I continue to be a fount of all things smoooooth and awesome in my everyday life. As you would expect. Did I mention that back when I thought I'd 1) have two kids at the same public middle school and 2) would probably be spending a lot of time sucking up to the administration for services for my kid, I agreed to be an officer in our PTA for this year? Oh yes I did. Because no matter how many times I go through the "volunteer... hate everyone... hate myself... remember that I hate people in general... wonder what made me think I had time to volunteer in the first place... pray for the...
Dude. Otto proves to be a hard act to follow. I feel like I have to have something extremely MEANINGFUL and HEARTFELT to share after he hijacked the blog yesterday and was all "My love will go oooooooooon!" while he stood at the prow of the HMS Woulda, hair streaming back in the wind. (Sometimes I get him confused with a movie I once saw, but I'm pretty sure that's very close to what happened.) And now I should be able to show up in a corseted ball gown and tell you how turning 40 changed my life, and I had a deep personal revelation yesterday about the nature of the human experience. The...
So my to-do list for today is about six miles long; I got up early (which I almost never do on Sunday, because sleeping late is easily in my top 5 favorite activities) and did some work and picked up the house a little and went out for groceries and was back before I'm usually even awake on the weekend. The plan was to have a couple of families from Monkey's new school come over to swim, so everyone could meet everyone else and the boys could play and---hopefully---Monkey would not refuse to get in the car when carpool time came. So I baked some muffins (when in doubt: bake) and made some...
1) Watching Chickadee pack up for school and carefully loft the new pink flute case that Otto surprised her with "because I'm proud of how hard you've worked with the marching band." I never knew how much I would enjoy watching two people trying to pretend they're not totally smitten with one another. 2) Khan Academy, and the fact that Monkey cannot get enough of it. 3) Surrendering to unschooling, and realizing it's going to be fine because Monkey disappeared for an hour and came back with the periodic table, several carefully-drawn atom diagrams, and a page of notes he took on alkali...
I do believe this summer will go down in family history as the Summer of the Tomatoes. Not that there's anything wrong with that; I do love me some tomatoes. But thanks to my husband's plant selection and what must be a particularly optimal growing season (can you believe I haven't seen a single tomato horn worm this year?) (knocking on wood; crossing myself; throwing salt over my shoulder; spitting twice), my tomato cup runneth over. And so the course of my days has changed. The weird thing is, I really kind of like it. I used to get up, have coffee while dealing with email, and get right...
I feel like my entire weekend was spent preparing or consuming food. And that's okay---lord knows that I am a big fan of eating, and I'm willing to invest some time so as to make that experience happen---but it helped me to understand that I would've survived about a week as a pioneer before being all "Screw this, where's McDonald's?" As you already know, my garden is producing tomatoes large enough to take over Atlanta, and a reasonable person would merely concentrate on those, as there's certainly enough of them to keep me busy. BUT NO. I am not reasonable. If some is good, MORE IS BETTER,...
Longtime readers know that one of the joys of summer, for me, is my little backyard garden. What started years ago with a few containers on the deck has steadily expanded into a series of boxes where I spend half my July wrestling with vines that need to go UP THE TRELLIS, dammit, UP. Some plants I grow from seeds. Zucchini, for example, is perfectly happy when you stick a seed in the soil and then completely ignore it for the next two months. Provided you do anything less traumatic than run it over with a car, zucchini will happily flourish until you have zucchini muffins coming out of your...
I always get a little twitchy when someone asks me for a recipe. I am not one of those "This is my secret recipe and if I tell you then I have to kill you" sorts, not by a long shot. I'm the person who brings a dish somewhere and if someone says, "Oh my gosh, this is amazing!" I've barely said "thank you" before I'm telling them how easy it is to make, let me tell you. So it's not a secrecy thing. It's a... slob thing. I am not an exacting person when it comes to cooking. I love to cook; I love to eat; I can follow a recipe with no problem. But the reality is that once I've made something...
6:00 a.m. Wake up. Look at clock. Remember it's Sunday. Go back to sleep. 7:30 a.m. Wake up when Otto gets up. Go back to sleep. 8:30 a.m. Hear Otto making coffee. Get up. 8:35 a.m. COOOOOOOFFEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. 8:45 a.m. Put turkey breast in crock pot. 8:50 a.m. Field Chickadee's inquisition; she is certainly not eating any of that GROSS ANIMAL in the crock for dinner, so what is she having? Is that cranberry sauce on the turkey? Did I save her any? Because she is NOT EATING CRANBERRY SAUCE THAT TOUCHED TURKEY, MOM. 8:55 a.m. I give up my sanguine replies about how I have unfailingly...
