Organizing the Piano

05 Dec 2010 2 Comments

by katsmama in arts and crafts, holidays, learning Tags: , , , , ,


In order to put out Christmas decorations, we have to clean. The girl wants to be in charge of the Christmas village, which consists of two newspaper offices and a spooky castle. As we start clearing off the piano, I am realizing that one of the reasons it hasn’t been cleaned before is because of some unfinished business. There is a big basket of sheet music that dates back to when the girl took piano lessons. I mean, it dates back to when the girl quit piano lessons.
So much clutter is psychological- I had wanted piano lessons as a kid, but never got them. The girl started out liking lessons, then hated practicing, hated lessons, hated me. There was a lot of yelling. We hosted her final recital, she did a beautiful job, then she quit, and I had (still have) a lot of mixed emotions. The basket of sheet music contains her Suzuki book 1, the Suzuki book 2 that I bought, hoping she would change her mind, notebooks that I took notes in about what she needed to practice, flash cards, envelopes with prizes she could win if she practiced 2 hours, 4 hours, 6 hours…
I am tempted to put the whole pile in a box to be dealt with at some later date. No. Must deal with now. Wish me luck.

OK. It is later, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought. I went through the basket while the girl dusted the piano. I got rid of some bad memories, and was able to pull some Christmas music to the front of the basket. We pulled out a vintage linen tablecloth to represent snow, and she set up the buildings, plus the spooky castle on the hill. Then she actually added to it, making some houses, and an ice skating pond. In a perfect world, she would then sit down, pull out some Christmas music, and start playing piano. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. I guess I can dream.

No, there was no tornado...this is just how the living room looked before. It is much better now. At least the top of the piano is organized now...

There is no joy in warball

17 Nov 2010 1 Comment

by katsmama in body image, learning Tags: , ,


            One of the good things for me about doing yoga is the non-competitiveness of it. I have spent a lot of my life feeling klutsy and bad at sports, and I finally have found a way to move my body where I’m not at risk of losing. When I was in middle school, I was placed in an “adaptive P.E.” class. It was me, another similarly clumsy smart girl, and 2 older kids with Down Syndrome. We threw balls at targets, walked on balance beams, caught bean bags. It was awful, as if regular P.E.,  they gave it to me as an intervention. I remember feeling so frustrated. That clumsy 12 year old is sometimes alarmingly close to the surface of my everyday adult life. I cried a few weeks ago in Yoga class, because I couldn’t do “Dancer’s Pose”- which is where you stand up, reach back, kick your foot up and grab it, then lean forward, balancing. 

Step one, reach back, step two, find your foot...can I go back to step one again...

 That physically retarded (can I use that phrase? probably not)  12 year-old-swam up to the surface, and I wound up just bawling in child’s pose for a while.

After I got myself back together, I got up and finished the class.

I went to class the next week though, and managed to find my foot after asking for help from Kristin, who’s awesome. www.lovelandyogacorefitness.com I’m still not great at the balancing part, but I get stronger every time.

            I had a realization today, in the shower (don’t all great realizations come in the shower?) that I shouldn’t be doing yoga to get better for next week’s class, but to get better for life. See,  when I couldn’t find my stupid foot, I made plans to practice holding my foot back, grabbing it, leaning forward, then I felt guilty when I didn’t follow that plan. A lifetime of experience with gym teachers gave me the idea that I should throw balls at targets to improve my eye hand coordination, or do squats to have stronger glutes, or run faster so that I can … run faster.

            I need to try to keep the idea before me that I walk because walking helps me think, and dancing is fun, and riding a bike feels good, and yoga gives me peace.  I can’t blame the gym teachers- maybe they were trying to teach me this all along, and I wasn’t ready for it. They found joy in war ball? doing the shuttle run gave them time to think, doing jumping jacks brought them peace? Maybe.

            So, what is your favorite way to move your body now? What did you hate in gym class?  Bonus points if the answer is the same, but the attitude has changed… 

One day I’d like to write a novel

01 Nov 2010 Leave a comment

by katsmama in learning Tags:


 

Announcing the end of the one day novelist: National Novel Writing Month starts today. The idea is to sign up on the website www.nanowrimo.org  and keep track of the number of words you have written on your own novel over the course of November. Winners are people who make it to 50,000 words by the end of the month. There is no prize- it’s like Farmville- no one asks you if you have real tomatoes from Farmville, right? Same with Nanowrimo- if you win, you have the satisfaction of winning, and a rough draft of a novel.  Pretty cool, I’d say.

 For the last several years I have started this big adventure in writing a novel, and not finished…this year, I think I have it figured out, though.  I heard a writer being interviewed on the radio- don’t remember who, and he said, “To write a novel, you have to have your characters make choices they can’t undo.” That has been my problem- every year I start out with characters that I come to love, and then I become overprotective. “don’t go to that party,” I think, “you’ll get pregnant!” or “you can’t call the lawyer, they just make things worse!”  By the time I get about 30,000 words in, I am bored to tears, then it’s Thanksgiving and I run out of time.

So, my solution this year is to go to greek myths, specifically, Jason and the Argonauts.  All of Jason’s bad decisions got made thousands of years ago, I just have to show him dealing with them. I’ve got a lot of notes, some research I printed off the internet, and will start tomorrow. I’ll try to post a word count here on the blog, in case anyone cares, and I’ll let you know at the end of the month if I have won.  Also, if anyone has title suggestions, please comment

Rustic Apple Tart and Hand Pies

16 Oct 2010 Leave a comment

by katsmama in favorite things, food, learning Tags: , , , ,


Hand pie- it’s a perfectly cromulent word.

These could have stayed in the oven for another five minutes for that golden brown deliciousness.

Worlds collided today when the girl brought home My First Cookbook, which  has a pastry recipe, and I picked a zillion apples from our tree. A surprising number of them weren’t wormy.

Look how many of them don't have worm holes! We don't spray or anything, so worms are the rule rather than the exception.

I chopped enough for a crockpot full of apple sauce, and a pie. Then the girl’s recipe turned out to be for tarts, and I said, what about hand pies? Hand pies, she asked, did you just make that up? Ummmm, no. I’m sure I’ve heard it somewhere.  So, we’ll cut circles, put in apples, then fold them over.  The circle we chose to use was the ring from a half gallon sized canning jar, which made lilliputian sized pies…They’re very cute.  The girl made pie crust for the first time, and we actually should have asked Grandma or Great-grandma for lessons, because I think I’ve only made pie crust twice before in my life.  The girl did a good job, though, it’s nice and flaky.

Baked them for a surprisingly long time- I guess I’ve learned something with this project, because I keep saying how surprised I am. It took about 25 minutes at 350, which was enough to brown the bottoms and lightly brown the tops. The apples are still a touch crisp, so it could have gone even longer. We had enough for 6 half moon shaped pies, and I rolled the scraps into a freeform circle, dumped the rest of the seasoned apples into the center, then folded the edges up over it, into a rustic apple tart.  “Rustic?” she says, as if that isn’t a real word. Rustic is totally a word! The rusitc tart held together beautifully when cooled and sliced.

Promise me you'll eat this with ice cream.

Rustic apple Tart

3 cups sour apples, peeled, seeded and chopped

1 tablespoon sugar

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

1 tablespoon flour

your favorite pie crust recipe, or whatever instant pie dough solution you like best.

Toss the apples, sugar cinnamon and flour together in a bowl. Roll out the crust and cut reasonable-sized circles. On reflection, the canning lids, about 3 inch diameter, made very small pies. Place on a parchment paper covered cookie sheet, fill with the apple mixture, fold over and bake for 25 or more minutes. For once, we forgot to put sprinkles on top, but sprinkles would have been good.

For the rustic tart, I was recalling something I read in Cook’s Illustrated a year ago, so there are probably better sources of instructions. Roll out the dough, place apple mix in the middle, with a good 2 inches of border. Fold up the edges and crimp it, then bake for 35 to 40 minutes.  Because the top is open, it is easier to test these for doneness- just stab an apple with a paring knife to see if they are soft enough.

First grader’s reading goals

10 Oct 2010 2 Comments

by katsmama in learning Tags: , ,


I joke that we home school in our family, and then in August we send our kids to the neighborhood public school. Truth comes out in a joke- I am a teacher and general know-it-all, DH is a journalist and general know-it-all. Our kids are becoming know-it-alls. It is nice that we have separate but overlapping fields of knowledge. Actually, you could draw a Venn diagram

Plants, food, language, linguistics, literature, mythology, show tunes, food, plots of old movies, history of Tudor and Stuart dynasties

Weird pop culture references, 80’s sitcoms, the time travel paradox, Star Trek

Astronomy, geology, geography, physics, music, pop hits of the 80’s, obscure college bands of the 90’s, Star Wars, AP style, computers

 

This shows precisely how nerdy I am, that I would draw a Venn diagram about my nerdiness, but not know how to make the Venn diagram show up on the web.  It looked okay on Word.  I’ll have to figure out how to do it in an illustration….

            Our kids have interests and knowledge areas of their own, including Legos, art, dinosaurs, insects, zoology, the Littlest Pet Shop ‘verse, but I don’t know how to make a Venn diagram for the 4 of us, even in Word, much less make it show up on the web. 

            All summer we read, talk, go to museums. There is a lot of lying around, playing with Legos and riding bikes, too, but just by the nature of who we are, there is a lot of learning going on.

            The girl started reading before kindergarten, and hasn’t stopped. She reads, and re-reads, she complains about movies that get the book wrong. She cruised through the Harry Potter series in about 6 weeks, came up for air, then started at the beginning again.

            For a while, the boy seemed to think that reading meant sounding words out, and he hated it.  Last summer, he was recognizing words on packages or on signs, and I would compliment him. I would say, “Good job reading!” and he would say, “I wasn’t reading, I just saw the word and I knew it.” He sounded so disgusted with me, but it was just that he didn’t know that is the definition of reading- seeing the word, and knowing it.

            Going into first grade, he thought he was a bad reader, because his sister is so good, and the books that he is most interested in, like “The Dinosaur Encyclopedia” are too hard for him to read on his own (I have learned a ton about dinos, because I have read the stupid thing aloud to him so much, but it doesn’t really stay with me, so I didn’t put it in the diagram as an area of expertise)

On the first day of first grade, when they were testing him in reading, the tester had to go find more books to get one at a challenging enough level.  He is mostly bored by the books at his level- he wants me to read the dang dinosaur encyclopedia again. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_2_19?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=dk+eyewitness+books&sprefix=dk+eyewitness+books or lately books on Greek myths that I have brought home from my middle school.  He thinks he can’t read because he can’t read those, and he already knows everything in the first grade books.

9 weeks into the year, we have our first conferences this week. I wonder what we’ll learn. What are your thoughts about homeschool, public school, unschool?

Knitting socks and lessons learned

05 Oct 2010 Leave a comment

by katsmama in arts and crafts, learning Tags: ,


The yarn harlot  www.yarnharlot.ca/blog has written about a self imposed sock club( for those who don’t know, a sock knitting club is where you sign up and buy a pattern per month and the yarn to complete it.) Anyway, the yarn harlot had a closet full of sock yarn, and a stack of books with patterns bookmarked, so she created her own sock club, putting copies of patterns she wanted to try into Ziploc bags and choosing sock yarn to go with them. Every month she pulls out a bag and blogs about the results.  I was inspired to do kind of the same thing, although without the Ziploc bags.

Oooh la la, look at those socks.

For the month of June, I chose a wavy lace pattern called Old Shale, from the Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=twisted+sister+sock+workbook and some great kettle-dyed hot pink sock yarn from Knit Picks www.knitpicks.com   

            June was vacation month- I got out of school, spent a couple of days cleaning and packing, and then got on a plane to Boston.  I started the first pink sock on the way to the airport, worked on it at DIA after we checked in. I checked my toolkit with my luggage, so I didn’t have a measuring tape.  I used a 4×6 index card that I had copied the pattern on to measure my progress, and when I had a 4 inch cuff, I started the heel.  This detail is important.  I turned the heel as we flew over the great lakes, and cruised down the instep.  How far is it from Denver to Boston? Slightly less than 1 sock.

            I knit more as we wandered around Massachusetts. We found the hotel, got pizza, went to the science museum, rode the T, walked the freedom trail. My production slowed considerably, until we drove to Mount Washington and I finished the toe.

            I started sock number two. We assume that socks will be twins. Commercial socks are usually identical, handmades are sometimes fraternal.  I worked on the ankle of of pink sock number 2 as we drove down the coast to Providence- we started at Salisbury, which is near Cape Anne, and drove down and through Gloucester, Salem, Boston. At rush hour it began raining, and we struggled with reading road signs through trees in the rain. Quincy, Braintree- ooh, John Adams was from there!  Bad signage made the drive stressy- DH drove, the kids slept, and I kept knitting. Knitting is good for stress.  I kept thinking “one more repeat, and I’ll measure.”  I fished the index card out of the bag…4 or 6?  Which edge had I measured with? I somehow remembered 6, but when I compared it to sock number 1, it was 4. So my second sock was about an inch and a half longer than my first. Drat.

Choices:

  1. a pair of unmatched socks.
  2. make a third sock to match the second, then hope there was enough yarn for a fourth to match the second.
  3. rip out one and a half inches of lace.

 

Great color, too bad they aren't the same length.

I chose option C- I took a photo first, there in the twilit car, in the rain, in Rhode Island. Then I figured out where to rip back to and unraveled- 2 hours of knitting gone in 30 seconds. Then I carefully picked up the stitches, counted them twice and made the heel and kept going. It’s a great pair of socks. And maybe I learned something from making it.

I’m an English teacher, and a writer, so a big part of me wants this to be a metaphor. Wouldn’t it be great to get a do-over in life- rip out and pick up…it’s painful to admit a mistake, but freeing to fix it. Another part of me says, “it’s just a sock.” So it is just as likely I didn’t learn anything.

Water in the west

27 Sep 2010 Leave a comment

by katsmama in environmentalism, gardening, learning


A dusty spider web, waiting for rain.

 

I recently learned about  Liebig’s law,( http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/  ) an ecological principal I wasn’t familiar with before. I always blame my lack of scientific knowledge on the fact that my junior high science teachers were ski coaches, and then I had the football coach for biology in 10th grade. By the time I got Mr. Marta in my junior year, I was already on the road to being an English major. I’ve been trying to make up for it in recent years.  Anyway, Liebig’s law is basically that whatever resource that is necessary for an organismto survive is in the shortest supply is what puts an upper limit on the carrying capacity of an environment for that organism.  For worms, it might be organic matter, for tomatoes calcium, humans on the Planet Express Ship, oxygen… in my garden, in Northern Colorado, the limiting factor is water.

I read a lot of organic gardening books, and magazines, and most of them are centered on the east coast, where wet soil is the problem. There is lots of information about drainage, and raised beds to dry out your soil faster in spring, and waterlogged roots and certain plants not liking “wet feet”

 I noticed today that there are cracks in the soil of my flagstone path. The sand that separates the pavers is falling thru to the center of the earth. There are probably cracks in the beds too, but the mulch hides them. I have run the drip system in the beds, and the sprinkler in the lawn, but I don’t water paths, so the cracks will get bigger until it rains. We had a misty day last Saturday, enough to make it cold and unpleasant for the boy’s soccer game, but it didn’t close up the cracks in the soil.

I went to Massachusetts on vacation this summer, and it rained solidly much of the time we were there. I asked landscape professional (okay, he was a tree trimmer) how much rain they averaged in that area, and he didn’t know how much rain they got. He shrugged, and looked at the other guys on his crew, and guessed about “an inch a week?”

 Around here, people tend to know , to the fraction of an inch, exactly how much moisture we’ve gotten- they’ll say “well, the weather service says half inch, but I only had three tenths in the rain gauge.”

It has not rained here for almost a month- we’ve had some scattered showers, but the soil is cracking, and the woods are burning. The fire in Boulder has made national news, my great uncle has had to evacuate his house. There was another fire near us, DH took the kids up to take pictures for the paper (link). A big pile of hay is on fire in Fort Collins, with sunny and warm in the forecast for the next week.

Mulch and compost help, and using native plants, and the Denver water board has a ton of information on dry climate planning and planting (www.denverwater.org/Conservation/Xeriscape ) I am experimenting with a sunken bed, the opposite of raised, obviously. I have dug out about 4 inches of soil next to my horse tank, and I’m adding some compost when I put in tulips and irises. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I dug out a couple of buckets of soil, and will fill this in with compost. It's ugly now, but wait til next year...

 When I see the smoke in the air, I wonder about the future- I can drag the hose to the raspberries, and run the sprinklers to keep the trees alive.  I hope for rain, though 

 

It’s not depreciation, it’s self-deprecation, idiot! er, I mean, Self Deprecation and Giftedness

16 Sep 2010 4 Comments

by katsmama in learning Tags: , ,


bedside reading

A selection of books by my bed.

My daughter is ten, and in the gifted and talented program at her school. A few years ago, when she was first being tested, I told my sister in law, and she asked if my husband was gifted, and if that was where she had inherited her intelligence…I realized that I had done too good a job hiding my light, as it were. Covering, acting like I wasn’t as smart as I am…

Actually, I have spent 40 years swinging pendulum style from showing off knowledge, back to acting normal, then exploding with brilliance, then faking idiocy. In the 80’s in a small town, it wasn’t okay for me to act smart. I remember hemming and hawing at Trivial Pursuit questions pretending the answer wasn’t obvious, sitting on my hands in Spanish in junior high. It was absolutely not appropriate for me to get better grades on Spanish tests than the Mexican-Americans who spoke Spanish at home- they were mean to me because of it. I didn’t stop trying, I just tried to be less obvious about what I knew. Other people who grew up with me may argue, perhaps they were super-intelligent and felt their intelligence was nurtured by their peers. No one else has lived my life, and being super genius was not the way to go, most of the time for me. I developed a “self-deprecating” style in the hopes that people would like me. It doesn’t always work.

Inside, I’m still nerdy, and desperate for people to like me, or at least not hate me.. I sometimes wish I could be that person who thinks, if they don’t like me they can f— themselves, but I’m just not. See, I can’t even cuss on my own blog, I’m so desperate for you to not be offended. So, the pendulum swings again, and I listen politely while people explain things to me that I already understand, then I show off, explaining how linguists use a phonetic alphabet to transcribe people’s accents, or that the Rosetta stone is actually in the British Museum. Then I make a joke, put myself down before anyone else gets a chance to. Those boys in junior high Spanish were mean as a form of social control- they didn’t want to feel bad themselves, so they made me feel bad.

At least I have chosen a job where my intelligence is mostly rewarded. I teach, and that is a job where I can be a know-it-all. I’m supposed to be an expert, if not a genius, and so I mostly fit in here.
As an adult, I have found circles of friends who like me for me, a husband who is my peer. I am so lucky. The pendulum doesn’t swing so far that I am afraid of falling off anymore.

Knowing this, I worry for my daughter. She is, as I said, also gifted (she gets it from both of us, dammit…)and I see her crazy pendulum swings now, in upper elementary, and wonder what middle school will be like. When she gets an answer on her homework wrong, she’ll hit her forehead with the heel of her hand, chanting “stupid,’tupid, ‘tupid!” Then the pendulum swings again and she says, “actually, Mom…” and correct my misconceptions. She recently learned the word misnomer, and went around using it correctly. “Monty Python’s Flying Circus is actually a misnomer, it isn’t a circus that flies…”

I wish her grace- the skill to gracefully show what she knows without appearing snotty, I wish her confidence, not arrogance. How do I guide her? Her G.T. teacher, herself a gifted person who is the mother of a gifted girl, oddly isn’t much help…she has just come through the teenage years and wonders how she survived, I think. Conversations in the teachers’ lounge usually turn into parents bragging about how smart their children are, a round robin story topping festival. Not helpful, when I want my little girl to grow up happy…

I shared the story about my sister in law not having noticed I was smart with a colleague, herself a gifted woman. She laughed. In my voice, she said, “Oh, see, I’ve been hiding the fact that I’m smart around you because I didn’t want you to feel baaaad.” She had also spent time covering up her intelligence, but she had realized that she could be one of those people who says F you. She knows who she is, and and she isn’t going to act any differently just to make other people feel comfortable. She probably even can curse on her blog. I’ll just stay here on this pendulum until it slows down.

photo credit, Jeff Stahla

If this is how she is after a carnival, imagine her on a bad day.

Grandma Noodle Soup

26 Aug 2010 Leave a comment

by katsmama in food, learning, Uncategorized Tags:


Grandma Egg Noodles

Waiting for the stock to simmer so I can add the noodles. See my purty blue Dutch oven.

 

My old roommate Rhonda taught me how to love Chicken and Noodles and Mashed Potatoes, so I should probably call this Rhonda noodle soup, but instead at our house, we call it grandma noodles, after the premade frozen noodles that is a key ingredient. It could be made with dried egg noodles, but it wouldn’t be the same- check the frozen pasta section of your local mega mart, it is worth the search.

At it’s simplest, this is noodles cooked in broth, perhaps with chunks of actual chicken in it and carrots, if you like mushy carrots, then served over mashed potatoes.  It is insane, I know, to pour a starch based food over another starch based food.  It’s crazy. Crazy delicious. 

2 quarts chicken broth

1 [pack size} grandma noodles

½ cup chopped carrots

1 cup precooked chicken or turkey- leftover is great- in fact, this is a great post-Thanksgiving recipe, because you can do turkey stock.

I have made this with store bought broth- Better than Bouillon is my favorite mix, but you can use whatever broth you like. I use homemade, lately, because I’ve learned how to make it. Look for it in a future blog post.

Yes, it is a very beige meal, but sometimes you want beige. More color next week, promise.

Take the noodles out of the freezer, stab holes in the bag and defrost in the microwave. Meanwhile, heat the stock to boiling.  and chop up any leftover chicken or carrots or whatever, and scrub and chop your potatoes ( I usually leave the peel on, because I am kind of lazy. I also know it’s good for me. Fiber. I know. I’m old.) In another pan, cover the potatoes with water and boil until soft. (Huge digression- I am at about 5000 feet above sea level and potatoes take longer for me than they likely do for you- I knew this intellectually, but when I went to Boston this summer I kept burning my tongue on coffee- dang, how can you stand it? hot coffee is hot at sea level!!! Anyway, I guess that is a difference between knowing something “intellectually” and really knowing it.)

So, when the stock or broth is boiling, add the noodles and carrots and chicken, then simmer until the noodles are done.  If you do it right, the soup will be done at about the same time as the potatoes.

Drain the potatoes and return to the pan. Throw in some buttermilk and butter- I never measure, just a glug of one and a chunk of the other. Then mash. I like lumps. I grew up on instant potatoes, and appreciate the lumpiness of real ones.

Dish up a serving of potatoes into a bowl and make a well in the middle, then scoop up some noodles and broth to cover.  I made this as a back to school meal, but it works on a  busy day, before trick or treating, after Thanksgiving, home from skiing, before basketball practice…anytime, I guess, that you want some starch with your starch. Be sure to have starch for desert, as well.

You did what to a chicken?

10 Aug 2010 Leave a comment

by katsmama in food, learning Tags:


This was after the thermometer rang in at 175, and I had turned the burners off.

Last Thanksgiving, I saw directions for “spatchcocking” a turkey. What is that? I wondered…it sounds dirty. Well, it is. But not in the way you’re thinking. It turns out, spatchcocking is cutting along either side of a bird’s spine and removing it, then smushing it flat, so it grills faster.
I spatchcocked a chicken today. I was going to take pictures, but I had all kinds of chicken stuff on my hands, then I pinched my finger in the kitchen shears, so I had some issues with the camera. I was going to have the girl help me, but she was on http://www.lego.com again (it’s like Facebook… for imaginary people?). She spends more time with fake Legos than real one, these days.
Anyway, no pictures of the process of cutting it up, which is gross, but easier than I expected. It goes fast- indirect grill for 15 minutes skin side down, then skin side up until you get to 175 degrees on the thigh, like another 15-20 minutes For slightly more expert advice… try http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/butterflied-chicken-recipe/index.html I think you can do it in the oven, too, and it would speed things up.
I know there are those of you who are opposed to chicken on the bone, but I think it has more flavor. And you can’t beat the price- whole young chickens are pretty cheap.
I wondered about the word origins, being the word nut I am, and it turns out that a lot of other people wondered, too. http://www.nakedwhiz.com/spatchdef.htm No clear answer about what language it’s from- I like the Irish story best, but really, who knows?

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