Whoville

Oh, I don’t mean to harp on Sarah Palin again. I’m sure she’s a charming woman and quite entertaining at a cocktail party, and she probably makes a mean salmon dip too. And okay, yeah, I’m profoundly hoping that in just a few short years we’ll be having a hard time recalling her name. “Oh, you know, whasserface, the Alaskan governor, ran with McCain? Susan somebody?”

But I do have to say I’m flat-out fascinated to see the debate this week. I honestly can’t imagine what it’s going to look like. I’m starting to think we should invite friends and come up with a drinking game or something to really round out the evening – you know, like the one involving How the Grinch Stole Christmas; every time they say “Hoo” (18 times during the theme song, sung 3 times in the movie, if I recall) you have to take a swig?

Let’s say a sip of your white wine (we’ve matured, after all, since those days) every time we hear “Senator Obama” or “experience” or … ?

Suggestions, anyone? What talking points will her script revolve around?

Oh, and am I the only one who’s had Bush’s 2004 debate with Kerry pop into mind, the one where suspicions ran amok that he was wired? Will Sarah Palin be unexpectedly on-point? Will she have an unusual bulge? I suppose hers could be in her cleavage, and no one would be the wiser.

Saturday morning post

I woke up this morning ridiculously early, as is my wont, even though I actually got to sleep last night at a decent hour; somewhat embarrassingly, I kept drifting off during the debate and finally conceded that bed was a smarter place to be.

I do find ennui setting in when the candidates insist on posturing and point-scoring instead of actually, oh, answering questions, but that’s the general stuff of debates and wasn’t really what made me nod off. No, that would be a long week of late bedtimes and early risings, topped off by the three adult beverages I consumed over the course of the evening at various locales. And maybe the 8-some miles I ran yesterday (do feel free to shout “yippee” here for me if you’re so moved; it’s the first 8-miler I’ve done in almost as many years).

And you know what? Nothing hurts this morning. Oh, sure, that little twinge in my right lower back that’s part of my reality — but no knee pain, and no achilles tendons creaking or groaning. Yep, I have to say the old bod held up right well to the 72 minute run I put it through yesterday. And that makes me so damn happy I might consider getting up at 4:30 a.m. every day.

Well, maybe not EVERY day. I’ll leave that to the triathletes.

Training log, stardate 8.2857142: 72 minutes = 8+ miles

Yes, YES!!

Well now. I can’t say as I generally find myself jumping up and down and shouting in agreement when I read something published in the National Review.

But that noise you just heard? Was me, shouting Yes! YES!! to this piece by Kathleen Parker, who early on swooned over the Palin pick but whose “cringe reflex” has been overworked in past weeks. She proposes that Palin step down, perhaps citing personal reasons — caring for her infant son, even.

And I say again, Yes! YES!!

Because John McCain, while hardly my dream partner for the presidential dancefloor, doesn’t scare me. But President Palin? Sweet heavens. Run for the hills.

ps

When my husband and most honest critic saw my J. Beever post and had what can only be described as a totally non-reaction reaction, it occurred to me that maybe I’d better point out that that photo? Is of a chalk drawing on the sidewalk, and not a 3-D object. You got that, right? No? Go back and look again.

J. Beever

I may have been living in a hole lately, or at least in a little microcosm of cultural deprivation, but a friend recently sent me an email with photos of some of Julian Beever’s works, which is the first I’d heard of him.

Imagine walking out for your latte or wheatgrass pick-me-up and seeing…

Meeting Madame Butterfly

If you love this kind of stuff the way I do, you can see more at his website. Or maybe soon on a street near you…

Update: When I showed this to the MPM and his reaction was thoroughly Umm, yeah… and??? It occurred to me that maybe I’d better point out that that photo up there? Is of a chalk drawing on the sidewalk, and not a 3-D object. You got that, right?

even worse at math than I thought

No, not me. Though I don’t get much of a chance to exercise it these days, I actually have some affinity for numbers. No, this deficit exists in the administration.

No, no, not the Administration; I’m not going there today, where numbers are concerned. Maybe soon, but not today. Today I’m pointing at the folks responsible for decisions down the block there at our neighborhood elementary school.

I wrote earlier about our skewed classroom crowding situation. Go ahead and click and get yourself on board if you need to. I’ll wait right here.

All right then. As it turns out, there were some more interesting facts lying about, that with my kindergarten-centric world I hadn’t yet heard when I posted earlier. And while I stand by my points regarding the kindergartners, this is perhaps a step even closer to egregious.

I’ve learned that the 2nd-grade class has 76 students (remember, K=71; 3rd = 49). Due to its size, this class has had four sections ever since kindergarten. But this year? This year it was condensed into three sections, to make room for the preschool program to be housed at the school.

Again, I’m going to revisit the numbers. 3rd grade: 49 students, in three sections of 16, 16, 17. 2nd grade: 76 students, in three sections of 24, 26, 26.

Now, for funsies, let’s play with those numbers here, oh, just because. Let’s say that the classroom for the preschool had been obtained by eliminating a section from the 3rd grade instead, giving them two sections of 24 and 25, and the 2nd grade would have its four sections with, let’s see now, 19 in each.

Total number of students subjected to crowding in the administration’s choice of structure: 76.
Total under another entirely feasible structure: 49.

This doesn’t seem like higher math. So I’d like to know what other factors were weighed, beyond the numbers.

And you know what? I’m going looking for an answer. Because I want to know if one of the factors was creating the optimal environment for those fewer 3rd-grade students to prepare for their standardized tests, at the expense of half again as many 2nd-graders. Because I believe that would be putting the scores ahead of the students in the worst of ways. Which to my mind is wrong with a big old capital W — or flip it over, M for Moronic.

And if this nagging suspicion of mine is correct, what then? Well, I’m not sure. But standing silently by in the face of injustice and/or stupidity isn’t something I’ve ever been much good at. We’ll have to see.

I bean jonesin’ bad

In the light of the apparent area-wide cannellini bean retailer boycott/recall campaign uncovered in my last post, I went on a blitz today and scored the last six cans to be found in the city — perhaps in the entire metro area; who knows?!? — at a Kroger across town. Yesssssssssss!

You’ll be relieved to know that the twitching and uncontrolled sweating ceased once these sweet babies were in my hands. Not that I have an addictive personality or anything. Oh, wait, yes I do.

Hopefully this will see me through a few Perfectly Simple White Bean Salad fixes, at least until I can score again:

just call it crack

auughhhhhhhh!

While this would be an appropriate title for a post on the current financial mess our country has woken up to in recent days, I’m using it in a more personal context here.

Last night I had the brilliant plan of going to the grocery store after the kids were in bed. Husband had to work on a presentation he’s giving tonight to a crowd of anywhere from “fifty to four hundred,” as he was told, so there wasn’t likely to be much interactive entertainment at the casa.

In standard effort at multi-tasking, I took my cellphone with me so that on my way to the store I could return a call that had come in while I was brushing various sets of teeth. (Little roads, little traffic, little call… I know, I know. It’s still not so clever. But neither is the pursuit of sanity in combination with motherhood.)

Anyway, it turned out the call was much more involved and lengthy, so instead of a three-minute drive-dial it turned into me sitting in the parking lot of Ukrops (a Virginia grocery chain) for, I dunno, 20-30 minutes? At which point I signed off, promising further thought and discussion at a time soon if not certain.

Head still in the cloud of conversation, I grabbed my two capacious canvas bags and headed in. Got my cart, stowed the bags under, scanned my tarjeta to print out the deal flyer and was perusing it when I realized I didn’t want to be at Ukrops.

Not as in I didn’t want to be grocery shopping, which when unencumbered I actually find relatively painless, but as in I wanted to be at Kroger instead, three blocks away. I’d known that all along, but my brain, engaged in that more-depthly conversation than I’d intended, steered the car to its more frequent haunt. Multi-tasking, meet semi-tasking. Crapola.

Okay. I ditch the cart and jog back out to the car, annoyed at myself of course, since I’ve been having a major jones for Perfectly Simple White Bean Salad, which of course requires cannellini beans, and since Ukrops hasn’t had them in stock for a month Kroger was my whole mindset for the evening.

Get to Kroger and realize that I’ve LEFT THE CANVAS BAGS stowed under the cart at Ukrops. Shitfuck. Since driving back to Ukrops to get the bags and then returning to Kroger to shop would clearly negate any environmental benefit of bringing my own bags, I resign myself to a paper/plastic choice and head in with my list.

This Kroger, as it turns out, is in the midst of a reset or reorganization or some sort of dramatic restructuring of its setup, which means of course untold time spent making multiple criss-crossings in search of my items. At least there aren’t any of my taxpayer dollars involved, for which I suppose I should be grateful.

I check off every item except, of course, cannellini beans, which are nowhere to be found in either the canned bean section or the Goya section, where they were last week. No cans, no shelf labels. I sigh, resigned. This is after all the store where I once found chickpeas not in with the beans but next to the canned hominy (a staple of some southern kitchens, though not mine; in the picture on the outside of the cans, they vaguely resemble one another). It isn’t exactly foodie heaven there, though cannellini beans are a ways from corn shoots or chanterelles. But I digress.

Fine, I think, I’ve got to go back to Ukrops to retrieve my bags anyway; surely maybe they’ll have restocked by now and I can get them there.

At Ukrops I rescue my bags, which are amazingly still underneath the cart, and I’m off to conquer the wild cannellini. I stop, I scan, I re-scan, I peer at shelf labels. 200 linear feet of canned bean product and there’s not a cannellini to be found. In fact, they’ve now even removed the label where last week there was empty shelf space.

Tell me please, has there been a nationwide cannellini bean recall and somehow in the midst of fiscal apocalypse, no one bothered to tell me?

she should be blogging, don’t you think?

My friend C, whom I wrote about previously here hasn’t yet succumbed to pressure and begun her own blog (okay, those three kids and her time-intensive from-scratch lifestyle might have a little something to do with that), but she wrote me an email recently titled “If I had a blog, this would be my post for today.”

I don’t really have the traffic that would push me to having guest posters here at fraught, but I’m just going to go ahead and make my own rules here. My blog, my rules, right? And maybe technically this isn’t even a guest post, since she’s not logged in and clicking “publish” herself, but I did ask if she’d consent to having it here, since I loved it so.

Here it is.  Enjoy!

This morning at 5 a.m., I reached into the vegetable drawer and pulled out a clove of garlic. While I am squatting there, in the kitchen, before coffee or any sort of clarity, an earwig scurries out of my garlic, hits the floor and scampers away. I have three little kids asleep. I scream anyway.

Then I sigh. This is not my first gross-out experience with my increasingly environmental life. There was the time I was chopping mushrooms from our local Farmer’s Market. They were on the cutting board, ready to be sauteed, when a small person diverted my attention. I came back to cooking, oh, I don’t know, 15 minutes later. The board was crawling with tiny maggot-looking worms. These came from my mushrooms?!?

I did a big body shiver and threw the whole thing in the trash. And then recently, again I spied speck-like wormy insects rolling about on the counter. How did they get there? From the nearby compost bin? From the garden peppers I had earlier diced? From the blueberries we picked over the weekend? Some things it’s better not to know.

But I do wonder: am I giving up chemicals just to replace them with bugs? And which is actually better for me?

It seems that going green can actually make you feel a little green — around the gills. Like those ants I vacuum up because I don’t want to spray pesticide where I sleep and eat and my kids play. Witnessing hundreds of them, marching unrelentingly toward the crumbs that reside on my floors, makes me feel a little sick to my stomach.

In these moments, the ant-maggot-earwig occasions, I try to channel my inner Annie Dillard:

“I allow spiders the run of the house. I figure that any predator that hopes to make a living on whatever smaller creatures might blunder into a four-inch square bit of space in the corner of the bathroom where the tub meets the floor, needs every bit of my support….

“Inside the house the spiders have only given me one mild surprise. I washed some dishes and set them to dry over a plastic drainer. Then I wanted a cup of coffee, so I picked from the drainer my mug, which was still warm from the hot rinse water, and across the rim of the mug, strand after strand, was a spider web.” – Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

And really, what fun is life without those surprises? Maybe tomorrow I’ll find a cricket in my carrots.

race report

By popular demand, here’s the scoop from the SoRo Moms team effort at the triathlon on Saturday (1500m swim, 40k bike, 10k run).

Good: I slept reasonably well, waking only slightly more often than I ordinarily do.
Bad: Real triathletes get up at 4:30 day after day. In MY life, 5:45 is early.

Good: We knew we were going the right way because the school bus full of volunteers was right in front of us at the first turn.
Bad: The volunteer bus was right in front of us… from the first turn to the last.

Good: We got there early enough not to be rushed.
Bad: Waiting around that long made me think about how early 5:45 was.

Good: Our swimmer’s time totally rocked!
Bad: Pressure on me.

Good: I rode a negative split (nb: second half was faster than first).
Bad: I didn’t push it nearly enough in the early miles.

Good: Only one woman passed me.
Bad: I know her, and was faster than she once in the past. Ouch. And she was doing the whole race solo. Double ouch. And she’s a year older than I. Triple ouch. And she has FIVE kids. Quintuple ouch.

Good: I passed her back.
Bad: …when she dropped her chain and had to stop on the side of the road.

Good: I felt strong at the finish.
Bad: Dismount station was at the TOP of a hill, requiring a “run” downhill in slippy bike cleats into the transition area.

Good: Seeing my teamies cheering as I came into the transition!!
Bad: Realizing I couldn’t have run 6.2 miles at that point had there been large hungry carnivores chasing me.

Good: Watching our runner come in off the really challenging run course with a terrific time and a huge smile!
Bad: Fat Glaring Man yelling unhelpfully and then chastising us far longer than warranted for obstructing the late-pack runner coming out of the transition. Except we weren’t, unless you count two women across 8 feet of pavement a serious obstruction to someone 20 feet away moving at less than lightning speed. “Not Cool!” right back atcha, FGM. Next time try yelling something instructive and useful. Like, maybe, I dunno, “Please move onto the grass”??

Good: Finishing 15th of 34 teams, including the hardbody all-male collegiate ones. Rock ON SoRo Moms!!
Bad: What’s bad about that?

Good: Having a great day and a ton of fun with my team.
Bad: Not being out there doing it solo… sigh.

Reality: Other things are front and center in my life these days. And that’s all right. And good.

front & center

perfectly simple white bean salad

I meant to post this recipe last week when I made it, but other things got ahead of it in my brain and there you are.  Often I think that inspiration of the moment might lead me further down the road to perfection where a dish is concerned, or at least amuse a bit.  This one, however… well, I can’t think of anything that would improve it, so I make it the same way every time.  Oh, and it’s so freekin’ easy. You’re gonna love it.

Perfectly Simple White Bean Salad

1/4 c olive oil, sacrificial quality
2 largish cloves garlic, chopped fine
1 3″ sprig rosemary
2 cans of cannellini beans
2-3 tomatoes, chopped in bite pieces
1/2 C basil, chopped up well
1 tsp kosher salt
1/2 tsp black pepper

heat garlic and rosemary in the olive oil in a small saucepan over medium heat. This will infuse not only the olive oil but your entire kitchen with a most appetizing smell, useful for making people think dinner is well underway even if you’ve only just begun.

Don’t turn the heat too high, but allow it to simmer there, with little bubbles rising, for about 7 minutes.

While that’s doing its thing, open the cans and chop the tomatoes. Turn off the heat to the oil if you’re a slow chopper or you had trouble with the can opener; it’s fine to let it sit there past 7 minutes while you finish up.

Toss the beans and the tomatoes together in a happy way.

Remove the rosemary sprig and pour the oil over that happiness. The garlic will mostly stay in the pan, so if you love it you can scrape all the chopped bits out into the salad and enjoy. Or not.

You know it was only about one generation ago that garlic was considered low-class, and an odor of it about your person a huge social faux pas? Hard to fathom, but my parents are both in agreement on that fact, which makes it something of an anomaly right there.

Bon appetit!

just a little nervy

Way back before I had kids, heck, before I had anything close to a stable relationship, I did what a lot of people with extra free time and no real talent in any one sport do: I dabbled in triathlons. I was, and remain to this day, an ugly swimmer — people who are at home in the water wince at my stroke — but I always fell happily some short of drowning. I was a reasonably strong cyclist, and a decent runner.

My last triathlon is over a decade past; my last significant time in the pool, yep, right around that long ago. I no longer have any foot speed to speak of, and my interest in devoting time to the training necessary to race hovers right around, oh say negligible, even if I could somehow create the 30-hour day I’d need to fit that kind of effort into my life. But as it’s turned out, I have a number of friends who are involved in the sport, and when they talk about races I always get a little wistful. It’s being part of the energy of the event that I miss.

I’m firmly in touch with reality and know that a solo triathlon is not in the cards for me anytime this decade. But a month or two ago I came up with the brilliant idea of doing a RELAY TEAM, something I have to admit I was more than a wee bit scornful of back in the day but now seems like the cleverest notion ever. Pick your strong event and then be done! All the fun and none of the stress!

See, I have enough of a competitive nature that a race was always a major adrenaline episode. Sleep the night before was a haphazard and fleeting affair, and I have distinct memory of standing in the water, waiting for the gun and watching the numbers on my heartrate monitor climb well into triple digits. Standing still. Sure, I was an adrenaline junkie in my thirties, but fact is I got me enough going on in my life that I just don’t seem to crave that kind of edge the way I used to.

Enter the relay. First, there’s no swim to develop survival anxiety over, and second, there’s no pressure, right? I put together this all-women’s team specifically for the purpose of FUN. I didn’t cherry-pick one of the area’s top female swimmers, nor did I tap my friend who can crank out 6.2 consecutive 6:30ish miles, each of which would have put me squarely in the role of potential Baton-Dropper/Weak Link/Lame Leg, and thus create something for me to be nervous about.

Nope, I found two other moms-of-preschoolers who are fit and excited and can handle the distance and took pains to assure me that they “aren’t fast.” Ahhh, yes. That, friends, is the lack of performance pressure I was looking for. Three neighborhood moms. We had a little pep rally on Wednesday, complete with wine, and I left confident that I’d managed to put together the funnest team around. This’ll be a blast: a beautiful day, a solid workout, cool women for company.

Packet pickup, where you get your T-shirt and your race number for the race tomorrow, was today at the local running store. I breezed in there and chatted with a few people and picked up my packet. But funny thing? As soon as I looked at my race number, I could feel my heart do a little bump, and my gut do a little tweak… hmmmm. An all-too-familiar feeling. Race nerves, get thee back!! This is about fun. Really.

I’m just hoping I sleep well tonight. And I’m leaving the heartrate monitor at home. Go, Team SoRo Moms!

fire & rain

I had a conversation last night that reminded me some clarification might be useful. I wrote a post a while back that made passing reference to my struggle with addictive tendencies.

It’s like this. I am wired such that if there is something that brings me pleasure in the moment, from cookies to email and much of the spectrum in between, I am then driven: I want need want more. A little really doesn’t do the trick. One cookie? Please. A single email? Not hardly.

I am a creature of excess. Thankfully for my sanity and overall health, not to mention my role as a functioning member of society, I don’t have much of a taste for intoxicants; on the whole I don’t find being out of control pleasurable.

So at times my pursuit of the stuff of pleasure in my life edges toward uncontrolled, and thus does not bring me happiness. Wisdom lies here: “Do not mistake pleasure for happiness. They are a different breed of dogs.”

Thank god for The Google, so I can properly attribute that to Josh Billings, whom I see also is attributed “About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.”

Two others that put me in danger of aspirating my lunch, reading as I ate:
* Flattery is like cologne water, to be smelt of, not swallowed.

* It is much easier to repent of sins that we have committed than to repent of those we intend to commit.

And I’ll leave you here, with the taste of great writing and original thinking in your mouth, rather than anything further I might have said re: me.

Besides, I have to go check my email.

overheard

I live in the south. Not the deep south, and in truth I was some surprised when I moved here at just how Southern it is, given that if you look at the map, well, we’re only like one state south of Pennsylvania. But the accents are, at times, thicker’n smoke in a pool-hall. And the attitudes are, well, Southern. This is Tobacco Belt, and Bible Belt, and generally if you lose sight of that it won’t be long before you’re jerked back to reality.

The contractors hired by my next-door neighbors for their major addition (ARGHHHHHHH!) arrived yesterday. I was, and am, generally in a swivet about that whole undertaking for a variety of reasons, some more complex and some as simple as the fact that I’m facing many months of lots of noise and commotion and redneck contractor types wandering about, all not nearly far enough from my kitchen window.

I was cleaning up the chaos of school-morning departure when something in the seriously accented conversation I couldn’t quite hear made my ears focus and pivot toward the window like a satellite dish, and I have to confess that my immediate thought was, If these yay-hoos are telling racist jokes I am going to be one pissed-off person (being well more than halfway there to begin with), and I am not going to keep it to myself.

Instead, what I heard was, “But O-baya-muh, he done messed up. Said ‘at raht ‘air on the TEEvee. Lipstick on a peeg.”

Then, “Naw, that ‘uz somethin Muh-Kain sayd first. They just put it bad on O-baya-muh.”

Well, color me undone. I don’t know which one uttered the correction, the one with the camouflage hunting cap and NASCAR shirt far from covering his capacious gut, or the one a mite younger and slimmer with tattoos up both calves and the cigarette dangling. Matters not. We’ve got us an engaged electorate, by gum. Would they walk two days to cast their vote? I can’t say. But I bet they just might drive their pickumup down to the local pollin’ station.

Dear Innisbrook, it’s 2008

Sorry for the crappy photo but okay now already. This is the envelope that came home, on the fifth day of school, filled with all the information I need to pimp my kid (thanks Kate) for Innisbrook’s “Premium Products for Fundraising,” urging her/me to push wrapping paper and associated unnecessities of life on neighbors friends and rellies.

Isn’t that sweet? All perky and gung-ho on saving the planet, enthusiatically in step with THE hot topic for 2008. And then looky there, what’s that, like 1958? in plain broad view. You’ve gotta wonder, how many folks did that little gem of antiquity get by over there at Innisbrook?

Me, I’d studiously ignored the whole packet. It was the MPM who brought it to my attention, with a snort. Love that man.