Tater Tot Casserole

I’m just avoiding you.

Madame Chaos has some new material, maybe later this week.  Maybe not.  Heh.

6:00am:  Alarm rings.  I hit the snooze button.

6:05am:  Alarm rings.  I get up and dress in my sweats and my daughter’s running shoes.  My neighbor will be by in ten minutes so we can go, *ahem* “jogging.”

6:20am:  Dang.  I was hoping she slept in and wasn’t coming–she’s just late.  And she’s got her 11-year-old son with her.  They grin at me in the darkness.  We get out to the road and start “jogging.”  With a bum knee and recovering from a respiratory infection, I’m even slower than usual.  Her son, wearing hiking boots, beats us handily as we take 15 minutes to “jog” 1.4 miles to the neighbor’s house and back. 

6:35am:  Back home.  I might as well sit at the computer while I stop sweating.  Check email, check blogs.

7:00am:  Whisper goodbyes to Kiwi as she goes out the door to the bus stop, heading for math and band at the Jr. High.  Decide to put off shower and waking other kids to surf web for another 10 minutes.

7:10am:  Wake elementary school kids.  Spend 50 minutes getting them ready for school, wondering for the 384,295,582,856th time if I shouldn’t have stopped homeschooling them this year.  Somewhere in there J heads off to work.

8:00am:  LouLou head to bus stop, and I let G stay home because he’s still coughing and says he has a headache. I start preparing cake for my friend’s birthday lunch.  She said to surprise her–she’s never had apple cake, so I make that.

8:30am: Abandon messy kitchen to read half of “A Fish Out of Water” to Madame Chaos and Dee, then decide we better leave early to relieve the overflowing recycle bins and return RedBox movies.  Dang.  I didn’t shower.  Well, yesterday’s clothes will be fine then, right?

9:00am:  Missy, Madame Chaos, Dee, G and I get in the van.  Missy drives us around to the errands, then to the high school where she takes five classes.  She’s still technically homeschooled, but takes band, choir, math, speech, and seminary at the high school.

9:30am: We pick up Kiwi from the Jr High, then I drop all of them off at home while I head to the elementary school where I volunteer Monday mornings.  I spend 45 minutes in LouLou’s class, and the rest of the time in G’s class (even though he’s home sick). 

12:00pm:  Run to one of our town’s two gift shops, looking for a birthday gift for Maria.  Decide to get the yellow pepper-shaped dip bowl and see if I can find a red bowl somewhere else to go with it.  Drive to the other gift store (it’s closed Mondays) then Kings then in desperation to the dollar store, and finally go back to the first store and exchange the pepper bowl for a cute but not-quite-what-I wanted chip-and-dip set. 

12:50pm:  Back home to pick up Dee and Madame Chaos and the birthday cake; try again to make my unshowered hair appear nice; the kitchen is still a huge mess but I feel guilty leaving Kiwi to her homeschool (and sorta-sick G) alone, so I don’t ask her to clean it up for me.

1:00pm: Head to Maria’s birthday lunch at Kim’s house; Kim’s behind on today’s orders for her surgical hat making business, so I pitch in for half an hour on the sewing machine before we eat.  Madame Chaos jockeys for the scissors, holding up an almost-finished hat:  “But I want to cut this, Mom!”

2:30pm: Leave Dee to play with Kim’s son while M.C. and I drive home so I can get ready for LouLou’s 4-H club meeting.  Spend 45 minutes frantically sewing some sample string-pieced quilt blocks for demonstration; leave the house late (the kitchen still a huge mess) while spritzing on some perfume and trying again to make my hair not look stringy.

3:35pm:  Pick up LouLou and her friend at school then out to the country school to pick up Kim’s daughter and drive them all to 4-H.  In the car I have a coughing fit that leaves my lungs burning and all my mascara running down my face, adding to my aforementioned beauty.  We finally get to 4-H, where I teach the quilting mini-classes to the teens while the younger kids do their cooking and sewing rotations. 

 5:30pm:  Try to stay under the speed limit as I transport a carload of kids to their homes, and get home just in time to pick up G for his wrestling practice (he’s feeling better).  The kitchen is even worse now, with the after-school snack mess added to my cooking mess from this morning.  On the way out the door I holler to the big girls that I didn’t get anything made for dinner so just heat up some soup when the kids get hungry.

6:00pm:  Feel oddly grateful that we’re in the stinky wrestling room so my own gross unshowered carcass is less noticeably rank, while I watch stinky little boys learn the half-nelson.

7:30pm:  Get home to pandemonium; where’s my husband?  Hiding out at the computer, as unwilling as I am to face the mess and homework and parental judiciary duties.  We watch a battle scene of Serenity before we finally get up to herd the kids into chores, homework, and bedtime routine. 

8:45pm:  Get the younger set into bed; we’re still waiting for Missy to get home from working on a school project at a friend’s.  I’ve reached overload with kids and messes and so dh takes over and I head to bed.  I need to decompress; I read Eleanor Roosevelt’s biography for book club before escaping into sleep at 10pm.

I never did get that shower.

That’s what a lunar eclipse looks like to a 3-year-old.

I’ve been a pretty regular exerciser for the last ten years, even keeping up at spinning class until my 8th month of pregnancy.  Over that time I’ve taken step aerobics classes, lifted weights, sweated to The Firm in my neighbor’s basement, gone for walks, or attended 5:30am spin (stationary bike) at least three times a week.

Until last fall.

One morning I woke up at 5:00, and decided I wasn’t going to spin class, and I just never went back.  No gumption, no energy, and very little guilt.  I cancelled my gym membership, and wondered what was wrong with me.  One option I never, ever considered was jogging–ever since I about hyperventilated in junior high track, I’ve had no desire to run.  But two weeks ago, my neighbor invited me to start running down the road and back (a total of about 1.25 miles), it just hit me, Sure, why not?

The first day I stopped to walk about 6 times.  This morning was our 8th run, and I only walked twice.  I know that is sooooo pitiful, but at the Cool Running site, which has a program called “Couch to 5K,” I’m learning that I’m not the only beginner who is so out of shape! 

I decided to put this on my blog to give me more incentive to keep going.  My goal is to be able to jog the whole 5K in 7 more weeks, which puts me at about April Fool’s Day.  Maybe, just maybe, I will enter our town’s sprint-length triathlon this August.

I can’t believe I just said that.

I have dubbed February The Longest Shortest Month of the Year.  In 2004, I wrote a poem that encapsulates the feelings I have about what is nearly always my most difficult month:

Scratch February

Like a twitching itch on an unreachable patch

Of flesh, I jerk and spurt through

Twenty-eight days.  The sour

Stubborn silence of the soil

Mocks my languish, longing

For the euphoria of Spring still

Far off.   By turns soggy

And solid, bewildered by snow,

Then rain, then impossibly amiable

Temperance, the earth bows to the numbing

Power of interminable gray essence.

March on, February.  I am already

Out of step.  

                         –February 2004   

At the time, I was teaching poetry to three teenaged homeschoolers in a twice-weekly class in which we explored language, verse, rhythm, and practiced reading and writing poetry.  I wrote the above poem in response to
an exercise we did where we each brought five beautiful sounding words, and five ugly-sounding words.  We were to write a poem or two using the lists either separately or together.

The lists we had to work with were as follows: 

 Beautiful words:  essence, luminescence, cerebral palsy, piano, soil, croissant, tintinnabulations, silence, mystic, acquiesce, sorrow, languish, euphoria, fantasia, sashay, license, luscious. 

 Ugly words:  squelch, intoxicated, confabulation, gulch, kitchen, hack, gawk, puke, sour, ugly, gross, power, gut, rut, turd, scratch, jug.

We talked about auditory combinations that seem to be common in “ugly” words, like the hard “tch” sound, and about how words beginning with “sn” had a sort of slimy, nasal-y sound, as in “snot,” “snitch,” “snooze,” and “snore.”  Words thought of as “beautiful” often had the  “sh” sound, as well as other continuants, instead of the heavy stops of the “ugly” words.

 What are your favorite words to love or hate?  Why?

On Saturday, dh took all six kids to Cabela’s with him.  While he shopped for boots and salivated over the rest of the store, the kids took in the large collections and displays of stuffed-and-mounted animals, fish, and birds.  When they reached the aquarium, our five-year-old daughter Dee pointed and said,

 ”Look!  It’s the animals they haven’t killed yet!”

 . . . . is the name of my completed Valentine raffle quilt to be donated to the high school band’s travel fund.  I’m posting quilting details for those interested.

I did a sort of opposite-stitch-in-the-ditch by using a wavy stitch in the middle of the background blocks:

I used those quilted waves to echo the scalloped edge.  The pattern was very vague on how to do the scallop, but I think it turned out well:

The stitching ended up making some unintended heart shapes on the back:

I quilted meandering loops-and-hearts in the heart and the borders, using thread matched to the colors on the front but a verigated pink on the back.  This (very poorly lit)shot of the back (made of a plushy, Minkee-type fabric) gives you an idea of the finished quilting:

The quilt finished at an odd size — 53X62 inches — but it will be a great throw or cuddle-with-your-sweetheart blankie.  It was hard to let it go, so I hope it makes a ton of money!

As you well know, she looks like a cherub but it is a cunning disguise, meant to disarm the uninitiated and allow her to continue her nefarious crimes.

Here’s to many more years of nonstop adventure!

About six months ago I found the Yahoo group Stashbusters, an email discussion group made up of fabriholics who are trying to break the fabric-binging habit and bust their stashes of fabric by finishing UFOs (UnFinished Objects), PIGs (Projects in Grocery Sacks), and WHIMMs (Works Hidden In My Mind). The members report finishes, participate in challenges, post photos of completed projects, and encourage each other along the way. I have learned so much!

When I was asked to help with fundraising for Missy’s high school band trip, I decided to make a quilt to raffle. I had a charm pack of 35 different 5″ square Valentine fabrics, and asked the Stashbusters for ideas on how to use them in a simple, fast pattern. I was given some great advice, encouraging emails, and helpful links. I wanted to show the resulting quilt top, pictured above, so my fellow fabric fiends could see.

While looking for ideas, I came upon and bought a pattern called Scalloped Charm. I liked its simplicity, but modified the block so that the sashing and posts would surround every charm square. I did buy another valentine charm pack, as well as the fabric for the large border, but everything else was from stash. I also employed Bonnie Hunter’s ingenious leaders-and-enders technique for making two quilts at once, so while I was piecing the raffle quilt, I used 2.5″ squares as leaders/enders and effortlessly pieced almost all of a second scrap flag wall quilt:

It’s almost like magic — I got the whole star field done plus much of the red and white stripes, just by using those squares at the beginning and end of piecing chains. As a bonus, I saved thread and time because there are no long thread pieces to cut at the end of piecing, since there is always something under the needle. Thank you, Bonnie!

So I’ve got the raffle quilt top ready to quilt.  I’ll just use my domestic sewing machine (I don’t have a long-arm quilting machine) to do it, but I welcome any input and advice on what I should do.  At first, I was going to use a deep-pink-to-white varigated thread and just free-motion hearts and loops all over, but the thread is pretty obnoxiously hot pink.  So now I’m thinking I’ll use red thread in the heart section and try to soften its blocky look with free-motion hearts and loops.  But the rest of it is undecided–should I emphasize the pink field’s strong diagonals by quilting in-the-ditch, or should I free-motion there, too (probably with pink thread)?  Quilt the borders separately?  Use pink thread in the brown border? 

The pattern calls for a “scalloped” piping just inside the binding.  I’m thinking about a pink border with a red scallop, or the opposite.  What would you do?

Or Thoreau..

Or Van Gogh.

Or So-and-So.

 Whoever.

 Last year when I finally got around to reading Beckett’s absurdist play Waiting for Godot, I was struck by the similarity between the two main characters’ waiting in vain through five acts for this fellow Godot to show up, and my own growing ambivalence over the current political scene.  The past six years, which I might have titled Waiting for Bush to Figure Stuff Out has simply rendered me unable to muster my usual election-year semihope that any one candidate can really make a change for good (reading War and Peace last year and being strongly persuaded by Tolstoy’s fatalist argument also contributed to that).   In every election but one, I have voted third-party as a meager protest against the two-party system that, in my opinion, only encourages candidates to be wind-sniffing opportunists who cannot be taken at their word.  There are aspects of both parties’ platforms that turn my stomach, so I can’t align myself with either of them. 

So I greet the hype over the current caucus season with a yawn.  You’d think, as a Mormon, that I’d be enthused about Romney’s run, but I’d be happier if he had kept his “unchangeable” stance during the Massachussetts gubenatorial election regarding choice and on gay rights; however, he’s shown himself to be a panderer like the rest of ‘em.  I simply don’t believe his story about his “change of heart”– while I do think that it is a mark of intelligence and tolerance to be able to change one’s mind, to be willing to examine one’s beliefs and attitudes and make adjustments as needed, in Romney’s case, the timing was tooooooo convenient.    And, despite our common religion, I don’t agree with his (current, public) stances on immigration, abortion, or gay rights.   Life is just not as clear-cut as that. 

But there really isn’t anyone I can get behind–which seems to be the case every election season.  I hate how polarizing the electoral process is, and its negativity spills over into my views of the candidates.  I wish I could be an optimist about it–I am very grateful to live in this country with its freedoms, democratic processes, and emphasis on compromise, and I know that careful consideration in choosing a leader is the least I can do to show that appreciation.  On the other hand, anyone who WANTS to be president must be at least a little bit of a lunatic.

 It is going to be a long year.