thirty

not a recipe, exactly:

and thus, i doctor isaac's ramen in a delicious manner, and prove myself to be a domestic genius.

twenty-nine

there is only one more day left in the month of november! and then it's december. i need to get in the holiday spirit:

baking things
getting a tree
cleaning things
listening to festive music
crossing things off my work list
and so forth.

twenty-eight

it is as gray as november should be, but strangely warm. we'll be sad to send mark's mom back home tomorrow!

twenty-seven

some elements of a happy life:

a good dog.

a nearby beach.

















 


a couple of sweet college girls.

























a banjo, and someone who knows how to play it. 

























the girl has headed back to school, lugging her books and banjo and a shoebox full of homemade scones and granola. the weekend went by too fast, but it was full of good food and great company, walks on the beach, cafes, late-night games, banjo concerts, angels in america, and doctor who.

twenty-six

leftovers, naps, my kids and their friends, baking scones for zoë to take back to school with her, angels in america, new boots from the sweetest mother-in-law ever, dog walks and a silver sky.

twenty-five

mulling over all that i have to be thankful for today. like birch trees, the ocean, a quiet walk around mackworth island.

fairy houses, a pet cemetery, the warm sun, and my friend mark by my side.

 























and my girl--beautiful and smiling--home for thanksgiving weekend with her sweet roommate flo.

twenty-four

happy day of family, friends, and a fabulous feast.

twenty-three

never fear, my boy cleaned off the table and the tofurkeys are in the fridge and there are cinnamon rolls and cornbread and pies a-baking and mark's mom has arrived and thanksgiving will proceed apace.

twenty-two

i would like to report in an extra-calm voice that when i returned from a nineteen hour trip to the grocery store with my seventy-five bags of food, this is what my (previously) clean dining room looked like:

that table there is the one on which i plan to serve thanksgiving dinner. yep.

also, when i was driving i saw this!*




















*calm down, i was at a stop light.

twenty-one

my birthday present from my bruddy arrived!

he gave me a subscription to quarterly, a service that sends you cool things in the mail periodically. my very first mailing arrived today, two little notebooks and two tattly temporary tattoos by marc johns: I LOVE THEM.

twenty

the latest music video from the team that brought you this and this. it is so much fun to watch and listen to, a belated birthday present to my girl (starring my girl, featuring her on voice and ukulele) from her pal.

nineteen

this little bean is nineteen years old today. i am wishing the happiest of happy birthdays to one of the smartest, quirkiest, bravest, most stubborn and beautiful people i've had the pleasure to know in my life. i can hardly believe my luck: i get to be her mom!

eighteen

three incidents from a dream:

1. i was eating tortilla chips out of a bag with a woman i know. out of the corner of my eye, i saw her take a bite out of a chip and then slip it into the pocket of her sweater.

2. on dream-npr i heard the statistic that in the next ten years, only two out of ten women will have babies. but those two will have, on average, nine babies each. later, at a party, a man with a german accent asked if anyone knew what the birth rate would be for the next decade.

3. i ate chocolate cake from a pan, spilling most of it on the floor.

seventeen

don't these cookies just look so tempting? don't you just love the name so much that you want to buy a dozen boxes and hand them out for christmas presents?


update: i had a couple of  ideas for names of food products.

wut now?
y not?

sixteen

oho, it's day sixteen. i have now, midway through this month, officially given up on nanowrimo. i know, i know--lame. but who chose november to be national novel writing month, anyway? there's way too much going on in november for it to be the ideal i-think-i'll-write-a-novel month. plus, there are only thirty days in it. at the very least, it should be a month with thirty-one days. like march. note, i am able to keep up with national blog posting month, which is much more my speed.

i am sewing, sewing, sewing, punctuated by occasional vocabulary-quiz-writing and the drinking of coffee and the making of vegetable pot pies and suchlike. the sewing machine seemed to be dying, and mark proved himself to be a fixer of sewing machines (i should not be surprised, considering what i've seen him do with a dishwasher and a furnace).

at night, i read furiously, so as to make a dent in that famous pile o' books. sometimes i leave the house, most often to go back to the library and pick up more books. sometimes i go to trader joe's (man behind me, last night at trader joe's: "i BEG your pardon for staring, but i want to eat dinner at YOUR house tonight." me: "oh..."  note: he was staring at my groceries, not at me).

often while i sew i watch things on hulu or netflix. i watched all the parks and recreation i could, and then i moved on to every movie made in the 1940s that is streaming on netflix. there was one called either the scar or the man who murdered himself or hollow triumph that was so ridiculous. it featured a man masquerading as another man who looked exactly like him except for a scar on his cheek. the man even had the identical german accent. which was especially odd, since the first man's brother did not have a german accent. i kept thinking, "wow, they made some really bad movies in the 1940s too."

fifteen

funny story. i was invited to a birthday party this weekend (an 11-11-11 party, to be precise), and i made fauxstess cupcakes. i carefully royal icinged a cursive letter P on each cupcake (for peter, the birthday boy) and put them in the fridge. when i removed them later, however, the cursive letter Ps no longer looked like Ps to me. they looked like penises.

note, above, my hasty attempt to camouflage my accidentally inappropriate cupcake art. i wished i had a three year old child to explain the random flowerish squiggles.

fourteen

(Unknown photographer, Portrait of three women, 19th century)



14 is my lucky number.
yesterday, on day 13, my sewing machine broke and my dog threw up all night.
i am looking forward to some excellent luck today!

thirteen

a few couple of my favorite things:


certain slants of light that take me by surprise.

























the soft nose of my canine friend, especially when i'm sad.

twelve

it wasn't this spectacular display, but it was my very own bayside murmuration* nonetheless. i got out of the car to take this picture and you should've heard the sound they were making!





*that is, if they were starlings. i actually have no idea, so let's just say that they were.

eleven

waiting for our parent-teacher-isaac conference at the learning shack last night:

 









































































i always enjoy them, because i enjoy being with him, and it's especially fun to hear him talk about what he's doing at school. and i pretty much love his teachers at the shack.

happy corduroy appreciation day to you. does that mean it's also national picket fence day? world folks-with-skinny-legs day? international hug-a-telephone-pole day? why, yes. yes, it does.

ten

minnow is worried. this pile of library books is not getting any smaller, partly because i mostly checked out 800-page novels, and partly because i apparently requested even more books than i originally thought, and as soon as i finish one, i get a notice that two more are ready at the library. and i keep picking them up and adding them to the pile.

nine

hey, if you are a fan of breaking bad you might want to listen to this insider podcast (but be warned, it's chock full of spoilers!).

also, did you know there is a contest to win a walk-on part on the show? weird.* and a four-day trip to alburquerque. no, really. also, i spelled albuquerque right on the first try. and yes, i entered.

this gets funnier every time i watch it. mostly because i have observed isaac do nearly this exact thing.

i have also been watching parks and recreation lately, usually while i sew many scarves for this year's close buy catalog order. gosh, i love amy poehler.

i thought about having this post be a list of nine complaints, but i could only come up with four (and two of them were driving-related, which is particularly boring to read about). the first had to do with comic sans. come on, everyone. educators, especially. comic sans is not "fun." let's have a little dignity. also? learn to love the BCC option when you're sending school-related emails to hundreds of people. oh, i though of another one! you don't write a "blog." you write a "blog post." or you "blog," verb, though i'm partial to "write."

enough complaints.




*because...can you imagine what that part might be? a dead and partially dismembered body? a car wash customer? a dominican laundry worker?

eight

"Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you." -- Hafiz

seven

i saw this yesterday at target: camouflaged among the bottles of mouthwash was this method brand refreshing body wash. mint flavor. which caused me to speculate thusly:

*organizing things by scent
*organizing things by color
*deliberate prank by a mutinous target employee
*deliberate prank by a jocular customer
*accidental placement by an overworked, underpaid, red polo shirt-wearing target employee

six

happy no more daylight savings time. i love falling back, don't you? what i love less is when it's dark at four p.m. although as i come to terms with impending winter, i will love that too, it's...cozy.

we drove down to cambridge yesterday so that isaac could attend project link and mark and i could walk around in the cold sunshine with mom and dad, eat pancakes and smoked tempeh bacon at clover, drink good coffee, give directions to russian tourists, observe dogs in sweaters, and sample the vegan ice cream and rosemary french fries at veggie galaxy.

oh weekend, you go by so quickly. and it's nearly the season for me to stop listening to the news on the radio and start listening to old-timey music. it's my personal precursor to christmas music--that, and old movies in black and white, those almost-christmas movies.

five

“I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center.”

- Margaret Atwood, from Variation on the Word Sleep

four

work.

wow, it's been a long week. not because of work, actually, just because there are weeks that feel like they last six months. oh, glorious hyperbole! next year for halloween i want to be that lady with the scissors up top. shoot, i found that image somewhere on tumblr, where i wasted many a minute looking at vintage pictures. i can't remember where i found it, but i think it's from an old movie.

there are long, soft scarves in my life, and cups of tea and chairs and many pens. mark got a foreign body stuck in his eye and had to have it removed with metal tweezers at the eye doctor. but it's friday.

three

i came across so many bloggy references to panelle yesterday--which i'd never heard of before--that it was fairly clear the gods were instructing me to make some. i followed this recipe for sandwiches with spinach and bleu cheese. the actual panelle are little fritters made from chickpea flour (somewhat unattractive photo below) that are crispy on the outside, with a layer of chewy inside that, and then creamy. perfect for a sandwich.

 

two

november is here, and i've decided to do this again, and also this. thus, a month of blog posts whether i've got anything to say or not. and also some frantic writing, in an attempt to make it all the way to 50,000 words this time. we shall see. there are a few other things that must be accomplished this month! note how i instinctively wrote that last sentence in the passive voice. hmmm.

i spent a few days with the girl in new york. the photos below don't reflect the realities of trudging through inches of cold, slushy snow-slop in my sneakers. and then, yes, the sun came out, and my sneakers dried. interesting fact: it snowed much more uptown than downtown.

rabbit rabbit

you can do it, little rabbit!




“a wind has blown the rain away and blown
the sky away and all the leaves away,
and the trees stand. I think i too have known
autumn too long."


-- e.e. cummings