Adventures in the Pointless Forest

Some things I learned

1. Regarding the caramels: (a) my pan is in fact 3.5 quarts in size (if you filled it to the brim) and I don't think you'd like to make this quantity of caramel in any smaller pan; when it boils up as you add the warm cream mixture it goes quite QUITE high up. Pour gently. (b) my pan, which is perhaps my very favorite saucepan, and especially for candy making, has been discontinued apparently! Shocking and sad. So I suppose I won't be recommending it to all of you, after all.

2. On other sweet-related topics: (a) whether the problem is the pectin I bought or me, or something else altogether, there will not be any fruit jellies going out this year. I tried, believe me I tried, but... no. (b) when things go excitingly wrong in a time-sensitive way with hot fruit puree, it seems that I respond by remarking "balls shit balls shit balls shit balls."

3. Whoops, we had succeeded in not going to the mall at all for YEARS and then we did it two weeks before Christmas, that was exciting. It was because I had, for some odd reason, when Jane said no, she really did not want snow pants this year, responded by not buying any. This was extremely stupid, obviously. Then it snowed, and it transpired that oh, in fact, she did want some and indeed would not even be allowed to play on the unpaved bits of the playground during recess until she got some so in fact it was actually rather pressing, you see, that she acquire some without delay.

So off we went and wandered stupidly from shop to shop on the tide of crowds, and then Steve discovered he had lost his credit card earlier in the day, and Jane discovered that there is ASTONISHING HIDEOUS BEAUTIFUL TAT for sale at the mall, and I discovered that I wished to depart my body. So we all learned a lot, really.

In the end we did find some snow pants for Jane and this made her quite blissfully happy, and when we got home she played outside for a long time and that was very nice. It all makes her very happy, as you can clearly see:

 

Halloween, Voting Day, Falling Back

Traditionally I am a big hater of the return to Standard Time, because it is depressing when the sun sets in what becomes more and more the middle of the afternoon, but traditionally I have not had to get up in time to have a relaxing breakfast while also wrestling a small child into her clothing and getting her out the door to preschool, and... actually it is kind of magnificent how much easier it has been to wake up in the mornings this week, so I may be revising my opinion on this matter. Also, Halloween was delayed around here until Sunday on account of Hurricane Sandy, which meant that the time change put the entire window of trick-or-treating after dark, which is how it should be.

—a pause here while I go and vote. Boy, there sure were a lot of judges and things on the ballot, and there sure were a lot of stations to visit in that process. But at last I have my "I Voted" sticker (actually an "I [Ohio as grossly deformed heart] Voting" sticker), which is of course the real point of the whole endeavor—

Anyway, trick-or-treating was pleasantly after dark. I am of the view that Halloween should be dark and thrilling and spooky, with friendly lit houses. If it is a weekday, your parents go to work, and then they come home, and then you have dinner which is pumpkin soup or something, and by then it is good and dark out, and you go, and then you come back and sort all your loot. Or you can have the dinner in between loot sorting and jumping up to give out candy to older kids, that works too and is what we did this year. But either way, it's all about a walk in the dark, and candy. And then more sorting and trading, until eventually your parents say "It's late and it's a school night, so get it together," and you go to bed kind of costume encrusted, the end.

What you do before it gets dark, of course, is take pictures:

One day, Ratty, all this will be yours.

"I pat the bread? I love you, bread."

I was a witch, to go with. I felt that Steve should go as a broom, but I didn't feel it so much that I made him a costume to that effect. Oh well, he was a broom in my heart. Or something. What about you? Any brooms out there?

But, disappointingly, no Jesuits at all.

Steve is taking all of the vitamins:

Jane is just along for the ride on this one.

Meanwhile, the city is currently in the throes of Fiesta/"Old Spanish Days," which manifests ambiently in the form of lots of little girls running around in flamenco dresses, confetti everywhere, and a massive equestrian parade + mariachis.

For the most part the parade participants dress up in spangly sombreros or white-person cowboy gear, but as my local informant said, "as long as you have a horse, anything goes." The most striking example was the matched team of what appeared to be a dozen Revolutionary War cosplayers, complete with Paul Revere manpurses. The donkey-drawn cart full of elderly Shriners was good, too.

(Is there any other kind of Shriner, practically speaking? Yes, the pictures on their website strive mightily to give the impression that their ranks are bursting with plenty of robust young things, but Shriners in the wild tend to look more like they are probably veterans of the Spanish-American War. The fezzes, though?

 

Eternally young.)

She's been doing this all week.

I have an important scientific finding to report, regarding a newly observed heritable trait.

The pillow is the noteworthy thing in this picture, not the flappy hand. Although, now that you mention it, that too.

 

Towels, as everyone knows, are almost as helpful to sorting out bugs in your code as pillows are. God, these are terrible photos. 

Moving along. The pictures are not going to get any better here, just warning you, but the important thing, after all, is SCIENCE:

What's this? Some sort of textile object, I perceive.

Just a moment for adjustments, and... ah!

Just so.

Steve needs to step up his game. Sessile head-thinging is a head thing of the past! Head things on the move are the way of the future.

Ats.

Tomorrow is Jane's first birthday. With my usual inimitable sanity, I have made party hats for the party we are not having.

Note that there are in fact more hats than people to wear them. Also, I took long enough at the store choosing the paper that I made the baby cry. Excellent parenting.

Steve and I put the hats on ourselves, of course, while she was sleeping. 

Soignée.

Admirably focused on his work. 

Then I put everything away before Jane could wake up and participate in any way herself. No birthday hats for you, baby. It's not your birthday yet, now is it? When she's older, we should make sure to ride her Christmas bicycle for her every night in Advent, and dogear the pages of all her books before she can read them. It's just more thoughtful that way.

It's raining, while Rome burns.

It rains and rains, and nothing drains. Crossing the street is an exciting adventure in fording streams. It is damp even inside the clothes dryer and my hair is retaining water like a pre-menstrual victim of congestive heart failure. 

First world dilemmas, how embarrassing you are. For instance, I wear the same shoes--boots, actually--nineteen days out of twenty. They are quite wet at the moment. They were aggressively expensive, but considering the use I have gotten out of them I am not too ashamed about it. Then this week I started thinking with alarm about the eventual day they wear out, not to mention the fact that wearing them daily puts greater wear on them than giving them a day between wearings would do. The future looms, cold and bootless. 

Obvious solution: buy a second pair of related but different boots from the same maker, if you like them so much. And yet the prospect of spending nigh on (oh I can't actually quite bring myself to say it, after all) for no real pressing reason seems not entirely prudent or frugal, somehow. Yet is it not less frugal to wear my existing boots into the ground like a horse that is never rested nor watered?

This in fact goes well beyond being a mere first world dilemma into the realm of moneyed-idiot pseudo dilemma, a whole super-class of moronic "problem" best solved with a quick slash of the guillotine. I do hanker after those boots, though.  

No matter. It is easy for me to deny myself in this case, quite aside from the sway of my bank balance and common decency, because I am far too incompetent to deserve any treats at all. Today's major achievements have been making vast quantities of horribly mediocre tofu curry (you may wonder how mediocrity, by its nature, can be horrible, but I assure you it was), somehow giving myself an itchy face rash in the course of trying to make my skin look nice, failing to take a shower, and tramping mud all over the kitchen and laundry room floor. 

("I don't wonder how mediocrity can be horrible," Steve remarks, reading over my shoulder. "It's an existential horror." Isn't it, though. And he ate the curry.)

There's a hand towel bungeed to our coffee table.

I got paid! My bank account is now looking almost unwholesomely healthy. You'll be pleased to learn that I immediately responded by purchasing the expensive lipstick I had been contemplating. Then I made some food for the baby, to demonstrate concretely that I could both have lipstick and feed my own child. Well done me.

It turns out that I am the kind of person, at least right now, who really enjoys making tiny baby delicacies. This will probably surprise exactly no one who knows me, since it combines my abiding interests in cooking, geeking out over cooking (as I used to do with bread baking), and avoiding slimy half-eaten purees.

There is no way, obviously, to pass entirely over the fact that infant eating is a messy process, especially if you are also attracted by the difficult to reconcile ideals of letting them feed themselves and of not being a fussy control freak, but I do my best and have been channeling my overly fastidious impulses into cunning little vegetable patties. I may as well enjoy it while I can. You also may be interested to know that organic brown rice ricecakes are for the birds. They are nasty hard things that get sticky and useless in five seconds flat. Their store brand white rice counterparts are more like it. 

Meanwhile, Halloween is nigh upon us and so today I was in a position to say, "This bag is filled with koala components." And say it I did. If it comes out at all successfully, I will be sure to post photos, never fear. I suppose we had also better remember to buy a few sacks of candy to dispense to the local small costumed people. I hope there will be plenty of them. It is so disappointing when trick or treating comprises a mere trickle of desultorily dressed youths whose parents are sitting in idling cars nearby.

On the other hand, Halloween is by all reports a thing here, and by "thing" I believe I mean the kind of drunken, fratty revelry that one would prefer to flee town altogether in order to avoid, not unlike St. Patrick's Day in Chicago. Once we accidentally went to Chicago on St. Patrick's Day, and as visitors we didn't even have our own home out of the way of things to escape to. I won't forget that sea of bobbing boozy giant green foam top hats in a hurry.

I'm not entirely sure what the Halloween equivalent of the giant green hat is, but I guess I'll find out. 

This photo spread of "Dogs Looking Depressed in Their Halloween Costumes" is a good idea, but ultimately I'm not convinced. None of the dogs looks as glum as the captions claim. By contrast, pretty much almost every photo ever taken of a cat would fit right in at mycathatesyou.com. What this proves about cats and dogs is left as an exercise for the reader.

Don't you just wish you were married to me?

Me: Sometime we should go out on a date that requires real dressing up, in the sense of you wearing a suit. Or doesn't require it, but includes it. Plus dzing.

Steve: dz?

Me: Your perfume.

Steve: Oh, Dzing! Not "Dee Zee-ing".

Me: Right.

Steve: I was like... "Demilitarized Zoning"?

Me: That would be "dmzing".

Steve: MORE FOOL I.

Me: Which smells like napalm.

Steve: Victory.

Me: Old napalm. Indeed.

+

We occasionally have the old-fashioned kind of conversation, too.

(As I said in a voicemail when we were trying to coordinate our activities from across a bay on this recent trip: "You need to call me so that we can discuss this with words. From our mouths.")

On this occasion, I am clanking about in the kitchen: "What's 200 degrees Celsius in Fahrenheit?"

"About 400." (hem, hem.) "392, specifically. You can figure it out exactly, because it's 1.8 times 200, plus 32. It's super easy to go in that direction. Harder going the other way."

"What? How am I supposed to remember 1.8?"

"Well, boiling is 100, compared to 212 in Farenheit. So you just offset by 32 degrees because of freezing, and—"

(Psh.) "'Fahrenheit is really great; multiply by 1.8.'"

Sorted!

I like textiles.

Thank you for all the suggestions. I will take them up in good time. Just now Steve has gone out of town to find us a place to inhabit next year, so for the moment all I will be making is myself slightly insane, plus the usual thousand mats a day of post-partum shed hair. Do you need some to fill your hassocks with? I have plenty and am not feeling stingy.

So in the meantime it is just me and Jane and the entire last season of Lost. 

Jane naps and hangs out and gets changed on a stack of rectangles. This lovingly constructed pile of fabric exploits some of wool's finest qualities, and then switches it up with the fine contrasting features of cotton. Observe:

 

The bottom layer is the mock shearling blanket mentioned here. It showcases wool's talent at being fluffy and insulating. On top of that is a tightly woven and super-lanolinized wool mat that I bought off the internet. It demonstrates wool's ability to repel water, or more relevantly, baby piss. To soak up that which has been repelled we have a lovely cheap hand towel, showing off cotton's aptitude for absorbency, laundering, and cheapness.

The structure as a whole highlights my champion skills at being a dork. QED.

I am also fond of my Bensimon tennis shoes. They would be fashion forward if it were three years ago. I find them charming, anyhow, and they are some kind of limited edition in linen.

Have I convinced you yet that this is an aspirational lifestyle blog?

Riddle me this.

I have:

1. A sewing machine.
2. Demonstrated ability to thread said sewing machine, change its foot and needle, wind a bobbin, and sew a seam.
3. Good scissors!
4. Some straight pins.
5. Not much else. Oh, a washer, a dryer, and an iron, I suppose. But no fabric, say, or patterns or experience.
6. A scattering of infant naptimes.
7. Pickiness.
8. Impatience.
9. The internet and a credit card.

Tell me, friends, what should I make, and out of what ingredients?