In Which I Am Ill

Here is what I learned last night:

1. Like butter, milk, and bacon, you should always keep a back-up quart of ice cream in the freezer.

2. If all the snot in your head is crowding out the brain cells, put your husband in charge of the garnishes.

I learned this when we had one of my husband's professors and his lovely wife over for dinner last night. I'll be quite frank: I wasn't in a good mood about it. I was looking forward to meeting these people and wanted to make a good impression, but I was also coming down with a cold and wanted to curl up with tankards of orange juice and chicken broth.

But the perfect hostess does not cancel at the last minute, even if she risks getting her guests sick. The perfect hostess knows that if she gives the impression of being organized and hygienic, her guests will never suspect her of giving them the sniffles.

So forward we went. I'd made a big pot of white chicken chili and a sour cream coffee cake the night before, so all I had to do was set the table, light the candles, and warm up the chili after work. Easy. Or at least it gave the impression of being easy--sort of like those messy buns where you need four hands and half an hour of earnest teasing to make people think you just threw it together. (I used to whine about not having a big sister to teach me how to make messy buns, but in the age of YouTube I suppose that complaint is no longer valid.) I was a little concerned about the coffee cake--it had fallen mysteriously as it cooled--but decided that on my list of things to worry about, dessert wasn't nearly as important as "make sure not to leak snot into the chili while stirring."

It turned out to be a lovely evening. Much laughter, and I mostly understood the architecture-talk. (Mostly. There were a few bad moments early on when they walked in and said, "Oh, what a lovely home!" I thought they were talking about our decorating, but then they said it was a great example of modernist something in the something style, as evidenced by the roof joinery, and all I could say was, "Mmm!") We were having such a good time that no one looked at me funny when I cut into the coffee cake and understood the mysterious deflation: The bottom third wasn't cooked.

"Ha! Ha!" said I, giving my husband a hunted look that meant Please tell me we have ice cream and frozen berries in the freezer so we can improvise some sort of berry crumble.

"Yum! Cake batter!" he cried.

So we got through that. We had a nice conversation over tea and none of us even noticed how late it was getting. Eventually they headed out. The hubby threw plates in the dishwasher and I bagged the leftovers to put in the fridge... at which point I noticed the cup of fresh-squeezed lime juice, the chopped scallions, the shredded cheese, the cilantro, the sour cream, and the pico de gallo I'd meant to put out as garnishes for the chili.

"Ha! Ha!" said I, giving my husband a hunted look that meant It is time for me not to be awake anymore.

"Don't worry. We'll use those on the leftover chili and you're taking a sick day tomorrow," he said.

"I don't need to take a sick day tomorrow."

"You sneezed thirty-eight times tonight and you've turned into a mouth breather. You need to stay in bed."

And so I conclude with this question: If you went over to someone's house for dinner and she sneezed thirty-eight times and, by the time you left, was surrounded by her own little sea of spent Kleenex, you wouldn't blame your subsequent cold on her, would you?

In Which the Best Is Yet to Come (We Hope)

Folks, it's official: As of today there is more pregnancy behind me than before me. Which I call a reason for rejoicing. Although if the Advice Ladies at work are to be believed, I've got plenty of agony left to go. 

"Ohhh, get ready, it's the most excruciating pain you've ever experienced," say the Advice Ladies. "They'll need to stick you with the epidural like eight times and then the baby will get stuck and then you'll have an emergency C-section and the anesthesiologist will screw up and..."

"I'm not having an epidural," say I.

And then they look at me like I look at the people who dance on street corners without enough clothes on--with pity and with concern and with hope that the craziness isn't catching. 

But I'm not going to freak out about labor. If it's the price of a child, I'll pay it. No, more than that--if it's the price of getting my normal body back, I'll pay it. The first twenty weeks of pregnancy have been an accelerated journey back through the best of puberty--the greasy hair (they told me prenatal vitamins would make it thick and glossy), the acne (is this what they mean by "glowing"?), the moods...oh, the moods...

My husband has been a prince about the moods. And they're a lot better than they used to be. There were a few nights when I burst into tears while making dinner, wept that I couldn't handle the responsibility of heating up leftover soup, flung myself into bed, and cried myself to sleep. And then there was the horrible day when he told me, so, so gently, that maybe we needed to start budgeting for all the steak I was suddenly eating. 

Here is the lesson of the second trimester: Not being nauseous is a great mood improver. 

Which is all to say--poor Princess Kate. The benefits of a diamond tiara don't nearly outweigh the awfulness of vomiting. I hope they plunk that dear woman at an estate somewhere in Scotland, give her nice stretchy sweatpants, and then leave her alone for nine months. And then I hope--I really, really hope--she'll be willing to share her Royal Pregnancy Hair Tips. Because my hair just cannot handle another pregnancy like this.

In Which I Advise Those Who Will Come After Me

I was naive going into this. I admit that. I thought that being the wife of a grad student would be simple. Sure, I anticipated a few changes. I knew that I would have to proofread the occasional paper. I knew that the hubby would usually have to study during our evening coffee dates, but I looked forward to this as a chance to catch up on all the classic literature I missed in college. I imagined myself hosting study parties at our apartment and feeding everyone blondies. (I make very good blondies.) I imagined everyone asking for my blondie recipe.

So far, no one has asked for my blondie recipe. 

I imagine that I am not the only person seeing her spouse through graduate school. In the spirit of solidarity, then, let me offer these five handy tips for surviving the long years ahead:

1. Learn the lingo. This is important. The hubby and I used to have conversations that went like this:

Hubby: ...and the anterior shakes on the Dutchman's joints appeared bilaterally spliced between the midsection and crossbeam, and, as Higgins notes, the brick facade is fundamentally unstable without the stretcher bond touchpointing the spall.
Me: Erm. Can you chop that mango for me?

But after a month or so we had this conversation, of which I am not proud:

Hubby: I'm free Saturday after I get back from field recordation and condition assessment for stabilization at the Watson-Price barn.
Me: The...meh? The what?
Hubby: I've been doing this for two weeks. Remember?
Me: Is that where you're trying to save the barn that they should totally just tear down because it's an eyesore?
Hubby: I'm getting the feeling that you're not particularly invested in my chosen field of study.
Me: Erm. Smoochies?

So I'm working on learning the lingo, because I like knowing what my husband's talking about. I know what a a jalousie window is and where to find it (trailer parks, mostly) and I know that lamb's tongue has nothing to do with soft fluffy animals. I'm still mostly quiet when he's talking about school, but now when I say "Erm" it's an educated erm.

2. Expect to cook a lot of dinners and do a lot of dishes and wash a lot of laundry. I imagine that spouseless grad students just let the dishes and laundry pile up until the end of the term, at which point they burn it all. I see no other option: there simply isn't time in the graduate schedule to allow for normal domestic activities. As the spouse, if you don't want to reside in a hovel you're going to have to take on a bit more than your fifty-percent share of the housework.

Your spouse will feel guilty about this. Every time he thanks you and apologizes for not being able to help, tell him it's your joy and you love being able to help him out. And then, at the end of the term, when exams are in the past and he's had his first good night's sleep in three months, he'll cook you a nice dinner. There will probably be candles. This makes all the laundry worthwhile.

3. There will not be much you can do to help. Get over it now. You can't do the reading and you can't take notes and you can't do the detailed architectural drawings (well, you can, but you will do them wrong). You will wake up at three in the morning and realize that your spouse hasn't come to bed yet because he's still trying to churn out a paper and you will want with every ounce of your being to take some of the load off his shoulders. You can't. You can't even format his footnotes for him because his program uses an incredibly counterintuitive style you've never heard of before.

I may be alone in the desire to format my husband's footnotes.

4. Grad student housing sucks. It's best to get over this quickly. You will dream of drapes. You will imagine all the colors you could paint your walls if you were allowed to paint. You will spend untold hours on Pinterest lusting after the floorplan you can't have. You will wish desperately for a puppy, but the only allowable pets have gills. You will fantasize about having closets with doors on them. You will think about someday, maybe, having neighbors who don't store their trash outside their front door. (Also pans full of grease.)

The day for drapes will come. For now, just be glad you have a door that locks.

5. Remember it will end. This is the hardest part--especially on this side of summer, when the hubby will have an internship 3,000 miles away. But I keep trusting that, as always, many years from now I'll look back on this time and be amazed that it went so quickly.

Well, maybe not quickly. But it sure can't last forever. Until then, I'll keep working on this blondie recipe. Because even if I don't get an honorary master's degree out of this, I will at least keep my family well fed. 

In Which the Government Gets My Money, Even Though I Don't Feel Like They're Doing a Particularly Good Job Representing Me

Here is what it's like to do taxes in high school:

Collect W2 from employer. Give it to Dad. Dad says, "Cool, I'll take care of that." Several months later, receive check in mail. Rejoice.

Here is what it's like to do taxes in college: 

Collect W2 from employer. Lose it in stack of papers. Two months later, panic and turn desk inside out looking for it. Succeed. Give it to Dad. Several months later, receive check in mail. Rejoice.

Here is what it's like to do taxes as a newlywed:

Collect W2s from employers. Add up the two numbers. Write numbers on forms and send forms to government. Several months later, receive check in mail. Rejoice.

Here is what it's like to do taxes when you have one job but that job involves the occasional speaking engagement and you have one W2 but about eight miscellaneous income forms from the different groups you spoke to and your husband is a graduate student and he was a non-resident for the first term of the year and he has a lot of receipts for school-related expenses like books and protractors and and you also moved across the country and have about a thousand receipts documenting the move:

Collect every piece of paper you have touched in the past year. Have a glass of wine. Regard papers. Wonder what would happen if you wrote a letter to the IRS saying "How about we just call it even this year?" Have a cookie. Compose letter. Show letter to husband. Giggle manically while husband deletes letter. Call H&R Block and try not to sound too hysterical on the phone. Resolve to become a hermit next year.

We know what would be easier? We could make taxes proportional to how well we feel the government's done. I'm happy to pay my state and local taxes this year, for example. The roads aren't too pothole-y and the trash is always picked up on time. The state parks are well maintained and they're always careful to post warnings when someone has been mauled by a bear recently. Congress, however, reached an unprecedented level of incompetence this year, and I just don't trust them with my money. 

If you need me at any point in the next week, I can be found on my couch amidst a pile of papers and file folders and ballpoint pens and paper clips and post-it notes, wishing that we were still on the feudal system and I could satisfy my debt to the government (or benevolent overlord) with a few sheaves of wheat and my daughter's hand in marriage. Wish me luck. 

In Which I Make Plans and Abandon Them

I have this friend.

I met her in college. We were both eighteen, but she was already so much older. It was like she was the dorm mother, always there to wipe a tear, always ready to make you a big pot of tea and listen to your sorrows. And she was a great cook. (Still is.) It's funny to think of dorm and hospitality in the same breath, but somehow she managed it.

I had different priorities. I was planning to work for the International Justice Mission at the time. I was working on my French and was certain I'd be using it in international development. I wanted to be important. I wanted to do something big, something that would make a measurable difference in the world. I remember telling a group of friends that I was more interested in planning my career than dreaming about marriage and children.

We got older. My friend travelled. She learned languages. And while she was doing that, I settled down and got married.

Priorities change.

Perspectives shift.

I can't tell you where my friend is today--it would, quite literally, compromise her safety. She's working for peace and she's working for justice and she's working for the restoration of all things. The global community will be stronger, more vibrant because of her life. Whenever I talk to her I tell her to be safe, and I tell her that she's free to come live in my neighborhood so we can swap lasagna recipes and have Christmas present wrapping parties. And I feel like I'm telling Joan of Arc to stay home and churn the butter.

And me? I live in a valley not far from the mountains. I share my life with my husband, and our hopes for the future are for children, pets, a backyard with lots of trees and maybe a creek, and a loaf of bread in the oven. I pray that our home will ring with the laughter of good friends. That's it.

I have a quiet life.

And I can't imagine being happier. I can hardly remember a time when I didn't want this, and not for the world would I trade my life for my friend's. Nor would she trade hers for mine. In spite of our best-laid plans, I think we've both ended up exactly where we were supposed to be.

How's that for happy endings?

In Which I Give Up Before I Get Started

A friend of mine, through a fluke of gift subscriptions, receives two copies of Better Homes and Gardens every month. She very kindly gives me the extra magazine, giving me a chance to study the lives of people who have too much money and too much time on their hands.

The chief purpose of magazines like this is to make the reader feel inferior. Are there really people who never have dishes in the sink? Whose pantries stay perfectly organized? Who have boxes of craft things and can always find the tape when they need it? Who have matching dishes? Who manage to keep all their children's toys confined to a few tasteful baskets? Who repaint their kitchens every two or three years? Who display orange and pink throw pillows? Who put the bed skirt on the bed instead of tossing it in the back of the closet? Who wear heels and pearls while washing dishes? Who arrange vases and antique-looking knick knacks on their bookshelves instead of books?

This last point is the one that really gets me. Any picture of a home that includes bookshelves inevitably looks like this:



Seriously. The caption on this photo is actually "Arrange perfect bookshelves every time." On these bookshelves are vases, candles, framed pictures, large shells, and boxes (which probably contain scented pine cones and other out-of-season decorations). Where the poop are the books?

Oh. Here they are.



Very charming and artistic and everything, but what happens when you want to grab a book that isn't on the top of the stack?

Boom. That's what happens.

But magazine people don't have that problem, because magazine people don't actually buy books to read them. Magazine people buy books to fit their décor.

So I flip through the home section pretty quickly and move into the gardens. Which is just another opportunity to feel inadequate, because I can keep a plant alive for about a week and a half before it dies a grisly death. I also skip through the craft section, because I am not the sort of person who should be allowed anywhere near scrapbooking supplies.

But I can make a mean French onion soup. The kind that takes a whole afternoon to simmer. The kind with inch-thick baguettes and melty, bubbly Gruyère on top. If I had the magazine people over for dinner they'd ask questions about calories and fiber content, and they'd note that our books are arranged by genre and author, not color, and they'd politely choose not to remark on the fact that I still have gourds and dried corn on the table from Thanksgiving.

I have genetics working against me here. Twenty years ago my parents were trying to sell their house and they painted the living room a particularly striking shade of blue. It wasn't even dry when the realtor walked in and said, "Well, the first thing that has to change is that paint." Like them, I will never attempt dramatic decorating. I will never have a charming country home. But I'll always have soup and good friends and the man I love, and plenty of books to keep me company on rainy days.

In Which I Humbly Request Your Assistance

My computer got all sluggish again tonight. (More sluggish than usual, I mean. It's pretty elderly, and just like elderly folks it wakes up pretty slowly and likes to take the occasional nap in the middle of the day...usually when I'm trying to watch the new episode of Downton Abbey.) When it gets slow I usually just give up and figure I should have been doing something more useful with my time anyway, but the hubby does this mysterious thing where he cleans out the cache--or, to continue with a metaphor I should probably abandon, gives it Alzheimer's. So it forgets all the things it doesn't really need to know and gets all speedy again.

So the hubby was cleaning the cache, and as he did so he remarked, "Crazy! I'm removing half a gigabyte!"

And I did that thing where I go "Hmm!"

Because here's the confession: I don't know what a gigabyte is. I know it's a lot of bytes. I know that a megabyte is a lot of bytes, too, but giga doesn't really sound that much bigger than mega. I understand both prefixes to mean, "Oh, gosh, a whole bunch." And now apparently I have to know about terabytes as well. Why couldn't they just stick with the metric system?


I start to panic whenever bytes of any size come up in conversation. I never know what I'm supposed to say, so I start examining the other person's face for clues. Do they seem impressed? Appalled? Irritated? Geeked out? I always say exactly the same thing ("Dude, seriously?") but I vary my tone to suit their facial expression. This is the quickest way to end the byte conversation, I've found.

But I've decided to come clean about it, and here's where I'm asking for your help. I need a clever mnemonic device to help me remember the order of the sizes. Evidently it goes:

byte
kilobyte
megabyte
gigabyte
terabyte

So I need a B.K.M.G.T. phrase, please. The hubby suggests "Bring Kleenex! My Girl's Tribulations," but this has two strikes against it:

(1) I'd prefer a phrase less concerned with my propensity to sniffle.
(2) I can't remember it.

I was considering "Burger King Makes Great Tacos," but I can't stomach lies on that scale. So I turn to you, Gentle Readers. Please, please, help me sound educated.

In Which I Demonstrate Remarkable Generosity

So. Pippa Middleton has a new book coming out. It's called How to Be the Perfect Party Hostess and she was paid a $622,000 advance for it. Apparently it's going to include "amusing anecdotes."

Now. I'm not saying she's greedy and I'm not saying that she's crap at titles. I'm just saying that I could come up with a better title if I were trapped in the Labyrinth of Crete and the Minotaur were close on my heels. (Or, for the less classically minded among us, if I were being chased by murderers with knives. Or possibly bears.) And if I were to write such a book, no way in heck I'd ask for that much money for it.

In fact, to demonstrate my generosity, here's the first draft of Do You Think They'll Notice the Chicken's Raw? And Other Adventures in Entertaining, which I offer for absolutely no money at all.

Chapter One: An Abundance of Booze


A few months after I was married, my new brother-in-law described my wedding as "an epic drinking fail." From this I learned the first rule of entertaining: always provide alcohol. Little umbrellas are appreciated but not required.

The way I provide alcohol is this: I inform my husband that we need wine, or beer, or cider (for people like me who don't really like beer but don't want to look weird and have wine instead), or delicious mixed drinks. He goes to the store and comes back with something cheap and delicious. He has an unusual talent for finding quality drinks in a reasonable price range--a talent I do not share. Once I went to the store to buy bourbon and ended up spending eight bucks on something the hubby described as "nail polish remover." This is why I'm not allowed to buy alcohol anymore.

If you are without an informed party to buy your alcohol and uncork a bottle of wine without giving himself a hernia, find one immediately. Do not attempt to entertain without one.

Chapter Two: Ambience, Or, Why No One's Talking


There are two essential elements to setting the mood for your party: decorating and creating your iTunes playlist.

To decorate, first shove all your laundry in a little-used room. Close the door and do not allow guests to enter. A quarantine sign on the door would not be amiss. Next, purchase several large swaths of batik fabric. Artfully arrange the fabric over every piece of furniture you got at a thrift store while you were in college. Finally, gather several stubby beeswax candles and position them on the table. Do not worry if they melt all over the tablecloth. This is art.

When choosing the music, it's best to start with something artsy. Something that makes people think "Hmm, my host is one classy dude." Philip Glass is a good choice. Transition into something with a discernible beat, and finish up with Shakira or Lady Gaga. By the end of the evening you want people dancing, or at least swaying their hips with a thoughtful expression on their faces.

Chapter Three: Wouldn't It Be Easier to Get a Party Platter at Costco?


Food provides not just something to chew on during those awkward pauses in the conversation, but sets the tone of the entire event. A casual gathering? A big pot of chili with mountains of cheese! A weekend brunch? Coffee cake and fruit salad. A formal dinner? Three different appetizers, brightly colored cocktails, and salmon arranged in a spiral and slathered with creamy dill sauce.

When planning the menu for your party, be flexible. Allow for the possibility that your guest of honor will inform you, as you present him with a side of barbecued ribs, that he became a vegetarian last Tuesday.

Expect compliments. These are your friends: they should tell you you're the best cook in your generation. If they don't show the proper appreciation for your garlic shrimp cocktail and pesto-parmesan straws, don't invite them back. Life is too short to make delicate appetizers for people who prefer Doritos.

Chapter Four: Isn't It Time You Found New Friends?


The guest list is the most tedious--and the most crucial--task on any host's to-do list. Who to invite? How many? And if Karri comes you can't invite Brad, because they have that history, but Josh probably won't come without Brad because he doesn't know anyone else, and if Josh doesn't come Alli will get upset because she totally has a thing for him...

And so on.

Don't invite any of them. Once you've gone to all that work planning the menu, decorating, selecting tasteful music, even lighting candles, for heaven's sakes, why would you want to spoil any of it with other people?

However, as Alton Brown quipped, "There is no meal that can fix bad company, but I've seen great company fix meals." And so, on those occasions when you simply must entertain, invite the friends who won't hold it against you if the meat is still bleeding and the enchiladas burned and the broccoli is all gray and slithery. Similarly, don't hold it against them when they offer to spring for pizza.

Fin.

In Which the Planet Goes All Rumble-y

Slow news day today. I was driving home from work, listening to the dulcet tones of Robert Siegel on All Things Considered and frowning over the impending doom of Europe, and then the station broke away to do the local news.

The local NPR station sucks. This is a source of constant frustration to me. The announcers are always stumbling over words and giggling when they mess up and they're just so boring to listen to. When they're not stuttering and giggling they sound like they're welcoming people to a funeral parlor. The one exception is the Token British Dude, Kristian Foden-Vencil, who has the oddest name I've ever come across. He's not a particularly good speaker--not bad, just average--and I think they hired him to confuse listeners and make them think they're listening to the BBC.

Anyway. Slow news day. The biggest stories coming out of Oregon today are the following:

1. Students at Oregon public schools aren't getting any stupider, but they're not getting any smarter, either. Test scores stayed flat this year. They milked this story for about three minutes, interviewing people with official-sounding titles who all said "Well, we're glad the kids aren't stupider, and we'll work hard to make them smarter next year."

2. There was an earthquake at Mount St. Helen today. Which got my attention, believe me. They were about a minute into the story when they mentioned that it registered 2.0 on the Richter scale, and scientists then revised that number down to 0.8. This is not a very impressive number, and I decided not to have a minor freak-out about it. In fact, said a scientist, this was a fairly normal earthquake. They record rumblings of this type every single day. I think this was supposed to be reassuring, but it had me gripping the steering wheel with the Clutches o' Death. Mount St. Helen is constantly being shaken by small earthquakes? And I'm supposed to feel better? 


Apparently earthquakes are a slow-news item around here, and I guess I was the only listener hyperventilating, because Kristian quickly moved on to...

3. The grape harvest looks to be better than expected for local vineyards.

Whoa. Wait. Dude. Earthquake. Daily earthquakes. And I know for a fact that people are still hiking all over it. Don't these people have any sense of self-preservation? And who gives a crap about Greece imploding when Mount St. Helen is making ominous rumbling noises? So I got home and decided to do some research on West Coast earthquakes.

You know how sometimes you'll get a weird rash on your foot and you Google it and then you end up convincing yourself that it's fatal and at the very least they're going to have to amputate? Or you have a sore throat so you plug your symptoms into WebMD and up comes "throat cancer" and you spend the rest of the night in a cold sweat about it? This is why you should never, ever Google things that scare you and have the potential to be blown out of proportion. I should have remembered that. And I never should have looked at this article. "The amount of devastation is going to be unbelievable..."

We're doomed. We're all doomed. But I'm determined to look on the bright side: maybe, thousands of years from now, Oregon will be sort of a modern-day Pompeii and archeologists will find our apartment and use it to learn all sorts of things about life in the twenty-first century. Chief among their findings, I imagine, will be the discovery that twenty-first century humanoids didn't keep up with the laundry.

I should go work on that, probably. For posterity's sake.

In Which I Celebrate the Season

The trees are turning and the air is getting crisp and morning runs have never been lovelier. Which means it's time to begin my annual tradition of Nagging Noah About Halloween.

This is a tradition that goes back to the early days of our relationship. Every year I tell him I want to dress up as Noah and Mrs. Noah and carry around stuffed animals. Possibly we could pose the animals in an inner tube, which is about as close to an ark as we're going to get. And every year Noah celebrates his own traditions, which are Getting All Snarky About Costumes and, at the last minute, Putting on a Fedora and Calling Himself Cary Grant.  He looks darn good in a fedora, so I've never raised much complaint.

But for the record: once we have kids Cary Grant will be retired, at least on Halloween. Instead, we're going to throw on bathrobes or sheets or something Old Testamenty and dress the kids up as animals and put them in a wagon that we've gussied up as an ark and drag them around the neighborhood. It will be epic.

In the meantime I'm celebrating fall in all the usual ways. There's a snaggle-toothed jack-o'-lantern sitting on our doorstep and beginning to rot--no way that thing makes it to Halloween--and we've got a skillion apples waiting to be cooked into pies. I'm downing gallons of chai, but no orchard-fresh cider this year. It's bizarre--a gallon of cider costs $7.99 out here. This is, of course, highway robbery, so I'm staging a protest. I asked my mother to get a gallon and stick it in the freezer for me, so I'll have some when we go home at Christmas.

And the celebrate-fall plan for today? Pack away the summer clothes and sandals and get out the winter coats and sweaters and blankets. And figure out something to do with all my scarves. I have a lot, and I don't really need a lot--the winters here are pretty mild. Noah gives me lots of raised eyebrows over my collection. Maybe I'll pin them to a bedsheet and cut a hole for his head and call it a Coat of Many Colors. He can be Joseph this year instead of Cary Grant. It's probably best to work up to Noah and the Ark gradually.

In Which I Seek Connection

I've got another conference coming up next week. I'm pretty darn geeked about this one, actually. It's a children's writing conference and I get to spend the week talking about books and kids and why the very most important work in the world is bringing them together. Can you think of any better way to spend a few days in September? Any way at all?

I was at a conference with my father a few years back (and it might help you here to know that my dad is probably the most extraordinary children's writer of his generation) (and I only say this because so many other people said it first). He gave a keynote address about the importance of story, and by the end he had everyone weeping. Even me, and I'd already heard all his stories. Afterwards I asked him if his goal was to make people cry, and he said, "I want them to take this work seriously."

That's my goal at this conference, too. To teach the writers to take their calling seriously. To teach them the craft and give them the tools to become excellent. Also, I get to bring some picture books and read bedtime stories. (It would be easier to find a good selection, incidentally, if Hubby-of-my-dreams had let me take the unliftably-big-box-o'-picture-books when we moved. This was a source of some contention at the time. It's still a source of contention, actually. While I understand that our apartment is laughably small cozy and if we get more books we'll have to start stacking them underneath the pots and pans, or possibly on top of the refrigerator, I'd still feel a lot better if they were close by instead of sitting in the guest room at my parents' house.)

Another advantage of this conference: I get to actually spend time with the writers. This usually doesn't happen. Here's how it often goes:

I sit at a table in an overcrowded room with a bottle of water, pad of paper, and professional-looking pen in front of me. A woman walks in, looking like Marie Antoinette on Guillotine Day, and takes a deep, shuddery breath as she extends her hand. I introduce myself, give her a massive smile, and tell her to sit down and tell me about her work.

She speaks very quickly for thirty seconds as she gives me her memorized pitch. It sounds like she's reading marketing copy. She stops abruptly and looks at me, then glances down at her notes. (I can read these notes upside-down. At the top it says, it big letters, SMILE and at the bottom, DON'T LEAVE WITHOUT BIZ CARD.) She looks back up at me as if she's being hunted.

"Tell me when you first felt that you needed to write this book," I say. My whole goal here is to calm this person down. I know it's nerve-wracking to meet a publisher. I know she's been preparing for this fifteen-minute interview for weeks. But I also know that I'm not as big a deal as she thinks I am. (A few months ago I told a friend that I was teaching a class at a conference, and her jaw just dropped. "You?" she said. "Why would they ask you?" All I could think to say was, "I'm extremely important, you know," and then she just bust out laughing. Lord, grant me more friends like this.)

So this woman and I chat about her work. Sometimes she tells me a story--a sickening, heart-wrenching story--about an event that changed her outlook on life. Sometimes she cries. Sometimes she laughs. Sometimes she takes my hands and prays with me. And then the fifteen minutes are up, and another writer is waiting in the wings, and we shake hands and say goodbye. And the part that I hate about conferences is that I have sixty appointments like this in the space of two or three days, and I don't always recognize the writers when I see them again. I hate that. I hate making a connection with a person that I know is going to be so temporary. I hate that my next communication with this person will probably be a rejection letter.

But the connection's important, brief though it may be. That's why we're here, after all. To look another person in the eye and make them understand that they matter. Their work matters. Their passion matters. Their pain and their joy both matter.

And that connection is even more important when it's made with children. When you take the time to give a kid a hug, to ask about their hopes and dreams and the mundane little details of their lives. When you dig a little deeper than "What grade are you in?" or "So, do you like school?" Writers for children have the enormous joy--and enormous responsibility--of connecting with more kids than they could ever reach individually. Of teaching them that they matter and their stories matter.

That's what I'm going to be saying, in one way or another, at the conference next week. I'll be making connections with writers and hoping that they, in turn, pass that connection on to a whole generation of kids.

I absolutely love what I do.

In Which I Wonder How Things Got This Bad in the First Place

The hubby and I are moving again. Not too far--just to a new apartment across town. And as with every move, we're standing back, hands on hips, staring at our possessions with a critical eye and thinking "Now, what can we throw out so we don't have to put it in a box?"

I suppose this purging is good for the soul. I don't need six pairs of black dress sandals and I never wore that swimsuit and I have always hated that sweater. But today that critical eye has turned toward the bookshelves. Our ever-growing pile of Donate-or-Sell includes the following:

• Two copies of To Kill a Mockingbird. One has my ninth-grade scribbles all through, with every third paragraph underlined and highlighted. There's even an occasional post-it with words like "IRONY" and "FORESHADOWING." The other has a mangled cover. We're just keeping the nicer hardcover edition.
• The Book of Vice, by Peter Sagal. I've got the same crush on Mr. Sagal that every girl has, and I liked the book, but I don't see myself cracking the cover to learn about the porn and gambling industries ever again. 
• Time Enough for Drums, by Ann Rinaldi. Discovered I had two copies of this. Not sure where the second copy came from. Are the books breeding?
• Two copies of The Little Prince. (I still have three, two in French and one in English.) The two on the donate pile appear to be encrusted in yogurt. 
• Sense and Sensibility: The Barnes & Noble Cheap Paperback Edition.
• L'Etranger. This was another duplicate book, but it has footnotes with English translations throughout. Evidently this is the "For Students Too Lazy to Pick up a Dictionary" edition. 
• Stiff, by Mary Roach, because it was good and probably important but also pretty gross. 
• My Life as an Experiment, by A.J. Jacobs. After The Know-it-All and The Year of Living Biblically I was pretty sure this guy had a screw loose, but My Life confirmed it. I don't deny the guy can write, but he's just a little too abnormal for me. 
• The Romanovs, by Robert Massie. He's a great author but it's not his strongest book. He spends an extraordinary amount of time documenting the assassination. It's some of the most detailed gore I've ever seen in print. 

Happily, however, I have persuaded the hubby to leave my Bill Bryson and Agatha Christie collections intact. (There was only mild grumbling about Agatha Christie.) And he didn't grumble at all when I said I wanted to keep both copies of Jamaica Inn. See, here's my dilemma. The older copy is beat up but I love love love the elegant sleaze look to the cover, while the newer copy is in great shape but has a deeply embarrassing cover. Would you want to be seen in public with that thing?

No. Of course you wouldn't. That's the sort of cover you stash under your pillow and hope no one sees. 

I'm off to make a gut-wrenching decision on Into Thin Air. I loved it in tenth grade but haven't cracked the cover since. It's sort of pleasing to have it on the shelf, but probably not pleasing enough to justify boxing it up and lugging it across town. Wish me luck. 

In Which I Make Nice Smells

A brief history of chicken stock:

1990-2006: Every year around the end of November, I watch my mother make turkey stock. All sorts of unnatural items go into the pot, most memorably the bits of a turkey that you would be least likely to consume. I helpfully observe that the neck looks like the thing that comes out of one's chest in Alien. My mother, year after year, swats me out of the kitchen and informs me that my observations are not appreciated.

2007: Thanksgiving with my fiance's family. After dinner, I observe a large pan in which turkey bits and unappetizing veggie parts are floating in water. I give it a good squirt of dish soap and go on my merry way. Not long later, I see the pan bubbling on the stove. Well, poo. I consider my options:

(a) Pretend I didn't see the pan and let my future grandparents-in-law eat soapy stock. Deny all responsibility next time I see them, when they say "And it was the darndest thing...there was something off about that stock. Something mighty peculiar..."
(b) Confess.

I chose the latter option, and to Grandma's credit her face didn't even fall. She actually laughed and said, "Oh, honey, it doesn't matter. Saves me having to use it." And she never once brought it up after that, even though she totally had license to tease me mercilessly forever after.

2008-2010: Avoid the kitchen at stock-time.

2011: I have been reading, I think, too many cookbooks. All my favorite authors tell me that I haven't really lived until I've made my own chicken stock. They tell me I'm not a decent cook if I use the Swanson stuff. They tell me I won't regret making it. And since I believe them, I decided a few months ago that I would man up and just make the dang stock. I have, therefore, been collecting all the extra chicken bits from our meals and tossing them in the freezer, and by now I have a pretty nice supply of carcasses in there.

So tonight, not wanting to go for a run because it's very cold and rainy feeling all domestic-goddess-y, I threw on my apron, excavated the carcasses from the bowels of the freezer, dug through the vegetable for crisper for anything of interest, tipped the contents of any spice jars that were mostly empty into a pot, and sat back to spend the evening sniffing. And oh good glory.

I say this in all humility: I am very, very good at making stock. I am probably the world expert at making stock. It is deep and rich and probably sinful and it's only been on the stove for ninety minutes.

Mom, I'm sorry about all the snarky alien remarks. And Grandma, I'm sorry about the soap. I didn't know what I was ruining.

In Which I Raise a Crumpet to the Happy Couple

Well. That was lovely, wasn't it? Two happy people setting out on a grand adventure together...and what better way to begin an adventure? I always like to have cherubic choir boys lauding me when I start my adventures, personally. Also shrubberies. And fabulous hats. (Especially hats that resemble the entire female reproductive system.)

I don't know how Kate managed to make it through that ceremony without bawling her eyes out. I was a watery wreck at my own wedding (ended up wiping my nose on my roses when I hoped no one was looking). Heck, anyone with that kind of poise deserves to be queen.

But the best that can be said of the wedding has, of course, already been said by my sister, who is infinitely smarter and wittier and charming-er than moi. As she so elegantly put it:


"Everyone is going on and on about how this is a sign of hope, a celebration of the potential of the next years, a way for the Church of England to attract some people back into the fold, or a chance for the monarchy to make amends to its people for its past mistakes. A tall order for two young people who just want to get married. And, for all the pageantry, for all the songs, for all the tears, I am less than sure that the wedding accomplished any of these things completely and I doubt that the new princess or her husband set out with those goals in mind. I think they just wanted to get married. However, what the wedding did do was, for two hours, unite two billion people around an event that wasn’t a war, a riot, or a natural disaster. Instead, it was an act of sweet love and a moment of true happiness. As a global community, we haven’t gotten one of those lately. I’d kinda forgotten what they looked like. Who knew happiness came with so many hats?"

In Which I Observe My Surroundings

Since we moved to Oregon everyone's been telling me, in reference to restaurants, stores, coffee shops, attitudes, hairstyles, and cars, "That's so Eugene." I never have any idea what they mean. Do they mean that something is local? Distinctive? Trendy?

In my quest to understand the essence of Eugene, I have made the following observations:

• While walking down the street one frequently overhears something like the following: "They had a baby girl but they're raising her gender neutral." (How does one do this?) 
• There is a fair here--the Oregon Country Fair, held every July--in which visitors are politely requested to cover their genitals before 5 p.m. Please note that paint counts as a covering. 
• At the Saturday farmer's market, vendors dressed as Pilgrims (probably not intentionally--they're just wearing a lot of blankets, which seems Pilgrim-y) sell hemp onesies, ugly scarves, and stale bread. 
• Every fall the city crowns a Slug Queen. (I think Slug stands for something, or perhaps it's just in reference to all the slugs littering the sidewalks here.) Apparently this is an honor. 

All of these things are, irrefutably, so Eugene. And here's just one more story that, I think, neatly illustrates the culture in this city. (Or possibly throughout the Northwest? I'll need to continue my research.)

There's a woman I work with who is just the most lovely, tender-hearted person in creation. She's soft-spoken, gentle, and unfailingly generous. She's the sort of person who can always be counted on, who, you sense, would maintain her calm in the worst kind of crisis. She's the sort of person who strips away all your illusions about what a lovely person you are, because she's just so good. 

For the past week or so she's been growing one of those little ducks in a jar full of water on her desk. You know those things? It's a little pellet, and you drop it in water and after 48 hours the pellet turns into a slimy, dense heap of duck. Or T-Rex. Or Christmas tree. Whatever. The duck (I named it Butch) has grown to its full size, and it was sitting out on a little plate. I went to look at it today, and we both sort of tilted our heads as we looked at it.

"Don't you just want to rip its little head off?" she asked. 

I stared. "No, not really. No," I said. 

"I'm used to dead animals," she shrugged. "My husband owns a fish hatchery, and he's just got a menagerie of carcasses in his freezer. I told him to throw me in there when I die, but to make sure to pose me nicely."

"Pose you nicely," I repeated. 

"Yes. We found a dog on the road once that was just about gone, so we took it home and called the vet. It died before we could get it there, though, so we brought it back to the freezer and posed it nicely."

"You don't freeze a carcass," said I. "I think you're supposed to bury it or incinerate it or something."

"But the owners might have been looking for it. And they did come around just a few days later, and it was good for them to see their dog. It was posed so nicely, they said." 

I must have been giving her quite a look because she laughed and patted my arm and said "It's not that weird around here. Trust me." And I thought, You are so Eugene. 

In Which I Get Good at Bureaucracy

We moved to Oregon a few months ago and have, ever since, been putting off making it legal. (It's the residency equivalent, I suppose, of knocking someone up and fleeing the state before her pa can tell you to make an honest woman out of her.) (I feel like this metaphor is going to fall apart on me soon, so best to abandon it here.) 

But the hubby's Michigan license was set to expire soon, so off to the DMV we went. 

The Oregon DMV is a wretched little building populated by bored people. The flippy-hair chick at the information desk is bored, the scraggly-hair lady at the computer is bored, and the unwashed masses of people clutching their checkbooks--some of whom have been there long enough to actually begin decaying--are also bored. (We fell into this last category.) (Not so much the unwashed part.) 

The flippy-hair chick--somehow I remember her chewing gum, although this cannot actually be the case--added up the costs for us. Sixty bucks each for licenses. $173 for the license plates. Some other large amount of money for the registration. Five bucks each to take the driving test. And seven dollars--this amount sticks in my head--for a VIN inspection. The VIN inspection consisted of the flippy-hair chick leaving her desk, walking outside, looking at a set of very tiny numbers hidden on the car, and then returning to her desk. Seven dollars for this. Do you know how many lattes that would buy me? (Two.) 

After the VIN inspection (which, I've just got to say, the car passed with flying colors), off we went to sit in the chairs. After the length of an ice age scraggly-hair lady called us up, looked at the eighty-seven identifying documents we'd brought along, and concluded that we had insufficient proof of address. 

It was around this point that I started longing for cake. I figure when people move to a new state the least its DMV can do is provide a party of some sort. Would welcome balloons really have killed them? 

Scraggly-hair lady seemed disinclined to provide balloons.

So Hubby ran home to get extra proof of address. (Looking the lady squarely in the eye and saying very sincerely, "I promise you I live here," didn't seem to do the trick.) He returned, documents in tow, twenty minutes later. In these twenty minutes the scraggly lady had already forgotten us, so we had to begin the process all over again. But finally she let us take the test. 

Here are some things you need to know in order to get a driver's license in the state of Oregon:

• The exact distance at which you should flick off your brights when another is approaching from the opposite direction. (I just turn them off when I see the other car's headlights. Apparently you're supposed to wait until they're within 400 feet. Maybe it's just me, but I'm not very good at judging distance when it's pitch black out.)
• The amount of your fine should you not provide proof of insurance upon an officer's request. 
• How long after a move you have to provide the DMV with your new address. 
• What you should do when you see a big red sign that says "STOP." 

I got one of these questions right, plus a few others, but was ultimately declared a menace to society, and scraggly-hair lady refused to grant me a license. Hubby got many more questions right than I did. He got his license. 

So back I went the next day to re-take the test. Same bored people in the same wretched building. I passed this time--fewer stupid questions--but the powers that be (scraggly-hair lady was nowhere in sight) once again refused to grant me a license because I'd neglected to bring all fifty-eight thousand pieces of documentation. 

But I returned, still valiant, on the third day, every piece of paper that has ever had my name on it in hand, and presented them to the scraggly-hair lady, who was now wearing a pair of badly ripped jeans. She took my picture and asked me if I wanted to be an organ donor.

"Everything but my eyes," I said. "I wouldn't wish my vision on anyone. Ha ha ha."

"Um, there's not really a form for that?" she said. (Did I mention that she was an up-talker?) 

"Never mind," I said. 

"Well, welcome to Oregon," she said, and cracked what may have been a scraggly-toothed smile. It wasn't a welcome cake, and it certainly wasn't a bunch of balloons, but I felt like we'd become friends by this point. I smiled back. 

In Which I Instruct the Reader in the Virtue of Patience

Birthday tomorrow. I was all geared up to make a birthday pie, but once I was up to my elbows in soapy water from the dinner dishes I lost all my oomph. So the birthday pie is going to have to wait until the weekend. And anyway, it seems silly to celebrate before I receive the birthday package my father hinted at so darkly the other day. Apparently it includes a copy of Dick and Jane and Vampires. I already have Yiddish with Dick and Jane (“See Jane schlep. Schlep, Jane. Schlep. Schlep, schlep, schlep.”), so this will round out my collection nicely.

If I had my own Dick and Jane story, incidentally, it would go something like this:

Kathleen needs tea. Drink, Kathleen. Drink!

Now Kathleen can talk. Talk, Kathleen. Talk!

So many emails. Delete, Kathleen. Delete!

Too many proposals. Reject, Kathleen. Reject!

Way too many adverbs. Erase, Kathleen. Erase!

Now the day is done. Goodnight, Kathleen. Goodnight!

Goodnight. 

In Which I Return

It’s been four years since I shut down my old blog from college—shut it down because my life consisted of (a) playing French nanny to a four-year-old and (b) sitting on my fiancé’s couch addressing wedding invitations, and neither of these things do a lively blog make. But since that time I have done the following:

1. Married the fiancé
2. Burned a few dinners
3. Landed a job in which I was never called on to produce the names of dinosaurs in French
4. Quit the job
5. Snagged another job—this one far away from home, and …  
6. Blazed a whole new Oregon Trail

We’ve been here a few months and it’s starting to feel like home. We’ve found the best trails to hike, the coziest coffee shop, the grocery store with the most dependable produce, and the best waffles in creation. And now that those big priorities are taken care of, I have a little more time to indulge in telling the whole world what I think about, oh, everything.

So here’s my new forum for musing about literature, science (the portion of it that’s accessible to English majors), current affairs, and my quest to find the perfect pastry dough. Welcome.