I would blog but . . .

Max is making me go swim with him tomorrow for a whole hour so I'd better get some sleep. It's my only hope of keeping up.

Jill of PGM, if you read this, check your email.

Our house is on day four of pretty darn clean. :::glow:::

I'm off to bed! Know this: everyone here is healthy (except Chris who is allergy infested as usual), school is going well for everyone (ohmigosh it's all I can do not to laugh every time the twins start earnestly sounding out the letters they see -- no full blown click yet. They just don't blend well enough. But it's sooooo cute!!!), and Chris met his third Stay-at-home-dad of twins in State College. I think SAHDs of twins must be more common because in general twins cost too much to put in daycare. Someone HAS to work, someone HAS to stay home -- you're more likely to look for creative solutions.

Mrs. Zook's Tomato Soup (Amish)

Makes about 10 quarts (but I put in pints because it's a fantastic soup base. If you're going to add other stuff to it, then a quart is too much for lunch for my family.)

Mrs. Zook's Tomato Soup

14 qt. tomatoes
2 qt. water
7 onions
14 sticks celery
pepper to taste
3 bay leaves
14 strands parsley
14 T melted butter
14 T sugar
14 T flour
8 T salt
1 pint water

Boil tomatoes, onions, parsley and celery with 2 qt. water, put through sieve (or use a squeezo/food mill with strainer if you have one). Boil sugar, butter, flour, pepper, and salt together with 1 pt. water. Add to tomatoes as soon as it thickens up and stir really, really well. Put in jars and process 30 minutes.

To use -- heat 1 jar tomato soup, add 1 jar cream or rich milk, serve with crackers -- or mix with 1 jar vegetable soup.

My variation: I also added an entire head of elephant garlic to it. Elephant garlic is more mild than regular garlic. It added interesting depth to the soup, but no obvious garlic taste.

+++++++++

I canned the vegetable soup last weekend.

Mrs. Zook's Vegetable Soup

1 large head cabbage
3 large onions
1 large bunch celery
12 large tomatoes
1 lb carrots
1 handful fresh parsley

Chop all vegetables till fine. Put in large kettle, cover with water, add salt to taste. Cook till carrots tender. Put in jars, process 25 to 30 minutes.

This is incredible when added to the tomato soup. Incredible as in, you'll never be constipated again, there are zero weight watcher's points, and it can heal whatever ails ya.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

Nope. No idea who Pam is. But this is her kick-tush salsa. I added a whole-lotta garlic to it, too.

Pam's Homemade Salsa

12 Qt. tomatoes (1/2 bushel)
1.5 Cup vinegar
2 Tbsp coriander
1 Tbsp parsley
2 Tbsp cumin
1.5 Tbsp oregano
2 tsp paprika
1 tsp chili powder (revised by Alaska)
4 tsp garlic powder
1.5 Tbsp canning salt
3 large sweet peppers
2 C chopped onions
1 C chopped hot peppers

Directions

1. Scald and peel tomatoes. Chop into chunks

2. Wash and chop peppers and onions. (Use gloves when handling hot peppers. Hey, I didn't think I needed to either. It doesn't hurt at all -- at first.)

3. Put all ingredients into large pot.

4. Cook over medium heat until desired thickness is attained.

5. Put in hot jars and seal. Process in hot water bath 20 minutes.

Note: All ingredients may be put in food processor to chop if a smoother consistency is desired. (But although I would and did cheerfully use the food processor freely for the vegetable soup, I do think that using it here would lose something. Like, big chunks of ripe, vine-picked tomatoes.) Taste salsa periodically to see if additional spices may be needed. Season to taste.

Everything else I made this year is out of Ball's Canning book. Well, okay, Saturday night's jam which Max and I dubbed "Very Berry Orange" was

pick out all the raspberries and blackberries that didn't go back from the big collection of raspberries and blackberries you bought. Stare mournfully at the cup and a half you have left. Shrug shoulders and move on. Cut off leaves and chop into quarters 2 qt. strawberries. Give to 9 year old to mash everything into pulp. Remember that container of Schwan's frozen orange concentrate which is 100% juice. Toss all that in there, too. Add 7 cups of sugar (oh, yeah! Great lesson for 9 year-old on exactly why jelly is considered a sweet and not a fruit. He'll stare open mouthed for a bit.) and a package and a half or even two packages (but we did a package and a half) of powdered pectin.

Bring to hard boil for one minute stirring constantly. Pour into hot jars, seal, and process for 10 minutes. 15 if you underestimated how many jars and lids you needed and started grabbing clean, sanitized, but not hot jelly jars off the shelf. Made about 20 half-cup jelly jars and three half-pint jelly jars. We put half a small jelly jar of this jelly on our biscuits last night with dinner and agreed that we'd really come up with something here. THIS is worth giving out for Christmas presents! If we don't eat it all before then. :::Brushes biscuit crumbs off shirt::::

Mania? Too Many Double Mint Oreos?

We'll never know the reason but every so often I have a kick-tush weekend like this one and even I, Alaska-the-never-really-satisfied, have to give myself a pat on the back.

:::pat, pat, pat:::

I met my work deadlines this week (Good, Girl! Here's a biscuit!)
I fed the kids mostly healthy food (Good, Mommy! Here's a biscuit!)
I canned a million tomatoes and strawberries and stuff (Mmmm, dip the biscuit in the soup!)
I resurrected the sour dough feeder (best kind of biscuits!)
I got enough of the living room reorganized and cleaned that I know I can finish the job completely tomorrow (Good, Mommy! Now take your biscuit and go do the basement.)
I made good progress on my blue sweater. (No crumbs on the sweater!)
I made good progress on the outside of the house. (No biscuits, the squirrels already ate them all.)
I didn't get squat for sleep though (BAD, Mommy! No, biscuit.)
And I did some emotional eating (shut up and give me the biscuits. and none of that low-salt stuff.)

Oops, all that back patting woke a baby. He probably smelled the biscuits. Off to bed!

Slow Blink

Slow blink is what Chris used to call the funny look Max would get on his face right before he passed out cold. His eyelids would go doooooooown and then uuuuuuuuuuup and then dooooooooown. zzzzzzzz

I have slow blink.

But for a darn good reason! After I stayed up too late doing salsa, I got up at 8am. I managed to find Max a ride to his football game so I wouldn't have to lose five hours going -- only to get to watch none of it because of the need to keep the minions alive. We got him dressed and he headed off to his game where he . . . didn't play at all. But he was expecting that this time and since he gets to play every play of the whole game during the grey games, he didn't care.

While he was gone I attacked the second half of that bushel of tomatoes. It took two hours to get everything ready but I finally had tomato soup cooking. Then I sat down and read six pages in the Book of Mormon. I'm trying to do the Book of Mormon challenge and get the whole thing read again before the end of the year. In order to pull that off at this point, I need to pretty much read six pages a day. Oy. So anyway, I did. Then I looked up cherry tree pruning on the Penn State extension website. It was alarming what they wanted me to do to my poor defenseless toddler cherry trees, but I could see the purpose, so I headed out to the yard and pruned the cherry trees, the American Holly tree (so the neighbor can drive into his own driveway without paint damage), the huge magnolia bush, and the lilac tree. I discovered that there are carpenter ants living in the lilac tree and making a somewhat successful attempt at killing it. oh dear to that. I trimmed our solitary hedge for what is probably the first time this summer. But it looks great now. I pulled a bunch of weeds.

And then the twins were sick of keeping me company outside so they went back inside. That put an end to my yardwork. About this time Max came home so I offered to pay him and his friend to take all the limbs and go put them in a pile by the compost. They happily did so and I happily paid up.

Then I spent another two hours smooshing all those cooked veggies first through my collander and then through a fine-screen seive. The end result was great though. I got 19 pints of fantastic tomato soup. I added some half and half to the leftovers and Milo, Ben, and I pigged out on that for dinner.

Around this point it was 7:30 and I had to decide what to do with the time left to me. I picked jam because if I didn't, I'd have to admit I let a billion pounds of strawberries go bad. Luckily Max agreed to help me by smooshing the strawberries. Strawberry jam is REALLY easy to make, even if you do keep messing with the recipe by adding some orange juice concentrate and some blackberries and some raspberries (came out great). I used up every last canning lid including some vintage ones that Jill found in an (unopened) box in her basement. They worked fine.

So there! Now our church clothes are laid out on the ironing board and I just heard the last jam jar pop so it's off to bed for me. Tomorrow is church, a swim team kick-off meeting, and some paying work. Oh yeah, and more work on the living room. I did actually make great progress on that today, too. But it needed a LOT of work.

I take it back

I was putting in the second round of salsa, trying to decide what I thought about having ruined 16 pints of salsa with too much chili -- when I decided that, duh -- we love chili! I'll just mark it "chili base" and add that to beans and hamburger and ta-da!

There was only about a quarter cup left when I'd finished filling the last jar, so I dug around in the cupboard until I found some different chips. The first batch I'd used are lime encrusted tortilla chips. The ones I found are simple round tortilla chips. So I take a bite.

And then another one.

Hmmm . . .

And another one.

Hey! Not so bad!

Mental note: this batch doesn't go with the lime chips. Plain chips are fine! Is there a chili taste? Yes. But it's not as overpowering as I thought. :::wipes salsa juice from chin::: It'll be fine. Nevertheless, I marked the first batch on the lids "C Salsa" so I'll remember that these are the ones that *would* be good in chili -- if I make some.

I'm blind!!!!

Why are some onions so much more painful to chop than others? Half of my right eye is still glued shut from tear goop and I'm afraid to touch it to clear anything up because I was chopping the hottest jalepenos I've ever owned this evening.

I picked up my last bushel of tomatoes this afternoon. At first I thought that the Amish farmer I'd bought the tomatoes from had kind of stiffed me. I didn't really hold it against him because, well, it's the middle of September and I kind of figured he'd given me every "canning grade" tomato he had left. He'd been so sweet about carrying the tomatoes to my truck (this is a farmer's market. I could have been parked blocks away. I wasn't. I was illegally parked in the pastor's parking space just a few feet away but that's another story.) that I didn't begrudge him the quarter bushel I thought was missing. When I went to start dividing up the two boxes of tomatoes into "salsa" and "soup" I realized that the box I thought said "1/2 bushel" really said "1 1/9 bushel" and the smaller box was the 1/2 bushel. In actual fact, he'd given me a little MORE than a bushel of tomatoes. So here we are at 11pm and half of them are simmering in the horrifically full 12 qt pot. I'm hoping I'm done by 1 am. I actually scalded the tomatoes around 5 pm, but then the youngin's all started clammoring to be fed. Max's friend was over, so put the scalded tomatoes in the sink and made angel hair pasta with meat sauce. That went over well. After that, Max and Brian headed over to Brian's house for a bit and I went back to working on the salsa. I had borrowed green peppers from Jill because the ones I'd bought for the salsa appear to have been eaten. But just as I was building up steam again, I realized that we were out of "goodnights" and we really needed some of those.

(Related to that, I was talking to Jill's husband just a bit later as I was getting the boys ready to go out the door and I said that I was going to the store for "Goodnight." He said, "I have one of those you can borrow." Now, you have to understand, Doug makes little jokes ALL the time. I thought he was doing his typical play on words thing and I laughed, then said we'd stop by in a bit to borrow some gardening tools. Well, when I *did* stop by for the gardening tools I find out that he was completely serious! I was talking to Jill and telling her that I was happy that they finally have "store brand" Goodnights because they're, of course, much cheaper. Turns out her younger daughter is still using them. So I really could have borrowed a night diaper from them, LOL.)

So anyway, I packed up the boys, swung by Brian's house to get Max, brokered a sleepover for NEXT Friday, headed out to the grocery store, bought more green peppers, drove to Jill's house, borrowed garden tools, headed home and spent two more hours putting together the stuff for salsa.

After all that? I think it has too much chili powder. I'm bummed :( That's a lot of salsa for too much chili powder. Lesson learned -- when making big, big pot of salsa, add spices slowly, taste often. Oh well, it's edible. It'll be great with beans.

pant, pant, pant

I really have no love for these mid-September last-Harrah-of-summer heat waves. I have no love for hummidity in August, but I accept it. It's August on the east coast, ergo, it is humid. But by mid-September I expect some relief. And I don't mean from the air conditioner. So, I am grouchy today. Because it was HUMID and it was HOT and it was SEPTEMBER 15!

On the upside, it was a day where much was accomplished. I can't say anything much was FINISHED, but it was a day of promising beginnings. Having accepted that we were keeping the enormous Ethan Allen living room set that I got at auction the other day for next to nothing, I called Jill this morning and asked her to help me assemble the hutch and move bookshelves around in the living room to make room for it. She did so, and then tentatively offered some design advice. I'd put the piece here and she said it would look better there. It *would* look better there, but that opened a whole new can of worms with the remaining bookshelves, and I had decided I would solve that problem the day I could afford to trash the four el cheapo Target bookshelves (that have to be bolted to the wall just to stay upright. I don't mean they'll lean forward and fall on their face. I mean that they'll collapse sideways due to the damage this humidity is doing to their cardboard core.) and replace them with inexpensive but at least they'll stand up by themselves matching IKEA bookshelves.

Then I pointed to the stagnant pile of unhung pictures that have been leaning against the wall in the living room since the end of April. Jill has the honor of having more pieces of art and framed photographs on her walls than ANYONE else I know. I've been to the Hirshhorn and the National Museum of Art and MOMA and a dozen other art museums and I'm thinking that Jill could give them all a run for their money -- all in her 2500 sq feet of historic old house. But the amazing thing, once you get past the sheer numbers, is that it's all so wonderfully arranged. Unlike most houses I walk into, I really do spend time just looking at the pieces of art, the photographs -- the walls invite you to. So, I wanted her to help me figure out where the rest of photos should go.

Jill said she could but she'd have to, um, take down all the existing pictures first and put them where they REALLY should go. I offered to go find a nail puller. So she went home and came back with a full picture-hanging kit. She ripped picture stands off the back of frames that had no hooks and added hooks. We swapped out some pictures so that more deserving pictures could have the better frames. She offered to go home and get some of her pieces that she doesn't actually have wall space for anymore and bring them over so I could have MORE stuff on the walls!

I thought that was very funny. And, as soon as I get a chance, I'll take the kids over there and see what she has.

The most interesting thing to me about all of it was that she said most people hang their stuff too high on the wall. Most of what she took down she re-hung in some new location at a lower level.

The pictures themselves clearly LOVED having her there. Old, tired photographs seemed to literally leap off the shelves. As she worked, I started seeing piles of frames tucked away on a shelf I hadn't noticed in months. The photos in standing frames crammed three layers thick jumped up and down and demanded to be considered for wall space. An old photograph of Max and the twins at Disneyland seemed to suddenly wiggle out from under a pile of homeschooling materials and demanded to be noticed. About the same time, a collage of photos printed on plain paper of a trip to the zoo many years ago, admitted that it had faded and lost most of its color and volunteered to give up its frame. It truly did seem like Toy Story among the picture frames.

Only about a third of the frames were hung before it was 2:50 and she had to skeddadle home to go mother her girls. But she promised to come back soon and hang the rest. They all lay propped against the wall that she staked out for them. They still look VERY happy and excited. They can't wait for her to come back.

I only had an hour after she left to put a few things in order. Oh, I should mention here, that I spent last night regorganizing his homeschooling stuff and fine tuning the schedule now that preschool has started and it's time to get into a really nice rut. It took about two hours but I even got the schedule laminated, hole-punched, and on a binder ring before midnight. So today we flipped to the Tuesday, Thursday card on the ring and Max *loved* the little time limits I'd put in parenthesis after each subject area. It's as if in knowing by when he was supposed to be done, that the task suddenly seemed so much smaller. OH! It's only 20 minutes of math is it! Well, pshaw, that's no time at all! Zip, zoom. That's done, Ma! What's next? And we had the most enjoyable morning of homeschooling in about a month. No dwaddling, no attitude. Just read, do, gloat, move on. We took a long break while Jill was here, but still got everything done in time for Max to get to go to his friend's house to play (after his friend got home from school).

Then it was off to Max's weekly group piano lesson. I'm supposed to sit in on it, too -- because it's Suzuki oriented. But when I suggested to the teacher that Max might have to miss the lesson because I didn't have a sitter for the twins, she scoffed at the idea -- she cracks me up. She said, in her usual theme of "you baby that boy too much" that its not mandatory for the mom to be there (mind you, the week before her theme was that the parents really SHOULD be there and be involved in the group lesson) and that the moms who WERE there for the whole lesson were "the moms of the little kids. Max is not a little kid."

I can't tell you how WONDERFUL it is to be seen as an overprotective worrywart of a mother who OBVIOUSLY doesn't give her son enough freedom. It is MUCH more fun than being the overwhelmed mother of infant twins who OBVIOUSLY must be neglecting her older son entirely since he's such a horrific discipline problem and probably has ADHD and she probably feeds him twinkies and lets him stay up all night and that's why he acts like that. Or, she's just a nincompoop who has never bothered to teach him to behave in a civilized manner. Being THAT mother wasn't much fun. So I brought him home to give him some more time under a higher level of LOVING supervision and we appear to have made great strides because lately I've heard that he's really a pretty great kid. (Well, I knew that, because he was never really that much trouble at home at all. It was group situations that triggered the falling apart.)

So I packed up his piano stuff and gave him the eye and told him to behave and I dropped him off at piano. And the twins and I went off to drop off two over-sized blankets at the cleaners and then headed over to Micheals to get two beads that I needed to finish up a project, and then we went back and sat in the music academy parking lot and the twins watched a movie and I knitted and we waited. And he came out, happy, had a great time, confessed to goofing off some in a matter-of-fact way, but promised that it was no more so than anyone else in the class (I can count on the kid to be truthful, by and large, so I do expect that he's reporting things accurately) and again I felt some relief. I can handle behavior "within the range of normal." I don't NEED perfection. Pick some other kid to be the homeschool poster child. I'm not your missionary. I just want normal, regular, ordinary. We can raise the bar next year if we want. For now, five months into our life here in our PA home, I'm basking in having hit the goal we set when we brought him home at the end of first grade. Ordinary.

Anyway, after piano we drove to football. I spoke with one of the team moms about this and that, told Max I'd be back around 7ish, and took the twins home for an hour. We had dinner, I checked email for the first time today, and then we headed back for an hour at the playground that is next to the football field.

Once we were all home again the boys were all restored to civilized levels of cleanliness (and no water on the floor, yay!) I put *most* of the displaced books back on their respective bookshelves, and then I did some paying work. Now, back to the paying work. (And sulking because I didn't get a goodnight call from Chris the traveling husband. But he's fine, right? Not in a ditch? A girl worries.)

Cold Feet

All that's left to finishing the soakers I made for my little cousin Konrad is weaving in three strands of thread. That's it. I keep putting it off because I'm not convinced that it was all for nothing and won't fit anyway. I want to immediately launch into the second soaker, but use and entirely different waistband -- then send them both together in hopes that one will fit properly.

The danger with this is that if I get held up with work or an overabundance of boys sports activities then he could potentially outgrow BOTH soakers likety split. 3 month old boys are uncooperative like that.

In the meantime, I've been drowning my sorrows in my sweater. Now, progress on this has been slow because it's a lacey pattern and that means really, really paying attention to what I'm doing.

At some point I decided that part of my problem was also the bamboo circular needles I was using. So I went off to my neighborhood yarn store -- Stitch Your Art Out -- and bought a longer set with metal ends, telling myself that I'd knit faster. Hey! It wasn't just an excuse! It worked! It's a silky cotton blend and it flows over the metal in a way it just didn't over the bamboo. And, the whole thing is a lot more manageable on the longer needle. I knit a few rows yesterday and it really was nice to finish up a few rows in a short sitting instead of making it halfway across the row. I found myself thinking that maybe it was time to start haggling over end dates with myself. It's really a spring sweater, but it could be worn nicely under a cardigan.

I've been barely working for the last week. I had a few things coming across my desk that took an hour or two each morning, but that's it. So you'd think I'd have accomplished all this wonderful stuff, right? Like, all the laundry would be caught up and the whole house would be spit polished, and the kids would all be smarter, more polite, and better looking.

Sadly, all I have is a lot more spaghetti sauce and some grape jam. Oh, we've had our moments. I took the boys to the park today and we were even on time for his last football game. Preschool has been interesting to say the least. They sent the boys home with homework. Uh. Homework? Get this -- they sent them home with little fishing nets and told them to collect bugs to bring back tomorrow.

Oops -- off to another football game. Don't want to be late!

Oh that was painful

I just did a blow-by-blow of the rest of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Lost the whole entry when a software update decided to shut down my browswer for me.

Ouch.

So now you get a very unsatisfying note that we had a wonderful time at the farm, slept deeply, relaxed, made a million pints and quarts of tomato juice, tomato soup, vegetable soup, and salsa, and basically had a great time. Favorite memories include dinner by candle light, outdoors, after dark, and Max having a fantastic time being Vic's cashier at the auction.

So Monday we reluctantly weighed anchor and headed home. We stopped in Columbus for a few hours to hit COSI with my mom, then drove the rest of the way, arriving home around 2 am.

I spent the rest of the week catching up with work, canning spaghetti sauce, jam, vegetable soup, going to new activities with the kids like the twins' speech preschool, Max's new group piano lessons, his individual piano lesson, and myriad other little errands. It's been fun, but ironically, I'm really tired. I stood all day today and peeled way too many tomatoes. After next weekend's bushel, I'll be sick to death of tomatoes. I got all my baking done today though, so at least tomorrow we'll have bread. We've been out for a few days.

The last of the bread is out of the oven. I'm off to bed. It's good to be home.

Where Was I?

Okay, I'm so far behind in my blogging that this may take a few entries spread out over the night. First, reports that I have canned the minions are greatly exaggerated. If I was eyeing them it's because Milo in particular won't stay dressed. It's September and apparently September is a great month to be three years old and naked. very naked.

We had a wonderful, wonderful time in Indiana. We left an hour later than I'd planned on Thursday -- 6 am instead of 5 am, but I'd stayed up till 1 am the night before and 5 am wasn't happening. We drove as fast as the law would allow but still didn't make great time. The traffic was fine -- I just had to keep stopping for more caffeine. We got to Indiana about 5 pm their time. The first thing we did was untangle my Aunt's computer a bit so that it would let her use her verizon email. That went smoothly and then we headed over to my grandmother's apartment to have dinner with her. We hung around and knit for a bit, then headed back to Charlotte's house to sleep. She has a great guest bed. We slept soundly.

In the morning Charlotte had gone to work, so Max and I went back to grandma's apartment fr breakfast. She eats in the cafeteria there for breakfast and there were a half-dozen other residents there at that hour. There was a piano in the next room. Grandma had wanted to hear Max play, so he played a few of his tunes. He was an instant celebrity among the 90+ crowd. He liked that just fine.

More later.

If You Wubba Me, Then I Will Wubba You --Grover

I wubba my husband and sons -- and I miss my husband and twinkies. A big, big miss.

AND

I'm having a wonderful time with my Aunts (happy girl sigh).

Max ran the battery on the lap top WAY down. So this is all you get. But suffice to say that we have MANY MANY empty jars and grand plans for filling them.

Little Update

I need to get to bed since Max and I are due to hit the road ear-lie in the mornin' but Max's football program had a parent/coach meeting prior to practice this evening. The coach's acknowledged some errors and communication problems were fixed. There will still be "A" kids and "B" kids and there will still be games where the B kids won't play -- but there are also 6 "B" games scheduled, now, too. That makes for a LOT of football games. Kind of glad now that the football season is over the first week of October.

Anyway, it was nice to see things redirected without any further drama and liveable solutions found.

In other news, I canned 6 quarts of spaghetti sauce, sent out some work, ran a bunch of errands, grocery shopped, and um, packed.

I am terribly anxious and really upset about leaving the twins. I know they'll be safe with Chris but there it is. Separation anxiety.

Right Then

So, tonight was a football game and the best I can say about it was that it did not rain until the last three minutes of the fifth quarter. The "A" team -- which is made up of the coach's kids and a few others -- played the whole game. The "B" team did not. At all. The game was "too close" to chance it because we were only 10 points ahead. Two minutes before the end we scored another touch down and we thought, okay, let our kids play these two minutes, please. But they didn't.

Instead they muttered something about a fifth quarter and let the A team finish the game.

THEN they invented a fifth quarter and sent the "B" team out to play against all the kids on the other team with spotlessly clean jerseys.

Now, I sound bitter but I'm actually very satisfied by the solution. My kid is perfectly happy to play only one quarter. He'd rather play it in the real game, but a "fifth quarter" works, too. The simple fact is that you can't learn the game during practice -- you can learn some skills, but the game has to be played on a field, against other kids who want to beat you. Period.

What I'm not thrilled about is the pathetically uncoordinated, and frankly, thoughtless way in which is was handled. I was told later that the idea of the fifth quarter was concocted on the way to the game and agreed to by the other coach prior to the start of the game. But none of the parents were told until 44 seconds before the end of the game. By this time, there was a group of about six to eight parents and their spouses (and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins) who were too mad to be "okay" with the solution. There were also some kids hurt and in tears. They also didn't know they wouldn't be playing until the fourth quarter.

If a coach had come jogging down the side lines in a get 'em excited kind of way and said, "Hey, great news! The other team has agreed to a fifth quarter! So if your kid doesn't get in during the game, don't worry! They'll get to play in the fifth quarter!" It would have been a disappointment, but that's it. The kind of thing you grumble out -- like someone bringing 11 items into the express lane when you're in an all-fire hurry -- and then get over. Your kid jogs off the field after the fifth quarter and you meet him with grins and attaboys.

Most of these kids got, I dunno, really unhappy parents.

Me? I'm disappointed in the way it was handled and I even spent some time talking to the wife of one of the coaches trying to help her see it from the other viewpoint -- she was feeling pretty defensive -- but after the last few years -- well it's just not something I can get hugely caught up in. It just kind of made me draw back a bit and keep my expectations of the season low. We'll keep the twins home and I'll find a quiet place to watch from the side and keep to myself. Max and I talked about it on the way home and we decided we'd do all we could to make Football work, but maybe we'd bump it down a notch in terms of priorities. We'd put it ahead of swimming and even, :gasp: group piano lessons. But I think now we've bumped it to third place. If swimming turns out to be more fun than it was in the spring (our expectations there are guarded, too -- it could be fun at times, not fun at other times) then we'll do three nights of swimming and two of football. We'll do the Thursday evening piano class and miss the first 15 minutes of football practice on those nights (we were going to have to do that anyway -- the other two classes are right smack in the middle of practice and that's going too far).

I suspect that for the first few months anyway, very little will change. We'll do football three nights and swimming two nights and try to focus on the good for football. But like I said, we definitely took it down a notch in our expectations tonight. It wasn't that much fun tonight having higher expectations. So we'll adjust the expectations and carry on meeting our obligations to the sport as much as we're permitted to.

Me, Max, and the Maytag Man

The Maytag Man here in town is Rodabaugh Maytag and I managed, through gross Quicken mismanagement and the failure of a client to pay me in anything close to a timely manner, to bounce a check there. Darn! So I went in a few weeks ago and made everything right. I was there, maybe, five minutes.

Well, today at the football game there's this guy and he's talking to my kids about butterflies and smiling at me like we know each other and I have no clue who he is, but it's clear he's not on the dark side and I have to admit the face looks familiar. I'm MUCH better with faces than with names.

But you know, it could be someone from church since none of the men ever look anything like themselves once they're not in a suit. I don't say anything because I hate for people to know just how phenomenally pathetic I am at remembering names, and in this case, it's even worse because I just can't quite place . . .

So the afternoon continues. Max weighs in and I sit a few feet from the scale and breath a sigh of relief when I hear his (fully clothed and in-cleats) weight. That was the end of the issue for me, but just the beginning for Max. Apparently the kids all took great interest in each other's weight and Max was the biggest Pee-Wee. I think some of the kids had been hoping he'd weigh-out of the group and go up to Midgets to sit on a kid his own size. The kid next closest in size to him was 6 lbs less, and that put him below the 100 lb mark. So Max finds himself in the position of minor celebrity as "the biggest Pee-Wee." He doesn't quite know what to make of this at first, but soon grocks that it seems to come with some status -- so he flows with it. I watch with some amusement from the side lines. He still needs to lose ten pounds, but I'm glad he's not being teased for being big. He's at least a half inch taller than everyone else. I heard about it a lot.

PA Stranger: Which number is yours?
Me: Max is 60. :::point:::
PA Stranger: Oooh . . . he's big!
Me: Yep.

There was a variation that went like this:

PA Stranger: Which number is yours?
Me: Max is 60. :::point:::
PA Stranger: Oooh . . . he's big!
Me: Yep.
PA Stranger: :::eyeballs now half-naked twins::: How old are they?
Me: Three. They'll be four in November.
PA Stranger: All your kids are big!
Me: Yep.

What can I say? Making monsters is a gift.

But back to my main monster, Max. (The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind or another . . .) He goes off to join his team and it's sweltering now. HUMID and too hot. Wah. So I take the twins back to the car for the chairs we forgot and it takes us FOREVER because both boys are playing a rolicking game of too-independent-for-my-own-good. We get the chairs and go back to the field in time to see the kickoff.

It was an exciting game but I wasn't getting to watch much of it. Too-independent-for-our-own -good was continuing and they were increasing the stakes with Milo finally upping the anty with a sassy, "MOM, I'm FINE!" and turning and marching back in the direction from which I had just brought him, AGAIN. He got a swat and then he had to sit with Mom for awhile. This displeased him. In the meantime, the butterfly guy had started playing catch with Ben. I wasn't going to interfere because I avoid doing that when I see one of my kids glowing and so happy he's floating inches off the grass. Then suddenly I placed butterfly man -- he's the maytag man!

Well, that was just fine because really, he'd been super understanding about the whole check thing, and I guessed that he'd placed me by then but was too kind to say so -- "Hey! You're the woman who bounced that check!" That's an akward start to a conversation. In the meantime his mom came over and we talked about the twins and the knitting I was doing and to make a long story short, two more quarters sped by. Both twins peed behind a tree. Max sat on the bench with the other bench sitters. I worried. The Maytag man and his sweet mom and his sweet kid -- boy they were a nice family -- continued to play with my kids while we all kept an eye on the field.

Finally the fourth quarter arrived and by this time we were good and slaughtered by the panthers in spite of some heroic efforts on the part of our (first-year) team. (We're new to the league.) So whether by advance arrangement or not, the coaches send in the "B" team. So Max gets to go in.

Now truthfully, at this point, if it hadn't been for the continued efforts of the Rodabaugh (Maytag man's) family we might have lost the twins for good because now I really *am* hyperfocused on Son #1. But somehow we managed to keep them in sight. Max plays better than I've seen him in practice, but still, he looks unsure and seems to hesitate to overpower the opponent. I know him -- he's not afraid -- he's too nice. After about five minutes, half the group runs off the field to be replaced by other kids. Max is with them.

But when I look back a few minutes later, Max is back on the field! There was some confusion and he wasn't supposed to come in. He's back in front of #85 and the ball leaves the ground and Max goes for his guy -- and shakes him like a wet puppy and tosses him to the ground before charging after the ball.

Wah?

What happened? I immediately infer that (as much as I would like to believe that the coach said something and Max responded to direction) #85 brought that on himself.

Well, Max caught on. 9 year old boys are, apparently, harder to break than they look -- that his position is supposed to do that for every play and then he's supposed to run after the ball.

Max played hard for the rest of the game and stayed in for the entire fourth quarter. A very satisfying game to watch.

I tell Mr. Rodabaugh's mom my life story while we're chatting. I don't know. My kid gets all footballish and suddenly I'm out of my shell. It was a wild moment.

The game ends. I round up my half-naked wild men and my chairs (the cover of one has completely disappeared -- a bummer because the other one didn't have a cover either and now I have way too much to carry), we say goodbye to the Rodabaughs (and I hope secretly that we end up near them again for the next game--only this time with Chris so that one of us can watch the twinkies and one can watch Max) and we go find Max.

Max informs me with quiet indignation that he's never been so insulted in all his life! It turns out he means that quite literally. He's rarely been insulted and never to the extent that #85 was laying it out there. Apparently he called Max a loser, a chicken, and other synonyms for those two. Max, who has never, ever been in a fight in his life, was suddenly inspired to take three weeks of coaching and put it to use. This was the moment I observed. After that he'd caught on to how the position was meant to be played and it didn't matter what the guy did or didn't do after that. He came at him. Max was pleased with himself for "giving him a good smack down at LEAST once, Mom."

It is further proof that God knew what he was doing when he didn't assign me any girls to raise that I nodded and replied, "Now, even if the guy in the game on Tuesday is the sweetest kid and clearly your next best friend -- you still have to knock him down like that. Okay?" Okay he says.

It was a blast. I don't know the final score -- it's a sign of our newness to State College that it doesn't matter to me (for the record, Max and I never bothered to find out who won the swim meets either. We were just there for the fun of it.) The next game is Tuesday night. Tomorrow it's back to work and school and all I have to show for my five days off is 6 pints of applesauce, 3 pints of pear butter, and a whole bunch of pints and cups and half-cups of plum-orange jam. They all turned out well, but there are air bubbles in my applesauce, so I may have to reprocess those. I still have a huge bag of apples to turn into applesauce and I still have a huge collection of tomatoes to process. Maybe tomorrow after piano. I only just got the kitchen clean again. Tomorrow night is a sleepover here at our house. Yay for Max! I love this town.

In Which I Thelma and Louise It All By Myself

Sometimes you just need a good night's sleep. And another one. And another one. And then, some more . . .

And sometimes you just need two whole days in a row where you don't have to type for more than twenty minutes at a sitting.

Sometimes you think, "That's it! I'm taking two days off!" and it turns into five :) Okay, well, technically, I should look quickly through a folder today and get rid of it. And technically yesterday and today I spent 20 minutes doing some very minor revisions to a few files and then sending them back to the person who sent them to me. But it's not work in the usual deadline racing sense. Nope.

I am still SO tired. It's funny how once you finally start to get caught up on missing sleep that you find out just exactly how over drawn you were. And then on night three the weird dreams kick in because apparently your brain had a backlog of weird dreams to watch.

So what have I accomplished so far during my wild ride away from reality? Well, really, not very much. I did some knitting:



Isn't that a pretty colorway?

Main Entry: col - or - way
Function: noun
Date: 1952
: a color or arrangement of colors

Yep, I was four inches into it when I figured out that I'd somehow lost my mind and completely miscalculated the number of stitches required. It would fit the baby perfectly when he's about, oh, four.

I had to rip it all out. Let's look at the colors again.



So I knit half a dishcloth for a swap I'm in instead.



I'll start the soaker again today.

Today is the day I finally do the canning I've been trying to do since Wednesday. Off to do that. I leave you with one more reason you should move to State College, too: walking your dog at dusk.

Will edit more tomorrow

I apologize in advance for the goofy symbols I know are about to appear.

Dy, I sat by the side of the football field tonight, madly typing away on material due to someone in the morning, and FROZE as a steady breeze blew and the sun sloooooooowly set. It was a big bummer and just WONDERFUL all at the same time. It feels so great to feel COLD.

Made me wish I had brought my knitting, but it was just as well. I got enough done that I actually ran out of things I could do (with the books I’d brought with me). I eyeballed the clock on the computer and tried to decide if I had enough time to go get a hot chocolate. I decided I did not.

Penn State called this week to touch base on Ben and Milo and preschool. Still no official start date, but they did say it would be this day or that day, one week apart. That is progress. Now I am waiting to hear from them for Max’s evaluation.

My goal tonight is to stay UP until all my work is done. Then I am taking two days off. That looks like this.

ONE WHOLE DAY I am not working.

ANOTHER WHOLE DAY I am not working.

I can only do this because I am not behind on the one project and because as of tomorrow morning, the other will be done. I need to find another project, but I am feeling a wee bit burnt out and truly in God’s hands here, really never more so. So I assume that when I am reenergized here in a bit that more work will come.

Honest to goodness ways God got all up in my business this week:

1. Sunday night I spilled water on my one-and-only-laptop. It went silverscreen and then black. It sat there corpse like. I ran and got a hair dryer and talked to my brother-the-computer-guy and let him say reassuring words like data recovery. I felt TOTALLY bummed about not being able to finish my work, but the massive anxiety attack I would normally have completely failed to show up. I finished taking the laptop as far apart as I dared (mostly just freed the keyboard and took out the widget slot to get more air circulating) set it up in front of a fan, and then I prayed. I started by apologizing for praying about computer equipment but explained that, as he knew, I do not have the means to get a new computer this, um, year. Then I asked for comfort, and a working computer in the morning, and the ability to fall asleep instead of sitting there chewing my nails to nubs and getting more and more anxious. And I felt, about as much as a person can get a memo from God, that I was to set the alarm for 5pm, knit a few rows to chill out, and go to bed and it would work just fine at 5am. So I did. And I felt fine. And I got up at 5am when the alarm went off and put all the screws back in the computer and pushed the power button. And it worked fine. I finished the last few bits of the first unit due that morning and made the deadline for it. I finished the rest of it yesterday. So God answers prayers about computers, too.

2. Well, the second is too much information for the blog, but lets just say that I love my church, I love this particular ward, I love the Mormon Mafia and the individuals who make it up, not because they have to but because they sincerely believe It is the right thing to do and they take good feelings and feel paid. I love the Sister who will talk to my husband at the playground like a real human being and say with enthusiasm when she sees me at church on Sunday that she wants to have us soon for dinner. I love the soft little hiss of stress relief that I can hear when the house gets quiet. It is there on my twins face who are coming to think of a weekday as a day that they go to the playground with Daddy (and words as things to be sounded out, but That is a blog for another day). It is there in Max’s laugh and the way he is feeling free to test some boundaries. We were led to these changes and HE WILL SEE US THROUGH THEM as long as we let Him. Even a wretch like me.

3. Every time I start worrying about money and work this week, I just feel a strong message that I am NOT to worry about this. Only good things are in store. Be patient. Things will be more comfortable by Christmas. I am tired. I am feeling the side effects of that, but things are looking up. A day with my brother and SIL, a weekend with the Aunts and Grandma, absolutely no reason I should be up past ten pm for the next few weeks. That is GOD at work in my life, I tell you what J

Sunday Afternoon

I'm halfway through a big day. Well, not quite halfway since I have a deadline like nobody's business at start of business day tomorrow morning and I suspect it's going to run into the night to meet it. But the most physically and emotionally draining parts of today's to-do list are done.

There was church. We were late but I gather Penn State must be getting ready to start soon because everybody including the Bishop was on vacation. I only had three kids in Max's Sunday school class (I'm subbing for the whole month) which is good because it's really all I can handle. I cheated today. I brought M&Ms. But by golly, we got through the lesson with model behavior.

I gave a little presentation at the start of Relief Society and handed out a food storage questionaire to help me set some goals for this group.

:::pauses as she spies a ball of wool sitting nearby on the bookshelf and the Advisary whispers in her ear to toss her responsibilities aside and go knit:::

Where was I?

Oh yeah, so then it was back to Primary to watch over my class and before I knew it, Church was over. We headed home. I got Max started on lunch and then before I could chicken out, I put on my ugliest shorts, an old t-shirt, and my lawn-mowing sneakers. We haven't mowed the lawn in :cough:amonth:cough: Actually, I think it was five weeks. The first two and a half weeks we didn't have to. High heat and no rain = no grass growth. Yeah, that! In the meantime, a wasp nest was establishing itself in an old ground squirrel hole in the yard. They were well-behaved wasps and I really thought nothing of it. Chris apparently was imagining all the ways they were going to kill him the next time he mowed the lawn. I thought this was very funny but once I understood what was keeping him from mowing the lawn I knew I'd lose this particular wait-it-out battle. I would have mowed two weeks ago but I'd always remember at 2:00 in the afternoon and frankly, it's been too blasted hot.

So I mowed. It *was* hot and the wasps *were* irritated at me. I waited until the very end to mow as close as I dared to their hole and in the end my solution was to put a big rock over their hole and then mow quickly. The rock didn't keep them from coming out, but it bought me a little time while they figured it out. The grass is still long for about 8 inches around that hole. I still think it's funny. The rest of the yard looks just fine. I filled the compost bin and mowed about a third of the back yard -- the other two-thirds hadn't grown enough in its constant shade to bother.

Then it was back inside to shower, have lunch, and blog. I'd better get to work. If I make my deadline in the morning I'm rewarding myself with a Monday off to knit and focus on the kids.

Apollo, Dionysus, and DPN

So Sarah Poppins says to me, "is knitting considered Apollo's playground of Dionysis'?"

And my first thought was, "um, okay, which is which again?" And then I thought, "Well, it's not Bacchus's because if you drink too much while knitting you're bound to drop a stitch somewhere and then in the morning when you have rip it all out you're also nursing a headache."

But thankfully, I married a guy who Knows These Things, so he gave me the bad news that it's just not that simple and also, that I'm comparing apples to oranges on account of Bacchus being Dionysus in Roman clothing. Oh.

Now, I didn't *want* it to be Apollo's playground because Chris is forever giving me a hard time about how unsexy knitting is (which he is wrong about) and I don't know that Apollo, being all into order and everything, is all that sexy.

But in googling around Dionysus, I don't think he's really the knitting type. While it's true that some knitting patterns do seem shrouded in darkness and mystery and might drive a woman to wander around the wild woods shouting, "evoi, evoi" -- they're only tearing out stitches--not the living flesh of animals.

Apollo? Well, he's the god of music and it can be nice to listen to music while knitting -- but I admit I really, really like listening to a child's football practice while knitting. Is Apollo there? I don't know. There's certainly testosterone to spare. Apollo is associated with law, philosophy, and the arts. It helps to be philisophical when the item you just spent a month knitting turns out to have some fatal flaw (like one sleeve is longer than the other). I won't go into whether knitting is an art or not -- of course it is. And law? Well it's not against the law to take your knitting needles on an airplane, so it has that in its favor.

I guess I'll have to vote in favor of Apollo. He seems a little sexier to me after reading more about him. Actually, he sounds a little like Chris. Only Chris is probably funnier and looks better in elf shorts.

(Admit it, how many of his regular readers were petrified of posting at his blog this past week for fear of accidentally saying something that earned you those shorts? Jeez Louise. And you all thought he was kidding when he said that at least twice a year I have to tell him -- quite seriously -- if you get arrested I'm not bailing you out until the morning, so bring your own cash.)

The important thing is that I made progress on my soakers today and I did a really nice three-needle bind off for the shoulders of that child's sweater. Now if I can only remember whether I used size nine or ten needles for the ribbing. I have to start the sleeves soon and I just *can't* recall.

Mmph, mmph, mmph

I can't blog about work because that would be breaking ten of my own rules about blogging. Mercy I sure want to.

::::goes and kicks the wall::::

On the upside I do have one work project that is doing just fine and most of the time I get to work on that. A shame they won't pay me for another 45 days.

1 day. 2 days. 3 days. 4 days. . . .

:::presses reset button:::

Let me hunt around here a bit. There must be something worth blogging about. School is going well. We've worked from home the last two days just because it seemed a good idea at the time. He definitely pokes along more slowly at home. On the other hand, we've kicked booty at the piano. And it's been great for me not to have to schlep the 50 lbs of materials that the "45 day" job requires in and out of the truck to the library. The only content area still to be "worked in" to the schedule is writing. I've got grammar, two latin programs, two math programs, phonics/spelling, reading, handwriting, and music theory all going great guns. But we haven't started writing yet. I'm giving myself till September 1st. Things can fall apart when you try to assimilate them all at once. For now, I get to work more effectively and do a lot of the schooling and that's yummy.

Chris is doing well with the twins. The house is cleaner. Football is going well. If only it weren't so blasted hot and muggy. If only I could . . . bleah.

And I know, I know. I have to let God take care of the details. It's only my job to work very hard at the opportunities provided me and to not fret about about the stuff out of my control.

Up, Up, and Away . . .

So as my Aunt alluded to in the comments below, I'm making plans to fly the coop for a weekend at the end of the month. The Aunts (t is always capitalized when referring to The Aunts) are planning a canning weekend in which many things end up in sealed jars and I'm assuming, there is also much gossipping and knitting (or needle pointing if you are Connie -- and Caroline if she is coming).

The Aunts are (in order of appearance) Caroline, Constance, and Charlotte. My Dad is Richard and he comes after Caroline and before Constance. I don't know why he didn't get a C name, but he didn't. When I was growing up and in trouble, I was always CarolineConstanceCharlotteYOU!!!knockthatoff. Other people got their first, middle, and last name, but my Dad seemed to only remember his sisters names when infuriated with his eldest daughter. Unresolved issues? Hmmm. (KIDDING Dad) What's interesting is that Constance is usually Connie. But if I were in trouble at least I got HER full name.

Since I've totally slacked on canning this summer, I'm counting on us to actually get some canning done. At the same time, I'm looking forward to a nice long drive there and a nice long drive back, and a fair bit of knitting in between.

Max wants to come. I wasn't sure what to think of that at first. I'm still not sure. On the one hand I know I'm supposed to want a weekend as a grown-up with no kids. On the other hand, being a grown up with one kid -- the one who happens to be really great to travel with -- doesn't sound bad at all. And since my Grandma be there, too. Well, I just think every opportunity to get a boy and his great-grandmother together should be taken. He wants to bring Emily so she can run around, but Connie's dog would eat my dog, so I'm guessing Emily should stay home.

Today was work and school and piano lessons and then I worked at cleaning and straightening up the house. The house looks a lot better. I still have a few things I want to accomplish downstairs. I found some floor lamps for $8.50 at Target and got some of those to add light to the downstairs. I also got a cheap bookshelf that I plan to organize all the math manipulatives in. But I can't help but feel like we're making some progress here. I'm tired. I'm still moody. But things are looking up. It's a little like buds on a tree that has otherwise looked dead. You don't have to go deep to find the green anymore. It's right there full of promises of new growth.

Along those lines, the cherry trees I planted and that had seemed to be doing well -- but not growing as much as I thought they should -- have recently exploded in growth. They've shot up more than a foot and put out lots of new branches. I'm very pleased. If they survive the winter, I think they'll go on to produce copious amounts of cherries in a few years. Yum :) I think that will be us, too. We've been doing reasonably well, but I think great happiness could burst forth sometime in the next few years. We could be sitting around just minding our own business and suddenly realize how wonderful this all is.

You know, it's so incredibly freeing -- the idea that I'll never move again. Since it's not a joke, but rather something I mean quite fervently -- it has given me permission to put down roots, to not worry about the future so much, to plain old not worry so much. I don't have to worry. I know where I'll be in ten years -- and who I'll be with. Poor Chris. He's got so many cherries in his future.

And I was going to get SO much done today

So, a few days ago I suggested to Jill that she and I "ditch everyone" and go to breakfast. Her husband, upon reading the email, worried that we had some kind of Thelma and Louise thing planned. No, she assured him. Just waffles.

And indeed that is ALL we had planned. We didn't even really linger that long over the waffles! We came, we ate, we gossipped, we tipped, we left. But on the way out we took the other exit out and spied a whole gaggle of people across the way under a tent and suddenly remembered that there was a big estate auction there that day. Well, heck! Lets go peek! We've never been to an estate auction before.

Jill wanted an edger for her hubby. I wanted chairs. Real chairs. The kind you can sit in and read and knit or just knit if you want.

Well they had some really nice furniture, including a few chairs that would work, and then a whole lot of JUNK. We went and got numbers and then wandered over to the shed where they were selling the garden stuff. I tried to get a shovel for the snow, but you know, I wouldn't go over $4 so . . . but that was good because I quickly caught on to how the whole bidding thing works. It's you and one other guy until one of you shakes your head no and then someone else might get into it with whoever is left until finally there's just one person left who wants the widget. I bid on a rake -- here I'm thinking "what do I know we got rid of that I'm gonna have to go to Lowe's for come the fall?" But the rakes went higher than $2 and I wouldn't. I know, but my husband didn't know I was there and I wasn't going to go home and tell him I got a deal on a $5 rake. $2 is obvious. You don't have to explain that. So then there was a battery chargeable weedwacker and nooone really wanted that, me included, but then I remembered Chris complaining how heavy the gas-powered one is. So okay, I bid the $2 and that was that. I got a $2 weekwacker. If it never starts I won't cry.

We walked back to the cashier table and I tried to pay, but you have to wait until they get this form that tracks everything and we'd beat it to the table. They told us to go look at the stuff in the garage and come back in a little bit. Well we walked into the garage and the next thing I know Jill, who likes old stuff, is drooling over some sleigh bells and some big metal pails. I eyeball a dremel for Chris, but decide he already has one. Then I saw the Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots *in the original box*. Well, okay. I want to try for that and sell it on eBay.

I won't bore you with the blow by blow, but the short version is that we didn't leave for another 4.5 hours. Yep. We Thelma and Louised it right there in auction yard. It was FUN and the mennonite family that ran the auction were witty and young so there were cute kids to watch and the auctioneer's side commentary left us all in stitches. He's the mennonite stand-up commedian of auctioneers. In the end I discovered that Jill has terrible taste in Owls (kididing! Okay, no, I'm not, but we all have our issues), that we're so similar that a) the auctioneers thought we were sisters and b) we bid simultaneously three times.

I came home with two really nice living room chairs for $25 and $40 (I was willing to go to $50 for the matching chair, dangit. Nothing in our house matches. Let my two estate-sale chairs match!) I got over 100 canning jars for $15. $3 for 40 quart jars. How cool is that? Some of the pint jars are a pretty blue. Only one of the jars is chipped. Since I really did get the jars for canning, I'll probably toss that one into the recycling.

What else? Hmm. I got a good quality food processor. I'd really wanted one for Christmas and now I can cross that off my list ($4). And I got a few things I thought I might sell on eBay. One is a juice jar and glass. I found them on eBay, but they're not selling for more than $5 and since I only paid $1 for both, I think I'll just keep them and use them. The only other thing I bought was two sturdy plastic chairs for 50 cents each. After being there two hours we were ready to SIT. It was insanely hot. I spent $10 on two cheeseburgers, two sodas, and two fresh-squeezed lemonades. They were REALLY good.

So at the end we packed up everything and came on home. Chris helped us unload and then we helped him with the elf shorts (I took the photos. Jill entertained the kids.) From there we let the boys (Dads) have some time to themselves and took the kids to the pool for the evening.

It was a great day, Dy. Just for you I'll recap that. A great and ordinary Saturday in which chairs were bought, waffles were eaten at a local restaurant, splashes were made in the local pool, and in the end we returned to our very own home sweet homes. Now. In which freezer did I put that football ice cream?

I'm Starting to Catch On

So all along I've wondered what the catch is with State College. We've moved to -- for a part-mormon liberal democrat family -- the most perfect place on Earth. It's cheap, it's beautiful, the people are friendly, there's plenty to do, it's extremely family friendly, and it has a Wegmans! Why isn't everyone rushing to sell their expensive, over-taxed home where they have to work too hard and moving HERE? You can see SOOOO many stars. Isn't that reason enough?

But I'm starting to catch on to State College's Dark Side. They may be a little twisted in one small regard. I present to you EXHIBIT A:



Now, the Minnesotans were a bit off about their football. The people we bought the house from called us two days after we moved in because they were homesick for their violent "Vikings" purple shag carpet. I had to break the news to them that since I knew we were replacing it, I hadn't bothered to put down a drop cloth while I painted (two days into a new house is too late for me and my paint brush, kwim?)

And for all I know, this year they convinced Edy's to make a Vikings ice cream flavor, but they were, obviously AN ENTIRE STATE.

I'm beginning to wonder if maybe we shouldn't buy more bicycles. Just how passable will the roads be around here on game days?

"Eat to the bottom of this carton to see if you're a winner!" Oh yeah, somewhere out there is a very, very sick rabid football fan.





Of course I bought it! It's got caramel filled chocolate footballs in it. How cool is THAT?!?

Can you believe it?!?

Verizon says that if I run over my own phone in my own driveway in my own Ford Expedition, that it is NOT considered a "manufacturing defect" and therefore, not covered by warrentee. Not even if you didn't MEAN to run it over.



Put out the word. Do NOT call me on my cell phone. It's just not ringing right . . .

Showing Off

So here is my sister-in-law modeling the shawl I made for her. I didn't get any photos of it before I sent it off in June, so I begged her for a photo, knowing it would look better on her anyway. This was a mohair shawl from the same book there on the left as the Wigwam shawl. It was also the first project I finished in a reasonable amount of time (March to June while moving and working) since I picked up the needles after my two-and-a-half year baby twins break. [As an aside, I'd bet money she made those earrings herself. She beads.]





Yeah, I know, she's prettier than the shawl, but they go well together, don't you think? (Thanks Jess :)

1999

The '98-'99 school year was my last year as a public school teacher. It didn't go well. I switched at the beginning of that year from a really wonderful, grounded, hard-working school in a really awful neighborhood that was a 90 minute drive (each way) from my home to a politically twisted school in an upper-middle-class neighborhood about 25 minutes from home. The kids weren't from truly affluent homes. This was Northern California and most of the families were probably a little house poor. But it was squeaky clean and homogenized and pasteurized and, it turned out, more than a little paranoid.

It wasn't a good year for me.

But it had its moments and one of them was a kid named Daniel. Daniel had Tourette's. I didn't know anything about Tourette's. I looked up some information on the internet (this might have been pre-google, LOL, I really don't know) but I didn't recognize my student in any of those descriptions. I know he was taking a (some?) medication so I guess that must have helped some, but I don't really know. I don't know which of those symptoms he was supposed to have and which he didn't. I didn't ask. Whatever it was that he was being treated for hadn't manifested itself in my classroom. What I saw was a sometimes shy, often witty kid with a really solid foundation. Some kids have a lot going for them, but their core being is shakey. Maybe it's how they came into the world and with love and a good home they outgrow it. Maybe they came into the world just fine but they got snubbed on the love and good home part. Whether he had it when he arrived, I don't know, but I do know that his mother loved him "like the rock of ages" as the song goes. She was a favored school volunteer.

I liked her, trusted her, and gave her pretty much free access to the room. She'd come and go as she pleased and even when the class was acting up and I was having a bad day, I never really gave her a second thought. There was another parent who was there a lot and I remember regretting giving her so much freedom. She openly disliked a few of the more challenging students telling me once that she didn't know how I could stand it -- these kids were just so horrid. I remember just staring at her, speechless. There were 34 kids in that class and six of them were on ADHD medications. I had a full-inclusion aide for one of my kids who had congenital brain damage. One very bright child had some pretty severe emotional issues. Another was dealing with one of the most bitter divorces I'd ever seen. None of the kids ever acted maliciously. They were just a poor mix, in a class that was too big, and nine. Nine year olds are wonderful people but their ability to control their own impulses is often over rated. They're younger, in some ways, than they look. It's an easy mistake to make.

But this mother I'm remembering did not make that mistake. She knew. Daniel wasn't her first. He was her third or fourth or fifth. I'm not sure. But he wasn't her first or second, I know that much. I would see them sometimes hanging out in the office. After school, usually. She'd be chatting with someone and he'd be there and he was inevitably touching her. He'd be in her lap, or hanging over her shoulder, or playing with her hair. There was nothing weird about it. It was just that there wasn't any of the distance that the other nine-year-olds in my class were already starting to show. Oh, they'd be affectionate with their parents, but not where someone else could see.

Max was one that year and I remember walking into the office once and she was talking and he was perched on her knee and just listening to the conversation. He was relaxed and leaning against her and completely unself-conscious. I thought, "Please, please let me be deserving of that."

So you know, today, as I read through the introduction of Max's math lesson, sitting next to him at a table in the public library, he leaned against me, tucking himself into my arm and making silly jokes about the lesson and I had the sense to take no credit and just be grateful. Thank you, God. Thank you for Pennsylvania and Chris and the public library and this forgiving kid. Thank you for seventh chances and one more day that he'll be affectionate with me in public.

And thank you Daniel and his mom, for giving me something worth working towards. I hope, 8 years later, that you had a wonderful high school graduation last spring and that you are both looking forward, in your own way, to a terrific freshman year. I'm sure, wherever you are Daniel, that you'll do great with that solid core you have. And I'm sure, wherever you are Daniel's mom, that you're proud of him.

I'm happy

:::hums:::

So the new routinish schedule is going well. We're only three days into things but I like it a lot so far. I haven't quite nailed the sleep aspect of things which means we can't quite seem to get out the door when we mean to, but each morning we've done better. There is one perk -- my laptop battery is only good for three hours anyway and I can't find a plug at the library, so thus far, 3.5 hours has worked out fine. The last half hour I'm just hanging out with Max in the library and reading him spelling words or whatever.

It's been surprisingly productive. I even made it to the post office today which I'd been putting off for at least a week. I have a photograph I need to mail. Maybe I'll get that out tomorrow.

Anything could happen.

I focused on a different client this week and that's made for a very pleasant week. I've been able to get more done at the library, even with Max there to prod along, than I was in the same amount of time at home. AND they have free wireless. How cool is that?

Other little bits and pieces of life continue to unfold. Football practice is going well this week. He's no prodigy, but he's enthusiastic and really trying hard to learn the game. We're proud of him (and frankly, I think he's only showing off his great brain power when he demonstrates he's still a little afraid of the ball. It's a big, hard ball covered in leather.) I finally got some answers about how the YMCA team is structured, when the true swim meet season is, and other KEY bits of information about that program. Apparently I should have bypassed the coach eons ago and contacted a parent on the board. Who knew? So much to my surprise I've learned that the season won't even start until fully a month after I was originally told it would (by YMCA staff), that the meets won't start until mid-October, and that the season goes through February. This is good as football will be good and over by half-way through the season and so it's okay to pass up some meets to go to football games because there will be meets to go to once football is over.

Alright. As good as things are, I still do have some work to do tonight. I'd rather knit, but, oh well. I'm nearly halfway done with that colorful sweater and I'm on the second skein of yarn on the blue sweater for myself :) I'm definitely getting some knitting done.

Latin

So, regardless of the rest of the subjects, Latin is my job to teach. We've been gamely using Latina Christiana. Because of my lack of, I dunno, competitive spirit, we've happily been chugging along at a snail's pace. He's got it just fine! We just seem to linger over a lesson for weeks and then go back and do review again at the first sign of a pause in action. Then we really *did* take the last two months of school off Latin. So we've been back at it for a few weeks and are, once again, doing review. I don't know WHY I make us go back and do the review. I haven't hit anything yet that he can't remember. But I do. Call it habit.

Shortly before the year began though, one of my favorite homeschool bad influences introduced me to The Cambridge Latin Course. Now, I think, I'm not sure, but I think CLC is really for kids at the first year of Hogwarts. 11-ish is what I'm saying. Nevertheless, it is so insanely well organized and written that as long as you *aren't* overly competitive and concerned with looking all advanced and what not -- or in other words -- are willing to dilly dally a bit, there's no reason to hold off. Well, I say that but Max is, after all, a fourth grader. If you're reading this and putting together your first grader's curriculum then I say NO. You don't need Latin. Come back in a few years. TRUST me that what you have is enough. But say your kid is nine or ten or eleven and Latina Christiana is not doing it for you, then I have to admit that the program is really nice. We are, three-ish weeks into the school year, still on the first lesson. But oh how we giggled our way through it at the library today. The "main character" of the first lesson -- because CLC is built around immersion stories with black and white drawings (like a comic book) -- is a dog. Somehow running through the vocabulary today (and there's plenty of it) we got to a discussion of the word "is sitting" and that led to deciding that maybe we should train Emily to follow her commands in LATIN. And that led to lots of gesturing and giggling. Anyway, there's tons of Roman history and culture built into the lessons complete with full-color photographs of ruins from Pompei. We're enjoying it very much. It's a little hard to get HOLD of if you order it on your own -- they'll basically run a security check to make sure you're not really a high-school student trying to get hold of the answer key. But everything but the teacher's manual is available easily through eBay. I've heard that the related activities on the website are pretty good, too: http://www.cambridgescp.com/latin/clc/clc_home.html



Oh, we're still doing Latina Christiana I. I guess just because it's not rocket science andwe seem to be fine doing both. But then, we're doing both Saxon 5/4 and Right Start Level E, just because they seem to solve each other's issues, and THAT is some honest-to-goodness work. So two Latin programs is cake.

Because, Like Sarah, I Am a Raving Lunatic

So, as we like to do, we rewrote the schedule again and are trying to stick to it. It's a process, this getting to the "right" schedule/routine as I keep reminding the Pupdaddy. I think he went and dug up the schedule after I didn't come home when he was expecting me to (and there it was, "Chris feeds twins lunch. Alaska and Max to piano lessons.")

This time along we were aiming to incorporate some sports changes (out: early AM swim team practice. in: late evening football practice) and to try to figure out a way that I could get some work done and the twins could get some attention.

Of all things, we decided we'd try sending Max and I to the library where I could oversee hs-lessons and work and Chris would stay home and tidy and play with the twins. On Mondays, we detour on the way home for lunch and have the piano lesson. Every other day, we come home for a late lunch and then Chris takes Max for afternoon hsing and I keep the twins alive (this involves less interaction than the AM with Chris) while doing the second half of my work day.

Today we got off to a late start because we're still playing catch up from getting sick and for the life of me I can't get out of bed at my goal hour. So we were about 40 minutes late getting out the door and then the first thing we did was go to The Waffle House for a cheap breakfast. Two blueberry pancakes and an egg for $4. Max did his reading and I started sketching out the next five lessons that I need to turn in this week. We were there about an hour, talking in between reading and writing, enjoying this nice breakfast, and it was one of those sunshine moments you don't forget later. What a handsome, funny, brilliant kid.

From there we headed over to the library where I worked and he did math, latin, and some piano (written piano book stuff). Tomorrow I'm hoping we'll get off to the library earlier (we'll eat breakfast at home) and be able to get grammar, spelling, and composition in there like I had planned. It will work or it won't. I was pleasantly surprised by what I got done and feel like it did work for me. I didn't have the productive afternoon I wanted, but that's what I get for not getting my bread-making done this weekend. I did get some of my food storage reorganized and I cooked a bunch of oatmeal and nine-grain cereal and bagged it into 1-cup servings so I can just thaw it and add it to my regular whole-wheat bread next time. Adding the extra step of cooking the grain and letting it cool was more time consuming than I thought and I burned the first batch of oatmeal when the phone rang.

So we'll see. It might work to do it this way, it might not. I'm trying not to get my hopes up. But having me work all day at home wasn't working either. There were just too many interuptions.

Pass the Ginger Ale, Please

So everyone but Max has a bug today. I had the tummy bug. The twins have colds. Chris has both. Poor Chris. He's obviously been smooching on WAY too many people.

I finally finished my Step-mom's 60th birthday present. (Her birthday was in January. Oops.) I actually finished it a week ago but it took me another week to get around to sitting down with needle and thread and tacking the ends of the ribbon in place just to be safe. I didn't trust the ends to come unwoven the first time it was drycleaned.

The pictures don't quite do it justice but you get the idea -- it's finished :)




This is one of the new projects (color is called "Way Cool"). This is the back of a simple hoodie that I'm making for Milo. Jill says it's too girly. I'll wait until it's done, but if she's right, the yarn (Hip Hop by Berroco) comes in plenty of more boyish shades and my local yarn shop has a bunch of them. The pattern is ultra simple, but I wanted something that I could maybe finish in a week or two this time. Some immediate gratification.



That said, I never KNEW it was morally okay to have more than one project on the needle until I started reading knitting blogs. That this WAS okay was a complete revelation -- and that it could be considered GOOD (because it dramatically drives up the employment rate of your stash, which permits some inflationary tactics at the yarn store since, after all, you're "using up" some of your stash) was life changing. Life can get kind of stressful with all this life happening and being able to pick the project that best fits a given need or mood is really wonderful. Need to feel like you're capable of making great strides in a small amount of time? Pick up big, bulky hoodie project. Want to feel clever and advanced? Pick up complicated 16-row sweater project. Creative, albeit past the point of practicality? Pick up that seeded stitch preschooler pants project. Giving and aunt-ish? Pick up those soaker pants. And of course, today I wound up a ball of mohair so I could start a pair of socks and feel an affinity to the Yarn Harlot.

So yeah the internet! My yarn stash thanks you, my local yarn store thanks you, and my happy hands thank you.

YAWN

Milo has a ReallyBadCold. I worried it was pertussis because he woke up last night unable to get a good breath in. I ran around desperately trying to find the spacer for the inhaler because he couldn't get the hang of using it by itself -- kept just getting the albuterol on his tongue. Finally, I grabbed a toilet paper tube and used that -- I'm sure half of it ended up in the tube but I gave him four squirts in about 15 seconds and he got enough of it in to breathe. Cough, cough, cough, cough. He sounded HORRIBLE. Finally he worked it all out, calmed down, fell right to sleep again.

Cranked up on adrenaline, I drifted in and out of sleep from 2:00 to 3:00 and then got up shortly before 7:00. I had an interview for a little administrative assistant position that wouldn't have brought in more than a couple hundred dollars a month, but was related to Max's piano and it seemed like it would work with everything else I was doing. I'm glad I left early as I was pretty hopelessly lost and used every minute of the thirty minutes I'd left early to get there just right on time.

It was a nice interview but I left feeling no more sure that I really wanted the job. When they called later in the afternoon and said they'd decided to give the position to a long-time parent (it's a parent-run organization) but they really hoped I'd join the board as the piano parent representative, etc, etc, I agreed to think about it and sighed happily. I guess I really *didn't* want the position. I have so much to do already and lately carving out minutes to knit or just spend time with the kids and hubby have started to bring little bits of normalcy to our lives that we haven't experienced in what seems forever.

I have these moments where I'm watching the kids and they're so dang HAPPY and I'm thinking, "Look at that! They're having a childhood." I could kiss Max's friend from down the block every time he comes over because it's just so great. I was swinging in the backyard the other night waiting for Thor to finish marking the 700 little bushes and trees in the backyard (but a man-dog's gotta do, what a man-dog's gotta do) and looking up at the tops of the trees that are awfully far away. How did this happen? How did we end up a few hours from the place I lived the longest as a child? How did we end up back with the birds I heard outside my windows as a child? I look around and all these people could have attended the Methodist church we went to in Georgetown.

I think I mentioned that when I got off the plane the weekend I came out to look at houses here I picked up the car and headed out into a snow storm. Once I found the right freeway I settled back and peered out the window, chugging slowly along at 35 mph because anything faster was impossible. And I saw a Giant food store. That was my grocery store as a child. And I saw a CVS and a Victorian house with an old, old metal swingset in the backyard. And it hit me like a hammer on the head that I had inadvertantly brought my family back to My Home. I didn't think much beyond that. Just that, how about that? The going got tough so I boxed up the family and took them to the place I Knew Best.

But lately I'm realizing that there are implications far beyond just "Wow, how subconscious was that?" It means they'll have, by and large, an East Coast childhood. This is the first time my son has chased and caught lightning bugs. And it means, well, I don't know. I don't feel as homeless as I usually feel. I don't have that "not from around here" feeling.

Sometimes you put a knitting project down and you don't pick it up for EONS. And then you do. And when you finish it there is a feeling that goes WAY beyond the usual, "I'm done with this" feeling. Well this is kind of like that. Like I've picked up an unfinished project and started knitting on it again. Only this time around I'm a *much* better knitter. I know a lot more about that yarn and am not nearly so akward with the needles. I know I can really makes something with that yarn.

I hope that makes a bit of sense.

Anyway, back to Milo. I got him to the doctor's after my psuedo-interview and we ruled out pertusis and he prescribed some albuterol in liquid form and some kind of steroid. I didn't *want* them because we're switching insurances this week to get everyone on one plan and save a ton of money and the last thing I need is anyone thinking the boy has asthma, which he doesn't. So I took the prescriptions to the little corner pharmacy which does not accept Milo's existing insurance. I asked for the cash price and braced myself.

$22 and some change for both. Total. YEAH!! I paid. We left. And not only that but apparently this stuff has been around so long that they figured out how to make it taste GREAT because Milo begs for it. "PWEEEEEEZE, Mommy!"

Now, little by little, everyone else is getting it, too. Oh well. It'll be nice to have a quiet weekend.

In Which We Wobble Out of Orbit

It occured to me on the way home tonight that truly life as we know it is coming to an end when I, Alaska, realize I will be blogging ALL FALL about football. I will be blogging about 9-year-olds playing football, but football nonetheless. I may even blog about Penn State football just because, apparently, the whole place turns blue here. It's already the case that my grocery store is covered in Penn State football paraphanalia.

But tonight I will blog about my 9-year-old. We confirmed tonight that life and Chris had taught Max little about football. He didn't know much out there. But I saw it all from a less biased position -- it hadn't been *my* job to teach him any football. And I had married Chris thinking that his lack of football mania was a nice perk. So I have to say that while there were many, many boys out there and many, many of them knew more about football than Max, he did *not* stick out like a sore thumb. He lacks stamina -- but he made it through the entire two-and-a-half-hour practice still giving it his best at the end. I. was. so. proud. I was! I was this 37-year-old mother of a football playing fourth grader and he was listening and doing what he was supposed to be doing and even, dare I say it, sometimes better than the other kids at paying attention.

The twins and I had gone off to run errands and we joined the football practice at the point where it was already an hour and fifteen minutes into things. I'd worried that there would be nothing for the twins to do but run onto the practice field, so I'd stopped at the store and picked up two nerf footballs (that say, I think, Penn State on them) so they'd have their own game if they wanted. I shouldn't have worried. There were other little boys to play with, a big piece of playground equipment, and some dogs. Maybe I'll bring Emily tomorrow. Chris and I sat and watched them all -- then after 45 minutes Chris got antsy about projects in his workshop, so he took the twins home and tucked them in and I sat and knitted two rows, listened to a brief talk from the head coach, and got to welcome the victorious little dude when practice finally ended right on time. He was tired. REALLY REALLY tired. And really happy. He knew he'd pulled it off. It was fun. He knew he was going to be okay. He had that look that a kid gets on their face when they are genuinely proud of themselves. They don't say anything. They don't need you to affirm it. It's enough all by itself. These moments have been few and far between the past few years. He can be so hard on himself. It was good to see him give himself credit for a job well done.

So we walked to the truck, climbed in, shut the doors . . .

And I decided maybe we should drive to the grocery store and buy the boy his first stick of deodorant. That was a hoot! Standing there in the grocery aisle pulling the lids off of all the manly deodorants and sniffing. He found one he liked. Not floral. Not strong. Hope it works and I also hope it doesn't poison his brain.

We talked and he laughed and he laughed that old Max laugh. That full deep laugh. And I was just blown away by how much I love this kid, by how fast he's growing, and how wonderfully young he still is. He was silly and yet appropriate. He grabbed a package of straws at the store saying, "Ben and Milo go nuts for these things." While I was working the self-checkout thing, he loaded the groceries into bags. I started picking up all the bags and he said, in a "don't be silly" tone, "I've got this Mom. Your hands are already full." And indeed they were, but that would never have occured to him before. We walked out to the truck and he climbed in and I got a look at the bottom of his new football shoes and his feet are so BIG!

You know, earlier in the evening after Chris finished musing over why he'd had so little football exposure as a kid Milo had come around looking for his football (which I'd retrieved after it was abandoned earlier in play). So Chris got up and began tossing the ball back and forth with his youngest child. He was patient, had realistic expectations, and knew how to coach a 3.5 year old to do things well. Milo had a wonderful time. It's no picnic being the firstborn. We're so well intentioned and so clueless.

I'm off to try to make gauge again on those soaker pants.

For Gaye as I am obviously too tired to focus on work for more than 90 seconds at a shot

I read this the other day and thought of you and your yarn. Seriously, send it to me. We'll get it washed up and then when you're here in October, we'll find just the perfect pattern to turn its potential into something warm and cozy (and practical for PA visits).

From At Knits End (still making me pee my pants in PA) by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Some knitters purchase yarn with a pattern and a plan. They buy with a specific goal, and most of it is used more or less immediately and as planned. Others talk about the yarn "telling them what it wants to be." They buy and hoard yarns, seemingly at random, until a yarn speaks to them about its destiny. There is sometimes a lag of 20 years or more between a yarn purchase and its realization as a knitted item, although there may be several periods of swatching and "false starts." This process cannot be rushed or failure is certain.

I'm definitely in the latter camp. But since I've decided to make more time for activities that make me feel less like a worker bee and more like The Queen, I've noticed my yarn is VERY, VERY talkative. Do you think it has been yelling at me all along? Oh wait and see what that blue cotton yarn that my grandmother bought for me 7 years ago wants to be. It wants to be VERY VERY cute and matching in a little boy's size 6, is what it wants to be.

A few days ago I splurged and bought a new knitting book. I wanted seven of them, but the twins had already Barnes and Nobled me into temporary bankruptcy with a run on board books, flap books, and an interesting hologram book with a focus on shapes, so I let myself pick just one while they charmed an elderly man who'd fathered seven children. I'd seen this one around, of course:


(that's clickable by the way)

and always brushed it off as too detail oriented. After all, as I believe I've confessed in the past, I've knitted a million items on DPNs but remained terrified of a simple garter stitch sweater. Now that I've overcome my phobia and produced a rather sweet baby outfit, (immediately returning to shawl and poncho making during the move), I'm very interested in trying all sorts of new things, but frilly edges still seemed a ways away. THEN I OPENED THE BOOK.

It's not a book about knitting on the edge! It's a book of pattern samples! I mean, it looks and acts like a book about edges, but many scream to be converted into an entire garment. I was hooked. I don't know what I'm going to DO with the book, but it clearly wanted to come home with me. I haven't used it AT ALL yet and still I am convinced that it belongs in your knitting book stash, too.

From Donna's Blog

First, her question of the day:

Have you become friends with anyone you met (first) on the internet?

Twice. The first time I met a gal in the twin cities from whom I'd bought diapers. She was just so darn nice and she had twins only a smidge older than my twins. I still think she's just one of the nicest people on the planet and it's a shame I didn't make more of an effort to stay in touch after we left MN.

The second was Joyce who is also just top quality human being and who makes me laugh a lot. She's smart and honest and doesn't put up with a lot of crud. Just don't change plans on either of us at the last minute ;)


Now her Friday questions
Appetizer
Name 3 people whom you admire for their intelligence.
Well, Einstein, my brother, and Jill's husband Doug. But I know a LOT of really smart people so those are just the first three who popped into my head. I've also known a lot of really smart people I don't admire at all and over time when it comes to hero worship I tend to look for people who have their ethics straight or who worked their whole lives at knocking off vice after vice and they are the ones I hang around and kind of try to figure out how to be like them.

Soup
What's the last food you tried that you really didn't care for.
I tried some new dish a week or so ago that we all kind of gagged on. I don't remember what it was though. We decided it was a texture thing I think.

Salad
If you could rename the street that you live on, what would you want it to be called?
Does Too Exist Court

Main Course
When was the last time you were genuinely surprised?
Monday night. My friend threw a Pampered Chef party. I went to support her and because my pancake pan was completely trashed. I make pancakes a few times a week. Regular frying pans make that chore take forever. But when I got there she gave me a card from my aunt gifting me with the pan and, like, a million other items that I just can't wait to use. I love my kitchen. I got all sniffly. Never saw it coming. Outrageously generous. Incredibly thoughtful.

Dessert
Share a household tip.
Real cherry cobbler beats "bisquick" cobbler any day and it's just as easy to make.

:::skootching over to more comfortable chair:::

I'm an hour ahead of myself tonight as I ran out of patience around 7:30. Max had gone over to his friend's house to play after dinner and the twins were rummaging around looking for trouble and feeling sorry for themselves since they couldn't go to Brian's house. So I offered to read to them. We tried the living room but Emily was adament that we could too throw her ball and read together at the same time, so we headed back to my room to read on the big kingsize bed. A dozen books later I was ready to konk out and the twins were still in a position to fight off sleep for another hour or two, so I kissed them and told them to go to bed and got up while I still could. They had to be put back to bed twice more in the next fifteen minutes, but then they stayed. I did a load of dishes, took the dogs out to do evening dog things, tidied the kitchen some more, and then called Max home. It's 10 of nine and all the minions are in bed. That has got to be a record. Still, I need to finish a work project tonight so that I can be caught up by early evening tomorrow. It's a big day and I want to go watch everything with a clear conscience. Max's last summer swim practice is tomorrow morning. Then tomorrow afternoon is Max's first football practice ever. Assuming he survives that with no structural or neurological damage, he'll go to his last summer swim meet straight from football practice. Crud, that reminds me. I have to send his health insurance company some more paperwork.

I love to knit. I hate to weave in the ends and I'm afraid to wash and block this shawl. But by golly it'll be in the mail on Friday or you can all toss cyber tomotoes at me.

And back to work :)