This Is It ...

He got the news directly from the mouth of his guidance counselor. Then he got a very nice "welcome to Sarah Lawrence" phone call from the associate director of Admissions there.

That's all well and good. Great even. Totally psyched.

But I've been waiting for this hot little number to hold in my hot little hands.

Who doesn't love their very own fat envelope?

Christmas 2013

Happy Holidays! We celebrate Christmas at our house, and the tree is finally done.

So here's our tree, with our newest family member, Roodolph Nuryev, the roomba.
He's on sabbatical until all the decorations he can knock over
are put away for the year. So, if past history is any indication ... July.

Tom never understood why we needed to have garbage on our tree,
but this carved wooden apple core was one of my original ornaments. 
It's always on the tree every year. Don't mess with my apple core.

Souvenir from  Albuquerque, this picture doesn't do justice to this carved gourd.
Also, who else has a fruit-slice-garland on their tree? 
I'm the only one I know!

Humuhumunukunukuapapa'a (I know! I can't believe it's not in spellcheck, either!),
carried with great care from the famous Maui Aquarium debacle of '010 to Honolulu, to Boston. 

Another souvenir -- I see a trend here -- this one from Maine, where the deck hosted hummingbirds,
galore. Oh, and bears. But the life-sized hummingbird ornament fit better in my suitcase.

I wish I could remember when I made this nativity scene. I know I had it in
my office on Church Street, which would have been 1987 (Hi Maurice!).
Every time I put it out now I expect to come down stairs in the morning
and find the dog next to an angel in shreds on the floor.
So far so good.

Spider web. This ornament feels right at home in our house.
It has plenty of company.

And, of course, Scruffy.

Love. Enough said.

Just a Suggestion ...

... but here's a thought for all the teenage boys that follow me (Yes, there are a couple of you.):

When you're going to stay over at a friend's house and mom's asleep so you text your bro and ask him to let her know, tell him to leave the note on your bedroom door. When you leave the note where she has her tea and reads the paper and does her sudoku, she might not see it right away.

Because here's the thing: when you don't come home unexpectedly and your mom checks on you in the morning before she walks the dog and expects you to be there and you're not, she's going to do things like:

• Call your friends
• Call her sister even though it's only 4 a.m.  in San Antonio
• Walk around the house wringing her hands
• Call your friends' moms
• Think about calling the police
• Imagine the worst and maybe look up the phone numbers of all the local emergency rooms
• Clean the house so it's not too bad when CPS comes to take her surviving child
• Oh, and walk the dog so that she's not cleaning up dog poop on the living room floor while she's trying to arrange a search party

The one thing she is NOT going to do is drink her tea and read the paper.

We cool?

A Propos of Nothing in Particular

Agent 96

A propos of nothing in particular, I thought this was as good a time as any to share my theory of parenting:

Agent 98

God makes babies cute so we won't toss them out the car window as we're driving down the highway.

He makes teenagers big enough that we can't.

Not actually my teens. But I have as much chance of getting a picture
of them these days as I have of tossing these specimens out a window.

Harvest Time

It started innocently enough. "Let's do cukes," I said."I bet we could grow cucumbers in the garden." 

98 with today's harvest

 

If you can't read the scale, that's twenty-six pounds of cucumbers.
(Click photo to enlarge.)

 

 

I named him "Cukezilla."

I'm a little afraid of him.

Jammin' 2013

I did something during this last school year that I haven't had to do for years. Oh, no! I had to buy jam!  Always, every June (usually right around the Solstice but nowadays some weekday morning when it's not too hot, not too wet, not too buggy, and there's not too much traffic) we'd head north to Tewskbury to pick strawberries. Quarts upon quarts of strawberries. The pre-kid-days high was, if I recall correctly, 40 quarts. Of course "pre-kid-days" is code for "strawberry-margarita-days" so we were pretty invested in maximizing our take. Some swirled that same day in the multiple blenders (to keep the assembly line going) for the steady stream of thirsty visitors who somehow always rang the bell the afternoon after the morning spent strawberry picking. Some frozen whole for mid-winter strawberry margaritas, too. What seemed like a metric ton would be sorted, hulled, and simmered for jar upon jar of jam.

I am rather by nature unable to follow a recipe. A little tweek here, some nuts or white chocolate chips there, maybe a mix of grains instead of plain white flour for a loaf of multigrain sourdough bread. Look on any website, in any cookbook, and they all say the same thing: do not double a jam recipe, it will fail. Do not substitute ingredients, or your jam may not set. So I carefully pull out all the ingredients: the berries, the sugar, the pectin ... but I cannot stop my hand: berry jam with lime just sounds so much tastier than berry jam with lemon, don't you agree?

And every time I make jam I read and reread the instructions: 4 cups of berries: check; pectin: check; quarter cup of lemon lime juice: check; the last item on the list, sugar, always causes a double take. Every year it's the same thing: "No," I think to myself, "SEVEN cups? That can't be right." So I crosscheck other recipes and sure enough, the ratio of berry-to-sugar is right on target. Then too late I recall, "Oh, yeah, I remember reading that last year."

 

The scariest part of making jam the part that says, "Bring it to a full rolling boil that cannot be stirred down, over high heat." So you're telling me to allllllllllmost let it boil over, but for the love of all that's holy, don't actually let it boil over or you'll be cleaning scorched fruit syrup off your stovetop until next jam season.

But the end result, in addition to the sticky film on every horizontal surface in the kitchen and a wooden spoon dyed a lovely shade of pink, makes the risk all worthwhile. We're set for school lunches, hopefully, until 96 is -- gulp -- in college. Then he's on his own for lunch.

Mixed Berry Jam
Strawberry, Raspberry & Blueberry

What Kind of Children am I Raising?!

It was about 1200º F in Boston last Sunday. And it was Dorchester Day which I suppose is a big deal fun day if you live in Dorchester, but if you live in Medford and have to go to Milton it's not so much fun as, well, whatever the word is for something that makes what should be a 15-minute drive into an hour-long drive, it's that.

It had been a busy weekend, and by 7:00 p.m.Sunday we had all just about had it. The garden was turned, mulched and planted. Deck furniture was scrubbed. Firewood was moved. Empty propane tanks were lugged to BJs, filled and  lugged home. Dinner was made and served and cleaned up after. Even if there was no dessert.

Then at 7, I heard it for the first time this year -- the ice cream truck. Parked right in front of our neighbors' house. So I call to the boys - "Hey 96, 98! Come with me and we'll get something from the ice cream truck." Which, itself, is something I probably haven't said since about 2005.

96 hollers down in response, "Can't, mom, I'm studying."

98 hollers up from the cellar "No thanks, mom, I'm doing laundry."

It's the ice cream truck, for Pete's sake! What kind of children am I raising?!

OMG!

At the Junior Awards Ceremony at 96's school today ...

 ... which came with a brass and wood token and a very nice letter ...

 

Did I mention? OMG! OMG! OMG!

And without wishing to make this part sound like an also ran, 

he also received the Certificate of Commendation for excellence in Latin IV Ovid, 

which came with hoc libro .

Good day. Great year.

Ever the Romantic

Today's our anniversary. Ever the romantic, my proposal story goes something like this:

Me: Hmmmm, my lease is up in January.

Him: Well, maybe we should just get married and you move in here.

Me: Stutter …. Stammer … Headtilt … Cough (In my defense, I was paying $490 for an 1100 square foot rent-controlled apartment in Harvard Square.)

Him: So why don’t you go buy yourself a ring.  I’ll pay you back.

Sadly, we did not capture this moment on video.

He didn’t get off quite that easily, though. I made him come with me and put the ring on his own damn credit card. We picked out a very deep blue sapphire and set it with a small diamond on each side. I loved that ring and was heartbroken when it went missing a couple of years ago. One of the reasons I haven’t replaced my now-11-year-old minivan is because it’s conceivable (albeit unlikely) that the ring is somewhere hidden in the car: the last time I know I had it on I was en route to the pottery shop and realized I needed to take it off. I don’t know if I took it off in the car and left it there, or if I took it off at the pottery shop and it fell behind something, or if I didn’t take it off at all and it slipped off my finger into a discarded blob of clay. But I still hold out hope that I’ll find it wedged behind some bolt or stuck in a crevice in the car. So as much as I want this shiny new car, for the time being I’m sticking with my scratched up worn out old one with a shiny new transmission.

I never had that doves-and-trumpets fantasy wedding fantasy that some little girls have. In fact, for as long as I can remember, my “fantasy wedding” went something like this: I’d go into work on Monday morning and when everyone was talking about what they did that weekend, it'd come to my turn I’d drop an, “Oh, nothing much. I just got married, is all.” 

Okay, so we're both missing the romance gene. That in itself is a little romantic, don't you think?

I never had the white dress thing, either. Possibly before I'd even met Tom, I had been shopping at the old Loehmann's outlet in Burlington and found a really pretty mustard-yellow linen suit with eyelet embroidery  on the jacket and skirt. As soon as I laid eyes on it I knew I wanted to get married in it. I bought it there and then and it sat in the back of my closet for I-don't-know-how-long.

We planned to be married in the Council Chambers at Cambridge city hall. It’s a beautiful room and with its paneling, and jacquard and velvet, it's often the site chosen for special occasions. Mind you, Tom wanted to get married in front of the Mars meteorite at Harvard’s Natural History Museum, but I put the kaibosh on that (because whoever heard of getting married in front of a meteorite? That's crazy!)

 I.made arrangements (meaning, I filled out a form and paid a fee) to have my friend Jan authorized by the Governor to solemnize our marriage The authorization was for a particular person – Jan – to marry a particular couple – Tom and me – in a particular city – Cambridge – on a particular day – March 15 – and was voided if any one of the particulars changed.

Rena, one of the number of ex-girlfriends Tom stayed friends with after they broke up, was tickled to learn we were getting married at City Hall.“I want to come! You’ll be right around the corner from my house!” she proclaimed.  At first we said no, because it really was supposed to be a non-event, witnesses only, and we didn’t want other friends to learn she had been there and that they hadn’t been invited. We didn’t want any hurt feelings, and we were working with what in retrospect I realize was an obviously-overblown sense of other people's enthusiasm about our wedding.. We love Rena and of course we wanted her there. But we swore her to secrecy – she mustn't tell a soul that she had been included.

So we show up to city hall: Tom and I, Jan, and our miniature entourage, only to be informed by the Council chairperson that she only allows "real" Justices of the Peace to perform weddings inside the chambers. Indignant that charlatan solemnizers-for-a-day take business away from (and money out of the pockets of and food from the mouths of the children of) real JP’s, she explained this as if she was president of the JP union local.  It would have been funny if she hadn’t been serious. She wouldn't budge, and clearly we needed a Plan B. Fast.

The rest of the story was serendipity: We get to city hall to learn we can’t be married there. With the clock ticking down on Jan's authorization, Rena reminds us that her house is a short block away and she’d be honored to host our wedding at her house. So we traipse through a cold March drizzle (my big day’s big hair eventually even bigger than I had planned) to her home which, if she had planned to host a wedding that day, could not have been more appropriately appointed, right down to the flowers and wine.

I love that I’m the only person I know who got married in the home of her husband’s ex-girlfriend. I love that my husband was the kind of guy who had such lovely women in his life, and by extension, in mine. The only down side to getting married in Rena’s house: 15 years of, “Why can’t our house be tidy sometimes, like Rena’s? Remember that?” 

My Morning in Pictures

 I wondered to myself this morning, "Why should only my facebook friends have the pleasure of my obsession with this foolish snowmageddon when I can put my morning's pictures here and bore an wider audience?"  You're welcome.

Can it really be that I've had Zoet almost three years (Tom's been gone three years this week, as a matter of fact) and I've never had to dig a path for her to take care of business? I can now cross this off my bucket list.

Our morning routine today was anything but. This was the little path out the front door I had dug for her last night.

Okay.  So I opened the back door to this:

I use the word "open" loosely. Sweet baby Moses in a basket igloo. Then I remembered the french doors onto the deck.



















Like the good and responsible pet owner I am, I don't make my 15-pound, 8-inch-tall dog go out into the elements unaided, so I designed a little bathroom cave for her. But she's a smart little pistol and when I sent her out there she looked at me all "This is a setup right? No. Freaking. Way. When was the last time I didn't get yelled at for peeing on the deck?" Point taken.

Hands a'wringing, time was a'wasting. I've got this countdown clock that needs attention before, to put it delicately, Kaboom!

I go back to the back door, remove the storm windows and remove the screen and begin to dig out with one of the shovels I had wisely brought into the house before snowpocalypse began, and modeled a new little facility 12 inches outside my back door.

Crisis averted.

Now, obviously, I can't be won't be digging out of the house any time soon (although I do hear my overachiever neighbor's snowblower in the distance) so I can't show you a picture of the house. But see that yellow house on the left? Change that vinyl siding to natural cedar and you've pretty much got what my place looks like. That'll have to do for now.

We can all rest easy. The weatherman has clearly discovered the cure for New England's snowrectile dysfunction.

Two Words: YOLO

98 turned 15 today. With a trip to P.F. Chang's and a red velvet Assassin's Creed III cake (what other flavor Assassin's Creed cake were you expecting?) quite literally under our belts and on or breath, birthday kisses have been duly exchanged. Now we just wait for 9:17 pm when, if I'm not asleep (a 50/50 chance at the moment) he'll get a birthmoment kiss. I was so confused when the nurse told me 98 was born at 9:17 pm. I thought it was his weight, and my brain knew something was wrong with that, but just couldn't figure out what it was ... other than the whole NINE pounds? SEVENTEEN ounces? Who even new there was such a thing? (For the record, 98 was a much more thoughtful 7 pounds, 13 ounces. And bullet-shaped. Labor was about 14 minutes and one push.)




Of course I posted a baby pic or two on Facebook this morning (Don't. Tell. 98.) and found some souvenirs in the closet, to boot.

Washing machine's shrinking stuff again, Mom

Swag

Not That You Needed Any Proof

Not that you needed any proof I was thinking about you, but ...

Remember that time we went apple picking?

Remember that time you put the hinges on all the little panels under all the sinks in the house so we could use them to store small stuff? 96 was such a cute good helper. (FYI, I still store the vegetable peeler inside the kitchen sink panel. Tell that to the boys, though, who seem to think it belongs in the gadget drawer.)

And remember that time we were in San Francisco and went to Ghirardelli Square
for ice cream, and saw the Edy's ice cream truck in back of the factory?

And remember that time we were still in San Francisco?

Or remember that time we were in San Diego, on the other end of that same trip?
San Diego's on my short list of cities I might want to retire to. 98 has informed me that if I retire to
Hawaii I shouldn't expect to see him much because he doesn't like to fly over water.
I don't know if he thinks this counts as a  "pro" or  a"con," though.

I never saw you in shorts before the day we moved to Kwajalein;
I never saw you in shorts again after the day we moved back.

Seriously, remember that first winter we were back? We got back in mid-November, 2002.
We saw an icicle hanging from the highway that first day; we watched that icicle grow
in that same spot until the following April.

As if I'd forget. 
 January 17, 1953 - February 7, 2010