Thursday, August 27, 2009

he said, she said

I think I'm going to lose this one but I have to put it out there anyway.

T and I just had a (VERY) minor disagreement about something. The gist:

When my originally slated time for leaving the house keeps moving earlier and earlier due to additional tasks I need to do while I'm out, I say that my time of departure is getting moved BACK. Because, hello, the numbers are going BACKWARD. Example: I was going to leave at FOUR, but now because I have to go to the post office and mail a package AND stop to deposit a check as well as stopping off at the library to pick up holds, I had better leave at THREE. Bigger numbers going clockwise = forward in time. Smaller numbers going counterclockwise = backward in time. Ergo, my time of departure has been pushed BACK by all the errands piling up on the other side of it.

He disagrees and says that if your time of departure is pushed back it means you're leaving later. Which, once he told me that, sounds more like what the world at large would say in that situation.

Which just goes to prove that the world at large is JUST AS WRONG as my husband is about this particular issue.

Saturday, August 22, 2009

misguided thanks

My husband is a very busy guy. He not only works forty hours a week (and commutes eight), he also shares the responsibility of ministry in our congregation, is an assistant Scoutmaster with all the weekly meetings and weekend trips that that position entails, has a Bible study in our home one evening a week, dedicates one evening a week to one-on-one time with each of our kids (auto body lessons with LT and air-rifle shooting lessons with C) and one morning a weekend to a meeting with his ministry partner, and has a list as long as his arm of projects he'd like to do "in his spare time". On top of all this, he is also the go-to guy for many of his friends who have automotive-related projects -- or disasters -- of their own and need his help and expertise. (If you're wondering how we manage to each remember what the other looks like, hey, that's easy, we have pictures.) It's this last bit - the helping friends - that is the origin of something that has always rubbed me the wrong way. At the end of an afternoon or a day working on a car with T, often his friends will turn to me and say, "Hey, thanks for letting him help me out."

Excuse me, what? He's a grown person. He's not my son. He's not my ward. He makes his own decisions. But it was only just now that the thought crystallized so fully that I had to sit down and type it out RIGHT NOW instead of doing one of the other gazillion things I'm supposed to be doing this weekend: Would a person ever think of thanking him for letting me out for the day? That would never fly; that would imply... ownership. Control. Right? But this happens to us all the time, and we're not the only ones, I'm sure. So, in our topsy-turvy sexist society, it's not only OK to mock husbands and dads as idiots on TV, it's not only OK to joke about keeping husbands on a leash, it's also fine to imply that wives are In Charge of whether their husbands have the day off to help a friend or not. Our cultural sensitivity correctly keeps us from making offhand comments or jokes that would imply that women are lesser beings or that bless our hearts, we just need a man to tell us what to do, but we haven't figured out yet as a society that saying the same thing with gender roles reversed is just as bad. Maybe someday.

OK, off my soapbox and back to my sewing machine, where I'm going to be plotting a date night... if I can remember the name of that handsome man who pops his head in the house every now and then for long enough to kiss me goodbye again.

Thursday, August 06, 2009

this turned into mostly a garden update

Twitter won't load and Facebook is a minefield of inscrutable "we're broken" errors. This is a sign, obviously. No, not a sign that I need to close the laptop and go do something, you ninny; it's a sign that I need to write a blog post instead. Sheesh. Do something?

I woke up this morning to delightfully chilly air, very rare in late summer, and the smell of dew on fields of dry grass, which is even rarer and made me think of autumn. We have a low-pressure system hovering over us today, and the weather is supposed to be beautifully uncharacteristic of August in the California foothills. For just this one day, our high is supposed to be IN THE SEVENTIES, and considering that last week our high was 107, I would say that yes, this makes the weather a bloggable topic.

Oh my goodness, that's the ugliest word I ever saw.

Fairtime is approaching and I have once again entered a bajillion things. I think I entered about ten photos and fifteen baked items and four preserved foods (the BLACKBERRIES this year, they are to DIE for) and a handful of knitted things, in addition to being the adult coordinator for C's 4-H club's feature booth. I have no idea what compelled me to sign up for that. It is so outside my comfort zone.

Blackberry jam, made from free blackberries.

the free blackberries. YUM OH MY GOSH.

Speaking of food that grows in the ground, and stuff, I haven't been a good garden blogger this year at all. Here is an update:

Tomatoes are doing REALLY REALLY WELL. I might actually be canning some soon. After an initial bout with blossom-end rot, we're getting LOTS of healthy, juicy, beautiful red tomatoes on the Sioux plants, which are definitely going to be my go-to tomato for the rest of my gardening life. The cherry tomatoes are also thriving, but the Illinois variety I tried because they were supposed to be prolific and early must not like our heat, I think. They're putting on a few tomatoes per bush but they're not very happy about it.

This is where I'd put a picture if I had a recent one but I don't, and if I went out to take one now I'd get all sidetracked and never finish this entry. So. Moving on.

Peppers are also doing well. I did pepperoncini again even though I swore I wouldn't, and this year I'm going to let them get completely ripe before I pick them. Pepperoncini I buy in the store (which I'll never do again because I have a lifetime supply in my pantry just from last year, and I'll have another lifetime supply after this year, I'm thinking, so I'll be set well into the afterlife) is yellow in the jars, so when my pepperoncini got yellow I thought they were ripe. Turns out, silly me, that this variety is ripe when it's red. So I'm going to allow myself to hope that it was this fact, and not my own inadequacy as a food preserver, that made last year's batch rather limp and squishy once they'd been processed, and I decided to give them another try this year. I'm also growing the same orange bell peppers I did last year -- we've been eating lots of those green but they haven't started changing color yet -- and some lovely long red peppers that are just starting to turn.

Squash is so-so. We had some early zucchino rampicante that was WONDERFUL and we LOVED it, and now it seems as though the new ones on those plants are getting... BLOSSOM-END ROT. I am not kidding. If it's not that it's some similar squash-ish thing. The ends just rot away. I'm so sad.

Unrotted zucchino rampicante. If we don't get any more healthy ones than these (and there are a few that look like they might make it), it will still have been worth it.

Regular zucchini is slow, but doing better now that I've decided to water it every day instead of every other day, and yellow squash is FINALLY going to give us something, if it doesn't shrivel up and die at the last moment like yellow squash sometimes tends to do early on.

My pumpkins and melons are very backward and behind and looking like they're not going to do anything, and that's mostly my fault, I think, because I planted them about three weeks later than I meant to because I was lazy about getting out there and getting all the weeds cut back.

Claire's stuff is doing wonderfully. We've eaten at least ten pounds of her potatoes -- from FOUR PLANTS; T has decided that potatoes will be our Survival Garden Staple for the rest of our natural lives -- and these aren't ordinary potatoes. She has two plants of blue potatoes, which are gorgeous and a conversation piece and oh by the way UNFATHOMABLY DELICIOUS. We are hoping they'll keep producing long enough that she can have a good fresh one to put in the fair.

She also has two plants of Russian fingerlings, which are yellow and hearty like Yukon Golds when you mash them, and also delicious in every other possible way you could ever conceive of cooking potatoes. Alas, no picture of those.

The ******* gophers ate all my beans. Grr. Next year: more raised beds.

Outside the garden, we have two apple trees. Last year they did nothing, and I assumed that they were useless like several of the other fruit trees that were here when we moved in, but I am so glad that T didn't listen to me and cut them down to make more garden space, because HOLY COW THE APPLES THIS YEAR. The trees are COVERED in lovely green apples whose cheeks are just starting to turn pink.

Free apples! I hope we can harvest them before the squirrels do. The deer have already kept the tree nicely trimmed up for us, and they come along to eat windfalls and stare longingly in at our garden, which makes me stare longingly at them thinking about nice tenderized chicken-fried venison steak with mashed blue potatoes and some rich brown gravy, and sliced tomatoes on the side.

I meant to tell you all about the roller skating and the school planning and the seven units I'm taking next semester which starts in ELEVEN DAYS OH MY GOSH but I can't now because Twitter is back up I have stuff to do outside. 'Bye!

Sunday, August 02, 2009

who I was on the way to being who I am

I have made a resolution regarding this blog, which has been nearly killed by Twitter and Facebook, or more specifically by my addiction to Twitter and Facebook. Much easier to dash out a 140-character snippet about something than take the time to write about it - besides, it's easier to hold people's interest for 140 characters than it is for a paragraph. Or five. Of rambling. About nothing.

Anyway. Resolution: When I have a thought that's too long for Twitter, instead of giving up, I will post it here. At least it will be SOMETHING, and it'll be good practice for me to start using full sentences again, right? I may have papers to write in school, and I don't want them to come back all marked up in red: "Look up the concept of 'indefinite articles' and get back to me," would probably figure heavily, for example.

So. Without further ado, the first in the TOO LONG FOR TWITTER series (I am totally going to have to make a category for that):

My friend Beck twittered (tweeted? twitted?) about finding one of her old diaries, full of embarrassing things like quote collections from when she was eighteen, and it reminded me of one of the many, many goofy things about my youthful self. I had this bedroom, see, like many teenage girls do, and I had stuff all over the walls like banana stickers given to me by boys, and birthday cards from friends, and dried-up upside-down roses ALSO given to me by boys, and pictures drawn by the children I babysat, and Save the Whales posters, and abstract crayon drawings done by me with peace signs hidden in them because I was a Deep Person with Important Ideals. These Important Ideals were further on display in a long strip of adding-machine tape (I am not joking) on which I had written Very Deep Thoughts in black Magic Marker, and which I'd then fastened to my walls just below my ceiling like a wallpaper border except I don't think I'd ever seen a wallpaper border at the age of sixteen. It had quotes like this:

"We are the music makers; we are the dreamers of dreams." Good quote. I like it. Not knowing any better, though, I attributed this one to Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder quotes it in the 1970 Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory); it wasn't until later that I found out that someone else had sorta said it first. I also had this sentence airbrushed fancifully onto a T-shirt at the fair once -- there, too, it may be noted, attributed loudly to Willy Wonka. And then I actually wore the shirt. To school. I was cool beyond your wildest imagination, is what I'm saying.

"Man was the pariah-dog, the moral leper... He was the muddier of crystal waters, the despoiler of forests, the murderer of the innocent, the challenger against God." DO YOU SEE HOW DEEP I WAS AND HOW MUCH I CARED. This was not long after I wrote a paper titled "People: The World's Worst Enemy" for my freshman English class.

I would go on but I have mercifully forgotten any further embarrassing quotations from that strip. There were many, many more. Hey, we didn't have Facebook in those days; we had to express our quippy selves somehow. (Apparently my book covers weren't a big enough canvas.)