Child [at my bedside]:
Mama?
Me:
Mmmm?
Child:
I had a nightmare. Can I sleep with you?
Me:
Mmm-hmm.
Child:
Okay. [Retrieves bedding, climbs in next to me.] I’m sorry you couldn’t sleep.
Me:
I was asleep.
Child:
Oh, good. I’m glad something didn’t wake you up.
Me:
You woke me up.
Child:
Oh. Right.
Sometime in the last 24 hours, we’ve inadvertently let a fly into the house.
I am more tolerant of arthropods than most, both inside and outside the house (see posts about spiders and ants). Around here, unwanted bugs are routinely captured and relocated. Just last week, my daughter discovered a small (only about an inch long – must have been a female) common stag beetle (Pseudolucanus sp.) on the upstairs landing. My daughter hollered for me to come get it, unable to decide if she was more afraid of the beetle or for the beetle. (The cat had also taken an interest in the matter.)
Male common staghorn on our porch awning
(close to actual size, which was 2 inches)
Two notable exceptions to this policy of arthropod amnesty are mosquitoes and flies. I am a mosquito magnet; anyone within a quarter mile of me will not be bothered by mosquitoes because they are all biting me. Mosquitoes in the house must be ruthlessly hunted down and destroyed so I will not be covered with huge red welts when I wake up in the morning.
Flies are just plain annoying. They land on your food. They land on you. They buzz around your head and in the corner of windows and drive you BONKERS. Between the sanitation concerns and the annoyance factor, they rub me all wrong. I do try to let them out of the house, but they are incredibly uncooperative: if I open the window, they bash themselves silly on the pane above (or below) the opening. If I open the door, they leave the room. The whole thing soon spirals out of control, and I end up rampaging through the house like a wounded elephant, bellowing and swatting at everything that moves.
Today, however, the cat has gotten into the act, so I don’t have to. She’s been dashing from window to window in pursuit of the fly, clambering over furniture and behind shades. She leaps at it when it zips past; a little while ago she bounded up the stairs after it. I figure she’ll catch it eventually, and in the meantime, she’s kept it too busy to buzz my head or land on me.
Now, if I can only get her to chase mosquitoes…
The cat in action
(not actual size)
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We have been watching The Rockford Files on Netflicks with the kids lately, and it’s been an absolute joy. The cars, the clothes, the pay phones: all those wonderful relics of a time that seems almost horse-and-buggyish now, even to us adults.
Watching the show all these years later, I’m aware of a lot of things that slipped right by me when I first watched it as a kid with my family. Here are some of the things I’ve learned from Jim Rockford over the years:
Here are the things my children comment on the most:
I’d forgotten how delightful James Garner is in this role – too compassionate and human to be hard-boiled, but tough and crafty enough to hold his own in the company of genuine criminals. He plays Rockford as an honest man living on the edge of respectability and financial solvency, which lends a faint air of desperation to his choices. We’re never entirely sure how much he enjoys acting the gambler and con artist and how much he just does to survive. I find myself once again enchanted by his warmth, his wry sense of humor, and his disarming frankness, and I’m pleased that my children have succumbed to his charms as well.
This week I attended the funeral of a relative with whom I was not particularly close. As the minister gave the eulogy, I found myself wondering if I was at the right funeral. The deceased was known in the family for his sharp tongue and the casual cruelty with which he wielded it. He was ruthlessly tyrannical with his closest relations and given to acting out of spite and apparent malice.
The minister spoke of a generous man who cared about his family and gave selflessly to the community. Indeed, I learned a great many things about him during the funeral: organizations to which he belonged, leadership positions he had held in the community, that he had once worked for NASA. I was amazed.
Granted, I had had as little to do with him as possible for the last thirty years, and a lot can happen to a person in that length of time. I found myself wishing I had known the man the minister was talking about, because he didn’t bear any resemblance to the unpleasant person I had pretty much avoided since high school.
I was especially moved when the minister gave thanks in prayer for this man’s life and the ways in which God was visible in it. By that point in the service, I was beyond incredulity and actually able to listen to the message in the minister’s words. Through mysterious grace, I was able to see this relative in a completely different light, perhaps even to see him, in some dim fashion, the way God might have seen him. And through that same miraculous grace, I was able at last to join the minister in giving thanks for this man and the curious ways in which the Spirit had worked through him.
Today is a very special day: it is Friday, and it is the 13th day of the month. Three Fridays fall on the 13th this year, 13 weeks apart from each other. Today is the third and final Friday the 13th of 2012. You have to admit that’s pretty cool, from a mathematical perspective if nothing else.
The origins of various superstitions surrounding Friday the 13th are not clear, nor are those superstitions universal. Folklorists have recorded several theories explaining the supposed unluckiness of the date, all of which fall apart when correlated with other historical information. Superstitions, both good and bad, surrounding the number 13 and the sixth day of the week are well documented throughout history, but the two don’t seem to be linked until the beginning of the 20th century. Ironically, it would seem that the phenomenon of Friday the 13th, as we know it today, is a product of modern thinking.
I’ve never thought of it as unlucky myself, and once I learned about various pre-20th century associations with the number and the day, I started to view it as a day of special significance to me as a woman.
Friday is named for the chief goddess in the Norse pantheon, and is the only day of the week that bears a goddess’ name. I suppose this could be the reason why Friday seems like such a grrrrl power day to me.
There are 13 lunar months in a solar year, so the number 13 is often associated with the moon. Women and the moon are frequently connected in folklore and tradition for a variety of reasons, and many cultures in the West personify the moon as female. (I have felt an affinity with the moon since I was a small child, long before I knew any of that stuff.)
So the coincidence of these two calendrical facts has led me to view Friday the 13th as a special day for most of my life. (No doubt my tendency to flout tradition plays into it a bit, too.)
And if you need more proof that Friday the 13th is anything but unlucky, I offer this: it has been raining here – softly, gently, steadily – since before 6:00 a.m. In this year of record-breaking heat and drought, that is a blessing.
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Tagged Friday the 13th, grrrl power, lunar months, moon, superstition
Now that we’re a third of the way into July, I thought I’d report on how the Z to A Even Day Challenge worked out.
I was able to stick to the schedule pretty faithfully, only missing the appointed date a couple of times. The every-other-day format allowed me to post a day late without falling behind on subsequent postings, exactly as it was intended to do. This kept the stress level very low, which was also one of the objectives.
I wrote almost every day, whether or not it was a posting day. On the days I didn’t get to write, I thought about writing: possible topics, what I wanted to say, etc. To my mind, that’s almost as good as writing, because that’s the groundwork. With stuff in my brain clamoring to get out onto the page, I had a jump start the next time I sat down to work.
With my unplanned week off the grid, the challenge worked out almost exactly to fill the months of May and June. I wrote every day during that week away and continue to do so, though not everything I’ve written has been blog material. The real point of the exercise was to support a habit of daily writing, and it succeeded marvelously.
So where do I go from here?
Onward and inward/upward/outward!
On the way back from Cincinnati last night, we were treated to terrific light show. For the entire drive of more than an hour, the sky lit up in a spectacular lightning display. We weren’t in rain most of the way and had a clear view of each strike: lightning really does move from the ground up.
Every few minutes, a column of light snaked up from the ground. When it reached the clouds, the bolt scattered, combing through the clouds with glowing fingers. Sometimes the countryside was illuminated like broad daylight; other times it was simply blinding, though only for a split second, thank goodness.
But as amazing as the light show had been, the best thing by far was driving into steady, soaking rain for the last twenty miles. No one minded getting wet one bit.
I have become the sort of person who always has at least one avocado in the house. In fact, when I eat my last avocado, I feel a little panicky: what if I want some avocado before I have a chance to stop at the store?
Growing up, I don’t think I even knew what an avocado was. For all I know, they didn’t carry them in the grocery stores where I lived. My first true experience with avocados happened while visiting friends in Santa Fe. We went to a local restaurant where they made guacamole fresh, at your table, while you watched. It was amazingly delicious, and I was in love.
I started looking for avocados in my local grocery, buying them whenever I found them and making my own guacamole. Then another friend, who had lived in Santa Fe for several years, introduced me to sliced avocado on a sandwich. She puts turkey, a slice of bacon, Monterey Jack cheese, and sliced avocado on toasted wheat bread spread with homemade pesto mayonnaise. It’s incredible! Now I had something else to make with avocados!
Now I put avocado in my Southwest chicken soup; I put it on tacos and burritos; I eat avocado wedges with chicken salad, and sometimes I just scoop it out of the shell with a spoon and eat it plain. I recently found a recipe for tuna salad with avocado, which I will be making for lunch the next time I eat at home.
What’s your favorite avocado recipe?
(The image above is from http://whatscookingamerica.net/avacado.htm, which has some great information about choosing and using avocados.)
I’m back in civilization after a week in the woods with my daughter’s confirmation class (and about 70 other confirmation kids from a dozen congregations). It was peaceful to be off the grid; it was heaven not to have to plan and prepare meals, though I did help with setup and cleanup several times. Because I was a last-minute substitution (our youth minister’s mother had surgery two days before camp began), I had very few responsibilities, so a good chunk of time was at my disposal almost every day.
I put that time to fairly good use. I finished reading a novel I had begun weeks before, and then devoured three more novels I’d brought along. For those keeping score at home, that’s more novels than I read in the twelve preceding months. (I’m so far behind in my reading that it’s statistically unlikely I will live long enough to read all the books in my possession right now – never mind any list I might have.)
All that reading made me realize that I need a new prescription for my glasses. To rest my eyes between bouts of reading, I wrote. I drafted a couple new poems, recorded a few dreams, explored plot ideas that came out of those dreams, and reworked a poem I found when I flipped back through my journal. I was able to write every day, and it was wonderful.
I’m trying to figure out how I can wangle an invitation to camp again next year.
(I’ll be off the grid for a week, so the Z to A Even Day Blog Challenge is on hold until I get back.)
(image from Amazon.com)
At the library last week, I saw a new cookbook that I must have: The Cookie Dough Lover’s Cookbook, by food blogger Lindsay Landis. It’s chock-full of recipes featuring egg-free cookie dough made to be eaten raw. I knew this book was for me when I read the following:
This book is dedicated to anyone who’s ever been caught with a finger in the mixing bowl.
When I was growing up, we always doubled any cookie dough recipe we made because otherwise there would be no cookies. We all ate the cookie dough, raw eggs notwithstanding, and with five people dipping into the mixing bowl, a single batch of dough wouldn’t yield much more than one pan of cookies.
From the moment I walked in the house with this book, my daughter badgered me to make things from it. The first night, she insisted on making Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Pudding. Pudding made from scratch involves a lot of time standing at the stove, stirring, which explains why instant pudding is so popular. She gamely hung in there, declining my offers to relieve her. The pudding didn’t cool in time to eat that night, but we had a festive dessert after dinner the next evening.
We next made a batch of classic Chocolate Chip Dough. It was delicious! We didn’t feel so great after snarfing down the entire batch, however, and agreed in future to divide the dough and set a portion of it aside before we start eating. That strategy worked well with the Peanut Butter Dough we made next, which we modified by using half whole wheat flour and adding chocolate chips.
Aside from the delicious doughs themselves, the cookbook offers recipes in which dough plays a decadent part: truffles, fudge, brownies, pie, cheesecake, frozen treats, granola bars, pancakes, fritters, and more. The directions are easy to follow and the photography is truly drool-worthy.
(I apologize for not having any pictures, but we ate everything before I thought about this blog post. The truth is, I find it hard to think about anything at all when faced with a bowlful of cookie dough.)
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Tagged baking, children, chocolate chips, cookbooks, cookie dough, cooking, desserts, Lindsay Landis, The Cookie Dough Lover's Cookbook
The Daily Compost 