Almost Daily

2010-03-10T12:57:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the worn things can be patched up and brought back to life. This quilt was made by Ian's mom, out of old clothes, jeans and shirts circa 1970. But by the time I met it, it's backing had torn and it had been boxed up as something laced with memories but too much on it's last leg to stand regular use.

When I took it to the fabric store to find coordinating fabric to be the new backing (a challenge given the nearly forty years of shifting definitions of "fashionable"), it still smelled like the cedar chest. I felt like I should be explaining to everyone what I was doing, apologizing for the haze of cedar scent, but realistically, probably no one noticed. New backing fabric, new binding, new batting in the middle. It's heavy, and warmer now than it used to be.

This is the first quilt I tied. Usually I wrestle them through my sewing machine (I may drool over a long arm but we don't have the space for one, never mind the $15K it probably takes to buy one), but all the denim in this one had me convinced I would break multiple needles if I tried the usual technique. I'm pretty sure I won't switch over to tying all my quilts, but it's a good skill to have and much easier than I thought it would be, even if my fingers did need a week to recover. And it works with the rustic nature of this quilt.

It spent last night on our bed, under the cat. It's nice to have it back in circulation.

2010-03-07T19:00:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-03-05T20:46:00.001-08:00

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.

2010-03-02T18:34:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-02-25T16:57:00.001-08:00

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.

2010-02-22T12:01:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-02-19T13:23:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-02-18T12:26:00.000-08:00

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?"

2010-02-13T20:59:00.001-08:00

I'm a horrible person because I don't remember who made this doll for me.

I think it was my grandmother, Mom's mom, but it might have been my great grandmother. It might have been Mom. I don't remember. I've been told several times and the information just doesn't stick.

I do remember playing with this doll a lot. I liked to braid and rebraid her hair. She's stained on one hand, probably from being taken outside too much, or being held by my own grubby hand. Disturbingly, I never named her. She has always been The Ragdoll.

She's Caitlyn's now. And I've made her a new dress.

I may have gotten a little carried away and made it too long. And the pattern is for a "conventional" doll, so it doesn't fit right. This is the last time I make that collar; it won't lie flat and the facing is always sticking out. I figure if I make a few more outfits, I'll get the bodice adjusted properly. Caitlyn certainly wants more clothes for her "baby".

Her name is Isabella.

2010-02-13T15:43:00.000-08:00

There's been a flurry (accidental weather pun) of hype about the Olympics getting started yesterday in Vancouver. The news has been full of worried reports about our unusually warm January and the measures the hosts are going to to keep the snow on the mountains long enough for the Games to happen. We don't watch TV, broadcast or cable, and we're really not sports fans, so it's mostly been a thing happened Out There.

And so, it took me a moment to recognize the subject of this project at Craft's blog. Then, after I realized this was an Olympic Something I was looking at, I looked again. Hmmm, those creatures look familiar. So, I checked, and hot spit! We know the folks who designed the mascots for the Vancouver Winter Olympics! Not only is Caitlyn collecting their books, but they did graphics for one of Ian's music videos. Kinda makes me all giggly inside.

Of course, now that the whole thing has actually made it to my radar, I need to decide if we're going to share any of the Olympic Madness with Caitlyn this year. Growing up, the family television had a tendency to disappear when it wasn't Olympic Time, so that automatically made the Olympics something special. I also remember liking the medal ceremonies, who knows why. I got to watch the Torch go by in 1984, when the Summer Olympics were in Los Angeles (I think I climbed a tree to see it), which was also the year the third grade classes at my elementary school held a Third Grade Olympics in conjunction with the Current Events unit about the Games in Sarajevo.

Maybe I'll look for the highlights on YouTube. But I think I'll wait a while before trying to explain the whole thing - international competition and the layers of issues (legitimate and otherwise) and all. Maybe 2014.

2010-02-09T19:25:00.001-08:00

We stopped by the p-patch on the way home from school this afternoon and discovered that the garlic planted last fall is doing swimmingly. I used some maple leaves in the fall as a mulch, and the garlic now is growing through the leaves. Not just pushing the leaves aside and growing up between them, although there's plenty of that going on. No, this is garlic greens literally poking holes through the maple leaves and then pushing through and up, so the maple leaf is actually suspended several inches off the ground. I'm sorry I didn't have a camera with me - and that it didn't occur to me til just now - or I would post a picture.

There's also some kale chugging along out there, and a thin population of fava beans which will need to be cut down and turned under soon. I'm afraid my cover crop ambitions didn't turn out so well. I'm not sure if I should blame the fall weather or myself for not getting the seeds sown in a timely fashion. No, it's probably my fault, since I waited for the summer crops to be done before sowing the fava beans, thus shortchanging them on a couple weeks of growing time before the weather did whatever it did (I don't really remember what it did in November). I like the idea of cover crops, but I think I'm probably working in too small a space to really do succession planting right.

I was surprised to find two clusters of pansies that are doing really well, blooming even. I may dig them up and move them to the backyard since the space around my clematis is bare.

As we came to the house, Caitlyn noticed the crocus in the front yard starting to bloom. She's so excited about spring and summer that she's started breaking out last summer's wardrobe. Nothing fits, of course, which means it goes nicely (she thinks) underneath her winter clothes. I keep having to tell her to take the shorts off before she puts the tights on.

2010-02-06T16:23:00.000-08:00

The sun was out today. I spent the bulk of the day cleaning up the gardens, removing the winter die-back and so forth. And I found some flowers!

Gonna get some dirt this week... the garden is waking up!

2010-02-04T18:32:00.000-08:00

I should feel guilty about this. But I don't, surprisingly enough.

Caitlyn and I skipped school today. Sure, she's been coughing all week and has a sniffle in her nose. And yesterday, two of her teachers commented on it, one to me, one to her. Today she told me that one of her teachers said, "You sound sick. I'm going to stay over here, away from you." So, we had a reason. But Caitlyn's not feverish, and she's gone to school with a cough before.

No, the big reason we didn't go to school today: I didn't want to. I didn't want to deal with the train/bus routes and the nearly hour-long commute there and back again. I didn't want to drive 20 minutes. I didn't want to sit in Tully's for two and one-half hours. I didn't want to pack lunch. I just didn't want to do any of it today.

If we were going to play hooky, I suppose we could have done something significant with our day off. But we didn't do that, either. Caitlyn rested and played quietly in her room. We read a bunch of books. We made it to the library to pick up our holds and to the Post Office to send our OLPC to Haiti. Caitlyn broke a needle (plastic) working with foam beads (I don't know how) and did some puzzles and practiced some letters. I got about as much work done at home as I would have at Tully's.

But the benefit: I'm not a basketcase tonight. And that seems worth it.

2010-02-02T13:01:00.001-08:00

Caitlyn and I walked from school to the Westlake Link station yesterday afternoon. We found cherry trees starting to bloom (one totally covered in buds so that it looked pink from a block away) and daffodils pushing their greens up. Caitlyn nearly burst with joy when we found a camillia in bloom; she's been waiting to pick up faded camillia flowers for a full year now.

And while I don't mind not being frozen whenever I step outside, I worry that this past record-breaking warm January will have unpleasant side effects later: a cold snap just as the fruit trees are setting, costing us the cherry or apple crops, or a insufficient snow pack that will have us running out of water in August. It's rather depressing to be (re)confronted with my ability to find the downside to anything, including sunshine and flowers...

In completely unrelated news, I have found a way to make fruit muffins palatable to Caitlyn, I think. She's objected to peach, strawberry or blueberry muffins in the past, something that made no sense to me since all those muffin varieties are sweet. She loves the fruit straight, and she eats carrot muffins, so what's the problem?

Lumps. Serve her a bowl of potato-corn soup with chunks of potato in it, and she won't eat it. Run it through the blender so it's lump-free, and it's delicious. So, perhaps the same principle applies to muffins. I replaced (most of) the milk in the muffin recipe with raspberry purée and (so far) the result is fruit muffins Caitlyn eats. And as a bonus, muffins made with raspberry purée are pink when you put them in the oven! The raspberry seeds get stuck in my teeth, but nothing's perfect, I guess...

2010-01-29T20:18:00.001-08:00

Caitlyn and I ate our last honeycrisp apple yesterday. I'd bought 18 pounds of them from Jim and Carmela at the end of our local farmers' market season. The apples stayed in the refrigerator, in their box on the bottom shelf (crowding the beer, which somehow Wednesday seems to have forgiven me for) since purchase in mid October. I think we ate most of them as-is, not using them for pies or crisps, just slicing and enjoying them.

Our last apples were starting to get a little wrinkly. I'm not sure if that's the result of four months in the fridge or if four months is about the "shelf life" of the honeycrisp variety. But they were still wonderful, sliced up and eaten for lunches before school.

I believe the apples are the first thing, of all the produce I put up, we've finished. So far, so good.

2010-01-26T10:27:00.000-08:00

I think words are superfluous sometimes.

Don't you?

2010-01-25T13:06:00.000-08:00

I have great hopes for this stuff: Fast2Fuse, a heavyweight, double-sided fusible interfacing. I picked some up with a book of no-sew crafts for kids for Caitlyn for Christmas. The goal is a fabric craft she can do all by herself (while I'm using the sewing machine, for instance). The book comes with tons of templates to copy, cut out, and trace. Use the iron to fuse the fabric to the interfacing and make hats, bags, toys, games, mobiles, cards, boxes. Get out your glue and your sequins and embellish to your hearts' content.

A family member had a birthday this weekend, so Caitlyn and I made a card with some of the Fast2Fuse.

I think the card came out well. And I think we have a successful proof of concept. Time to turn Caitlyn loose with the stuff and see what happens.

2010-01-24T21:40:00.000-08:00

While in the kitchen this afternoon to make dinner rolls and a batch of muffins, I discovered that the carrots were no longer happy with their storage method. Lacking a root cellar, I had scrubbed the carrots, popped them into bags and put them in the drawer in the bottom of the refrigerator. The previous batch of carrots hadn't objected to this treatment, beyond sprouting little roots and trying desperately to grow new tops. This new batch was rotting. My guess is that I had not closed the bag tightly the first time, allowing the carrots to "breathe"; these newer carrots' bag was twisted closed and tucked under.

Fortunately, I noticed this before I lost all the carrots. So, much like last year's Adventure with Saved Onions (wherein I put several pounds of onions into airtight containers only to discover that onions don't like this (a vegetable trend, perhaps?) and then spent an afternoon removing the molded parts and dicing the inner parts for a session in the dehydrator), this afternoon was spent on Project Save the Carrots. I threw the gross ones in the yard waste, scrubbed the rest, removed tops and tails and tiny rootlets, and then cooked them all.

We now have two batches of carrot muffins, two loaves of carrot bread (based on the muffin recipe - I just couldn't be bothered to make more muffins), a batch of carrot-cumin soup (thanks, Ian!) and carrots reserved for tomorrow's vegetable hot pot with biscuits. Which is probably a silly thing to have for dinner, given that we have a pile of leftover bagels from the weekend's activities and that tonight's dinner rolls were shaped in a moment of Carrot Distraction and thus are roughly the size of my arm. Maybe I'll freeze the rolls, if I can find space in the freezer around the muffins and the carrot bread.

2010-01-21T17:20:00.000-08:00

We opened up the first cheese last night. A gouda. Not quite two months old.

It tastes like cheese, and although it's not quite like gouda, it's surprisingly yummy. It's soft and creamy still in the center, which makes it hard to plane for sandwiches. If I'd left it to age for another month or so, perhaps that would be different.

But, it's HOMEMADE CHEESE!

2010-01-19T20:13:00.000-08:00

When I got started on it this morning, the vision for dinner was potato soup. When the garden produces 48 pounds of potatoes, that's a lot of potatoes to discover/invent ways to eat. Some of them are starting to show their age (perhaps the pantry is slightly warmer than the perfect potato storage temperature), but they still soup nicely.

But there was half a sweet potato in the fridge that I threw into the pot with the sautéd onions and the dried bell peppers. I added one of the jars of whey from cheesemaking last month and the whey that was floating on top of the latest batch of yogurt. Added two bouillon cubes and left it to get to know itself while Caitlyn was at school.

I'm not sure where the magic came from. The result was a little sweet, a little salty/savory. A delightful soup, eaten with cheese, and perfect for a rainy evening. Which, oddly, it's not right now, since all our rain is apparently misaddressed to California (there's a short video of the storm surge at Steamer Lane at the bottom of this article about flooding rivers, downed power lines, closed schools, smashed cars and one hydroplaning driver - sometimes I miss winter drama in San Lorenzo Valley.)

I didn't take a picture of dinner tonight since it wasn't terribly photogenic. Caitlyn sneered at it as she came to the table. But she perked right up when Ian pointed out that I had put her soup through the blender and her bowl was lump-free. She ate two bowls of it, so clearly, something went right.

2010-01-17T10:59:00.000-08:00

The other day, Caitlyn asked for a definition of "girlfriend, like when grown-ups get married." So I defined, aiming in grand parental fashion, for age-appropriateness and a balance between traditional definitions and using too many words to explain the various non-traditional relationships in our lives.

Caitlyn then announced, "Me and Alik are girlfriend and boyfriend." This was followed by a description of the afternoon's events on the playground, a game that seems to consist of sitting at the bottom of the slide and waiting for the other person to crash into you as they come down. And then, nonchalantly, she adds, "And we're getting married tomorrow."

"Really?" I'm playing this cool. Nothing Fazes The Mama.

"Uh-huh."

"Oh. I was hoping I could go to your wedding. May I come tomorrow?"

"No," she tells me, as if I were the most stupid person on the planet. "It's during recess."

"I see. Will you show me pictures?"

"Oh, sure."

The topic has not come up again. I can't remember Alik coming up again, except in a discussion about why Caitlyn couldn't wear sunglasses to school ("But, Alik wears glasses to school!") Maybe next time, I'll manage to get introduced to the young man...

2010-01-14T20:57:00.000-08:00

Reality Intervened, after I had promised Caitlyn project time after school today, and she was all set for some no-sew fabric crafting. Instead, we made dinner. I'd been reading about Solar Oven Chef's frittata and Hip Chick's kale tortilla, so:

She chose the potatoes from the pantry, then scrubbed them clean. I peeled and chopped. She put the water in the pot and carried the full pot to the stove, were we turned on the burner together. She watched the pot to be sure it didn't boil over. I sautéd onions. She added the broccoli. I drained the potatoes, and stirred everything together. I broke the eggs, she beat them. I put dinner in the oven.

The result:

The best part: Caitlyn ate it. She liked it. She called it delicious, and thanked herself for dinner.

Lessons for Mama: get her more involved. And find a better space to take after sunset food pictures in the kitchen. The light over the stove looks bright, but man, dinner looked lots better than the photo turned out!

2010-01-13T19:50:00.000-08:00

Ian and I seem to have acquired a stomach bug and, as a result, Caitlyn got to watch The Wizard of Oz this afternoon. This was her first occasion to talk to the characters on screen, telling Dorothy and Co., "Hurry! Hurry! Run!" while they were attempting an escape from the Witch. And thus is the future habit of telling horror movie victims, "Not that way! Can't you hear the soundtrack cues?!?" born.

2010-01-10T19:04:00.000-08:00

I've checked out my seed order for the year, minus the potatoes. I'll order them in a day or so (after Seed Savers answers my question about garlic). Everything else will come from West Coast Seeds. I even remembered to check the stash of leftover seeds from last year and am not buying more zucchini or carrot or spinach seeds.

The challenge veggie of the year will be eggplant, which is more a challenge for the garden and less for me. Meaning that the challenge will be to see if the garden can produce actual eggplants, since I have a terrible time getting pepper plants to produce actual peppers in a quantity that justifies the space they use in the garden. Previous challenge veggies have been beets and turnips, which the garden produced just fine and which I didn't do very well at finding yummy things to with the results. It seemed wise to stick to things that I am reasonably comfortable cooking - although I generally only cook one or two eggplants per year, so perhaps the challenge will be finding something to do with a sizable eggplant crop.

I also decided to get some melon seeds. Last year's melon plant did pretty well. I'm skipping green beans this year since I have so many quarts in the freezer.

Otherwise, we'll be planting our standards: peas, carrots, mescluns, pumpkins, butternut squash, zucchini (just one plant!), spinach, kale, potatoes, tomatoes. I'm going to try starting onions from seed, too. I wonder if that means that I need some deep seed-starting trays?

Outside, the garden sleeps under its blankets of maple leaves and fava bean plants. I wonder if it's looking forward to planting season...

2010-01-07T12:35:00.000-08:00

It's only a problem some days.

Caitlyn's school is in a room in the lower level of a Catholic school attached to a church. St. Joe's has a lovely big white building, and if we get close enough, soon enough, we often get to listen to the bells tolling noon. Last year, we watched the lengthy process of stained glass window restoration/installation.

But sometimes when we walk past the church to school, we walk past a bit of church life. If people would get married or christened at noon on a weekday, it wouldn't be such a big deal, but weekdays at noon seem to be reserved for people who die. And walking by a Big Catholic Funeral - with priests in matching robes, incense burners, large hearse, coffin, and processing kin - seems to be something I have trouble with. Even with the warning of the slowly tolling bell, twenty minutes after noon when bells shouldn't be ringing, I get choked up and clingy.

It makes no sense. I'm not Catholic. I wasn't raised Catholic. These services and rites have nothing in common with Dad's memorial. If anything, it should feel like I've stumbled upon a movie set. But I can't quite breathe.

We walked around, crossing to the other side of the street so Caitlyn and her classmate George didn't accidentally race each other through the grieving crowd. There were small children near the hearse, being urged forward or comforted by a woman not that much older than myself. Were they saying goodbye to a father or grandfather? I picked Caitlyn up (40 pounds these days) and asked for a hug.

"Why are you crying?" she asked. I told her that the funeral made me think of Grandpa Jim.

"I remember him, too," she tells me and squeezes me back.