la femme follette

still, life

I bought patty pan squash today at the farmers' market and then was sad to see it going.  I love the shapes and colors of patty pan.  I grew it as an ornamental one year, but that was dumb, and vine borers got them anyhow.

The reason Kowalski called the other day was to sweetly ask after my health and I remembered that I forgot to follow up with a great many people about this development.  Basically, I was a medical mystery for weeks and weeks, then months and months, and in the end it all came down to two diagnoses which are not mutually exclusive, both vague and very subjective in their diagnostic parameters, wildly variant in their clinical presentations.  Also incurable.  One is progressive and can be unregenerate, but also, can be nothing at all, due to the obvious flaws in its unscientific diagnostic process.  There is also a third diagnosis (from a third specialty) that is benign-ish, but not the point.  It was a collateral discovery in all the endless lab work.

So, after having seen all these specialists, hearing about my options, about which thing to sign onto, Mari and I took a week or so of considering it all (not least of which what kind of scam is Big Pharm running in all this), after which  I just said, "Fuck this.  I am not going out like that."  We went on vacation, I am back in the gym, I am taking my vitamins.  I have (have always had) an excellent acupuncturist.  For the moment, I am on a raw diet, as with the last three summers.  Fuck a bunch of being sick.

I learned a lot because of this, chiefly that I do not take care of myself in the same way I take care of others (and I know that as a mother I am so not alone in this).  I definitely do not rest enough (and that it is possible to take a freaking break already).  I was reminded that people really love me and us and and want to do (and will do) what they can to help.  I found out who it is that can be cool, who cannot handle the truth, who wants to play Ryan O'Neal in Love Story, who will raise hell with me, and who just wants me to sit in their metaphorical lap so they can smell my metaphorical hair. Also, who can manage in the face of news and who it is that just vanishes.    

Lisa B-K reminded me that people like the lists.  (I am one.)  When Kowalski got his answers and gave his staunch support to my sassy rebuff of the health-care system, he asked me to give to him the list of songs I came up with for him to consider for the children's session the Kowalski Brothers are recording this summer.  He wanted to pan a few, but I insisted, reminding him that "Froggie Went A-Courtin'" was my idea and it turned out so sexy when they did it.  Who knew?

I just typed & deleted several too-much-disclosure paragraphs about Kowalski & me and music & us, a more-guarded presentation of which can be found here.  Now I am too tired to type a list. 

I went to the shopping district while the children were at camp Friday, and I wanted to have this Lela Lee tote so much.  I did not, because I knew Fillette would want to carry it and it would become complex and exhausting,  So I took this photograph to satisfy myself. 

   

flowers

As I was going deaf, I was part of the time stoned on percocet while Mari had the children out of the house so that I could be horribly ill in peace.  On the third day of opiates, when I could not sleep all day any more, I spent the afternoon trawling eBay to add to our casual ironstone luncheon settings.  It is time for a party, for god's sake.  I bought 6 bread plates and 8 dinner plates in 3 patterns to fill out what we have in an already-varied & rowdy floral arrangement.  I like flowers.   

I do not like things to be matchy.  I like assemblages to reflect the casual ramshackle serendipity of a purchaser who likes what she likes and gets what she loves.  In fact, before I married Mari, I was evaluating his fitness as decorating-mate (this is an important thing! many couples fight about!  we do not!) and home-companion so I said to him v suspiciously, "Do you like things to be all matchy??"  He did not.  He said, "It looks like a hotel."  My guy. 

It has rarely happened that when I get it all into my house, it does not go.  When it has happened, it is because I froze and refused to follow my instincts.  This is how we have a pair of awful pitchers I got at the Crate & Barrel, years ago from the flagship store on Michigan Ave when we were first married.  They are these awful clear-glass things, and I am now afraid to get rid of them solely because they have not in all our moves nor all our use sustained any damage at all so they have become some accidental talisman, though for what I am not certain.

The napkins are for the children, who have become enamored of using cloth.  Garçon still mostly uses the cloth he is wearing upon his sleeve, but Fillette will take a napkin from the sideboard at breakfast, keep it all day, then after dinner take it up to the laundry when she goes for her bath.  I do not know how I got one child who is so good and one who is so naughty.  I would have been happy to have 2 just each in the middle.  Because pathological goodness is its own problem.  Especially in the little girls.

stuff it

A couple of weeks ago, when we were at the farther-away-but-superior children's hospital across the river for Garçon's follow-up appointment, there was a dad in front of me with the most intriguing bag.  It was shoulder-y and red, with a nice sturdy countenance and also pockets all around the inside -- from which stuff was poking out -- and a couple on the outside.  It reminded me of a re-invented garden tote. 

I figured it was some kind of luxe techno bag for techno types like the dad & Mari, and when I peered at the label -- it read "skip*hop" -- I thought nothing of it, but made a little note to myself to write it in my filofax, which I was clearly about to open, as we were all on line for the outpatient checkout, but I was too busy writing checks and making new appointments and realizing that my calendar is already running 8 appointments into 2008 scribbled on the last page of 2007 (SO NOT OK WITH ME) and so I forgot.  When I remembered that I forgot, I was pretty sad.  I try hard to be organized & not jotting a note about consumption?  Anti-organization.  I bought my 2008 calendar insert to soothe myself.

A few days later, Fillette and I were slouching around town while we waited for Garçon to finish up a workshop & I took her to the fancy childrenswear store to see if they had a dress for her wear when her current dress-up dress is outgrown (they did not, but Boden did in their Mini section, like mother, like daughter, I guess).  I saw across the way the bag that eluded me before.  Oh!  It is a diaper bag!  What? 

It changed everything, but I went over to look at it anyhow.  So cute!  So stuffable!  The corporate gas on the tag said it was waterproof!  PVC-backed poly-cotton canvas!  Interesting ...  I did not buy it that day, but made a note to look again on the onlines.  I felt pretty stupid, a lean, mean mother of school-aged kids buying a diaper bag?  Whatever.  But I kept coming back to a. many pockets and b. waterproof.  Oooh.  I mean, I do not carry much anymore in the way of snacks or rations or anything, not because I don't need them, but because I do not wish to a. carry two bags or b. get my stuff all sticky with juice or the residue inside a wrapper from fruit leathers.  But that is all.

Then, I mentioned this to two friends who have children the same age as mine and they both said, essentially, OMIGOD, I WANT ONE, TOO!  So, I knew I was not having some kind of deranged consumeristic baby nostalgia.  At least, I was not alone in it if I was.

It came today.  The only problem I have with it is that the strap is a little light and also narrow.  It is the perfect heft & depth for shouldering the bag, not so excellent for its messenger incarnation.  I can get over that.  Today, I lined up everything I would carry in my bag on a city-trip day-outing with the children, defined as: public transit to and from the site; between meals; within reach of shopping & restaurants.   

This includes: one Rhodia pad, a Sakura MicroPerm pen, a copy of The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby, one tube of arnica gel, one pot of hand cream, 2 containers of Dole diced pears,  2 LaraBars, 2 fruit leathers, a personal-sized filofax organizer, one juice box, a copy of Ranger Rick, the latest Boden catalog, a sunscreen stick, an Oxo coffee cup, a (n empty) 1-l Nalgene, 2 plastic spoons, and a giant red change purse. 

And it all fit!  With room for my wallet, which I forgot in the lineup, and a size 6x cardigan, which was foisted off on me while we were out.  Better than I realized  about this bag:  the top shuts in ziploc fashion (side-to-side, no selvage) with velcro; it has a grabby handle on the top by which one can carry it in one fist.  I read some reviews of this bag (the Expo) that panned it for its "funnel effect."  The bag zips loose at the bottom to expand its front-to-back depth from 3.5 inches to 7 inches.  It does indeed create a funnel effect whereby things would slide down & get trapped inside by whatever is in the pockets along the top, but since what falls down in this bag are not pacifiers and diaper pins, but a filofax and a wallet, I consider the funnel a feature.  Meli lost her wallet once on transit because someone reached inside her open-topped bag when she was distracted by her baby.

Hallowe'en is tomorrow and I am writing about diaper bags!  Fillette needs a dye job!  I have to find the pumpkin buckets!  Mari and the children somehow both (all?) forgot about carving up the jack-o-lanterns tonight and I do not care!  I mean, how do children who have not shut up about Hallowe'en for six weeks forget about the carving of the pumpkins?   

checkered past

This is a chair that we bought in the year 2000, along with 5 other chairs (two with arms), a drop-leaf table with two leaves, and a china cabinet.  All of it was made by the Drexel Furniture Co in 1961, according to the tags on the table, and Mari and I found it in Frederick, Md, while looking for something different.  The set consumed a lot of space on the floor of one of the antique sector's stores, and when the dude caught me circling it, he offered it to us for a song.  Well, that and we had to get it back inside the Belltway, for which we borrowed a friend's extremely boss (and brand-new) Ford F150.  A good friend, and gas was cheap then, wowee.

There was a wrinkle.  I was pregnant with Fillette.  These chairs were so hideous with their drab floral wrongness and once they were in my home, I hated them.  I also, by association, hated the whole dining room set.  I had craved a little drop-leaf table in a glossy, frenchy mahogany, with those curvy little chairs & a cute little corner-curio, the lot of it with groovy paws at the ends of the legs.  I spent every night after Garçon went to bed crying my eyes out about our horrid dining room set.  Mari was on travel the day after we hauled this thing home, and I would call him every night, weeping and weeping about how awful this dining room set was and how our lives were ruined.

Mari was helpful, because I told him in the store that I could replace the fabric on the chairs, that it would be a  snap.  He would remind me and I would cry and cry and cry more.  He would say "Honey, what now?"  And I would try to control myself -- so excellently, hilariously, stereotypically pregnant -- and then I would be fine.  Until the next night, where our son would go to bed, I would be alone in the house (and pregnant!  and irrational!)  and his cell phone would ring and it would be all the crying & confessions of true lives undone by ugly chair fabric.  Again.

When he got home after a week, he offered sweetly to take me to the fabric store, whereupon I (yes) began crying and told him that he did not understand that I could never go there under pressure to pick a fabric for how could I ever choose???  Then I turned into the irrational shouty pregnant lady.  O, pregnancy!  You and your inconveniencing hormones.

Eventually, while doing something else at the Crate & Barrel outlet near the midwife's office, I happened upon a red-gold checked fabric that appealed to me and I had it cut as quickly as possible & left.  This was because I had entered the phase of pregnancy known as "nesting."  Also, I changed the fabric myself in what seemed like record time.

Well, it is a quick project even without the hormones, as it happens.

I had been thinking of recovering the chairs, idly (because even when not pregnant, choosing decor is hard for me), and then in the Junior League Thrift Store a couple of weeks ago I got it all together.  I was fondling a gorgeous hand-crocheted baby blanket, while wondering if it was truly awful to pass it off as my own work -- in a sin of omission kind of way -- to that baby who just got its project scrapped, and I noticed a whole big wad of yardage of some cast-off upholstery fabric that appealed to me.  Great!  It was $10.  Grand!  No choices to make here!  It is a sign from the universe!  It was more than enough.

One thing is that I did fall in love with the wrong side of the fabric.  Ha-ha.  But when I got it home and figured out which way was up; I felt fine.  Because it seemed like fate.  Or Santa. 

So, recovering these chairs is simple, once the tools are assembled:  unscrew the four screws holding the seat on the chair; wrap the seats tightly in the fabric; staple it with a staple gun; then put it back together.  I can always hear Polly Perfection on this project -- take off the old fabric, yayaya, blahblah -- but whatever.  I am sure the day will come where someone will look at the undersides of my dining room chairs, but I will not give a fuck even then.  I will say, "It was a 45-minute job.  Go the fuck home."

There is a lot of the f-word in these projects here at my house.  As if Quentin Tarantino produced a show for HGTV.  My staple gun sticks a little bit?  That cocksucking motherfucking bitch heard it the fuck all the goddamned whole way through.  Shit.  Part of the problem was that I was stapling through three layers of fabric, but come on!  Lay off already, douchebag!

The one legitimate concern about wrapping and bunching the fabric any which way is that the seats have to be screwed back on.  If there is a lot of fabric covering the holes, the screws cannot reach.  But that is irrelevant!  I use a drill with screwdriver bits!  What does it say on the side of the drill?  It says Bad Motherfucker.  Fillette says, "Mommy, no.  Black and Decker."  Less than an hour, no tears, no baby on the way.  Phew. 

heavy

For a week, this book order has been piled up in our living room, right between our entry hall and the sofa.  I cannot seem to make myself pick it up, mostly because that Shelby Foote tome weighs about 15 pounds and also because we are out of room on our shelves.  Also, that I kind of just like the piled-up disaffected intellectual look of it there.  Ha.

I knew this day would come someday; I've written about how I have done everything to armor myself against its arrival, its brutal rending of my heart.  Today, all of us were walking to a restaurant to eat, and Fillette sidled up to me to hold her hand.  I held her hand for about ten feet, then reached down to scoop her up.  She complied, then after a block or two, said, "Mama?  I think I am too big for you to pick me up.  I just wanted to hold your hand, so will you put me down?" 

I held her hand and we walked behind Mari and Garçon and I cried and cried while we walked along campus, in this awful, silent, strangled way that made me feel so alone, which amplified my misery exponentially.  Besides feeling alone with my reaction, I do not even know what I was feeling, why there was so much crying.  When we got to the restaurant, and Mari was all, "Um, crying wife?  Is this about Springsteen?"  I whispered to him behind my menu what had happened and kept on weeping.  I excused myself to the ladies' room so I could cry some more.  When I came back, soggy and quieted, I mouthed to him, "She doesn't need me any more."  But that is not it.  I do not know what it is, why I am so upset.  Not upset, no -- sad.   

What I do know is that I wrote here, in the winter, that I hope that when she gets older and wants to complain about some perceived slight or failure in my mothering, that someone tells her to get over herself, that I carried her around until she was six years old.  I also hope that when that day comes, someone would also point out to her that when she said she was ready, I let her get down.

highway 61

Fillette and Garçon came tumbling out of Vacation Bible School Monday, telling us in tandem and as one, We learned about a man named Abraham today!  -- not Abraham Lincoln!  Another one!  They seemed surprised when we laughed a little said, "Yes, we know who you mean.  He was married to Sarah?  That one?"  Their eyes goggled.

They are always slightly miffed at us when they learn things of religion or civics and then learn that we have, in effect, been holding out on them.   Last year, when I took them to a Flag Day celebration, they were irate -- How does everyone know the words to this song?  How do you?  They whispered accusingly, over and over.  Mass -- when we go -- is always for them a mystifying choreography of sitting and standing and shaking hands and milling around, again with words everyone else knows by heart.

We tend to be such tight-lipped holdouts on the subject of practical religion, leaving it entirely up to the children to deal with it themselves (which we are not sure is the most excellent way, but to us feels the most authentic, this way), that people are usually surprised when they find out the children attend Vacation Bible School.  With close friends, the shock comes in this -- Are you sending them to VBS?  Did you not decide to live in a hooligans' paradise? -- and we say, "They wish to go.  It was their idea.  They saw a sign and they liked the word 'vacation.'"  Then we shrug, and they say, "Oh, well that makes sense." 

With people who do not know us well, but see only our glorious hooligans' paradise and presume we are some kind of dogmatists in the ways of lawlessness, they continue, But how can you stomach ... Christianity??  We then have similar responses, Mari's wordless and nonplussed and mine pitying and intellectual -- The Bible is a foundation text for Western Civilization.  I spent my whole childhood in a convent school, so while I am never shocked when people do not know it all chapter and verse, I admit to being curious as to how they get on in life having disdained it all along.  The biblical allusions in art and literature and film are numerous and widespread.

In a related way, I detest -- having been raised by Jesuits and Dominican nuns -- the way that conservatives in the USA have coöpted religion as such that it is a dirty word, a dirty concept, so that letting your children spend a total of 15 hours each summer in the genteel, richy-rich, Presbyterian, Grace Kelly Church of Christ is tantamount to sending them for a summer in Waco.  To Jonestown.  I just heard Pete Seeger talking about this recently, that protests and activism and believing in a better world and love and pacifism in this country used to be intimately twined with Christianity and morally-just thinking and the belief in the example of Jesus, that it did not used to be the exclusive provenance of evangelical fundamentalists and their perversions of the scripture, not to put too fine a point on it.

I asked Fillette -- the reporter of the two -- what they learned about Abraham, and she said, "He had a son?  Two sons?  Isaac ... and ... um ... I forget the other."  I assured her that most people had.  By the time the four of us got home, I was asking if they knew what happened with Isaac?  On the mountain?  When God tested him?  They had not heard this story, and I told them.  After I was finished, they said, "Um ... OK?  Really?"  and I told them true.  They both laughed nervously and said, "Are you kidding?"  I pulled down the book and read it to them.  They excused themselves, wondering again to each other as they walked off -- in essence -- why are people always holding out on them?

I said to Mari, suddenly, as soon as they were gone, Oh.  They probably didn't want to tell that to a bunch of little children.  Mari said, Whose parents typically attend church?  No, Femme, you think?  I think that when one married a woman who is a little daft, one should renounce sarcasm, but anyhow.

Around the house, I bought a Jadeite bowl.  I made strawberry preserves.  I am on the hook this week for harvesting plantain, yarrow and comfrey (the last as photographed above, from a month ago, when I missed its first harvest) to make a variety of garden-girl unguents.  I am thinking hard about our 100-mile foodshed, but right now am still trying to unpack.  Also, our floors are filthy and my garden is a shambles -- roses with blackspot and aphids; valerian volunteers everywhere.  The great news is that after many summers of ripping out dahlia tubers, certain they were big & weird weeds, I finally let this year's planting lie.  I planted a borage and I am not sure if it is going to make it.  Rain tonight!

maladresse

The satisfying coda to our second annual American South vacation was having to force myself to eat barbecue at the last stop on our tour.  Force myself as inGosh, I would really like a salad, but I must eat this in the hopes that I will not really want it for another year, what since I am a nominal vegetarian and also do not live in a barbecue-ready town. 

Oh, it was much less fun than one might think.  Urp.  Would that every road-trip vacation with two school-age children be burdened so lightly.

I have something of a Cassandra-like gift of clairvoyance, in which oftentimes when I resolutely close a door -- metaphorically speaking -- the building I leave behind inexplicably bursts into flame.  It is an uncultivated skill, but still it remains.  So I was not at all surprised when after my very round and thorough trashing of digital photography and its place in my life, our digital camera was stolen on the very first 24-hour interval of our vacation.  In fact, I was somewhat relieved to have it gone, save for the annoyance of having something stolen, stolen! 

I do believe that its loss was a blessing in disguise that kept us from instead losing anything more valuable.  For the remainder of the trip, everything was right and tight with regard to our people and our belongings, although I was a little chafed at having to check for my wallet every five seconds, unable to shake the feeling that something else would just vanish while ostensibly beneath my survey.  I am grateful it was not the children and just a camera for which I recently decided there was no place.  As we were pulling out of our little beach adventure, a little girl went missing, six years old, blonde, wearing a green tankini.  I want to be confident she was found without incident, but find that I am afraid to confirm.

Today, really very unsettling in a different way, was this: I stopped in an antiques store along a pastoral two-lane highway and while inside with Fillette, choosing between a set of green (not Jadeite) Fire-King mixing bowls and a set of Pyrex nesting casseroles that match a set of nesting round-bottomed bowls I have, but the flat-bottomed casseroles had a white daisy pattern and my mixing bowls are solidly the same color of Pyrex 1960s avocado green, and then deciding on buying them all, I dropped the set of 3 Pyrex bowls.  They smashed all at once with a most impressive noise over the floor and I was horrified. 

The women who owned the shop were very kind and understanding and attempted to comfort me, but I was in a way inconsolable for 1. I was about to buy them and take them home, 2. I felt like a vandal.  Those bowls have been on this earth for over 50 years and here I come and whoops, smash & crash, and 3. I am not a butterfingers.  Sure, I am clumsy and quite rubbery of limb, but I am not the kind of gal who will drop a stack of bowls.   I never have been. 

Fillette was very sweet and something like a perfect salve, for she was also sad about their loss, having rooted for them from the minute we first saw them & also somehow understanding that they were old and cannot readily be replaced.  My sense of shame and sheepishness over this is somewhat immeasurable, as if I accidentally careened drunkenly into the Whitney with a lit cigarette in each hand, spinning and burning and maybe even vomiting all over Hoppers or Wyeths of both varieties with nothing to say but, Oh, shit.  Oops!

Now I am obsessed with Pyrex and Fire-King, although I really do not like Jadeite.   I saw it in real life (i.e., not in the MS Living spread) for the first time today and it is such a non-color.  Fire-King made a green that is quite lovely and, um, colored, and I got one of those today (not all 3), choosing an accompaniment of another cream and a third white.  Hopefully I won't break them.  My friend Lorna's 11yo accidentally broke a stack of her nesting Pyrex last year and I feel  I should write the girl a note that says, "Oh, I did it, too.  And I was so sad."  I mean, really.  What is to be done?  It is just gone, baby, gone.  Oh, shit.  Oops.  I broke a piece of America and cannot get it back.  I think this is going to take me far and wide into the dark parts of the region's antique malls.  I think a certain canner looking for chairs who also resides in the region should ride shotgun.  She can expect a call.

go buckeyes

I went on a fabulous plus impromptu shopping spree last week in the blue-haired-society-matron meets wooden-necklace Boutique Row in the charming Old Money district where our acupuncturist practices.  It all started because of these chicks.  They are tiny and made to look as though they are carved from wood, though they are not.  So dear. 

Six is sixy.  We love her.  The day was filled with favorite breakfasts and favorite lunches and family outings before favorite dinner.  TMNT is the best money we have ever spent taking the children to see a movie.  She loved her wrap and at one point during the birthday dinner said, "I am so happy!  I think I am going to cry!"  And I love her, god, but I have to harden my heart, for I know she will break it.  The clock is ticking.

I rather like an aggressively homemade birthday cake. When I was a girl, all of my birthday cakes were bakery cakes.  I mean, I am from Chicago, and they came from the nearest 100-year-old German pastry outfit, so no one has to cry in their punch bowl for my lifetime of boughten birthday cake, no.  But I think what has happened is that I do not think that a birthday cake made at home has to look anything but, well, aggressively homemade.  I court this look by (among other things as in not really giving a fuck about it looking anything other than handmade) using a putty knife to frost.  A putty knife!  OK!  They are always a little crooked, too, what since I whack up the tops of them to make them sit more level, but do so with heedless imprecision. 

It is overcast and quite chilly.  After a rollicking morning of fake blood capsules, phony hickeys, plastic roaches, squirting chocolate, shoe squeakers, and plastic pet puke, the children and Mari are involved in some nefarious hot-gluing craft project they found in the pages of the April Ranger Rick.

I have my choice of excellent projects:  patching the walls in the room I have been preparing for paint for 6 months, working on a revived blanket formerly stashed away for three years, and miscellaneous home reorganization of the sort that has finally come to such a fine point that I pretty much matched the month's grocery bill at The Container Store last week.   

I have to force myself to do one of those things, instead of what I secretly wish for on this quiet weekend ... learning to crochet granny squares for a brand-new distraction.  Oh, star sign of mine, how you do not like to see just the one thing through.

balloon

Starting the New Year with a house, upended by party, and a child who is in her pajamas all day long, demanding (rightfully so) coddling and also applesauce, it not quite the clean slate most people wish for, but I rather like it.  It takes that Miss Perfectpants edge off the whole matter.  In fact, I had to cancel every appoinment I had this week and next because of Fillette's illness.  This was challenging and frustrating, because I don't have my 2007 filofax insert yet.

Last night, I had a dream in which I was going to NYC, so decided I would pick one up when I was there (in real life, I was in nyc two weeks ago and forgot to grab one.  I was distracted by a number of things that day) and it was so vivid, that I woke up this morning and was saddened to realize it was all a dream.  Daily Planner online, here I come. 

My new year's resolution, if I even really have one, is this:  to write down recipes.  This has everything to do with pernicious Miss Perfectpants, but I will jot a recipe down from the online or the emails on a tiny sheet of paper.  Then take it to the kitchen, cook from it, promptly lose it, then again, repeat, etc.  I have to just write them down.  In a book, a blank journal assigned this purpose.   This I have never been able to do, because old boring Miss Pp, in her infinite tedium, says, no!  try to sort it!  organize it by category or main ingredient or type of dish!  Miss Perfectpants!  Fuck you! right up the ass!!  Writing it down where I can find it -- over and over -- is good enough.

Knitting projects ahead:  felted bag for child (I already felted a bag, which must be accounted for in the category of Time, Wasted, and so will be going at it again from a pattern without straying), socks for friend's birthday, lace-weight scarf for Mari's great-aunt.  Baby blanket must be knitted and sewn, and that relies on the umbrella swift for winding these last four balls of yarn for it,  and which Miss Perfectpants wants to set up in precisely the right location.  My life's work is trying to unhitch Miss Perfectpants's wagon from my awesome star.  She is positively leaden!

contagious excitement

Approximately two hours after the last guests left our party last night, Fillette (for whom the entire night had been normal, through dinner, bath, and the bedtime routine) suddenly and right in front of our astonished eyes, within minutes, becomes covered in tiny pink blisters.  Worst party ever!  Now I have to call every one of our friends and tell them.  This is very terrible.  I hope no one dies, or even gets shingles, which I hear is like a fate worse than death. 

The effect of the party is that I have a six-pound varied supply of smoked meats in my refrigerator.  There is handmade pepperoni, hot salami, sweet and hot soppressatas, a wet salami, and some cappiccola.  Also, I have some manchego, something called izdiabal, I think, cremosa provolone (made in wisconsin!), and a bit of asiago.  The ricotta cake was incredibly well-received, and I have inhaled the incredible smell of the leftovers so often that no one would dare eat it now, even if it were not just dissolving right inside the fridge.  It will have to be thrown away tomorrow.

(Shout-out technical talk to Marsha and the lovely Santos:  I had to cook a large quantity of lentils and black-eyed peas in cylindrical stockpots, instead of using lower, deeper sauciers, and so purchased a heat diffuser for the party's food preparation.  It changed my life.  Only regular stirring!  Not any stirring to prevent scorching!  What a miracle!  I had often wondered if my life would be wonderful if I had one, and now I know the answer is Yes.) 

I wish that the children ate meat, for we have an awful lot of it, even the unsmoked variety (most of which has been put up in the freezer), but I am now quarantined and so housebound with two children whose dietary requirements are narrow and also about which they have capricious, yet, unwavering ideas.

Fillette is a picky eater and I do not wish to argue with her about what she will and won't stonewall, particularly when she is ill.  Tonight, she had congee -- rice porridge (the third miracle of the heat diffuser!) -- with a poached egg on top and some grated ginger within, where she could not see it, but only say, Is something, er, soapy in there??  And then I would say, innocently, "Hm?" and then distract her, with a change of subject.  Say, dancing, or singing. 

Mari thought for certain that I had exhausted the plentitudes of Eye Schmaltz for rent on DVD while Garçon was ill, but no.  I came home from the library today with two Shirley Temple films (hence, the dancing and singing talk), two from Joe Camp's Benji series, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Mary Poppins, Bambi, and the original Miracle Worker, with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke.   

Tomorrow morning, early, Garçon starts his very first trial at working for our eccentric neighborhood cat lady, helping her with landscaping detail.  God only knows how much she plans to pay him, but it shall not hurt the child to learn that Hard Work Has Some Reward.  Case in point:  mere weeks after I wrote on and on about my dissatisfaction with the plastic desperation of the world's gift givers, giving and giving, for the sake of getting it wrong, an umbrella swift arrived here at my very own home, addressed to my husband, but intended for me.   Now I can spend hours winding yarn that I have bought in skeins, and in addition, a whole world of Yarn for Sale has been opened to me!  Because I am no longer limited by the skein/hank issue!  This is where Mari learns that No Good Deed Goes Unpunished!  Happy New Year!