house, since recently they've encountered some real wolves in sheep's clothing. Or, more to the point, some truly sucky young men that, as you might remember? -- On Wednesday of last week? -- their father was inclined to punch in the face, but who looked, on the surface, like the handsome and charming proverbial Boys Next Door. If, by chance, you live next door to a brothel-slash-bus station-slash-public toilet.

If you could please see to this straight away, I would be very grateful.

Thank you,

Shelley

"A plague on both your houses"

2011-08-04T16:14:00.003-05:00

I went with Katie on a scouting expedition to the Illinois Shakespeare Festival at the University of Illinois at Bloomington and we saw a wonderful production of Romeo & Juliet that just took. My. Breath. Almost literally, since the perfect little theater is an outdoor venue and when the play started at seven thirty, it was still about ninety-two degrees outside.

My favorite Romeo and Juliet is still the 1996 production, directed by the genius Baz Luhrmann, and starring Leonardo di Caprio as Romeo and Claire Danes as Juliet. For all of you who wonder about Leonardo's ability to pull off a believable Romeo, just watch it, is all I can say. And Claire Danes has a way with the innocent and girlish, yet steel-spined Juliet that will break your heart and make you think back to the days of your first love, I guarantee. There are lots of stars in this production, including a sinister and scarily nasty-sexy John Leguizamo in the role of Tybalt, the Prince of Cats, but the best of them all is the above pictured Harold Pirreneau as Romeo's best friend, Mercutio. He is full of life, right up until the moment he dies.

"A plague...on both...your houses," he gasps out, clutching the mortal wound Tybalt has given him with a switchblade. He turns, dazed and disbelieving, and mutters, "They have made worm's meat of me." Then he wheels back around, summoning his remaining strength and screams in the white-hot fury of one young and dying before his time, "A PLAGUE...ON BOTH....YOUR HOUSES!"

It's one of the most arresting moments of cinema I've seen, and hands-down Shakespeare's best curse, with Caesar's ghost in Julius Caesar coming in a distant second with the ominous, "Thou shalt see me at Phillippi."

The Mercutio in the Illinois Shakespeare Festival production we just saw was very, very good (played by a young actor named Santiago Sosa) and his moment to utter is the moment I always wait for in Romeo & Juliet, one of my own personal tests by which I judge the performance, asking myself Did that raise the hairs on the back of my neck and render me momentarily incapable of inhaling?

Santiago Sosa did a creditable job, although I have to say like there's nothing better than the banshee scream under Luhrmann's direction. Yet. I'll be happy to attend as many performance as I can, so as to compare and contrast, of course. My pleasure.

Here, for your own pleasure, is the very clip I've been talking about.

(And by the way, Katie and I both agreed that the Illinois Shakespeare Festival is a very worthy off-year trip for my students and their parents, great for the summers when we aren't traveling to Ontario.)

A moment of unabashed and guilt-free gloating

2011-07-30T20:36:00.006-05:00

HA! HA HA HA! There something I've wanted to be able to do for a long time here at InsomniMom, something I couldn't do because Blogger was being glitchy and weird and not allowing people to fix this particular problem that was occurring with their blogs. There were hundreds and hundreds of pleas in the Help center, begging the powers-that-be to get this thing fixed already. But yesterday? I just happened to check back and Blogger has resolved the issue with their software and I FIXED THE PROBLEM and if the problem occurs again, I CAN FIX IT THEN, TOO. So HA HA HA, stupid mean troublemakers. HAAAA!!!!

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger

2011-07-30T06:51:00.004-05:00

HGTV's reality show House Hunters is one of my favorite television programs, but honestly, I don't know why. It drives me mad. It makes me speak to my TV, an inanimate object. It sometimes makes me change the channel with a belligerent click of a button so that I can watch something more edifying and soothing. Like Hell's Kitchen, or one of those cable news shows where people with opposing viewpoints gather around a table and interrupt one another with their shrill bickering.

The reason why House Hunters makes me so crazy is that it features a nearly endless parade of young couples -- and I'm sure they're thoroughly vetted to make sure the annoyance factor is firmly in place, because I am just that cynical -- who demand endless luxury on budgets that are neither.

For instance, the girls and I were watching a show filmed in Virginia a couple of days ago. They were newlyweds; he was an Army veteran whose back had been injured while he was serving in Iraq; she was working somewhere, obviously, but also studying for her Master's degree.

Their budget was about $230,000. The realtor, with a pained expression, expressed severe doubt that they were going to be able to find a house that met all their needs in that price range. That marked the first time in the half-hour program that I was so happy that my life's path didn't lead me to trying to get people to buy houses, because I'd be in jail.

The man was hoping for a large soaking tub, preferably with jets, so that he could continue the re-hab on his back at home, which I thought was reasonable. But he also wanted a swimming pool. She wanted a lot, starting with stainless steel appliances. Granite counter tops. Two sinks in the master bathroom. Hardwood floors. And pretty much every other big-ticket item you can think of.

So the realtor did his best. He took them to two different model homes where the items they desired were upgrades from the basic package. The couple was loudly horrified when they were told that those hardwood floors throughout the entire downstairs? A $7,000 upgrade. The granite counter tops instead of the standard upscale laminate? A $4,000 upgrade. An extra sink in the master bathroom? A $2,000 upgrade, due to the fact that more plumbing had to be run and the entire room's floor plan reconfigured to accommodate the longer vanity.

Outrageous! they exclaimed. Just totally, like, not fair!

In the end, they chose one of the model homes and added so many upgrades, they went over their original budget by some $30,000. Because, you know, black appliances (the standard package) are entirely unacceptable. So now they've got shiny luxe surfaces to prepare their generic boxes of mac-and-cheese on.

The second couple, in an episode filmed in North Carolina, had a bigger budget, but no more sense than the first couple. They, too, were rigid in their expectations and there was no intention of finding a house that met their basic needs -- four bedrooms, big back yard for the kiddies, open floor plan, office space for her home-based business -- that they could work to upgrade as they lived their lives. No, it all had to be there RIGHT NOW, THIS VERY MINUTE, even if it strained their budget to bursting.

One house was entirely eliminated from the running because the solid-surface kitchen counter tops weren't granite and the sink? It was not under-mounted.

"Oh, well, then, BURN IT DOWN," I said to the television. "Seriously. Light a match and set fire to that dump."

"Mom," cautioned Meelyn in a wary voice. "You know how you get..."

"It's their fault," I mumbled irritably.

The next property, a new build, caused the couple to view their hard-working, unappreciated realtor with barely disguised disdain. "There is....carpet," the woman of the couple said, uttering the word 'carpet' in the same tone that another person might have said 'hard-packed dirt.' "There is...carpet...in this room."

The room in question was a space that was meant to be either a formal living room or a home office, neither of which is exactly incompatible with....carpet. And the carpet was not bad. This was a new house, after all, and so the carpet was pristine and unviolated by someone else's incontinent dog. It was a low pile rough oatmeal color, which I found attractive, but.....carpet.

"Well, that will just have to go immediately," her husband said impatiently. "We don't want....carpet."

The couple and their realtor made their way to the kitchen, which had black appliances, all brand new. As one, they turned to the real estate agent with expressions of incredulous horror.

"Well, THIS certainly isn't what we were expecting," the woman finally managed to say through tight lips.

"We have to have stainless steel," her husband elaborated. "We won't consider any property that doesn't have stainless steel appliances. And the master bedroom had only the one walk-in closet."

Now, see, if I were the realtor, I would have taken my clipboard and started beating them with it about their heads and necks. But instead, seated on the sofa in my living room, I shouted, "Get the gasoline cans! The kerosene! THE MATCHES! Burn that heap down and tie the realtor up and leave him to roast like a luau pig! How dare he show you a property without stainless steel appliances!"

"Mo-o-om...." sighed Aisling, "you remember that they can't hear you, right?"

In the end, that couple also went over their budget because living on tuna-noodle casserole seemed preferable to trying to scrape out an existence in a house -- one couldn't really call it a home -- with only one walk-in closet in the master bedroom. How could they subject themselves to that indignity?

Fortunately, there are just enough nice couples on House Hunters that I don't have to fall completely apart and sit there in my own living room (which has hardwood floors, the original ones to our 1880s house, underneath the carpet that covers them) biting the remote and tearing the stuffing out of the cushions. But, oh those horrible, smug people with their demands to have it all, right this very minute, unable to contemplate life in a standard kitchen! They make me insane.

I hope their stainless steel is a constant source of grief to them as they fight a losing battle with the fingerprints. I gain strength from this thought.

Advice from your mother

2011-07-29T13:02:00.002-05:00

This morning the girls and I were in the van, driving Aisling to work; Meelyn and I were going to drive on to do the weekly shop after we dropped her off. They had control of the radio and the station we were listening to was an alternative rock station out of Indianapolis with a morning drive program that proposed to allow listeners to call in with a problem, which the a.m. "personalities" and other callers would help them solve.

As we pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant where Aisling works, the woman deejay said, "And coming up after the break, we'll have some advice for Alyssa, who was wondering if she should break up with her boyfriend before he goes to jail."

I snorted. "What's the number of this radio station. I've got some advice for that girl."

"I don't know what the number is," Meelyn replied in a voice of airy innocence.

"I don't either, but even if we did know, we wouldn't tell you," Aisling added with searing honesty.

They know me so well. "Why not?" I asked, smiling.

"Well, because for one thing, you'd be on the air," Meelyn began.

"And for another thing, your voice would be broadcast out over a large portion of Indiana," Aisling continued.

"And for a third thing, you don't think my advice would be well-received," I finished for them. "What do you think I'd say to that girl?"

Meelyn gave a little sigh. "Well, first you'd say, 'Hon, you need to respect yourself enough to find a man worthy of your love.'"

"Yes," I nodded. "Carry on..."

"And then you'd give that speech about how for every loser guy in the world, no matter how addicted or lazy or mean to his mama or stupid or half-witted or criminal or no gumption (whatever that means) or ungrateful or hateful or abusive -- there is a whole line of women standing there in front of him, convinced that they're the only ones ever to understand him, that they can change him with the power of their love and things would be even better if they had two or three babies together," Meelyn enumerated.

"Yada yada yada," Aisling put in.

"Yeah, it almost sounds like I know what I'm talking about, doesn't it?" I said smugly.

"And THEN you'd say," Aisling went on strenuously, "that the absolute BEST TIME EVER to break up with your boyfriend is when he's on his way to jail."

I shrugged. "Well, it's not like you're sending him off to the Marines or something. Why on earth would a girl tie herself to some dope who's going to jail?"

"Yes, Mother, we agree with you," said Meelyn with finality.

"I should totally be running that radio show," I said, and kissed Aisling goodbye.

This just in...

2011-07-23T21:04:00.008-05:00

Remember these? I don't think I've seen pantyhose packaged in the actual L'eggs egg form since....the night of my high school graduation? Anyway, I was just browsing through the Femail section of the U.K. Daily Mail, and I have just discovered that panty hose are OUT, a total fashion no-no. Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge (the former Kate Middleton and new bride of Prince William) was excoriated with vigor in the Mail for wearing "nude tights," which the features editor severely claimed made her look "middle-aged and dated."

A couple of weeks ago, People online had an article with the breathless title "Is Kate Bringing Back Sheer Pantyhose?" which makes it sound as if she's hauling them in on a cargo ship and then driving around on a forklift in a warehouse, stacking pallets of hosiery.

I make no claims on being a fashionista, but I wasn't aware that tights, er....hose, ever went out of style. Are you telling me that businesswomen going to meetings and teachers in classrooms and female lawyers arguing cases in court, not to mention all the people going to church and funeral homes and fancy-dress dances are going to these places with bare legs? I know that our culture dresses down a lot and also that women don't wear skirts and dresses as often as they used to, but still. Still. I mean, not everyone has a perfect pair of pins that are ready to show off to the critical public eye.

What are you supposed to do with that scar you got from a bike wreck when you were fifteen? Or those veins on the backs of your knees? Or your pallid skin with variable hues that range from salt white to marble white to snow white? Well, I'll tell you: you're supposed to be smearing self-tanner on them, according to a How-To article I read on Yahoo. That way your undressed legs can go from Crayola orange to Sharpie orange to traffic cone orange, and won't that be a big improvement?

Nobody wants to wear those horrible "sun-tan" pantyhose from the seventies, but I thought the entire point of nude hosiery was to make your legs look, well, NUDE. As in, the color of your skin, with all the minor imperfections in texture and hue nicely covered up.

Why is that considered middle-aged?

If it is, then put me on the list with the duchess. When I wear skirts and dresses, I like that "nude tights" look.

My personal idea of hell on earth

2011-07-22T11:28:00.005-05:00

I was at our local YMCA this morning, dragging myself out of the pool after an hour of water aerobics (don't be too impressed - I'm a member of the Silver Splash class where the lady closest to me in age graduated from high school with Calvin Coolidge) and one lady said, as she slipped on her flip-flops and picked up her towel and swim cap, "I'm going camping with my son and daughter-in-law and grandkids this weekend, so I'm going home to take a shower."

We all made that "ahhhhhh!!!" noise associated with grannies getting to spend time with the grandkids and she continued, "I just feel like I never really get my best shower here, and since we're going to be gone until Sunday evening and I won't get a bath or a shower until then, I want to make it a good one."

"You won't get to take a shower until Sunday evening?" another lady asked dubiously. "You must be camping rough."

"Yes, with a tent and everything," said camping lady, "but it's worth it to be able to spend time with the kids!"

My heart sank down to my bare toes. Honestly, I managed to find one of the few men in this area who, due to experiences in the Army with camping outdoors during the winter, refuses to camp, fish, hike or shoot animals with gun or arrow, thus extracting myself from the possibility of close association with the great outdoors. I have brought Meelyn and Aisling up to fervently believe that Nature is best viewed through windows, behind which we can enjoy either the central air conditioning or the central heating, whichever is appropriate. But I'd never really considered until that moment that someday, they meet men who actually want to go outside and stay there, and those men may influence my sweet girls into thinking that spending all weekend out in this terrible 90 degree summer heat and sweltering in an airless tent and cooking on a teeny little Coleman stove (or worse yet, a campfire) and going showerless for days on end is a fun way to bond.

And they may drag my innocent grandchildren into that mess.

And! I, as a doting grandma, might have to GO WITH THEM and live in outdoorsy squalor in order to prove my devotion.

As I drove home from the YMCA, I pondered whether or not I actually love anyone in this world enough to voluntarily spend the weekend in a tent, unbathed. I don't think I do. I will pack them up the most awesome picnic basket ever, and even tuck in some citronella candles and an Aim-n-Flame. I will stand on my front porch to wave goodbye and shout, "I love you! Have a great time! See you on Sunday!"

But I don't think I can actually go along. Unless maybe my husband and I can somehow obtain one of them camper-truck things like in the picture above. It looks like that vehicle is big enough to at least have a sink where I can splash my face, brush my teeth and take a sponge bath. I could probably do that for a weekend, for the sake of my daughters and grandchildren.

But I'm telling you, I already don't like those sons-in-law.

Things that make you go "eeeewwwww...."

2011-07-21T17:03:00.005-05:00

So today for lunch I was scavenging around in the fridge looking for something to eat and I came across half a baked potato, left over from dinner the other night when the first half was enough and the second half too much.

"Tasty!" I thought, and pulled it off the shelf and popped it in the microwave.

While I was waiting for it to nuke, I got a package of shredded cheese out of that same fridge, and then happily remembered one of those little packets of Oscar Mayer bacon bits that was in the cupboard. A cheese and bacon potato (accompanied by a number of sliced jalapeno peppers, of course) sounded like a perfect lunch.

When the microwave timer dinged, I took out the potato and threw some shredded cheese and the bacon bits on it, added my hot peppers and a little salt and popped the top on a Diet Coke. It was really, really good.

Until I finished.

Getting up from the table, I picked up the packet of bacon bits, preparatory to putting them back in the cabinet. In doing so, my eye happened to fall on a sentence in red letters printed on the little zip-seal bag: BEST IF EATEN WITHIN FOURTEEN DAYS AFTER OPENING.

Oh dear, I thought. I know those things have been in there for at least three months. Maybe longer. I can't even remember when I bought them.

Which is when my eyes fell on the sentence directly below that one:

REFRIGERATE AFTER OPENING.

All of a sudden, my baked potato didn't seem so tasty. I've been waiting all afternoon with a sense of impending doom for the throwing up to start, but so far so good. Unless they make their way through my digestive tract and instead of throwy-uppy, I....

Oh, it just doesn't bear thinking about. Is it too late to get my stomach pumped?

When they heard about the new Mass translation coming this Advent...

2011-07-11T13:53:00.004-05:00

...these sisters went a-frolicking! Seriously, a lot of us are looking forward to the new/old Mass, which is making its debut on November 27, 2011, the first Sunday of Advent. The reason why I call it new/old is because it is a more consistent translation of the Latin Mass, which was used throughout the world until the 1960s, when it became possible for people to pray the Mass in the vernacular: French in France, German in Germany, English in the United States, Spanish in Mexico. However, the general thought has always been that the Novus Ordo (New Order) translation was a bit, well, hippy-dippy.

For instance, during the Mass when the priest would say, "Dominus vobiscum" in Latin, the reply from the congregation was, "Et cum spiritu tuo." That means, "May the Lord be with you," the response being, "And with thy spirit."

In the Novus Ordo Mass, the priest would say in English, "May the Lord be with you," with the congregation responding, "And also with you."

Hmmm...

Mike McLeish, my fellow teacher in our parish's seventh/eighth grade religious education class, told our students one Sunday, "It's as if the phrase was dumbed down a bit, if you see what I mean. 'And also with you' isn't really a good translation of 'And with thy spirit.' It's a bit...." He looked over at me.

"Informal," I supplied.

One of our students, a smart eighth grader with a great sense of humor, spoke up: "It's sort of like the priest saying, 'May the Lord be with you,' and the congregation saying, 'And RIGHT BACK ATCHA.'"

Yes. Just exactly like that. So splash and leap and kick in the waves, Sisters! Rejoice in the coming of a new translation! But seriously, I would draw the line at jet-ski rental.

NUNDAY: It's a grand old flag

2011-07-04T08:46:00.005-05:00

This Dominican sister is proud of being an American, waving her flag to welcome Pope Benedict XVI to the United States a few years back. There's just something very nice, I feel, in seeing a sister in a traditional habit seated amongst all the ordinary business suits and dresses. I liked this nun in particular because even clothed in the garb that Dominican religious have worn for hundreds of years, she's still very much the modern woman, so excited to see Il Papa, she's even brought her binoculars.

Bridesmaid revisited

2011-07-01T12:47:00.007-05:00

My mom raised me to be a smiler, and also that it is a social solecism to point my finger in the shape of a gun and say "POW!" when they annoy me. So I go about smiling at folks, even when the best they offer me in return is a grim look from a sour face.

It used to be that you could generally coax a smile from another woman, and elderly ones would often say things like "Hello" or "Good morning" and men will generally nod pleasantly. But these days, it's hard to raise a smile from anyone and I'm starting to feel a bit stupid, pushing my shopping cart through the grocery store and beaming at people like a fruitcake. People never smile back anymore, and instead look at me at best as if I have some truly unfortunate assortment of dental problems going on (and I don't - I use tooth-whitening toothpaste and I wore braces on my teeth from ages 18-22 and I've only had one cavity in my whole life, so there's nothing there to offend anyone) or at worst as if they'd like to knock me down in the aisle and roll their buggies over my head.

So I'm thinking maybe I'll be able to wake people up a little if I start doing the finger-pistol thing.

What do you think? Grin or gun?

Summertime, when the livin' is easy

2011-06-30T09:08:00.004-05:00

This school year, unarguably, was one of the longest and most painful the girls and I have ever endured. Looking back on it, we can't really figure out why. I mean, it was largely the same as every other school year we've had. But it was a long one. And the winter was just abysmal. And, as high school students, they're doing work that's harder and takes more time and is just more involved than it was back when they were just little things, of course. So why, we don't know. We're just glad it's over. And to that end, when school let out, we fled to the pool as if wild dogs were snapping and snarling at our heels.

So that's where we've been: poolside. At first, we sat straight up on our lounge chairs, our eyes glazed and looking straight ahead in fixed stares, murmuring through stiff lips "Snow. The snow. The snowthesnowthesnowthesnow. THE ICE! THE ICE AND THE SNOW!"

Then we progressed to being able to lean back, although our limbs were all still rigid.

Then, as the sun began to warm our skin and our muscles and our weary bones, we relaxed. And we've been lugging in our favorite cooler stuffed with apples and peaches and popsicles and water bottles and diet soda and turkey sandwiches and those handy little one-hundred calorie snack packs. And we've been staying for hours, lathering ourselves with sunscreen and swimming laps and reading our library books and deploring -- DEPLORING! -- the hideous country music station that someone in the swim club's main office has decided would make a nice change from the "oldies" station (meaning "the music I listened to in high school") we'd all previously been enjoying.

We've been relaxing. Vacationing. Recovering.

You should see my tan.

Of parental concern

2011-06-13T05:49:00.004-05:00

Sometimes it is extra-difficult to parent teenagers. You want them to have enough life experience so that they won't flounder helplessly out there in the big world of a college campus. But then again, you want to limit that life experience in a number of crucial ways, sometimes because you remember from your own painful experiences, or also because the state of the news today and how it tends to stand your hair on end.

Along the way, as your kids make friends, you get to know those kids and their parents, and you hope as your children's friendships develop that you're going to be able to trust the friends' parents to basically have the same goals and values that you do. I mean, we've all heard about the parents who have that notion that kids are going to drink anyway, so "they might as well drink at our house where they can be safe and where we can confiscate their car keys." Which is, let me say, a FABULOUS parenting philosophy until someone wanders off and drowns in the neighbors' pool. Or falls off a second story deck onto the patio below. And just for the record, without mincing any words, if you're one of those parents, my husband and I think you're an idiot and a criminal and our kids won't be visiting.

It's fairly easy to keep your kids away from people like that, although I have to say that home schooling has probably helped us a lot in this respect; our girls' friends are mostly other home schooled kids, and the parents of their public and private schooled friends are generally the more conservative type who'd never dream of doing something as boneheaded as deliberately serving alcohol to a group of minors.

But here's a problem I've come across several times as the girls have grown older and it's one that worries me a lot. This affliction is one that besets Christian parents, both Catholic and Protestant, and it's one that makes me utterly helpless with anger and turns me into the kind of mother who has to tell her children "No, absolutely not. You cannot spend the night at their house" much more often than I want to.

Because it isn't my kids' fault when adults are stupid, but they're the ones who end up suffering.

The affliction I'm speaking of is this: "My kids have been raised in a Christian home and they're very devout themselves, so I know I can trust them to behave in a Christlike manner and uphold the morality of Christianity in general and our home in particular."

This is a hard one. Because I really do trust my kids. I think Meelyn and Aisling are wonderful girls and I'm with them pretty much every hour of the day (or at least in near proximity) that they're not sleeping or working. I'm completely convinced that their relationship with Jesus is real and it's a relationship they experience personally on a daily basis; He's not just someone they take notice of in passing on Sundays as they go forward to receive Communion with a casual and disinterested "Hey, Jesus. What's up?"

However, I also know they're human. And they're young. Since they're young humans, there are things that my husband and I, as responsible parents, need to be on the lookout for, to protect them. Because we don't want bad things -- including unintentional bad things -- to happen to them.

The latest problem that's come up had to do with the prom. Aisling was invited to spend the night at a friend's house to have kind of an afterglow, where several girls could sit around eating popcorn and deconstructing every single minute of the evening. The friend's family lives on the opposite side of Indianapolis, and we had plans the next day that were going to make it difficult to drive all the way to the west side of the city to get her, so I told her no, she couldn't go this time. She was disappointed, but Aisling is a good girl and she understood the logistics of our schedule the next day and didn't kick up much of a fuss.

I'm so glad we didn't let her go. Because it turned out later that the friend's parents had a boy/girl after prom sleepover that night.

I heard later from another mother that the boys slept on one floor of the house and the girls slept on another, but they were all accessible to one another, of course, because they were under the same roof of a single family dwelling, albeit a big honkin' house. But I heard from Aisling that her particular friend, the girl whose house this was, stayed up all night with her date, cozily ensconced in the family room, and talked until dawn.

First of all, let me say this: If the girl told Aisling that nothing sexual happened between her and her boyfriend there on the sofa, I feel I have no choice but to believe her. I know the girl vaguely -- she's been here a couple of times for sleepovers -- and she seems to be a very nice girl. I know a lot of people would just brush this off and say, "Well, it was definitely a provocative situation, but nothing happened so just let it slide." But I don't roll that way, I just don't and I'm too far gone in this parenting thing to start letting situations like this slide now. My point is, something could have happened so easily. Not because the girl and her boyfriend are bad kids. Not because they don't love Jesus with their whole little hearts. Not because they're (theoretically) committed to staying chaste before marriage, which is what I have always assumed other Christian parents of my generation were teaching their kids with something more enlightened than what my parents told me, which was, "Don't have sex because you might get pregnant and we'll kill you."

My beef in this boy/girl sleepover situation isn't nearly so much with the kids as with the adults.

First of all, as I told Aisling when we were discussing the decision to just have her come home after prom, is there really anything wrong with just going back to your own house and falling asleep in your own bed while drowsily recalling all the lovely events of the evening? I really deplore this part of our culture, which has been around since I was in high school, where the prom just isn't a formal dance, but a huge cultural event that calls for dinner beforehand and then the actual dance, then an after-prom party, then an early breakfast cooked by several tired mothers before everyone heads home at seven o'clock in the morning. Often there's the rental of a Hummer limo involved, and not just the one formal gown, but also the cocktail dress for the after-party and a casual outfit for breakfast. It wears me out.

Secondly, this boy/girl sleepover thing strikes me as incredibly stupid, almost as dumb as renting a room at a hotel for a bunch of prom attendees to share. And it's even dumber when the kids in question have been raised in Christian homes where the virtue of chastity has been explained and taken somewhere beyond theory and into actual practical experience as the kids have grown older. Because we all know what can happen, right? An emotionally extravagant evening like the prom, the glamour and romance of formal gowns and tuxedos and dancing in a beautiful place with lots of friends around...and then the intimacy of hours spent together unchaperoned, in the small hours of the night. We all know what can happen. WE KNOW IT.

So why put our children -- and someone else's child -- in the way of temptation? Why would an adult do that? If sex outside of marriage is wrong, and most traditional Christians agree that it is, and we've been coaching our kids to save their virginity for their future spouses (and, as a bonus, avoiding unintended pregnancy and/or disease), then why put them in a situation where their self-discipline is going to put to a test that they might not be able to endure?

It's like saying to a kid, "Look, I know you're really, really hungry. And I know that I've told you that this big dinner, this thick, juicy slice of prime rib cooked to perfection and baked potato with melting butter and a crisp, green salad with garlic croutons and the best and richest blue cheese dressing, topped off with French silk pie, this is food that is for certain occasions only, not just any time you want to sit down and indulge. But listen, I'm going to put all this food on the table in front of you and I want you to sit close enough that you can see it and smell it, but DO NOT TASTE IT. Don't even think of taking one single bite. Because that would be all kinds of wrong, and if you do, I'll be so disappointed in you and so will your dad, and not only that, it will also be a sin. So don't even think about it, all right? Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go set the table."

It's not right and it's not fair. It's wrong to do this kind of thing to teenagers. It's immoral. And no Christian person with a brain in his or her head would ever do something like this, especially if they'd have the gall to be dismayed when their fifteen year old gets pregnant. Because she was a good girl! He was a good boy! And so much was expected of them, what with how they'd been brought up and all, as Christians!

This is the concern we've had lately. And this is why Aisling, who really likes this girl, can't go to sleep over at her friend's house. Not because the friend is a bad girl, but rather because her parents can't be trusted. Their judgement isn't sound. We don't know them all that well anyway, which is a bit of a strike against them these days. But now? Now that we know they feel that there's nothing wrong with hosting boy/girl sleepovers? They are off our list, forever. Let them do their social experimenting with someone's else kids, if other someones are thoughtless enough to let them do it.

Plus, I'm really mad at them for making my job as a Christian mother even harder than it already is. They've given me one more thing that I have to say NO about in a list of no's that's already a long one. And they've let down our side, the side of Christian home schooling parents who I'd imagined before to be fairly well united on major things like this. The only bit of relief I have in the whole situation is that at least they're not Catholics. That would have just added insult to injury and this situation's already bad enough as it is.

This is one of the things we've been discussing a lot in our house lately.

RANDOM: In which I meet the Random Topic Generator in an attempt to get past my writer's block

2011-06-12T20:55:00.004-05:00

I've been suffering -- as have you, I'm sure -- from a terrible case of writer's block lately. It's not that I don't have ideas. It's just that every time I think about sitting down at my desk to write about them, they either seem too tedious to blather on about, or not funny enough, or not of general interest or just *yawn*.

My fellow blogger Amy came to my rescue by alerting me to the presence of a Random Blog Topic Generator, which turned out to be a great deal of fun. First, you pick a category from a range of suggestions, such as Current Events, Music, Politics, Health, Personal, Business and Recreation and then click the one that strikes your fancy. Because I'm just this kind of fussy little fart, I told myself that I could have three clicks: If I didn't like the first two random topics generated, I could move on to the next, but that I had to take the third one or the house would fall down. Yes, even at my age, I still play those little OCD games with myself, which is worrisome but it's too late to stop now and I can't afford therapy on our health insurance.

So my first two clicks were too hard. The first was "Which Do You Prefer: Classical or Baroque Music?" The lovely thing about this is that I DO KNOW THE DIFFERENCE between the two because I took piano lessons for twelve years. However, writing about it just left me cold. Although, for the record, I prefer baroque. Just so's you'll know. The second click generated this topic: "NATO countries." I had to get up from my desk, find an empty corner, and sit there, rocking and humming for a while. I managed to recover enough to crawl back to my desk by digging my elbows and my face into the carpet, knowing that I had to take whatever topic was generated next because THAT WAS THE RULE.

All a-tremble, I clicked. And the Random Blog Topic Generator fed me this one: "Getting a root canal."

So here we go!

Getting a root canal sounds like a terrible, terrible thing. I do know that it isn't quite the process it was, say, twenty years ago, and whenever I hear that someone I know has to get a root canal, I always jump in and say soothingly, "I hear it's not quite the process it was twenty years ago!" and then I offer to bring them some soup.

I know that my friend Beth has had to have a root canal, and my cousin Susie has had a root canal, and neither one of them threw a party to celebrate the good news when the dentist told them that he had to canal their roots or whatever it is that happens in a root canal, so I'm thinking that twenty years down the line or not, getting a root canal still isn't one of those memories you treasure in your heart and pull out to mull over during times of doubt and sorrow. Unless, of course, you were lucky enough to be pumped full of nitrous oxide like Susie was during her recent root canal; she solemnly assured me that nitrous oxide takes away all fear and inhibition, rendering the patient likely to say, "Doc, you don't have to just do this root canal - you can also take my sacred virtue if you'll just keep the good stuff coming."

Susie said her oral surgeon didn't take her up on the offer. She seemed disappointed, although I haven't yet been able to determine if that's because the laughing gas was such a treat, or if the surgeon was dishy.

At any rate, I still don't know what happens during a root canal or even why they're performed and I hope to retain that innocence for the rest of my life. So far, I've had one cavity and two abscessed wisdom teeth, plus I wore braces for four years, so I feel that I've had plenty, thank you.

Wow. this random blog topic generation-thingy is just wonderful. Thanks, Amy! IT HAS SET ME FREE.

Writer's block

2011-06-09T16:13:00.010-05:00

Or maybe typer's block would be more accurate? I can't think of anything at all I want to write about and I think it may be something to do with my middle-aged hormones -- and oh, look! All of my male readers just did a hasty click AWAYAWAYAWAY -- but everything just seems incredibly exhausting and overwhelming right now. I think it has also to do with the fact that a very strenuous school year just drew to a close, with only a few dibs and dabs of book work left for the girls to finish, and my Shakespeare class just wound up yesterday, and I've not been to the pool yet and I'm going through one of those times, in utter defiance of every good habit my poor mother taught me, where I honestly can't see the sense in making the bed in the mornings because we're just going to get back in it and mess it all up again anyway.

So I either need vitamins or I need some ideas for what to write. I can take care of the vitamin part, but if readers would like to send in some random thoughts that they might enjoy seeing addressed with mild snark, I'll give it a shot.

Foodie quote

2011-05-27T18:56:00.003-05:00

I'm currently reading through the cookbook titled Paula Deen's Kitchen Classics and found this quote in the forward that I really liked and agreed with, although I'm not really a Southern cook, per se. More like a Mom cook, but even Susie, born and bred south of the Mason-Dixon line, agreed that I am definitely not a Yankee cook. "I don't think there is such a thing," she sniffed.

Anyway, here's Paula's thought on down-home cookin' and it reminds me a lot of what Julia would likely say about French country cooking, and Dorie Greenspan too: "Southern cooking comes from within. We show our love to someone through the kitchen, through food. We bake a cake or a pie as a welcoming gift or a show of support in tough times. Southern cooking is comfort food. It's flavorful and filling and makes you feel good.

"It does not require a sophisticated palate. It's poor-man's food. Kids don't have to acquire a taste for it. They love it from the start. Southern dishes do not require split-second timing. They do not 'fall' in the oven. We don't go in for ornate presentation, either, or sculpted desserts. We just heap food on the plate."

That's what it's all about, isn't it? Country food is country food, no matter what country you're in. Just make sure you heap it on the plate.

copyright (c) 2005, Random House, New York

FRENCH FRIDAYS WITH DORIE: Spinach-Bacon Quiche

2011-05-26T19:15:00.002-05:00

I was working this afternoon on this recipe for the French Fridays with Dorie cooking group so that I could get it posted tomorrow. I made a pastry crust, got it all fitted into my quiche plate and assembled my ingredients: bacon, spinach, onion, garlic, eggs, heavy cream, some salt and pepper, parmesan cheese...quiches are generally pretty easy to put together and I'm glad about that, particularly today. Last night, you see, we had some of the worst thunderstorms I've ever quivered my way through, complete with tornado sirens and howling winds, hail and whirly, twirly clouds in the sky. It was quite a night and left me with a storm hangover: all day long I've been twitchy and dove for the downstairs bathroom -- a windowless interior room -- when an ambulance's siren wailed by outside.

Anyway, quiche is a lovely, comforting food and this one sounded so good. I finally have given up on Dorie's pastry crust because it just never turns out right for me. Instead, I tried one from Paula Deen's cookbook, Paula Deen's Kitchen Classics, and I'm happy to say that it turned out perfectly: easy to throw into the food processor, easy to roll, chill and then fit into my quiche plate. Plus it was delicious, flaky and light the way pastry is supposed to be. I don't know what it is about those Dorie Greenspan pastry crusts, but I just hate them. All that butter and shortening going into a crust that shrinks and tears and doesn't cook evenly is a bit of wastefulness that I find extraordinarily annoying.

So! Quiche! It wasn't until I had everything ready to go that I realized that the bag of spinach I bought last week? It was nowhere to be found. Did I actually buy it? Did I buy it and then didn't realize that the girls were making salads like busy little rabbits? I don't know.

What I do know is that I made a very delightful Spinach-Bacon Quiche with no spinach, and it was very good indeed.

Almost here.....

2011-05-26T17:00:00.002-05:00

The swim club opens this weekend. I'm so thrilled because it has been a long, long spring and an even longer winter and I wonder if anyone would think me odd if I fell to the decking, kissing it and weeping. Actually, on second thought, there might be a whole lot of people doing that very thing.

PSA from a deep, dark brunette

2011-05-25T09:01:00.004-05:00

This is a new hair color from John Frieda. I purchased the color called "Natural Medium Brown" in an attempt to stem the great grey tide that is overtaking my head, and let me say right here, thank you, recession, for making my life so vivid and full of new experiences, like coloring my own hair. Because without you, I never would have had the chance to try out this new foam hair color (messy, awkward; it's so much easier to use the L'Oreal or Ion from Sally's Beauty Supply, both of which have point-and-shoot applicators) and also to TURN MY HAIR BLACK.

Family

2011-05-24T17:06:00.004-05:00

A picture of the ol' home place, where Papa lives.

NUNDAY: And here you thought nuns could only play bingo

2011-05-23T15:54:00.002-05:00

My family plays this card game, Spoons, because it's an easy one for even the little ones to play. Although we found out that due to a certain ruthlessness in our genetic makeup, it became necessary to tell the little ones that not only could they not play with us, they couldn't even stay in the room where we were playing. Because my mother? She will wrench your wrist around on your arm and laugh while she's doing it in order to take possession of that last spoon.

I don't think this group of sisters plays quite that violently -- I don't see blood on anyone's habit -- but those flying hands lead me to believe that there's quite a spirited game in progress. Maybe if I'd found a picture of them taken later that day, one of them would have been in a sling? Who can tell. I doubt it, though. It would be very hard to say in confession, "I confess that I broke Sister Immaculata's pinky finger because she wouldn't give up the spoon." That would be difficult for anyone.

Prom Night - behind the scenes

2011-05-23T11:01:00.003-05:00

This picture, taken outside the Indiana Roof Ballroom at about 12:30 Saturday morning, is proof positive that the prom finally got here after months and months of waiting. We bought the tickets in late January. We bought the dresses in early May. We found the shoes, the jewelry, the desired hairstyles....as well as a glittery hair spray that made the girls' hair look like it had been sprinkled with diamonds. Everything was very lovely.

Unless you were at our house about ninety minutes before we left to take the girls to the dance.

You probably suspected that all had not gone smoothly, right? Because these things just never do. Formal dances exist, I believe, to give families practice for weddings, so that when a groomsman's shiny shoes aren't included with his tux, or when the cake turns out to be not exactly what the bride had asked for, or when certain individuals on one side of the family come to the celebration wearing faces more appropriate for a funeral with matching attitudes, or when the service is unaccountably messed up, or when the matron of honor turns out to be three months pregnant by the time the wedding rolls around and can just barely zip up her dress, people can deal with these things without flying into a thousand screaming pieces. I know, because all of the above things happened at my wedding. And see how normal and calm I am, all these years later?

Our only enormous problem with prom arose from something I told Meelyn she should do to treat herself, and that was have her makeup done by an associate at the local Salon Professional Academy. True, the associates are still students, I told her, but by the time they get to the point of being allowed to do prom makeup and hair, as the sign outside the academy advertised, they are competent and well-equipped to make a girl look like a fairy princess.

Or so I thought.

Aisling's appointment was first because she opted for the whole hair and makeup package. The associate who did her face came in, Aisling said, with an enormous suitcase fitted with different compartments for her huge collection of cosmetics. They talked about the look Aisling wanted -- pretty and pastel, no harsh colors -- and the student-artist went to work, creating a look that Aisling was thrilled with, and indeed she did look very lovely when the girls came home later.

But Meelyn, my poor Meelyn....

Meelyn was asked to work the lunch shift at the fast-food restaurant she's been employed at for the past couple of years: the manager is finding it difficult, despite these hard economic times, to find employees who will actually come in when they're scheduled to work, and then lift a finger once they're there. So Meelyn went in to pick up the slack, which meant that she didn't get to go for her makeup appointment until 3:30 (since her hair is short, she felt she could manage it by herself, unlike the updo Aisling had for her longer hair.) Meelyn drove home and took a quick shower and then set out for the salon, where I'd dropped Aisling off an hour before.

Thankfully, Aisling chose to sit in a nearby chair and watch Meelyn's makeup being done instead of sitting in the waiting area with her book: otherwise, we probably would have had to have Meelyn's face sandblasted to remove the thick layer of orange pancake makeup the technician -- not the same one who did Aisling's face -- trowelled on. While watching the student smear the awful stuff on her sister's face, Aisling, whose personality is more, well, forthright like mine, rather than sweet and more aquiescent like Meelyn's, said, "Uhhm, should you be trying to blend that a little more?" when a traffic-cone-colored line appeared along Meelyn's jaw.

"She looked at me and rolled her eyes," Aisling said indignantly. "She ROLLED HER EYES. Like she knew what she was doing over there with her stupid Cheeto foundation!"

"I was turned away from the mirror, so I didn't know anything bad was happening," Meelyn sobbed, bright-white tear streaks marked on her face. "But when Aisli said that about the blending, I could tell something was wrong. And then there was the look on her face, like she was about to scream or vomit or both."

Apparently, the technician replied, "That's all the foundation we have" and went back to slapping the orange on Meelyn's face. You see, the students at the salon academy have to supply their own beauty products, whether those products be for hair or skin or whatever, and somehow, someone missed the fact that Ms. Facepaint was not exactly ready for that advertised prom makeup, especially since her only other accoutrment was a black Sharpie marker, which she used to color in Meelyn's eyebrows.

That was the point where both girls cracked.

Aisling said, "Okay, that is just not right," and she went up to the front desk to request that an instructor be sent over to parlay. When the instructor came over and surveyed Meelyn, sitting tensely in the chair while the associate carried on with the eyebrows, she immediately offered the services of the same technician who did Aisling's makeup.

"The instructor turned me around in the chair so that I could see myself and I knew I was going to start bawling in front of them all, so I said I didn't want anyone else to work on me and that I just wanted to leave," Meelyn sniffled, scrubbing her face with a face cloth and about a pound of cleansing wash.

Horrified, I said, "You didn't PAY for this mess, did you?"

"No," said Meelyn. "I just walked out and Aisling scampered out behind me. She'd already paid for her hair and makeup."

The two of them spent the drive back across the city to our house with Meelyn sobbing and bewailing her fate and Aisling trying to hold back her own sympathetic tears as she came as close to the line between Cussing and Not Cussing as she could without incurring parental wrath, yelping the story out to me via mobile phone. When they flung themselves into the house, I was standing in the foyer, uselessly flapping my hands and trying to keep myself from reeling and writhing and fainting in coils.

"LOOK AT ME!" Meelyn screeched. "I'M A FREAK! HOW'S COME AISLI ALWAYS GETS THE GOOD PERSON AND I GET THE IDIOTS WHO WOULDN'T KNOW A MASCARA WAND FROM A GARDEN RAKE??!!"

I hugged her and she cried into my shoulder and I don't know if I'll ever get that dreadful orange color out of my top, so my Oxy-Clean has its work cut out for it. Meelyn charged up the stairs to go to work with the aforementioned facial wash and warm cloth and I threw myself into one of the chairs in the foyer, aghast.

"What on earth happened?" I asked Aisling. "How could this have gone so wrong?"

"That student was a....a....complete and total beeyotch," Aisling replied flatly.

I gave her a narrow-eyed stare. "Be very careful."

"Well, she was. How could you be that bad without knowing how bad you were? How could you agree to do someone's PROM MAKEUP and not even have a basic understanding of skin tones. And how could you make someone's eyebrows look like that?"

"I don't know," I responded wearily. "It's beyond me. But I do know that I'm going to place a strongly-worded telephone call just as soon as I can do it without screaming."

When Meelyn's skin was purged of the horrible color and the drawn-on black eyebrows, she and Aisling went to work and made her look very lovely indeed. How fortunate to have a young, fresh complexion, because I guarantee if we'd been trying to make ME look better, it just wouldn't. Have. Happened. Once her makeup was sorted and she was glowing, Meelyn did her hair, which looked very cute: a quick spritz with that really very nice glittery hairspray, and the two girls were ready to get into their formal gowns -- classic black and white for Meelyn, apple green for Aisling -- and then into their chariot (otherwise known as the minivan) to be taken to the ballroom for an evening of dining and dancing - the most grown-uppy fancy party they'd ever been to, especially without us.

We picked them up, yawning, five hours later. As we drove home, their happy voices spilled over each other as they told us about the dinner, their friends, the music, the dancing, and most of all, the beautiful Indiana Roof Ballroom, which looked like a fairyland with slowly swirling stars projected onto the floor all evening.

"When I went to the prom," I said reminiscently, "it was in the Girls' Gym at the high school and there were paper streamers hanging off the basketball goals."

"We know," said Meelyn. "You've told us a thousand times."

"Ten thousand," corrected Aisling.

"You both look beautiful, even after dancing for hours," my husband said. He took my hand and squeezed it. "Two young ladies, barely girls anymore."

"Unless they say 'beeyotch,'" I declared.

NUNDAY: iPhones are for everyone

2011-05-16T15:37:00.003-05:00

"Sister Maria Josef, have you downloaded that iPod app so that you can pray the Divine Office without a breviary?"

"No, Sister Catherine Michael, I've been too busy checking to see what nuns were being featured today on InsomniMom, so OH MY SAINTS AND WIMPLES, IT'S US! LOOK!"

May I?

2011-05-16T15:24:00.002-05:00

It's May, the glorious, blooming month of May. The month when our school year, like everyone else's, starts winding down, but in lots of ways the "winding down" is more like an application of sharp, pointy spurs than a gradual lessening of activity that winds up on Memorial Day weekend with a graceful fall into a hammock.

No, we are going all-out around here. The girls, at my insistence, have to finish every last chapter down to the final period in every book they have. Firstly, because I remember what it was like as a public school teacher, feeling so frustrated because there was never, ever enough time to complete a textbook. Could I honestly say that my students had taken a complete course in American Literature when they didn't finish the last four-chapter unit in the book? Maddening. Secondly, home schooling is really expensive and I want to know that we're getting every last penny's worth out of those books, darn it!

Thirdly, I'm a tiger mom. My friend Shaun called me that last week and I was thrilled. I admit that I have worked the girls really hard: they take about eleven subjects per semester and doing so has given them opportunities that they never would have had in either public or private school. Using the Indiana Core 40 webpage at the website of the Indiana Department of Education, I planned coursework for them that would give them the best education we could manage, so I feel like it's only fair to make sure they work to the back cover of every book. Rowr!!!

So they are working at top speed, remembering that I (tiger-mom) grade them on the 96-100 = A grading scale, trying to finish their books before our last day, which is Tuesday, May 31. On Wednesday, June 1, they're hoping to start Chemistry as a summer school course. Whew.

I am in the midst of preparing transcripts and we're all waiting with bated breath for Mee's SAT scores to show up on May 26. It doesn't leave a lot of time for blogging.

Typing is difficult for tigers, after all.

NUNDAY: Putt putt putt

2011-05-08T23:50:00.003-05:00

Who knew the cloister's grounds included a nine-hole Nancy Lopez course for the nuns to use during recreation? (And don't you love those hats?)

It's been a longish kind of week...

2011-05-08T20:29:00.005-05:00

It's been one of those weeks -- a seven-day period in which I have been called, several times, to exercise a love for the human race that I do not feel. Mostly by not killing someone, because I hear that kind of decisive action is frowned upon by 1) God; and 2) society, at least the kind of society I have been participating in during my forty-something years. And wish to keep enjoying, unless I get a better offer to move to a desert and become a hermit. I would like to think I'm not alone in this and not just wandering in a MURKY HAZE OF MENOPAUSAL ANGST, but sometimes I feel terribly alone. Everyone else seems so....nice. Except for the people I'd like to kill, who are idiots, every last one of them. Ain't that always the way?

NUNDAY: Algebraic mayhem

2011-05-02T11:38:00.002-05:00

Here in this picture we have one Sister (N), a number of swarming children (X and Y) and some hidden Easter eggs. What combination of N + (X + Y) equals the moment when Sister yells, "Brian Joseph Casey! You give that basket back to Mary Clare RIGHT NOW! And Christopher! CHRISTOPHER! Stop eating those eggs! They've been unrefrigerated for seven hours! And....and....JUST EVERYBODY STOPPPPPPPPPP!!!!"

Ooops. Too late.

A typical conversation between my mother and me

2011-04-28T19:11:00.003-05:00

[Standing in the lobby of a restaurant, waiting for a table]

Me [finding some change in the pocket of my rain coat] : Here, would you like a penny?

Mom [coyly]: Is that for my thoughts?

Me [smirking]: No. Because I know you don't have any.

Mom: Why, you.....[grabs penny out of my hand and throws it with deadly accuracy into my cleavage]

Me: You are such a spaz. BUT! I have another penny! [triumphantly hold another coin up]

Mom [grabbing the collar of her coat and holding it closed while emitting an ear-piercing shriek]: AAAAAAAAGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

[Diners turn and look at us both just as I throw the penny at my mother, which hits her harmlessly in the arm and falls to the floor with a faint jingle in the sudden silence of the restaurant.]

Mom [as soon as the diners return to their meals and conversation, in a low voice]: SUCKAH!!

A typical conversation between Aisling and me

2011-04-25T16:31:00.003-05:00

[In the van, driving to a babysitting gig at the church]

Me: I am so hungry. I didn't have a chance to eat anything before we left the house.

Aisling: Why don't we stop and get a cup of coffee?

Me: Because a cup of coffee doesn't have bacon in it. And besides, we're running late because you were upstairs singing a Taylor Swift song while you were doing your hair and you couldn't hear me hollering at you.

Aisling [with a palpable lack of sincerity]: I'm sorry.

Me: *rolls eyes*

Aisling: Hey, I have a protein bar in my purse! Do you want to share it with me?

Me: Is it one of the kind that tastes like a handful of leaves covered with carob?

Aisling [rummaging through her purse]: No, it's one of the good ones, you know, that hardly has any protein in it.

Me: Oh, no, that's okay. You save it.

Aisling: Oh, good. Because I just remembered that I gave it to Daddy yesterday.

NUNDAY: Celebration!

2011-04-25T16:27:00.004-05:00

I love this picture of a rosy-cheeked Benedictine sister throwing a double handful of colorful flower petals into the air with a wild whoop of joy. Either that or the demure sister standing next to her just gave her a pinch.

So great a Redeemer

2011-04-18T14:07:00.005-05:00

Holy Week is here, in all its remembrance of mourning as we add our sufferings to the sufferings of Jesus (Col. 1:24,25) along with all the sweet nuns, shedding their innocent tears on behalf of the Bridegroom....but with the promise of triumph to come.

NUNDAY: Experiencing the Nun Run

2011-04-11T09:34:00.004-05:00

To make you smile this morning, here's a picture of two young Sisters of St. Francis participating the the 2007 Nun Run, sponsored by the Diocese of Milwaukee. From what I have read, while there are actual nuns in the annual Run, there's very little running, unless you count the kind that happens in a 15-passenger van as it shuttles between each of four or five participating abbeys. The Nun Run was put together in order to spark interest in vocations to the religious life, with young women signing up to visit several different congregations on one mad weekend, getting a taste of what each group of sisters is all about.

Biased thought below; you are forewarned:

(As a thought of my own, I'd like to add that, in checking out the pictures of the four participating congregations from 2007, three of them were plain-clothes nuns and in each group, the youngest sister looked to be about a thousand years old and counting. Whereas with the Sisters of St. Francis, who are garbed in the traditional habit to set themselves apart from the world, marked as different and making a silent testimony of their sacrifices for the good of the world, the vocations seem to be coming along a a fine pace, something like the Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who keep frantically adding on buildings to their convent so that postulants will have a place to lay their heads at night.

What I surmise in all of this is that people are tired of seeing nuns in velour track suits at Mass, which is what I saw at the abbey of the Sisters of St. Joseph in Elwood, Indiana a few years back. The chapel was half full before Mass, but there weren't any nuns there and the girls and I were disappointed. "Where are all the sisters?" I whispered to an elderly lady, thus garbed, sitting next to me, who was occupying her time before Mass by crocheting a scarf. She looked at me in surprise. "We ARE the sisters."

Oh. And I just love your tasteful aquamarine blue exercise gear, Sister. J.C. Penney, was it? Big sale at Kohl's? Yeeeeeshhhh.....

So what I'm saying is, if you look at a nun and you can't tell she's a nun, what is the point of being a nun? THERE'S SOMETHING IMPORTANT MISSING THERE.)

FISH ON FRIDAYS: The Tuna Casserole Project

2011-04-08T12:09:00.003-05:00

This photo is proof positive that you can use rotini in your tuna casserole -- you can use any darn shape you want to; it doesn't have to be the traditional elbow macaroni -- and it is still going to be ugly and make your house smell like a bait shop and taste like, well, tuna casserole.

Somebody turn the garbage disposal on. I'm bringing in the plates.

French Fridays with Dorie: Garlicky Crumb-Coated Broccoli

2011-04-08T12:08:00.002-05:00

[In which I do nearly everything wrong, but the recipe turns out well anyway;
thank you, Dorie.]

So, you'd think that a recipe featuring steamed broccoli and six other simple ingredients - bread crumbs, garlic, butter, salt & pepper and lemon zest -- would be pretty much foolproof, right?

Probably would be, as long as you're not counting this particular fool.The only thing I did right through the entire fifteen minute recipe was steam the broccoli correctly.

Here's the run-down: Steam broccoli until it can be pierced with a fork. In the meantime, gently saute the garlic in the butter. DO NOT ALLOW THE GARLIC OR THE BUTTER TO BROWN. Add the crumbs and toss until gently toasted. Salt and pepper the crumbs to your taste. ADD THE LEMON ZEST. Stir, then add the broccoli and toss to coat the florets in crumbs. Serve.

I had the crumbs and the butter. Garlic, yes. I had the salt and the pepper. I didn't have the broccoli, which I think one could argue is a necessary ingredient in a recipe titled "Garlicky Crumb-Coated Broccoli," but I remedied that shortly before it was time to get to cookin'. But I forgot the lemon.

It was while I was frantically searching the fridge for the lemon I'd neglected to buy when I was right there in the produce department of the grocery, buying the broccoli, that the butter and the garlic got brown. My head was deep in the fruit drawer, my hands pawing through some apples and plastic clamshell of grapes, when all of a sudden I thought, "Wow, that butter smells brown. And so does the garlic."

I bumped my head on the refrigerator door and then hit my elbow on that very same door in a get-to-the-stove-fast maneuver that could have been choreographed by Cirque du Soliel if it hadn't involved my yelling, "Ow! OW!" At the stove, I noted dismally that the butter and the garlic were indeed too brown. Not burned, no, but brown.

The crumbs went into the skillet and were duly salted and peppered: I gave up on finding them lemon and resorted to the use of ReaLemon, a fridge staple that I have a love-hate relationship with. Hate, because it's nowhere near the real, fresh thing; love because of forgetting to buy lemons and well, LEMON SQUARES. Anyway, it will do in a pinch and I sprinkled the crumbs lightly. After than, it was a simple manner to get the broccoli from the microwave steamer, give it a quick pat with a paper towel, and add it to the skillet to toss it with the buttery seasoned crumbs.

It had, I thought, a very nice presentation. That's not one of my best pictures, but there it is up above, posting next to the cheeseburger I ate for dinner. The girls and I liked it a lot, but my husband allowed that he prefers his broccoli with cheese sauce. A keeper recipe, for certain.

NUNDAY: Watch your ankles

2011-04-04T13:06:00.003-05:00

Upon first looking at this picture, you may have thought that these Franciscan nuns were participating in some arcane Catholic ritual (with Our Lady of the Greenturf and the Wooden Mallets watching in the background) or maybe doing some kind of exercise to help them gain their strength for rapping the knuckles of naughty little boys in the classroom. Neither is right; these nuns are playing croquet and I'm thinking that there's nothing like a long-skirted habit to allow a person to cleverly conceal an opponent's ball and just....move it a few inches farther away from the wicket, right in the path of Sister Mary Joseph's dead-on swing and....*WHAM*

French Fridays with Dorie: Quinoa, [Dried] Fruit and Nut Salad

2011-04-01T14:27:00.007-05:00

Quinoa, o quinoa! Little did I know how difficult it would be to track you down! I went to four different groceries and did everything but put on a deerstalker hat and carry a magnifying glass à la Sherlock Holmes, trying to track you down, you grain-that-was-a-staple-of-the-ancient-Incas, pronounced KEEN-wah, mild and almost bland in your flavor!

After I'd driven all over town, I discovered that I should have sought you out in a health food store. Bugger.

ANYHOO, I went back to the first grocery I'd visited on my quest and bought a humble box of couscous. I am familiar with couscous, using it in place of rice (which takes much longer to cook) in several dishes, and it was there patiently waiting for me. So, KEEN-WAH, I made a very nice salad, no thanks to you, you big snob lurking there on the health food store's shelves.

By the time all that was over, I'd run out of energy to cook, so it was a good thing this nice little salad was easy to prepare. Dorie advised using a number of different dried fruits and nuts to add taste, color and texture, so I used dark raisins, diced apricots and dried cranberries for the fruit and slivered almonds, chopped walnuts and sunflower seeds for the nuts. There was a light dressing made from ginger, olive oil and lemon juice to pour on after the couscous was stirred together with the fruit and the nuts and then all that was left to do was plunk it on the kitchen counter to give the flavors a chance to blend.

That time spent on the counter was the longest part of the recipe; the second longest was the part where the couscous had to cool to room temperature. So if you're looking for a salad that can be made with minimal effort on your part, but which yields a delicious flavor and an appealing appearance, this is your dish.

This salad was a recipe that I enjoyed very much and I'd definitely make it again. For one thing, it had a lot of eye-appeal, the EXACT AND COMPLETE OPPOSITE of that Tuna Noodle Casserole I posted below, which looks to be the color and texture of Elmer's School Paste. If you'd like to see the casserole but you're not on my main page, go down to the index and click on the FISH ON FRIDAYS link. But you may not want to

I made our individual salads in tiny bowls that I lined with a pretty bed of spring mix salad greens, placing about a half cup of the salad on top It looked really nice, but it tasted even better. The texture is very interesting, being both chewy and crunchy at the same time, but not in a way that interfered with one's ability to chew and swallow without choking, as some foods do, my primary example being Ants on a Log, that Food of Death posing as a delightful childhood snack-fave. The couscous had a very slight grainy texture that added some interest as well, but the graininess is so small that it's not as if you were working around it and thinking, "Oh my....CRUNCH and CHEW and GRAIN...FIND ME A NAPKIN!"

And then there was the taste, to which the couscous (and, I presume, the quinoa) didn't add a whole lot. It was there, I suppose, to add body. You can detect a slight butteriness from the couscous, but mostly what you're tasting is the dried fruit and the nuts, bathed in that delicious little dressing bath. I'm not sure what it is about lemon juice, ginger and olive oil that made such a tasty component to the salad; all I can say is that it was brisk without being sour, a very spring-and-summer sort of dressing.

Tell you what - this salad reminded me a lot of the Birdseed Salad that Carol and I enjoy so much at Stream Cliff Farm. It's a broccoli-onion-raisin-sunflower seed salad that's also known as Amish Broccoli Salad, depending on whether you're at Stream Cliff Farm or not. Although the ingredients are different (except for the raisins and the sunflower seeds), there's still that same element of texture and freshness. Birdseed/Amish Broccoli Salad is pretty common here in the midwest, so if you live here, you may well have eaten it. And if you've eaten it and liked it, then you'll probably like Quinoa, Fruit and Nut Salad as well. Alors, give it a try.

FISH ON FRIDAY: The Tuna Casserole Project

2011-04-01T05:40:00.003-05:00

This tuna casserole recipe makes use of one of my favorite small kitchen appliances: the slow-cooker. I read the recipe, bewildered, wondering what it was about tuna casserole that would need four to six hours to cook. I mean, noodles? Maybe eleven minutes in boiling water. The peas, even frozen ones, cook by themselves while the casserole is in the oven. The tuna itself is already cooked -- I got a sudden mental image of a Midwestern housewife cramming an entire raw tuna, head, fins and all, into her Crock Pot -- and couldn't come up with anything. And then, a moment of revelation: The purpose of cooking a tuna casserole in a slow-cooker is twofold:

1) To make absolutely, positively CERTAIN WITHOUT A SHADOW OF DOUBT that all ingredients have reached their maximum level of gluey gloppiness so that each individual helping separates itself from the serving spoon with a sticky sound and lands with a sound that falls somewhere between a *thwack!* and a *thmp* on the plate, and;

2) To make your house smell, like, REALLY, REALLY GOOD. I mean, awesome, with that canned tuna fishy smell permeating every porous surface. Mmmmm....

Peek-a-boo

2011-03-30T17:27:00.004-05:00

I was on my way from Hobby Lobby to Kroger today when my mobile buzzed.

"Hello?" I said after pressing my speaker phone button.

"Hi, honey," my husband said. "I'm on my way home from work. Where are you?"

"I'm headed over to the Cross Street Kroger."

"Well, I'm on Scatterfield getting ready to turn right on Eighth Street, so I'll be home in a few minutes."

Nonplussed, I looked around me. I was on Scatterfield at the Eighth Street intersection. And there he was in his familiar Chevy Blazer, phone pressed to his head.

"Hi!" I sang. "Look across the street."

I saw his head turn and I waved. "Well, hey there," he replied, laughing. "Good to see ya!"

"You too! I'll be home in twenty minutes."

"Okay...whoops, hey, my light just turned green. Love ya."

It's funny how, when you see someone who is as familiar to you as your own hand in an unexpected place, they look somehow different and you think with some sense of amazement, "That's MY HUSBAND." Or wife, sister, son, granny or whoever. It was a funny little incident that made me smile today.

Human nature [mine specifically]

2011-03-28T13:58:00.003-05:00

If I were, say, in a parking lot. And there was someone backing out of a parking space who did so in a manner that struck me as being boneheaded -- just shooting straight back with only a minimal fuss regarding mirrors, pedestrians, stray shopping carts and, incidentally, MY CAR -- I would say something like, "Geez, you ridiculous turd! SLOW DOWN and take a look around, how's about?"

But if there was another person who, while I was waiting to park in the space his or her car was currently occupying, s-l-o-w-l-y unloaded the groceries, climbed carefully into the car, laboriously fastened the seat belt, turned on the car and then checked every mirror twice," I would respond by muttering, "Yes, I've got ALL DAY to sit here waiting for you. Please take your time. Check your phone messages! Find another radio station! Take a look at your teeth in the vanity mirror! I've nothing urgent going on and it's SO MUCH FUN sitting here in this parking lot waiting on you to LEAVE, I'm just nearly beside myself with excitement."

I simply cannot be pleased. I don't think this speaks well for my character.

NUNDAY: The hour of mercy

2011-03-28T11:09:00.002-05:00

With so much crazy going on in the world right now, I wanted to take a moment to thank all the cloistered sisters -- mostly Poor Clares and Carmelites here in the United States, with a few Passionists, Redemptorists, Benedictines and Dominicans gathered into the mix -- for their vocation of prayer for the world. Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline, the good sisters are on their knees in their chapels, praying for us all.

If you want to pray too, check out Breviary.com for the Ordinary of the Divine Office by clicking here.

If you are in need of prayer, you can call the Carmelites in Terre Haute, Indiana and the nuns, who pray a minimum of six hours a day, will put you and your intentions on their prayer list. You can call their prayer line 24/7/365 and the number is 812-299-1410 or you can write to them the old-fashioned way at Carmelite Monastery, 19 Allendale, Terre Haute, Indiana 47802-4751.

The unbearable brightness of seeing

2011-03-25T13:45:00.005-05:00

I've been invited, on Facebook, to participate in something called "Earth Hour," an event of which I was previously unaware. And it's a good thing, as it turns out, because there's nothing like happenings like Earth Hour to exasperate the living [deleted to spare my mother's feelings] out of me and undo all the good that's being done in me by the application of greater amounts of prayer during Lent and some pre-menopause vitamins my husband picked up for me at GNC.

Earth Hour, which will happen tomorrow, March 26 at 8:30 p.m., is the time when we are all to shut off the lights in our houses to "take a stand against climate change." (See the Earth Hour website by clicking here.) According to the website, this is more than just fumbling around in the dark for sixty minutes and whacking your ankle against the coffee table, it is "all about giving people a voice and working together to create a better future for our planet."

I am not sure how shutting off the lights in the house for an hour is supposed to give people a voice, although I can see that there might be a bunch of voices lifted up yelling, "Oh, $#&@!" as they hurt themselves in the dark. Apparently, this is about "sustainability issues," and stopping "the degradation of the Earth's natural environment" and also, loftily, "building a future where people live in harmony with nature."

What a load of crap.

People do not live in harmony with nature because nature, my Earth Hour friends, is the boss. Ask the people of Japan. Their country ran right up against nature in that earthquake and the following tsunami and there is nothing harmonious AT ALL about that mess. Their lights have been turned off for them and it is absolutely nothing that they wanted to happen.

Our pioneer ancestors here in the United States lived much closer to nature than we do. Here in Indiana, my forebears and their neighbors didn't have electricity. They didn't have running water. They didn't have indoor plumbing. And you know what? Their entire EXISTENCE was about keeping nature at bay, conquering it. Can you imagine what a relief and a joy it was to those people to spend years clearing their land, eventually building barns and replacing their log cabins with real houses? Can you imagine how exciting it was to have "the electric," as my great-grandparents called it, run to those houses? How amazing it was to have water, both cold and hot, running in sinks in the kitchen and the bathroom? How amazing it was to have a coal furnace that kept everyone warm?

We are soft, now. We've lived so long with those amenities that we've forgotten how lucky we are to have them. We've lived so long with them that we -- or at least some of us -- have the gall to scorn them. I think the biggest irony is that this Earth Hour palaver has been spread largely through the internet. Which operates ON ELECTRICITY, with desk top models that are plugged into wall outlets and laptop batteries that are charged and why does this fact seem to have escaped so many?

And why don't those same people understand that the constant drive of civilization has been to be in harmony with nature by protecting ourselves from it? Nature is red in tooth in claw not only in wildlife; it's also pretty down and dirty environmentally, as in the aforementioned Japan. I wonder if any of these folks who plan to turn their lights off at 8:30 tomorrow suffered through Katrina, when the whole push was to put as much of a halt to Mother Nature's gallop as they could after the terrible flooding. People needed food to eat that was unspoiled. They needed potable water. They needed toilets and beds and places to wash themselves and their clothes.

Three of those things I mentioned depend largely on electricity. Efficient cooking, bathing and washing can be accomplished through solar power, I suppose, but when the need is urgent, there's nothing like a big old generator to get things done. You can drink warm water out of bottles. And unless you have one of those adjustable beds or an electric blanket, the place where you sleep is electricity-free.

But then you have to think about the people who are served by electricity in ways beyond the normal scope of most people's lives. What about the people who are on dialysis machines? Ventilors? What about babies in NICU in their incubators? What about the people who need radiation treatments and MRIs and CAT scans and surgery? Do you want a surgeon to take out your gall bladder by candlelight? No? Can't blame you. Neither do I. Thank goodness we have all this EVIL electricity to keep all those things going so that people don't have to die at birth, like they did in generations past because we didn't have the technology to hook a baby up to an electric heart monitor. Thank goodness our life expectancy isn't 40 years old, which was the average life span for a man in 1900. You can get treatments for your cancer or your failing kidneys and any number of other ailments that used to kill people by the dozens. Thanks to electricity.

The last thing that strikes me as being so bogus about Earth Hour is this: We're all being called to turn off our lights at 8:30 tomorrow evening. Just the lights. No one is being asked to unplug the computer or the television, the washer and dryer, the refrigerator. Please tell me - what good does this do? Yes, yes, "raise awareness," blah blah blah. Big flippin' deal. This serves no purpose whatsoever, unless it might actually wake some people up so that they can see how fortunate we are to live now, in this time and place. With electricity and the technology that's been brought into being through it. And Nature, kept at bay, so that we can enjoy this easy life we've been given in civilization.

FRENCH FRIDAYS WITH DORIE: Beggar's Linguine

2011-03-25T10:11:00.003-05:00

I had to make the executive decision (as CEO of the kitchen here at the home place) to skip over the scallops with caramel-orange sauce that were the actual French Fridays with Dorie recipe for this week because I knew that I'd be the only one willing to eat them and fresh scallops are too expensive just for a private little lunch dish for me, so I backtracked two weeks to make the Beggar's Linguine on pages 370 and 371 of the Around My French Table cookbook by Dorie Greenspan.

This recipe is a real oddball, which is not something you immediately sense when you read the title. Because what could be more innocent and bland than linguine, pictured there above in the strainer in my kitchen sink? Well, you're about to find out, my dears.

Beggar's Linguine is a really simple, peasanty sort of food. So simple and peasanty, in fact, that my immediate reaction upon reading the recipe was "Oh, HELLS to the no." Because the sauce that covers the pasta is as buttery and rich as could possibly be desired, but the flavors that mingle in all that butter are as follows: Mission figs. Pistachios. Raisins. Almonds. Orange zest. All of which you can see in the picture above, sitting there on my cutting board and waiting to be stirred into the melted, foaming butter on the stove.

Okaaaay. So is this a main course or some weird little dessert featuring noodles? I was confused and had a moment of wondering if Dorie was TOYING WITH US ALL. I mean, last week it was those sweet/salty cook....er, crackers? Who knows what they were, other than good? And now she's asking me to make a pasta dish with dried fruit and nuts?

Kayte offered reassurance -- she said she liked it and would definitely make it again, so I put my head down and forged onward.

Honestly, this picture doesn't do the Beggar's Linguine justice. I tried to make all the fruit and nuts come to the top of the bowl, but I kept spilling heavily buttered linguine onto the counter, so I gave it up and hoped for the best with some parsley and the orange zest. It really is an attractive-looking dish.

The girls and I ate it for lunch yesterday and agreed that there were things we did like about it -- the butter, the parmesan, the linguine, the pistachios -- and there were things we didn't like, namely, the figs. Aisling thought the figs were too sweet, Meelyn thought they were too chewy. I thought they were all right and I didn't hate them.

We also felt that it was hard to eat. You want to twirl that linguine on your fork, but then you can't get all those small pieces of fig, almond, pistachio and raisin on there too. It was a dish that made you work for your meal, so maybe you....wouldn't be a beggar anymore and could move on to something more upscale, like a nice vodka sauce?

This was a good recipe and I'm really glad we tried it. The girls said it wasn't something they'd ever request again, but they thought it was interesting and a fun lunch. Would I make it again? Well, I think yes, on the whole. For one thing, it's a meatless meal that would be a good lunch on Fridays during Lent. For another thing, it's totally different than everything else we eat, which, to be honest, runs a lot to tacos and chili in a never-ending cycle: sometimes even the Meal Matrix can't save you from yourself. So I'm thinking that this week was also a success. Thank you, Dorie!

FISH ON FRIDAY: The Tuna Casserole Project

2011-03-24T20:29:00.011-05:00

This week's revolting casserole might as well have saved the money on that flat-leaf parsley garnish because did you ever see the likes of a plate of linguini covered with TUNA GRAVY? No, I thought not. You want the recipe? I'm not going to help you with a link because, really, you need to think this over before you click, for about six or seven months at least. Google "Tuna Gravy" and you'll find a number of recipes at Cooks.com, one that will even allow you to add "canned peas (optional)."

I just called my husband over to take a peek at the image and he peered at it, frowned, looked a little closer and then said in an offended voice, "Why would you make me look at something like that?"

Because misery loves company, baby.

Please feel free to call me honey

2011-03-22T15:41:00.002-05:00

I went to Aldi today to do the weekly food shopping and I went alone for once. I usually take at least one of the girls with me because Aldi is one of those bag-and-tote-it-yerself places and it's always nice to have an extra set of hands when you're sacking it all up and stowing it away in the car. But today I was on my own, which means I am free to enter into conversations with total strangers, a character trait which the girls discourage, my mother completely understands and my brother finds utterly reprehensible.

"I suppose you're one of those people who talks to people in line at Disney World and the movie theater and in the waiting area of the Outback," he said superciliously.

"Oh, yes," I replied. "I am particularly friendly at the Outback because I'm usually working on a Foster's draft."

I wasn't drinking a beer at Aldi when I was standing in line with my shopping cart full of groceries, but I struck up a little conversation with the elderly man behind me who was holding a gallon of milk in each hand.

"Why don't you go in line ahead of me?" I asked. "Your hands are going to get really cold standing there holding that milk and I've got an awful lot of stuff in this cart."

"Why thanks!" he said, smiling and nodding his head affably. "My hands were already kind of cold and I'd just got to the line."

He went up ahead of me and we chatted about the deliciousness of the Aldi brand green tea as compared to the way more expensive Bigelow and Lipton brands. When he was ready to leave, he turned and called out, "Thanks again, ma'am!"

It was kind of odd being called "ma'am" by someone who was clearly old enough to be my grandpa, but I smiled and said, "You're welcome."

Evidently it struck him the same way because he went toward the automatic doors, but paused and turned back around. "Ordinarily, I would have called you honey," he said apologetically, "but my granddaughters tell me I'm not supposed to do that anymore."

The cashier and I both giggled. "You can call me honey anytime you want to, honey," I said generously.

"Me, too," offered the cashier.

"Aw, it's just a good old world, isn't it?" he asked engagingly, and left with his milk.

NUNDAY: How to have fun during Lent

2011-03-21T11:01:00.004-05:00

These sisters chose to work a picture puzzle during their recreation time on Ash Wednesday and it looks like the postulant in the foreground just got caught hiding about five of the thousand pieces up her sleeve.

It is COMING. It CANNOT BE STOPPED.

2011-03-20T13:44:00.005-05:00

These may be daffodils. Or maybe tulips. For all I know, they could be flesh-eating plants from the Little Nursery of Horrors - I don't know which flowers are what kind until they're blooming and sometimes not even then. All I do know is that these are GREEN and they're poking THROUGH THE SOIL and they aren't frozen stiff or buried in snow, so that can mean only one thing: The television programming is, like, all basketball, all the time.

You thought I was going to say "Spring has sprung" didn't you?

Sorry.

FRENCH FRIDAYS WITH DORIE: Salted Butter Break-Ups (Broyé)

2011-03-19T11:17:00.006-05:00

Kayte, Katie and I have been really inconsistent in our posting of recipes made with the internet cooking group French Fridays with Dorie, which uses Dorie's lovely book Around My French Table and I am very relieved that FFw/D is not one of the more uptight cooking groups on the internet where if you fail to post a recipe on the assigned date, the other members of the group hunt you down and beat you with their spatulas. This week, however, we were all at the top of our game and made these weird little....cookies? Crackers? I don't think we've figured out exactly what they are yet; Dorie calls them "Salted Butter Break-Aways," but in France, they're called broyés, which means "crushed" or "crumbled."

This was one of the easiest recipes I've made so far -- uhhm, not that I've made that many from this cookbook -- but since it was a simple matter of flour, sugar, butter and sea salt, it was kind of hard to find a reason not to. So I did, and they're a very unusual....cracker? Cookie?....anyway, nothing like anything I've ever eaten before.

The recipe sounded as if they'd be something like a Lantz Captain's Wafer, you know, those little rectangular butter crackers that you can get in individual cellophane wrappers at salad bars? Or like a Keebler Club cracker: crunchy, slightly sweet, slightly salty. As it turns out, the broyés are not really like either of those things. For one thing, they're not as crackery, being crumbly yet more pliable and less dry than what we Americans think of as a cracker. Secondly, with two-thirds of a cup of sugar, they're much sweeter than any cracker we commonly eat, but with one teaspoon of coarse sea salt, they're much saltier than any cookie found on the aisle of any grocery store you care to name. In short, these coo-...er, ...cra-...whatever they are, simply can't be defined in terms of American tastes.

They are good, though! You mix up the dough in the food processor as you'd do for a pastry, shape it into a flattish square and then chill it for an hour. At the end of that time period, you roll it out into a nice, flat sheet, score it prettily with fork tines (my favorite part) and paint it with a glaze made of egg yolk. Yes, that's right: egg yolk. Not egg white, which is the most commonly used glaze ever if you want to give your food a nice shine. Yolk.

I am not much of an egg person, have I ever mentioned that? Especially the yolks.

When you bake the broyés or break-ups or whatever you want to call them, they're supposed to come out crispy on the edges and firm-with-a-spring in the center, which is how mine came out. To serve, you just....break off a piece, whatever size you'd care to eat. Which is kind of fun. I liked all those funny, misshapen pieces and broke up the entire thing so that it would be easier to store.

I found that broyés go deliciously well with, say, a slice of Swiss cheese. Maybe a nice, sharp Cheddar? I didn't have any of that, nor did I have any Gouda, but both seem like they'd pair up very amicably. I also pictured some sweet grapes or a sliced apple and a glass of moscato; in short, the makings for a very nice little picnic at the park on a day in the spring, just you and your bien-aimé, who would probably eat, lean back on one elbow and then say, "That was nice, but how's about we pack all this up and go get a real lunch?"

If I were to do these crookies -- that's the only way I can think of to describe them -- again, and I probably will because they were good, I'd use only half the sugar (or maybe even less than that) and a little more salt, just a pinch. And I would definitely glaze them, but only with white of egg because yolks are just so yucky.

All in all, a success!

FISH ON FRIDAY: The Tuna Casserole Project

2011-03-19T09:50:00.003-05:00

Here is this week's offering, shown to you because? At your Catholic high school? The cafeteria ladies hate you.

20th Anniversary approaching!

2011-03-16T10:07:00.004-05:00

I just got a telephone call from my husband, who said, "You know, with our twentieth anniversary coming up in June, I thought it would be nice if we did something special, so I made hotel reservations in downtown Indy and got us a table at Ruth's Chris Steak House. How's that sound?"

How does that sound? Does this man know me or what? Downtown in Indianapolis with the Indiana Historical Society and the Indiana State Museum and noon Mass at beautiful Old St. John's and the Indianapolis Museum of Art just a short jaunt away, PLUS STEAK??!!

I am already packing my bags.

Skip on over to Etsy

2011-03-14T14:31:00.002-05:00

These gorgeous keepsakes are available over at the Etsy page of St. Luke's Brush and have you ever seen such incredible work on humble eggs and wooden pegs? Featured in this picture are the eggs in the forefront of the picture, obviously, with rosary boxes behind them. In the last row are customized saint wooden pegs; any saint you'd choose to name, this gifted artist will paint. What great gifts these would make for Easter, baptism anniversaries, Confirmation....you name it. And I guarantee that they aren't nearly as expensive as you might be thinking they'd be for such amazingly detailed work.

The artist behind St. Luke's Brush is a father of four and "an aspiring commercial and fine artist," as well as being a member of the Catholic Etsy Artist's Guild (search "teamcatholic" to find other artists.) If you'd like to follow St. Luke's Brush on Facebook, copy and paste the following URL into your address bar: http://www.facebook.com/pages/St-Lukes-Brush/116907268367835?v=wall&ref=ts

NUNDAY: Pass the Cheetos!

2011-03-14T13:24:00.005-05:00

You might recall that Pope Benedict XVI, who looks a great deal like my Grandad, visited the United States in April 2008 and that lots and lots of people went to see him, including these Domincan Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist from Ann Arbor, Michigan. The sisters had a chartered bus to take them from Michigan to Maryland, and just in case they got hungry on the long trip, they each packed a little red tote bag full of snacks. (Word has it that there was also reading material available to while away the time, as well as puzzle books.) I hope that their beautiful white habits weren't covered with orange Cheeto fingerprints by the time they saw His Holiness.

I would seriously love to travel with these sisters. Not only are they smiling and happy, they are serious snackers. My kind of people.

FISH ON FRIDAY: The Tuna Casserole Project

2011-03-11T13:08:00.004-05:00

Today is the start of a new bit on InsomniMom that I'm calling the Tuna Casserole Project.* Just for some lighthearted fun, you know? Unless you're one of the four people in North America who really likes tuna casserole, and I have to confess that if you are, I just don't know what to do with you. Stage an intervention? Write to the archdiocese for the name and number of the nearest exorcist? Weep sorrowful tears over a can of BumbleBee? All three? I'm stuck.

Anyway, tuna casserole is funny. People have such BIG reactions to it. You hardly ever hear someone say indifferently, "Tuna casserole? Yeah, my mom used to make that. I didn't much care for it." No, with tuna casserole you get reactions like a belligerent, "DO NOT EVER SPEAK THOSE TWO WORDS TO ME AGAIN" or perhaps a quivering voice whispering, "Sometimes when I have a fever, I can still smell that smell....that terrible, terrible smell...." accompanied by hand-wringing and a facial tic.

This Friday's offering is one that I named "Vomit on a Plate." I took a quick, holding-breath peek at the recipe and while it doesn't actually call for vomit, it does call for canned cream of mushroom soup and a great many peas and a generous amount of overcooked elbow macaroni. Plus the tuna, of course. By themselves, those things don't look vomity -- well, canned cream of mushroom soup isn't really what I'd call beautiful or anything, but still... -- but mixed all together and baked in a dish? It comes out looking like this and I'm not sure how you could get it onto your fork, let alone near your mouth. Totally yucktastic.

*These are images from the internet that have been deliberately posted by the people who made these casseroles. Yes, there are actual RECIPES for these things out there, but I'm not going to post them or even link to them because first of all, you don't really want to make something that looks like that, do you? And second of all, if you did make something that looked like that, let alone posted a recipe for it on the internet and served it to your family? Would YOU want to be outed? I think not.

I'm just as sick of snow as the next person, but...

2011-03-10T13:14:00.003-05:00

I found this YouTube video of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England, Will's hometown, on another site this morning and had to imbed it here. Because even though it's snow and winter is unspeakably vile, this is still Stratford, right?

There are several really great views of Shakespeare's childhood-into-adulthood home on Henley Street, some beautiful stills of the spire of Trinity Church where he was both baptized and interred, a few peeks at the snowy garden (absolutely radiant in summer) that marks the site of New Place, the house he bought and came to live in at his retirement, plus some nice looks at the Guild Hall, including a great shot of the second story windows that comprise the King Edward IV Grammar School where young Will learned his Latin and his love for Ovid. If you're a Shakespeare fan, it's a lovely mini-tour. If you're not, well, it's just a bunch of dreary snow and don't bother.

By the way, I don't think that slushie stand was there when Will was a lad....

It's official!! (Meditation on Lent at 12:24 a.m.)

2011-03-09T00:23:00.003-05:00

I am sitting here in front of the computer when I should be sleeping. It's a perfect night for sleep -- chilly and rainy, with a chance of smooth, clean sheets on the bed -- and why I'm wide awake is something I wish I could change, especially since all this awakeness is only going to lead to Ash Wednesday being one REALLY LONG DAY.

Here's the thing: On the home schooling e-list I'm a member of and amongst my friends on Facebook, there's been an article circulating about, an article with an idea that many of my friends have said is "the perfect thing for Lent," as if we're talking about a really great necklace to accessorize a party dress. So I, being the nosey kind of person I am, and also piously hoping to have the Best Lent Ever! went like an idiot and looked at this article and immediately wanted to go off into a corner and, I don't know, maybe just DIE a little bit, not much, but reviving enough to go to 6:00 Mass today and get my ashes.

Here's the article. Read it at your peril, if you're some kind of person who is crazed with self-loathing or maybe just a grouchy old bat like me. I mean, I'm sure Mrs. Wittman is a lovely person, but oh my holy saints and angels, what kind of mind can come up with this sort of torture and even type Sunday is a Day Off! in bold type with an exclamation point? I would certainly think that Sunday would be a day off: you're going to need at least 24 hours to drag yourself to the hospital so that they can give you some glucose and some penicillin and some drug with plenty of codeine in it. All so that you can go back home on Monday morning and start the whole dreary business again.

All in twenty minutes, twice a day.

During that forty minutes, you have to do things like deep clean the kitchen, wipe down all light fixtures, clean out closets, organize the Tupperware, built a storage shed out back, hand polish each blade of grass in the front yard, clear the trash off at least three major thoroughfares in your city and climb to the roof of your church to personally inspect and repair each individual slate shingle.

Well, okay, some of the things on that list might have been slight exaggerations. But I'm not joking about the Tupperware! And I am also not joking that, down at the bottom of that list, there is an entry for Day 39 (Good Friday) that instructs me to "Prepare kitchen for Easter baking." Are you KIDDING me??!! All forty days of work and I still have to do something called "Easter baking"? At that point, I'm sure that all I would be baking is my own head, placed in the oven with a note pinned to my back that would read: "I JUST CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE. ALL THIS AND NO SWEETS - TOO MUCH!"

I do hope that my friends who have decided to undertake this challenge will meet with success, and although I insist on a clean and tidy house myself, I found as I read that list that I really don't care quite THAT much. I am okay with Fly Lady and her much more relaxed manner of dealing with dirt and clutter; I don't get that stressed-out feeling that I have now, the one that has totally wiped the sleep from my eyes as I contemplate Garage Week, Day 31 -- Throw out all unnecessary junk. I am completely unwound by that thought, and I don't even have a garage.

Not just for your dryer anymore

2011-03-07T17:14:00.002-05:00

Oh, I know they're spelled differently -- lint, Lent -- one is a common noun that describes all that fuzzy stuff that comes off your clothes as they're being tumble dried. I have a very artistic friend who created gorgeous handmade writing paper out of dryer lint once. Lent, the proper noun, is that forty day period of fasting and abstinence before Easter, when Catholic and (some) Protestant Christians alike walk with Jesus, uniting with Him in His Passion and celebrating His resurrection while anticipating His second coming.

Lent is a time of year that I always look forward to, although upon reflection I'm not sure why: I'm not all that good at it. There was, for instance, that year I gave up Diet Coke as a personal sacrifice and by the third of the six weeks, my family members were all going around with big, frightened eyes and white faces. Then there was the time I gave up sweets and berated myself loudly one morning for having jelly on my toast. ("Don't you think you're taking this to a ridiculous extreme?" my husband asked warily. "No," I replied. "I'm just sad because, if I had to goof up on my no-sweets fast, why did it have to be with TOAST and why couldn't it have been NUTELLA?!?")

I also start out with great spiritual plans: I will read a chapter of the Bible per day, pray a rosary, go to weekday Mass on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, plus go to the Stations of the Cross at least three times. I'll do both the morning and evening prayers! I'll read at least two books on the lives of the saints (making sure to choose people who were not gruesomely martyred, because eww.) That's always the plan on Ash Wednesday, anyway. By the first Sunday, I've already managed to crumble, substituting one decade for an entire rosary and looking at my Bible and feeling guilty instead of actually opening it.

Considering all this, is it any wonder that a non-Catholic, non-Lent-participating Protestant friend asked me, "If Lent is so hard, why do it?"

Ah, there's the rub. Why do it? Why go through six weeks of self-denial and abortive attempts to attain spiritual growth?

Because it's good for the soul, that's why. Jesus taught us to fast; he fasted forty days in the desert. Jesus taught us about self-denial; he went to the cross for us. Jesus taught us about prayer; at times, he took himself apart from the disciples to spent time in communion with his Father. At other times, he prayed with them.

Any time we work to be more like him, Jesus meets us more than halfway. And then there's that spiritual harvest thing: the more you give Jesus -- your love of desserts, your willingness to meditate on his life while praying the rosary, your trip into the confessional, and the money you'd usually spend on buying a fancy coffee dropped quietly into the poor box -- the more he gives you back. Seriously, even when my grandiose plans for spiritual advancement fall through and I end up doing only about a quarter of what I originally intended, I always feel like the measure that has been pressed down, shaken together and running over by Good Friday. I feel close to Jesus (I can hear him saying quite clearly, "Okay. STOP IT" when I'm thinking about doing something that would not make him proud, one of the less agreeable parts of that Lenten Closeness.)

I feel good.

And when the Easter Vigil is over and we're driving home in the darkness with the sounds of the bells and the Gloria still ringing in our ears, that's when I feel the best. Exultant, as sweet and full as the Communion cup I've sipped from, glowing in the true presence of the Savior.

So let's just say that I've experienced Easter Sundays without the trials of Lent beforehand and with those trials set constantly before me, and I would never, ever go back to the first way. You can only have a true Easter, a real shiny-happy glorious Easter if you've humbled yourself to suffer with Jesus in the desert.

Ten years ago, I would have never thought that could possibly be true. I would have said, quite wrongly, that God has no need of our silly sacrifices. The pastor of the Protestant church I was attending back then even said it during one of his sermons: "I can't understand why those Catholics think that their 'giving up' something matters to God." How could it possibly matter to God, who owns the cattle on a thousand hills, if I stop eating candy for six weeks? Does it really matter if I give up Facebook or watching HGTV? Doesn't that seem a little weird, to think that God cares about such trivial things?

If you believe that, then let me ask you this: If your ten year old mowed the neighbor's lawn for week after sweaty week and then used some of the money he earned to buy you a birthday present, would you find that trivial? Would you say, "Aww, that's sweet, son, but listen, this is just a Penguin paperback you bought with the money you earned from cutting Mrs. Franklin's grass. It's not like this is a real gift, but thanks for trying."

OF COURSE YOU WOULDN'T. If your kid did that for you, you would fall to the ground and drown in a puddle of happy tears and have to be revived by the emergency medical technicians who came on the ambulance and the first thing you'd say when you came back to your senses would be, "Look. Look at this beautiful, lovely Penguin paperback my darling child bought for me." You'd probably sleep with that book under your pillow for the next million nights, and long after it had crumbled into cheapo paperback dust, you'd remember that sacrifice, that unselfishness, that desire to do something to make you happy, that honor given to you that was so much more than a trivial gift that cost $9.98 at Wal-Mart.

And do you think God, the omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent being who told us to call him "Daddy," do you really think that he thinks anything less than that?

Try it and see.

A great article titled "What Can I Do Before Lent Begins" can be found here.

Catholic Culture.org has an entire area of their website devoted to the hows and whys of Lent; you can check that excellent resource out by clicking here

NUNDAY: Bump, set, spike!

2011-03-07T13:24:00.002-05:00

Because even though you are called to a religious vocation, you can't spend all your time praying.

Surprisingly delicious

2011-03-03T15:32:00.002-05:00

I was on the road with Aisling the other day, driving her to this or that venue to do this or that activity -- after a while they all blend in together -- and I needed something to eat. A McDonald's was handy, but McDonald's breakfast is so yucky. All the heavy biscuits, greasy sausage and probably-from-powder eggs do not a good breakfast make, in my opinion. And I should know a good breakfast because, well....I'm a gourmand. Which is a polite way of saying that I eat a whole lot of really good food.

Anyway. I happened to remember that McDonald's has a new oatmeal with chopped apples and raisins in it (mostly because of the enormous yellow sign that read "TRY OUR NEW OATMEAL WITH APPLES AND RAISANS [sic]!" and I figured even McDonald's couldn't fubar instant oatmeal that much, so I buzzed through the drive-thru and ordered the oatmeal and a cute little chubby container of milk and it was actually very good.

Somewhere out in that field....

2011-03-03T15:27:00.004-05:00

...there are a bunch of elves schlepping baking sheets, rolling pins, cookie cutters and mixing bowls and irritably asking Ernie, "SO NOW WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO, MR. KNOWLEDGE?!?"

(Road crews were cutting down this tree on a country road on the way to our church in Hamilton county. The girls and I couldn't help but speculate.)