too liberal.....

ok, so in my dreams i was explaining to someone why i could not support something or another...no recollection what it was...other than i turned and walked away from somebody with the dismissive...' i am far too liberal to support your position'.....hmmmm....that statement could include a multitude of positions......gay marriage, marriage of priests, wine sales less than 28 miles from home, full library access to all books in the collection, full coverage of undergarments.....i appreciated the front-page opinion in yesterday's lexheraldleader about banned books...... as well as the paper's coverage in general.....i have taught several x-rated Sunday school lessons this fall..... direct from the good book.....about lust, incest, rape, murder, covetousness...(the curious should look to the books of Kings and Chronicles)......those who desire to censor libraries must be careful not to shoot themselves in both feet, as their 'guidebook' contains themes worse than most soap operas....sadly most folks do not bother to look up or validate most of what they hear......which is why the far-right has such a gullible audience in these perilous days........

impromptu protester

ok so i laughed out loud at the audacity of this photo,........gotta love the impromptu protester....

a cold rain on cybermonday.....

ok, so.....i am bundled up in my new silky throw as i type.....the throw that i bought for this very purpose while i was out christmas shopping on saturday......i could have given it to someone else and casually taken over its use during the post christmas days and weeks......but i am cold now and i figure that honesty is the best policy when it comes to gift-giving......i have purchased items that are really for other people.....just not as many things as i found that i could not live without on my short weekend outing.....i may have to make use of this year's cybermonday to finish up my christmas purchasing, or at least research what is out there to be bought that loved ones cannot live without once they have opened the special gift on xmas morning.......or so the mamma-fantasy goes.....at least i have gone beyond the mamma-worry that i have not spent equally, or has not presented an equal number of wrapped gifts under the tree.....i would prefer to work out these parity issues all wrapped up in my cozy throw....but in order to pay for these purchases i must go to work....after 4 days off i can barely remember how to find my way back there.....and sadly my coworkers will be just as loathe to do actual work, so may be in equally foul moods......is it too early to wish it were friday?.......

the bathroom phone...

ok, so.....in one of many dream sequences i was in my cousin's bathroom in cleveland trying clean up the phone.....i say my cousin's bathroom, but i was my grandmother's house before it was my cousins, so i could be confused as to current ownership.....and i could also be confused about the phone, as there was never a phone in that room, let alone a white princess-style with a black handset.....and the white part was not the typical plastic of yester-year phones...it was more resinous and less glossy.....kinda like it could also double as a cutting board.....the phone had been used by someone likely digging in the garden, and i was spraying it with some sort of bathroom cleaner i found under the sink....in this dream i do not recall actually seeing my cousin, or my grandmother....and while i am certain there is some sort of explanation for why i would be in her(their) bathroom cleaning off the phone....i cannot imagine what it might be....

poems

ok, so...from billy collins

. Thanksgiving Morning

The crossed multiple blades of the blender
set out to dry on a counter.
The corkscrew unsheathed and ready
to enter whatever cannot resist its twisting.
The carving knife waiting alongside
the sharpener for its abrasive touch,

The blue box of matches, the white candles.
The branch of dry leaves brought in
Along with vines clustered with red and yellow berries,

All of which points to the anonymous turkey,
soon to be trussed with string
but now soaking on the cold porch
in a bucket of salted ice water,
in brine, as they like to say this time of year.

And we must not overlook the oven,
radiating in a corner of the kitchen
set at first at 500 degrees
then lowered almost mercifully to 350,
still hot enough to lift the bird
into the condition of sacrificial edibility,
yet short of what would incinerate a book,
the oven that swallowed the witch and Sylvia Plath
and now the oven of our pleasure,
our forks and glasses blindly raised.




2. The Gathering, a Thanksgiving Poem

Outside, the scene was right for the season,
heavy gray clouds and just enough wind
to blow down the last of the yellow leaves.

But the house was different that day,
so distant from the other houses,
like a planet inhabited by only a dozen people

with the same last name and the same nose
rotating slowly on its invisible axis.
Too bad you couldn't be there

but you were flying through space on your own asteroid
with your arm around an uncle.
You would have unwrapped your scarf

and thrown your coat on top of the pile
then lifted a glass of wine
as a tiny man ran across a screen with a ball.

You would have heard me
saying grace with my elbows on the tablecloth
as one of the twins threw a dinner roll across the room at the other.

happy thanksgiving...

ok, so we are spending our first t-day in years with child #2.....and our first in years with the collection of folks either from cincinnati, or who are driving there to be with this gathering of extended family.......happily, this is the sort of crowd that will re-live last saturday's football win over michigan, and maybe embellish each and every touchdown.....sometimes it is nice to be amongst those who bleed scarlet and gray rather than blue.....

creamed spinach- the recipe

ok, so this is among the dishes i am schlepping to cincinnati- from the smitten kitchen:

Creamed Spinach

Serves 6

2 pounds baby spinach or 2 1/2 pounds fresh spinach, tough stems discarded
1 3/4 cups heavy cream or whole milk, or a mix thereof
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 small clove garlic, minced (optional)
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
Pinch of freshly grated nutmeg

Wash your spinach well but no need to spin or pat it dry. Place spinach in a large pot over high heat. Cook, covered, with just the water clinging to leaves, stirring occasionally, until wilted, about 2 to 4 minutes for baby spinach and 4 to 6 minutes for regular spinach.

Press or squeeze out the excess liquid any number of ways, either by wringing it out in cheesecloth (my favorite method), putting it in a mesh strainer and pressing the moisture out with a spatula or large spoon or letting it cool long enough to grab small handfuls and squeezing them to remove as much water as possible. Coarsely chop the wrung-out spinach.

Wipe out large pot so you can use it again.

Heat milk or cream in a small saucepan over moderate heat, stirring, until warm. Keep warm. Meanwhile, cook onion and garlic, if using, in butter in your wiped-out large pot over moderately low heat, stirring occasionally, until softened, about six minutes. Whisk in flour and cook roux, whisking, about three minutes. Add warm milk or cream in a slow stream, whisking constantly to prevent lumps, and simmer, whisking, until thickened, three to four minutes. Stir in nutmeg, spinach, and salt and pepper to taste and cook, stirring, until heated through.

Do ahead: Creamed spinach can be made one day ahead and chilled, covered then reheated over moderately low heat until hot. However, it really tastes best eaten immediately.

creamed spinach

ok, so.....i have already made the cranberry sauce, have already purchased the sweet and sour red cabbage with bits of apple, and today i will prepare the creamed spinach.....using a recipe from one of the food blogs....yeah, i am making it a day ahead so i can transport the dish cold and warm it up in cincinnati........taking it hot would be problematic......i have tried numerous creamed spinach recipes over the years....most i prefer to the original mother-in-law 'recipe', which nobody seems to have.......what i can tell you is that there is an unwritten expectation for creamed spinach to be at family gatherings, and that whatever i bring will not be quite like it should be.....which is why i volunteer to bring this dish year after year......i actually like creamed spinach, and i might as well make the kind i want to eat.....

looking for my purse and keys

ok, so for some reason i was in a doctor's office last night....in my dreams.....sitting next to my mother and watching some drug rep present some sort of educational program to office staff.....and when we got up to leave i could not find my purse or keys.....and so i was wandering through the halls of this office searching for these items.....finding only mismatched shoes and clothing......curious thing to dream about.....

pyrrhic

ok, so the word Pyrrhic popped in 2 vastly different nytimes articles today......the first time i skimmed over it, assuming it was an SAT-quality word thrown in for emphasis....the second time prompted an immediate google definition search.....and now i know that Pyrrhic means a victory with devastating costs to the winner......

lost

ok, so.....i spent the bulk of my spare time this week looking for my sunday school books.....the student guide as well as teacher's version and an independent commentary by a semi-famous retired baptist minister.....i looked in places where these books should be, as well as places where they should not be.......several times over...and while i did not find the books, even after sorting through the recycled newspaper/catalog/magazine bins the garage, my car, my spouse's car.....under the bed....you get the picture.....i did find the mate to an earring......looking in obscure locations did inspire the cleaning out of the linen closet, whereupon i gave the goodwill over 8 sets of sheets that i either do not like, or that do not fit our bed very well........and i was also moved to go through all of my drawers.....and the closet.......the backseat of my car was overflowing with stuff when i headed out to the goodwill.....sadly, this altruistic act did not translate into divine intevention with those lost sunday school books.....i was able to construct a lesson.....we are studying bathsheba.....and i knew what we had already covered, and i made a reasonable choice as to where we were going next......i was relieved to discover that i was not the only person who spent the week looking for something that was not found.....we collectively lost quite a lot fo things.....some much more important or costly than what i cannot find.....and none of these things is as important as what was lost by the family who sit behind us in worship service....they lost their house to a fire on thursday.....the father barely made it out, as he was asleep in the basement after working all night, and did not hear the smoke alarms.....losing a few books pales to losing all that one owns.....

resealable frozen shrimp....

ok, so.....i woke up with a splitting headache....not surprising in that i worked all night in my dreams......i was trying to cake care of multiple disasters.....there was loss of power, freezing temperatures, water shortage.....and there were people in their pajamas in what was meant to be my kitchen....and the mother of the group held up a resealable bag of frozen shrimp and told me that this was all she had and what was i going to do about it.....and i was trying to pick up the clutter on the kitchen counters......but the pajama family was strewing things about almost as fast as i could pick them up....there was a framed group photo that included my pastor....a curious touch for a dream sequence....no explanation as to why the pajama family was in my home, or in their pajamas.....or how they were connected to me....

silver-plated lasagna server....

ok, so.....on my veteran's day off i drove my mother on our yearly rounds....the beaumont plaza goodwill, liquor barn, red lobster, tuesday morning, and camp nelson national cemetery to see my dad's grave before we return home......my mother fussed because we did not retrieve the handicap tag from her car......we have never retrieved the handicap tag from her car....as hell would have to freeze over before i park 2 perfectly able women in a handicap spot.....as it happened the handicapped spots at the red lobster were full...and my mother was forced to walk an extra 20 feet to the door.....which she managed to traverse despite her pleas of disability.....ah well.....i did find a lovely brown linen shirt at the goodwill...and a silverplated lasagna server that looks exactly like one we used at the restaurant....i paid $2.75 for it happily......it was in a box so i am certain that it is NOT from the restaurant.....the sparkling wine i selected at L.barn was much sweeter than i remember from the last time......still mighty tasty for my friend anne's visit.....i especially appreciate her words of wisdom....a mother is only as happy as her saddest child.....i am aging into the no-news-is-good-news portion of my life for this very reason....the less i know the less i can obsess about.....i also found 4 champagne flutes that match those i already own...perfect for my scheduled bookclub gathering in july..... i will surely find a dryer sparkling wine by that date....

poetry reading......

ok, so i had a hard time getting by the fact that the poet looked very much like my long-deceased neighbor, who was both a poet (haiku) and an artist and a gardener........we fell out long ago over her use of the n-word in front of my children when uk basketball was on her television....which was often.....and the knowledge that she kept loaded guns under many of her seat cushions....i treasure the pair of framed watercolors she once presented to me because they 'went' with my front room......but i did not go to the auction where her larger pieces were dispersed after her death even though i knew there to be a watercolor of a brick wall/gate with a perennial border that i would have enjoyed....ah well.....i waas amused by the poem where the mother and her daughters are at a pilgrimage site in ireland.....and the daughters are mortified that the mother was going the last bit of the journey barefoot, and they huddled at the bottom of the rock stairs as she climbed ever higher toward the ancient cliffside monastery in conspiratory debate over just how many of their mother's embarassing pilgram affectations were deliberate......and i admit that i would probably climb to heights that i feared if i knew it would adequately un-nerve my children.....

reese's (skinny) boyfriend

ok, so in my dreams i was sitting in an auditorium with green upholstered seats....and my middle child was sitting next to me, followed by reese and a person reese introduced as 'her skinny boyfriend'......and we were all holding small cats .....not kittens, just scrawny cats like our cat....and i happened to be holding our cat, though mostly the cat would wrangle herself out of my death grip and jump off somewhere until i called her back.....and there was a chorale group on the stage singing songs by the 80's group kansas....and the choir wore robes that were not quite on or off.....more like huge shawls than robes.....and the guy playing guiatr backup stood below the stage rather than on the stage......and some guy saw me brushing my hair and tried to take my brush.......and then we walked 'home'...down the hill to the place where my parents no longer live.....and the new owners had taken out the fence and built very loe stone walls....which we stepped over to get into the back yard, and peered into the backroom where the new owners were moving the kitchen.....the cabinets were not yet attached to the walls, and the fireplace was now behind the kitchen island......curious.....

repeat

ok, so......there is a sweet ballad in repeat....playing over and over while the youngest child gets ready for school.....or at least the song seemed sweet the first 10 or so times.....curious that fine line between entertaining and annoying.....

the annoying whine of motors on a lovely fall day....

ok, so....i weeded in the last of the beds this afternoon.....dug out daylilies and repositioned irises and mulched and such......which would have been an idyllic way to spend a gloriously sunny day in november, had it not been for the whine of leaf-blowers.....

books....

ok, so.....i brought my driving to-and-from work book on cd in the house on friday evening so that i could finish it up....yeah, i had 2 discs to go before it was over, but i was anxious to find out how it ended....The Messenger by Daniel Silva.....part of a series of mystery-thrillers that feature an art restorer/spy for the state of Israel Gabriel Allon......i heard about this series on npr in a 'books you ought to read' sort of piece......though the library has all of the books in this series, i prefer to listen to them on cd so that i do not miss any of the clues and nuances that often allude me when i read book in print.....with actual books is it too easy to skim through the pages to get the gist of the story line.....and while this method gets the job done by the deadline (read this as bookclub meetings).....i do lose out on much of the word pictures.....such is probably the case with the book i read yesterday after weeding out the hydrangea bed.....A Parchment of Leaves by Silas House.....i was ensconced in the red lounger on my new terrace, with a glass of wine....and i managed to get through the book from start to finish.....ideally i would reread the book to get all that i missed the first time, but i have no interest in reading about these characters a second time.....and i will go to book club having finished this assignment, and i will bite my tongue when the cozy, flowery prose is talked up to the point of worship.....my oldest child refered to this same author's previous work as precious prose.....meaning that with ky authors we are less apt to judge the work critically than we would the work of out-of-staters.....enough of precious prose....i am on to the second book suggested on npr as thrillers worthy of my time.....The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo.....written by a Swede who turned in to his publisher three novels in a series and then promptly died....i had to start over in order to remember the plot as it has unfolded thus far.....the time line has jumped back and forth a few too many times for my taste.....the prose is spare..which i much prefer to the alternative......to the point.....too bad the library did not have this book on cd......i would have enjoyed listening to this plot unfold...

saturday....

ok, so....i am so very glad it is saturday.....an exhausting week on so many levels....

reply to my comment...

ok, so i commented on a sweet article in the nytimes by a woman who walked/ran the recent nymarathon....and the author took the time to comment on my comment, which was unexpected and a nice touch......

yes, we have no bananas.....

ok, so in my spare time i am attempting to configure this song to the H1N1 vaccine......i will keep you posted....

a room of one's own....

ok, so.....this tale is often told in this forum....and i bring it up again because it is timely......way back in my college days....maybe graduate school....my history of procrastination goes way back....the literature text books were in the same aisle as the nutrition texts.....and i happened upon several stacks of appealing book covers as i searched for those on my list.....and i walked away with books assigned for a class i would never take.....the yellow wallpaper, the vagabond, a room of one's own.......oh, my.....how those books changed my course more so than my nutrition of disabled children courses.....and this evening, when i have already been brought to tears by a deja vu article in the nytimes by a woman who walked/ran her first marathon at 6 hours and 58 minutes...i came across this piece about a woman who inherited $75,000 from her feminist literature professor.....i have read Woolf's essay "A Room of One's Own" almost as many times as I have read Hemingway's 'A Movable Feast'....which says that I lack the attention span required to digest a weighty novel......or that I appreciate brevity in my social commentary.......and admire those who voice the purist sentiments of feminism......the unadulterated urges to be all that one can be.....i read with sadness about the passing of the young women of middle eastern descent run down by her father because she had become too westernized....there can be no quarter for a father who would kill his own daughter because she had the audacity to think for herself.....the world would be a better place if more women thought for themsleves and acted accordingly.....and it is not just me 'sayin'......