I try to avoid impulse buys. Usually the stuff around a cashier station is just junk, except for all the chocolate you can pick up in the checkout lanes at the Seward Park PCC. And shopping at my local Lowe's tends to me make me cranky enough that I refuse to buy extra stuff at the registers as a matter of principle; they made everything I was looking for so hard to find, why should I buy this just because it's here?

But it's spring. They've rearranged things to put the vegetable gardening stuff up front (or at least on your way out if you are checking out from the garden center). And they had asparagus crowns.

I've been daydreaming about growing asparagus ever since reading about it in Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle. It's popped up recently over at the Urban Farm Hub. Fresh asparagus, and it's supposed to be pretty, too, all ferny-like. But I couldn't quite settle on a place in the backyard for it; since asparagus isn't an annual, it needs a permanent home, and most of my backyard garden is pretty well occupied at this point. But then, at Lowes, standing in front of the boxes of asparagus crowns all wrapped up in burlap bags, the light went on: I could plant it in the P-Patch. One of those little bags leaped into my hands and didn't leave until we'd checked out.

So, I've planted 6 asparagus crowns (three more than I was expecting, though I'm not sure why) in our P-Patch plot. (Unfortunately, they don't photograph well for me at this stage, just little nubbins peeking out, so I'll leave you with these far prettier violas, instead.)



They march in their rows on the south side, just east of the garlic. I won't see any crop until 2012 since I'm supposed to let the spears grow uncut to build healthy roots, and they will be all the sweeter then for the delay. And whoever inherits my P-Patch plot when I have to let it go someday will luck into homegrown asparagus without the waiting period. I hope someone tells them what it is before they dig it up.

The mail last Saturday made it official: we know where Caitlyn will go to kindergarten next year. This process has been agonizing for a number of reasons but I think things can be reduced to (a) difficulty finding the answers to our questions and (b) free-floating societal pressure.

There's an absurd amount of pressure regarding school choice and enrollment. The free parenting magazines that periodically show up in the cubby at preschool are packed with ads from schools and camps and programs as well as articles (vague, overly-generalized articles) on how to get the best for/from your kid. There's a fog of expectation out there (kind of like how movies encourage eating disorders) that insists that if you aren't applying to the exclusive schools and stretching your family budget to pay for them, you are compromising your child's future. A good job and prosperous career path require a good college record, which requires excellent high school marks and lots of extracurricular activities, which require the same from the middle school, which requires a strong elementary school, one that teaches "readin', 'ritin', and 'rithmetic" but balances the academics with music and art and field trips and cultural activities and social justice and ecological awareness, which you just can't do without the right preschool. It probably goes on further, like in order to get into the right preschool, you need to have a whole collection of Mom-n-Me classes under your three year old's belt, which means you probably should have been reading Plato aloud to your belly before your pregnancy started to show. The child's personality is entirely left out of the equation, as are all the other variables (economics, family stability, frequency of relocations, learning styles, etc). Not to mention that if something doesn't work at some point on this path, you can change something or try a different path entirely.

I like to think that I march to my own beat most of the time, but it was difficult to avoid feeling like if I messed up Choosing The Right Kindergarten I would be Screwing My Kid For Life.

And that made evaluating and sorting through our options that much more important. I would be Judged By The Future on how I did this now. So, I asked questions. I collected recommended questions from friends and family. I compiled a list of questions ranging from basic statistics (class size? ethnic balance? free lunch percentage? teachers with masters? average daily attendance?) to school ideology (graded homework for lower grades? recess for upper grades? how do you handle diversity? playground conflict? parent involvement? different student abilities?) and probably terrified the principals to whom I sent them all.

Finding the answers felt much more difficult than I thought it should. In an ideal world, there would have been one place that would have answered at least most of the questions. But I was all over the Internet. The Seattle Times has a School Guide that has some information in it. Seattle Public Schools has Annual Reports. The State Superintendent of Public Instruction has a Compare My School tool. There are review sites tucked into various cyber-corners, blog posts if you can find them. Each school has a website in various stages of care or neglect. Of course there isn't the budget anywhere for it, but couldn't all these be pooled somewhere, or indexed so you can find them?

To add to the confusion, the school district has decided to transition to a neighborhood school assignment plan. While generally I think this is a good thing, I'm not crazy about being in on Year One. We are a start-up kind of household, but this is one place where I don't want to be the one inventing the systems. And getting clear information on how the new plan will work and it's levels of implementation has been like trying to get a drink from a faucet that only drips: time-consuming and unsatisfying. Shouldn't How to Enroll in Our Schools be an easy thing to find? But apparently the district likes to release information on their website incrementally. I couldn't just go there once and get a good handle on how to proceed; I could find out what step the system is on this month ("early registration" information is available in December, assignment process info becomes available in January, open enrollment process information in February, I might be able to learn Caitlyn's bus stop sometime in August), but getting an overview of the whole process - that I never found. Simply knowing the landmarks on this trek from the get-go would have made the whole process much more pleasant.

I think it was the word "kale" in the title that grabbed my attention. I'd recently added 101 Cookbooks to my Google Reader and while browsing along found Pan-fried Corona Beans and Kale. And suddenly I knew what Tuesday's dinner would be. We are, after all, still trying to eat the kale in the backyard before the seed potatoes arrive.

Ok, so it wasn't the recipe from 101 Cookbooks, but the similar one in Heidi's book, Super Natural Cooking (which I bought on the recommendation of an old school friend and which I've admired regularly but hadn't gotten around to actually using). I used cannellini beans from the pantry and kale from the garden and totally forgot about the recommendations to not forget the nutmeg or the lemon.

I seem to have also forgotten that Caitlyn is currently in a no-bean phase. "I'm just not that in to them," she says, completely serious. Ian tried to encourage her by talking about how he didn't like beans as a kid but now thinks they're great, an anecdote that didn't impress her and made me worry that this no-bean phase is going to become a no-bean epoch. The adults, on the other hand, thought dinner was wonderful (if unphotographed), a reminder that sometimes great food is made from the simplest preparation of quality ingredients.

They were talking about it again this morning, just like yesterday and the day before: the mid-term elections and the odds of the Democrats losing their congressional majorities. The interviews and discussions are sizable, sometimes filling 20 minutes of airtime, and conducted with such breathless urgency a listener might think the elections are next week.

But they aren't. The election is in November, which last time I checked is 8 months from now. That's a heck of a long time to maintain any level of interest, much less the frantic one the media seems to have whipped up for itself. Listening to these stories on NPR makes me angsty ("Oh dear, we're going to swing back to conservative majorities before the progressives have a chance to make any progress.") and angry ("How dare people blame the current status of things on the President and his party? There were 8 years of mismanagement by The Other Guys; you can't clean that up overnight!"), two states I find unhealthy to maintain for very long, never mind eight months. At this rate, I'm going to burn out on the news.

And what's sad about this is that the burnout will include all forms of news. I won't just stop listening to the stories and predictions and analysis about the election in November; I'll stop paying attention to events and news locally and globally. To avoid being in a constant state of distress, I'll enter a state of willful ignorance. And I'd bet I'm not the only one.

The other result of this myopic journalism is to inflate the importance of these elections, while simultaneously treating them like a sporting event. Not that elections aren't important, but certainly there are equally important things citizens could or should be focussed on. By treating the midterm elections with the urgent blow-by-blow of a natural disaster or an athletic competition, the media encourages people to expect government to move faster, to keep up with the constant pressure for News. If it's not done and over with in a week or two, at most, we can't be bothered to pay attention; we've been trained to rapidly switch our attention from one shiny thing to the next. And none of this is good, for either government or citizen engagement.

I always seem to forget how pleasant mornings can be. Clear sky, the sun creeping slowly down the south side of the house and around the garage. Birdsong and crow conversations. The occasional neighbor, with and without dog. The train dinging it's way down MLK.

It's peaceful in a way that the afternoons are not. I generally like all the kids running through our neighborhood, and I'm grateful to live in a place where they can get out and play. But sometimes it's nice to have the quiet. Hopefully, Caitlyn will forgive me for not having enough gardening tasks for her in the mornings; she retreats inside, "to warm up my hands," and I rejoice in being able to plant and harvest without chaos and questions, without having to keep one eye out for the thoughtless enthusiasm that results in smashed plants.

The pea trellises came out of storage this morning, as did the row cover. I'm really excited about the new row cover supports. I've been looking for something better suited to the task than the grading stakes and string I used last year, but I wanted something that wasn't going to be three feet tall or be permanently attached to a garden bed. I just don't have the space for the industrial strength options I kept finding. Gardeners.com finally had something suited for small, multiuse spaces.

And with all the hardware came the seeds. We planted the leftovers of last year's Oregon Trail shelling peas in Caitlyn's garden bed before she went inside. There are Green Arrow shelling peas planted along the pea trellises and a row of non-climbing Cascadia snap peas behind one trellis. I put three rows of Bloomsdale spinach and a row of mesclun mix under the row cover.



With luck, we'll have salad greens in about a month. Until then, we have kale, which is putting on a growth spurt in all this early warmth and sunshine we've getting. It needs to be eaten in less than a month, as it's in the space the potatoes will need in March.

Frosting, sprinkles, political engagement - what's not to love? Caitlyn and I joined some friends at Cupcake Royale yesterday for MomsRising's Project Cupcake. The project: decorate 155 cupcakes for delivery to state legislators in Olympia to remind them that although the kids can't vote, that's no reason for the state government to try to fill the $2.7 billion budget shortfall by cutting the programs kids need.



Caitlyn probably decorated close to ten with sprinkles and extra frosting in piping bags; I think I only did two, maybe three. All told, 181 cupcakes went to Olympia today. And Caitlyn managed all this without getting her finger in her mouth or frosting on the bums of strangers while weaving through a crowded space. Later, when asked what she did that day, Caitlyn announced, "We made cupcakes for the government!", so I think even my civics explanations were a success.

Of course, you can't decorate cupcakes without also eating one:



There was a lemon drop hard candy on the top of Caitlyn's. I made her eat the whole cupcake before she was allowed to eat the candy. Mama's strict like that.

We're been having basic civics discussions lately, mostly in context of public vs. private schools. This mostly has involved who pays and how, or How to Explain Taxes to a Preschooler.

So, today, Caitlyn asked me, "Is government real?"

"Should I find some pictures of the people who work in government for you?"

"Yes. Because I'm not sure I believe you."

Which seems to me to sum up quite a bit, actually. The visual, easy-to-understand connections between the Taxes I Pay and What Government Does For Me seem to have broken down or disappeared (although I sometimes wonder if they ever existed and it's the Big Picture Informed Rational Human that has disappeared, the extinction of homo rationalis or something). In other words, I'm pretty sure that Caitlyn isn't the only person asking "Is government real?"