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Saturday, April 30, 2005

April reads

I kept thinking I'd finish more books this month, but I've been in less of a reading mood lately than I usually am. It must be the crocheting. Anyway, here are my measly four (completed) books for April:

1. Anne of Avonlea -- L.M. Montgomery -- 2
   
   • This has always been my least favorite of all the Anne books; I like it even less than the really episodic ones later in the series which were written years after she finished the rest of them. This one has some of the most annoying characterization of any book I've ever even remotely liked -- I always just read it because I feel like I have to, before I can move on to the rest of the series.
     
   
   


2. Sense and Sensibility -- Jane Austen -- 5
   
   • What can one say? It's Austen for crying out loud. (Every time I read this, my love for Colonel Brandon and for Elinor increases, and my hatred for Robert Ferrars and the Steele sisters increases even more.)
     
   
   


3. Pride and Prejudice -- Jane Austen -- 5
   
   • Again with the 'what can one say'. In fact I'm not even going to try. Just writing the title makes me want to dive into this one again.
     
   
   


4. Anne of the Island -- L.M. Montgomery -- 3
   
   • Usually I like this one pretty well but it just fell really flat for me this time. Maybe because it pales in contrast with P&P? I mean, anything would. Or maybe because the older I get, the more distance I feel from the lighthearted college life depicted in this book. I've "grown up" with Anne Shirley -- when I discovered her books I was the same age as Anne when she arrived at Green Gables, and I've read them over and over through the years, getting older (necessarily) as I went, passing up Anne as a teenager and then Anne as a college student and then Anne as a working woman and then Anne as a young wife and new mother, until now I'm more in a Rainbow Valley sort of stage. And that's kind of depressing -- because Rainbow Valley is where Anne pretty much completely disappears.

     Oh, wait a minute. This was a review for Anne of the Island, wasn't it. Sigh. Um, OK. Less Philippa next time please, Maud.
     

pardon our dust

Well, thanks to the fact that my ISP was a little miffed at all the extra space I was taking up on their server (outdated people think 20MB is enough for a website! sheesh! what do they think this is, 1998?) and started charging me $10 extra per month because of it, I have spent the bulk of this afternoon setting up shop at LivingDot. People, LivingDot ROCKS, and I'm not just saying that because they imported all my old posts from Blogger FOR FREE and everything they do is SO LIGHTNING-FAST and they are so helpful and friendly. Well, or maybe I am. Anyway. I heart LivingDot so far, even though I keep accidentally typing LivingDog and having to fix it.

What I don't heart is the way Internet Explorer, unlike *the-cough-cough-far-superior-cough* Firefox, can take a stray quotation mark in your style sheet and turn it into an hour of hair-pulling, mouth-breathing, headache-inducing stress. THANK YOU IE. Cause I was, you know, a little cocky and relaxed and overconfident there for a while.

Anyway. I am still working out a few bits and pieces here and there -- like, for instance, I need to get links and little introductory pictures put up in the sidebar, and a link to the photo blog, which has, by the way, also moved. That's particularly fun because this server is case-sensitive and my old one wasn't, so if I'm calling up clover.jpg I had darn well better have a file called clover.jpg and not, heaven forbid, clover.JPG on hand for your handy dandy little browser to find, or you'll just see a little white box with a red x in it, and there's nothing artistic about that at ALL.

Friday, April 29, 2005

oh dear me... I really did it

DO YOU SEE THE DOMAIN AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE.

I'm sorry, just had to FREAK OUT a little bit about that.

Thursday, April 28, 2005

in which Rachel gets political

I usually don't. But the very idea that people are upset about this has me scratching my head and going, "wha..?" in a very ANGRY sort of way. I mean, come on, there shouldn't even have to be such a law in the first place. For crying out loud, if someone is going to provide my child with a candy bar, let alone an invasive and hazardous medical procedure which ends the life of my unborn grandchild, I want to be involved in the decision. They aren't "the village's" children and never will be.

Honestly, it's refreshing to me, after having to stand by and futilely watch things roar downhill for nearly the entire duration of the 90's, to have some (a few) things go the way common sense would dictate in the past five years.

[/rant]
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Wednesday, April 27, 2005

out of practice

I've had a lot of little thoughts buzzing around in my head, but I'm having a hard time writing about them. So here are a few little tidbits, none of which is worthy of anywhere near an entire journal entry on its own.

• I'm feeling SO MUCH BETTER. Seriously, yesterday was, like, the turnaround day for me. I was able to take not one but TWO (very short) walks yesterday; I am not up to my normal levels of activity yet, but I'm acting a lot less like an invalid and I'm not suffering for it like I did even on Monday when I decided to just live normally. I'm glad T has stayed home, because I am not supposed to so much as lift a gallon of milk, and he's handy for keeping me from OVER-doing it (plus, hey, we've blown our entire vacation budget for the summer on this surgery, so T being at home for these three weeks is pretty much all we're going to get; might as well enjoy it, right?). But he doesn't have to be constantly at my beck and call now, which I think is probably a good thing. And that's hopefully the last time I'll write ANYTHING in this journal about this whole recuperation thing -- I know everyone must be bored with it by now.
  
  
• LT has decided to spend all of his money (that's $110, $50 of which he just got for his birthday) on a Father's Day present for T. He's actually been planning this for quite some time. I would say "there's not a selfish bone in his body" but that's not QUITE true. But there are certainly fewer selfish bones than there were in my body when I was nine.
  
  
• Also about LT: doesn't this look... vaguely disturbing? Or at least decidedly uncomfortable? He was just lying like that, all ho-hum, writing in his journal during school this morning. (I remember being a kid and sitting on my bottom with my knees splayed out to the side like an M and hearing similar comments from adults about that. I guess kids are just made of rubber.)
  

• I have a whole post about Hosea 4 written but I set it aside until I can read it with some objectivity because right now I think it seems really scattered and nearly pointless.
  
  
• I haven't done nearly as much reading this month as I had thought I would. I've only read 4 books. I can't even remember finishing anything before I went in for surgery. And everything I've been reading has been rereads, except for one book which I'm not sure I'm going to finish called Theodora's Diary. It's supposed to be a kind of Christian Bridget Jones. Except that it relies a wee bit too heavily on the kind of bland humor that gets passed around via email -- you know, the whole funny-mistakes-in-church-bulletins stuff -- and on caricatures of various Christian fringe-ish sorts of groups. I think the author (and publisher) figured she had a captive audience, consisting of all these Christian women whose consciences won't let them really get into the more vulgar humor on the market today -- and hey, she's British, so that's a plus, right? All I can say about this book is: YAWN. The four books I've finished are two Austens (S&S and P&P; I'm on MP now) and two L.M. Montgomerys (Anne of the Island and Anne of Avonlea. Neither of those last two is doing anything for me this time around either, which is sad. Must be something wrong with me.)
  

• Um, I think that's finally all. Cripes, SHUT UP, Rachel.

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Saturday, April 23, 2005

my husband. And his friends' baby.

Here, just from yesterday, is a brief partial list of reasons I'd be totally jealous if anyone else was married to my husband:

• He willingly went and bought me, um, girlie stuff at the drugstore.
  
• He made breakfast and lunch, and dished up the food that people brought for dinner, and he did the dishes, as he has every day since I had surgery last week.
  
• HE MADE ME SIT DOWN AND READ JANE AUSTEN. Do I even have to continue?
  
• He was outside at twilight having a strategy-and-sneaking sort of war with the kids and LT's friend, who was over to spend the night for LT's birthday. He was on C's team.
  
• He spent the morning fixing his grandmother's brakes (for free, of course) and just smiled when she was impatient with him about it.
  
• He has extremely sexy arms.
  
• He cleaned the guest apartment because his friends were coming to visit today.
  
• When I went to bed, he stripped the blankets off and then made the bed while I lay in it, which -- especially the cool sheet floating down -- is just the most comfortable thing ever. In a comfort-food sort of way.
  

Speaking of T's friends -- they are the ones with the miracle baby about whom I wrote in my old journal. And here's Little Miss Miracle herself, in all her little babyish glory:

This is the first time The Nikon has been set loose on a baby. It is having a hard time controlling itself, let me just put it that way.

Thursday, April 21, 2005

that was then...

and this is now...

Happy ninth birthday to the first person to ever make me a mother. *snif*

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

grab for Grover, honey

I have a stuffed Grover. People think it's the kids' Grover, but it's mine (as are, ahem, ALL of the stuffed ducks in our house, but that's another story). T bought Grover for me when I had Natalie; I had always been a Grover fan and had been coveting this particular cheerful blue Grover at our drugstore for quite some time, so when I needed something cuddly to apply counterpressure to my incision (somehow this helps. and pillows = too bulky and quite impersonal, really, don't you think?), and my baby was miles away in a different hospital from me, he thought Grover would be a nice touch. And he was. Grover came along with C was born, as well, and he has been invaluable during these last few weird days of lounging around in soft-waisted pants all day while people get stuff and do things for me. Especially this morning.

See, in case you've never had abdominal surgery, here's a little tidbit of information: Laughing, really letting loose and belly laughing -- it hurts (as do coughing, sneezing, standing up, sitting down, um, breathing deep -- but I digress). So this morning, when T came in and told me to grab Grover before he brought C in, I knew something was up (after all, she HAD been awfully quiet for about a quarter of an hour...). He had advised me wisely, let's just put it that way.

This is what happens when C is left alone with a piece of blue sidewalk chalk in front of the bathroom mirror. Isn't she lovely?
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Monday, April 18, 2005

this is what being laid-up gets me

I guess all I need to get a piecework project actually put together (my least favorite part; has taken literally years on this one) is major surgery. Who knew? And what will I have them take out next? ;)

Saturday, April 16, 2005

Thank you

thank you for all your nice thoughts and prayers about my surgery. I'm home, about to take a nap, but I wanted to post about how wonderful my family is. I came home to a huge WELCOME HOME MOMMY banner across the front of the porch (pictures later), a sparkling clean house, with THE LIVING ROOM REARRANGED (have I mentioned how much I love rearranging furniture?) so as to allow me access to books, light, pens, paper, the computer, the remotes and a view of the TV (meaning as soon as I wake up from my nap I'm starting a Jane Austen marathon), all from my recliner. Everyone is being so nice to me. I am in some pain, not as bad as after the c-sections I don't think. Thursday was awful, Friday was bearable, and today is fantastic by comparison with the other two, although I still have that feeling like I will never again feel normal. Will be glad to prove that wrong SOON. :)

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

the best-laid plans...

Well, here's a list of things I meant to do before I went into the hospital:

1. Get fully caught up on laundry.
   
2. Make the house spotless.
   
3. Find a picture of the kids together to take with me. (one of the few evils of digital photos is that they're seriously less portable, unless you print them, which we can't since our printer hates us.)
   
4. Make a new journal template.

5. Write at least one journal post that wasn't full of whining, so that newcomers to my blog wouldn't run screaming the other way at the first sentence written by a person who gives Cousin Gladys in The Blue Castle a run for her money in the whining department. (Read This Now. This Means You.)
   
6. Go to the library and get some light-but-not-hilarious (because I know from experience that laughing after abdominal surgery is a huge no-no) books to take with me in addition to the stack I've already got going.
   
7. Wash my bathrobe. (this takes a load almost by itself. It's huge and blue and terrycloth.)
   

Now ask me how many of these things I got done. Go ahead, ask.

Maybe the BIG FAT ZERO you just heard has to do with the fact that I spent Monday in Yosemite, Tuesday in the valley doing pre-op stuff, and today working my hiney off (ha! I wish) helping to fell about 20 trees, and pulling brush, and stacking logs. T's dad (the realtor) had a client who wanted some property brushed and cleared a bit before he would agree to buy it, so T's dad hired us to do it. Today was the only day that my dad, T, and I could all work on it. LT and C helped also. I AM SO SORE OH MY GOSH SO SORE AND I CAN'T TAKE ADVIL. At least I'll have morphine tomorrow. That should knock out some muscle soreness pretty effectively, wouldn't you think?

Anyway. Ahem. This was supposed to be a NON-whiny post, wasn't it. Whoops.

Sunday, April 10, 2005

bye-bye, Snickers (and Special Dark and big bowls of Rocky Road and...)

T has hypoglycemia, specifically reactive hypoglycemia, or if you want to get really technical, he has "nonhypoglycemic hypoglycemia", since when he goes in for a 3-hour glucose screen, even though he's very nearly comatose about fifteen minutes after the glucose hits his system and he stays that way for the entire three hours, nothing shows up in his bloodwork. For quite some time, maybe two or three years, he's noticed that if he eats sweets, especially on an empty stomach, he gets a) very tired, sometimes to the point of literally HAVING to go to sleep b) a thudding headache in his temples and c) extremely irritable. Nowadays if he even eats, say, not-sugared but not-whole-grain breakfast cereal, he is in bad shape. Yesterday he had cake with lunch and spent the afternoon unconscious on the couch, and the rest of the weekend was not a whole heck of a lot better for him. When all this mess surrounding my medical issues is all cleared up, he's going to see a new doctor; meanwhile, since his symptoms match reactive hypoglycemia exactly, we're going to assume this is what he has and act accordingly, and see if all symptoms clear up.

Which, frankly, is not going to be a whole lot of fun.

Well, there is that aspect that's kind of fun, wherein I get to be all methodical and make lists of possible foods to eat and create SIX MEALS A DAY from them. But let's face it, a man who can ordinarily eat nearly an entire single batch of waffles in one sitting is not going to like having one-inch cubes of cheese become a regular part of his diet. My favorite teenaged-boys-eating-horror-story is: when T was in high school and then in the Navy, he would frequently buy a pound of sharp cheddar cheese and a quart of chocolate milk, and that was a meal. Or he and a friend would go buy a dozen donuts. Each. For breakfast. He doesn't do that anymore, of course, but still, it's a big step from where he is to where he'll be from now on: looking at a dinner plate with, for example, two six-inch whole-wheat tortillas holding a total of two ounces of meat and some vegetables. But hey, lettuce is a free food! As is celery! So he should be really happy about those, at least. I mean, come on. Lettuce and celery! Who needs cheesecake when you have those?

I'll sign off with two pictures. This evening at almost exactly five o'clock the whole family started in at the same time with the "I'm HUNGRY" thing, looking at me as if they expected me to pull a roast turkey and all the trimmings out of thin air or some such thing. I told them I'd make dinner but first I asked them if, just to humor me, they could do an actual baby-birds-in-the-nest imitation, to send me into a kitchen with a smile. And they did.

And then here's a picture of me, coloring with C. Did you know that Crayola manufactures a crayon called "purple mountain's majesty"? Anyone who can tell me why that made me send a tersely-worded email to Crayola gets a free signed first edition of my first book: The Essential Guide to Grammar Snobbery.

That's just the working title, of course.

Saturday, April 09, 2005

big decisions

I'm going to the hospital on Thursday to have surgery. As if it weren't hard enough to make a decision on the scale of the one I had to make to arrive at that point, now that it IS decided, I face what is possibly an even bigger quandary:

What the heck am I going to bring to read?

So far I have in my stack: Anne of the Island. A Shakespeare omnibus edition, Four Comedies, which includes Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice. The ancient hardcover edition of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn that I bought at the Salvation Army thrift store a couple of weeks ago (possibly the most serendipitous purchase I've made in years; I have wanted this book for a long, long time, and this is a nice old edition without any modern soft-focus art on the cover, and that's exactly what this book SHOULD be. And I got it for fifty cents). I also have my bound paper journal, which I haven't written in since last fall, and of course I'll be bringing my Bible; maybe I'll study Romans in addition to my daily reading, where I'm in Joshua.

It's not like I plan to read ALL of these. I just want a variety to choose from, because who knows what my mood will be? And -- here's the scary thought -- I really don't want to be down there in the hospital, alone and in pain at eleven o'clock at night, and suddenly think of the ONE book I REALLY want to read, and have it not be with me. I wonder if I could have the surgery at home. You think? Then we'd at least be just down the street from the library... T wouldn't mind a little library outing, would he?...

Anyone have suggestions? I'm open to them, as long as they leave room in my bag for my stuffed Grover, who has been through a lot of hospital hours with me.

I hadn't planned to post this initially; I was going to keep it all lighthearted, but, well, here are some of the worries I keep giving to God and then snatching back from Him, in case you were, you know, fresh out of things to pray for:

• Pain. There will be a lot of pain, this I know.
• Loneliness. I am not really accustomed to sitting alone in a hospital room from the end of visiting hours to the beginning of visiting hours the next day.
• Coming out of the anesthetic. I'm not worried that I won't; I'm OK with that. It's just that -- well, I'm sure there must be a more miserable physical sensation than coming out of a drugged sleep into debilitating pain, but I've never had to deal with it, and, well, I feel wimpy right now.
• Having to explain to the entire world why I'm having a hysterectomy at thirty, or else having everyone think I'm trying to keep some deep dark secret if I just say "I've had surgery." I know, I know. None of anyone's business, and I worry too much what people think. But there it is. Here's a short synopsis of "why", since I know if I don't do this I'll have to do it in the comments anyway. I hope it's not TMI; just in case, you might skip to the next bullet if you're squeamish and/or male. Adenomyosis (basically low-grade endometriosis) --> really horrific, um, well, girl stuff --> severe anemia --> exacerbation of supraventricular tachycardia --> weakened heart, possible severe heart problems later. And over all of that is a family history that makes my gynecologist's pen nearly catch on fire from scribbling notes anytime I have to remind him of it. So.
• The possibility that I will be coming home to an utter disaster area. This is not very likely; T is nicer than that. But I know how things can get away from a person.
• Getting a roommate who wants the TV on all the time. Oh please, no. Please. ;)

Friday, April 08, 2005

quiz (EDITED)

Ever the copycat, I saw that Kristen had taken a quiz, so I had to do it too. (Better not jump off the Empire State Building, OK, Kristen?) My results were:

1: Baptist (non-Calvinistic)/Plymouth Brethren/Fundamentalist (100%)
2: Congregational/United Church of Christ (87%)
3: Baptist (Reformed/Particular/Calvinistic) (81%)
4: Anabaptist (Mennonite/Quaker etc.) (79%)
5: Pentecostal/Charismatic/Assemblies of God (75%)
6: Seventh-Day Adventist (69%)
7: Church of Christ/Campbellite (63%)
8: Presbyterian/Reformed (61%)
9: Methodist/Wesleyan/Nazarene (57%)
10: Anglican/Episcopal/Church of England (43%)
11: Lutheran (39%)
12: Eastern Orthodox (37%)
13: Roman Catholic (21%)

The top result I can really see. I have read about the Plymouth Brethren in the past, and from what I read, I found their attitudes about the church, method of meeting/worship, and set of beliefs to be the nearest of any established "denomination" to what I see as Scriptural. Edit: I was mistaken; I was thinking of the Christian Missionary Alliance, I think. The confusion comes in because a man whose biography T and I like to read (R.G. LeTourneau) was brought up as one and converted to the other. Whoops. I don't know enough about Christianese labels to interpret the rest terribly accurately. It is interesting that the more credal, liturgy-based denominations landed nearest the bottom -- rather accurate, considering that even a responsive reading sends me into convulsive Methodism-flashback shudders.

Thursday, April 07, 2005

me, nerdy? wha?

Thanks to Google and an initial curiosity about SI prefixes brought on by a math lesson on the metric system with my son, here is what I just spent the last half-hour figuring out when I should have been typing:

earth: 5.9742 × 10^24 kilograms
one yoctoearth = 5.9742 kg = 5974.2 grams = 13.2 lb

world's oceans: 328 million cubic miles of water.
1 mile = 1.6 x 10^3 m = 1.6 x 10^5 cm
1 cubic mile = (1.6 x 10^5cm)^3 = 4.096 x 10^15cm^3 = 4.096 x 10^15 ml
oceans = (3.28 x 10^8) x (4.096 x 10^15) ml = 1.343488 x 10^24 ml
one yoctoocean = 1.343488 ml

1 mole of carbon = 6.022 x 10^23 atoms = 1.2011 x 10^1 g
1.99452 x 10^-21 g = 1 atom carbon
1.99452 x 10^-24 kg = 1 atom carbon
1 smallish cat: 1.99452 kg
1 yoctocat = 1 atom carbon

[atom of carbon]:cat::[13-lb bowling ball]:earth::[amt. of Tabasco on my omelet]:oceans

So pointless. And I'm not entirely sure all the math is correct, although I think it is. And yet... so much fun.

Also, I typed the following sentence in somebody's comments earlier today:

For movies, I just FTP them to the free webspace that I have from my ISP, and then link them from my blog.

Your average twelve-year-old, let alone your average blog-addicted housewife, could tell you exactly what that sentence means today. Yet when that twelve-year-old was born, the sentence would have been pure Greek to just about anybody. Interesting.
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Wednesday, April 06, 2005

a couple of really well-timed recipes

Here it is the END of winter and I'm posting soup recipes. It's all Kristen's fault. She wanted me to email them to her but I felt low on actual content today, so I thought I'd just post them here. Plus the world in general is not fat enough yet, so this clam chowder one needs to get spread around a little more. YUM.

Monterey Clam Chowder
(my brother found this recipe after we'd been on a trip to Monterey, getting clam chowder samples at every restaurant on the Wharf. THANK YOU BROTHER, it is wonderful. And I probably really needed those EXTRA FIVE POUNDS PER BOWL.)

• 1 carrot, diced
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 1 potato, diced
• 1 stalk of celery, diced
• 1/2 lb minced bacon
• 1/4 lb butter
• 3 cloves fresh garlic, minced
• 1 pt clam juice
• 1 1/2 c flour
• 1 pt milk
• 1 pt heavy whipping cream (when I make it I use just a quart of half-and-half and a pint of nonfat milk -- not because of calories but because it's cheaper and nonfat milk is what we keep on hand. It comes out fine this way, actually maybe a little easier to eat cause it's not SO overpoweringly thick and rich. YMMV.)
• 1 pt half-and-half
• 1/2 t black pepper
• 1/2 lb chopped clams (fresh, frozen or canned) (2 or 3 of the 6-oz cans)
• 1/2 t clam base (optional -- you can get this at Smart and Final but I've never used it. It makes a mellow clam chowder without it. Might be stronger with it, but Monterey clam chowder generally has a milder clam flavor than New England clam chowder anyway.)

Sauté vegetables and garlic in bacon and butter in a 5 quart sauce pot over medium heat until vegetables are tender but not brown. Add flour to make a roux. Cook for two minutes, allowing flour to cook while stirring occasionally. Add clam juice, milk, half-and-half, and cream. Stir with a whisk. Add pepper, clams and clam base. Cook over low-medium heat, stirring occasionally to prevent chowder from scorching, for two hours or until chowder is brought to desired thickness. (took WAY less than 2 hours for me. More like 30-40 minutes.)

Once you have the vegetables sautéed, you can put the whole thing in a crock-pot for several hours if you'd like.

And here's one for minestrone. I read that word phonetically till I was heading toward junior high. I had heard of minestrone soup; it just never occurred to me that it and the mine-strone I saw in Campbell's cans in the store were the same thing. I did the same with Yosemite, although I was cured of that one much younger. My five-year-old self would see hitchhikers carrying signs that said "Yosemite" and wonder -- what's this Yose-mite place? Hello, Rachel, YOU LIVE RIGHT OUTSIDE IT. Do I need to tell you about "Chevrolet"? Probably not.

SHUT UP AND GET TO THE RECIPE ALREADY RACHEL.

Thank you, I needed that.

OK, here it is. Warning, it takes like eight hours to make if you don't soak the beans overnight, five or six hours if you do. It's not something you can just whip up for dinner. I got this recipe in Cultural Foods class in high school, which was kind of an odd combination of the history of the discovery of and immigration to the US, and home ec. You'd have to try it to understand, but I don't think they offer it anymore. SHUT UP AGAIN RACHEL.

Minestrone

Soak 1 pound of small white beans (navy beans) in a couple of quarts of water, either overnight, or by simmering them for 2 minutes and then letting them sit in the pan for 2 hours.

Then melt 3T butter and 1/4 c oil in a heavy 5-quart saucepan. (I use less at a time but I do probably end up using this whole amount. I'm sure you could make the soup without the sautéing, too, but I never have yet.) Sauté the following one at a time, 2 minutes each:

• 1 c chopped onion
• 1 c diced carrot
• 1 c chopped celery
• 2 c diced zucchini
• 1 c diced green beans
• 3 c shredded cabbage
• 1/2 bunch chopped spinach (I've always left this out. Not because we don't like spinach, just because, um, I never have it on hand and generally forget to buy it.)

Add vegetables back to the pan, and add:

• 1 lb cubed beef steak or stew meat
• the drained beans (reserve the liquid)
• 6 c weak beef broth (I used 2 cans broth and 1 can water)
• 1 can tomatoes
• 4T tomato paste (I just add the whole 6oz can, have no idea how many T that is)
• 1/2 c chopped parsley (I use maybe 3 T of dried parsley)

• 3 cloves minced garlic (why don't they have you sauté this? I'll have to try it sometime)
• 1 T basil
• 1 T salt
• 1/4 t pepper
• 1 c red wine (I always feel like Such A Grownup buying wine at the store. I only ever buy it for cooking; can't stand the taste of it. Because I'm a baby. I don't like black coffee either. Or dark chocolate.)

Cook all this for 4-5 hours, adding bean liquid (or you can have pitched out the bean liquid after step one, and just add water, like me) as necessary, stirring occasionally. In the last half-hour add about a cup of pasta -- recipe says broken spaghetti but I just use whatever suits my fancy that time -- rotini, farfalle, conchigliette, you could probably use salad macaroni -- live dangerously. ;)
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Tuesday, April 05, 2005

We are going to make a poem.

(this is my THIRD ENTRY for this calendar day. I am firing them out, it seems.)

If you've been reading online journals for more than five minutes or so you've probably seen the meme where you ask your readers to grab a book and read the such and such line from such and such page and post it in their blogs. I just saw a little twist on it over at someone else's journal, where you ask the people to post the answers in the comments and then add them all together to make a little poem. Such a clever idea that I had to steal it.

So. Grab the nearest book to you (you know the drill, no going to the bookshelf and pulling off your copy of Plato, seriously the one that's really closest to you at your computer), and open it to page -- let's say 18. In case someone ends up using a children's book, it'll be sure to have at least that many pages. Find the first complete sentence on that page and quote it in my comments section. And then if you want to do this on your own journal you're more than welcome to do it there too. :)

Thank you for humoring me. :)
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a life-changing moment

I think I'm finally ready to take a really big step.

I've been thinking about it for a long time. I wanted to wait until I was fully prepared -- until I knew I could do the best possible job caring for another living being. The timing had to be perfect. I needed to have built enough of a life for myself so that I felt complete and able to share myself with another, and yet, I didn't want to get so set in my ways that I would see my new phase in life as a burden, or as an inconvenience. It's a hard decision for a woman to make, but I think this is it. Now is the time. I am finally ready...

to own a houseplant.

Two, in fact.

See, we have these stereo speakers, with these flat horizontal tops. And they tend to get just STUFF piled on top of them, because, you know, that horizontal surface thing. And it has occurred to me that what they need is a nice pretty houseplant apiece.

Keep me in your thoughts as I move into this new part of my life. And most importantly -- and if you know me at all you'll know why I say this -- keep the poor houseplants in your thoughts. Please.

March reads

I just realized that I forgot to post about the books I read during the month of March. Again, this is books finished, not simply dabbled in or begun. It's a VERY short list this month, thanks to a) good weather getting us outside, b) work, c) The Nikon, d) this blog, e) all the OTHER blogs I started reading recently, and f) Les Misérables. I couldn't start another one while I was reading that because I was afraid I'd give up and not go back to it.

March:

1. Les Misérables -- Victor Hugo -- story/characterization 5. actual book as a whole: 3
   • There's a detailed review of this in this post.
2. Izzy, Willy-Nilly -- Cynthia Voigt -- 4.5
   • This is a book I first read in junior high, and I revisit it periodically. Cynthia Voigt has a way of writing about young people that makes theme seem as real as the person sitting next to you, or more so, and she tackles serious issues without either minimalizing them or preaching for pages on end about them.

     One aspect of this book that I particularly like, more even than the drunk driving discussion, which is the main theme, is its treatment of friendship and of the issues: what makes a friend? How important is it to "fit in"? It looks at the judgments made by those who do fit in about those who don't in a really satisfying and subtle way, through the character Rosamund Webber, who is one of my literary heroes.

3. No Children, No Pets -- Marion Holland -- 4.5
   • This is an old (1950's-ish) children's book, somewhat in the style of an Americanized "Secret Seven" kind of thing, but with fewer children involved. My mother read it aloud to my brother and me when we were children, and I just finished reading it aloud to my children, who hung on every word just as I did when I was little. I enjoyed it myself as well; it's interesting, if for nothing else, as a nostalgic look at pre-Disney, pre-space-center Florida.
4. Much Ado About Nothing -- William Shakespeare -- **
   • ** How do you rate Shakespeare? You just don't. Either you restate the obvious or you look like someone who's trying to be different simply for the sake of noncomformity. So no number rating for this one. I will say that I actually really anjoyed reading it, and not just from the standpoint of being a person in love with language and its use. I was interested; I wanted to know what happened next. I didn't even know the story, so this was lots of FUN to read.

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Sunday, April 03, 2005

you know you wish he was YOUR dad

Here's what the kids (the 35-year-old, the 8-year-old, and the 5-year-old) spent Saturday afternoon building:

that old dryer just keeps on giving

LT as gunner and C as driver (I think those are the correct technical terms)

inside view. I told them to "look angry." Remind me not to tick LT off, will you?

It was his idea. That should not be surprising to you. :)

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Friday, April 01, 2005

I waited to type this until I was relatively certain I could do it without swearing.

Well, I can never again say that I have never received a traffic ticket.

Wow, it made me a lot angrier than I thought it might, to type that. Deep breathing, it's OK, life goes ON, Rachel, it's only a speeding ticket, it's only THE END OF A FOURTEEN-YEAR STREAK OF SMUG DMV BLAMELESSNESS, IT'S NO BIG DEAL, RIGHT??

Really. Um. Wow.

Anyway. I blame it on Verdi. I was listening to the "Anvil Chorus", and...

No, wait, it's all the cardiologist's fault! If I hadn't had to drive down there to return the stupid holter monitor...

Um. Can I blame this on my low iron? no?

Seriously, I decided as soon as I saw the red light in my mirror and looked down to see my speedometer sitting at 65 that I wouldn't make excuses, I would just be straightforward and honest, and be a good testimony, and all that.

That and I thought maybe it would confuse the patrolman so much that he'd forget to write my ticket. But it didn't work. At least I can do the traffic school online.

On the way home, C appointed herself my official backseat driver. "I will keep an eye out for speed limit signs, Mommy, and I will read them to you if I see them, so you will know how fast to go. Because I am a very fast reader." And she did, too. "Mommy, it says 'SPEED LIMIT 45'. Are you going 45?"

Then a car VERY nearly ran over my daughter in the Vons parking lot. I was pushing the cart, and she was walking beside me, as we walked through the lot. The backup lights came on, on the car behind which we were walking, and before we could even trot out of the way, the car bolted backward. I pulled C out of the way just in time, and was still explaining why when the seriously seasoned citizen driving the car pulled backward far enough to finally see us (both wearing bright red sweaters). "I didn't hit her, did I?" Casual as anything. I clenched my teeth and replied, "Not QUITE."

I swear, all I want to do tonight, aside from maybe a nice relaxing sunset walk, is sit here and hork out on chocolate and do something totally boring, free, and harmless. Transcribing mind-numbing audio files about printer technology never sounded so good.