Poetry

by

Giveaway Winner, Mystery Item Identified, Things I’m Making and Planning to Make, Something But Not a Lot

We’ve got a new week and a new month and a new blog post. Thank you for being here.

Giveaway Winner

Thank you so much to everyone who entered the giveaway for Nicole’s debut novel, Inhale, Exhale. Twenty commenters threw their names in the hat, and the winner is…

Stephany! Woo hoo! Your copy will be in the mail asap.

Mystery Item

It took until Saturday for me to remember the mystery item I’d been meaning to order last week. (By the way, I loved Kate’s suggestion that it might be chipotles in adobo, which I’d previously blogged about running out of in a previous post! Good eye, Kate – fortunately, it’s on my grocery list, although my store was completely out of chipotles the last time I looked.) The mystery item was Loop ear plugs. Not a kitchen item AT ALL. I keep meaning to get Carla a pair of these ear plugs because a) I think she could use them during in-class study time, when her teachers discourage the use of headphones and b) I know she could use them when we go to noisy restaurants, which tend to make her feel unbearably overstimulated.

Things I’m Making

Speaking of Carla: she is going through another phase of not being particularly amenable to eating. She eats a decent enough variety of things, I think, but she gravitates toward easy foods which are often less nourishing and/or nutritious than I’d like. I would especially like for her to have easy foods to grab for breakfast a) because she often skips lunch. (We have discussed this with her doctor, we are on top of it, do not worry.), and b) because I want her to be self-sufficient in the mornings.

One food she has been into lately is the Starbucks bacon, gouda, and egg breakfast sandwich, which she gets without the cheese. I am having a strange and intense aversion to Starbucks lately, which isn’t the worst thing for many reasons. But this means I am less open to taking Carla to Starbucks. Also, Starbucks costs money and I am not eager to spend money on fast food breakfast more than once a month (outside of extenuating circumstances). Anyway, this is to say that I gave in once last week and took her to Starbucks for a sandwich with the caveat of using that sandwich as a prototype from which to make our own homemade breakfast sandwiches.

I made these bacon and egg sandwiches on ciabatta bread and froze them. (I added about a quarter cup of cheddar cheese to the egg mixture, because my kid likes cheese mixed in to her scrambled eggs, she just can’t abide it melted on top of things.) The finished product seems a little dry to me (no butter? no mayo?), and Carla has yet to try one, so please cross your fingers on my behalf. I will be quite irritated if she doesn’t eat them. (I eat very few sandwiches and also dislike eggs, so I will not be eating them. Maybe my husband will eat them.)

While I was cutting up the loaf of ciabatta bread, I made a miscalculation and ended up trimming the ends off of all eight sandwiches. Which gave me an excuse to make French toast muffins, a thing that seems delightful and which I have never tried before.

The French toast muffins needed to sit for two hours, so while they were sitting, I made a batch of homemade granola. I love granola, but it’s spendy. This batch called for coconut oil, which I don’t love, but it turned out okay. I used chia seeds, which is what I had on hand (because I purchased them specifically to make granola), but I would like to try adding flax seeds and/or hemp hearts and/or puffed quinoa to future batches. I suspect it will take me a long time to make it through this batch, though – I really only add a few tablespoons to yogurt.

Things I’m Planning to Make

I suppose while I’m making things, I might as well make a meal plan for this week.

Dinners for the Week of February 2-8

  • Slow cooker Mongolian beef: This sounds good and slow cooker meals are always appealing – especially when it’s so enduringly chilly outside.
  • Cream of mushroom soup: This sounds luxurious and warming. I will have to make some sort of protein for my husband to go along with his.
  • Ramen with shrimp and edamame: My husband wanted to try the squiggly noodles from Trader Joe’s, and I am always a fan of ramen with shrimp and some frozen edamame. Easy peasy.
  • Chicken paprikas: Yes. We haven’t had this in a while and it’s the perfect cozy comfort meal for winter.

Something But Not a Lot

In a rather drastic tone change, sometimes I feel so keenly the exhortation to say something that reaches beyond my little cozy corner. I have sat at my computer, many hours and many days, trying to find the words to express my despair and disappointment at the state of the world, to articulate the scale of my love and hope for all of us. Maybe it’s ignorance or delusion or cowardice or all three, but again and again, I find that I don’t know what to say or how to say it. I continue to read and listen to voices stronger and braver and more knowledgeable and more eloquent than I am. (The fragment “Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse” keeps looping through my brain.) I continue to seek out blog posts, fiction, essays, and poetry to make sense of things, to offer comfort, to provide distraction, to inspire, and to organize the complicated tangle of emotions into words.

Today, this poem is resonating with me.

That’s all I have for you today, Internet. Stay warm and be well.

by

Five for Friday

Today, I’m taking a page from Stephany’s book and using blog posting as a distraction from the ongoing endless current heavy news. Losing myself in the mundane is soothing, in its way.

If you need a genuine smile, Michelle’s post about photo doodles was magic for me. In the meantime, here are five inconsequential things on my mind today.

  • Watch Me: I am having an Extremely Reactive Skin Situation this week. My underarms are itchy and inflamed, my lips are dry and peeling, and my face is sporting multiple spots and blemishes (including a Rudolph-esque cyst on my nose; a little late to be festive, no?). Plus, my Apple watch band is leaving an angry, painful red blotch on my wrist. Well, wrists plural, because I switch arms every day to give each wrist a break. I love my Apple watch and use it for various timers and alarms, and to track my steps, my exercise, and my sleep. Honestly, no wonder my arms are getting tired of it. But my wrist-swapping method is not working as it once did, so I need a new solution. My husband uses a leather watch band during the workday, and a nylon watch band for working out. I just use the silicone band that came with my watch; maybe I need a nylon watch band? Of course, as with everything, I am spoiled for choices… this one is utilitarian and simple and cheap. This one comes in fun colors/patterns. Or maybe I want a new silicone one, like this? I would prefer a watch band I don’t need to swap out every time I exercise (although if I do need to swap it out, I would be tempted to try a stainless steel band for non-exercise time. How can I choose? Do you have an exercise watch band you like? Or some way to prevent the skin reaction?
  • Everybody Plays the Fool: Some people in my life believe that I anthropomorphize my cat. Which is entirely true. I feel like he is a person in the purest, most universal sense of the word. Sometimes I get the feeling that he is trying very hard to see me as whatever the cat equivalent is for “person.” But I am so very stupid, and have such a very difficult time understanding his clear and simple wishes. Even though I do not understand his clear and simple wishes, I understand his frustration, and just how patient he is being with me, and just how very stupid he thinks I am. I mean, look at this face. I am the recipient of this face multiple times a day. This morning, he sat there staring expectantly at me for a good ten minutes before he gave up in disgust and left my office. I never did figure out what he needed.
  • I Won’t Back Down: Yes, yes, I know I made a big ol’ deal about how I’m FINE with giving up on books that aren’t working for me. But right now I’m reading two books – one with my eyes, one with my ears – that aren’t doing it for me, and I’m just unwilling to let them go. The audiobook is a mystery, and it’s kind of boring, and I don’t really care at all about the narrator/protagonist… but I’ve already given up four hours of my life to listening to it, and I’m more than halfway through it, and I just want to figure out who the murderer is and be done with it. Multiple times a day I tell myself, “Just Google it, and start something else!” and yet I keep plugging away. WHY. The other book is one that SO MANY PEOPLE seem to love, and I want to love it too, and yet it just isn’t striking the right tone with me. To be fair, I haven’t given it much of a shot – a few pages, at most – but I have no desire to pick it up. Seems like an obvious DNF… Except that I WANT to like it. There have been a handful of times when sticking with a book turned out to be worthwhile. I remember thinking The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was a drag for at least 100 pages, but then I ended up really loving it and enjoying the entire series. Of course, the best example is The Goldfinch, which I hated right up until the very end, when the book transformed itself into one of my all-time favorite novels. What if I give up on one of these two books and miss out on another Goldfinch?!
  • Take a Picture: When I was putting together a holiday card this past December, I found plenty of photos of the three of us, and tons of photos of my husband and daughter, but it was extremely hard to find any pictures that featured me and my daughter or me and my husband. I have only one or two very loose goals for the year, but one of them is to appear in more photos with my husband and child. The thing is, I’m not exactly sure how to accomplish this. My husband is a wonderful and prolific photographer, but he’s not always inclined to take photos of people – his eye is on scenery and artistic groupings. Plus, I’m usually the one who insists on taking photos on more mundane occasions. Like, he’s fine taking pictures when we go to Paris, but has no patience for pictures of all us around the Thanksgiving table, you know? I did announce my goal to both husband and daughter, and asked them to help me accomplish it. They seemed receptive, but time will tell. Of course, the other obstacle is me. I do not tend to enjoy seeing myself in photos. If only I can remember that I *do* like seeing myself in photos, long after the fact. My critical eye is kinder with the passage of the years. It is well worth the teeth-gritting of appearing in photos today to achieve the pleasant nostalgia I will feel when I see them in two or five or twenty years.
by

Some Gentle Aspirations for 2022

Time for some non-resolutions! As per tradition, I am setting some gentle aspirations, rather than goals. These are simply a testament to what seems important now, and when I review them at the end of the year, they will help me better understand my priorities over time. I refuse to feel bad about failing to accomplish any of them, except for the writing-related ones, which I already feel bad about not achieving years ago. 

In addition to the aspirations I may or may not complete, I would also like to state that I am making some resolutions that I am NEARLY CERTAIN of completing, either because I have already completed them prior to this writing, or because I am on the precipice of completing them in mere days. That is the power of posting one’s goals on the internet. I can decide which goals to post, and maybe I have already achieved them, and that is my business and I will be delighted to count them as complete. It is the equivalent of writing a to-do list where the first item is “wake up” and the second item is “write to-do list.” It feels good to cross things off the list and momentum is important! For instance, I encourage you to put “put away holiday décor” on your own list of resolutions, even if you stowed the last ornament days ago. Then you are already ahead of the game!

For sake of honesty, however, I will alert you to any of these goals that are already half complete. Because I don’t want to cheat anyone, not you, certainly, and not my future self, who will be super annoyed that I have halved her feeling of accomplishment at year’s end but who will also appreciate my sense of ethics. 

Personal

Aspiration: Read 50 books. In 2021, I read 74 books. That doesn’t seem replicable, but I think 50 is an achievable goal. 

Aspiration: Work out 5 days a week. This is an oldie but a goodie. I need to get back into regular exercise, and I know it can be done. 

Aspiration: Read a poem every day. I am semi-stealing this aspiration from Nicole, who read Rumi every day last year. Wow. That is A Feat. But it inspired me. However, I am not going to limit myself to Rumi, or to a single poet. I have an entire bookcase FULL of poetry and yet I rarely read poems! This must stop. Poetry is an essential part of life, and I can so easily grab a random book off my shelves each evening, and flip to a random poem each morning rather than reaching for my phone. 

Aspiration: Buy some new shirts that make me feel cute and not like a slob. Listen, you know I am All For stay-at-home clothes. But I have discovered over the past somethingish months that I would like to feel cute in clothes when I inevitably am forced to leave the house, and I do not feel cute in clothing that doesn’t fit me. This is one of those goals that I may have almost achieved even as I write this: I ordered two shirts from Nordstrom with a Christmas gift card. But I am cautious. The new shirts could look… not good. So I may still have this feat ahead of me. 

Aspiration: Come up with a workable weekly schedule. This stems from a middle-of-the-night attempt to come up with a schedule for myself, allowing for maximum writing and revising time, but also slotting in time for working out, eating, and blog stuff. Which led me to determine that there aren’t enough hours in the day and I need to “wake up at 5:00 and go to bed at 10:00 every day,” when I don’t know if that’s doable. Okay. I’m pretty sure it’s not. What I need to do instead is to come up with a few different versions of a schedule, try it out, and then figure out what combination of timings and tasks works for me. 

Aspiration: Try baked oatmeal. This is a late addition, because I somehow forgot about how badly I want to try baked oatmeal after our breakfast convo the other day (she says, as though it wasn’t in early November). For some reason, it intimidates me. Mainly because I really really don’t like oatmeal. But this sounds more like a cookie than like hot mush, and it gets such high praise, and I am going to try it. 

Reach Aspiration: Leave my phone upstairs unless I leave the house. This is laughable to even attempt, isn’t it. And yet I have done this, multiple times, and feel such a sense of freedom from the pull of email and social media when I do. If I could do this on a daily basis, just think of all the work I could get done! 

Family

Aspiration: Eat more vegetables. If you think this aspiration seems as though it should belong to the Personal category, you would be correct. But I am the meal planner and dinner maker in this house, so I have a certain amount of vegetable wielding power around here. We could all do with more veg on our plates. 

Aspiration: Do more non-screen things together. Listen, we have a good amount of Family Togetherness around here, which is a wonderful blessing. But a lot of our time together involves a PlayStation or a TV. We can do better than that. If we ever get snow, we will go skiing and sledding. Once the weather warms up and dries out, we can go biking. When the weather, as is typical, absolutely sucks, we can play the wide variety of board games we own. If we don’t want to play the ones we own, we can buy more of the murder mystery games we enjoy. This is doable. 

Aspiration: Do less “forcing” of my will on the family. This is semi-stolen from/inspired by Swistle. (Maybe the connection is only in my head, because her resolution is very different from mine.) I have noticed that a lot of things don’t happen unless I nag and badger and harp. That’s not fun for anyone, INCLUDING ME. For instance, we were supposed to make sticky toffee pudding for New Year’s Eve dinner. Dessert. You know what I mean. But even though I washed the potatoes and broccoli well in advance of dinnertime, no movement was made by anybody else to prepare anything for the dessert. Then my husband decided at a very late moment – like 4:00 or 5:00 pm – that he wanted to work out. Which is great! Exercise! I am fine with that! But then when he was done, it was much too late to do anything, including make the fancy dinner we had planned, and especially making sticky toffee pudding. We did end up making the steak and potatoes and broccoli, which were delicious, but we didn’t make the pudding. And we didn’t make it yesterday, either, even though we were Going To Make It, because once again he got caught up playing video games with Carla and then at 5:00 pm wanted to work out and lost track of the time. This is fine! It’s prioritization at work! It is not enough of a priority for him to note the time and stop playing video games. It is not enough of a priority for me to do all the work of making sticky toffee pudding by myself. So it didn’t happen. It could have happened, if I had called down to him that we needed to get started if we wanted to have sticky toffee pudding for dinner. But the thing is, it is not my job to be Ultimate Time Monitor. It just isn’t. So I wrote a blog post and drank a cocktail while he worked out, and we did not make sticky toffee pudding, and maybe we won’t do it today either, who knows? There are three of us in this family, and it is not my sole responsibility to keep everything on track. That’s not fair, and it’s not fun, and no one likes the Time Badger, least of all the Time Badger herself. Some things are going to fall by the wayside. And sometimes that will cause some pain. And maybe that pain will inspire a change in behavior, though I am not optimistic. 

Aspiration: Go on some dates with my husband. We went on three (outdoor, rainy) dates in 2021. We now have a good babysitter to call on, should we need her, and one of these days we may decide to brave a restaurant. But even if all our dates take place in the summer, outside, that is fine! I just want to spend some time ALONE with my husband, AWAY from our house.

Reach Aspiration: Have friends over for dinner. We have been to two friends’ homes this past year, and if nothing else, etiquette requires that we return the favor. But also I would like to entertain again. A little bit. Maybe.

Reach Aspiration: Stop treating Carla’s needs as if they are mine.  Brought to you by Girl Scout Cookie Selling Season, which is my own personal hell and yet which is somehow My Thing instead of my husband’s. But that’s only one example of many. This is a two-fold aspiration. First, Carla is eight-and-a-half and can do with more responsibility. Second, just because I am The Mom doesn’t mean that I am automatically responsible for Carla’s laundry in addition to my own, for Carla’s meals in addition to my own, for Carla’s whatever-whatever. We are so fortunate to have two parents in this household, and I should allow/enable the other parent to do just as much as I do. Sure, some things will always fall to me because of my husband’s job (making and attending appointments, for instance). I think, for awhile, this will involve things like answering questions about “what does Carla normally eat with her chicken nuggets?” but perhaps that will be a worthwhile endeavor. See also the related issue of Putting Away Rags and Hand Towels Is Not My Sole Responsibility. 

Work/Finance

Aspiration: Revise my manuscript and start querying agents. Everything I read says that the agent-seeking stage is soul destroying. I am going to do it anyway. Check back at year’s end to see if I have fragments of soul remaining.

Aspiration: Finish my second manuscript. This second manuscript is a thriller, and I think it will be quicker and simpler than the first one. I just need to figure out the ending and WRITE IT. That is in the wrong order. I need to WRITE IT and figure out the ending.

Aspiration: Get a financial advisor. This is another one of those goals that I have already all but completed! My husband and I met with a financial advisor, and he is supposedly looking over our haphazard finances at the moment, and all we need to do is sign an agreement and let him HELP US make wise financial decisions! Side note: Carla asked us if he was a man. Her follow-up question was whether all financial advisors are men. Her follow-up to that was whether we knew any of these supposedly-existing women financial advisors. This line of questioning kind of made me wish that I had found a woman financial advisor. But it was hard enough to find THIS GUY and get up the nerve to meet with him, so I am moving forward as is.

Reach Aspiration: Take a writing class. I want to take a class about writing short stories (I am not good at writing things that are short) (you: YES WE ARE AWARE) or maybe about writing a personal essay. This terrifies me. 

Home/Property

Aspiration: Install a gallery wall in the living room. This one is BACK ON THE LIST, baby! You have kindly supported me and offered me reasonable suggestions for accomplishing this goal by myself many times, and still I have balked. You must first understand that I am incapable of making straight lines. “But use a ruler,” you say. No, even with a ruler, my lines somehow get distracted and wander off. So my husband MUST be involved in this project, because he is the yin to my yang, the meticulous to my slapdash. You must second understand that my husband was originally GUNG HO with this project, many years ago when it first appeared on my list of totally achievable desires. And that he then decided, at some point, unbeknownst to me, that it was MY project, and I should be in charge. That’s where things broke down. Because while I am willing to say “we should have a gallery wall in the living room,” I am unwilling to be the sole person dictating which items appear on said wall, which is co-owned and co-utilized and co-looked-at by other people in our family. And also, even if I could just go balls to the wall (unintentional pun) (but disturbing/perplexing imagery when I call out said pun and visualize it) (why is “balls to the wall” even a phrase? I have never thought deeply about it before and never want to do so again) full steam ahead and pick out a bunch of artwork, I simply cannot install it in a way that would look purposeful and not like a feeble earthquake had come through and jostled everything on the walls. My husband refused to care about the project. I refused to move forward. The project died. This is very long. This past fall, my husband and daughter and I went on a road trip, and found a little gallery that had lots of fun things, including a painting by a local artist of our state bird. We wanted very badly to buy the painting, but I said that I couldn’t in good conscience purchase it, knowing that I wanted it to be on the gallery wall, and knowing also that the gallery wall would not happen. This turned out to be a carrot, friends! A carrot! My husband said something like, “Well, if I promise to help you realize your gallery wall dreams, can we get the painting?” Marital compromise at work! And I agreed and we bought the painting and it has remained in its paper wrapping since August. But now, NOW, we are on the threshold of a gallery wall! Supposedly! Let’s refrain from holding our breaths. 

Aspiration: Hire someone to redo our ceiling and paint our trim. I am including this as one aspiration because a friend suggested a person who supposedly does both. 

Aspiration: Hire someone to fix our fridge. Our fridge leaks. It makes constant musical noises at us to alert us that Something Is Wrong. It has done this for… years, now. I have been afraid to have someone look at it because I fear that the only answer is to buy a new fridge. But it’s time. It’s time. 

Aspiration: Clean our basement and finalize a craft space for Carla. This is another aspiration that is all but complete. We spent the last week of December doing a DRASTIC CULL of our basement, and it looks as fabulous as a basement storage area can look. We also set up the craft-space items Carla received from Santa, and are in the process of finalizing it all. There is still much to be done (I need to cull THREE boxes of Precious Baby Items to ONE, for instance) (plus we need to buy a rug to go underneath the craft area), but it is well on the way. 

Reach Aspiration: PAINT THE BASEBOARDS MY GOD IT HAS BEEN 11 YEARS. Why is this a reach aspiration, you wonder? Well. My baseboards have been dark forest green for eleven years, that’s why. 

I think that’s PLENTY for this year, Internet. Wish me luck!