juliloquy

dog-eared

Quotes from dog-eared pages.

"The question is always—what are we going to do with this obstacle? And, like all other traumas, if we can use it for learning, then we can turn pain into wisdom. But it means doing the homework—reaching, changing, and going to new ground without maps. Sometimes I wonder if this is why so many marriages fail. Where in life do we have any preparation to be shown our worst selves by someone who loves us and understands it as a gift to become better at being who we are?"
—John Calvi, 1997

"We have to forgive each other,
not for what we have done,
but for what we are.
For being so infinitely less
than we ought to be.
We have to learn to give
where we had hoped to get
and to understand where
we had hoped to be understood."
—Harold Loukes, 1958

"These six sayings are basically all the important messages that one person can give to another.
I love you.
Thank you.
I'm sorry.
I need help.
That's not good enough.
No."
—John Calvi, 1988 

Ladies, he's single!

A short post tonight; we have been playing virus volleyball here and I am wiped. But I wanted to highlight my brother.

When he visited us last month, he, Roo, and I took a brief hike on the Whiskey Still Trail. (Shmoo had school and HPR had work.) Look out, Steve!

 

The eponymous still:

When we returned to the car, Steve noticed what to me looked like a bunch of debris in the creek. He got out his tripod.

And shot these. Wow. One person's debris is another person's beauty.

 

 

jumpeRoo

My awesome and amazing sister-in-law has written an about-to-be-released crochet book called Baby Blueprint Crochet. She names many of the patterns after people she knows.* Yesterday, she presented to her readership the Joni Jumper. Named after da Roo! [Rooie herself not pictured.]

Can you stand the cuteness? I didn't think so.

*And the Julie cuff in Robyn's previous book is named after me. So nice!

verde

Little did I know I'd get several days of posting out of the green tomato harvest. Today after we dropped Shmoo off at Kindergarten, Roo and I got to work on the tomatoes.

I set aside the red cherry tomatoes, destemmed and rinsed the greens, then carried a collander full of them into Roo's room. She worked in her play kitchen and played with stuffed animals while I halved the tomatoes and put them in a stock pot. As I was cutting, the smell reminded me of green apples. Then I remembered Caroline "Ma" Ingalls surprising Pa with a green tomato pie. (Pa thought at first that it was apple.) I'm not pie-experienced, but I decided to do a green tomato crisp. That took care of about one-fourth of them. (It tasted pretty good with a dollop of yogurt - probably could have used a bit of lemon juice during preparation.)

The day got away from us before I had a chance to make the salsa (I'm thinking of using this recipe), so I'll try again tomorrow. But here are the processed green cherry tomatoes.

And a photo HPR took when the kids helped him in the yard yesterday.

the kitchen bloggess

It's kitchen tips day here at juliloquy!

I don't know whether I've mentioned here before my great veggie-soup-stock-making technique. I learned it from my college housemate, Mikee, and have been doing it ever since (when freezer space has allowed, that is). Whenever you have veggie ends and peels that you'd otherwise throw out (onion and garlic skins and ends, carrot peels and ends, potato peels, broccoli/cauliflower stalks, etc.), save them in a container in the fridge. When you have a good reserve (perhaps a full pint or quart of these castaways), put 'em in a big soup pot with a bunch of water. Bring to a boil and let it simmer for a few hours. Let it cool, then strain the stock through some cheesecloth (or a tea towel) and freeze the stock in 2- to 4-cup containers. You can keep some in the fridge, too, if you plan to use it within a week or so. I recall Mikee saying that pepper guts are pretty much the only thing that doesn't work well in stock. I've even used apple peel, pumpkin and squash skins, and the occasional turkey bacon rind.

We try to eat seasonally/locally as much as possible, but the downside of course is that it's hard to find anything green in the winter. Note: you know my blog is not commercial, so this is in no way an advertisement. Just something I love that has been fun for the kids, too. We bought a kitchen sprouter a while back. We also got the seed sampler to go with it. Shmoo loves picking out the seeds to go into the various trays. Keep it near the sink and pour water in twice a day. We have had great results with our sprout crops. They work best at room temperature or a bit lower, which meant we took the summer off from sprouting since we don't run the air conditioning very often.

putting the "tic" in pedantic

Have I raved yet about Shmoo's pre-K? It's part of our local public school. (Thank you, Frederick County taxpayers!) Shmoo is in the afternoon class with 19 other kids. The teacher and teacher's aide are fantastic. They have taught my child some punctuation marks and he loves it (period = stop sign, comma = take a breath, quotation marks = talking marks, and exclamation point = excitement mark). They have terrific catchy songs, practice positive behavior reinforcement, and teach sign language. The majority of kids are reading by the end of the year. Shmoo loves being around kids his age.

The school also has a once-a-week program for two- and three-year-olds, too, which parents and siblings attend. They give 5th graders a chance to be assistants for the little ones. It's so well organized, age appropriate, and perfect for getting families involved in schools.

Shmoo's class get to bring "baggie books" home: books from the school library packaged in zip bags with a reading log sheet to complete. Of course, Shmoo is all over that, too.

The books he has been bringing home most often are in the Sweet Pickles series. Do you know these books? I guess I'm a little too old to have been exposed to them in early classroom, since they first came out in 1977. (Probably took several years for them to make their way to small-town ND, too, like "Sesame Street," which I never saw as a little kid.)

Anyway, these books are bizarre. I guess I'm spoiled by the fabulous books we have access to at the public library (thanks again, Frederick County taxpayers!), but imho Sweet Pickles feature ugly illustrations, flat text, and flatter plot lines. I guess their point is to teach some sort of emotional intelligence or something. I don't know. Anyway, thanks to the amazing internets, you too can experience the books. I found this YouTube video of a guy reading a Sweet Pickles book as he drinks a beer. (Now that's more like it. Maybe I can figure out a drinking game to go along with the books!) You probably don't want to play this video in front of the kids, however, as the guy throws in a few swears. Enjoy!

HOPE

I'm so happy to remove from my office door the cynical Bush quote about thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people [I give him the benefit of the doubt and believe he misspoke, but still] and replace it with this:

[Click through to see full size.]

too excited to focus on work today

We have never had to wait to vote at our polling place. At most, we've seen a crowd of about 4 people voting in any of the elections in the past 4.5 years. This morning we arrived at the fire station before 7:30 and the line stretched around the corner. One neighbor brought a folding chair and we joked that he could make some money by renting it out today.

We told Shmoo that we'd see our neighbor - Mrs. Price - who owns the other half of our twin home. She is a poll worker. When we got to the front of the line, we saw that her grandson, Mustafa, was with her, also as a poll worker. He was an awkward 13-year-old when we moved into our house in 2003. Now he's hulking and handsome. I get choked up when I think how he must feel; his first presidential election is such an exciting one. (Mine was 1988, which was not so exciting, although I was into it and made a homemade "I Like Mike" sign.) I also get choked up seeing pictures of politicians voting. High-profile people standing up to be counted just like the rest of us. I love the look of that poll worker, perhaps a school teacher or retired librarian, doing her job next to the young man who seems to be equal parts skeptical and in awe of the VP candidate in front of him. OK, I'm just going to post it in case the link doesn't work for you. It's from philly.com.

Our kids were squirmy and impatient, but it was great to chat with people we usually just greet in passing. Our total wait was at least a half hour. Afterwards we caught the 52 bus and passed 3 other long-lined polling places.

And now I just have to sit on my hands until the results come in.

out of da Shmoo

A coupla things.

At Shmooie's school recently the teachers asked kids what they want to be when they grow up. Shmoo thought about it, then got a big smile on his face and said: "I want to make donuts!" I'm so proud. (So you see the obsession has continued. I look forward to the family discount.)

_____

Last week we were walking back from the park, the kids in the urban minivan. As we crossed the street, someone turned left and blasted right by us, a few mere feet from the stroller. Before I could censor myself* I said "Shit!"

The car didn't hit us and as I regained my composure I wondered whether Shmoo had noticed the new vocab word. He didn't say anything for a long while. Then he chuckled and said "Silly Mommy. You're supposed to say 'shoo' for flies, not cars." I laughed along with him—heh heh heh Shmoo, you're so right. Silly Mommy.Whew.

*We're not big swearers. I admire the artfulness with which others swear, but it's not us. We are in fact the Flanders family, you know, with our usage of words such as piggers and bunsers. I did go through a bit of a cussing phase when I was in Bulgaria, however, because I was nostalgic for American swearing.

Djibouti call

I may currently be a woman of routine, home by 7:30 every night to put the baby to bed and pack a lunch for the preschooler, but there was a time when I could hop on a train and be in Istanbul in 12 hours or less. These days, my only travel to new places has been through books (and of course blogs like Andrea's and Holly's). I read when the Jonester (sorry! another nickname!) nurses, so I’ve been logging lots of page-miles in the past 10 months.

After I read What Is the What I felt like I had learned a lot about Sudan, where I had previously known next to nothing. So I have decided to make it a life goal to read a book about every country. This is where you come in.

The list below contains, off the top of my head, some of the countries about which I’ve read. Most of these books are novels, but I feel they’ve given me a sense of the culture of these places. If you will, please recommend books that you have loved that are set in other countries. Know the great Nauruan novel? Togolese tome? Panamanian Pulp? Enlighten me.

Afghanistan: Caravans (Leon Uris), The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)

Australia: One for the Road (Tony Horwitz)

China: The Bonesetter’s Daughter (Amy Tan); Spring Moon (Bette Bao Lord)

Colombia: One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia-Marquez)

Congo: The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

England: too many to name

Egypt: Palace Walk (Naguib Mahfouz)

France: Chocolat (Joanne Harris)

India: The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy), Interpreter of Maladies (Jhumpa Lahiri)

Ireland: Trinity (Leon Uris) Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)

Japan: The Lady and the Monk (Pico Iyer), Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)

Mexico: Like Water for Chocolate (Laura Esquivel)

Nepal: Into Thin Air (Jon Krakauer) OK, that's more about insane mountain climbing culture, so I'd take recommendations for another, too.

Nigeria: Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe): 50 years old this year! Must reread.

Oz: Wicked (Gregory Maguire)

Russia: Fathers and Sons (Ivan Turgenev)

Sudan: What Is the What (Dave Eggers)

Multicountry Eastern Europe: Bury Me Standing (Isabel Fonseca)

I have also read the excellent Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World (Pico Iyer), which covers several countries: North Korea, Argentina, Cuba, Iceland, Bhutan, Vietnam, Paraguay, and Australia.

My sister is sending me Three Cups of Tea, so Pakistan will be checked off the list soon. (Cathy - if you haven't sent it already, don't worry. I can get it from the library.)

OK! *two brisk cheerleader hand claps* Let's go!