Friday favorites

1. Favorite month. November marks the start of real fall: no more silly warm days, brilliantine skies and frivolous scarlet leaves. Time to think about mortality and the ultimate random nature of all things: my favorite month. At least while I am in it. Plus there is the little reprieve at the end that reminds us that molecular disassociation aside, the real purpose of life is a full turkey dinner eaten after a long day of skiing in the company of family and friends (even if not all the family and all the friends.) That reminds me: it's time to book a condo for Thanksgiving.

2. Favorite holiday. Er, not Halloween. I am intrigued by the Day of the Dead (more on this here), but it is not really mine to celebrate.

Aside: Pros and cons of instituting new holidays/ traditions

Pros: Step outside your comfort zone
         Find rituals that address needs not covered in current holiday plan
         Feel pioneering and multicultural
         The creation of new traditions is a beautiful thing (according to parenting magazines, anyway)

Cons: The artificial quality emphasizes the absurdity of all holidays
          Feel like a dork
          Feel like an impostor
          The kids keep asking why are we doing this?
          So do I.

3. Favorite meal this week: the delicious pork and pepper stew my Mom made when Si and I flew out to visit them last weekend, or possibly the accompaniment, pasta and mushrooms made with the succulent fresh oyster mushrooms they picked on the walk we took. Man, oyster mushrooms are good. They make me revise my previous stance on mushrooms as food (which, succinctly: eh). On the same walk we stepped down to the muddy shore of a pond where there were hundreds - well, scores - of dime-sized froggies.

Second aside: I have mentioned before that there is a woeful lack of frogs in the lives of my kids. The frogs probably don't mind this, but it makes me ache a little that we don't live in a place where the perennial absurdity that is a frog can be a common experience. It's partly a climate thing: the high plains is not kind to amphibians. But it's more a situational state: it's because we live in the suburbs, near a creek and a marsh. Our waterways are frogless. And, possibly not coincidentally, largely kidless as well.

4. Favorite book I'm reading this week: The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Short, clever, damning yet generous and manages to open a drafty window on a different world before it slams shut at the end. Close runnerup: A Visit from the Goon Squad. I'm often leery of obvious experimentation - okay, we get it, you're brilliant - but here it is funny and it works.

5. Favorite powerpoint. The one in A Visit from the Goon Squad. Obviously. When else is a powerpoint presentation even going to be mentioned, actually. Which makes me wonder about the realism of using powerpoint for personal expression the way she does here - unless you think of it as a revived technology, some remnant from the past dragged up and put to new and vastly better use. That does happen.

8. Favorite work thing: that niggling nervous tummy feeling of always being late and behind the ball. Oh, wait. Different list.

Friday favorites

1. Favorite book I've been reading this week: The Little Princess, to Helen at bedtime. This is actually one of my favorite books of all time, and I look forward all day to reading it, even as my adult mind keeps getting tripped up by some of the details (what part of two adult men spying on a child through her window, and then sneaking into her room as she sleeps, is NOT CREEPY? Also, the happy ending where the rich youngish man finds the love of his life in, I mean becomes the legal guardian of, his dead business partner's 11-year-old daughter - well, it's great and all until she wants to be a grownup with HER OWN LIFE and get married and stuff, and THEN WHAT HAPPENS?)

2. Favorite meal: a made a pork chop thing with red cabbage, and a crock pot chicken and yam thing that I didn't even get to eat because I was so busy going to a wine-tasting tupperware party up the street (my life can be SO HARD sometimes), but I think my favorite thing this week was the lentil salad with goat cheese and sundried tomatoes that I managed not to burn. Needless to say I was alone, all alone, with my privileged bowl of lentils in the corner. Everyone else ate cereal and cheese quesadillas.

3. Favorite weather this week: it snowed on Thursday, real snow that stuck on the ground and everything. We built a fire and lay around reading books/ building Minecraft thingies (sets? scenarios? I don't even know).

4. Favorite work run. This fall I've been doing runs at work. These are way, way better now that the temperature at noon is no longer 92 degrees in the shade. It's still a barren, bleak, warehouse-filled landscape, though, and while most days I run over and do laps around the windy expanse of soccer fields, once a week I give myself permission to drive to the bikepath and run along Cherry Creek.

Friday Favorites

1. Favorite time of day. Morning, obviously. Always. But this time of year I like it especially: I get up when it's still dark and write, and then either go for a run or drive to work as the sun is rising, so I'm glutted with sunrises these days. I love it. It's so much better than my habits from the past few years, where I was running in the dark half the year and in the shower, I think, for the sunrise.

2. Favorite read of the week: I'm working my way slowly through The Hemingses of Monticello, which is about the family of slaves who were both Thomas Jefferson's unacknowledged inlaws and his companion and children. This is pretty much the perfect book for me right now: I spent the first half of the year immersing myself in the life and world of Thomas Jefferson, and dreaming of how to create my own private Monticello (which I'm still ambivalent about. I think people who create utopias tend to use the people in their lives as building blocks, and men who create utopias are especially dangerous this way). Now I'm reading about the invisible secret of Monticello, made visible. Much of the book is obviously speculative, but it's such smart and carefully researched speculation that it hardly matters.

3. Favorite meal of the week: chicken soup (made with leftover roast chicken) with basil pesto and rolls made with leftover mashed sweet yams. We've also had a lot of dessert: both Helen and Silas dedicated themselves to dessert projects this week. Si made a recipe he'd found on the internet, cupcakes with tombstones on them (well, two of the cupcakes had tombstones. Then he decided that was way too much work and the rest just have frosting.), and Helen made a recipe she'd found in a craft book, sugar cookies with food color paintings on them. She also made a T shirt with a pink zebra painted on it in fabric paints. They're both so crafty, those kids, although Si is still a follow-the-instructions-to-the-letter kind of guy, while Helen feels free to improvise.

Other than that it's been kind of a hard week, for no especial reason, except that I've had five bad hair days in a row and the kidnapping in Arvada has been bringing me down and I'm in kind of a personality head butting with someone at work (who is not in my department, so it's not really a crisis or a constant problem, just a disappointment to realize, again, that I am not liked by all people all of the time even though I SHOULD BE BECAUSE I AM A TENDER PRECIOUS SNOWFLAKE AND ALSO BRILLIANT.)

Anyway. The yard is adrift is golden glowing yellow, so there's that.

Another Sputtering Return of the Friday Favorites

1. Favorite moments of the debate (note: this was the first presidential debate I have watched in 20 years, not counting SNL. I might wait another 20 years before I watch the next one.) Was it when Silas, turning away from the evening's Educational Entertainment, emerged with a carefully chosen alternative viewing choice? Or when he realized that no, sorry, we weren't going to turn off the debate to watch Spongebob? Was it the end, when it was finally over? Was it forty minutes before the debate started, when Helen and I were driving home through deserted streets that were gray with dusk and blooming with big dimly orange puffs of autumn ash tree - the debates were held here in Denver, not far from our house, and the interstate closed at 5, so it was like a little holiday time at the end of a busy working day. This one, I think. This was my favorite moment. Before they started.

2. Favorite part of the season. Every fall I think about Kenko's injunction that "branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with faded flowers are worthier of our admiration" - and then I think, nah. The fall leaves at their red and gold peak thrill me much more than a pile of brown leaves on the ground, even if that means I am privileging a certain moment in the eternal flux of the universe. There will be plenty of time for austere beauty in November. Today I remain resolutely delighted by the first flush of golden ash and bitter red sumac. This right here is my favorite moment of fall.

3. Favorite book I read in September: Finders Keepers by Craig Childs. This book hits on pretty much everything I struggled with when I lived in southwest Colorado and made my living (such as it was) walking the National Forest looking for pottery shards and rock flakes. I hated how anytime we found something interesting our job was to seal it in a plastic baggy and ship it to a big artifact storage locker. I hated the feeling of salacious pleasure I got anytime we poked our noses into something that was once private. I hated how I couldn't just slip a pretty little shard into my pocket, no matter how much more I'd appreciate it than the artifact storage locker.

4. Favorite mood for the week: recovering invalid. Between the sewer mess, the melancholy fact of fall, and the trip for work to Las Vegas (whoo boy) (it wasn't like that, just DULL), I am feeling the need to treat myself like a delicate Victorian convalescent this week. Someone who needs to lie about in the sun wrapped in lots of clean linen, being administered medicinal doses of tea and fresh air. So I took yesterday off. I volunteered in Helen's classroom this morning (which was awesome. I will definitely do this again.) I slept in two days this week.

5. Favorite dinner I made this week: make-your-own tacos. I cooked the beef with a new chili powder I picked up on a trip to the Littleton Penzey's: this is actually the first time in my cooking life that I have deliberately purchased a spice mix and to paraphrase a friend, I will need to live forty more years in order to make up for forty years of not using spice mixes. The mix is delicious. I think it has sugar in it, and possibly powdered heroin. It is so, so yummy.

6. Favorite work thing*: my personalized stationery. I like it so much that I hoard it: no ordinary to-do lists for this stationery, no sir. Only the biggest and most important lists go on this stuff.


*I have been feeling insulted and put upon lately by the fact that I need to work. This is not a feeling specific to my particular job, which happens to be going fine, but an irritation at a basic life condition (namely, that I am not independently wealthy; or possibly that the world has not chosen to pay me for doing what I like to do. Harrumph.) However, I am going to counteract this feeling by listing my favorite work activity each week. Identifying details will be redacted, obv.

Friday Favorites: Rain

Let me try to resuscitate my regular Friday thing here with this tribute to rain, which I love, although we have been receiving it in quantities and velocities that I find it harder to appreciate.

My favorite things about rain:

1. The smell. Of course. Although it turns out that if it rains every day and every night for a week and a half, the smell is less "fresh pine forest" than "underside of mushroom."

2. The way it makes the yard grow and grow and grow. All our plants are bounding forth from the earth, in startling abundance.

3. The sheer awesome power of a deluge. I mean, even if I am kind of horrified at how the water is pooling up and washing away (goodbye, landscaping! Goodbye, compost! Goodbye, woodchips! Goodbye, edges!), it's still one heck of a show, these afternoon storms we've been having. Every morning brings its own surprise (wow! I didn't think that the puddles would reach that high!)

4. Sitting in the house/office/car and feeling smugly appreciative of modern systems of enclosure.

5. The excuse to bring a child into bed, just like the old days. When they were smaller. And fit in the bed. This one is kind of double-edged.

6. The inexplicable way it makes the end of the world feel farther off (in contrast to drought, which makes the end of the world feel right on our doorstep).

All said, I'm still crossing my fingers that today's the day we get NO rain.

Friday Favorites

I was out of town for work at the start of this week, and even though it was only three days it somehow felt like three weeks and now I'm really just running on made-up time, or so it feels. Like I'm going to look down, Wil E Coyote-style, and realize that ohmygod I forgot to feed the kids. Or holyshit Christmas is TODAY and we haven't even put up our lights. (We HAVEN'T put up our lights.) (But I did make the kids breakfast, and I'm reasonably sure they're at school). So I'm playing mental catchup, here. But I'll still put up a quick favorites post:

1. Favorite holiday: Christmas. Yes, it is, for real. And you know what else? My second favorite holiday is Easter. Old curmudgeonly, nonChristian, hasn't-belonged-to-a-church-in-over-thirty-years me.

2. Favorite part of my commute: where the highway goes down into the Platte River valley and for a mile or so all you can see are cottonwoods, plains, and mountains.

3. Favorite part of traveling for work: the food. Also, making coffee in my hotel room while I take a shower. Also, check-in. Otherwise I kind of hate it, I'm finding.

4. Favorite thing to dream about: landscape. Those dreams where I'm just setting forth into a new a tangled country, either on foot, or more rarely, in a truck. The world in my dreams seems vast and unpopulated. Lately the land in my dreams has been covered with houses, or is platted to be covered with houses, or is not very far from a large population center. Hmm. Coincidence? Or living in the suburbs with little chance to leave them? [Interestingly and perhaps ironically, my second-favorite dream involves looking at real estate.]

5. Third favorite thing to dream about: my grandpa's house. Always in these dreams there is an undiscovered room or floor filled with fascinating things. Two nights ago, however, I dreamed I was in his house and needing to pee, but every room I went to had been demoed. Apparently we were undertaking a "quick" bathroom remodel during our visit to his house. (I wonder where THAT dream came from?)

In other news, we have drywall, folks. Once we get rid of the drywall dust, the house will be downright habitable. Who NEEDS a kitchen, really?

Friday Favorites

My oldest threw up on the bus today. Rite of passage, right? Poor kid. (also: guilt. He said he felt dizzy this morning, but did I listen? No.)

Now I'm kind of feeling like sickness lurks around the corner. My throat is...not sore yet, but drippy, if you know what I mean.

So. A Friday Favorites post about the great things about being sick. Because feeling crummy sucks--but it's always nice to have an excuse to glug down some Nyquil (off brand, of course).

1. Sleeping in, taking naps, and more sleeping in general. This really only works if it's not a coughing cold.

2. Watching TV/ movies and feeling like this is good. This is exactly what I should be doing vs Don't you have some laundry you need to do? Only that laundry never goes away, does it? Damn.

3. Nyquil, benadryl, and etc. Duh.

Well, that's it. I hope this isn't a really involved cold. I also hope it isn't a big one for the coughing.

Friday Favorites - Mother's Day Edition

My to-do list for the weekend:

- make Si and Helen make appreciation cards for their teachers before we procrastinate so much that it's too late to give them
- clean the house, esp the bathrooms
- pry ant-ridden timbers out of the landscaping and pile them for easy access to the roll-off dumpster we're going to get next weekend
- take Helen to gymnastics, preferably by bike
- go to Si's baseball game on Sat
- run with Si at least once (I've been making him run a mile four or five times a week--separate story)
- do the laundry
- help the kids plant their herb garden
- mow
- water the garden (the peas are coming up! and the carrots and the radishes and the chard!)
- weed
- go to the store
- go for a longish run
- finish a pitch for a magazine story I've been working on
- call our Littleton friends to see if they're still on for Saturday night dinner
- have our Littleton friends over for dinner
- figure what to do for Mother's Day

Note that last item? That's always how this holiday seems for me: one more damn thing to fit in. I'm not opposed to it per se, although I do grade into the camp of it's a holiday invented by card companies to sell more cards. I used to enjoy it, back before we had kids and Mother's Day was an excuse to go with my MIL to a nicer-than-usual brunch place. Sometimes I still feel nostalgia for the old brunch days, but then I remember that this was back in the days when I didn't know what to do with all my time. On Sunday we'd sleep in, laze about staring hungrily at the walls, drag ourselves to the brunch place, wait for hours, cram as much pancakes and French toast into our food-holes as we could, then roll home to laze about for the rest of the day. If I was feeling ambitious I'd go for a run or work in the yard. But the whole brunch thing would mean that the day wouldn't really get started until 1 o'clock or so--which is why brunching has pretty much become a thing of the past. I mean, please. One o'clock? That's like dinnertime, practically.

Anyhow. My five favorite things about NOT going out for brunch:

1. Breakfast takes 15 minutes to make, including the coffee, and I'm done eating in ten.
2. I can eat what I really feel like at breakfastime, which is cereal.
3. I don't spend the next three hours on a carbohydrate-fueled food bonk.
4. I can eat when I'm hungry and move on with my life.
5. No lines.

Friday Favorites

We've started to collect bids for the work on the roof and also some other things (what we technically want to do is tear down the entire north part of our house, scour the site with bleach, and start over. Due to earthly realities, like funding, we'll fall somewhere short of this). And by "collecting bids," I mean "talk with various builders and contractors about all the wonderful possibilities and also make lots of little drawings on pieces of scrap paper." That is to say, we haven't actually seen any pricetags, although here and there we'll get a figure thrown out--"oh, THAT will cost five thousand dollars" or "probably in the realm of fifteen hundred." So we're still in the dreamy phase. Wouldn't it be nice if we had a window here by the fireplace? Wouldn't it be nice if we had space for a study down here where the bathroom is now? Wouldn't it be great to have the stairs over here?

At some point, we'll get some numbers, and cold, bitter reality will set in. That will be painful. But in the meantime, just the idea that we can make this thing anything we want it to be is kind of liberating. Also, the idea that we are People Who Work On Our House, as opposed to what we've always been, which is People Who Think A Lot About Various Problems But Never Get Around to Actually Doing Anything About Them, is kind of liberating. It will liberate our money, too, from its cozy place in our bank/ equity/ future paycheck. But even that is a state of mind, and states of mind can change.

Well, I'm not sure how exactly I'm going to move from this to a list of favorite things, either. I suppose I could list my favorite things about construction, which are:

1. The smell of fresh lumber
2. Getting to pick through tile samples at Home Depot
3. That feeling, after it's all done, that we can live in a place that is not filled with noise and drywall dust and Toxic Attic smell is WONDERFUL, and feels like some kind of miracle.
4. The feeling that we're finally getting something done.
5. Yeah, that's it. House construction is basically miserable, and on top of it all the expense is staggering. However, unlike lots of expensive things (having open-heart surgery, say) at the end of it all everything is much, much nicer.

Friday Favorites

Home again, and raining. I did my run in the rain this morning, and while sometimes this is my favorite kind of run, this morning it was not. I did like getting out, though, and I still get unreasonably excited when the creekwaters rise. And they're rising.

Well, my Friday Favorites this morning are kind of predictable: my favorite things about coming home.

1. Getting to see Hubs and the kids. Both kids were being especially sweet this morning, particularly given the conditions of rain and sleepiness. Silas actually went to say goodbye to Hubs without being prompted by me. AND he said, "Have a good day, Mom!" as he left the house. To wait at the bus stop. In the rain. He probably qualifies for some kind of 3rd grade medal.

2. Getting to check on the flowering/ sprouting status of plants in the yard. This is bar none my favorite activity this time of year, and I build up a craving after a few days away. I planted carrots and peas on Sunday, but they're not up yet (it would be a wee bit unusual for them to sprout this fast, but I'm always hopeful).

3. Getting to see the dog. She actually crawled under the covers with us last night, which she hasn't done for YEARS--I wonder if the rain bothers her? Or maybe she could hear very very distant thunder? Or maybe she missed me?

4. Getting to eat exactly what I like for breakfast.

5. Getting back to a routine. No matter how much I enjoy being away, whether for work or on vacation, there's always this nagging feeling of things being off-kilter. Now things are on kilter again, except for looming house repairs/ renovations.

Worst thing about coming back: all the same old problems in the house are STILL HERE. Ugh. Ants. We have ANTS. In the roof, along with also apparently fungus/ rot, which is what they eat. We're still sort of assessing slash dithering on this. GOD. Sometimes I imagine running into the people who lived here before us and asking them if they actually did one single thing in the house NOT the cheapest crappiest way. (The roof is NEW. NEW ROOF AND IT WAS PUT ON OVER ROT.)

And then I share a little laugh with myself because seriously, that's so not my style. I'd probably just smile and tell them OH WE LOVE THE HOUSE. AND EVERY SINGLE DOLLAR WE ARE SINKING INTO IT LIKE SOME VAST TAR PIT OF MONEY.

Friday Favorites

Well, I suppose I COULD write a post about the joys of not posting...but, it's snowing, I've been browsing through seed catalogs, and I'm instead going to write about my favorite things about buying seeds in the dead of winter.

1. The pictures. Even though the pictures of oversized peas, tomatoes, squash and spinach glistening and bursting out of the page are practically cliche, and are in most cases the exact same photos that were in the catalog last year, and besides OBVIOUSLY consist of the rankest type of food porn--I love them. My mouth waters. My mental kitchen fills to the brim with luscious vegetables--piles of tomatoes, bowls full of peas, shelled and unshelled, bouquets of cilantro and basil. I imagine stepping out to the garden and loading my arms with piles of flowers and vegetables. I start to think I need stripey eggplant and golden cucumber, even though my summer garden barely has room for the basics (tomato, basil, and zucchini), even though I don't actually LIKE eggplant all that much. I start to think that all of this bounty will be in season at the same time, just like in the catalog (I even think that I'll actually be able to use fresh tomatoes and fresh cilantro at the same time and make a decent homegrown salsa! hahahaha!). I start to go a little crazy, in other words. I love going crazy.

2. The plans. This time every year I get out the measuring tape, march out into the snowy, muddy yard, and start planning my garden beds. In my wake drift thousands of scraps of paper, all with indecipherable sketches of the backyard. Inexplicably, I am loathe to throw any of these scraps away, and tend to gather them up and stuff them into files. They're VALUABLE, man.

3. The kids. Sporadically they like gardening, and I try to encourage this as much as possible by letting each of them choose something out of the catalog (retail: the shortest way to a child's heart. Alas.) This year they pooled their resources and decided to buy an herb garden "kit"--this is one of those products that consists of about five seeds, a couple of plans, and a really nice photo, and costs eight times as much as the seeds by themselves. I kept my comments to myself, though (except to ask "Oh--do you EAT herbs?").

4. The wait. Right now the garden is all anticipation--and as much as I do love planting seeds, enriching beds, staking tomatoes, and all the other puttery chores that come with it, anticipation has the value of not actually taking any time (except of the time-wasting variety), and also not any disappointment (why in the Sam Hill didn't any of these seeds SPROUT?)

Friday Favorites

I like February. I really do. It's lighter and usually warmer. It has Valentine's Day, which I don't actually like, but which makes for a pleasant flurry of bright-red and chocolate-flavored activity in the middle of the month. By the end of the month early finches and crocuses start pushing their way in, reminding me that winter isn't going to last forever.

Which is so, so good, because February is right about when I start to feel like this season is going to last forfuckingever [note: spellcheck suggested "bloodsucking" here. YES.]. I am ALWAYS going to be dragging myself out of bed in the pitch black dark, stumbling through the house as I pull on my coat and gloves and running shoes, shivering as I step out into the night to run. I am always going to be coming home as the last light fades from the sky and the kids start to cannibalize each other as I assemble the ingredients for dinner. If I need to dash out to the library or the store after dinner, it's always going to be in the icy dark. The back yard will always be sealed under a glacier of ice studded with summer detritus (melted jackolanterns, plastic shovels, matchbox cars).

So. A little post about my favorite things about coming home late in the dark, shall we?

1. The neighborhood looks so cozy as I pull into it at 5:30, with its blue-black streets and its rows of yellow windows.
2. The house itself feels cozy, as we pull the drapes closed and turn on the lights. It feels like the phrase "coming home."
3. If I've managed to get something going in the crock pot (ok, so far this has happened ONCE), it smells like the most delicious dinner EVER and I am so grateful--to crockpots, to my morning self who so thoughtfully set this up, to dinner.
4. If we decide fuckit, we're going out to eat, this feels like a magnificent indulgence, and I am grateful to restaurants everywhere.
5. I know that if I didn't currently have a job and I had been sitting around the house all day, I would be totally nostalgic for this "coming home" feeling, and I would conveniently forget the exhaustion, the starvingness, the kids melting into puddles of accusing misery.

Happy Friday, all!

Friday Favorites

Back with the Friday Favorites! These should be the easiest posts ever, right?

And, well, okay, they are pretty easy. What I want to enthuse on today is January. Right? It's the coldest, darkest, most miserable month of the year, and it doesn't even have any holidays to enliven it. A cold, sober month. And yet I love it so (although I freely admit that if I lived in Toronto, or the Outer Hebrides, I might feel differently). (Wouldn't that be so cool to live in the Outer Hebrides? And probably much more bearable in these days of Netflix and the Internets.)

My favorite things about January:

1. All that busy, hot holiday shtick is DONE. I love Christmas as much as the next person, but man, I am always so glad to see it go.

2. My family's birthday season is over. We begin in August, with Silas, rocket through my nephew, my MIL, Hubs, my dad, my SIL, my sister, my mom, and me, finishing up with Helen just before Christmas. At which point: WHEW. There are a few outliers who require attention and presents at odd times, like May, but for the most part, presents and parties are put aside.

3. Although I am in a low swing in my affection-for-cold cycle, I do like cold weather, at least in theory, and January has plenty of it. I like the frosty hay-colored grass in the morning, I like the plumes of steam sent up by energy plants in the early morning, I like the white tufting on the mountains in the morning (you: uh, Melospiza, I think that's called frost).

4. I like the abstemiousness and frugality of the month, after all the overeating and overspending of December. Again, some years this frugality is more, uh, theoretical than in other years, but still. I likka the idea.

5. The days are getting longer again. Now when I leave the office at five it is still pale dusk when I get to Helen's school, and not pitch black. Oddly, though, the mornings are still very long and dark. I am REAAAALY looking forward to doing my runs in the twilight, instead of the dark. REAAAAAALY.

So! Go forth and prosper! Also, have a good weekend.

Friday Favorites

It's been a week of crazybusy at work, which kind of sucks, but also provides a kind of chemical high, you know? Only today, for reasons that made sense only back in November when I made the appointment, I am taking Helen in for her annual checkup. So in the midst of busyness I have enforced staying-at-homeness. And--it's kind of nice.

My favorite things about staying home on a weekday:

1. It's quiet. The neighbors are all off working, or stashed indoors.

2. It's 9:10, and I'm still in my pajamas. In a little bit I'll go in and have a bath (a bath!)

3. It's bright and sunny.

4. I get to watch what the dog does when we're gone (she sleeps in one spot, then unfolds herself painfully, limps off the couch, and goes and falls asleep in another spot).

5. I don't feel the need to do weekend-y things, like go to the store or clean the bathroom.

Well, that's it. Happy Friday, everyone!

Friday Favorites

Okay: not for the first time I'm going to do a passive aggressive Friday Favorites and list all my favorite things about something which I'm doing this weekend but I DO NOT WANT TO DO.

My favorite things about going to The Condo*:

1. The snow is nice and white up there. And there are big piles of it.

2. There are lots of fun, funky breakfast places up there within walking distance. Not that we ever go to them.

3. It's nice to get out of town for a while. Right? Isn't this always true?

4. Not everyone who goes to The Condo will be at The Condo.

5. Time's up!

Erg. Commence noticing how much of a first world problem this is. (Although really? If we were living in a Peruvian shantytown? At least we could put the kids outside.)

*The Condo is a piece of important family heritage. It's also small, has uncomfortable beds, and is in the middle of the urban mountain corridor, about 20 inches from I-70.

Friday Favorites

Last night we had dinner with my mother-in-law, who, after a brief holiday, once again lives in the same city as we do. In fact, she now lives closer to us than she did when we lived in Fort Collins. Those of you who have been privy to my mostly petty struggles with her over the years will understand when I say that if I'd known, two years ago, that we would move seventy miles away only to have her closer than ever, I might never have agreed to leave in the first place (I think that "moving away from MIL" might have been in my "pro" column when I was trying to get my mind around moving.)

Well, in the past two years, she has mellowed, I have mellowed, and I'm now basically glad to have her only a stone's throw away (a stone thrown by a seven-league giant, besides). Here are my favorite things about living near my MIL:

1. As she gets older, and more in need of help, it is SOOOO much easier to help her when she lives only fifteen minutes away.

2. Once again she can do random fun things with the kids--and now that she's so close, it doesn't have to be all three grandkids. The special, one-on-one relationship that she had with Silas in his first few years can rekindle a little, and maybe she can spend some special time with Helen as well, just the two of them.

3. When we drive her home after dark (she doesn't drive at night anymore), it's just the right distance: the car has time to warm up, I can listen to a decent chunk of a radio program, and yet it's never so far it feels burdensome.

4. Okay, I'll admit: free in-a-pinch babysitting.

5. For the first time in about ten years, she seems relaxed and happy. This is good. This is very good. When MIL's not happy, ain't nobody happy.

Have a great day!

Friday Favorites

On my lunch hour today I took a much-needed break and went for a hike. At one point I was walking through a fault-block valley with only the footprints of deer and coyote in the snow around me. Horizon to horizon, for several miles, what I could see was not much different from what Jesse James and his teenage buddies saw when they were running through this area a hundred years ago. For a few minutes I could even feel the wind blowing through my head, which maybe doesn't sound pleasant but which is the opposite of stressy-stress regular life (trust me).

Then I got back in my truck and returned to work, where I checked Facebook and noticed a common theme among all my old English-department cronies, most of whom now teach. For example:

"MR was just told by a colleague that has been keeping track of how many essays he's read and graded this semester and it was 379. That's more than one essay a day for an entire year. And this is ONE semester. The punch line? After all of that revision? Still bad essays."

and

"SS is staring at a stack of 50 essays to be graded by Monday at 8:00 a.m. But first, coffee. And maybe, if I can find a random leftover one around here, half a xanax so I don't have the desire to kill the students I know will ignore everything I've said all semester :D."

Etc. Since every so often I feel moody that I don't still teach, so these posts are a nice reminder of why I am so, so, so, so glad that I didn't go that route.

My top five reasons why I'm glad I don't teach:

1. Reading 379 essays (and counting!) a semester.
2. GRADING those 379 essays.
3. Absolutely having to be at work at a specific time several times a week.
4. Having to perform every day.
5. Ugh. MORE grading.

Friday Favorites

(Sort of).

The only thing I like about my commute is getting to listen to books on tape. I imagined I would listen to all the same books I read, and that I could get back some of my precious reading time that has been lost to taking a job.

Well, that was wrong. There are certain things a book on tape needs in order for me to listen to it and not just tune out while some windbag drones on out of the speaker.

Here's what I need from a book on tape:

1. It has to sound like someone telling a story, not someone reading a story. UGH. I listened to When You Are Engulfed In Flames by David Sedaris first and it was wonderful and I giggled to myself all along the highway. Then I checked out Barrel Fever, which is an older book, in which David Sedaris hadn't perfected his reading style. I didn't finish that one. Although I see on Amazon that there's a newer edition--maybe I'll try that one instead.

2. Pretty much, it has to be funny. I'm sure there are some exceptions to this rule, but I haven't found them yet. Plus, it's harder to be conversational about, say, the apocalypse (A Brief History of the Dead--unfinished).

Okay, that's it. I'm also in need of some recommendations. How about you? Heard a good audiobook lately? Or have any ideas about a book that might make a good audiobook?

Friday Favorites

So far, I've made three of the Halloween recipes posted by Sundry on Milk and Cookies and mm-mm, are they good (note: I did *not* make the hand), although I'll come right out and say that so far none of them quite delivered on my expectations. I.e., they didn't taste quite as good as they looked in the pictures. I wasn't organized enough to get a photo of my creations before I left the house, but I will try to post one later, because also? my creations don't look as good as they looked in the pictures on Milk and Cookies.

Anyhow, what I wanted to post today is my favorite things about cooking:

1. I can explore without leaving my kitchen.
2. It's crafty, yet doesn't lead to crap accumulation, unlike actual craftiness.
3. It offers immediate gratification (or, occasionally, immediate feedback on The Wrongitude).
4. It allows me to incorporate my love of lists and projects with my love of eating.
5. It involves FOOD. Mmmmm.

Friday Favorites

A break from my transportation kick to bring you my five favorite things about snow days:

1. Sleeping in.
2. That awesome, "and now we take a break from our regularly scheduled programming" feeling. Regular life is having some technical difficulties...so let's all sit around in our PJs and play Memory.
3. I'm often inspired to take up outlandish and totally uncharacteristic house projects. Like: I made a sock doll yesterday. People! A sock doll!
4. Hot chocolate and cookies are obviously medical necessities.
5. The snow.