Fourth day of school

Day one, he had his doubts, because he hadn't gotten any work done.

Day two, he said, "well, socially I think this will be fine, but I'm not so sure about academically." He was anxious about already being behind because of computer issues. (No wireless access in the temporary building makes it tough to do online school.) That evening we talked to his US History teacher, who suggested that he start history and math after Labor Day, and the academic pressure relaxed.

Day three, yesterday, massive confusion about pick-up location amidst a torrential downpour, but when he finally made it home, he said, "I had a really fun day today." YAY!

Plants and other living things

I can't believe I killed the rosemary plant. I thought those plants were pretty near indestructible. Less than three weeks with me, and it looks like it was abandoned for months.



I guess it's still a good home, though. When I looked through the viewfinder, I realized that the plant had an inhabitant that seemed quite happy to be there, although less happy to have a giant looming human peering at it.




Even more than the dead rosemary, though, I can't believe that the flowers are thriving. Plants are weird.



I had another picture of the plants, a close-up. But I couldn't resist this one with Zelda smiling at me from the door. Happy flowers, a happy dog, a happy lizard--three out of four isn't so bad.

Dinner

I did a mangled recipe for dinner tonight. Back in San Francisco, my roommate Danielle made a pasta dish with smoked oysters that was delish. I've tried to make it a couple times and never come anywhere close, so tonight I browsed for smoked oyster pasta recipes, then took the bits of recipes I a) liked and b) had the ingredients for. (And b was sadly more important than a.)

(Of minor note--I didn't really cook much back in SF, so it's possible that the dish was incredibly good just because real food always tasted amazing. When you live on bagels and microwave pizza, sometimes all food really needs to be is warm.)

So my recipe: I preheated a frying pan with a generous dollop of olive oil in it over medium low, while I diced an onion. A small one, because the big one was half rotten *sigh*. Threw the onion in the pan, and while it started cooking, pressed two garlic cloves through the recently re-discovered garlic press, which probably only has a brief window of use before it gets buried in the drawer again, and added them. Took a handful of sun dried tomatoes and chopped them up, although not too fine, mostly because they kept sticking to the knife, then tossed them in the pan. Finally chopped up a tin of smoked oysters--mashed might be a better word for it--and added it. Stirred a few times.

Then--and this was probably key--I realized that I'd forgotten to start my water for the pasta. Ah, how sad. I turned the heat a little lower on the pan of "sauce", and turned the water on. Except for some reason I only turned the water on to medium. Another 20 minutes later and I realized my water still wasn't boiling. About 40 minutes after I started cooking, the water finally boiled and I could cook the pasta.

The reason all that is important is that my "sauce" cooked slowly for a long time over a really low heat. And it was YUM. Funnily enough, though, not so much on the pasta, although I was certainly happy to eat it. But I was too hungry to wait, so kept taking little bits of the oyster/onion/garlic/tomato mash and spreading it on bread, and it was fantastic. Definitely one of the better mangled recipes I've done recently. It didn't even occur to me to take a picture, but since it was really one of the ugliest foods I've seen, that's probably not a problem.

(Another minor note: the kid wouldn't even taste it. I allowed this, because I didn't really mind if I didn't have to share. He got to have some bottled sauce over spaghetti instead.)

Going gray

I never spent much time picturing my hair turning gray: sure, sometimes I imagine myself as an old woman, already gray, but that's not usually about the hair. That's about family or solitude or pain and suffering.

I have said that as soon as I started going gray, I'd start dying my hair, but secretly, I haven't been so sure. Honestly, dying your hair is a lot of work, a lot of maintenance, and I'm kinda lazy when it comes to my looks. I barely brush my hair and I rarely get it cut--how would I keep up with color?

But when I pictured that day, I pictured my hair with a sprinkling of silver, strands lightly scattered throughout the brown. Never once did I imagine graying at the temples first. Why not, I wonder? That's how my brother went gray. That's how lots of people go gray. But you know, those people generally seem to be men.

Now that I'm finally here, I really understand why we dye our hair. And it probably is worth the work. But I'm also sort of curious about what it will be like if I just let it happen.

Family visit

I claim that I can work through anything and it's largely true. Long practice, I'm sure: way back when, I could walk through crowded school hallways without ever pausing in my reading to try to get a few more pages in between classes. Back when I was freelancing, I was perfectly capable of writing a coherent news story with a three-year-old pulling on one arm. Reading while walking is actually easier than writing while parenting, but the practice focusing during the former probably made the latter possible. The experience of the latter has made my current work a breeze. I really could probably work through a hurricane, if the power stayed on.

Today, my parents brought the kids over, and while sitting at my desk, I could see R, T, and C playing in the pool. It was another phenomenal day--I might have considered it too hot, just a few short weeks ago--and there was laughing and splashing and moderate shrieking. Meanwhile, the dog couldn't decide where to be, Dad was working on fixing the wood of the pillar two feet away from me, and the bird was sure that since I was at my desk I should let her out (she's not concerned with trivial details like the risk of someone opening the doors to the outside) and kept trying to tell me so. Loudly.

And yet still, I worked. I'm torn, though, between being pleased with myself (what focus!) and hoping that this wasn't one of those days that one regrets wasting on one's deathbed. The fun chaos of having six people in the house is all too rare in my life.

The game has changed

The basketball game with the dog isn't working out quite as well as it did the first few days, because Zelda has decided that she likes to swim. She won't even wait for us to get to the ball anymore: if it's in the water, she hurls herself in after it. Once she reaches it, she drags it to the stairs and then waits. If we don't throw it, the current created by the pump will slowly drag it away from the steps and into deeper water. She lets it get a foot or two away, and then her muscles start to bunch and her legs tremble and then...Splash! She's back in the water. She spent more time in the pool today than I did.

R's computer is broken and he is out-of-sorts. I think possibly that not having all the outlets that his various games provide is giving him too much time to reflect and worry. But it's not showing up as coherent "I am anxious about school starting" statements, more just generalized mean, coupled with a longing to fight about nothing. I declined to buy flank steak for stir fry and you'd have thought I'd become Republican from the scorn heaped upon my willful ignorance. Sometimes I think becoming taller than me has gone to his head. You'd think he'd at least learn to cook before criticizing my ingredient choices.

Leaving the house

I'm tempted to find it ironic that I leave this house so much more than the last. I don't think I could even count the number of places I've been in the last two weeks: restaurants and food stores, hardware stores and...hmm, I wonder what the generic name is for stores like Target and Bed Bath & Beyond? Well, plenty of them, too. Ha, and that doesn't even include the pool supply stores. Oh, the pool supply stores! Yes, how I've loved them.

I'd guess that all that will slow down a little now that we're more settled, and once school starts, but actually it is one of the things that I'm loving about our new home. There's so much more here. Yes, I could have gone to every place I've been from the last house (and did, sometimes) but it was a trek. To go anywhere except the grocery store was an hour commitment for the driving. Oh, and the food--well, our "easy" sit-down restaurants there were Perkins and Chilis and while I don't mind either, I don't mind them a lot more if I eat at them very very rarely.

Yesterday, I went to the farmer's market and it's the prettiest farmer's market I've ever seen. Considering how crowded it was at 8:30, I'm not sure I want to visit it at 11, but it was lovely. I bought some lemon parsley pasta (which we haven't tried yet), peaches and green beans, and best of all, a container pot of mixed flowers for the front porch and another of rosemary. I told the saleswoman that I was death to plants so wanted something that had a chance of surviving me, so she carefully picked out a pot with three perennials, including one that looks like beach grass, and told me all the others plants (four or five of them) would die, but that would leave more room for the surviving three. I suspect, knowing my history with plants, that they'll all die, but the beach grass might survive. I can hope, anyway.

I put the rosemary on the patio table and between the smell of cedar from the shower and the smell of the plant, the patio smells so good that I could sit there all day and just breathe. I ate dinner there in the early evening--a plate of fresh bread and interesting cheese and some smoked salmon and grapes and a glass of San Pellegrino water (eventually upgraded to a glass of red wine, the Menage a Trois that I like so much) and yes, it sounds pretentious, I'll have to balance it out with a microwave pizza or some leftover Chinese food today, but truly, it was delicious.