School is almost over (!!!) for the year, and my kids are deep in exams. The great state of Georgia (and most of the country, it seems) is eager to make sure that No Child Is Left Untested, so between SLOs and EOCTs (Student Learning Objectives and End of Course Tests) and APs (Advanced Placement), I'm pretty sure classes are over and the only thing the kids are currently learning is how many kids can actually walk right off campus with a single test pass. On the rare occasions when they find themselves in class WITHOUT a test, they seem to be engaging in the time-honored learning traditions...
Did I mention that I---like every other person in the world who likes to cook and bake and who gets periodically sucked into food trends---made some sourdough starter a while back? I did, and now I have returned to that place where I don't buy bread, I just make a couple of loaves every week. That's all good and well (I enjoy doing it, the family seems to enjoy eating it, and it's both cheaper and more nutritious than the stuff from the store), plus I'm experimenting with making other stuff (sourdough pizza crust! sourdough garlic knots! sourdough oh look I'm making something else I can't...
This weekend I Planted All The Things and Baked All The Things and also managed to burn a spectacular burn across my arm in an impossible location while I was rotating the pans in the oven for this cake. I am talented! Now on my left arm, my tattoo is busy scaling/flaking ("SOON I SHALL REVEAL MY TRUE FORM!" I keep screeching at the children, who have long suspected I am actually Cthulhu underneath all the gray hair and under-eye bags), and on my right arm, I have a 2" long blister. I'm a mess. I'm such a disaster, I never even told you to go read my latest advice column over at Alpha Mom,...
Nerd Night was on hiatus for a few weeks (Easter and other scheduling issues), and lo, there was much sadness across the land. "Why aren't you baking us delicious sugary things?" lamented my spawn. It was tragic, truly. Sometimes I get a wild hair about a certain kind of recipe, and other times a recipe just sort... suggests itself to me. Like, two weeks ago, Nilla Wafers were the Penny Item the day I went grocery shopping, so I ended up with a box of those. And then a week ago, Jello Pudding mixes were B1G1. So I figured I'd make a good ol' southern banana pudding, but of course both of my...
I mentioned that I've been making bread again, right? The thing about homemade bread is that... then you have a lot of bread lying around. Weird how that works. And my first few batches of homemade sourdough didn't rise quite as much as I wanted them to, plus they weren't terribly sour, which means they were excellent for things like toast but not so much for things like sandwiches. You know what else homemade, dense bread like that is great for? Overnight French toast. If you've never made this before, go make this overnight bananas foster French toast immediately. And look, I'm not gonna...
"Hey Mir," you say, because you think it's funny by now, "is your bathroom renovation done?" "Ha!" I reply. "HahahaHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" I howl, and eventually you run in the other direction because I am a little deranged at this point, and frankly, scary. I know I've mentioned before that I find Snapchat useful for staying connected to Chickadee, but there was something immensely satisfying about sending her this snap yesterday, childish though it may have been. (Listen, I was told the drywall guy was coming first thing, then when I inquired around 11 as to what was going on, I was told...
It's one of those unwritten rules---similar to how bringing an umbrella with you keeps it from raining---that if you have Something Big happening, a million other things will have to happen at the same time, because it is not enough to deal with that ONE thing. Of course. So: Our production of The Vagina Monologues opens tonight, which means Chickadee and I have been spending long hours at rehearsal, AND Otto has about a dozen extra things going at work, AND Monkey is under the weather AND every committee I am on for school needs something from me right now AND a great job opportunity fell...
So I did this weird green smoothie cleanse and lost some weight. I never know if writing about that sort of thing is interesting or boring; I mean, it's interesting to me, I guess? Maybe not to you? I might write about it next week. It was... an adventure. I'm glad I did it for a number of reasons, not the least among them that I appreciate being able to fit into my pants. Anyway, during the first few days of the cleanse, especially, while I was dealing with caffeine withdrawal and general hopelessness (I'm the best advertisement for this cleanse EVER, clearly), I felt like I wasn't thinking...
I've been threatening to do this for months, but I finally wrote a counterpoint piece to all of those "HOW TO MAKE SURE YOUR SCHMOOPYKINS GETS INTO HARVARD" articles. It was surprisingly cathartic. My distress over various "experts" in this area is threefold: 1) Who says you have to go to an Ivy or other generally-rated-as-one-of-the-very-best sorts of colleges in order to succeed? That's dumb. If that was true, none of the other colleges would exist, or no one who graduates from them would ever make a living. These pieces are rife with a snobbery about education that I find really...
