Adventures in the Pointless Forest

Oh, hello.

...I didn't see you there. Oh, that's right, it's because I've been looking the other way for the past oh dear God two and a half years. That might explain it. You may have noticed that in the interim, everything in the world at large became extremely horrible. I'm not saying it's my fault, exactly; I'm just saying it's not 100% obviously not my fault. Mistakes were made.

Anyway, in the spirit of fiddling while Rome burns, here are some of the things I have been up to in this darkest timeline:

1. Growing sunflower shoots in our spare room, because I feel the need to be more in touch with my inner hippie and also because as unappetizingly, macrame-ish-ly wholesome as they may sound, they are actually delicious. Also because if you want to waste many hours on the internet without fear of wandering accidentally into the abyss, you could do a lot worse than opting for the cozy rabbit hole of the exceedingly detailed, beautifully photo-illustrated, compendious material available at sproutpeople.org. And then you might find yourself placing an order for some sprout supplies yourself. Or not, because you're not me. Who can say!

2. Drawing pictures of our new cat, whose name is Sardine, and who is quite insane, as kittens tend to be, in varyingly plausible situations. Like this.

The pictures go in Jane's lunchbox. 

The old cat, Nemo, died a while ago. Sorry I didn't tell you. Even though his most notable habit at that point was pissing on things, we were still sad, so it took some time before we were quite ready to begin again. But time did pass and now here we are with a lovely, deranged, floofy-tailed cat beast. 

3. Grading. So much grading.

4. Waiting for various academic publishers to contemplate whether or not they want to publish the book (!) I went and wrote. No, no, sit back down, it is not the exciting sort of book that features spies or romance or offworld exploration or dragons or dystopian teenagers or cats. It is the boring sort of book that features things like "referring expressions" and "presupposition."

5. Making caramels. Again! I may have failed to keep up with blog writing, but I remain faithful in my caramel making. Would you like to hear more about my caramel making? Well, whether you would or not, now you will! Anyway, the lovely Annette wrote and asked me about them. Perhaps I will tell you more about what I learned this time around after I've done it. But in the meantime, here is what I intend to do, based on prior experience:

Get out my 3-quart (actually a 3-liter! it's English) heavy saucepan, and another saucepan to heat the cream in. Prepare an 8" square cake pan by lining it with nonstick (important! though parchment would also do) aluminum foil. Then take:

• 360g cream
• 135g butter (salted)
• 270g sugar
• 35g corn syrup or glucose syrup
• scant 1/4 t. baking soda
• scant 1/2 t. salt

...and get it all lined up and ready to go. Heat the cream, butter and salt together in the lesser pan to melt the butter, then take that pan off the heat.

In the larger pan with plenty of headspace (everything will bubble up quite a lot, later), dry caramelize the sugar and corn syrup together, but not too dark, just a light clear butterscotch color.

Now add the cream, and the baking soda. OH LOOK THAT'S VERY HOT AND BUBBLY.

Cook to 248-250 degrees F (what is this nonsense, grams and Fahrenheit in a single recipe? yes, sue me.) If it doesn't get this hot it will have COLD FLOW, which is to say that it will abandon its shape at room temperature. Too much hotter and it will be too firm. Pour it into your prepared pan, set the pan on a cooling rack, and let cool COMPLETELY, i.e. overnight. Which for me means putting it in the attic so the cat doesn't destroy it, yes. Consider fridging it up a bit the next day before cutting; I won't need to because the attic is already fucking freezing.

And that's what I'm doing tonight, I guess! Twice, probably. How about you?

It's a lady carrot.

The most depressing day of the year! Allegedly. 

It was not too bad, here, though we've all had better ones. We slept extremely poorly last night. Poor Jane spend most of the night wailing and sobbing in our bed, and could not explain why. I kept asking her if something hurt, but she just seemed confused and inconsolable. Then whenever she would drop off for a moment, Steve would have a coughing fit. It was quite something.

In the morning, she was tired and feeble (as were we) and generally a little inclined to dissolve into tears (we managed to refrain), but otherwise okay. Since Steve and I both had the day off, we wanted to do something a little interesting, but in the face of the cold weather and the no sleep, not too interesting. So we went to "Asiatown," as Cleveland's not-really-a-chinatown calls itself, and did a little grocery shopping and let Jane gape at the tanks of live tilapia. One thing we bought was a bulbous carrot. 

"Why that carrot have a nose?" Jane inquired. "Let's give it eyes. And feet." So we did.

You will be glad to know that Jane was pleased by the results. "I like this carrot," she said. "It's a lady carrot. I like him."

With shitty pens

I feel it's very important to leave one's child at home and go to the office so that one can spend one's time there drawing silly pictures about one's child. And Batman. Don't you?

It goes like this: 

"Nooooo, I no want that!"

"What do you want?"

"Bread and JAM."

"But that is bread and jam."

"Waaaaghghghgh!"

Then Batman comes over and says something snide, and that totally takes care of it.

All this time, and this is what I come up with?

I'm sorry, have we met? 

Since I last wrote anything, we bought a house and moved 3/4 of the way across the country and I started a new, tenure-track job. Gee whiz! And as of this weekend, we have actually unpacked every box, down to the last picture frame, which is something we didn't manage to do either of the last two times we moved.

I miss Santa Barbara, our old place, our friends there, and our routines. I also miss the avocados and my lime tree. But... the new house is large and lovely and belongs to us (!) and Jane appreciates the stairs and the clothesline. We have entertained several houseguests already and expect more, which is very pleasing. We have friends of quality here, too, and there are trains.

In the meantime, Jane's bedtime routine has become rather more elaborate, and now includes a bedtime story to be composed on the fly by yours truly. These vary in their originality (as you might imagine) and have a variety of recurring characters and structural elements. They always end with a scene in which everyone goes to sleep. On a boat, on a train, on the back of an owl -- whatever, the endgame is sleep. Usually they feature Jane herself, as well as Badger and his young ward Hedgehog. A large rotating cast of secondary characters fill in as needed.

This past week she has become VERY into one scenario, known as "The Meeting Story," that consists mainly of major cribbing from the opening chapter of The Hobbit, retrofitted to the general storyworld of her bedtimes. She has demanded it several nights in a row now. Furthermore, now that the storyline is established, instead of having Mr. Badger open the door to guest after guest, it goes about like this:

Me: So just as the kettle was full, there was another knock on the door. Knock knock knock! Mr. Badger...

Jane: [in interrupting-cow style beginning around "knock"] I GET THE DOOR I GET THE DOOR I GET THE DOOR

Me: Okay, you opened the door and there was a whole family of raccoons! And they said...

Interrupting Cow Jane: THEY WANT A TEA THEY WANT A TEA THEY WANT A TEA?

Me: 'Oh, thank you, Jane, we would like some tea! We're here for the mee...'

ICJ: I MAKE A TEA

Me: Okay, so you put the kettle on the sto...

ICJ: I PUT A KETTLE ON A STOVE!

etc.

Eventually Merlin (why not Gandalf? because Merlin had already appeared in a different story, about snakes) comes and tells them that he has called the meeting because they are all going to go on an adventure tomorrow, no, he can't tell them more because he lives backwards, don't you know, and he can never remember whether he is remembering something that never happened or making plans for something that happened last year, so it's best if he keeps it all under his hat, but it will be a fine adventure at which their presence will all be required and there will be a boat on the river to pick them all up for it first thing in the morning, so they had better get some sleep.

Then they pull all the bedding out of the airing cupboards and make up beds for everyone and everybody is so excited they think they will never be able to go to sleep but after all the excitement it turns out that they do, quite quickly, after all, the end.

Well. I missed you! Sorry I've been so delinquent. Maybe I will reform this time. How are you?

Dumplings

Things tick along as usual, trending on the better side of the norm. Jane and I do both have lingering though I think finally waning colds (she: ever-replenishing fountain of snot; me: the nightly descent of The Cough, which starts out tickly and gentle and ramps up to a croupy honking bark until it eventually gives up again) but our spirits are unbroken. Behold:

I have also finally discovered and embraced the value of Benedryl as a sleep aid. Have you heard the GOOD NEWS about Benedryl? Of course you have, obviously. Everyone has, but I bet you are not enjoying its slowly descending drowsy embrace right this minute as I am. It works like a charm and it is great and I love it forever and ever, hallelujah.

Additionally I have at last begun whittling away at my non-Jane work on a daily rather than an utterly inadequate and procrastination-filled twice-weekly schedule. This puts a spring in my step and does a lot for my ability to sleep through the night instead of waking suddenly at three in the morning with the cold hand of HORRIBLE DREAD around my heart. Steve too appreciates these advances in my sleep régime, because apparently it is not so delightful when your peaceful slumbers are rent by your beloved's thrashing limbs and pathetic mutterings of "oh dear, oh dear, I can't, I can't, oh dear."

So we are all pretty cheerful at the moment, despite the snot.

Tonight I made these ricotta gnocchi for dinner, with tomato sauce. It was a little logistically complicated to make them for the first time (I think I will be able to do it more efficiently next time--there was a lot of doing this step over here and then realizing I wanted to do the next part over there) but not the slightest bit difficult otherwise, and they were excellent.

Jane called them "dumplings" and ate them very neatly with her fork, until she had had enough, and then she fed the last two on her plate to me. Sadly she is not always so obliging in her table manners. In particular she loves to peel apart the layers of the tortilla on her breakfast quesadilla and drop the shattery outer flakes with great deliberation on the floor.

On the other hand, she also loves to hug and kiss the trees. Have I mentioned this? We will go out for a walk and as we approach a tree she will dash ahead and fling her arms around the trunk, then plant a nice fat smackaroo on the bark. "Hug," she says with satisfaction and a last little reassuring pat for the tree. On balance, I think we'll keep her.

In January, it's so nice

I forgot to mention that the Christmas singing is half carols and half murder ballads. Also there were pierogies and vodka. What more can you ask for, really? We all had a blast.

Though we won't be living in the land of real winter until next year, and are instead marking our seasons by the difference between wanting a sweater before dark and not wanting it until after dark, there are some real season-oriented books in heavy rotation here. One is Chicken Soup with Rice. 

Jane loves all the Nutshell Library books, because they are tiny and fascinating, and because I sing them to the tunes from Really Rosie.

Anything that combines reading with singing is a big hit right now. This includes a little board book in which "You Are My Sunshine" is about a teddy bear (rather than the woman who left me and "shattered all my dreams," and why exactly is this a favorite song to sing to one's children, anyway?) and Tweedle Dee Dee by Charlotte Voake, which is a take on "The Green Grass Grew All Around."

The music is in the back. 

We love all of Charlotte Voake's books, especially this one, the two about a cat named Ginger, and the unfortunately out of print First Things First. Her quick and expressive pen-and-ink line reminds me of Quentin Blake's enviable looseness, without feeling like imitation Blake. Look at those birds on the cover!

The other seasonal book we have been reading a lot (Tweedle Dee Dee is not particularly about the seasons) is The Year at Maple Hill Farm, by Alice and Martin Provensen. Somehow I missed it in my own childhood, though I had seen the Provensens' illustrations in Nancy Willard's A Visit to William Blake's Inn. Steve's cousin sent it as a Christmas present for Jane, but the grown-ups have been enjoying it too.

It has so much packed into every page, but it never feels busy or cramped. For shorter attention spans, you can read the overview from the top of the page, or you can delve into the smaller details below. It is gentle but totally unsentimental, and often funny, too, and the art is of course fantastic.

You probably can't read it from here, but the picture of a cuckoo in the middle row says "This big bird is laying her egg in a little bird's nest. She must be cuckoo." Ho ho! The next picture is a sequel: "This little bird is feeding her babies. She must wonder why one baby is so big."

There is a companion book, Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm, and I want it, too.

All of these make me want to get back to drawing more. I am terribly out of the habit. My quick cartoonish owl is well honed from many instances of Jane shoving a pen and notebook in my face and saying "OWL PEASE" but everything else is just piles of rust.

How are you?

Detritus

A few things rendered quickly quickly, in hope that discharging them will clear the way for something a little more coherent, extended, and even amusing:

(a) Do you know what makes a great icebreaker when you are visiting a friend of a friend you have never met before? Arriving at their doorstep with a child covered in carsickness vomit. Truly! Suddenly everyone has a shared project with genuine, smalltalk-bypassing urgency but no actual danger or illness. Quick! Towels, water, an amusingly giant garment to serve as a change of clothes! By the time it's all sorted out no one is a stranger and everyone is awake, freshly scrubbed, and filled with the warm glow of modest accomplishment.

(b) Halloween came and went, and Jane was a very fine small Batman, or Batma'am if you prefer.

Please admire the authentic Adam West physique.

(c) Jane has switched to answering almost all questions with "yah!" This is just as uninformative as her previous approach, but much more gratifying in producing the illusion of happy, agreeable conversation.

(d) We finally repotted those poor trees. We also got them some food to replenish their severely depleted nutrients, which seems most likely to have been the immediate cause of their less than perfect health. (Thrilling? Yes! Tune in next week to watch them grow in real time, followed by our top-rated As the Paint Dries.)

(e) Is it possible? Could it be true that our long anticipated, long awaited dining room table—ordered at the beginning of August—will be delivered tomorrow? So we are told. I'll keep you posted.

(f) We were in danger of running out of exciting things to keep us occupied, with the imminent resolution of both the Sickly Tree Project and the Interminable Table Wait, but fortunately we all seem to be coming down with icky sticky colds, so that's all right. 

Mu shu dork.

WARNING: SO, SO NERDY.

In between doing laundry, failing to buy the dirt we were planning to buy, and watching Downton Abbey, Steve and I have been entertaining ourselves with selected episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I didn't watch it much the first time around, but I was moved to revisit it after I fell down the delightful rabbit hole of Fashion It So. 

It is pretty enjoyable! This is particularly true if you have a high tolerance for Deanna Troi's cleavage and also have someone on hand to make sure you don't accidentally watch any of the really stupid episodes that are terribly stupid and make you say "this show was stupid and terrible and stupid." Try to avoid that, unless you like it better that way.

The big surprise for me is that Riker is my favorite. I'd thought, based on my hazy memories of the series, that he was either very boring or some kind of irritating Cyclops type.* (I am making myself really super un-nerdy with this line of discussion and this comparison in particular, right? Where are you going, beloved readers who care about Nancy Mitford novels, analytic philosophy, and/or Serge Lutens perfume? Come baaaack!) But no, he is awesomely smug and smoove. I particularly enjoy when he is just puttering around in the background and instead of doing some kind of generic background tech, he is being a background total player. Also, he plays the trombone.

Anyway, last night, the conversation turned to replicator-generated human meat, as it will do.

"As long as I was at it, I'd have the replicator make it be me meat. Because why not?"

"But what cut?"

"Yeah, I don't know that there's that much good eating on a person."

"Right, and I don't really want to eat something that is TOO obviously HI! YOU'RE EATING A CHUNK OF HUMAN. So ribs are out."

"Maybe bacon."

"Ooh! Yes. Person bacon. PERSON BACON. Very catchy. Or sausage. Maybe a pulled person sandwich?"

"I think you mean pulled dork."

"Of course! Or dork chops."

So then, just now, I was looking at this post and trying to think of how I could end it, you know, with some funny little button. But...

"This is the dorkiest thing I have ever written," I said.

"You could make a joke about William Shatner and ham," suggested Steve. But I think I won't.

 

*Updated, much more delightful link! "An Interview with X-Men's Cyclops, Who Sucks."

Trees.

My mother came to visit and it was swell. Not only is she wildly entertaining company (at least when she is not keeling over from jetlag induced sudden exhaustion), she also claimed that visiting us was "like staying at a lovely spa."

This is (a) perhaps the thing a houseguest could say that is most perfectly designed to delight and flatter me, and of course (b) utter bollocks. I am not familar with any lovely spas that feature toddlers who scream like they are being tortured when you try to put them to bed ten minutes before they are ready and steal your iPhone between times, or staff who explain to you just how HARD it is to walk as SLOWLY as you do, with your dodgy knees, as they force you to walk all the way across town for the third time that day. 

But maybe you know one like that. Is it the best ever? It is probably the best ever.

In addition to putting up with our nonsense and calling it restorative, my mother also performed a grandparental babysitting feat more wonderful than I could have imagined. Wrestling a screaming child into bed so that we could go see Contagion and eat artfully prepared food was excellent, without a doubt, but the mindblowingly brilliant bit was the mornings.

Being an early riser ordinarily and on east coast time to boot, she was awake bright and early every day. And so, when Jane woke with her habitual aggreived creaky door noises and requests for cheese (chizsh! chizsh! chizsh! chizsh! chiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiizsh!) my wonderful, glorious, sainted mother would receive her happily and then CLOSE OUR BEDROOM DOOR so that we could roll over and go back to sleep. 

Also she accompanied me to a local nursery and engaged in what anyone else would certainly find mindnumbingly extended stints of lively conversation about my adorable new little trees: which to get, where to put them (here? no, how about two feet to the left? forward a bit? where the other one is? back over here?), how charming they were, how pleasing their containers, what other things would accompany them to best advantage et cetera et cetera oh trees.

Trees! They are rather fetching, aren't they?

Not having any decisive point to close on, I leave you with two views of Jane, the dignified:

and the somewhat less dignified:

History's most innocuous home invasion

Last night, Steve's parents (who are visiting from Florida) babysat Jane while we went out to a merry picnic dinner in honor of a friend's birthday, followed by an outdoor screening of Singin' in the Rain. I was even more excessively spazzy and logorrheic than usual, perhaps out of giddy confusion at Jane's absence, and everyone was very kind in response.

At the end, we stumbled home, full and fat, saw Steve's parents off to their hotel, and tumbled into bed not long after.

Around 3 am, the cat woke Steve, who tossed him outside as per his catty request, and staggered back to bed. About an hour later, I awoke to a loud crashing sound involving the baby gate separating the front room from the kitchen.

"Izzitthecat?" asked Steve, bleary.

The crashing continued. "It is definitely not the cat," I said, and got out of bed.

If you poke your head out our bedroom door and look to the right, you see this:

At night, it looks something more like this:

And what I saw at about 4:30 this morning looked something like this:

 

I gave a single short SHRIEK before leaping back into the bedroom and onto the bed in a single bound.

When I landed, I gasped: "Person!" 

As I turned on the light, Steve got out of bed himself. In the living room, trapped behind the gate and leaning one very very very drunken hand on the back of the chair, stood a young, biggish white guy wearing a black hoodie.

Steve, very composed, said, "Hey, man, what are you doing in my house?"

The guy blinked a couple of times, and his very, very drunken state was very, very manifest. (The crashing noise had been his several failed attempts to figure out how to navigate the baby gate, running up against it over and over like a not very sophisticated toy robot.)

Steve took him by the arm and led him to the front door. "Okay, you have to get out of here now."

Drunken Hoodie said something like "mrlrmblrm yeah?" and obligingly staggered to the door.

Steve put him outside and locked the front door while I dashed to the now wide open back door and closed and locked it. Then we went back to bed and said "Holy shit" at each other many times. 

Drunken Hoodie meanwhile stood around on our porch for about five minutes, then stumbled over to the wicker chair on our porch, ringing the doorbell with his shoulder on the way, and fell asleep. We decided this was acceptable until morning. (It seems likely that he had mistaken our back door for his back door when staggering home from a party blind drunk, tried it and found that we either failed to lock up when we went to bed or after letting the cat out—hey, let's not do that anymore!—and then washed up—CLANG!—against the baby gate.)

Did you know? It turns out that one's system produces a lot of adrenaline when there are strangers in one's living room at four in the morning. This makes it rather difficult to get back to sleep, unless you are Jane, who was briefly roused by about 30% at the height of the festivities, after which she snurfled and rolled over.

But not to worry! Steve and I both managed to drop off before six, at which time Hoodie woke up and rang the doorbell.

Steve went to the door and he tried, shamblingly and feebly, to come in.

"Okay, dude" (apparently Steve trends surfer under duress) "why are you ringing my bell?"

Hoodie replied, "hrmblarm josh?"

Steve explained that this was our house, Hoodie's friends didn't live here, and that he had to leave. Hoodie obligingly said "flmm yeah," lurched down the porch steps, and walked away.

And that was it! He appears not to have puked or pissed on anything, so we are calling that a win. Godspeed, hammered young hoodie man. I hope your friends take better care of you next time, or that you learn to live in a more recognizable house.

"When I write about this on my weblog," I said to Steve, "I am going to give my poor mother a heart attack." Sorry, mama!